Making It Up As I Go Along #261

MONDAY…

--- Quiet day at work. Lunch with Kiyomi and the reintroduction of some tensions elsewhere… good times.

--- Off to the movies with Karl tonight. Good one… the Departed. Worth the late night. Supper with him before the movie is good too.

TUESDAY…

--- Tired and not feeling real well today. Headache… stomach issues… over heated. I’m home by 11:30 and lay out on the sofa for the rest of the day.

--- So no writing Tuesday night even though I said I would… Wednesday it’ll be now I guess.

WEDNESDAY…

--- Off work sick. Really tired with a weird stomach and headaches… and I think fever. I sleep for about twelve hours today… mostly in the morning with an hour of sleep also in the afternoon.

--- A trip to the grocery store has to happen… no food for a real meal in the house… and it just about wipes me out to do it. Dizzy and sweaty by the time I’m home.

THURSDAY…

--- Off work again today. Feel better than yesterday but still not much energy. I’d expect to be in tomorrow though.

FRIDAY…

--- Work half a day again. I get to lunch and am too wiped to go any further. So it’s some stew at work for lunch and fuel to fight the flu… and then home to bed. I sleep for about an hour and wake when my laptop’s e-mail goes off. I’m so out of it that I roll over for the phone!

--- I’m asleep again by 10:30 on the sofa… get up and head to bed an hour later.

SATURDAY…

--- Quiet day trying to get well. I think I’m doing better. I don’t sleep much through the day… I do go to bed again around 2:00 but just lay there and rest for 45 minutes or so.

--- Hockey Night in Canada is the most I do tonight.

Fantasy Land

The mind of a child is great… at least how I remember the way I thought of things seems great now. As a kid, I lived in a dream world.

I grew up in a town outside of St. John’s. Wedgewood Park was officially a town but it was realistically a suburb of St. John’s. Still, it was an enclave… a community… in the middle of the woods.

We lived at the edge of fantasy land. Actually, my parents still live in the same place… it’s just that fantasy land went elsewhere… torn from our grasp as we sat in bliss.

Directly over our back fence was everything a kid could want. A hill, immediately after the fence was ideal for winter sliding. It was even a groomed course for us kids… as a town, Wedgewood Park had its own snow clearing equipment, and the plows included this hill on its routes. As a kid, I don’t remember why plows would go back there… I assume it was a location for dumping some of the excess snow. Also, I’m sure it was to make sure things were clear for the building to the right of our sliding hill… the recreation centre. The centre started off as nothing but a swimming pool. Later, a gymnasium was added to it. And the back side of the complex, which bordered the right side of our sliding area, was where maintenance and oil trucks needed to go.

Either way, the end result was a sliding hill with manicured, icy tracks to run and a plowed up snow wall to ramp off of when we felt extra daring.

At the base of the hill was a softball field. The field is still there but it’s more alien now. As a kid, that field was just as magical as Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park. It was nestled in between the rec centre and the surrounding forest. A great space of green grass and desert like sand.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the remainder of the land behind my back fence was forest. Trails and rivers zig zagged across the pine clad hills… the greatest playground for anyone under the age of seventeen. And likely a great party spot for those above the age… but that’s a use I never had for those woods.

Being a kid, I had little concept beyond the fantasy of my surroundings. The ball field was a major league cathedral. And I could just look out my back window, check to see if anyone else was on it, and then go with friends to play ball for hours on end.

And the wooded area was even more magical to me. I knew of trails back there. I never got lost in my journeys. But I had no idea where I was relative to the rest of the world. A group of us would go off on excursions and I went, always with the feeling that if we only walked a little further… just make one more turn in the trail… cross one extra river and head for the ridge that lay just beyond… and we’d be at the shore of the ocean. We’d be a hundred kilometres away, to a part of Newfoundland’s wilderness that I had always heard of but, being a kid of ten or twelve years old, was never allowed to go to without parental supervision.

In reality, we never were more than a kilometre away from home. Now that the woods are gone, replaced by blocks of houses, each one looking like the others, I can drive a car along the same places that I ventured over with backpacks so many years before.

My childhood took two major hits. There was a summer day in PEI when I was given controversial news as to the realities of Santa Claus… and the year that it took to destroy our forested paradise.

Slowly, it happened… bit by bit. You could hear the tank like treads of back hoes and diggers just beyond the trees. Little excursions by us kids were no longer to explore the far reaches of our province, or to build forts out of fallen trees… they were to spy on the monstrous intruders. To keep tabs on their progression.

We’d report back to each other. Six or seven of us would gather in my next door neighbour’s shed… the senior of us getting chairs while the low end ‘lackeys’ would try to make themselves comfortable on chunks of wood. We’d have serious meetings in that shed… usually meetings that were delayed long enough for us to make a trip to the convenience store… I mean such serious news had to be discussed with candy, chips or bars nourishing us. Such discussions, on an empty stomach, could bring on temperamental outbursts… or fainting.

We’d sit and discuss. Peter would explain how he and Barry were in the woods after supper, just the day before, and the construction crew had just cleared out the patch where Keith had fallen off a stump and knocked the wind out of himself last summer. Much lamenting would follow. Serious discussions of sabotage and protests would be planned. And, in the talking, we’d all feel an urge to go back to the woods. So meetings would be adjourned and we’d go back for more exploring and fort building… always with a careful ear for invading tanks and chainsaw hauling men.

In the end, our forest disappeared. The last of it was torn from the hill closest to our house during a dismal winter. Where trees of green once were, we went through a wet winter and spring with mounds of muddy gravel. Where I once watched for birds and just stared into the trees with wonder… I now watched mudslides.

Eventually, homes took over this area. And the home buyers did more than destroy my fantasies of the woods… they destroyed Yankee Stadium as well. For it seemed to be an oversight by those who bought homes on back of a ball field that balls may enter their yards or hit their homes. Complaints ended up resulting in kicking off the long time men’s leagues that played on this field of dreams for some twenty years. It happened just as I became one of those players. The field I grew up on, I was now banned from using. All because of the complaints of those who now live where my fort once stood.

The field is still there. Kids still play on it. But it’s left without that feeling of neighbourhood… the feeling of community. People used to spend their lives on that field. Neighbours played there as kids, and went up the ranks to the men’s league… where the new children of the community would sit and watch, waiting for the day that they could play in the men’s league… under the bright lights.

Now it’s just kids. And they aren’t even only neighbourhood kids. Parents drive them in from around the city. The community heart was sacrificed for a rental fee.

Wedegewood Park is still there… although it’s no longer a town. The suburb tag is now official. And the people going to the rec centre come from all over. They’re driven in from away rather than biking or walking there from a few streets away. The ball field sits empty more often than not. No organized league plays on it during those magical summer evenings. And the forest is gone entirely. My portal to the unknown, now a piece of suburbia.

I feel sorry for kids now growing up in Wedgewood Park. They just don’t know what they’re missing.