Future Endeavors

 

Art by Roy Lichtenstein

My Mining Tech education coming to an end, I had to think about what I’d accomplished, and what I might do with it. I can’t say that I ever liked what I was studying. It was boring. It was tedious. It was baffling that I hadn’t bailed on it after my first year. But my marks had always been in the toilet, I’d lacked confidence in my ability to succeed at anything, and to be honest, I still had no clue what I’d like to do with my life. What I liked and loved was staring me in the face every day, but I was too blind to see that. So, I persevered, and I was on my way to graduating with honours. Honours? I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears.

Graduating with a high GPA changed my perspective on everything. I discussed the prospect of university with my parents. I thought I might like to try my hand at an MBA. I thought it would be a good mix. I could work in the business end of mining; and if that didn’t work out, I still had two mining diplomas to fall back on. My parents ought to be proud. I was always thinking of a practical, marketable application. My parents agreed. The only problem, as I see it, is that I’ve never been motivated by money. And just like engineering, I didn’t give a shit about business. Long story short, my parents agreed.

Budgeting was as much a problem that year as any other. I took to staying in on Saturday nights again, watching Spencer for Hire, and Saturday Night at the Movies with Elwy Yost. I bought pop and chips instead of beer and pretzels. I actually payed closer attention in school. Studied more scientifically. Passed better. One advantage of Cambrian was that their final exams, any exams, did not carry the same weight as they had in Haileybury. In Haileybury, exams were a make or break phenomena, making up such a high percentage of one’s GPA as to stagger the senses, to invoke a level of panic unparalleled. Not so Cambrian. Exams were obviously worth more than any single test, but to not do well on any given exam did not necessitate failure. I did well on my exams, notwithstanding. I was a better student, a more methodical, calculating student.

I applied to a number of universities, Western among them. I was accepted, pending my final GPA. 3.01. Honours. Glory be. I was in.

But one did not just slide into Western’s MBA program. And although Western gave me credit for many of my mining courses, enough that I didn’t require any more 1^st year classes to move on to 2^nd year university (in engineering), I was enrolled in Social Sciences, and engineering credits didn’t count towards a Soc. Sci. degree, and there were Business 101, and 201 to take before anyone was let in to those hallowed ivy league halls.

There was a girl those last couple months. I’d met her through some guys I’d somehow met. I don’t know how we met, just that we did, and for a very short time I played a couple sessions of D&D with them. It didn’t last long. I was not that interested. I’d come to realize that my love of D&D was actually tied to and fused with my love for my friends. These guys were okay, they were as good and kind and welcoming as any others, but I suppose I was feeling nostalgic for those earlier best friends. She was a friend of one of them. She pursued me. She was rather pretty, too. Dark hair, almost black, bedroom eyes, ample curves. Actually being the target of such a girl was novel. Her friend asked me to tread lightly, to be gentle and kind, that she’d been mistreated by the last couple of guys she seen. She asked me if I’d like to accompany her to a wedding as her date. I thought about it, but I declined, telling her that I was leaving in a couple weeks for good, that she ought to set her sights on someone she could grow with. My mining friends told me I was an idiot.

All that said, registration was still months ahead, and money had to be made. Kidd Creek’s woes were temporarily behind them. I was accepted as a summer student again. And I landed work in the load-out again. That was alright. Why spend the summer underground when I could turn my face into the sun on my breaks.

Most of my high school friends weren’t really my friends anymore. There was still Garry Martin, and Chris Cooper, but most had begun to graduate and get on with their lives by then. Garry had begun to call me “Old Man,” citing that for six days a year I was actually two years older than he was, numerically. I couldn’t argue with such tenuous logic, and “Old Man” was better than “Psycho,” despite its esoteric appeal; but as you might imagine, Psycho was a tall order to live up to. There were still some friends at/from the pool, Jodie Russell, Jeff Chevrier (MIRV, nicknamed after RED ALERT, a video game at Top Hats that he could never defeat), and now there was Neil Petersen. Neil was younger, so I wasn’t sure what Garry saw in him then, but Neil played D&D, so he was in.

