Shared Reality

I can’t do the darn loon call. My sons can and I hold nothing but pride that they can make the sound of the loon. My Dad tried to teach me umpteen times to do that call and it never happened, but in a half hour session in his apartment a few years ago he laid the groundwork of success for the boys. 

The loon call to Dad is more than an interesting noise to make at family gatherings or at Pog Lake in Algonquin Park in the summers of my youth. Dad made that call with his friends in the 50s in their intricate games of war, they would use it as a signal to warn of whatever offence or defence was necessary to vanquish the enemy.  The call is connected from my sons back in time to his creek, his old forgotten piece of rail bed and his friends and foes in a different Woodstock and Canada than exists today. 

I have waxed poetic about my own life at the creek and bush behind our house in the 70s but Dad and I share this story line. Dad was at the beginning of the big wave of post war Kids we have come to call the Boomers and I was at the end.  His youth was my youth, He and his friends  laid the groundwork for the world the Boomers now lament is gone and I was the last recipient of the freedom that the tons of Kids everywhere all the time enjoyed in order to maintain the sanity of our parents.

 

The story is not just ours but it is everyone’s. It is the story of a time when play mostly meant fun and learning to live with the many personalities that were in the parks, the school yard and the hidden places where real imagination takes place. Some Kids got hurt, though I can’t remember many that were too serious, I did my share of bleeding and so did my friends. Some kids ended up at the bottom of the social heap and some rose to the top. I found myself often floating between the top and bottom, sometimes in physical and emotional pain and sometimes in the bliss of wonderful experiences. Is the pain necessary for the full understanding when life is really good? 

My Dad has more stories and it would be nice to write some down, this short report is about the connection between a boy born in 1944 and another in 1963 and the stability of the years in between. Both my Dad and I basked in the unquestioned world being built by our parents in post war Canada. 

 I still love the memory of the creek and the places away from adult’s sensible eyes. I think my Dad feels the same.

I Hate Golf Courses

I hate golf courses. Not all golf courses, only one specific one and the fact that there are so many. I don't hate the game of golf, though I don’t enjoy it. Golf courses are everywhere; they are prolific, and exclusive. They exclude by membership, or fee, or by the single pursuit they allow. Golf courses are often built near water and gag access to it. they inhabit the lands at the edge of town, or near a sterile suburb gaining tax dollars for the Municipality from the more valuable homes built near them.

A kid leaves through the aluminium screen door, the yard dotted with trees barely taller than this skinny blond tramp, he leaves the perfect grass the perfectly laid out Places, Drives and cul-de-sac. He leaves the perfect planned sameness. Pocket knife in tow from that trip to Old Fort Henry in Kingston a summer or so ago. T-shirt and 619 Levis, dog at his side he rounds the corner out of the suburban monotony. He can see it, down at the end of the street, corn now turning brown in the September sun. He sees the trees, the scrub, he knows this place, it is his home, the old piece of rail bed from some long forgotten branch line, the field, the creek the paths made by Kids just like him. He talks to the dog with the same colour hair as he, it is on a lead but he reminds it to heal, the dog tries to walk close and keep his pace. He is almost there he has no plan today it is just the two of them good master, good dog. In a minute the dog will run free and so will he.

Another day it is under the bed and in the dresser drawer of his basement lair, Crossman pellet rifle and the steel can of ‘bullets’. Out the door, Dean is just rounding the corner the boy pops across the street to collect Rob, the three are not out for mayhem, no trouble in their minds, they are marksmen, tin cans, chunks of bark and that first golden leaf on the otherwise green tree are the targets. They walk through the streets with the rifle barrels ‘cracked’ to indicate to the windows and wind chimes they mean no harm. The destination is the field, the creek, the rail bed. They will not return until hunger can no longer be ignored.

It is 1975 or 76, it is freedom, it is nature and fishing and bruises, dirt and snapping turtles, it is heaven.

Rush ahead almost forty years, the suburb is different. The trees are much bigger; it is a little less sterile. Just try to carry that mostly harmless rifle through the streets. Out the door down the street and around the corner and a bit there is a fence and beyond the fence perfect grass, fake landscape features, and sand traps. The kid of 2014 is stopped blocked by the exclusive golf course, even if he hops the fence, to what end?

Yes I hate golf courses. 

Just Are

The trees are not green in our honour.

The flowers do not bloom in colourful glory for our amusement.

Nature does not burst forth each spring as if beholding to people.

We are not the purpose of the majestic lustful rebirth.

No bird sings its tune for our ears.

It is not at our discretion that life is, though we seem to think so.

What ego we have to think of some mastery of the things that we must have,

things we will not live without.

They do not need us, and without us will thrive.

They will not cease to bloom, sing, procreate just because we are gone on the wind.

Open your eyes weak humans, know that you are but a wisp in the full gale of nature,

know that you are not the master but the prodigy of all that is.

Cast your eyes on your reflection and see now a being with no greater grandeur than the dandelion or the butterfly.

No purpose, but to be as the fish, the beaver, and the maple just are.