May Day and some recollections of a rapscallion once
We all at one time or another grapple with the purpose and meaning of our existence on this planet, questing onward and sometimes pointlessly, for tangible reasons to explain beyond speculation, our placement amongst the general population.
Possibly it’s the result of having been a writer most of my life but there are times when I just don’t understand what it’s all about. Particularly now when, at 52, I feel the immensity of challenge, to cram what’s expected of me, by I suppose divine mandate, into the few remaining years of mental and emotional competence…. left to expend on quality of life issues. My biggest dilemma now is to prove to myself, how necessary it is to forward life experience toward some final important objective. Unfortunately after all these years of beating the facts out of life-as-we-know-it, I’m having the toughest time of all, reconciling my childhood in another city with my early life re-location, to another Ontario community. As much as I try, I can not make sense, or progressive union, between my day to day life in Burlington, Ontario, with our family’s move to the Town of Bracebridge, circa 1966.
I will be wandering on some sunny woodland trail here in Muskoka, with nary a care in the world, when all of a sudden l will recall some point of childhood that as God is my witness, could only be caused by spiritual intervention. As if, in fact, it is a message from the so-called “other side,’ (the deceased) that I need to bloody-well pay attention to the important markers of life, I suppose have been inadvertently forgotten. I’m a firm believer in the existence of this “other side,” and I talk under my breath to a lot of departed friends as a sort of validation that they’re still in my heart, and I’m thinking of them day to day in respect of our time spent together. So when I get a flashback about a time and place, a person or situation that may have been inspired by a scent, a spray of light on a woodland floor, a sound or combination of intrusive events, I always wonder if there is some significant string attached that will make sense to a particular reminiscence.
The greatest divide is my years living on Harris Crescent, in the late 1950’s City of Burlington, situated on the shore of Lake Ontario. Today it’s as if it was all just a late night movie and that it wasn’t at all a matter of the Currie kid’s life-actuality. But it was. When I try to talk to my wife and two boys about my days growing up in Burlington, it gets worse, because the more I try to familiarize them with the lad I was, the more fictional it seems to become. The problem of course, is that I haven’t taken them to my old stomping ground on Harris Crescent, a block from Lion’s Club Park and only several urban neighborhoods from Lakeshore Public School.
Yet it’s not as if any memory has faded particularly just that I can’t for the life and spirit of me, put myself believably back to that time period of youth, such that it makes sense today. And there is no other contentious divide or emotional block that I can determine, other than the 1966 motor trip re-location (which was greatly desired), three hours north to the District of Muskoka, where I’ve remained ever since. But for some memorable years, Burlington was my end-all, and the sound of a fog-horn the daily greeting for a boy trundling off to school. I loved my neighborhood then and the wee folk I called friends, like Fred Vandermullen, Robbie Cooper, Johnnie Burtwhistle, Ray and Holly Green, Bobby Crews, Ronny LaRose, Donna Clarke and a girl I adored named Angela who lived in a house that backed onto Ramble Creek. I used to cross over the river, against my mother’s instruction, and play on the swing set with Angela long into the afternoon. When I had to leave she would cry and so would I. When we moved to Mountain Gardens in Burlington, in about 1964, I lost track of all but a few old mates, and when I moved to Bracebridge, in 1966, I kept in contact with Ray and Holly Green, of Courtland Drive, until that finally fizzled into the grand scheme of adult existence and subsequent demands of maturity. It was no longer acceptable to get soakers in Ramble Creek and make googly eyes at dear Angela the sweetest lass of my golden youth.
As a writer I get fairly frustrated these days, trying to wrap around that part of my youth into a modern day relevance. I’m determined to do this but alas, the moral of the story aside, the reason for pursuing messages in the abyss of early memories, isn’t making a whole lot of sense. Yet the void I feel, like sensing a shadowy watcher in the woods, commands me to rebuild the breadth of fact, the bridging of personal history, so that the rest of my family has some fundamental idea I wasn’t born and raised in my easy chair here by the telly.
I want my boys to relay to their offspring one day, how grandfather and his good buddy Ray Green helped their chum George, slide down the school coal chute at recess….and the punishment bestowed bad wee lads in the principal’s office. I escaped the strap throughout the years but poor George me-thinks, wasn’t quite as fortunate. If we’d thought about the consequences we would have known his beige “fake fur” coat was going to catch coal dust like a mop head, and getting the black off our fingers wasn’t going to be easy by the sound of the bell.
