Our Park Thou Art In Heaven…3

“Barrel Jumping” used to be an accredited winter sport, both amateur and professional.  It was never a winter Olympic event but it should have been.  I remember watching it on the Wide World of Sport TV program: that late Saturday afternoon stalwart of sports, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” which I believe is no longer a fan favourite being replaced by the mundane and hyped Monday Night Football.  Barrel Jumping was a real man’s sport, sort of like winter’s version of the “High Jump and Long Jump” combined and all rolled into one event except that on completing the leap the competitor either landed squarely on his blades on the ice in triumphant jubilation or crash mercilessly, convulsively, into the barrels themselves. With hope upon hope, he tripped himself up after his leap into space falling on to his backside then sliding into the boards of the rink or snow bank.  Unlike the “High Jump” there were no padded landing zones to break the skaters fall just the hard cold ice zone to break ones legs, one’s knees, ankles or pride.  Concussions seemed to top the list as well.  Probably a good thing as the more one became concussed the braver one became in this sport.  It was like their badge of honour. It was not the Sport of Kings but rather the sport of Dentists, Orthodontists, Chiropractors and Idiots. 

The premise being that, in spite of idiocy and insanity, it was all about jumping over plastic barrels on skates, on ice of course. The more barrels that were cleared the more adventurous and dangerous it became. It was very popular in the Northern States, particularly New York State around the Lake Placid area; Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine plus the backwoods of Quebec and parts of northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan Canada. It was a hugely popular and well followed event. We all had our own barrel jumping heroes.

The competitor, or idiot on skates, would circle the barrels like some sort of displaced matador insanely focused on the barrels themselves that were racked side by side on the ice. Starting with one barrel the excitement and suspense of the fans grew exponentially as the number of barrels increased: two, three, five, eight, ten and on and on it went until there was only one man left standing, or sliding into the boards. The crowds would cheer as each participant cleared the barrels in flight and cheered even louder if one came crashing down into one of the barrels. The cacophony of oooos, aaaahs and groans were the real metric of approval.  Scoring was dependant upon the competitor’s misstep and choreographed mishap, which was the real essence that made this event so compelling from a spectator’s perspective. With each subsequent jump the competitors would try and outdo one another for the admiration and adulation of the crowds. Some would twirl, some would spin and some would jump like a drunk figure skater before building up the speed over distance that was necessary to clear the barrels. 10, 20, sometimes 30 miles per hour they could muster, their leg muscles bulging with every stride, their arms flinging in a sideways motion as if giving flight like an airplane or like the birdbrains that they were. The jumper must leap about 6 or seven feet in the air with a forward projection if he has any hope of clearing the barrels.

The competitor must have agility, speed and guts and be intellectually challenged if he is to be successful in this sport. Some would just leap and fall without the grace or agility of a showman. Others would appear to be running in thin air. Their legs, arms and skates pumping like the madmen that they were while others had the audacity and fool’s courage to project themselves horizontally over the barrels once in the air, like a human cannonball or like superman in flight with their arms outstretched dead ahead only to come crashing down to earth headlong into the barrelled mass. These guys were a crowd favourite. In essence the sport of barrel jumping was never really about clearing the barrels but about the chaotic showmanship of the competitors and their relationship with the barrels themselves as they went flying in all directions.

Unfortunately Barrel Jumping never became an Olympic sport. Instead we have Rhythmic Gymnastics!

“It was too brutal of a sport” a commentator was heard to say. “No one ever made it as all the competitors seemed to fall on their backsides.”

Yesss, exactly.  

