The Labours of Hercules

After hours of labour Sandra looked at Mike. “You’re what?”
     “I’m sore.” He had just played a rigorous game of squash before his wife’s water broke and was feeling the effects several hours later.
     Sandra was a natural at childbirth. While it took me twenty-two hours and as many stitches to have Dan, her two labours averaged about seven hours. Completely natural with no pain medication. Still, she couldn’t be blamed for being unsympathetic. They say the closest a man could come to experiencing the pain of childbirth would be to pass a kidney stone. An eight-pound seven-ounce kidney stone.

True Grit

Guys think ice hockey is a manly sport, but it is wimpy compared to field hockey that girls were compelled to play as part of the phys-ed curriculum in high school. Field hockey sticks are more like clubs, and the hard rubber ball could do every bit as much damage as a puck. Yet we did not have the defence of any protective padding whatsoever. There we were in our skimpy little bloomers out there on the cold windblown field. Penalty for high-sticking was to run ten laps around the field – no sitting in a comfy box on the side.

Floor Hockey

Floor hockey was one of the few games I was any good at. The rules were pretty much the same as regular hockey, except you played in the gym, with a thick ring of felt about the size of a dinner plate and sticks that had no blade. Our puck looked official enough, but there was no money for sticks, and Mr. Mason told us that, if we wanted to play, we’d better bring in a broomstick or something from home.
     I’d like to see Mr. Mason ask my mother to give up a broom she’d paid good money for.

Photo of John “Apples” MacKay by Ed Carter, from the Earl Haig Fabulous ’50s Group.

What Position Does She Play?

Rich was unfamiliar with the unwritten Canadian rule that whatever is out on the sidewalk is fair game to any passerby. So when we saw that amazing dresser just sitting there, it took some convincing. I’ve never been coy about garbage picking and have dragged home everything from 100-pound oak doors to refrigerator parts. By far my favorite is a gorgeous brass lamp that, one IKEA shade later, sits in pride of place on my dining room sideboard. Even Rich loves it. Now if I could only get him to conform to that other Canadian rule: Don’t slag Paul Henderson.

Garbage Day

The woman’s house was carefully decorated. She took great pride in keeping up with the trends, and creating an attractive environment for relaxing and entertaining. It seemed like every time Joan visited her, there was another embellishment to the décor. Her friend was constantly upgrading. The slightest defect in her furnishings could not be tolerated. As soon as cushions got a little frayed, they were replaced. Or a tabletop would lose its sheen and it had to be tossed. “What a waste,” Joan thought. She was going to have to find out when garbage day was in her friend’s neighbourhood.

Major Marmaduke Lockhart Tindall

My mother gave me a photo of her grandfather to scan for a project my cousin was putting together: Major Marmaduke Lockhart Tindall in what looks, to my civilian eyes at least, like a pretty well turned-out uniform . . . except for the belt. The major might have been fifty or so when he posed for this, perhaps a young-looking sixty, but I’d bet that with every new uniform, from his time as private, he had kept the same belt. Five holes it has, and he’s on the last, but you can still see that each was used well in its time.

The Quest for the Perimenopausal Grail

I have two years before my next milestone birthday. My failing eyesight and waning pulchritude don't bother me because all the folks I love are cresting that same hill. I’m more concerned with lost opportunities and unfinished business. Onerous stews that have simmered on the back burner for decades. So there’s a long list of things I need to do by then and the top five are: Have a paperless office, finish my PhD, become perfectly bilingual, develop enough roadside confidence to drive on the 400 in February after dark, reach Enlightenment and get crack-whore skinny. Preferably in reverse order.

Milestones

I never had trouble with all of those ‘milestone’ birthdays where you feel you are getting old because, as far as I was concerned, I left my youth behind when I turned 20. Somehow the jump from my teens was the hardest birthday of all. One reason could be that I had a great adolescence. My mother might disagree with the former statement, but I was having a ball. Yes, there was some angst – but mainly there was freedom and fun. And ambitions and expectations of life that (it became clear as I got older) would never come to pass.

The Big Two Oh

Nothing had prepared me for my twentieth birthday. One day I was young and healthy, and the next I awoke with an odd lump on the back of my hand near the wrist: cancer, of course, or something worse, like whatever had happened to the guy I saw that same afternoon on the way to see Blade Runner. Surely he’d caught the exact same kind of wrist cancer, and it had spread upwards, wasting the muscles and burning the skin so that his arm looked like so much cured meat stretched over the bone. That’s how it felt turning twenty.

Les Collants Rouges

Mon Oncle Frank was a moose hunter in Rouyn, Quebec. So was his wife Alice. She always got the biggest, affording even the most distant relatives like us from Tecumseh moose burgers for the better part of the winter. Ma Tante had the bragging rights as a chasseur but Frank, a professional wrestler of the Killer Kowalski variety, owned the off-season. This was the 1950’s when everyone had his gimic. Frank came by his naturally. Born with two bumps on the top of his forehead and enhanced by a saturnine temperament, Le Diable enjoyed a repute that stretched to Noranda.

