Latest news with #PamFrampton
Winnipeg Free Press
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Elton John, Bread, black coffee and thou
Opinion I can still see us sprawled out on our bedroom's shag carpet, mesmerized by the record label going round and round. We had one of those portable suitcase record players and there would be albums spread out on the floor. Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player. Me age seven, you 17. Elderberry Wine. Blues for Baby and Me. Daniel. Pam Frampton photo This rose in columnist Pam Frampton's garden was planted in memory of her sister, Barbie. They named you Barbara Ann after the famous Canadian figure skater, but a love of the limelight didn't come with the name. You were shy. Reserved. The opposite of your other sisters in many ways. You had dad's looks and Mom's brown eyes. You loved Ringo, Robin Gibb, Bernie Taupin. You never fell for the frontman. We pored over the liner notes that came with Don't Shoot Me; loved the pictures of Elton and Bernie walking together. I fantasized about them coming to our small town in outport Newfoundland, but I knew it wouldn't happen. They would've had a hard time finding us. There weren't even street names then. We were in the yellow house on the hill, across from Ern Warren's store. I loved your quiet passion for music, and I was so glad you shared that side of you with me. You weren't a fangirl, just someone who knew what she liked. You didn't gush about it or collect Tiger Beat posters. We shared a twin bed. Not long before Don't Shoot Me was released, I was the bed-wetter who would wake in the night and leave you behind in the damp spot to go and climb in between our parents. You never complained. You'd just get up in the dark — not wanting to wake our other two sisters in their twin bed — fumble for your glasses and get a clean towel to lay in the space where I had been. The sheets would be changed in the morning. I often think of how you came into the world in the midst of tragedy, Barbie. Born breech in the terrible dark days after our grandfather's schooner was reported overdue. Then wreckage was found. Mom said they had to break your little arm to get you out. She brought you home with your arm in a sling and the whole family under a dark cloud of shock and grief. When you grew up and had a family of your own, I would go and spend the night with you sometimes; your husband away working and you on your own with a small child. I loved hearing your quiet voice, your measured cadence so much like our Dad's. I missed you then, much as I did those years you were away at university. Those weekends when you would come home; the nights we would whisper after dark in our little bed, and I would beg you to tell me every single detail about university classes, dining hall cuisine and residence life. You took your coffee black then — the heights of sophistication to my 10-year-old self. Soon, I was doing the same. As we grew up, we grew apart. You lived much the way our parents had, with daily life revolving around the church and the table. Bake sales and turkey teas. Cherry cake at Christmas. Making bread and berry-picking and hanging clothes on the line in the salt air. You loved simple pleasures and God and your family. When your cancer came back and you ran out of options, the world turned upside down. I took a day off work and my husband and I filled a box with provisions and drove out to see you — a rotisserie chicken, dark chocolate brownies, muffins, a bottle of wine, a bouquet of flowers, a frozen beef roast, crackers, cheese, a salad. I don't know what I was thinking but I wanted to feed you, as if you would magically regain your appetite and your health. I thought of the lyrics to the song by Bread that you always loved: 'I would give anything I own I'd give up my life, my heart, my home I would give everything I own Just to have you back again.' I told you that was how I felt. 'I know,' you said. But there was nothing to be done. When you died five years ago, I closed your brown eyes. It was the last thing I could do for you. On the anniversary of your passing, my husband and I found that Bread song on YouTube and played it in your honour. And then I sat alone and played another song we loved all those years ago. 'And it's all over now Don't you worry no more Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. Gonna go west to the sea The Greyhound is swaying And the radio is playing Some blues for baby and me.' Pam Frampton lives in St. John's. Email pamelajframpton@ | X: @Pam_Frampton | Bluesky: @ Pam Frampton Pam Frampton is a columnist for the Free Press. She has worked in print media since 1990 and has been offering up her opinions for more than 20 years. Read more about Pam. Pam's columns are built on facts, but offer her personal views through arguments and analysis. Every column Pam produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
CBC
20-05-2025
- General
- CBC
Retired journalist-turned-hero recounts golf course rescue
Retired journalist Glenn Payette doesn't typically find himself in the middle of a story but that all changed when he heard an unsettling noise on the site of a former St. John's golf course last Thursday. He and his wife Pam Frampton first thought the sound was coming from a goose as they strolled along Logy Bay Road. "Suddenly I went, 'No, no, hang on here,'" Payette told CBC Radio's The St. John's Morning Show. "'That sounds like somebody might be calling their dog.'" Payette made a beeline for the voice when he realized it was someone in distress. A man was in an irrigation pond at the old Bally Haly course, and he looked exhausted. Payette says he passed the man a log to latch on to as Frampton held onto Payette's legs to prevent him from falling in as well. She was on the phone with 911 all the while. "She told them, 'There's a man in the pond. He's drowning. We need help right here,'" Payette recalled. "Finally, I yelled out, 'We need the fire department right now!'... I didn't know how long I would be able to hold him," he said. Payette soon realized that this man fell into the water because he was trying to retrieve his dog, who jumped in because there was a dead dog at the bottom of the pond. The man was getting anxious, and couldn't wait for emergency responders to arrive. Finally, someone else passed by and Payette asked him for a hand. "We were able to, the two of us, pull him up and get him up so that his bum was now on the ground and he was safe," Payette said. The dog was soon rescued by police, but only after the officers slipped on the rubber — but caught their footing before another person went overboard. 'What if we hadn't been there?' The unlucky man and his dog were taken in for a checkup, says Payette, but it wasn't the last Payette saw of him. "He brought us a lovely bottle of champagne, which he didn't have to, [but] which my wife and I are going to enjoy," said Payette. It was a surreal experience for the former broadcaster. He says he's rescued the odd cat from a tree, has seen the aftermath of disastrous events, but hasn't been involved in anything of this magnitude. Reflecting on his career as a reporter, Payette said, "As an observer, you're standing back." "This was totally different. Suddenly you're in the middle of it," he added. "All of those different questions go through your mind after the fact…what if we hadn't been there?"