Our Park Thou Art In Heaven…2

…in those days winters seemed to be long and cold.  I often tell people today that when the snow came it stayed. It was deep in drifts with a purity of the colour white that was difficult to describe, especially on those cloudless, bright sunny days against the backdrop of a sky that was an unbelievable shade of blue. The sun was so blindingly bright.  It was on days like that that a young lad like me couldn’t wait to get up, get out of the house with my skates and stick and run up there to the park and get on to that clear, blue tinged sheet of ice. The ultimate thrill was being the first to grace that snowless expanse of smooth frozen water, as it was flooded the night before by a city caretaker. Like a winter’s magic carpet it transported a young lad like me to a fantasy world that was etched only by my skates, with the freedom and ease of movement that was pure athletic ecstasy.  Gliding, soaring, twirling: forward then backwards, sliding and turning or stopping on a dime, all by myself, alone in the whole wide world, to dream of hockey prowess and to dream of hockey glory.  To be alive! Then alas, like a sheet of glass the illusion is shattered as others arrive to enjoy and partake in this winter’s offering.  Soon the rink is packed with boys and girls with the odd parent or grownup all trying to claim their own bit of freedom’s frozen grace and elegance. As the day progressed the rink became clogged: the ice transforming itself into a whitish brown coloured slush, which impedes any chance of moving a puck gracefully.  It will only come alive again at days end when the caretaker, all alone on the rink with his own thoughts, clears the ice of snow then rejuvenates it again with its life giving water. 

The best time to go to the outdoor rink to avoid the crowds is during a school night. Unfortunately one had to convince the parents that homework was done – correctly – with the promise of being home at a reasonable hour. The lucky ones were those who lived adjacent to the park for there was little effort on their part in being able to get out there.  There were very few of us on the rink during a school night.  Either they were having a difficult time with their schoolwork; wanted to watch some nebulous TV program; or it was frightenly cold out there. The cold didn’t seem to bother me and out I went as often as I could for I wanted that ice surface all to myself, or perhaps with just a few of my closest friends.  The rink wasn’t lit at night artificially, directly, but for the natural light that emanated from the stars on a clear night; from the moon when there was one; or from the green, magnetic, sinuous hues of the northern lights; or from the artificial backdrop of the street lights and house lights.

There we were with our skates, parkas, toque perhaps, no helmets, gloves or mitts, blue jeans and the like.  Red rosy cheeks, with clear, warm snot running down from our noses. Sniff, sniff and sniff again.  We were a chorus of sniffs: soon to be yellow tinged icicles hanging, dangling from our nostrils and the cleft of our chins. But hey, it was healthy snot! On top of that, tingling toes and burning fingers signalling the early onset of frostbite – but we didn’t care. We were alive and young, and free. The faster we flew on our blades the warmer we felt and exhilarated by the sweet nectar of being alive.

We would set up a couple of goals and play a form of pond hockey. The sound of slapping sticks or pucks to wooden blades: the swishing, whishing and crunching sounds of our metal blades on ice were the only sounds to be heard.  Of course there was also the odd whooping, whistling and ribbing sounds coming from someone’s mouth when a deek, a fake or a shot of speed was masterfully executed.  Laughing, sometimes arguing, ranting and definitely cursing when a puck went astray off the ice and into the snow. Normally we could find it but on those rare occasions when we couldn’t find the puck in the snow banks we came up with our favourite “Barrel Jumping” competition…

Our Park, Thou Art in Heaven

Wedgewood Park was our universe.  Summer, winter, spring or fall: baseball, hockey, football, tag. 

The park wasn’t all that big. About one quarter of a mile long and about half of that again wide. It was surrounded by suburbia on three sides with Wedgewood school and the playground filling out the eastern end: the same school that was the nemesis of Our Lady of Peace. We didn’t really care all that much for the stupidity of our parish rules and played there to our hearts content.  Those rules weren’t God rules. They were man’s rules.  I learned that bit of wisdom later on in life. Some of my bestest friends ever even went to that school although they were damned for life, so I thought.  Hell was full of great guys. Damn!  Hell was full of goodness!

The municipality really did a great job on that park. They laid out an area for skating at one end, which became a tennis court in the spring and summer, keeping the other end open for just about any game that could be imagined by our limitless imaginations: home run derby in the spring or summer months and touch football in the fall.  On those rainy days that occurred from time to time we ventured out to play tackle, mud football. Didn’t really need to organize anything because a couple of kids playing football in the mud became a natural magnet that telepathically drew kids from all over the neighbourhood. Within a Nano second we had two teams going at it in a glorious bath of textured mud and goo.  Great fun.

