Archives for December 2019

Today, with two days left in the calendar year, my hometown has been laced with freezing rain. Seniors and toddlers were falling all over the sidewalks, nervous drivers were skidding through downtown intersections, and able-bodied adult pedestrians had to keep a keen lookout to jump away from an uncontrolled car, or to lend a hand to a prone septuagenarian.

As I returned from my early morning tasks, I found myself walking against the wind. Leaning into it, my face being pelted with ice, my socks and jeans getting wet, my hat ready to take flight. It was one of the few times I recall my face actually being punished by weather. And in my physical misery, I couldn’t help but think of my least favourite weather. Freezing rain.

Sure, it might look pretty in the trees from our window, provided the power is still on. And provided it doesn’t destroy the hundred year old oak that your grandfather planted as a boy. But it really is a dangerous and miserable weather phenomenon and I saw it in the eyes of my fellow travelers today. And it made me wonder how our weather affects us. In good ways and bad.

I am poorly traveled but in my limited adventures, I remember some things decades later. My girlfriend at the time and I went to Jamaica. The heat was stifling. Our modest hotel had one of those swim-up bars and the man behind the bar seemed to move more slowly than I thought possible. The first time we visited him, we probably ordered a Pina Colada and a Marguerita. Big mistake. He chipped the ice by hand off a large block, cut the fruit, shook them for an eternity, all in slow motion. Without exaggeration, the two drinks might have taken fifteen minutes to put together. By the second day, if we were thirsty, we knew to order a couple of Red Stripes while we waited for our drinks.

To this day, I still don’t know if he was just a slow old worker serving drinks to pale Canadians on a Monday afternoon. Or if his fifty years in the oppressive heat told him to take it slowly because the vacationers weren’t going to look for another bar in their bathing suits.

As Canadians, suffering our thirtieth or fiftieth or eightieth winter, it has to have affected the way we feel and interact four months of the year. Unless you are an avid participant in winter sports, our days mostly consist of traveling through the cold and the darkness from one warm room to another. But in our isolation comes commiseration. From two guys smoking in a Church parking lot in the cold. From sharing a blanket or two on the couch when the power goes out. From making an extra effort to help a fellow bus-rider find a seat, the bus being twenty percent smaller, given our parkas and our boots.

Do Swedes laugh differently than Greeks do in January? Do Inuit people wake up as happy in the darkness and coldness where they live constantly, as Brazillians do in the consistant light and warmth? Does the harsh environment make Newfoundlanders funnier than those who live on the plains of Saskatchewan? It has to. It must.

“Hot enough for ya?”, we used to joke. But our skins are mostly the same thickness, wherever we live. And extreme weather conditions must affect us more than simply dampening the soles of our shoes. It must affect the development of the souls of our bodies.

I guess I will never know. But the miserable weather outside has kept me inside long enough to ask.

With a New Year dawning, I have some thoughts.

As children, we don’t stay up late enough to see the beginning of the new year. We don’t make resolutions. We don’t need to lose weight or quit smoking or quit the job we hate. It’s just the beginning of a time when we will turn six or twelve and that’s about it.

As teenagers, it might be the first time we drink too much or kiss the boy or girl we never thought we would have the opportunity to kiss and we fall to sleep with dreams of the future.

I worked every New Year’s Eve for about thirty years once I hit my twenties. It was the worst and most profitable day of the year, paradoxically. I began each year in parts of four decades exhausted, with no reflections upon the future beyond how long we could drink at the bar and wondering if I would get up before sunset.

There are only about a hundred generations since the time of Christ or however we perceive that story. And I don’t think we’ve changed that much. That reading Shakespeare can resonate five hundred years later, tells me that. We reflect upon our past, we assess our present, and we aspire to a future.

I don’t think I have ever made a New Year’s resolution. And I never really kept one, if I did. I am not making one this year. Because if something isn’t integral to my happiness in mid-December, it will be no more important in mid-January. Calendars shouldn’t be monthly pages. They should mark our time in hours and days because that is where we live. We never lay our heads on our pillows and think, that was a great month. We lay down thinking that was a great day. Or sit in our most comfortable chairs and think that was a tough hour.

Three-hundred and sixty-six days from now (I think it’s a leap year), I don’t know if I will feel like it’s been a good year or a bad year. It will likely be some combination of both. With the good colours and the bad colours in a complicated painting. With the good songs and the bad songs in a radio playlist. With the filet mignon and the under-cooked potatoes on our dinner plates.

But it is a new year. With all that it may entail. Falling in and out of love. New lives to be welcomed and anticipated, and old lives to be remembered and missed.

The year is just a number. Our age is just a number. Our lives are contained within our days. And while our years contain our days, it’s within the days that we live. Turning out the light each night is more important than turning the calendar page.

And with that, Happy New Year, friends. But more than that, Happy Days, Friends.

I had lunch today with an old friend. As our conversation jumped from topic to topic, we spoke of his eleven year old son and his burgeoning basketball career. My friend and I are a few years apart, but we discovered that we both played high school basketball. And were basketball fans in the same era.

