Road Trip

I’d never been to an NHL game. That’s not much of a surprise; I was never much of a hockey fan (there’s a fair bit of subtext to that statement). I’ve watched games, but only while belly to the bar, the game just a prop to fill time between conversations. I may not have been much of a fan, but many of my friends were and most wanted to go see an NHL game, if they hadn’t already. Dawson too had made mention of it in the past, but he’d never actually come right out and suggested a road trip, either. Small wonder, as he’d never been to an NHL game, something that had probably been on his to-do list for years, if not decades.

One day the proposal came up: “What do you think? Do you want to go?”

“Can we get tickets?” was my only response. I’d always heard that Leafs tickets were hard to come by.
Dawson said he knew a guy that could get us corporate tickets. Corporate tickets? I imagined us seated in seats no further than five rows up from the ice.

“Alright,” I said, “I’m in. How do we want to plan this?” I asked.

Dawson wanted to wait before committing. He wanted to ask around some more, to see how many others might want to tag along. I think he wanted the trip to rival the Casey’s annual football crawl. I had my doubts, about that, thinking that the more people we had tagging along might make the prospect of getting enough tickets a serious concern. That said, I welcomed the thought of having more people along for the adventure. So, we’d wait and see how many tickets we’d need. I thought that prudent, so long as we didn’t wait too long. I had holidays to book, and the new year was fast approaching. He asked around. Many were interested; few had the money or could spare the time. The only takers were Joel and I. And Dawson’s brother. Dawson made his call. He got the tickets. Leafs VS Canucks.

“Are they good?” I asked. They were at the time, early in the season, but they had dropped in the standings as the season advanced. Then again, so had the Leafs. Neither were having a stellar year.
I left on my South African adventure. And returned. The date closed upon us. The game was only weeks away. Joel said he’d book the hotel.

“You’re sure,” I asked. “I can do it.” But he insisted. I suggested the Royal York. It was closer, and The Path led right to the ACC; we wouldn’t have needed to wear our coats on game day. But Dawson and Joel baulked at the idea, saying they couldn’t afford to stay at The Royal York.

The week arrived. I asked Joel if he’d called to book a hotel. I’m a worrier. I fret. I don’t like leaving things in other people’s hands. He said he had called on Monday and there was lots of rooms left. He had even found a hotel right across the street from the arena. I ceased to fret. The road trip was planned. We had tickets. We had accommodation. All we had to do was get there. I offered to drive. It was the least I could do, since Dawson had landed us tickets, and Joel had booked the hotel.

“What hotel are we staying at?” I asked mid-week. I fret. I needed to know where we were staying so better navigate to it once entering the city.

“The Primrose,” Joel said. The Primrose? I’d never heard of it.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Right across the street from Maple Leaf Gardens,” he said.

The Gardens? I asked my Dad. Where the hell is the Primrose? “The Primrose Hotel?” he asked. “I stayed there,” he said. “That’s nowhere near the ACC.” He showed me on a map where all our relevant addresses were in relation to one another.

I was pissed. I counted to ten. Done was done. I consoled myself that the Primrose was just off Yonge Street, close to Queen St. W. Subways were a stone throw away.

We packed our bags and hit the road Friday morning for Saturday’s game against Vancouver.

The drive was uneventful, despite our concerns. People had filled my head with tales of sudden snow squalls rising up and washing the world white, stranding vehicles for hours at a time. No such squalls arose. We arrived and parked in a car park a block from the hotel.

Joel was first to the Front Desk. “I’d like to book rooms for the weekend,” he said, credit card in hand.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the attendant said, “but we’re full.

“Excuse me?” I said to Joel. “I thought you said you booked the rooms.”

“I called,” he said, “and they said they had lots of rooms.

“You didn’t book?” I asked.

“They said they had lots of rooms.”

“Yeah,” I fumed, “they had lots of rooms a week ago.” I was livid. “We travelled to Toronto for the weekend without a reservation?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could Joel have been so stupid? Did he not know that hotels fill up? Apparently, he hadn’t. I was angry enough to abandon them and search for a room on my own. Not very charitable of me, but like I said: I was livid.

“Let me see what I can do,” the girl said. She tapped her keys furiously. Seconds seemed hours. The minute hand crawled. I was fretting.