One of my fondest memories of those days was O’Grunt’s dad firing footballs passes to Sean and I.  He had a canon for a foot as he would kick that football so high as to be almost lost in space. We did our best to try to catch it in the air but for the most part couldn’t.  It wasn’t as if O’Grunt’s dad did it all that often with us. No, just a few times, but those few times that he did kick the ball with us was kind of magical and remains a permanent memory: clear, enduring and endearing in my brainbox.  It was as if by our presence and participation that we received an acknowledgement from a grownup, from the adult world, that as kids we did exist and meant something.  Yes it was magical. There in that small park with my best friend at the time, running hard, sweating, laughing, cajoling each other and taking turns trying to catch that iconic bit of pigskin.

Ghoulishness

…We found the wall and being totally disoriented used our hands for touch and feel and bearing and began to move, ever so slowly. All of a sudden the walls gave way to nothing, an abyss perhaps, although it did seem to us on reflection that we were in what appeared to be a large cavernous room.  We kept moving but in extremely small exploratory steps hoping with all hope that we would find the landing and the stairs.  But, unbeknownst to us at the time we were going in the opposite direction.  So we stopped for what seemed to be an eternity and stood there in frightful anticipation of what to do, where we were and what would come next.  The only sound that we heard was that that came from our diaphragms, from our deep breathing and from our heartbeats.  It was as if our hearts were about to burst forth from our chests. We were bewildered, disoriented, lost.  And as our eyes adjusted to the darkness we could sense that we were not alone in this room.

“Helloooo?”  We cried out in the darkness. Only silence. That there was some form of artefact here with us was without question. We just didn’t know what. Suddenly these weird shapes came into a blurred but darkened outline and focus. Long, and short and stubby cocoon like objects took shape in a spectral like fashion.  As our eyes became adjusted and we acquired limited night vision, ghastly apparitions suddenly filled the room and our senses. Recognition of what we were seeing instantly came over us. We gasped in horror. A casket showroom befell upon us. Open caskets, half opened caskets, closed caskets: on the floor, on shelves, on their sides, on their ends, in organized disarray.  White pillowed laced interiors.  It was ghoulish and very, very frightening to us.

We screamed, turned and ran. Without missing a beat we ran down the short hallway, found the stairs and in what seemed to be two leaps found the bottom.  Turning again we found the lobby then stopped dead in our tracks again as we couldn’t quite make out or accept our current reality. In the darkness there was suddenly light. But not the steady, comforting, yellowish, incandescent evening light but the flickering dancing light from a thousand candles that moved along the walls and ceiling as if shadows of large, floating apparitions. Menacingly grotesque shadows that seemed to shrink to smallness then gradually billowing out in bizarre, monstrous forms. These deformed and twisted images were somehow exaggerated when someone moved along the hallways or within the rooms of the funeral home.  The dim light, the shadows, the living and the honoured dead plus what seemed to be a thousand candles all added up to one very macabre scene for a 14 year old kid.  I was shitting my pants and I ran for the exits.

This was one memory that wish I could forget and one that still send chills down my spine.

By the next day, all was back to normal. Someone had turned Niagara Falls back on!

Besides Darren and my Grandfather, there were many other deaths that occurred when I was young. Some were people that were very close, like my own father who died at the tender age of 54, or others at school who had the misfortune of leaving us at a very young age.  Or O’Grunt’s mother who died 6 months after my father.  She was only 50. Or the two teenagers I knew as acquaintances that lost their lives by driving over a cliff in a Volkswagen beetle. They’d only had the driver’s licences for about a couple of months. Sixteen for heaven’s sake! I was always reminded of that horrific incident as I passed one of their graves on the way to work each day.  His name carved on the granite headstone that was in my field of vision as I passed by the cemetery on the bus.