We spoke of the subtleties of the game, some of our favourite teams and players, missed and made last shots, both on television and in our respective high school gyms. We spoke of three or four starters on a half a dozen teams from nearly forty years ago. Remembering their styles and successes and failures.

Like most Canadian boys, hockey was my sporting universe. But by the time I reached high school, I’d grown tired of 6 am practices in cold arenas, the need for parents to get up before the sunrise, the cost of new skates every year, and the anonymity of Bantam hockey. Basketball was the natural next step of my athletic life.

It was at and after school, it was free, it was social, and your only concern was to have the right shoes and work on your left hand.

If I remember one of those old Canadian Vignettes correctly, Dr. James Naismith, the founder of basketball, hung peach baskets from the wall for the hoops. That’s where the name comes from. He cut a hole in the bottom of the two baskets, about two inches wide, so he could poke the ball out with a broom stick. And because the baskets still carried some value, he left the rest of the bottom in tact.

Unlike most other team sports, players stand nearly naked. Their faces exposed for all to see. Their personalities on full display. The cool-as-a-cucumber outside shooters, the grimacing defensive players taking a charge, the intimidating defensive whizzes swatting away the ball repeatedly, the fearless grinders entering the fray, fear be damned.

The nineteen year old Michael Jordan winning a championship with a jump-shot from the left side, the loathsome and unexplainable brilliance of Larry Bird, the infectious and spirited play of Magic Johnson, the creativity and athleticism of the imperfect Doctor J.

The larger-than-life personalities of college coaches, who gained and lost new players every year, yet every team, over decades, would play the same disciplined or free-lance style, regardless of the roster components. The fierceness of the Big East, the athleticism of Georgetown, the run-and-gun of UNLV, the discipline of North Carolina. Those games were forty minute theatrical productions, directed by two directors, each with a different style and vision.

As a school player, I’d never been in better shape in my life. There are no blades to coast on like in hockey, the play doesn’t stop every ten seconds like in football, and there’s no breather for the stars every inning like in baseball. No, you just keep playing until the whistle blows and that can be minutes at a time.

When we bench-warmers entered the game late in the action, we were easily identifiable. Not because we looked nervous and didn’t know where to stand or set-up. Not because we didn’t know the offensive plays or the defensive positioning. No, it was because of what we used to call our bench-warming scars. Silver dollar sized red spots on our thighs, just above our knees, where our elbows had rested for the first three and a half quarters of the game.

I don’t play basketball anymore. Not for decades. I don’t watch it anymore either, and I am not sure why. But I still love it.

I learned life lessons in a few years in those gyms. On defense, keep your feet moving, palms up, or hands high, communicate with your teammates, be ready to take the charge.

On offense, if you get the open look, take it. If you drive to the hoop, be ready to be knocked to the floor, knowing you can score the two points at the line anyway. And above all else, be ready to pass the ball to the teammate who has the better path to the hoop. Your team still gets the points and your scoring teammate will point to you to acknowledge your contribution, and your coach and teammates will already understand your contribution.

Basketball is a great game. It can continue to teach us even when we don’t play it anymore. And whether we swish it or clunk it, there’s value in knowing we took our best shot.

As a child, I grew up in apartments. I don’t remember the first time I climbed a flight of stairs. When I was eight, my family moved to a small townhouse but it had a finished basement and a second floor. Twelve steps down and fourteen steps up. I slept in the basement and as I climbed the twenty-six stairs to our only bathroom for my morning shower before school, my younger brother on the second floor would listen for my footsteps and quickly get behind a locked door ahead of me to do his toiletries. My father got polio during the Second World War and walked with a limp his whole life, refusing to use a cane, but he climbed stairs for sixty years.

I was a waiter in places for thirty years and often, while carrying three or four plates, I could not see the floor or my feet. And all these decades later, I still remember how many stairs there were to each section. How broad they were, how deep or shallow they were, how soft they were.

I once lived in an apartment in Montreal that had one of those exterior black, metal stair cases. When the weather turned icy, getting into and out of home was almost un-navigable. My last home had many stairs up and down. Stairs to the bedroom, stairs to the TV room, stairs to the bathroom. Everything, good and bad, in that house led to a staircase.

I have seen puppies and old dogs on the stairs. Some learning them and some remembering them. And it’s no different for people. Young children and aged seniors only want the same thing. To climb up and to not fall down.

One can live in a single floor dwelling and still be challenged by stairs. The challenge might be to quit smoking or drinking or gambling. To stop going to the well-paying job one hates and start going to the lesser-paying job one loves. To climb to one’s true love or descend from one’s sorrow.

I don’t climb too many real stairs these days. But I still can. Real and metaphorical. But sometimes, it is important to remember how many stairs there are and be re-assured there is the hand rail to help you up or help you down.

We climb stairs all of our lives. Climbing up, climbing down. We might be holding a child or we might be holding laundry or groceries. In the end though, the most important thing I think, is that we hold up ourselves. Don’t fall, and get to the landing where we need to be. Safely.