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.