She found a room. One room. Two double beds. Would that be alright?

No, it wouldn’t, I thought.

But it would have to do.

We had to share. Dawson and I also had to share a bed.

We shared until I woke up in the middle of the night, Dawson spooning me, Dawson’s arm wrapped around me. I freaked. I extricated myself, bundled up the coats on the floor, and stole the comforter off the bed. I can’t say I was comfortable. I can’t say that I didn’t ache when I woke.

We had hours to spare until Dawson’s brother was due to meet us, so we decided to play tourist. They wanted to go to the CN Tower. I wanted to go to Mountain Equipment Co-op. We compromised and went to the CN Tower. I hadn’t been up it since my Grade 8 trip, and really had no desire to, but I went with them, thinking that it had been a long time and I ought to stick by my friends in the big city.

I stuck with them until they were pouring over souvenirs in the gift shop. Time was getting short and I really wanted to go to MEC. I announced my desire to leave. They brushed me off. I left.

They were pissed at me when I returned to the hotel.

“Where the fuck did you go?” they asked.

I thought the answer obvious, my MEC purchases in hand. I really didn’t care that they were angry. I was angry, too. And I was hungry. I wanted to eat, and there was little time remaining before the game, with little time to hit a restaurant. But Dawson’s brother still hadn’t arrived. The clock ticked. The minute hand crawled on. Dawson’s brother walked in twenty minutes to game time, and we still had to travel down Yonge to get there.

We were late, half the first period gone when we gained our seats. Our seats were not together, either. And they were nowhere near the ice. We were, in fact, eight rows up from the camera. The hot dogs were expensive, the beer even more so. The Leafs were on the ice, but they hadn’t come to play. They lost 4-1. They were booed after a fourth power play without them taking a shot on net. I was ready to hit Yonge.

We had to go to the Brass Rail, apparently. The line-up was at least an hour long, so we went to Zanzibar’s instead. I bought the first and only round. I laid down a twenty for three beers, and was surprised when there was no change. They abandoned me for lengthy lap dances they could ill-afford. They wanted to stay. I didn’t. I put on my coat and said, “Suit yourselves,” so they left with me. A couple bars later, we discovered that the Primrose was in an odd neighbourhood. Not only were there an abundance of Ladies of the Night on every street corner, it was also an LBGTQ neighbourhood. We called it a night.

But not before Joel took pity on some girls he struck up a conversation with on the way back to the hotel, going back out to buy them each a cup of coffee. Or so he said. He wasn’t gone for that long, so he might have. I’ll leave that up to your discretion.

I took to the floor right off, leaving Joel his bed, leaving Dawson to share with his brother.
I awoke in the middle of the night to one or two of those Ladies of the Night prowling our floor, looking for some guy who had jilted them.

“Where the fuck is he?” one of them raged at the top of her lungs. “He said he was looking for some action!”

Their anger fading into the distance, never quite vented.

Maybe they were looking for Joel.

Stepping Out, Part 2

Toronto was a veritable haven of order and cleanliness compared to Detroit.

And the accommodations were far better, as well. We pulled into the Royal York, my first time there. My head was filled with the tales I’d heard of Kings and Queens and Presidents, of Grey Cups and horses that ran up and down its long vaulting lobby, and of Prospector Conventions where swindlers were shot down upon leaving the elevator for having done their partners wrong. It was beautiful. It was opulent. It was home for the next few days and Henri and I were staying on for the weekend after the games.

Our arriving in Toronto had split that now newly tight group of ball fans. The Torontonians went home. The others had split into disparate groups. The girls wanted to shop. Their guys were in tow.
So, Henri and I were on our own. I was disappointed at first, but we were eager to explore the city. I’d been there with Matt a few times, so I knew my way around a bit, but that was years ago and Matt had navigated the whole time, with me along for the ride, so its geography was a little hazy. My mind had been preoccupied by the city’s overwhelming immensity at the time. The booze didn’t help much, either.

Thankfully, there wasn’t much need to navigate. The Skydome being within walking distance of the hotel, so that sense of group was lost. We all made our own way to the games individually and found ourselves funnelled up a concrete ramp up into it furthest heights, exiting behind home plate in the high 500s, only to discover our climb incomplete. Stairs steeper than ladders led to our seats, two rows down from the gulls. I looked them up while there: $4. I could see why. We were of an altitude that the workers under the dome were eye level with us. They at least were wrapped in parkas. We were not. We felt the full force of the wind blowing off the lake. It was cold. It was brisk. It had the bite of winter despite its early September’s howling.

