It’s that spoooooooooky time of year again. The weather gets colder and everything around us just dies (or hibernates – which can look pretty much the same). The shadows become murkier as the sun disappears earlier and the setting becomes perfect for an eerie holiday.
Things that are innocent can get a little twisted. That creepy cat on a broomstick? It’s just a medieval feline on a Roomba.
That being said, I am not immune to getting goosebumps when my brain decides to play tricks on me. Many moons ago, Rick and I were in our minivan when we noticed a strange thing up in the sky. It was an odd shape, it was glowing, mayyyyybeeee it was moving? We were partly apprehensive and partly excited as we wondered what in the world this unidentified flying object was?
And then the clouds parted. And it was, in fact, the moon.
Oh.
Other-worldly, yes. But not unidentifiable. MOMENTARILY, however, it was deliciously scary.
Generally I don’t like to be scared unless it comes at me in ways I can control. Like rollercoasters: a nice dose of adrenaline within the confines of a super-seatbelt.
I suppose that metered scariness is the attraction about Halloween. If the masked strangers at my door are under 5 feet tall, I will reward them with a treat. Anyone bigger than that might get the 5th degree before we open the door wide and offer up a bag of potato chips with barbeque tongs.
This year, of course, I’ll be wearing a mask myself at the door, albeit a disposable medical one. Maybe I’ll dress up in hazmat suit, too. You can never be too safe this time of year. Or this year, actually.
Although it seems counter-intuitive to travel during a global pandemic, we decided to do just that this last week. Eschewing our plans made last December to visit Disneyland this fall with our adult children, we opted for safe(r) travels within the confines of our Canadian border. All of our pictures are clearly time-stamped by the masks we had to wear anywhere we ventured outside of our pod.
About a month ago we booked flights for six to Vancouver and held our breath, took our vitamins and said our prayers that we would actually be able to take said flights, barring any fevers, sore throats or other COVID-like symptoms. The plan, over which we had absolutely no control, went according to… well, plan.
Travel, as they say, is broadening. Our main destination was not Vancouver but the giant island to the west of it. Sure we could have flown directly there, into Victoria or Nanaimo, where we spent a couple of nights each. But part of the charm of visiting The Island is engaging in what I like to call Ferry Culture. For those of us born in the wide open prairies, we can get into a vehicle and drive ad nauseum for days. But when you live on the coast, water sort of gets in the way.
Ferry Culture involves a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. If you need too make sure you connect to a flight, you have to get to the ferry in time and before it fills up. So you get up super early, drive to the ferry landing nearest you, and then you wait in line. Then you get on the ferry and you sit back and wait again as the ferry takes you over. This can all take hours. Fortunately there was food and phones and, in this case, family to amuse us.
And it’s fun, especially when it’s novel and when you’re on vacation. And when the scenery around you is beautiful. All that water surrounding you seems to do its job of cleansing your brain – which is really what a vacation is for.
Maybe it’s the change of scenery or the brain-washing, but I found myself fascinated by the number of small things that added up to big things on this trip. While the boys skipped rocks on one little beach in Chemainus, Sharlie was able to look for seashells to her heart’s delight – there were so many on that little piece of paradise that she could literally take her pick of the best ones. On that beach there were hundreds and thousands of shells and rocks and logs that the tide had brought in.
Should I even mention the grains of sand? Or the gallons of water?
And then we visited the Butchart Gardens. Of course, there are very green plants and trees and flowers (still) everywhere in October on Vancouver Island but the Gardens do an especially nice job of arranging and clustering them in a way that gives you pause. And when you try to estimate the number of petals on an accordion-like chrysanthemum, you count past 100 quickly. When you consider the petals in a twenty foot square patch of mums, it’s boggling.
And most of the plants were not even in bloom at this time of year.
In the rather large Butchart Gardens there are also trees, shrubs, leaves and needles you could consider “counting”. But really, that would get old, fast.
And then, there is the travelling itself. The ferries we rode on could hold hundreds of vehicles, some of tremendous size. Where the heck was everybody going and what was so important that it had to get done on the other side? And plane travel: what would have taken us a good day or two in the car to traverse, we managed by crawling into a giant sardine can in just a little over an hour. 500 miles an hour at 30,000 feet. Really, you don’t want to think about it too hard or the whole relaxing part of the vacation just goes Poof!
All this makes me consider my own tiny mortality. It’s really not much in the scheme of THE WHOLE WORLD, is it? And sometimes, I wonder: what am I really doing here, anyway?