Were we growing up? Yes. Were we maturing? Somewhat. Not entirely.

Aubrey Bergin had about completed a correspondence course on Aircraft maintenance. He was finding it difficult finding future employment owing to his lack of hands-on experience. Go figure. He was seriously considering the military, the only employer who’d give him an apprenticeship. But until then, Aubrey and I were still lining up on the dancefloor bannister, girl watching, Aubrey still rolling the occasional beer bottle amidst the dancers.

Another night, Jodie and I were meeting others at the Victory Tavern. One block away, Jodie crossed on a Red, where I, noticing a cop lazing up the block, stopped cold. “Jodie,” I said, but Jodie was already halfway across. When he gained the far side, he noticed he was alone, and looked back to see why. There I was, on the corner, standing next to a bear of a cop. I waved. The cop hooked a finger at Jodie, who, after glancing at the still red light, and then the lack of any traffic, re-crossed, again on the Red.

“Never cross on a red light,” the cop said.

I could scarcely believe what he said, after his ordering Jodie to do just that.

More importantly, I saw Deb before I left Sudbury. It turns out that she was in Sudbury the whole time. I’d looked for her. I was always looking for her. But I never saw her. Then one weekend in Timmins I met up with one of my old Res friends. I asked after her, and he not only told me that she was still in Sudbury, he told me where she worked, a Camera shop, right downtown. I found it, and went there. I asked for her, and the guy manning the counter said she was downstairs and would be up shortly. I browsed the cameras they had on hand, and heard her stumble up the stairs. My heart raced. When she topped the stairs, she saw me. Her jaw dropped. She almost fell flat on her face in her rush to embrace me. Any doubts I had whether she loved me or not were dispelled at that moment. I knew then that she loved me when we were together, and I believed then that she loved me still. We embraced hard, we kissed. Tears rushed to my eyes. We kissed again. God, I missed her.

I asked her to join me for coffee. She said she was working. I said, “After.”

I asked her when she was working till, and when she said 9 pm, I said, “Come for a coffee,” again. “maybe I drink. I’ll wait.” I told her I’d do whatever she’d like. I told her where I was going to be, hour by hour. She was noncommittal.

I remembered that guy I’d seen once or twice in those last couple months while still in Res; and I wondered. I should have asked her for her number, but I was terrified that she’d refuse me, that she would actually tell me that she was still with that other guy, with any guy.

I waited for her. I watched the door. With each hour, my hopes slipped, my heart fell. I was crushed. Again. I wanted to leave, but I kept up that futile hope.

I never saw Debbie again. Not once.

The Nomad

Have you ever wanted to just pack up and leave? Probably. But you likely came to your senses and didn’t. The difference between you and I is that I did. On far too many occasions. This understanding that I could just get up and leave may have begun to take root when I was younger, owing to all those moves and restarts and reshuffles I’d weathered. I never quit, though. Not once. I always put my shoulder to the stone and persevered, only pulling up roots on completion of what I was doing at the time. During college I pulled up roots to escape, to run away. In time that became a wanderlust. So, it’s no surprise that halfway through my 2^nd year at Haileybury, I began to feel the desire to move on.

That desire was heralded by a conversation I had at a party, during Christmas break. Garry Martin and Debbie Huisson had, or were about to break up, but she and Garry were still friends, still chumming about. Garry had a gift for that, always able to remain friends with the girls he’d dated. More than that, he was able to get away with just about anything when it came to women. On more than one occasion, Garry would chase down some girl, even one he wasn’t seeing, grab her, lift her off her feet, and turning her upside down, bite her playfully on the behind, growling and shaking his head like a dog while he did it. The girls laughed. They always laughed. Had I done that, I’d have been up on sexual harassment charges within the hour, but not Garry. He did not bite anyone’s ass at the party in question. He behaved himself, as much as Garry behaved himself. Deb and I were talking, and she was telling me about how excited she was for her upcoming spring trip to Aruba. Aruba? I asked, thinking how could she afford to go to Aruba? I certainly couldn’t. I usually began to see my finances dwindle come New Year, requiring my annual loan from my parents, so travel was out of the question. I was jealous, and said so. I said I wish I could go somewhere, anywhere, on spring break, making a joke of it. Then you should go, Deb said, as if it were as simple as that. Of course, it was that simple; for her, anyway. But hers was an affluent family; mine wasn’t. I would never have taken a loan from my parents and then spent it on a trip to fun in the sun. I wish I’d been able to, but I would never have, not then anyway. Duty called. I’d committed myself to an education I’d begun to loathe less than I had, even if I was still baffled as to why I was enrolled in it. As for travel, and new, unknown experiences, I had a fear of forging out on my own, wanting the security of friends at my side.