Stories below us, those lucky patrons in the 300s were sweltering in the high sun. We spied shorts, tank tops and sandals. I was envious.

We shooed venders away when they hawked ice cream bars. One tapped an offending bar against a railing, its ring carried brightly on the icy air. He changed up his bright happy hawking calls thereafter to, “Something hard; something frozen!”

“Bring coffee!” I yelled back to him. We all did. He did, much to our surprise and delight.

Those seats were crap! We couldn’t tell where the ball was headed unless it was coming straight at us. We saw a few people below us reach out a little in preparation of its arrival, but there was never a hope of its ever reaching us. Not even Hercules could have batted a ball that high up.

I’d had enough after my first ineffectual coffee, caving in to my first impulse buy of the trip, a black Skydome knit sweater. Henri bought a Jay’s sweatshirt, team blue. Both were quite fetching. Both lasted us for years.

The second game was no warmer. By the 4^th inning we retreated to the bar two stories below us where we found two of our group’s number, the two eldest who’d had the sense not to freeze their tender bits off for the sake of $4 tickets. Where we’d thought to duck out of the cold for a cold one before braving the winds again amongst the gulls, we changed our minds when we saw them there and they invited us to join them, rekindling our earlier Detroit comradery. A half beer later, a third of the others joined us. By the 7^th inning stretch we were all there, watching the game on the surrounding TVs, comfortably basking in the heat streaming through the long wall of reclined windows that surrounded us.

The game over, we scattered to the four winds, and Henri and I were wondering what to do. Henri was all for cruising Yonge Street, but I wanted to head back to the Skydome Hard Rock Café; there was a stunning woman behind the bar the night before and I’d taken to her. I ought to have gone with Henri, but the call of a pretty face had overwhelmed my disdain for overpriced beer; besides, I’d done Yonge Street before, I said to myself. There were a few good bars there, but most of the better entertainment had moved on to Queen and Bathurst and Ossington years before. Henri went without me, probably pissed at me for my obvious foolishness.

Stupid of me, really. Girls in Timmins didn’t have much to do with me, so why did I think a sexy bartender in Toronto would take an interest and show me her world. But hope abounds.

Two beer later, seated in a much depleted Hard Rock café, owing to their not being a game played that night, I saw the error of my ways, but Yonge was a ways walk away, and I had no doubt that I’d ever find Henri in all those bars, so I headed up to John Street to Queen Street W and the Horseshoe, making a pit stop at a couple pubs along the way.

Later, back at the hotel, Henri told me that he’d had much the same night as I did, hopping from bar to bar. He told me about the ones he’d been in, and the ones he’d almost gone in but hadn’t. They looked too seedy, too rough, too scary. Had I been with him he’d had gone in, he said, though how having me in tow accounted for strength in numbers was beyond my ken. My rough and tumble side had never scared anyone, let alone the seasoned toughs that would have hung out in dives like those Henri had seen, but I’d always had a reckless streak. I’d probably have gone in without a second thought. I was always oblivious to the possible dangers around me when in the big city. It may have been all those dives Matt and I crawled through while in university. I must have made Henri nervous more than once when I decided to take a short cut through some alleyway.

Keith knew we were in town, so we made plans. He and Laura met us in the lobby.

“Where do you want to go,” they asked.

We’re in your hands, we said. Where’s good, we asked.

He suggested The Big Bop.

I’d never seen anything like it. Three bars in one, and black as pitch. Red pin lights and glow strips marked the walls and stairs, just bright enough to say, “Whoa, there!” STOP WALKING! WATCH YOUR STEP!

I loved the ambiance. I couldn’t see shit, only silhouettes, cigarettes glowing, the undulating sea of hats and heads, and those hellishly insignificant lights and strips. Waitresses carried little flashlights to match faces to drinks.