Victim of Ageism

The doctor frowned and made his pronouncement. “Bruises,” he said, about the hard lumps that had formed in my fledgling breasts. I was only ten years old when they arrived and therefore I was the victim of my big brother’s friends. They would never dare if I had been an older sister, but a younger sister was fair game, as far as they were concerned. Whenever they thought they could get away with it, they would ambush me and grab hard, copping a feel. When she learned the truth, my mother put an end to their game in short order.

Julie’s Nuts

Julie was always the odd girl out. The rest of us lived in the married-student apartments, while she lived across the street in the fancy tower with her single mother and the outdoor pool. Still, she once joined the tackle football game we were playing on the narrow patch of grass behind our building, although perhaps a bit too enthusiastically, and especially so during the pile on, when someone cried out that Julie had grabbed his crotch. The first time we could chock up to happenstance; the next time less so, especially when she herself announced the nuts she’d counted.

High School Confidential

If we as girls were subjected to those heinous blue gym “rompers”, the kind with the inexplicable two-inch belt and infantilizing big white buttons, our male equivalents, had they chosen to take up wrestling, were forced to wear something resembling a backwards one-piece Speedo. These were made out of some toxic synthetic stretch fabric and were usually in the school’s colours. Our rival school, Belle River had them in green. I assume ours was in dark blue, but because the crotches of those things looked like someone découpaged over a bowl of Christmas walnuts, I was too embarrassed to look.

The Deterrent

Nowadays I see the high school phys-ed uniform is pretty much the same for both boys and girls – shorts and a top. Seems like the most practical thing to wear for most sports activities. Back in the seventies they still insisted that girls wear this ridiculous one piece thing that was like a shirt attached to a pair of short bloomers. No sleeves and a belt at the waist. It did not look good on any body type. I think that uniform was responsible for many a teenage girl deciding not to take phys-ed any longer than forced to.

Mr. Mason

Mr. Mason was the only gym teacher I ever had. Until grade six, our regular teachers did the job, herding us all outside to play kickball or something, but in grade six they handed us off to Mr. Mason, who made us change into shorts—no matter the season—and run laps. In grade seven, he started teaching us all about sex and health. In grade eight, I asked him why the skin on my feet was peeling so much. He laughed and said I was probably going to die. And I decided not to take gym in grade nine.

 Photo by Manu Pombrol on Flickr. All rights reserved.

Nanny McTitleist

Like a lot of closet OCD’ers, I am a picker. Maddeningly, Rich has flawless skin, and except for a very brief, tantalizing bout of cradle cap in 1995, so does Dan. The time the three of us had chicken pox evolved into a dermatological Greek Hell myth for me: Those glorious spots were there, like big, ripe peaches straining on the vine yet I remained unsated because of the threat of scarring. Impunitous digging could only occur on my scalp. As a future crone with alopecia, I will be known as that nice cat lady with the golf ball head.

The Outsider

I am giving myself a backhanded compliment, but my clear skin as a teenager was just one more way I was excluded from the ‘crowd.’ Between classes the other girls would cluster around the mirrors in the washroom, moaning about their zits. Once I got one and pushed my way in, pointing it out, hoping to share sympathy with the others. All I got was derision and scorn. “You can hardly see it,” they sneered, “and have you ever had one before?” “You can probably eat chocolate all day and never break out,” they told me. And they were right.

Pop

“Take it from me,” said the father to his son. “I popped a few pimples back in my day; and the trick is to keep squeezing until you’ve got all the stuff out, every last bit, or it’ll just come back. Squeeze till you bleed, and you’re done.”
     “The big exception to this—” and he’d been waiting most of his adult life to pass this information along “—is that spot right in the middle of your forehead just north of the nose. Fuck with that too much, and you’ll be left with a crater where your third eye should be.”

Mother (Ron) Hubbard

It’s 2:45 am and I’m awake wondering if my fifteen year old took a shower like he was supposed to. The angst is symptomatic of my slippery slope to poor parenting that began with letting him eat meat and stopped somewhere after the third hour of PS3. Wayne Dyer tells me that faith in the universal spirit will solve my problems. In an attempt to vibrate at a higher plane, I let the shower business go. This morning at breakfast I ask, “So Dan, did you take a shower last night?”

With an incredulous, “Duh?” he returned to his oatmeal.

Levelling the Blame

You give them the best you can give, what more can they expect? And every time you turn around the rules change. At one time everybody said, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Nowadays nobody believes that anymore. You cannot beat the bad out of a child. Yet people are always ready to blame the parents, even the parents themselves. I remember my mother moaning, “Where did I go wrong?” at one somewhat serious transgression I committed. I did not blame her. I knew I had made my own choice in the matter. And I learned my own lesson.