I was raised in a home saturated by love. My parents married very young. They adored each other. They meet in the summer of 1952 one balmy holiday weekend in Grand bend. My Dad and some of his pals were staying in a cottage. Apparently they were making something that required sugar and hadn't any. My dad wandered over to the cabin next to theirs to see if he could borrow some. My mother answered the door. And as they say the rest was history.
It was love at first sight for both of them. Their song was 'They Call It Puppy Love' by Canada's own, Paul Anka. Mom was 18 and Dad was 19 when they married on the first day of August, 1953.
As my brothers and i entered the scene we became the fortunate recipients of our folks warm and affectionate home life.Growing up in the Culver household was a gift, grounding us in unconditional love. I just instinctively new my parents would stand with me no matter what.
Around age 12 we moved to Hespeler, which would shortly amalgamate with Galt and Preston to become Cambridge. It was around this time i awoke out of a slumber that had been fueled by imagination and wonder. When the childhood dream scape dissolved my naive and inquisitive heart was jettisoned into the turmoil of the bubbling cauldron that was the 60's.
The flickering black and white images of the evening news stick with me to this day Khrushchev pounding his shoe on a desk in the UN yelling 'we'll bury you'. John John Kennedy stoically saluting his father's horse drawn casket. Oswald murdered before my eyes. Civil rights protesters attacked by snarling police dogs and water cannons in Birmingham Alabama .The violence and in justice of the Vietnam war. To top it all off the eminent annihilation of human kind pronounced each time we practiced duck and cover. These were the touch points that set the stage Each a violent poke in the ribs of my conscious being.
It was then I began questioning the ethos of the world i inhabited... my conscience being stirred...Simultaneously something deep within started churning.
My bed was situated in such a way that as i drifted off to sleep each evening i could gaze out into the Cosmos. Starring at the night sky had a strange effect on me... I became overwhelmed with the vastness of the universe and would begin to contemplate eternity and beyond ... frankly this would sometimes scare the living crap out of me. A deep awareness of the eternal was triggered and i couldn't resist it's beckoning. Each night i returned to that window and pondered life and beyond.