The band played Petty and Mellencamp covers on the first floor. The second-floor blared electronic dance, the third beat urban rap. Little alcoves lined the stairs, the sweet reek of cannabis rising from one level to the next. A ratty old wingback chair and a table lamp might fill one, where couple necked and groped, where couples congregated to smoke their weed. One music or another was piped into those narrow spaces from one bar or another. I was hopelessly lost in no time. Okay, I wasn’t that lost, but it’s fun to think so.

Keith and Laura left early by our reckoning. They were dependent on the TTC to get them home and had a ways to get there and no desire to pay a cab the fare for the distance they had to go.

Henri and I watched them go and discovered that we were exhausted. We decided to retreat to the Library Bar at the Royal York for one last drink on our last night away from home.

I promptly took a short cut and was already deep into another alley without him.

“What are you doing?” he said, whispering loudly and harshly, unable to keep the exasperation from his voice.

I shrugged his concern off. “Taking a short cut,” I said. “Look, you can see the end of it. Who could possibly be hiding in here?”

I didn’t bother to mention the puke at my feet. Like I said, reckless, oblivious.

Stepping Out

It took some doing to get me off that barstool, despite my appetite being whetted by that small step to Sudbury. Not that I was idle, even though I was. My days and weeks were full, or so it seemed. I was not bored. New people entered and exited my life with increasing regularity. But inertia is a powerful thing. There’s comfort in familiarity, regardless its nature.

I began to feel a void in my life. Incomplete. I flirted some, first with Holly Barkwell, then with Janice Milton. Janice Kaufman and Cathy Walli, but sparks never flew. What seemed like interest was likely only curiosity. My sister begged to differ, telling me on those rare occasions that she was out with me, after my future ex-brother-in-law had become just that, that once or twice she’d caught one or another of them checking me out with more than just curiosity. Or so she said. I didn’t believe her, or more accurately, I wouldn’t let myself believe her; but her words were seductive. They seduced me with hope. So, I decided to try. But when I did pursue them there was always reluctance, an excuse, a sudden illness when time came for me to pick them up for a movie.

That led to more time spent on that barstool, a spectator to all that unfolded around me.

I suppose spending time on the barstool paid off, in time. I won some tickets to see the Blue Jays play in Detroit and in Toronto, plane fare and hotels included. I really didn’t know a thing about baseball. I’d stare up at the screen while at Casey’s, belly to the bar and beer in hand for more than a few games, but I didn’t care if I watched or not. I listened to some of those sad lonely souls argue and debate this play and that, how this player was “due” and that one not, but I was more of a movie guy, a bookish sort far more interested in story and character than the clichés spewed by the fan boys. I didn’t want to spend a week with any of them, so I asked Henri if he wanted to go

Henri didn’t know much about baseball back then, either, but he accepted, and began to watch games while he wiled away the hours at the city’s fresh water plant, where he was summering.

We flew to Windsor for the first games and met the other winners at the meet and greet. We were all Ontarians, but it was remarked to us that we were from the “super-Casey’s.” Apparently, even those from Sudbury weren’t aware how few “poplar” bars there were in Timmins where we Gen-X could gather to listen and dance to the only music we were interested in. Dinner was had, then we were on the bus to Detroit for the first game in the venerable Tiger Stadium. I was of mixed loyalty at those first games. I’d won Jays tickets, but I had been introduced to baseball while in London at Joe Kool’s, the unofficial Detroit Tigers foreign headquarters. But for that trip, I bought a Jays cap, and rooted for our “home” team while away.

Detroit was an awakening. We left Windsor in its manicured glory and spotted the burned husk of a thousand and one Devil’s Nights, as burnt and broken as Beirut at the time. Shattered glass caught the low light, a blackened and windowless church standing lonely vigil in its empty grounds.

I loved Tiger Stadium! It was like an open-air cathedral. We gained entry at field level, the green stretching out before us before climbing back up to our seats in all their obstructed glory.

I bought hot dogs and beer for Henri and me, mistakenly resting them on the head of the guy seated in front of me. His quick anger fled upon hearing my largely Canadian “sorry!” I offered him a hot dog or beer for his trouble but he declined, now laughing with the rest of us.

The Jays won. The Jays were great that year, making a run for the pennant. The bus lost. One of its windows was smashed, but shatterproof, the glass remained fixed in place. We left. There were cops on every corner, baring arms I’d only seen in movies.