But her escaping on holiday did raise up the desire to move on. I began to think on returning to Sudbury. There were women there, girls my age, not the high school girls and married women some of the guys I knew were dallying with. And even though the guys I was rooming with were better than those prior HSM roommates, cabin fever was setting in, and I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Neil had promised to teach me guitar, and despite my bringing my father’s Gibson back down with me, he never seemed to find the time or the inclination. I tried on my own for a little while, but learning to read music and the instrument at the same time proved a daunting task. Jeff and I began to argue in Milling and Chem class. John Star began to howl how I stole his land after a few drinks. “You’re kidding, right?” I asked. “Look at me,” I said, “I don’t own a fucking thing.”

I found other friends. I took refuge at Roy’s Restaurant. My cash dwindled, but Roy was always pleased to see me, chatting me up at the bar. I began to only go out Fridays, opting to stay in and watch TVOs Saturday Night at the Movies, with Elwy Yost, on a tiny 3 inch black & white TV combo my parents had gifted me when I left for school.

I recall my final D&D session vividly, not so much for the game, but for the evening on which it was held. We were up at the college after hours, in the cafeteria, set up on the short south wall. We were playing, winding things up, when we caught sight of a flash on the horizon. Deep, lengthy thunder rolled over us. We took little notice at first, it was just another spring storm out on the horizon, somewhere far out over Quebec. But in no time at all, another, even larger bolt splayed out over the full length of all we could survey. We stopped and stood as more and more bolts struck out in the far distance. More thunder rolled, closer this time. Just as one bolt died, another arced and stretched and reached out, then another and another, each one closer and closer still, each strike leaping a kilometer ahead of the last, so many at a time that they cast a bright blue blaze over all we could see, the elms, the town, the lake, the horizon, the underside of the boiling clouds. We fanned out, each to one of the partitioned alcoves, watching and feeling the storm as it rushed in on us. The enormous elms whipped and writhed on the storm’s fury as it crashed onto the shore and climbed the hill. Sheets of rain were thrown against the building. We ought not to have remained fixed as we were in the windows, but we were, each of us, awed by the spectacle unfolding before us, rushing up to us and over us. The thunder had become a long continuous, overlapping roar, each peel a bass bell resonating within us. And once past, it was gone, receding faster than it had arrived, leaving a vast silence and ghastly black void in it wake. In its wake I felt an emptiness. I was numb. I wished to be gone.

Towards the end, I’d arrive at Roy’s with no more than five or ten dollars in my pocket, enough for a few beers, enough to catch a set and be gone. The final night there, I was preparing to leave when Roy set a beer in front of me. “It’s on me,” he said. That beer complete, another was set in front of me, then another. “It’s the least I can do for you,” he said. “You may be surprised to hear this, but I think of you as a friend. If you ever pass through here again, say on your way to Toronto or something, I want you to stop in and say hello.”
I never did.

Limbo, and Beyond

So there I was, back in Haileybury, repeating 2^nd year, even though I’d passed it in Cambrian. It was like 2^nd grade, all over again. I’ll be fair; there were differences in the curriculums. Cambrian was more class-oriented, fewer field trips, with more mechanical and statistical overlaps, while HSM was a more “practical,” hands on, technical course load. Way more surveying, something I was never particularly fond of, having to do circle checks out back in the freezing cold. HSM covered milling, Cambrian did not.