On a podcast recently I was reminded of something that Andy Stanley said – whether it’s his words originally or not, no matter – it’s still good. He said that when we get overwhelmed with the idea of doing something good for mankind, just try instead to do for one what you wish you could do for all.
For some reason, I was reminded of this as I considered the seashores and the sand and the seas this last week. The stones that were skipped and the walks that were taken and jokes that we shared didn’t do that much for the world, but they did a world of good for us.
When I was 6 years old, I went into grade one with a preamble of only one-week during the previous June. Kindergarten – at least in my part of the woods – hadn’t been invented yet. I guess that June week was a supposed to be a warm-up for us as we occupied the recently vacated desks of the graduating first graders who got let out early for summer vacation.
All I know is that it interrupted my previously scheduled programming.
I was born in 1967 so by the time I learned how turn on the TV for myself – NO REMOTE CONTROLS WERE INVOLVED – children’s television was breaking in big. The Friendly Giant had been around since 1958 and Sesame Street arrived on the air in 1969. But though I loved Rusty the Rooster and the Cookie Monster, there was just something special about Mr. Dressup. He and Casey and Finnegan became Canadian household names when they got their own show in February of my birth year. Apparently those three characters survived as a spin-off when their first show Butternut Square got cancelled. Who knew? (Answer: Wikipedia.)
Three years ago, when Rick and I spent some time in Toronto, we wandered through the CBC studios and much to my delight, we came across Casey and Finnegan’s old treehouse and I was happy to see that such an important part of the Canadian television landscape had been preserved.
Over the years, the puppet-people changed but the inquisitive Casey and silent Finnegan were the hallmarks of my time so therefore my faves. But as much as puppets upped the attractive-to-children factor, it was Mr. Dressup that was the star.
It should come as no surprise that Ernie Coombs (Mr. Dressup’s other name) and Fred Rogers were friends and workmates. Fred and Ernie came to Canada in 1963, collaborating with CBC to create something new for kids. Fred eventually went back to his neighborhood but Ernie stayed on and created the longest running children’s program in Canadian history.
To me, Mr. Dressup oozed kindness. You could also tell he genuinely liked children and, maybe strange for an adult man, puppets. There was no artifice or self-consciousness when he dressed up in the craziest of costumes from his Tickle Trunk and danced around and used silly voices. He drew effortlessly with a marker on his easel. And he had a million ways to transform a toilet paper tube with his backup supply of construction paper, feathers and googly eyes, which really endeared him to my crafty self.
I’m always reminded around Sept. 11 that Mr. Dressup had a stroke one day before the twin towers fell in New York and then died a week later. The tragedy of 9-11 was acute but I was saddened that the passing of a Canadian icon went under the radar. Maybe Ernie Coombs, with his kind heart and gentle ways, had been spared the awareness of that painful event. He was an unassuming man and he left the world in the same way.
(Ducks to avoid rotten tomatoes, paper airplanes made from cancelled flight tickets, and cardboard boxes now empty of disposable masks.)
Yeah, I know. Remember the good ole days, those days of auld lang syne, when one would get the flu and puke your guts out and moan for a few days and have to learn how to walk all over again just to get on the scale and find out that you lost 7 pounds in addition to maybe three days of your life?
Yeah, coronavirus is not that kind of flu.
I have my share of vivid memories of having the flu. Me, nine months pregnant with Timmy, huddled over a basin on the floor trying to manage dry-heaving and Braxton-Hicks contractions at the same time. Me, again, last Christmas when I was deathly ill from a flu I caught from my husband that we then shared with EVERYONE else in our vicinity. (And that we secretly wonder if it was some sort of pandemic-prequel.)
I have another flu-tinged memory: me, again, back before I got pregnant with Tim. My dear friend Lynn took care of Gil until his daddy got home from work, leaving me alone to my symptoms. Too weak (maybe?) to climb the stairs to my bed, I opted for the floor in front of the television. This was back when we had Super Channel – the premier movie subscription channel of the time. The movie playing was The English Patient. I wasn’t English and I wasn’t wrapped up in bandages, but at that moment in time, Ralph Fiennes and I had our supine positions in common.
And I will forever hate that movie.
Was it the flu that colored my dislike so much? Or did I somehow peer into the future and see Lord Voldemort? I’ll never know because I WILL NOT RE-WATCH THAT MOVIE OR READ THAT BOOK. Just the thought of it makes me nauseated.
It makes me wonder what about this whole world-wide virus epidemic will leave us with bad associations. Presidential races? (Well, the virus can’t be completely to blame for that.) The smell of tequila-tinged hand sanitizer? The feel of a giant Q-tip up your nose assessing your positive or negative status because you sneezed a couple times at your place of employ?