I’d like my boys to have known Anne and Alec Nagy, the owners of our building at 2138 Harris Crescent….my second parents……I’ve told my family about the wonderous culinary wizardry that took place in that apartment kitchen, when Anne looked after me while my parents worked in Hamilton. I’ve told my boys especially about the great adventures Ray Green and I had in the Ramble Creek basin, and the many forts and rafts we built over those magical, enchanted years of unbridled youthful imagination.
I remember being scared to a fictional death by the vision of Mrs. White strolling through her lush garden adjacent to our apartment building. She resided on the corner of our street, occupying the charming Victorian house, surrounded by fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. To keep me out of her fenced yard I was told by my adult attendants that she was a bonified witch and the garden shed was where she prepared and tenderized the wee ones for the bake oven. I did get over her fence once and on jumping back on side, ripped the arse out of my pants which was a tad hard to explain to my mother Merle.
Merle told me a thousand times not to get into the tunnel below Lakeshore Boulevard that facilitated the watershed of Ramble Creek into Lake Ontario. The water was much deeper from this point onward to the lake, and it was said many young folks had drowned trying to sail away from their respective childhoods. I violated Merle’s law so many times that my friends knew automatically where to find me, if not at any of the other local hangouts. In this forbidden zone I stood on the ledge inside the tunnel and watched the Suckers swimming in the half illuminated golden pools below. It was the limbo separating a child’s ambition and responsible adulthood, that once I was able to brave the rest of the traverse down Ramble Creek to the lakeshore, I could set sail for places across the Seven Seas and sundry other oceans and rivers. I never got the chance. Just when we thought we had built the perfect raft that could be navigated down the creek, designed to clear the shallows and fit through the tunnel under Lakeshore Boulevard, and one that could safely sail upright out into the lake, we bloody well moved away and that was the end of an important dream of liberation from our fetters. I didn’t marry Angela, and Ray and I never sailed to the horizon, touched the moonscape or did even a quarter of what we believed important, and most of my chums became blips on the radar of once, and I always felt kind of bad about that slight of protocol.
Those emotionally charged, high octane days, never fit with the ongoing new realities of a kid in transit. While some kids have had to adapt to many more shifts in residence during their junior years, and a greater span of miles country to country, I still feel a sadness generally that I can’t fit one childhood journal into the binding of the second…. a volume, a generally happy story of a life presumably well spent. I want to make sense, document a logical progression of accepted family history that I’m actually the same kid, with the same parents, same vapor trail from birth in Toronto to middle-age crazy here in Gravenhurst, Ontario, my newest hometown. Maybe you suffer the same disjointed days and ways, and find as much difficulty making those important experiences of once, just as relevant to the modern day chapter, on how to enter old age with submission and tranquility.
I’d be a lot more tranquil for sure if I could one day put the soakers I got in Ramble Creek, on the same level as the soakers I now get wandering through The Bog, here in the Ontario hinterland. These feet have experienced many, many soakers, and while the water course has varied, the experience has always been the same. What a chill feeling of release and freedom then, and now, as water runs between the toes nestled in a muddy sock. Maybe the answer rests somewhere between the sensation of cool water in vessel shoes, and the fact we got them violating the strictest order to stay out of that creek. That creek was the means and route of our eventual emotional escape, make no mistake. Staying out of that water was plain and simply an order impossible to keep. When we set free our small experimental rafts, only one unmanned craft ever made it to the open lake, it was as if we had broken free of the earth’s gravitational pull. But it was the only success we needed, to feel the true, unrestricted flow of vibrant Viking Thule, as an unending adventure ever-more.
Figuring how I got from there to here, from a crush on dear Angela, to a dear wife named Suzanne, well, I’m just a little concerned whether those faded old memories are more fiction than fact, more fantasy than reality….. and if it was real, how will it ever merge, and then why should it, on the next greatest years of my life.
It has become an everso subtle obsession, building the next all encompassing adventure, proving once and for all that linking these point of life’s light,….. heaven’s held a divine plan afterall. I’m still building rafts and planning for new adventures. Heaven knows, I’ll never stop dreaming.
