Month: January 2023

A CLICK FOR HOLMES

 


A CLICK FOR HOLMES

I remember it was about fifteen years ago that Holmes bought me a birthday present. It was an odd occasion frankly, as this was the first time that had happened.

By then I’d known him for close to twenty years and not once had he gone out of his way to honour me and actually get me a gift.
Ron Ladd came into my life when he answered an ad for one of my sales crews. At the time, we sold cut flowers door to door all over Southern Ontario.
He was in foster care, and over the next few months and even years, a handful of his foster brothers joined us at his invitation. He was the first.
I could say he was the last too. Within a couple of years of working for me he moved into one of the rooms we rented after we duplexed a bungalow on Hamilton’s West Mountain. Mortgage rates were in the teens at that time and so, we did what we had to do.
I remember complaining to Homer, the Children’s Aid Society social worker who was covering his rent and being gently rebuked.
He told me he wished every one of his hundred plus caseload had someone like me in their lives. Who me? Yes, you. Through my shame, I accepted my role reluctantly.
Ron was a good tenant, learned quickly, and was a loyal and reliable contractor. He loved to laugh and I had the privilege of mentoring him into adulthood despite my flawed existence.
It was the rap era; he could dance too. We nicknamed him Holmes, as in, “What it is, Holmes?” He liked that.
Eventually he moved away to Calgary. We followed, leaving Hamilton and heading to the coast a year or two later. On the way, we checked in on him and roommate Billy Bopper (nickname), another foster kid Ron had brought into our circle, both like family.
We even took them to Cowboys, me wearing my new Lucchese boots bought special for the trip west.
I can’t remember if Billy punched anyone out that particular night or not. It was a long time ago after all, and “The Bopper” had the odd off-night.
Sure enough, in kind some time later Holmes followed us and moved to British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
There, we lived and worked together again. Eventually, I went into the newspaper paid sales business.
He’d by then become a kayak guide working the salt chuck. My friends and I fished the rivers and salt, and Holmes knew the moon phases and the tides. He had developed expertise.
Later on, he joined me as a manager. It meant reluctantly leaving Galiano Island in the Georgia Straight (“his island”) to help me run Calgary after I’d expanded out of the Vancouver account.
He did it for me.
So, it was he came over with these 30 lbs. dumbbells on what had to be my fiftieth birthday.
I was shocked that he had actually thought of me. Dumbfounded too as they were the perfect all-around size, and a man’s gift to a man.
He’d been doing a lot of body weight exercises and with little encouragement could do a “human flag” off any post. He was a compact powerhouse for some of those years.
Right away, I noticed: one of these dumbbells is loose. When you lift it, it clicks.
Of course, our relationship was based on respect and loyalty, the foundation of any male friendship.
But it also included plenty of the competitive tendency to ball bust each other.
He had a good sense of humour our man Holmes, and we both laughed easily.
I picked them up and started doing reps and click-click-click-click-click… I looked at him.
Happy with the gift but unable to shut my big mouth, I said something like, “Sure enough, one of them is loose and clicking, what the fuck Holmes…”
He answered, assuring me I could handle it, laughing at me with kid brother cheekiness.
It struck me later that my answer was unkind. The kid, from poor beginnings and a troubled start, and even though he was in his thirties, had thought of me. If he’d brought me two stones tied together with string on sticks my only answer should have been profound gratitude.
So now Holmes is gone.
It was a few years after returning to his many friends and actively working as a competent and well-liked kayak guide in the magical waters which surrounded his beloved island. He said good night one evening to his buddy and went to sleep, and never woke up.
I grieve that fucker still. Not in an overwhelming or necessarily burdensome way. Admittedly though, it was at first. Losing people who are loved is always a travail.
I cling to the Hofstadter idea that we exist in each other. Where I exist in Holmes might be in question… but where he is in me is never gone. My little buddy Holmes echoes endlessly down through time in all those he left behind.
And he clicks too. Every time I pick these up, which is pretty much every day, there it is: click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click.
Ten reps of Holmes, minimum.
I could do super slow reps, which are better for me and I sometimes do, and hear no click, but there’s no fun in that.
With every rep and every click, an echo, a click for each as my memory vault swings open to reveal one of a thousand scenes of me and my little brother.
A click, I see him at age 14 at his first week on the job, cherub-faced and full of commitment.
A click, now I’m teaching him to drive.
A click, I hear him dealing with his first jealous girlfriend (a blonde-haired blue-eyed Newfoundlander beauty).
A click, and he’s teaching my son, his de facto little brother, how to swim in our back yard above ground.
A click, he’s dancing to hip hop in Niagara Falls, N.Y., at a giant club while acting as our designated driver.
A click…
A click…
A click…
A click…
A click for Holmes.

