NOT ALL SERIOUS HERE AT BIRCH HOLLOW; WE HAVE A FEW LAUGHS

The first series of irreverent columns, about everyday stuff, appeared in The Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, back in the early 1980's. For a staunchly conservative publication my column was a tremendous change of pace. While I didn’t fancy myself a comedian, I greatly admired Paul Rimstead of the Toronto Sun. Most of the writers who worked in the Muskoka media with me, looked up to the former Bracebridge kid, who made it big in the print industry. He was a rogue, a champion of the underdog, the common schmoo who empowered those of us who drove crappy cars, like his Rusty Rita, and regular folks who lived pay cheque to pay cheque without complaining. He made being broke and hungover seem an accomplishment as it related to being a newspaper columnist. When he wrote about his Mexican “Liar’s Club,” (where he had retreated to write a book), we wanted to take the trip to join up. His foibles became ours. We were delighted to share his misfortunes because they made our screw-ups seem so much less significant.

My first Rimstead tribute column was entitled “Cold Coffee,” and amongst my peers it was known as “Tepid Tea,” “Sugarless Instant,” and “Bold Barfee.” I was thrilled they were interested enough in my work to find name parallels. I wasn’t offended. Until one day my writing colleague introduced me as the “Wall of Meat,” who writes “Bold Barfee.” Barney used to love attracting attention to my girth back then. It drove the publisher and the advertising manager nuts because they couldn’t avoid the fact our paper was winning on the newstands. Even if they hated the stuff, it was selling papers. It seems Muskoka, in that particular era, had endured quite enough conservative ink.

I went on to write an anecdotal golf column and another community piece called “Hometown Advantage,” for smaller publication. Without shame, I modeled them after Rimmer’s “Cocktales and Jockstraps,” book, and of course his regular Toronto Sun column. Of all the attributes I adored, number one was his lack of reverence for the old norms......like his bosses and politicians. I guess Rimmer did imprint on me more than I knew then, as I’ve had a life-long mistrust of politicians, and I don’t like bosses period. I’ve used humour to win arguments for decades, and I’ve found a lot of value in anecdote and the comedic jab, when having to deal with folks I detest. I sure didn’t like the ones who told me how I should write, and all the reasons I couldn’t use the word “fart” to describe how old they were.

A wise old bugger once told me I was too serious as a writer, and should try some basic comedy for a change of pace. That’s sort of what turned me on to Rimstead in the first place. I never finished one of his columns that I wasn’t happier than when I began.....usually laughing about it for the next hour or so. I realized that Rimmer was finding the light, anecdotal side of what I could only find as troubling or annoying. I didn’t want to read a paper just so that I could get mad at the world. I was already mad about stuff. I was a mid-20's history grad who was working outside his field, hacking out space-filler for the community press, and drinking way too much for my own good. What could be fun about this. First of all, I was looking at things as a reporter on the hunt for a front-pager. Thinking that a great piece of writing could catch the attention of the daily press. I might be able to “string” for the big boys. So for those first years I was bloody serious, all the time. I couldn’t see any way to break free from the cycle of poverty many of us were hopelessly mired. And yes indeed, a cycle of our own concoction. Getting a pay cheque and then drinking it. We were in a high stress business with overseers who wanted Pulitzer material from hacks who slept about four hours a night, ate grilled cheese sandwiches for breakfast, and opened the bar at noon. We were good and honest writers who were asked to work long hours for low pay. Thank God I found my sense of humor before they demoted me to occasional feature writer. It was one of those little publisher turn-ons. Make the senior writer with the bigger pay cheque quit, to free up money to hire two dumb asses instead, who couldn’t write classified ads without phoning their university professors for help.

The columns connected me to the lighter side of life. After the first year of embracing the comedic, anecdotal side of journalism, without ever touching the sides of fiction, north or south, I had actually developed quite a following. Which was quite an accomplishment because the subscribers were an intermingling of church-going folks, members of the Lions and Rotary Clubs, and Conservative Party faithful. Getting a laugh out of these goomers was tough, and I had to work up a blood-sweat every week to keep them onboard. There had never been an attempt by newspaper management to entertain readers before. Everything our paper did was to inform, promote and grandstand. During my period of editorship we had at least three columnists injecting personal follies, really neat, human interest events, as comedy, into the mainstreet print-offering. It’s not like we didn’t get criticism but the publishers liked the idea of weird stuff, and frankly anything with the exception of full frontal nudity to boost subscriptions. We did that by infusing light-heartedness into a rather humorless enterprise. Sure, we ran the big stories and did more investigative reporting than in the newspaper’s long history. But when it came to our columns, we demanded freedom of the press to indulge. And we did. It was bitter sweet. Over time we caught crap every week. There was a line and we crossed it a hundred times.

