Here is a little story I often think about when I was growing up in C.B.S. I don’t know if many people know of or can remember the old CN Station in Seal Cove, CBS. During the NFLD railways days people used to take the train from there to St. John’s. I remember mom sending a crate of hens to her cousin in Gambo. Another time me and my brother Reg plastered it with cow pies and the man who looked after it came down with a hoe and tried to scrape it off. C.N.R used it as a freight shed, and finally it was closed up and torn down in the early sixties. The station stood right in front of our place so we used it as a playground & hang out. I hope you enjoy the following story. I’ll call it the shiny silver spurs. Growing up in Newfoundland in the late 40s and early 50s as everyone knows porridge was the main breakfast cereal, especially in the winter time. One time I talked mother into buying sugar corn pops, as they were called back then and there on the back of the box, in a yellow star burst was the most beautiful pair of shiny silver spurs I had even seen. They had a shiny chain that went under the boot and a leather strap that went over the instep of the boot and rowels that spun and jingled as you walked. I could picture myself all dressed in black, like hop-along Cassidy, with the silver spurs jingling on the back of my cowboy boots and a pair of six shooters strapped to my hips and tied low to my legs. I needed two box tops and 50 cents to get them. I had one box top and to my surprise mother brought the second box of sugar corn pops. The 50 cents was no problem since we used to get 50 cents a day for recess. All I had to do was save my recess money for two weeks. Finally I had the 50 cents taped to the two box tops. I stuck them in an envelope and dropped them off at the post office and waited. Every time the train stopped at the station in front of our house in Seal Cove, CBS my brother Reg and I would run out to the end of the driveway to watch as the steam hissed from the engine (we wouldn’t get too close because we thought the steam would scald you like the steam from a kettle). We could see the man toss, no, fire the mail bags off the train to the ground and we could try and guess which bag my spurs were in. We would watch as the lady who ran the post office would drag the bags over the rocks and pot holes down the half mile of gravel road to the post office. After about two months of waiting I came home from school one day and there on the table was my spurs – broken. The tears ran down my eight-year-old face and through the sobs and sniffs I blamed my sister (who was six years older than me) for trying to jam them on her big feet and breaking them. “No I didn’t” she bawled at me. “Day was like dat when day came, you knows how gentle they is with the mail.” After the tears stopped, I picked up the spurs and sized them up. They weren’t shiny at all, they were almost the colour of a cod jigger and made of white metal, the chain was the size of the chain on my grandfather's pocket watch and the leather strap was just a piece of crown oil cloth. I tried to tie them to my long rubbers but that didn’t work, then I tried to tape them on and that didn’t work either and as I teared up again, Mom put her arm around me (as mothers do) and told me maybe Santa Claus would bring me a pair but he never did. The shiny silver spurs disappeared but I think of them every now and then. I wish I had kept them just as a reminder of the joys and heartbreak we had as children growing up in a different time.   Submitted By: NULL