Richard John Rheal Wood was born in Brampton, Ontario, Canada in the same hospital as me.

 

He was the happiest of babies, and kept that smile on his face all through his early years. Just look at the photos and you’ll see a kid with a ‘sunny disposition’ as my mum described him.

About 18 months later Jeff was born and they became typical brothers and best of friends, the elder Rick being more cautious whilst the younger Jeff was always pushing his luck.
With both sets of grandparents, loads of aunts, uncles and cousins, there was plenty of family warmth throughout his early years and beyond.

In Brampton we lived briefly in a ground floor flat in an apartment building on McMurchy St, then above a car stereo store at 79 1/2 Queen St. where I worked while attending college. 
Rick would have been about 2 years old when we moved from Brampton to Ottawa and into an apartment on Crystal Beach drive. He had a very inquisitive mind from an early age. I recall teaching him how to add and subtract using a number line years before he started formal school. Rick also spoke well from a very early age. His sentences rarely contained an “um or ah” – each word crisply flowed into the next without pause.  (Even his phone texts were written with proper punctuation and use of capital letters!)

Rick began school in Ottawa, a French immersion system where he quickly picked up the language. In nearby Mackie Park I taught him to ride a bike and ‘coached’ him at T-ball, which really means I told him to ‘hit the ball and run’.