This is the day…

COLD IMMERSION

COLD IMMERSION

The company is situated in Canada, in part of the northern latitudes where snow is common during the winter months from as early as November and as late as April.
Oh sure, I hear complaints from some quarters decrying the inconvenience of winter cold and its accumulation of frozen precipitation. I have an answer.
I have yet to meet someone impatiently waiting at a bus stop (or elsewhere), shivering in minus degree weather (be it Celsius or Fahrenheit), enslaved to the schedules of public transit (or otherwise), who opts for the choice when presented this way.
I simply ask them to remember the swarms of mosquitoes in summer, from the bloody biting black flies in May and June to the deer and horse flies which draw blood and hurt the rest of summer, and then I ask, “Would you rather have that AND six-inch cockroaches crawling all over the place… or this?”
Not once in the decades I have asked the question has anyone (albeit usually female but that’s besides the point) answered that they would prefer six-inch cockroaches and biting insects over winter.
When they answer predictably this way, I say, “Isn’t this great, it’s killing all those bugs!” To which I usually get an acknowledgement, but one clearly based on the better of two bad options.
So winter is like any cold, even cold viruses, in that it builds immunity. And just as a cold with runny nose and coughing is inconvenient but not usually debilitating, so is winter. It build courage I say…
Cold immersion is all the rage amongst the longevity crowd. My son and Chicken Executive Officer assistant has been known to don my winter boots and nothing more than the underwear he sleeps in to let the girls our of their coop and start their day.
Daughter Charlie is not as brave thank heavens, but, according to her mother, is chronically underdressed.
I can get some of that by wandering outside the main offices in a T-Shirt to visit the workers laying eggs to experience it. I will often linger, finding something to do, grabbing a shovel with bare hands that we leave by the fence and shoveling some of the snow impeding the hen’s and rooster’s paths.
If I arrive soon after Howie has let them out I might observe the Hustling Hens as they scoot around, nary a sound among them save for a stifled cluck here and there.
They defer to their defender, the main rooster who is first or second out and checks things to ensure the coast is clear.
Once satisfied, Sir Omelet will signal in the time honoured tradition of all worthwhile roosters. The Celts are said to have believed the rooster a mystical animal as it was first to be heard after a battle.
At the company, things get a little louder as the Hustling Hens start to scratch and dig, through snow if they have to, grateful for the two pine trees in their enclosure and the protected grounds underneath.
Once he has saluted the day gloriously in this way, sons of Sir Omelet, Red and Sir Omelet Jr., might give it a go, but never before giving their father first voice.
In some ways it is solemn, a ritual, a bit like the ringing of a church bell for an early Christian mass.
Some years ago, my Missus insisted I find myself a four wheeler with a plow to more quickly do my driveway. She went so far as to buy it for me. How many gals do that?
When it works it works well enough, the machine I bought I mean, and I can do the driveway in half the usual time. Next machine I get will be fuel injected, is all I’ll say.
I have a snowblower too and it’s a good thing I do. I keep a quarter mile stretch of grass cut in summer encircling the company offices to facilitate walking and exercising. In winter, the snowblower keeps this area clear for me and chief of security, Remington Cabela, as we patrol to make sure all is in order.
Some time of day will see me tossing a twenty-pound ball ahead of us just for fun. Remington has gotten good at avoiding where it lands and has quickly trained me to be very careful.
But it is the end of the driveway that garners my Missus’ attention.
Although I got her winter tires and change them for her faithfully each November and April, she lacks four-wheel drive and clearance.
So out she goes to shovel it like the indomitable Canadian gal that she is. And she never ever asks for help unless it’s over two feet.
She just takes care of it.
As you can probably tell, she doesn’t give a damn about “cold immersion,” in any form whatsoever.
This is the day…
cw

HOME SWEET HOME


Home SWEET Home…

Worth maintaining: property values alone need protection.
If we know NOT doing upkeep eventually means a leaky roof, we stay on it and ensure we are not left exposed to the elements… and the animals.
I learned that the hard way.
When I lived overlooking Lake Ontario, I once let my shingles on the lakeside part of my second story roof curl under the twinned forces of heat and wind.
One day, it rained… a lot, and began dripping significantly from the light fixture in the master bedroom.
I ended up replacing the shingles on the whole house by myself.
I learned a lot, and it was both pain and pleasure as I learned roofing… on the fly (by ladder actually).
The pain came from kidney stones I happened to get at the same time. Those are a bitch.
The pleasure derived all from satisfaction and outweighed the inconvenience of the roof maintenance by far.
No contest.
Common sense, maybe.
Many years ago, probably burdened by a bad back, I shifted perspective about the nature of my true home.
What a difference did it make.
This is the day…