We were halfway across the Ambassador Bridge when someone declared that we were missing someone. How the hell could we be missing someone, I wondered. Didn’t we do roll call? I thought we had. We turned around. In the middle of the Ambassador bridge! Alone at first, I watched as the big bus inched back and forth in its graceless U-turn, the distant traffic bearing down on us.

“Any time now,” we yelled as that distant traffic resolved into cars.

We were missing more than one. Fully four people decided to cross the street to watch the game from an authentic Irish American pub down the street. The game over, they walked back, only to see their ride gone when they got back to the stadium.

Back at the hotel we convened to drink and get to know one another better and relive our American adventure. What was the pub like? How was the crowd? Mainly Black, we were told. Were they nervous, we wondered, our heads filled with Hill Street Blues and the like. No, they said, they were baseball fans.

We still had another game to see in Detroit before moving on to Toronto.

I drank Molson Ex, much to the other’s amusement. It was a Labatt sponsored event, after all.

A Niche Found

University was very much an extension of college. Not of Haileybury; that had been like an extension of high school. More like Cambrian. Western treated their students like adults. It’s your education, they said. Make of it what you will. Study, or not; show up, or not; it’s up to you. It’s not our job to hold your hand. I was far more comfortable in that environment than I had been in Haileybury’s strict regimen. But I was older then than I was, an emerging adult.

I stacked all my classes in the morning, leaving my afternoons free for research and homework and study. Having to get up in the morning forced me to go to bed at night. I reviewed my notes daily. I actually liked my chosen subjects. That was a surprise. I’d never enjoyed the subject matter of my classes. This was something different, something I could sink my teeth into.

Granted, I was not in Engineering; I was in Social Sciences, taking Classical History, Sociology, Economics and Archaeology. It was a breath of fresh air. I loved ancient history, myths, cultural studies, and the rediscovery and unravelling of long-forgotten, buried secrets, and had for years. Sound like D&D? You bet your ass it does. D&D opened up a world of interests and mystery to me, much as it did from most people I’ve talked to who played it. Not one of them had any interest in joining a cult, conducting Satan rituals, hiding out in sewers stalking imaginary monsters (thanks Mazes and Monsters); they all became well-read, most attending higher education, some even becoming engineers.

I did dabble with computer programming but dropped it after a few classes. Those classes were all about learning to use an abacus and how to “program” Kraft Dinner in 25 lines or less. I thought it was ridiculous at the time, but I see now what they were getting at. Had I stuck it out, I might have been a millionaire. The timing was right. It was the mid-80s and computer programming was in its infancy. I doubt that I would have, though. I had no passion for it. Code and algorithms rang cold. I probably would have ended up hating it and failing had I stuck with it. Mind you, I did predict the future as I watched it unfold. I wondered why we needed VCRs when TVs were motherboards. I wondered why we needed cable subscriptions when anyone could reach out into the Ethernet to retrieve “whatever,” so why couldn’t anyone watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. These ideas of mine hadn’t arrived yet then, but they evolved over time. There was connection speed and data issues to work out, something I’d have never been able to do, but the ideas sparked within me. I suppose those same ideas sparked in a lot of heads, not just mine. But I was more interested in social science and books and movies and the arts and women than I was in code.

There was a pretty blonde sitting next to me in Classical History. There was Sharron Martin, sister of Garry Martin. There was Alison Tilly. I ventured forth tentatively. I asked them if they’d like to go for coffee. I asked them if they’d like to meet at the pub for a drink, sometime. Either I was too subtle, or they just weren’t interested. Most girls I knew then were younger than me, and I was beginning to lose my hair (it was a big hair era, for both men and women, don’t forget), and that had begun to sap my self-confidence, despite Doug’s advice to me about a woman’s worth (see earlier memories). I was not an athlete. I was a bit introverted. I was bookish. Altogether, I lacked confidence, especially when it came to women.

And I likely spent too much time in the university pub and in the bars weekends. I smoked, but a lot of people still smoked then. I was drinking far less than I had, already sick of hangovers. But a good habit is hard to break, and as I’ve said before, I’d long ago begun to associate booze and bars with fun with friends. A stupid mistake. It was the friends that made it fun. Without them, being in bars was dull, fraught with loneliness and depression.