Or the “Greaser” I knew who died in a street brawl.  And motorcycles seem to claim the lives of an inordinate amount of young men that I knew in those days.  When I think back to those times I can only shake my head in disbelief that I made it through those years unscathed.  For in their particular cases there was really little difference in our circumstances except that: “there but for the Grace of God go I.”   Lucky me!…

Death…Part 2

…It was dusk, 09 November 1965, when the biggest power failure in U.S. history occurred as all of New York State, portions of seven neighbouring states, and parts of eastern Canada, including Ontario and Quebec are plunged into darkness. The Great Northeast Blackout as it was called began at the height of rush hour delaying millions of commuters, trapping 800,000 people in New York’s subways, and stranding thousands more in office buildings, elevators, and trains. Ten thousand National Guardsmen and 5,000 off-duty policemen were called into service to prevent looting.  And it was also on this day that my Grandfather was laid out in a funeral chapel as the first of his three days visitation began.

My grandfather died of a stroke, in his sleep. I recall the Saturday morning that my Dad was called by his mother to come up to the assisted living complex and check out his father.  Granny seemed non-plussed about the whole thing.  Perhaps that stoicism of hers was a by product of her Irish blood or Irish Catholic background or perhaps it was from the years and years of infighting that occurred between her and her Scottish husband, my Grandfather, as they fought and cussed about who suffered the most from those dastardly Brits. The Irish or the Scots? Bonny Prince Charlie and Culloden or William of Orange, King James II and Derry?  Or perhaps they were both a tad cranky about the outcome of the Battle of Killiekrankie between the Jacobites and the British Crown. Whatever, my Grandparents on my Dad’s side had the Irish blood and Scot’s whisky in their DNA, and long memories? They could really hold a grudge.  Always at war with one another, always another drink and always the peace offering with the accompanying bagpipes to the tune of Scotland the Brave.  Whenever they had a party, at our house of course, and the cops were called by the neighbours due to the cat scratching bag-piped noise bellowing out into the street, my Grandfather would greet them at the door, regale them with the secret Highland handshake and invite them in with a shot of crappy Scotch. It always worked. If anything my grandfather was a happy man albeit a tad drunk and continually hung over in his retirement years.

When my Dad arrived at the home he checked on his father, realized he was indeed dead, and then called the police and the funeral home – Catholic funeral home.  Of course they did not have any pre-arrangements other than a small life insurance policy that they hoped would cover the costs. It didn’t and the siblings had to come up with the rest.  Not to worry as my Grandfather would always say.  I’ll be dead!

So they laid him out. The whole family had to prepare for and attend the wake. An open casket in a big open living room: 2-4, 7-9 daily for three days.  On that first evening, my sister and I became very bored, very quickly.  Squirming with restlessness and boredom, we decided to explore our surroundings, that being the funeral home. What we would find in a funeral home one could only guess but one could only imagine especially one with an active imagination like ours. So off we went, dumb as we were, exploring in a funeral home for heaven’s sake.

There were a few other living rooms in that home: some small, some large and some very private. There was also a canteen in the basement that was open for coffee and small snacks.  There were other rooms that were locked or out of bounds to all but funeral home staff.   There were the offices of the director, the assistant director, and the assistant assistant director: fitting rooms, plush seats, sofas and the like. And there was a second floor. And our attention was suddenly piqued toward the stairs.  So up we went, stair by stair, egged on by mutual self gratifying courage with our strength in numbers. Neither one of us would dare bolt. We could see some light at the top or the stairs, which indicated some open spaces. We had to see what was up here. When we reached the top landing we came to a door that was slightly ajar.  We pushed it open and walked right in, but slowly, inspecting our surroundings.  We were in a small hallway that opened up into what seemed to be a fairly large room.  But we could not make out what the room held.  And, at that precise moment in time, the lights went out and we were suddenly thrown into total darkness. We couldn’t see the hands in front of our faces. My sister gasped, didn’t scream, just gasped. We held on to each other for moral support.  What to do.  We better get back.