We all at one time or another grapple with the purpose and meaning of our existence on this planet, questing onward and sometimes pointlessly, for tangible reasons to explain beyond speculation, our placement amongst the general population.
Possibly it’s the result of having been a writer most of my life but there are times when I just don’t understand what it’s all about. Particularly now when, at 52, I feel the immensity of challenge, to cram what’s expected of me, by I suppose divine mandate, into the few remaining years of mental and emotional competence…. left to expend on quality of life issues. My biggest dilemma now is to prove to myself, how necessary it is to forward life experience toward some final important objective. Unfortunately after all these years of beating the facts out of life-as-we-know-it, I’m having the toughest time of all, reconciling my childhood in another city with my early life re-location, to another Ontario community. As much as I try, I can not make sense, or progressive union, between my day to day life in Burlington, Ontario, with our family’s move to the Town of Bracebridge, circa 1966.
I will be wandering on some sunny woodland trail here in Muskoka, with nary a care in the world, when all of a sudden l will recall some point of childhood that as God is my witness, could only be caused by spiritual intervention. As if, in fact, it is a message from the so-called “other side,’ (the deceased) that I need to bloody-well pay attention to the important markers of life, I suppose have been inadvertently forgotten. I’m a firm believer in the existence of this “other side,” and I talk under my breath to a lot of departed friends as a sort of validation that they’re still in my heart, and I’m thinking of them day to day in respect of our time spent together. So when I get a flashback about a time and place, a person or situation that may have been inspired by a scent, a spray of light on a woodland floor, a sound or combination of intrusive events, I always wonder if there is some significant string attached that will make sense to a particular reminiscence.
The greatest divide is my years living on Harris Crescent, in the late 1950’s City of Burlington, situated on the shore of Lake Ontario. Today it’s as if it was all just a late night movie and that it wasn’t at all a matter of the Currie kid’s life-actuality. But it was. When I try to talk to my wife and two boys about my days growing up in Burlington, it gets worse, because the more I try to familiarize them with the lad I was, the more fictional it seems to become. The problem of course, is that I haven’t taken them to my old stomping ground on Harris Crescent, a block from Lion’s Club Park and only several urban neighborhoods from Lakeshore Public School.
Yet it’s not as if any memory has faded particularly just that I can’t for the life and spirit of me, put myself believably back to that time period of youth, such that it makes sense today. And there is no other contentious divide or emotional block that I can determine, other than the 1966 motor trip re-location (which was greatly desired), three hours north to the District of Muskoka, where I’ve remained ever since. But for some memorable years, Burlington was my end-all, and the sound of a fog-horn the daily greeting for a boy trundling off to school. I loved my neighborhood then and the wee folk I called friends, like Fred Vandermullen, Robbie Cooper, Johnnie Burtwhistle, Ray and Holly Green, Bobby Crews, Ronny LaRose, Donna Clarke and a girl I adored named Angela who lived in a house that backed onto Ramble Creek. I used to cross over the river, against my mother’s instruction, and play on the swing set with Angela long into the afternoon. When I had to leave she would cry and so would I. When we moved to Mountain Gardens in Burlington, in about 1964, I lost track of all but a few old mates, and when I moved to Bracebridge, in 1966, I kept in contact with Ray and Holly Green, of Courtland Drive, until that finally fizzled into the grand scheme of adult existence and subsequent demands of maturity. It was no longer acceptable to get soakers in Ramble Creek and make googly eyes at dear Angela the sweetest lass of my golden youth.
As a writer I get fairly frustrated these days, trying to wrap around that part of my youth into a modern day relevance. I’m determined to do this but alas, the moral of the story aside, the reason for pursuing messages in the abyss of early memories, isn’t making a whole lot of sense. Yet the void I feel, like sensing a shadowy watcher in the woods, commands me to rebuild the breadth of fact, the bridging of personal history, so that the rest of my family has some fundamental idea I wasn’t born and raised in my easy chair here by the telly.
I want my boys to relay to their offspring one day, how grandfather and his good buddy Ray Green helped their chum George, slide down the school coal chute at recess….and the punishment bestowed bad wee lads in the principal’s office. I escaped the strap throughout the years but poor George me-thinks, wasn’t quite as fortunate. If we’d thought about the consequences we would have known his beige “fake fur” coat was going to catch coal dust like a mop head, and getting the black off our fingers wasn’t going to be easy by the sound of the bell.
