Making It Up As I Go Along #526

With the loss of a friend, mortality is the main thing on my mind this week.  And it’s something I’m not interested in writing.  Which makes blog time fairly difficult.

So a few short snippets that have stuck with me over the years.  Some may be monumental in nature.  Others may be small… yet they’ve all engrained themselves in my memory or left me in awe.  In no particular order… the top five.

Places

Stonehenge…

This is a place I had long before read about.  And it’s a place I’ve seen on TV numerous times from as long as I can remember watching TV.  Seeing it in person was mind blowing.  But not for all the reasons I expected it to.

We were riding the bus to Stonehenge.  A tour bus taking us there before continuing on to a couple of small English towns. 

 As we ride I’m passively watching out the window of the bus.  By passively, I mean I’m not looking at anything in particular… just watching the countryside go by.  Then suddenly… there it is.  I go from sheep and fields of barley to Stonehenge.  Such a sight makes you snap out of the semi-trance of passive watching.  The place so built up in my mind simply appears as part of a country drive.

World Trade Center…

I would have been eight years old when we visited New York.  New York, to me, was Sesame Street.  I knew of the Empire State Building because Spider-Man swung from it’s tower in the cartoons.  I knew of the Statue of Liberty.  And I had heard of the World Trade Center simply because of how enormous these buildings were.

When we got to the site, I was dumbfounded by the height.  Standing just outside of the towers and looking straight up… following the unique vertical lines of windows to the blue of the sky.  Every building I had ever seen before these, you could count the stories based on the horizontal rows of windows.  Like rings on a tree, you could do the rings of windows and, at that point of my life, I doubt I ever was able to count higher than 20 stories. 

But the World Trade Center made such counting impossible.  The horizontal rings didn’t exist.  All you saw were these lines of windows that went on up forever.  And even had the windows been more traditionally laid out, I’d never be able to keep counting up so high. 

The other things I remember from World Trade Center are the elevator ride to the top (watching floor numbers light up, one after another, for what seemed to be forever).  And being on the top.  Seeing a sign warning you to throw nothing off.  Seeing all the fences keeping you far enough back from the edge that eight year old me would never have been able to throw anything over anyway.  Though us kids always heard the stories of pennies embedding themselves into the pavement if tossed from such a height.  And if the penny hit you first, it would cut right through you and still disappear into the concrete.  And I remember the cabs.  From the top of the World Trade Center, it was just great lines of yellow dotted roads.  Each dot being a taxi cab.

Mistaken Point…

Just did this one the past Fall.  Standing on top of 565 million year old fossils was incredible.  Having these ancient creatures beneath my slippered feet and all of this on the edge of the sea upon this plateau of old sea bed.  Being able to bend down and gently stroke the bumps of stone while knowing your fingers were tracing the remains of creatures that lived on the bottom of a deep sea more than 200 million years before the first dinosaur ever came into existence.  How could that not affect you?

Olympia…

The most inspiring part of Olympia for me was the ancient stadium.  This was the original Olympic Stadium where all the running races occurred.  All the tourists lined the starting blocks posing for pictures and running fifty feet or so.  But I just wanted to walk it.  Went the entire length of the stadium.  Well past where the chatting tourists stopped.  By the far end it was quiet with only the breeze in the trees and the chirp of birds to be heard.  To be in that place, quiet, and to look at the grass mounds realizing these were ancient stands that held ancient people cheering on ancient races.  It was special.

Cape Spear…

It’s my favourite place to be.  But my favourite time there is what makes this list.  I once drove to Cape Spear at 4:00 AM in order to view a meteor shower from the edge of North America.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that night and dozens of people were perched in the parking lot of this most easterly point of North America.  We stayed more than an hour… watching dozens of meteors dance across the sky.  And as I prepared to leave, the orange glow of the not yet risen sun began to paint the eastern sky. 

There are other places that don’t quite make this list but have been special to me. Like Mykonos Island and it’s whitewashed maze of houses.  And being on a plane coming in to land at London… flying over top of the London Eye, Big Ben and Tower Bridge.  There’s the Greek hotel with a terrace overlooking a bay from high up on its mountain perch… where dad and I talked softly while watching evening turn into night.  And there’s Back Wester’ Shore… the great slabs of stone acting as giant steps to the sea just outside Joe Batt’s Arm. 

On any given day, perhaps some of these other places would be on my main list while one of my above five would drop down to this honourable mention list.  It’s just the way lists go. 

THURSDAY…

--- Day shift.  Ordinary day shift.

FRIDAY…

--- Lunch with Shannon at work is a good time.  Haven’t done it for a month or two.  Really tired in the afternoon though.  Odd of me, as I usually perk up after lunch.

--- Out to the movies tonight.  Wreck-it Ralph is some good fun.

--- Basically nap on the sofa after the movie.  Bed by 2:30 but slept a good hour up to then.

SATURDAY…

--- Night shift alone.  Pretty quiet night.  Kind of nice for some quiet time at work.

SUNDAY…

--- Softball before work.  Bit of Wendy’s to eat once I get in and work is fairly quiet again… though Keith is there with me tonight.

MONDAY…

--- Don’t sleep great.  About five hours or so… and sore and tired through much of the day after I’m up.  Do a half hour walk… but more slow for stretching the legs than fast for exercise. 

--- Watch Jaws again.  The more I see it the more I like it.  Getting to a point that this is one of my favourite movies now.  The acting of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw is first rate.  And the cinematography is really first rate.  Sure the mechanical shark doesn’t really stand up to today’s standards… but really, this movie is about much more than the shark.

--- Find out tonight that Karl has finally lost his fight with cancer.  No surprise because he really declined quickly over the last month but it’s still not easy losing a good friend.  I’ll miss him for sure.  Paddy’s Pub will never be the same.  Our walks from his apartment to the pub are among my highlights of life in Ottawa.  Only once did we not do a trip to the pub on foot.  It always gave a good ten minutes to chat on the way, catch up, check out the swans in the river from the bridge… and after the meal, with Guinness washing it down… sometimes a Dairy Queen treat would slow our walk back down to a leisurely summer evening pace.

TUESDAY…

--- Groceries, a good walk, and much reflection today.  Thinking of Karl as well as other friends and family.  Wishing many people were living closer to me on a day like this. 

--- Blue Jays trade makes for some much needed light hearted excitement.  Nice to see the Jays getting some high end players to try to compete with.

WEDNESDAY…

--- Quiet day.  Sleep for seven hours or so is not.  Do a walk.  It’s calm and sunny today.  And watch some TV… movies and Survivor and some rewind Olympic hockey.