Winnipeg Free Press
30-04-2025
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Death — a summing up
Opinion At times, English painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones swung wildly between dreading the end and longing for it. Two years before his 1898 death, he developed an irregular heartbeat and worried it might kill him. He wrote to his old friend May Gaskell, saying it would be 'an easy death and a desirable one — but I love my life — and would do all I can to prolong it.' Pam Frampton photo Ornamentation on a family crypt in Lecce, Italy. If we talked about death more openly, Pam Frampton wonders, would it seem less frightening? Josceline Dimbleby, author of the intriguing family memoir May and Amy, notes that the painter changed his tune not long after, this time writing to Gaskell: 'if the scythe man came now — that mower of lives — should I mind? No, by heaven, not one bit.' How did Burne-Jones pivot so quickly between a strong desire to live and a willingness to die? How do any of us welcome death with acceptance and grace, if given the luxury (or curse) of foreknowledge? My father had a beautiful death, if there is such a thing. He was terminally ill, but his pain was managed. He knew and accepted his fate, bolstered by a strong religious faith. He died surrounded by three loving generations of his family. My husband, in contrast, died briefly on a hospital gurney right in front of me after suffering a heart attack. The urgent, high-pitched whine of the EKG as he flatlined sent a mob of doctors and nurses running. A few jolts of the paddles later, and his colour — and life — returned. The sharp shock of realizing that he could be joking one minute and dead the next, even while under watchful care, is something that haunts me. And it has only increased my fear of the scythe man. I agree with Julian Barnes (author of Nothing to Be Frightened Of) that death defines life; that our knowledge of life's finiteness is what can make it so wonderfully sweet. But it's the sheer unpredictability of death that bothers me; its sometimes utter randomness. For people whose lives are ended through terrible violence, poverty, slavery, religious, racial and political persecution or other injustices, there may be precious little sweetness to be tempered by the knowledge of death. I have always had an image of myself channelling Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: 'Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' But Thomas himself neither saw old age nor did he rage against death. He died in 1953 at the age of 39 after falling into a coma. In her book The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, Katie Roiphe notes that one of the poet's friends wrote to another to say that Thomas's 'body died utterly quiet.' Indeed, Roiphe observes that Thomas moved beyond an acceptance of death in the latter years of his life to embrace the idea. 'The true mystery of Thomas's last days … is how the unnatural fear and apprehension of death melts into a craving for it,' she writes. 'It seems if you are afraid or preoccupied with something for long enough, you begin to develop a feeling toward it not dissimilar to love.' This warm feeling towards death has not yet stirred in me. And I don't think my lack of religious faith is behind my apprehension. The notion of an afterlife gave me no comfort or consolation, even in those years when I did believe in it. It's the current life I want to keep attending, not the after-party. (I could be wrong about the lack of afterlife. I guess I'll have to take my chances. As Barnes quips, 'The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing.') My friend Brendan died in October. While he did not run towards death with open arms, he did not fear it either. He approached it as he did life, with positivity and gratitude. He certainly wasn't tied up in any existential knots, and I was glad for him. Barnes writes that nowadays we have distanced ourselves from death and leave the messy parts to the professionals — doctors, nurses, funeral directors, urn purveyors — whereas years ago it was a more hands-on process, with people dying and being waked and prepared for burial at home. Perhaps that's why we don't talk about it easily now, except in hushed tones. There are layers of veneer between it and our ordinary lives. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. Yet each one of us is bound for that destination. I like Roiphe's summing up: 'I don't believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare,' she writes, 'but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid.' Email pamelajframpton@ X: pam_frampton Bluesky: @ Pam Frampton Pam Frampton is a columnist for the Free Press. She has worked in print media since 1990 and has been offering up her opinions for more than 20 years. Read more about Pam. Pam's columns are built on facts, but offer her personal views through arguments and analysis. Every column Pam produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