Luckily, I had friends. I always seemed to have friends then. There was Matt Hait and Jak Yassar Nino in my house, there was Jeff Chevrier and Walter Hohman at Fanshaw. There were a couple others I met in classes.

My first friend in London was Matt, that is to say he was the first person I met in London, aside from Jamie, but enough about Jamie for now. Matt and I played chess. Matt convinced me to get a membership at the gym. He gave me the guided tour of London’s best dives and its emerging underground. Matt was not one for dance bars. And he took me to Toronto a couple times when we had his sister’s wreck at our disposal, to Kensington and to Yonge, to College and Bathurst, to Queen St W, to the Horseshoe, to Sneaky Dees, to God knows where else. It was all a blur of backbeat and bass, of mods and mosh pits.

You knew this would ultimately become a tale about alcohol, didn’t you? Of course you did.

He was especially eager to show me the Ceeps (the CPR Tavern), his favourite bar in London. It could be the oldest tavern in London. Opened in 1890, it had long since become a university watering hole by the time I arrived. No one ever went there for the ambiance, there was never any entertainment aside from MTV, but it was the only bar I’d ever been in that encouraged its patrons to etch their names, hometown, and the date into the aged wooden tabletops. The Ceeps led to seedy little basement and attic bars that hosted some of the best and worst punk bands I’d ever seen. Those seedy little bars inevitably led to the raves, little after-hours parties in basements and in loading bays. But not before street meat, souvlaki on a bun.

My favourite was the FIRE STOP. It was a small bar, black as night and decorated in all manner of red. Chicago blues men graced the stage. Old men. Grey haired and fat and by far the best players I’ve ever heard. The FIRE STOP also had the hottest wings I’d ever had the misfortune to order. They came with a free first pitcher. Because they knew you’d be ordering more.

Nanny

Hilda Gauthier, my mother’s mother. My Nanny was a career woman. She had always worked. She didn’t do housework, not really, she puttered on occasion, and straightened papers, but she didn’t have time for such things, so she hired live-in maids when my mother was young, and then housekeepers and cooks later on, the last of which was Mrs. D., who worked for her for years, the only one I’d ever known.

As you might expect, Hilda had not been a hands-on mother. Not that she was distant. She wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to express her love. I think that may be why she was never a tactile grandmother with Karen and I. We knew she loved us, adored us, but she was more comfortable in the company of adults. And yet she was always happy to see us, was always generous and lavished us with gifts, and visited us with regularity in Timmins, usually for a week at a time.

Back in the ‘20s, Hilda had begun working at Bell, the telephone company, when her mother, Susan, took in Mec, my grandfather-to-be, as a boarder, and saw an opportunity for her daughter in him. Mec would be a pharmacist, not a working man living from paycheck to paycheck, but a proper professional. I’m not sure what Hilda thought of Mec in those first years, he was 11 years her senior, but she eventually did marry Mec, despite their age difference. And moved north with him to Matheson. Which must have been a shock. Matheson was not Toronto. Matheson must have seemed the savage frontier, the very edge of habitation and barely civilization. And Matheson was French. There were very few people for her to talk to, I imagine. So, moving to Cochrane was probably a wish come true to her. English. A railroad town. And their own business. Their money. Her own money. While in Toronto, Susan used to meet her at Bell, palm out for her paycheck.

In time, they flourished, prospered, bought and drove a car back up north when the road from the south to the north was completed, and later still, they adopted my mother, raised her, or reared her, in any event. The housekeepers and later Mrs. D. may have had more than a hand in raising my mother.

Hilda may not have been an overtly tactile and lavishly emotionally loving mother, but she was always there for my mother. She and Mec helped my parents when they married; financed a house for them; used their social and political connections to make arrangements for my parents when their first, developmentally challenged child was born. She was a live-in babysitter for my sister and I when needed, no matter how harrowing the experience of dealing with me may have been for her, at times. She was there to listen whenever my mother needed to talk, never judged. She bought my parents a Caribbean vacation for their 30th anniversary.

She may not have lavished us with hugs, she may not have said “I love you” often, but she found her own ways to express it.

Poppa

Joseph Meclea Gauthier, Mec to his friends. My mother’s father. Poppa had retired to his bed, and all my memories of him were in that bed.