Psycho followed me. For Christ’s sake, is about all I can say about that. James Parisi spread the nickname around when we returned for summer employment, and the Haileybury guys we knew picked up on it. My stereo followed that year, too. The purple palace had oodles more room than did the porch perch I’d had prior, and I’d always been jealous of those guys who’d had the luxury of their own music, so I was not to be outdone that year.

I met Greg early on, and after discovering we both played D&D, he told me that he wanted to get a game started, that he’d already lined up a few players, and asked me if I wanted to play, but only after consulting whether the others were okay with adding yet another player. I spoke to a few of them prior, displaying some enthusiasm, and was shocked and amused when Greg told me they were unsure, saying that they thought I wanted to want to play in a darkened room with black candles or some such nonsense. I burst out laughing, wondering where they got that idea. I asked Greg if I could stick the candles in beer bottles, then asked him where I could buy candles. We played, off and on, then the group split in two after a while. I was somewhat dissatisfied with some of their play, generally goody-two-shoes, one big happy family, let’s all stick together, hack and slash stuff. If you’ve ever played, maybe you understand what I’m getting at. My splinter group (Greg was involved in both) was a grittier affair, more focused on city adventures, politics, roleplaying, and vendettas and the like. I was asked to sit in with the other group on occasion when someone couldn’t make the session, but I didn’t make a point of it. It irritated me how poorly they played.

I’d met another friend in that first month, an older married guy (mid-late-30s) who was on what we used to refer to as the walking wounded program (workman’s comp. was paying his way). I knew Doug’s wife too; she worked at the cafeteria to help make ends meet. Doug heard about our game, wanted to try, and before I knew it, he and his wife were inviting me over for dinner once a month, maybe to get me out of the bars and fatten me up some. What I remember most about those dinners was kicking back to Doug’s album collection afterwards, the beers we shared, the conversations we had. He told me that he knew that my thinning hair was dragging my confidence down, and removing his own cap even though I already knew he was as bald as can be, exposed his own shining scalp. “Bald is beautiful,” he said, his expansive grin brightening his feral beard, “and any woman who doesn’t love your big beautiful bald head is no woman worth your time of day.” To prove his point, his wife bent over to kiss the top of his own, perfectly big beautiful bald head. They dragged Roxanne and Debbie out of me, told me neither disaster was my fault and that I’d get my feet back under me and find another woman when I was ready; I just needed some time to find my centre again. I laughed at that, then, pointing out that the School of Mines was only one step above a monastery. I believe now that they loved me and wanted to fix me, sure that I’d slake off drinking and self-deprecation when I pulled myself together. Had Doug’s goal been to get me back on the road to weekend sobriety (which it wasn’t, considering his love of hops and rye and cokes), he wouldn’t have fed me so many beers that I suffered some of the worst hangovers of my life.

The School of Mines was not really a monastery, despite its overwhelmingly male student body. There were a few females in attendance, if you were willing to join the queue. There were other women about, too, the locals, if you were into high school students, married women, or clingy girls looking for an escape route from the Tri-towns. There were those guys who preyed upon them. I remember a couple of my roommates picking up girls for a romp, only to trade them off amongst themselves mid-night, water them from a pot and not a glass, and send them on their way in the morning, joking about how skanks didn’t deserve a glass. Another roommate dated and sometimes bedded the grade 13 girls. I serenaded their romantic endeavors with the volume control on my stereo. Earplugs were a necessity.

