Did you ever have a family ritual you could not tell anybody about?  Not anything evil mind you, just a bit peculiar and betraying something about your background that could sound embarrassing in the wrong circles, or rather, in the right ones?
 

So, come a little closer and I will whisper to you about one such ritual that occurred in our family home when we lived in poorer circumstances, above a store on Yonge Street.  You see, my mother was very conscious of the need to clean and would often enlist us in scrubbing the hardwood with turpentine and steel wool.  When all the dust was cleared away, we gave the floor a new coat of wax.  My parents never heard of shellac and I can only hope there was never any on our floors.   Otherwise we would have destroyed it.
 

My mother often complained about not being able to invite people over more often.  The rooms were not painted, the dishes were cracked and our surroundings were shabby.  The furniture was rudimentary and old.  My brother and I quickly destroyed fabrics and paint jobs in any case.  We used to use the couch as a trampoline and would do headsprings and somersaults onto it.  When my parents sat on it, they would complain that the salesman had sold them one without any springs.   My brother and I kept silent.
 

A few walls had obvious dry wall replacements poorly integrated into the surroundings.   There were mice in the basement which my mother pursued fiercely with mousetraps, poison and a cat who she tried to bathe like a dog.
 
But there was dirt everywhere, impossible to eliminate.  I myself was black from head to foot when I came home in the evenings.  I was shocked to discover, when I bathed my own children, that the water was still more or less transparent.   Had I done a poor job in cleaning them?  
 

In our apartment above the store, the dust and dirt from outside were everywhere no matter how often we washed.  But the biggest shock and the greatest commotion occurred because living in row housing, we were periodically invaded by cockroaches too.  When we had the cat, she would eat a few, but this was nothing compared to the hordes we felt surrounded by.
 

When the bugs moved into our building, they would be seen in the bathroom or in the kitchen.  This was the time for our cockroach hunt.
 

My mother, brother and I would stand guard outside the bathroom, each holding a slipper or a shoe.  One would enter the bathroom and spray RAID throughout especially in all the nooks and crannies.  The sprayer then would rush out and take up his or her position on guard. Within minutes the first cockroaches would start to come out of their holes and the guards would swing into action trying to squash them as they scurried out along the wall or on the ceiling.
 

“There he goes! Get him!  He’s getting away! Got him!”
 

There is nothing as satisfying as crunching a cockroach with your slipper, especially when you have to go after five of them at once.  “Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Damn missed him! Whap! Got him!”
 

After about fifteen minutes or so of this frenzied activity with all of us scurrying around the hall a little like the bugs we were chasing, there was a return to calm.
 

The sense of accomplishment after a successful hunt was enormous.  We were exhilarated and laughing.
 

“Did you see that big one!  I got him just as he was getting away.”
 

“There were so many of them, they were everywhere.”
 

“But we got them all.   We got them good.”
 

Fortunately, they came back soon after and we got to do it all over again.
 

This hunt was sometimes the most fun we had together in a month.  Yet if I told others about it, they gave me peculiar looks and laughed behind their hands.  So please be kind and keep this story to yourself.