Since those days of breaking the crust off normal community newspaper-copy, I’ve always had a chuckle about the way it’s all snapped back like a too-tight rectum, reducing humor to the occasional typo that makes “rum” into “bum,” and “kiss” into “piss.” Even typos in my day were better. Consider the headline typos like “Prime Minister Trudeau to attend,” into “Prime Minister Turdeau to attend,”........and a caption under a front page photo that read “This young lady awaits the boat,” which when published read “This young lay awaits the boat.” We did it with a granny once too. “This grand old lay,” which I can tell you didn’t impress family, seeing as she was about to have her 100th birthday and apparently still interested, according to our paper, in getting some action.

I’m sort of glad I had this immersion into workplace comedy, and subscribed to Rimstead at such an impressionable time in my life. Thirty years later I’m still benefitting. I don’t get nearly as mad any more about much of anything. Things that might have driven me nuts around Birch Hollow, actually make me laugh today. If I’m going to die of a heart attack, by geez I want to go by laughing, not shaking a fist at a neighbor. This has helped me greatly defer anger and get on with solution finding. Solutions to what, you ask! I’ll tell you.

In all three homes we have lived, we have enjoyed the company of colorful neighbors who, bless their hearts, just wanted to live the good life at our expense. And they wanted to share their perception of good life with us. On Ontario street we had a neighbor who loved to urinate off his back deck, and if you happened to catch him in the act, he had no compunction about waving with a free hand. “Hi Suz,” he’d yell at my wife Suzanne. “Nice day eh?” He’s the same neighbor who set up a huge satellite dish on the property line, that kept hitting the top rail of our fence when he used his remote. He didn’t want to ask me to remove the plank so he just kept thwacking it with the dish until it broke. I remember standing there one day trying to fix the rail and having the dish nearly decapitate me, when the same media-obsessed neighbor was tuning in to a game show. “Sorry Ted, didn’t see you standing there.”

One day we were in our breakfast nook enjoying a cup of coffee, when all of a sudden the end of an eighteen wheeler came rolling by the end of the house. With chins against chests, we watched as a huge tractor trailer went into our neighbor’s backyard. There was our neighbor directing it back, nudging our fence on the way by. We ran out to see what the hell was going on, only to be met by a large group of local restaurant employees coming to decorate a Christmas float. I said to our neighbor, at the time, it might not have been a good idea bringing such a heavy vehicle and attachment over the unprotected (except by some earth) waterline. He was so decked out in Christmas cheer, nothing could penetrate his festive spirit. The very next morning, there was a swamp in our side yard as a result of a broken waterline. I told him about it, and because he was still getting some water pressure said “I’ll get to it in the spring.” In fact the only way it was fixed is when I talked to a friend on district public works, and told them about the leak, and that it was about twenty feet from the meter. In other words our neighbor, outside of getting a wet section of lawn, wasn’t paying for the lost water. Well, let’s just say it got fixed. Only to be broken several more times when Christmas floats arrived seasonally.

Another neighbor, when we lived on a rural property, also in Bracebridge, didn’t have a clue what a “pie shaped”lot looked like. He wasn’t big on surveys or the information about property lines they contain. He said he was too busy. Suzanne asked me who was cutting down trees, one morning, while she was feeding our young lads. Seeing as we’ve had problems with neighborly interventions before, I pulled on my boots and went out the front door. Our new neighbor on the right had strung a rope line, apparently to indicate the trees that were going to be cut that morning. Out of the twenty or so trees he was planning to execute, cause he admitted he liked the view more than the foliage, twenty or so were ours. I got his attention by jumping up and down, and when he turned the chainsaw off, thought there was a fire in our house. There was fire, by Jesus, and it was in my breast. I asked him, by what authority, he was cutting down our trees. “Your trees,” he said. “These are my trees, and I don’t want them here any more.” I stammered and stuttered in a blind rage, but managed to ask him the simple question, whether or not he had first consulted the survey to find the limits of his property line. “No,” was the answer. “We paid cash for the property and we didn’t have to provide a survey.” “Well you should still have a survey,” I said. “Do you know what it means to own a pie shaped lot?” He shook his head. “Well, you have one, and it means the back of your property retreats on both sides to a sharp point. In other words you don’t have a rectangle to work with. These trees are not within your property.” I avoided using the word “clown” to close the statement. “Of course they are,” he answered, trying to re-start his chainsaw. I said, “I will show you the survey sir, so that you can see what a pie shape is all about.” Well, he got mad because he had his heart set on some quality chainsawing that day, but told me how stupid I was for keeping such a miserable stand of birches and evergreen. Go figure.