For those of us on the rebound and less inclined to those sorts of romantic pitfalls, there were other distractions aside from D&D. There was the archery club, there were the bands that came to town, there were school bonspiels. I signed up for one, but as the teams were already set, I accepted a spare slot, subbing in whenever someone didn’t show. I had reservations. I’d never curled, and I thought it would be dull, arriving each night only to sit in the observation pub by myself, but one guy never showed, not once, so I curled each and every week. We were the worst! We sucked, but unless we were playing against a team set on qualifying for the Briar, we always had fun. Not one of us had ever curled before, so when consulting our skip (a dapper goateed fellow about my age who affected the country gentleman, replete with tweed and pipe) as to where we thought we should place a rock, the answer was invariably, “I’m thinkin’ anywhere within these coloured circles,” he’d say, pointing with the stem of his pipe. Not that we ever expected that we’d pull off even that lofty goal. We did win one glorious end, not the game, although we had won the occasional end throughout the tournament. We had just one glorious end. There were about six rocks in house (some of them closest to the button ours…a minor miracle), and on the final rock, one of their sweepers slipped, flailed about, and wiped out, somehow causing all of their rocks to be banished from the house, leaving only our three remaining! We celebrated like we’d just won gold.

Haileybury, The Scene of the Crime

Why did I return to Haileybury? I suppose I’d forgotten how miserable I’d been there. I may have thought it a symptom of homesickness, which it was in part. I suppose it was mainly my putting distance between Deb and I. Either way, my return was imminent. Where Cambrian took my year at Haileybury into account and afforded me credit, Haileybury was arrogant enough to believe that no other school could meet its high standards, so I was to “repeat” 2^nd year. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I decided to return to the Old Boy. But before I did, I needed to make some money.

I returned home, with the usual twenty dollars to my name, took a loan from my parents to tide me over, and went back to work at Kidd. There was a slight change from the prior year. I spent the summer on surface, not underground, working in the load-out. The load-out is where the muck (ore) is loaded onto the met site train. It was a quiet summer at work. There were sunny days, a few moments of tanning on breaks, tons of clean-up, and one minor accident. I fell from a ladder into a bin of scrap metal, no more than three for four feet, but far enough to earn some scrapes, some bruises. Within the hour I was relatively pain free, so I didn’t report it. Was that stupid? Maybe. Probably. But, it was more a blow to my pride than my body.

I met Aubrey Bergin in the Empire Hotel, that summer, Charlie’s specifically (although we’d spend time in both Charlie’s and Bogie’s; those were the two sides, dance and live music, respectively). A couple years older, he was as adrift as I was, so we hit it off right away. New friends, love to meet people! Of course, I hung out with my old friends too, returning from their first year of university. Most were slipping through my fingers, by then, soon to be just faces recognized in the mall. They, at least, seemed on the road to wherever they were going. True, they were only just finishing their first year, with loads of time to regret their decisions, but those are their stories to tell. There was Garry Martin, and Jodie Russell, still at the pool, and Chris Cooper, John Lavric, and Danny Loreto still out and about, seen mainly on weekends. D&D with Garry and Jodie on weekend afternoons, with Jeff Chevrier and Sharron Martin by then. And then the summer was over. Uneventful? Not really. Vague in my memory? Yes. Who remembers uneventful routine? I was settling in to a routine of work, and weekend indulgence, one that I coasted on until it was time to return to school.

Haileybury was exactly as I remembered it, no surprise there. I even stayed at Shirley’s rooming house again, although that year I upgraded to Marc’s old room, hereby known as the purple palace. Purple wall-to-wall carpet, violet wallpaper. It was by far the largest of all the rooms, and as I was already in the know, I reserved it. But this time, there was a whole new bunch of tenants, guys far more amiable than those I’d slummed with last time. Two of whom were to be classmates, owing to my year’s absence, Brian and Jeff. Brian was quiet, studious, travelled home often to see his girlfriend. Jeff had a Hog. There was a young guy there, Neil (not to be mistaken with Neil Petersen, who’s live large in further memories), one with a guitar. And a native, John Star. A few others.

What was different? I did not return home weekends like I had last time I was there. I’d grown accustomed to my freedom and independence at Cambrian, and was learning to spread my wings a little. I didn’t fly far. We wasted our weekends at the Matabanick Hotel, and at another (an un-named strip club; unnamed because I can’t remember what it was called), down by the Curling Hall (gone now, owing to the new lakeside development throughout), but mainly at a new bar on the corner of Ferguson and Broadway, Roy’s Restaurant (what I remembered as the old defunct theatre). The Matabanick still got the occasional band, but the focus had shifted to Roy’s, because Roy was determined to gain ad keep the college business. Which he did. He certainly gained mine, and my friends, Jeff, and Joe Clark, and Ronald MacDonald.

