Barn Burner

“Don’t do it.” Said Jimmy in a shaky voice. He knew his brother, and once his mind was made up there was no changing it.
     “No, it’ll be okay, just watch”. Ted lit a tentative match and placed it on a small pile of grass. The barn was airless and smelled of wood and hay. In an instant the heap, no bigger than a seven year old’s fist, went up in flames and within seconds the entire barn was in flames.
     The boys escaped in time but 40,000 bales of hay were gone and the cows went without their tea.

Fornax

Nicholas Lacaille kept to himself. He was good at school, not so good at making friends, and completely helpless with girls. But he had one special talent that broke through all that and even gave him a certain level of schoolyard cred: He made things burn . . . in elaborate and dangerous ways.
     So, on the beach, where most of the fire pits tended to come and go with the tide and the season, there was always one guaranteed to gather a crowd, whenever Nick happened by with the latest trick he’d discovered on the Internet or received through the mail.

Aversion Therapy

Sandy’s gramma was going dotty. She chain-smoked, but always forgot she had an open pack going. There were decks of smokes all over her house; easy to lift without her knowing. “Have one!” insisted Sandy, as they sampled the product. Joan had not really enjoyed her first smoke, but she took the pack home and hid it under her bed. A couple of days later her mother found it while vacuuming. Joan had to sit and smoke the whole pack, one after the other. Aversion therapy that did not work. In her teens Joan took up smoking with enthusiasm.

Smoking in the Boys Room

Dad had hosted a cribbage night and retired shortly before I got up on Saturday morning. I went to the basement to inspect the post-party debris. The leavings of an El Producto Corona sat in the ashtray, and although it wasn’t smoldering it was still live. I took a big draw from it, the way I’d watched Dad do and a huge jet of hot smoke went rushing into my lungs. I let out a violent cough and the butt rolled under the card table. I ran back upstairs to watch my cartoons, mildly aware that I’d done something naughty.

The Queen of Marvin Gardens

Diane had no patience for board games and would usually just go through the motions in the hope she’d be the first knocked out. Monopoly, however, presented a special challenge: it took so long to finish, and all of the losing usually happened near the end. Here she focussed on the long game, and did whatever she could to prevent people from getting the streets they needed to complete a set. Her strategy was to convince as many people as possible to hate this game as much as she, so that one day she’d never have to play it again.

Point of View

The television died. Dad said, “So be it.” He would not spend money replacing it. It did not take long for us to adjust. No doubt, that we were not teens was a significant factor. We played a lot of board games and we were lucky to live in a small town at a time when it was normal for kids to roam freely. Then it was football season. Suddenly a TV became a reasonable expense in the family budget. It was not long before we settled back into regular episodes of “I Dream of Jeannie,” and “My Favourite Martian.”

Let me tell you ’bout my best friend

The Screenager is limited to two hours per day on his PS3. The enforcement of this rule depends on a sliding scale of vigilance. If there’s company or I have a deadline then those two hours can stretch into the entire evening. And for as much as we parents whine about it, we had an equivalent. We all know the opening themes to Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family. Some even remember the more arcane Love American Style and the Courtship of Eddy’s Father. I don’t recall our parents yelling at us to get away from the television.

Get that thing out of my driveway!

After getting the estimate for a proper addition, we decided it would be cheaper just to purchase a mobile home.
     That would give our son some independence without actually forcing him out, a step out into the real world but with a guaranteed lifeline for food and water and power and poop.
     Sure, let him eat what he wants, sleep when he wants, party as loud as he can; and maybe someday, if he ever finds something he’s good at besides video games, he’ll scrape enough money together to buy enough gas and get that thing out of my driveway.

Playing House

For some reason it was the guys who moved out and got places of their own, rarely the girls. Probably because they had more access to the lucrative jobs out at The Point. They would usually rent an old farmhouse between three or four of them. The place would look like an untended dump in no time. Not only because of the sloppy habits of the guys, but also because the houses were perpetual party venues. There were always, however, willing girls happy to play house from time to time, who would whip the places into shape, at least temporarily.

The Checkers

I had a regular babysitting gig when I was sixteen years old. Several evenings a week I looked after a little girl while her mother worked the midnight shift at one of the local car plants. Of course my boyfriend Malcolm would come over and we’d play house after hurriedly getting young Kate to bed. This pattern continued until Kate’s grandparents started to drop up unexpectedly, say around eight or nine o’clock in the evening to talk with Kate’s mum, or to pick something up. And I always thought it very odd how they never knew their daughter’s work schedule.

Dear Penthouse Forum . . .