When we came to Cochrane to visit, we always stayed at my mother’s parents. Karen and I would get out of the car and run up to the house, a large green painted, cinderblock building, mount the stairs two at a time, and greet Nanny at the door. We’d leave our bags to our parents to carry. They were probably heavy for little kids, you can’t convince me otherwise. Having kissed Nanny, we’d race up the flight of creaky stairs to our Poppa’s room. I’d jump onto the bed with him, hug him and kiss him. He was a small man, rail thin, sporting a somewhat longish beard, making him a new age hipster, way before his time. He was the only man I knew with a beard. I’d seen others, it was the early ‘70s then, so they were scattered about, but it was also Northern Ontario, and barely out of the ‘50s despite the date.

Poppa should not be judged by his largely unkept state, or his having retired to his bed. He cut quite the figure in his time, despite that small frame. Born in Quebec, he mostly grew up there before his family moved to Ontario. It was rustic here, then. Matheson, Cochrane, and Timmins hadn’t been around that long. There were few roads, none of them connecting the North to the South. Indoor plumbing may have been a luxury when he was young. His father bought the Stanley Hotel in Matheson, his mother was a school teacher, a family of note in the North, middle-class. They valued education in a time when most people in the North quit school after grade 7. They insisted on it, sending their boys south to school in Toronto, a rare occurrence in those days.

Mec and his brother became pharmacists, graduates of the U of T. He met my grandmother while in Toronto, married in 1926, and settled back in Matheson first and then in Cochrane once he’d bought a pharmacy there. He was one of the first people to drive a car north from Toronto to Cochrane once the road north was finally completed in 1927, a trek that took 9 days, I’m told, 3 to North Bay, then 5 to Cochrane. He was an important figure in his community, never turning people away without their prescriptions, medicines he had to mix and dispense, himself. He kept a book of what was owed him, but he was paid in eggs and chickens and cut meat on occasion, often probably. He was in charge of rationing in Cochrane during the Second World War. He counted Judges and the leaders of the town among his friends, and a certain railroad worker named Jules Leonard, as well.

His memory and his welcoming hugs warm me still.

School Trips

Memories are a muddle, all twisted up together, at times. Two memories collide in my mind, somewhat similar, but obviously separate upon further exploration: the Grade 6 Midland school trip, and the Grade 8 Toronto school trip. There had actually been two school trips, not just one! I’d suspected that, but couldn’t separate them. The two were similar in only one aspect, the visiting of historic forts, but that was enough to overlay one on top of the other, confusing them in my mind. Middle-age, and the long span of years taking their toll, go figure. Pictures would have helped separate them, but I have none, either never having been taken, or long lost.

The Midland trip. Grade 6. I recall the theft of the ten dollars from my suitcase vividly. That left me with almost no mad money for souvenirs, as I’d mentioned in that earlier memory. Left without the means to buy much, I had to be very careful with what remained. I made one purchase that I remember, a small fur pelt, purchased at the fort from a native display, one about a foot in length, the pelt, not the display. It was soft, the hairs parting and flowing between my fingers. I had to have it, and I did. I remember placing it on the small desk in my bedroom at home, not sure what else to do with it, always wondering as the months and years passed why I did buy it, what use I had for it. My first impulse buy. Not the last.

The Toronto trip. Grade 8. I recall the Pong game and the shoplifting at the end of the trip. I remember who did it, but as with the theft from my bags during the Midland trip, I don’t believe any mention of names would be fair, not after so many years have passed. And what would it serve? One memory is rather vivid from the Toronto trip, however. For whatever reason, our bus had not picked us up at the end of some tour, and our supervising teachers decided that we were not so far away from our hotel that we could not walk back. We were further than they imagined, as we were exhausted by the more than the hour’s walk on concrete. Along the way, a woman stepped away from a building, and through a wicked smile, asked me/us/the cluster of boys I was with if we would like to party. She was dressed as you might imagine. I imagine she was in hot pants and a tube top, her hair flared out, her make-up loud and not particularly subtle. I blushed. I think we all blushed. The woman laughed, so did her “friends.” Embarrassed, we begged off, trying and obviously failing to be cool, and found ourselves walking a little faster, to catch up with the more numerous cluster of kids ahead of us, the one presumably protected by our chaperoning teacher.

That was the first time I’d ever seen a prostitute.