Yes, there will be bad memories when we think of 2020. Just the idea of another holiday coming up and wondering how to navigate it makes us wonder about the whole notion of Thanksgiving. (Let’s not even start thinking ahead to Christmas.)
I had a chance encounter this week with an old friend at the Coop where we were buying our Thanksgiving turkeys. I bemoaned the idea of another ambiguous get-together: I miss the freedom of hugging with abandon, of open door policies for the boys’ friends, of not having to THINK about dos and don’ts so much when it comes to just celebrating with family. And my friend reminded me that, on the flip side, many people are more thankful for their families than they were before coronavirus.
It’s good spiritual chiropractic, to have your thinking adjusted like that. There’s a lot that’s wrong with the world right now. But, as always, there’s a lot that is right.
It’s a rough time to be a twenty-something looking for work right now. All three of our boys fall into this category and they are in one stage or another of flux: going to school, just finished school and between jobs. The pandemic-economic climate has made job hunting – and keeping – difficult, especially when you haven’t had a lot of traction yet.
One thing that keeps me optimistic about their situation is remembering all the odd, crappy, weird jobs that I had when I was just trying to pay for my own schooling and make the rent. Oh, and be able to take myself to restaurants. At one point, I quit school and seeing the last of my student loan in sight, I needed to find work and I couldn’t be picky.
The summer of ’87 first found me selling ice cream in a semi-temporary booth in downtown Edmonton. Some entrepreneurial friends I knew (from church!) took a chance on me and I became – as my co-worker Barb liked to call us back before we were PC – a “scoop-chick”. It really wasn’t a bad job except I often worked the semi-scary late shift alone (on Jasper Avenue!) and there was no bathroom on site. It also probably wasn’t that great that I got to eat all the ice cream I wanted either. (My love of ice cream still knows no bounds.) A highlight of that summer? In the middle of an Oilers cup race during which we sold our trademark blue-and-orange-striped ice cream, I scooped a cone for Philly goalie Chico Resch which he bought for his friend Ron Hextall. (He picked vanilla.)
I was, however, still short a few hours of full-time and when I became friends with the franchise owner’s son, he put a good word in for me at his place of employ where I could work extra hours around my scooping job. The okay part? It was at a store at West Edmonton Mall which, in those days was where my friends and I spent a lot of time between the waterpark and the movie theaters and Bourbon Street. The not-so-okay part? I was HIGHLY UNQUALIFIED to sell automotive parts and accessories.
Working at JB’s Automotive definitely rings in as my WORST JOB EVER. If they would have let me just work the till, I would probably have been fine. But noooooo, THEY made me LEARN stuff. About CARS. Ew. On my very first day, I took apart a floor model of an engine, forever sealing the word “manifold” into my vocabulary. And then there was the time when I was called “dumb” because I couldn’t locate a certain part to order in the four-foot long catalog collection that rested behind the counter. At one of my next shifts at the ice cream shop, I overheard the same guy tell my boss about how he liked to go to JB’s and ask the girls there to look up parts he knew did not exist.
OHHHHH!!!
As summer was coming to a close, ice-cream was less in demand and I had to find another job to offset the angst of my auto-parts-sales job. It turns out, it’s always who you know. Another friend recommended me for a part-time teller position at the bank where she worked and so I became a “money waitress”.
Working for Canada Trust had its advantages with it being open till 9pm, especially since I elected to go back to school the following September. Classes filled my days and a decent-paying job filled my evenings. But being a teller had its sore points: we routinely ran out of cash (Cash? What is Cash?) during high seasons like Christmas and I was robbed once by possible gunpoint (it was in his jacket pocket so it could have been a fist-and-finger). I was a happy teller until the end of the night when my exuberance for serving customers was overshadowed by my propensity to make data entry mistakes. My supervisors were very disgruntled with me when I kept them overtime because I had trouble with my manual balancing at the end of shift. Their solution: they promoted me to Part-Time Teller Supervisor. Once I had to balance other tellers, I never had trouble again!
I worked at the bank for four years, paying for my schooling as I went until I graduated, pregnant and unemployable. Oh, and married. Which led to another chapter of odd jobs: wife, mother, homemaker…well, the list is kinda endless. Because there is ALWAYS something to do, right?
And even if I didn’t always like my jobs, I am happy that I have the stories. Plus, I survived the ’87 tornado unawares in West Edmonton Mall probably selling radar detectors and fuzzy dice. At least I knew what those things were.