Yes, those were their names. I am not making that up. Most people wouldn’t believe it, either, at first. Not even the QPP. One weekend we were all headed out to Notre Dame du Nord to drink and meet French women, Jeff and I in one vehicle, Joe and Ronald in another. They were running late, promising to catch us up. Joe and Ronald didn’t make it. The cops pulled them over, asked them what their names were and when they replied, the cops thought they were just being smart-assed Anglaise students making fun of them, so they arrested them. Joe and Ronald tried to show their IDs, but the cops didn’t bother looking at them, they told them to get out of the car, cuffed them and threw them in jail. They released them in the morning when they finally got around to looking at their photo IDs and driver’s licenses, but the night was lost.

I had an experience while waiting for them to arrive. I bought a litre beer from a corner store, and drank it out on the street, talking with an old Quebecoise who sat with me and Jeff while we waited for the bar to open (he was probably the ripe old age of 54, looking back). It was so weird. I’d never met an old guy like him before; pony tail, sideburns, pencil moustaches, gold teeth, grizzled countenance. All decked out in denim and cowboy boots, he looked like something that stepped out of the ‘60s. All the men I ever met that were his age looked like my father, blazers, dress shoes, dress shirts. How’d Jeff and I do, you ask? We drank on Ontario time, meaning we were a couple sheets to the wind by midnight when all the Quebecoise came out. We had no idea bars were open till 3 am in Quebec. We gave up and went home.

But it was D&D that made that year bearable. I met a quiet guy early on in the cafeteria. He was smart, a little terse and condescending most of the time to most of the guys myself included, so he was usually in there alone, lounging in the alcoves along the long wall of windows that overlooked Lake Temiskaming, basking in the heat with a book. I usually ignored him, but I was always curious about what people were reading, even then. One day I sat beside him and asked what he was reading. He angled the cover my way without responding. It was a fantasy book I’d burned through that summer. “Not bad,” I said, not meaning it (I thought it was dull and poorly written, actually; I remember that, not what the book was), “have you read…” That got us to talking, mainly about the books we liked, which turned out to be too long a list, many of which overlapped. D&D was referenced, we discovered we both played, and then like little kids, we were best friends. Not best friends forever, though. My friendship with Greg lasted the year, no more. We’ve never crossed paths since. But I recall him vividly: short, a bit on the stalky side, red hair, receding hairline, and sporting a Van Dyke with a chin strap. I’m horrific with names, always have been.

Thus began my return to the scene of the crime, the crime being the beginning of my life in mining.

High School Errata

I remember Garry forgot his homework at work and ran to the Sportsplex, without throwing on his winter coat and boots, to retrieve it. I told him that was crazy, that it was -30 out there and that he would freeze his ears off. He shrugged my concern off, and he didn’t.

I remember my high school parka. It was long and beige and reached past my knees. The hood zipped up until it was a long tube that projected from my face. It served me well on those long cold walks to and from O’Gorman.

Between the spring of ‘82 and the spring of ‘83, Lord of the Rings was all the rage. I’d just begun playing D&D and was keen to get a copy. I read it during all my free moments, even while walking home from school.

Not that many of my high school friends were interested in D&D. John Lavric expressed his. I brushed him off. I didn’t mean to, not in a mean way. But I did. I said it was fairly complicated and would take some time to teach him. I didn’t think he would really be interested (he was a car and snowmobile type guy, after all), not really, and it was largely a lifeguard clique thing. So, yeah, maybe I was just being an ass. I don’t know if he was insulted by my brush off. It was certainly pointed out to John as such by Danny Loreto. It thought Danny was a dick for pressing the issue, but Danny and John were pumping iron then together and maybe he was jealous for John's attention.

