It is a day of memories.
I have fond memories of small me when I was between 5-10 years. I spent most of my time wandering as a child. I would head outside on a Saturday and disappear for the day somewhere. There were times I would walk and walk…I never met a limit to how far I could walk…I think I could walk forever if I had to. Not run or jog, just a casual stroll through creation. So I would walk, or bike, and find my destination based upon chance direction.
I remember living on Elizabeth Street in Guelph in a little white house that I thought was haunted. The warm breezy summer days were the best as far as I was concerned. I would head out in shorts, no shoes, just barefeet and head down the street to the exposed shale hillside by the road near the raised railroad tracks. I would go there and sit on the side of the hill in the endless piles of broken dry dusty rock searching hour after hour for fossils. I would find different ones – leaves imprinted in the rock or small shells etc. I don’t recall ever bringing any home. I just liked looking at them. Maybe I felt as though the hill was their home and what kind of a boy would I be if were to spend my time kidnapping rocks, ones that served me so well, from their home? I was about 6-years-old when I did this.
The exposed hillside was also the avenue for a set of stairs the went steep up and over the tracks at the top. Guelph is a hilly place and so these sorts of things were not out of place. We had a name for these steps – they were thehundredsteps, it all ran together like that. I don’t know why we called them that, there were a lot more than 100 steps, maybe it was because most of us couldn’t count that high yet and it seemed like a crazy high number. Who knows.
Most of my days were spent alone. I pretty much liked it that way, which was good because we moved so often I didn’t have many friends. If I wasn’t hanging around thehundredsteps I was walking along the train tracks looking for spikes and railway explosives. I found lots of spikes, never found any railway explosives though. I started looking for the explosives after a city police officer came to our class one day and gave a presentation on urban explosives so we would know what to avoid if we ever saw it. I wonder why adults can be so simple at times when it comes to children? Of course the first thing half the class did after school was head straight to the tracks to look for explosives.
I enjoyed walking those tracks…it was right near downtown Guelph in a sort of industrial, sort of housed area. Along both sides of the tracks was a fairly wide expanse of long grass and milkweed which I would pull out and break open to expose the silky threads inside, all the while baking in the summer sun. I had so many sunburns as a kid coming home beet red almost everyday it was crazy.
I remember once hanging out in the school yard with a friend of mine, Tony Thomas, he was the biggest kid in the class mostly because he was held back a couple of times. He was the indian kid and nobody bothered him (we had never heard the word aboriginal then). Anyhow he and I would hang out once and awhile because he was pretty cool and I don’t think many people could get past their fear to see that. This time we were wandering the fence line of the school yard when I found a two dollar bill. Well I was pretty overwhelmed having never had so much money before and Tony just sort of stands there and says to me:
"Hey do mind if I have that? I have this money collection back home and it’d be cool to add that."
Well I just went and gave it to him. No problem Tony, you’ve got a money collection, I don’t. We don’t collect money at home it pretty much comes and goes out right away so here you go. I look back and laugh now at how naive I was. I think about this and wonder what happened to Tony. Most of the guys I hung out with as a kid didn’t do so well. Back through grades 4-8 one of the guys I went through school with was Mike Keunzig. He had the brightest firey red hair and freckles all over his face. He was pretty much a trouble maker and a tough guy. Most folks were scared of him. He wasn’t really a big guy, just a tough guy. I remember being paired with him in wrestling for grade 7 gym class. As soon as the pairing was announced I was doubtful I would survive the encounter. I was all of maybe 60 pounds in grade 7 and skinny as you couldn’t imagine. Well the two of us got on the mat with the others around us in a circle. Mike was prone position and I was kneeling next to him. Well the gym teacher blew the whistle and I had Mike down and pinned in like 10 seconds. I really didn’t realize what was going on. I couldn’t believe that Mike wasn’t as strong as he acted. After that he lost all his fright for me. We never really talked much and he kind of fell out of my world after that. Once in grade 12 while I was on a co-op placement with the Guelph Police we were patrolling and there was some tall skinny run down guy stumbling around on the tracks. Well, we got out of the cruiser and wandered over and I knew who it was right away. The officers I was with were pretty familiar with Mike by this time. He had a lot of white foam around his mouth and seemed fairly senseless. The officers were making crude jokes about what Mike might’ve been doing to get all that on him and just generally bullying him. They put him in the cruiser and we brought him back to the station. I didn’t know until I was much older that the foam was a reaction to drug use on Mike’s part. A couple of years later when I was home from university I found out Mike had been shot to death by a homeowner who had discovered him trying to break in to his house. It makes me sad sometimes to think of Mike and wonder what he might’ve become. He wasn’t such a bad guy.
When I was in grade 6 we were living on Garibaldi Street next to Roma Salami. The whole area was Italian. I’m 1/4 Italian and 3/4 Irish. My friends on Garibaldi were pretty much all Italians. I remember Franky Sarafin. He was younger then I and his Dad owned the salami factory. He was kind of pudgy but he had a pretty hot sister so I enjoyed hanging out with him if I could catch a glimpse of her once and a while. Frankie and another friend of mine and I would often spend a weekend day in rubber boots with flashlights exploring the storm sewers of Guelph. There was a large opening in a field behind Frankie’s house where the grate had rusted out and we would enter there and just start roaming. We had no idea where we were going. It was pitch black except for our flashlight’s beams and we would walk for hours. Once we came to a manhole and as we were about to push it open and climb out a car drove right over it and scared us half to death…we kept walking and came out in someone’s backyard at the base of the hill those tracks I told you about ran on. Those were the same tracks I would walk along on occassion and pitch stones at the glass telegraph insulators trying to smash them off the poles. This was a fun and reasonably easy sport because the poles were planted at the base of the hill while the tracks were at the top which meant the insulators were pretty much eye level.
Anyhow back to Frankie. He was a cool kid. I remember climbing into his big german shepherd’s dog house once and having the dog get pretty ticked and bite me right around the eye. Well I went home screaming with my hand over my eye and blood pouring out…mom thought I’d lost my eye somehow. She was pretty freaked out. Another time a different friend of mine and I thought it would be a good idea to ring Frankie’s doorbell and run away. We never counted on the fact the his Dad had a pretty nasty temper. We also never counted on the fact that we’d be stupid enough to run only five feet and hide under his steps. Well – his dad came out steaming and raging and found us hiding under the steps. He picked both of us up by the ankles one in each hand. Then he dropped me and slapped my friend across the face which sent us both flying home in fear. We never pranked Frankie’s house again.
This same friend of mine was also the guy I would hang out with on boring days. We’d head to his basement and sit at opposite ends, backs to the wall and legs outstretched. Then we’d toss darts at each other and see who would move first. Usually neither of us would move and we’d get darts stuck in our legs.
Yeah – good times. There’s lots more but I’m running out of memory for now.
Harnessing Chaos 