Archives for November 2017

I got on the bus tonight, coming home from a dental appointment. It was the OC Transpo number 7. It’s a route that travels through a good deal of the city, starting from Carleton University southwest of downtown, then through the city core and then eastward over the Rideau River, not far from the Ottawa River and then it heads south again and ends at what used to be the biggest shopping centre east of downtown, St. Laurent.

I started riding this route regularly in the fall of 1979, as I travelled from Manor Park to my downtown high school. I was out of district by about three hundred yards so I had to lie that it was imperative that I took some enriched course that wasn’t offered in my district school. I can’t even remember what it was now.

Anyway, about nine years ago my wife and I bought a house not far from where I grew up and on occasion I find myself on the same bus, along the same route, that I began riding as a thirteen year old.

A lot has changed along the route but maybe not as much as one might expect. Some of the houses that I remember being fairly new in the old days are now nearly forty years old. I still pass by the same corner store that was the neighbourhood favourite for generations of kids like me. It’s been run by the same couple for well over forty years.

I pass the street where I lived for most of my youth. The street from where, as an eight year old, I would walk to get to another closer corner store to buy my mother cigarettes. She would write a note in beautiful penmanship that I couldn’t possibly have pulled off and it would have a list. A quart of milk, Craven A Special Mild and Kotex. One of these times I told the lady I didn’t need a bag and I carried these items home just in my hands. My mother was mortified when she saw that I was kicking the box of pads down the street like a soccer ball. I didn’t know what they were.

The most interesting thing about this bus route for me is that at one point it travels down a street called Beechwood that separates one of the richest neighbourhoods and one of the least affluent ones. As the bus leaves downtown and the crowd starts to thin out a bit, I like to play a game with myself and try to predict where different people will get off. Some are easy. The young mom who doesn’t seem to be dressed warmly enough for the weather, she usually gets off on the side I would have guessed. The high school kid with braces and the $500 winter coat is an easy guess too. I’m pretty good at it because I know all the neighbourhoods so well and where the schools are and how expensive some phones are.

But more often than not, I’m really surprised by some of the departures. I always felt a little embarrassed by where I used to live so I’m always careful to watch for the kids who get off the bus at the stop I used to. And I wonder how they feel about it, after having watched them cavort with their friends who got off five minutes earlier where there are nothing but million dollar properties. I bet that dynamic hasn’t changed very much. That’s the way it was for me. The longer you were on the bus, the poorer the neighbourhoods got. And I was always the last off of my friends.

In bigger cities, where driving and parking is next to impossible, I find that taking public transportation is less stigmatized. I have friends in Toronto who make good money and they take the subway to work. But in Ottawa, there’s still a class delineation when it comes to taking the bus. Not for kids or students but when I step on a bus at the age of fifty-one, a little part of me wonders what the hell went wrong?

And as I settle into my seat on the old number seven, 38 years after it was essentially my school bus, I wonder what my thirteen year old self would have thought of my fifty-one year old self seated across the aisle. I have a feeling we wouldn’t have noticed each other. The past and the future seated together on a bus. Sometimes I think the past is almost as unrecognizable as the future is unknowable.

I’ve had some obstacles over the last few years and as I’ve spoken to professionals about it, I would tell them that the grief I once felt acutely about the deaths of many loved ones in a relatively short period of time had mostly dissipated. Times where I had once felt oppressive sadness had been mostly replaced by fond recollections and the odd moment of self-reflection. In short, I was mostly over it. Mostly.

The  other day I was walking down a street and I glanced to my left at a closed business on the other side of the road. A business that, as far as I can remember has been closed for more than twenty years. But the sign is still there for anyone who remembers it to recall where and what it had been.

It was called Houle Sports and it was one of the main stores where kids in the east end bought their hockey equipment, got their skates sharpened, where their parents shopped for Christmas for their sons and daughters in the seventies.

When my mom could scrape enough money together for some new stuff, that’s where we went. That’s where I got my Bauer Supremes. My Super Tacks. Top of the line skates in those days for lower middle class kids.

I tried out hockey sticks. Felt their bend. Looked at their curve. We got my new elbow pads and shin pads and suspenders there. It was a place where dreams were created and sometimes destroyed, if the price tag was a little much.

So, as I said, I was walking down the street, not thinking about much of anything and I turned to my left and saw Houle Sports. One time a mecca. Now and for a generation, an abandoned store front.

And I thought of my mom. Gone three and a half years now. I can’t recall the last time I cried about her. I don’t cry at her grave anymore. I can see it from the road where I often drive and most of the time I don’t even remember to look toward it the way I did obsessively for the first year or two.

