Making It Up As I Go Along #262

MONDAY…

--- Quiet morning. I’m feeling alright but still sleeping hard at night. That is to say, I’m getting in around 8 hours a night over the last two or three nights. I usually only sleep that long when sick… but, during the day now, I feel fine.

--- Order some Greek for supper with Megan and Melissa… work in TC AFIS with Devin tonight… but with loud banging in some construction work downstairs, it’s a distracting night.

--- Birthday gift comes early from Sister and the family. The new Bond movie on DVD… a good CD… and an interesting book. Good stuff to come home to.

TUESDAY…

--- Slow night in TC AFIS. My stats suffer even though I sit and work with few distractions. Just one of those nights.

WEDNESDAY…

--- The office is half empty tonight. With the way work is right now, the evening shift is smaller than normal… and a couple of people were off sick tonight too. So, in the end, it’s Anne-Marie, Dave, Karen and me in AFIS. And Karen and Anne-Marie left early.

--- Freezing rain makes the drive home slow but still not too bad.

--- Some nice e-mails today makes things seem on their way to finally being good with me and a friend. It’s good getting pleasantly surprising e-mails for a change.

THURSDAY…

--- Work is better stat wise… and I get some laughs out of Laura and her reaction to her computer reeking havoc.

--- My recycling container is taken by someone else… cause people are idiots!

FRIDAY…

--- Nice quiet evening at work. Dave, Glen, Laura and I are the only ones in AFIS. And to make it more like summer, a bunch of us go to the Chip Wagon to pick up supper (Laura showing me how much pick up her car has off the light)… then, in keeping up with the stuff that hasn’t happened in a while, I eat supper with Laura. And the final thing that hasn’t happened in a while… I clean the kitchen before we leave for the night.

SATURDAY…

--- Quiet day around the house… then over to Michelle’s for the evening. Linda and Jaymie also go and we sit around, watch some TV, and talk. Nice enough night.

Chicken Run

How far would you go for a meal of Mary Brown’s? For those who don’t know what Mary Brown’s is… it’s a chicken serving fast food place along the same lines as Kentucky Fried Chicken. Back home, there are all sorts of Mary Brown’s outlets. They’re as popular as KFC. But here, in Ontario, they’re virtually non-existent.

So, on this day, Melissa and I agree to make a run. It’s about 160 km from Ottawa to Kingston. And Mary Brown’s awaits us.

We meet at work and I hop in with Melissa. The run begins. And in the early stages, Melissa yells in Spring with the first sighting of a groundhog. She spots another on our drive home, several hours later, and I’m shocked at her keen eye for such a little creature.

By the time we reach the Corel Centre… now called Scotiabank Place… Melissa tells me how people have begun to call the hockey stadium “the Bank”. Pro hockey has, for the most part, tossed out all tradition and atmosphere for bucks. I glance over at the building which stands in the middle of nowhere and sputter under my breath at the half dozen commercial logos slapped onto the side of the façade. You’d think, with so much advertising, they wouldn’t feel the need to charge you $10 to park and another $10 for one beer… but the call of the buck knows no bounds.

We pass on by and both take notice of a snow covered hill off to our right. Neither of us had noticed this hill there before. Not a good thing… two people working with fingerprints… where minute details are taken into account to decide if a person is a criminal or not… and we’re both surprised by a hill! For me, it’s time to get a new job. And for Melissa… who just twenty minutes previous was spotting rodents from a hundred yards away… it’s time to put her away.

Further along, we spot something a bit rarer. As we pass through a small roadside town, we see turkeys. Live turkeys… just standing there along the side of the road. I think they’re possible ornamental… but Melissa looks back through the mirror to see them flap across the road after us.

The road trip continues. We’re just chatting quietly and watching the old farm houses drift by as we continue on towards lunch. Small town Ontario is possibly the best part of this province. Homes are older and show more character with their worn brick fronts.

But it’s still old farmsteads that grab me the most. It was like that for me back home too… when driving through the countryside. But the Ontario farms are better. Old stone houses which look like they were put together by hand… stone by stone… several generations ago. And usually there’s an old barn nearby… part stone and part wood… often leaning to one side with age and weathering. Planks of wood separating to leave little gaps of darkness where, if we stopped, we could peak to see what lays within.

And then we reach Kingston. A nice, old style town with interesting architecture. Right along the shores of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario… even though it isn’t the ocean, it is nice to be near a larger body of water again.

I look for signs welcoming us to the hometown of Don Cherry, Doug Gilmour, or Kirk Muller… but all three hockey legends (well, I guess it’s a bit of a stretch calling Muller a legend… but I have his jersey and it’s my story anyway) are mentioned nowhere.

We hit Princess Street and start the drive towards Mary Brown’s goodness. A roadway of royalty bringing us to the treasured reward… quite fitting. But Princess Street goes on forever. And we keep scanning the horizon for the great sign that brings memories of home.

In the end, it’s not so dramatic. We sit at an intersection and Melissa looks over to see the restaurant just sitting there on the end of a strip mall. But dramatic or not, it’s around 2:30 and lunchtime.

The meal is a return to home to be sure. Melissa has chicken strips… I have a chicken sandwich (a Big Mary) and tatters are eaten by us both. Those batter coated potato goodies that are so rare in these parts… they go down with a smile of childhood.

After lunch, we head back downtown and go for a walk along the waterfront. But the wind is cold here and our walk goes no longer than fifteen minutes… we rush back to the car to begin the return trip back to Ottawa.

It’s a unique and enjoyable way to celebrate a birthday. Even though my actual birthday is Monday, Melissa makes this event my birthday celebration… Who would have thought fast food chicken could make for such an adventure.

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.