Happy Birthday, Neil Peart
It's Neil Peart's birthday today. To celebrate, I thought I'd turn to Neil's own words about his first few years from "A Port Boy's Story," published in the St. Catharines Standard on June 24 and 25, 1994.
MY STORY begins in 1952, on the family farm near Hagersville. Mom tells me they used to wrap me in swaddling clothes and lay me in a manger, but don't get me wrong - this was no Christmas story. They just wanted me out of the way while they did the milking. But the dimly lit barn, redolent of straw and manure, was an early imprint, and to this day a dairy farm always smells like home to me. Wherever I may travel, from Switzerland to Senegal, my deepest memories are triggered by ... cow dung.