Barbara had arranged with her parents for Joanne to mind their apartment while they enjoyed their vacation, and Joanne and I enjoyed some time away from her parents. This, at last, was my chance; and although I was pretty fuzzy on the logistics of such an undertaking, every day I’d map out a new strategy, and every evening we’d end up on the couch . . . kissing.
     And every night I’d hobble home to my warm little bed and my overheated imagination and regale myself with a series of increasingly fantastic escapades of what could’ve been.
     And start making plans for tomorrow.

Delusions of Rapture

Damned insistent fantasies. Joan often regretted her highly primed imagination. She could not stop her mind from fabricating complex fictions of a future life together every time she met a new guy. At the very least she set herself up for disappointment, but often these dreams themselves ended up destroying the budding relationship. The guys were scared off by her intensity. She would let slip a detail of her delusion, and a look of terror would appear in their eyes. They would stop calling. If she had never built her fantasy world, losing them would not be as thoroughly devastating.

Pretenders

Lainie hated Chrissy Hynde because she married Jim Kerr, thus robbing her of the delicious fantasy she’d been conjuring for several months. It didn’t matter that Jim was the front man for Simple Minds and Lainie lived in Tecumseh. My Richard would happily sleep with Keira Knightley if she came on to him at Gretsky’s but given the unlikeliness of that ever occurring, he says she’s too thin for him. I’m convinced that the reason Pete Townshend and I are not together is because he’s only seen me once, and as it was Massey Hall he was a bit preoccupied.

Ohio

“Hey, kid,” says Kerr. “What’s round on both ends and high in the middle?”
     And the kid, who is Thom, looks back at us blankly and says, “I dunno, what?”
     He’s new to town, and here we are, the only other boys in the neighbourhood, blocking him out of the playground, and screaming out the answer together—“O-oooooh–HI–o-oooooh!”—and laughing . . . at him, of course, not the riddle.
     But he smiles all the same. “O-oooooooh!” he says, like he’s just discovered our deepest secret, turned our joke against us, and knows it’ll be years before we figure it out.

The Corner Office

The figure skating princesses had permanently colonized one corner of the change room. They were the ones who could do the flying camel, and the perfect twirl ending in an axel jump. They talked reverently of their legendary sister who had moved on to skate in the ‘Icecapades.’ When they were not talking of her they were talking about perfecting their own performances so they could follow her to glory. The coach would walk past the rest of us to bestow her presence and wisdom on that small clique. The rest of us were invisible except for our eager ears.

The Da Vinci Cookies

The Brownies held their weekly coven in the classroom next to where we, a small collection of farmers’ children and trailer park kids, waited for the afternoon bus to take us home to Pike Creek. Their hard Mary-Janes made such a racket as they skipped down the halls, a giggling blur of brown polyester and maple leaf neckerchiefs. Together they worked on their secret crafts and badges. They sang their own songs and wrote cryptic messages with their little Brownie pencils. They macraméd and découpaged. It was like the Freemasons for white girls, for Christ’s sake and I wanted in.

The Ball

As a member of Cub Scout Pack 33, I was assigned automatically to a baseball team—even though I hated baseball, because I sucked at baseball—and so didn’t give baseball a second thought until I learned we’d won it all, and that I was to be awarded . . . a baseball.
     My mother suggested I give it to Eddy, my friend, who, although he’d not been on my team, had certainly worked harder than me. Except I wanted the ball and felt, in a way, I’d done my part, because we certainly wouldn’t have won had I bothered to show up.

Bantam Brewskies

The kids were 12 or 13 years old. Joan guessed that would make them peewees or bantams. Their coach was a fat, loud old fart whose presence took over the restaurant. The team came in without reservations for their end of season celebration. What kind of an idiot would do that? But the manager cobbled some tables together at the back to accommodate them. Once they were settled Joan went to take their order. “These guys have worked hard,” said the coach, “They deserve a round of beer.” Joan laughed, and then she realized the old jerk was not kidding.

Bring Your Own Salt Shaker

The distinctive smell of beer and urinal pellets greeted the patrons of the Brunswick House, the cheapest watering hole in town. You ordered vats of draft, portioned out in ridiculously tiny pilsner glasses, like petite fours at a Troglodytes’ tea party. Irene and Carla, the singer-piano player duo, were the entertainment. Irene’s bawdy version of “I’ve got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” was a perennial favorite. But Carla, ever wary, fixed a gimlet eye on the audience, fearful some drunken undergrad would fling a bottle at her forehead. This is probably why the management insisted on the tiny beer glasses.

DJ’s

Who knows where they drink now, but in the early ’80s, at the University of Toronto, the engineers all drank at DJ’s.
     It was located, appropriately enough, beneath a monstrous tower built for the executives of Ontario Hydro, where at the end of every working day, young men might mingle with their future selves and swear they’d take a different path.
     But this is the story of Ray, a chemical engineer, who was caught there one night with a vial of pure ethanol, and so became the only engineer I’ve known to be banned from a bar just for drinking.