All those nights at the movies, those classic bits of pastime and drivel, that, once we watch again in our middle years, we are sometimes horrified by how bad they were, but weren’t then: Heavy Metal, The Dark Crystal, the Secret of Nimh, Beastmaster, what have you. There were gems in there, too, but as I recall all those John Hughes films were released in my college years and not in my high school ones. Those and others would come later: Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Diner, Reality Bites. After GenX had kicked in, in earnest, in all its angst and glory.

I'll never forget how serious Garry was when dancing. His moves were smooth, erratic, detailed, practiced. He and his sister Sharron had spent hours refining their moves. Come to think on it, so had Karen and I. So, there may be others out there who’d marvelled at my dancing technique, too.

There are more of these dropped threads, a lifetime’s worth. And I’m sure that I’ll remember more, and better ones, the moment I’ve written this. But I can’t put them all here; there are far too many of them. We all have them, those little moments that fill our time and memory, brought forth again by a smell, a glimpse of a picture, a little thing that your child does, a scene in a film. They rush in, linger for but a moment, and pass, sinking back into those murky depths they came from.

Cherish them when they do. Relive their wonder.

Dungeons and Dragons

Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons. Were we geeks, those of us who did? Maybe we were, all of us were already in the freaks and geeks crowds at our respective schools, each of us having learned to play chess, each of us avid readers, movie buffs, and maybe a little introverted, in our own ways, but we certainly didn’t feel like it. We also played sports. We also started drinking at about 15, far too young for that nonsense, but we grew up in Northern Ontario, so that was almost a given.

I began to play “the game,” at the pool. Henri Guenette approached Garry Martin, Jodie Russell and I and asked us if we’d ever heard of “D&D.” We hadn’t. So, he showed us what his elder sister had bought him for his birthday, a Basic Box Set, an AD&D Player’s Guide and DM’s guide (those in the know require no explanation, anyone else can look them up). Most of us had grown up watching and reading science fiction and fantasy, Star Wars, Star Trek, Sinbad movies, Doctor Who, Arthur C. Clark, Asimov, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, and the like, so we were intrigued.

None of us knew what we were looking at, so we spent our break between swims in the relatively secluded and sunny spot out back of the pool (the same spot where we would sun tan, what we’d been doing at the time) leafing through the source material (the game books), Henri filling in what little he’d already gleaned on his own. We decided to give this new type of game a try.

We had our first session; again, out back in the quiet seclusion, and were hooked. Before we knew it, we were playing upstairs in the glassed in observation deck most evenings. The place was perfect, long folding tables, folding chairs, and it was a place we were already at. Other members of staff watched, a few declared it silly and stupid, a few asked to play.

But we didn’t have a complete set of books, and each of us wanted our own. We asked the older lifeguards, those heading down to Sudbury to check out the university, to pick us up the books at whatever store was selling them at the time, Comics North, most likely. And before long, we each had a new set. We studied them, and the largely made up rules we’d been playing by up to then fell away.

Then Tory, our boss, asked us not to play at the pool anymore. Someone had seen us and complained. She said it was inappropriate. We weren’t aware of it at the time, but this was during the Satanic Panic, back when the news was reporting that the game was stirring up Black Masses everywhere, in the schoolyards, in dark basements; that, and mass murders and suicide. Truancy, runaways, cavities!

We convened to basements, splayed out on couch and floor, our papers fanned out around us. Pop, chips, pizza, then after some time, beer. Lots of tense moments and even more laughter.

When my mother heard about it, close on the heels of watching “Mazes and Monsters,” Tom Hanks’ greatest film before beginning his acting career, she asked me about it, and told me that a friend of a friend of a friend said—you know the drill—that we were worshipping the Devil (now my mother is a fairly religious woman, so she was understandably concerned); so I showed her what books I had, showed her the tables, the stats, the dice, showed her how the basic mechanics of the game worked, and then said to her, “this is no different from any board game; it’s just played in our heads.” She never forbade me from playing.

Did playing D&D stunt my development? I don’t know. Maybe. But it also quickened my interest in mythology, history, ecology, and helped develop my understanding of statistics.

Say what you will, but it also created some of the most deeply felt friendships I have ever known, memories of which I cherish still, regardless my not having seen some of them for some 30 years.