But on this day, as I stepped down from the curb, onto the first ice of the season, I saw the sign for Houle Sports and I started crying. Not because I needed new skates I couldn’t afford. Or that my favourite stick was in a colour I didn’t like. Or that the baseball glove I wanted didn’t fit quite right.

I cried because some things that were precious to me were gone in a way that I knew would soon be forgotten. The store was just an undesirable retail space in a bad neighbourhood. And the memories and emotions that my mother and I shared alone and together would be gone the moment I let them be gone. So I didn’t want to let them be gone.

I walked home. I wasn’t crying anymore. But I was reminded that if trauma is an earthquake and grief is the aftershocks, the aftershocks may come out of nowhere. And they last years longer than we could have rightly expected.

One day, that space will be bought and the sign will change and no one will remember Houle Sports. And yet at one time it was the most important address on this street for a mile.

The signs always change. The addresses become less and more important. But as long as we remember, there are echos of past times that still remain. Even if there are only a few of us that can hear them.

I’ve been reading a novel that’s set against the backdrop of a hockey-mad small town in Sweden. It’s a complicated plot but the descriptions of the hockey itself are evocative and it’s triggered a few memories that I had forgotten I had. Memories of little things that I didn’t think I had lost so much as they were stored so very far back in my mind that I didn’t have occasion to run across them. Like a photo album you know is tucked away in a specific drawer but it’s a drawer that might not get opened for years. And then the photos may as well have just disappeared.

The first thing this hockey novel brought to mind was the act of taping a stick. The precision on the blade, the grip on the upper shaft, the size of the knob that felt comfortable in you’re hand. (I’m quite aware this all sounds very phallic. And I suppose it is.) And there’s a distinctive smell to hockey tape, a rubberiness that I no longer really run across. Then there was the choice you had to make about what the perfect height of your stick was going to be.  The nose, the chin, the Adam’s apple? Because once you started in with the hacksaw and the sawdust started flying, there was no turning back. I haven’t taped a hockey stick in almost forty years.

I recall the particular pleasure of newly sharpened skates. We were kids and we didn’t get them sharpened for every game. And stepping onto the ice with perfectly sharpened blades made our eleven year old bodies feel that much more invincible. Our skills unbeatable. It’s a feeling I’d forgotten.

Basketball was very important to me too. And it, like every other sport, had its own set of rituals. There was the stink of the gym that enlivened me. The feel of the highest quality basketballs for the league games. Wilson Jets, they were called at the time. The sound of the swish and sometimes knowing you’d hear that sound the split-second the ball was leaving your fingertips. Priceless.

Lacing up basketball shoes was similar to lacing up skates. I always did it slowly, it had to be done slowly, to get it just right up and down your feet and ankles. How many pairs of socks would I wear? How high would they be? Wristbands? High or low? It was all part of the decision-making process that seemed so important at the time. And then one day I just stopped and never did it again. And eventually, I never thought of it again.

When I tried to write songs when I was writing for the bands I was in, I would sit on my sofa and on the coffee table would be the same items every time. My pad of paper, my favourite pen, a burning candle, an ashtray and my smokes and my drink. And they would each be in their own location. Pen and paper on the right, ashtray above that, candle in the middle and drink on the left. When I quit smoking, I quit writing for twelve years. Because something wasn’t right anymore and I somehow thought I couldn’t do it with the world being so out of balance.

I used to enjoy watching my father sort through his three or four tackle boxes the night before a fishing expedition. It seemed that as he picked up each reel or organized his lures and threaded the different lines on each rod, memories would come back to him and each of these items would recall a different lake or a different fishing buddy. He showed a patience in this practice that I rarely saw in any other aspect of his life. Maybe that’s why he enjoyed it so much. Even though I don’t really remember seeing him ever catch a fish. I see a bit of myself in that. I’m more patient doing things that calm me. Even if they’re seemingly more frustrating. Calmed by the process, perhaps.

Depending on our ages and our interests, I would bet that each of us has had our little rituals in our endeavors that really seemed to make a difference at the time. Or we may have scent-triggered recollections that allow us to travel to a place that we may have mostly forgotten.

When I finish reading this hockey novel, I’m certain I will have enjoyed it a great deal but the fact is that it returned me, if only for a few minutes, to a time and a place that gave me pleasure, pleasures I’d forgotten about. The simple pleasure of taping a hockey stick. That alone would have made it worthwhile.