One day I came home and the guy’s handyman was cutting our lawn. It was more than just a little ridiculous because it should have been obvious by our survey stakes, if nothing else, that he was mowing on the wrong side. Moving our lawnchairs, aimed at our house, should have tweaked something in the man’s head. When I asked him to stop, he nodded, “Right after I finish cutting the lawn.” I threw a couple of lawn chair’s in his way. When he turned the mower off and got all red-faced with rage, I asked him the same question as the other bloke. “Do you know what pie shape means?” Never had to explain that one again.

A neighbor in our third house, decided to re-direct a sump-pump drain from where it had been, onto a treed section of property, to shoot out instead into the thin backyard. He did this just prior to the start of the winter. By the March melt there was quite a lot of water building up at the fence line that we didn’t know about. One of our boys had dropped a toy on the way into the house, and when I stepped off the deck into the snow to grab it, the water rose up to my knee. It was up to the last concrete block before the woodwork of our house. We could hear the flow of water from the hose adding to the melt water from the snow. We phoned him to help re-direct the water, and talk about engaging a grumpy old fart. He blamed us for everything wrong in his life. Including the misery we were inflicting, getting him away from his recreation, to help save our homestead from floating down to the lake. When we finally let that water go down the driveway, well, it took a good chunk of our driveway with it. I told him to re-direct the sump-pump water away from our house. Several years and floods later, he did move it, and we haven’t had water rising at our back ever since.

Now it builds from the side. Several years ago another neighbor decided to get rid of excess water from the basement, and shoot it down a buried tube to the border between our properties. As soon as we hear the heavy equipment and chainsaws, by habit, we react. I watched with interest as the hose was aimed right at us. The idea, I suppose, was that the small basin in which it was centered, would be enough of a depression in the landscape to keep it running toward a drainage pipe that runs along the roadway. Not wishing to get into a scrap, at least immediately, we opted to take a “wait and see” approach. This fall, while walking the dog, I stepped into a quagmire of soggy grass and soil up to my anklebone. When I studied the source, well, there it was. An underground river was exiting through the water table, down toward the lake, instead of flowing to the roadside drain. Suzanne’s late-season garden was floating. The unstable ground extended for about thirty feet. I don’t know where all this new water was coming from, because for months there hadn’t been much of an issue. I was forced to dig a drainage ditch immediately for fear I was going to watch my lawn slip down the storm drain. From the moment I dug it out to the road, it remained full to overflowing through the winter.

One day we came home from work, and our entire upper driveway....where we used to park, was entirely covered with the remnants of a neighbor’s pine tree. It was a towering son of a gun and I wasn’t unhappy to see it gone. I just would have thought it prudent, our neighbor might have asked first before using our property as a temporary lumber yard.

I was sitting on my deck one day reading, and heard a group of people coming down our sideyard path. I dropped the book, looked out over the railing, and watched the sightseers enjoying the stroll. They were telling their children that this was a neighborhood path they could use instead of walking all the way around the block. They were at least very complimentary about Suzanne’s gardens, as they pointed out the various plants and shrubs we had planted along the winding path. I asked them what I could do for them, and they seemed annoyed by the intrusion on their nature walk. I love when trespassers argue with you. I asked them if they’d like to see our survey. One night a week later, while I was sleeping on a cot on the deck, during a hot spell, I awoke suddenly, staring at a lady who was walking through our garden, apparently looking for the same neighborhood path. We both shrieked, and she went running (which was a mistake) through the precarious pricklies of Suzanne’s garden. There was a lot of crying-out and crashing noises before she navigated that dark forest path.

When a neighbor asked Suzanne, one afternoon, where he should put the new Greek-themed water-fountain he’d just ordered, it was the first time I’d ever heard my wife suggest to an acquaintance, “Up your arse, cause it’s not going in the front yard.....understand?”

I went out this morning and found that someone had driven a rather large truck onto my lawn. This isn’t all that peculiar. We live just past a sharp bend in the road, and if conditions are right, a vehicle travelling too fast will skid on the ice, and spin like a curling stone, out onto our front lawn. Funny thing though, we’re getting desensitized to all the weird stuff directed away. The driver must have had to engage four wheel drive or a tow truck to get out, and we were sitting in the living room listening to Mozart. We’re built on a cement pad so we can hear the kids thwacking a tennis ball on the road but apparently, not a large truck sitting in our front yard.

In the words of that kid in the movie “The Burbs,” I love this neighborhood! And all the hoods in between. Thanks Rimmer for infusing good humor into what my mother used to call, little Teddy’s “worry worts.” Getting mad just shortens your life. With what I drank and smoked, life’s probably short enough as it is! No sense losing any more time being flustered.