Travelling Man: Part I

My journey in Freemasonry started, I suppose, long before I petitioned for initiation into the First Degree of Masonry. When I was a boy hanging around my father's service station I spent time talking to an old man who  wore a fascinating gold ring with the Square and Compasses set into a jet black stone. I"m not sure of the exact nature of the relationship between he and my father; business, personal or both. But I do remember that he had owned and operated the Dyke Restaurant at one time in a building adjacent to my father's station. He and his wife, Bessy, also lived in a quaint little house behind the businesses on the edge of the Avon River.
His name was Sam Gold. He was a Mason. He was also an amputee with an artificial or "wooden leg" as most people still called it back then. Sometimes Sam walked with the aid of canes; sometimes he was in an old wheelchair. I have no idea where Sam came from or how he came to live in Falmouth. But I do know that his life seemed to have been very interesting and had a certain mystique about it. Sam was always very well dressed for a man of his age in those times. How old he was then I couldn't say. But as a boy, I saw him as ancient. I remember that he was balding with tufts of white hair around the sides and that he wore dark-rimmed glasses. He smoked cigars....a lot. And a pipe too if I remember. He was the first person to show me a fountain pen. He wore a lot of gold jewelry.
Sam was a well spoken; albeit gruff man. And I remember him being quite short and surly with some of the employees and even customers in the garage. Some of the other men around the place used to like to torment him a bit and get him "wound up". But Sam was always very nice to me. He had a way of captivating your attention, drawing you closer and making you feel like he was about to impart the secrets of the universe to you. No matter what he said, his words sounded wise and profound. And he always looked directly into your eyes as if he were trying to see right into your brain.
Sam Gold was likely the first Mason that I met. The first, to be sure, that I knew was a Mason; even though I had no idea whatsoever what that meant. Sam seemed very unique and out-of-place. He didn't talk like the rest of the menfolk around Hants County. He didn't dress like them or act like them. And although they sometimes teased him for a bit of fun; they always seemed to have a certain respect for him.
As I look back now, there is no doubt that old Sam was "from away". From where, as I've said, I have no idea. I know that he has a son who lives in Halifax that was a friend of my father's and around the same age.
His name was Johnny Gold and for awhile he was quite an aspiring country singer here in the Maritimes. Later he was a DJ with Country 101FM in Halifax. I don't remember much about Sam's wife Bessy, except that she was very sweet and died sometime before my father sold the service station and packed us off to Yarmouth in 1979. Shortly after, Sam went to live at the Nova Scotia Home For Freemasons on Wentworth Road by the new Hants Community Hospital. That was the last that I ever saw of him and I remember that his little house was torn down. Sam and the "Masonic Home" , as it was called around here, are both long gone.

Beta Israel

One thing that I remember Sam telling me got locked away in my sub-conscious vault until many years later when I was a man. Sam once told me, and why I'm not sure, that he was descendant of Ethiopian Jews. He stressed that fact as if it was very important; not in the sense that it made him special, but rather that there was something mystical about a race of Ethiopian Jews. Most of the others scoffed at this. They told him he was full of shit and that there was no such thing. Jews are from Israel and Ethiopians are from Africa, they told him. And besides, he may be Jewish but he sure as hell wasn't black. These were all good points to a young lad of 6 or 7 years old and I didn't pay very much mind to it after that. That is until I was a soldier in Ethiopia many years later. That's when I learned that there is actually a race of Ethiopian Jews, and they claim a very ancient descent.