I’d like my boys to have known Anne and Alec Nagy, the owners of our building at 2138 Harris Crescent….my second parents……I’ve told my family about the wonderous culinary wizardry that took place in that apartment kitchen, when Anne looked after me while my parents worked in Hamilton. I’ve told my boys especially about the great adventures Ray Green and I had in the Ramble Creek basin, and the many forts and rafts we built over those magical, enchanted years of unbridled youthful imagination.
I remember being scared to a fictional death by the vision of Mrs. White strolling through her lush garden adjacent to our apartment building. She resided on the corner of our street, occupying the charming Victorian house, surrounded by fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. To keep me out of her fenced yard I was told by my adult attendants that she was a bonified witch and the garden shed was where she prepared and tenderized the wee ones for the bake oven. I did get over her fence once and on jumping back on side, ripped the arse out of my pants which was a tad hard to explain to my mother Merle.
Merle told me a thousand times not to get into the tunnel below Lakeshore Boulevard that facilitated the watershed of Ramble Creek into Lake Ontario. The water was much deeper from this point onward to the lake, and it was said many young folks had drowned trying to sail away from their respective childhoods. I violated Merle’s law so many times that my friends knew automatically where to find me, if not at any of the other local hangouts. In this forbidden zone I stood on the ledge inside the tunnel and watched the Suckers swimming in the half illuminated golden pools below. It was the limbo separating a child’s ambition and responsible adulthood, that once I was able to brave the rest of the traverse down Ramble Creek to the lakeshore, I could set sail for places across the Seven Seas and sundry other oceans and rivers. I never got the chance. Just when we thought we had built the perfect raft that could be navigated down the creek, designed to clear the shallows and fit through the tunnel under Lakeshore Boulevard, and one that could safely sail upright out into the lake, we bloody well moved away and that was the end of an important dream of liberation from our fetters. I didn’t marry Angela, and Ray and I never sailed to the horizon, touched the moonscape or did even a quarter of what we believed important, and most of my chums became blips on the radar of once, and I always felt kind of bad about that slight of protocol.
Those emotionally charged, high octane days, never fit with the ongoing new realities of a kid in transit. While some kids have had to adapt to many more shifts in residence during their junior years, and a greater span of miles country to country, I still feel a sadness generally that I can’t fit one childhood journal into the binding of the second…. a volume, a generally happy story of a life presumably well spent. I want to make sense, document a logical progression of accepted family history that I’m actually the same kid, with the same parents, same vapor trail from birth in Toronto to middle-age crazy here in Gravenhurst, Ontario, my newest hometown. Maybe you suffer the same disjointed days and ways, and find as much difficulty making those important experiences of once, just as relevant to the modern day chapter, on how to enter old age with submission and tranquility.
I’d be a lot more tranquil for sure if I could one day put the soakers I got in Ramble Creek, on the same level as the soakers I now get wandering through The Bog, here in the Ontario hinterland. These feet have experienced many, many soakers, and while the water course has varied, the experience has always been the same. What a chill feeling of release and freedom then, and now, as water runs between the toes nestled in a muddy sock. Maybe the answer rests somewhere between the sensation of cool water in vessel shoes, and the fact we got them violating the strictest order to stay out of that creek. That creek was the means and route of our eventual emotional escape, make no mistake. Staying out of that water was plain and simply an order impossible to keep. When we set free our small experimental rafts, only one unmanned craft ever made it to the open lake, it was as if we had broken free of the earth’s gravitational pull. But it was the only success we needed, to feel the true, unrestricted flow of vibrant Viking Thule, as an unending adventure ever-more.
Figuring how I got from there to here, from a crush on dear Angela, to a dear wife named Suzanne, well, I’m just a little concerned whether those faded old memories are more fiction than fact, more fantasy than reality….. and if it was real, how will it ever merge, and then why should it, on the next greatest years of my life.
It has become an everso subtle obsession, building the next all encompassing adventure, proving once and for all that linking these point of life’s light,….. heaven’s held a divine plan afterall. I’m still building rafts and planning for new adventures. Heaven knows, I’ll never stop dreaming.
Please visit my other blog at www.gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment