Making It Up As I Go Along #232

MONDAY…
--- I hurt my knee while sleeping. I’m hobbling around all day today but it’s pretty good by the time I leave at 3:00. But the question remains… how do you hurt your knee as you sleep?
--- A nap and evening ironing are just really not very exciting.

TUESDAY…
--- Not a bad day at work. Afterwards, I get Karl and we got to Gatineau Park for a hike. Get a good view of much of Gatineau… and also a distant view of Ottawa.
--- A fall asleep on the sofa for almost an hour before heading to bed… hope it doesn’t fool up my sleep.

WEDNESDAY…
--- Not a bad day at work. Golf afterwards. Atlas, Trevor, Phil Charron-Fortin and myself. Pretty good round for the second time out this year.

THURSDAY…
--- Busy day of work… a nap and spaghetti for supper in the evening.
--- I was awake around 3:30 this morning and never got back to sleep… so the nap in the early evening is no surprise.

FRIDAY…
--- Work is even paced… good for a Friday. An after work nap is followed by a baseball game with Nick, Sheila, Casey and Isaac from the office… plus a bunch of Nick’s friends. They lose the game and Isaac disappears by about the 7th inning… but it’s a pretty good night out.

SATURDAY…
--- Quiet day with some laundry. Join Linda Jackson in the evening and drive with her to the office pig roast. We stop along the way to where our new office will be… it’s a forty-five minute drive to get to the new office from my place… enough to make me say I will move before our office does… two years and counting.
--- Pig roast is good. Lots of time spent with Linda, her daughter, her daughter’s friend, Derek, Kiyomi, and Louis.


After the Show
After a night at the movies, Karl and I begin walking back to his apartment. He lives some ten minutes away from the Mayfair (an old style, one screen cinema) and whenever we agree to see a movie there, I park at his apartment. From there we walk along Bank Street, cross the bridge over the Rideau River, take the path under the bridge and walk through the side streets of the surrounding neighbourhood. It makes the ten minute walk fifteen minutes instead… but it’s better.

After our movie, we head back to his apartment. Escaping the bustle of Bank Street, we chat through the still night with our footsteps as the main source of noise. When footsteps dominate the noise of a city, you know it’s a quiet night.

Most of my night time walks have been alone. Here in Ottawa I walk alone after evening shift. And back home, in St. John’s, if I was walking at night it would be by myself as well. Most of my friends in St. John’s are with families now and they live in the suburbs. Walking city streets doesn’t rank very high on their list of daily priorities.

I love walking at night alone but it is a nice change to occasionally do such a walk with a friend. Karl and I chat during our amble home. We talk of the movie we just watched. We talk of the creative process of writing. And we talk about drawing and painting as well (Karl’s main creative hobby).

As we walk, another noise disturbs our footfalls. We stop talking and look across the street to see a woman, standing in her doorway and sweeping her front walk.

It’s 11:30 at night and she’s hunched over her broom with a pink hooded sweatshirt on and the hood up, hiding her face. Behind her, the all glass storm door allows the light of her lower unit apartment to silhouette her. The kitchen cupboards, table and chairs are clear in the light space of indoors. The old style, two story house surrounds and rises up from this beacon of homeliness. And she stoops out front… sweeping.

As we pass, Karl and I look at each other and smile. Such scenes as these are just pushed into the background of a busy, metropolitan day. You walk by and pay them no heed. But at night, in the stillness, it’s a conceptual painting brought to life.

We walk on, returning to the sound of our steps, and turn our discussion to the scene we just saw. We speak of the pink hood over the woman’s face. We speak of possible reasons why a person would take it upon themselves to go sweeping outside, late on a Saturday night. And we speak of the glow of the home within and how inviting it looked.

As we keep going, Karl asks me about how I write. He asks if I could describe our current scene and make a story of it. I think about it and feel a little pressure to try to describe our walk as a story teller this very second. But I tell him that such things usually happen hours or days after the fact, when my imagination plays with it and my memory becomes a picture.

As I’m telling him this, trying to describe the process I use, a black and white cat darts across the street and crosses the sidewalk in front of us. Again, we both pause and chuckle. I gesture towards the driveway the cat jutted up and say “that could be a part of such a story.” I look up the driveway as we walk past and see the dim whiteness of that black and white cat as it pauses at a gate, staring at us cautiously, waiting to see if it needs to scurry under the gate to safety or if it is fine where it stands.

We continue on. Returning under the bridge and coming up around on the other side. But instead of continuing on to the apartment, Karl suggests a drink at the local pub, and we backtrack along Bank Street for a block or two. We sit and continue our chatting over a couple of pints.

By the time we reach Karl’s apartment, it’s just past 1:00. Karl suggests a pizza before I head home and I’m intrigued to try out the local pizza place. We place our order and stand in the porch like customer area as we wait. A twenty-five year old TV is in the corner playing an old black and white Elvis Presley movie. The occasional distortion and lines on the screen tell us there’s no cable hook up. Only an antenna gives us the picture and I’m mesmerized by the memories as we await the pizza.

A city is at it’s best late at night.

Making It Up As I Go Along #231

Pictures...
Top: Coast Guard Vessel, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, exiting The Narrows with Fort Amherst in the background.

Bottom: Looking into downtown St. John's. Along the skyline is the Basilica on the right and The Rooms on the left.

MONDAY…
--- Downtown with Christine for some shopping. Lunch there and a little walk at Mer Bleue. Ice cream to cool off and some TV time before supper. We eat on a patio of a new place near my house. The Barley Mow is pretty good and it was a nice night to eat outside.

TUESDAY…
--- Busy day with Christine. Dick’s Diner, Mountain Equipment Co-Op, the Museum of Civilization (with the I-Max on the Nile included) and supper in the market.
--- Monty Python’s Search of the Holy Grail on DVD to end the night… Christine may not be much of a Python fan… silly cousin.

WEDNESDAY…
--- See Leslie and Kiyomi for the first time in weeks. Good for a smile or two.
--- Work is somewhat busy. Two walks with Linda (another one I haven’t seen in a month) is good.
--- Come home to my smoke detector telling me it has a low battery. This means having to go straight out again to get a new battery. The detector is electrical with only a battery backup… so there’s no unplugging it for the night (it’s hard wired in). Bit of a pain but oh well.

THURSDAY…
--- Work is pretty normal for the summer vacation time (meaning a third of the people aren’t in the place). Lots of walks today. One at each break and an hour long one when I go home.

FRIDAY…
--- Computer issues at work annoy somewhat. Not a bad evening though. Just Dave, Louis, Casey and me in CNI.

SATURDAY…
--- Quiet day for most of the day. I do a movie with Karl in the evening. I like “Click”... funny with some meaning.
--- A beer and a good stroll back to Karl’s place after that and some pizza to end the night in front of his TV with an old Japanese movie on TV. “The War of the Gargantuans” is a classic cheesy dubbed monster movie complete with rubber suit guy wondering around a model city as the feared monster.


The Narrows
Two rocky hills and an inlet. An inlet that’s so narrow they named this place just that… The Narrows.

St. John’s harbour has more history than any other city harbour in North America. The Roman Catholic Basilica, with it’s two towers jutting up into the downtown sky has even been used by sailors to gain access to this harbour. For you see, with rocky crags ready to punch holes in those ships searching for a place to tie up, captains were trained to aim their ship right between the Basilica’s towers. Go towards the towers and you’ll avoid the rocks. This history is my main objection to the monstrosity that is The Rooms (a building that stands next to, and dwarfs, the Basilica).

But it’s the history of The Narrows that captured me a few weeks ago. Jim, Sam and I joined Christina (Jim’s sister) at her new downtown home. A three story house I’d take for my own in a second. For the third floor loft/bedroom has a balcony located just off of it. And from this balcony there is a perfect view of The Narrows.

The moment we stepped out onto her balcony was perfectly timed. A coast guard ship was entering the harbour. And even though I couldn’t see the Basilica at that moment, I knew where that ship was pointing.

I saw a modern day coast guard ship but my imagination took over and suddenly I saw ships of all sorts making this same run through this same passage. I saw fishing dories. I saw schooners with great masts and sails. I saw modern day cruise ships, taller than any local building, edge between the rocks.

I saw the Mathew drifting in from the night time fog as a vessel from a dream. I actually witnessed that one. Even though John Cabot’s “Mathew” sailed the seas some five hundred years ago, I was there when the replica entered St. John’s harbour on the five hundredth anniversary.

From Christina’s balcony I saw sealing ships returning from the stormy winter hunts with hundreds of family and friends waiting onshore to welcome their safe return. I also saw ships of all sizes and type… some with sails and others with the hum of a motor… taking a crew out to sea… never to be seen again.

War ships have patrolled the waters just outside The Narrows. There to protect North America from invasion. Remnants of a great chain can still be seen at the base of Signal Hill on the left and Fort Amherst on the right. This chain once held a metal net in the hopes of keeping the German U-Boats out of the harbour.

At Signal Hill, Marconi sent the first Trans Atlantic wireless message. Generations of children have run along these rocks, lofting kites into the wind. And criminals have been left here, tarred and hung… a warning to those within the city below.

The Narrows have stood for five hundred years as a welcome to those who have travelled long from the old world. Once a ship enters The Narrows, it is home… the stormy seas are left outside, only peace remains within the safety of the hills.

And the Narrows are there to say farewell. When sailors venture out to return to the lands where their ancestors have come from. Most make it but, for some, The Narrows mark the last time they would be within a stone’s throw of land.

Many a kook have left The Narrows trying to row from Canada to Ireland alone and in everything from a ten foot dory to what looks like little more than a giant beef bucket. Sometimes people stand onshore to see them off but it’s more with a feeling of “what an idiot” than “bless that man”. Most times the locals know better, don’t pay any attention to the rower, and chuckle at the paper two days later when they read of how the coast guard had to pick him up fifty kilometres off the coast.

But it’s all there. The good and the bad. The glorious and the tragic. The historical and the ordinary. Those two hills of rock and that narrow channel of ocean have been home to so much history… and my friend can walk through a doorway and peer out on it anytime she wants.