Shulgan.com

Wonderland's Orwellian Doublespeak

Before I go about criticizing the place, I should note that the day we had yesterday at Wonderland was pretty great. The trip was kind of a treat for Natalie's 13-year-old brother. He's in town for the week, and he recently won a special citizenship citation at his primary school graduation ceremony, and when we asked him whether there was anything he really wanted to do while he was in Toronto he named the amusement park. So off we went.

It was my kids' first time at an amusement park. They loved the helicopters, the swans and the playground structures, but most of all I think they enjoyed having everyone together and cheerful and fun. Some of the best moments happened between rides, as Natalie and I zoomed the strollers over the brick pathways and allowed ourselves to be guided by the whims of our children. We set aside our workaday concerns, and focused on the kids. 

 

At the end of the day, around 5 p.m., Natalie and I took turns watching the kids solo, to allow the other partner to go and ride the Behemoth, the park's newish roller coaster. Natalie went on it before me, so when I went on it, it was her little brother's second time around. At the top of the first, monster hill, he pointed off to the south and said, "Check it out, you can see all the way to the CN Tower."

At that point, my entire body was rigid. "I'm not looking," I said to the 13-year-old boy next to me.

"Why not?" he said. "It's cool."

Between gritted teeth, I managed to get out, "Too frightened."

During Natalie's ride on the Behemoth I was with my kids in Kidsville. Or maybe it's Kidzville. Anyway, this was the end of the day, and after eight hours of amusement park intensity, the two of them were getting a little nuts. Plus I was tired. And then, off in the distance, I saw a sign advertising exactly what I needed:

 

The Parent Rest Zone! What a great idea, I thought. I envisioned couches and dim lighting. I envisioned soothing music and complimentary back rubs. Perhaps the kids could have a bit of a nap. Perhaps I could.

But no. Here is what we found when we entered:

A souvenir store! And this:

 
Coin-op rides! Lots of them! In an amusement park! What Wonderland called a "Parent Rest Zone" in fact was a loudly-decorated chamber crowded with coin-op rides and stuffed-toy vending machines. There weren't any couches. Instead there was a kiosk where Rogers, the cable-company, could tell tired parents about the remarkable products Rogers provides. Factor in that my kids go slightly insane around coin-op rides, and the relief that I'd felt when I first saw the Parent Rest Zone sign—that melted away.

I felt betrayed. This seemed like—like dirty pool. It seemed like cheating. "Really, Wonderland?" I thought to myself. "Really? Fleecing me of every last dollar is so important to you THAT YOU WILL STOOP EVEN TO THIS???"

This wasn't an oasis. It was the amusement park's most aggravating elements, compressed and made more expensive, in an area calculated to prompt children to nag their parents to spend just a little bit more money. Eventually I spied a small difficult-to-find changing area, where I traded Penny's wet diaper for a dry one. And then we got out of there.

I can see the logic behind this. I even realize such strategies help to keep the entrance price from being more expensive than it already is. But I wonder whether Wonderland's bit of Orwellian doublespeak is a misguided bit of capitalism. I wonder how much money they really make from the coin-op rides in the supposed "Parent Rest Zone." Perhaps a buck or two here and there from the parents who are so browbeaten that they feed the rides' slots just to keep their children quiet—even though other, better rides are a few feet outside.

But can you imagine the gratitude from customers that Wonderland would earn if they actually did make the Parent Rest Zone a rest zone? If they closed the cheap souvenir stand, for example, and made that space into something similar to what I'd originally envisioned—a soothing place with comfortable seating, one possibly even free of advertising or other product come-ons? Wouldn't parents' gratitude make them more likely to visit Wonderland more frequently? And wouldn't that generate more business for Wonderland, in the end? 

Easing Back Into Normalcy

Saw this guy on Dundas yesterday as we were waiting for a streetcar. It was me and Natalie's little brother struggling to keep content two children overly tired and overly hot after a visit to the Royal Ontario Museum. Although the sign was headed for the civil liberties demonstration at police headquarters, we certainly appreciated the sentiment.

Oh, and hey, about that demonstration—I think it's interesting the way people have delineated themselves depending on whether they actually witnessed riot police downtown. If you didn't see the cops, chances are you side with them and believe their actions warranted. But that's clearly not the case. I remain troubled by what clearly were infringements on civil liberties. Sunday night my sister's fiance took his bike down to Queen and Spadina because he was curious to see the demonstration. And like everyone else there, he was corralled into the police cordon splashed on the front page of today's Globe and Mail. He called me about an hour into things, just as CityTV was telling viewers the sound cannon had arrived at the intersection, just as the police were donning gas masks in the expectation of tear gas deployment. "Hey Chris," he said when he called. "I don't think I'll be able to get home for awhile. Can you pick up Julie from the airport?" The poor guy spent another three hours there, zip-tied in a monsoon downpour along with the other two hundred detainees. He hadn't been chanting. All he was doing was ogling the cops. But what if he had been demonstrating? In this country we don't round up people for peaceful protesting, regardless of what they're protesting against, regardless of when they're protesting. Police clearly overcompensated for their failure to prevent Saturday afternoon's civil disobedience. There should be an inquiry, and two people I usually support, Mayor David Miller and Police Chief Bill Blair, should acknowledge the deployment of excessive force and violations of civil liberties. (Check out Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank's comments.)

In other news, last night at midnight Natalie went off call and is now on a month's holiday for the month of July. It's been an intense ten days as I tried to amuse the kids solo. We had some great times and some not so great times, and now things will get easier. We are celebrating today by taking the kids and her little brother to Canada's Wonderland, and then I'm looking forward to concentrating on work.

G20 Portrait: The Vuvuzela vs. The Riot Cop

 

On Saturday night I was watching the CBC's coverage of the police action at Queen and Spadina when I realized I had the rare chance to head to a movie. A call to the Scotiabank theatre didn't say anything about a G20 closure so I zipped down to Richmond and John, where I discovered the theatre was closed. Drat. On my way back I checked out what was happening at Queen and Spadina.

My arrival happened around 9 p.m., a couple hours after the police car was torched. Riot police cut off Queen on the intersection's east side. This seemed relatively reasonable—the torched police car was just east of there. Then for no discernible reason the line of police pushed into the intersection. They stopped traffic both ways along Spadina. And they antagonized the crowd of about 150 people. The line of riot police took various shapes. It was a diagonal slash across the intersection. It was a series of dots. And then it reconvened in a thicker mass on the west side of Queen, cutting north-south from the McDonald's to the T-D bank and compressing a loose mass of people into a tight crowd on Queen West.

I walked through that crowd. Maybe a handful of them were protesting something. Of the actual protesters, the majority seemed to be against violence in protests. With rage, on the verge of violence, one woman kept shouting, "Peaceful protest!" A few of them were people like me, people who had seen the thing on the television and were fascinated by the spectacle near our homes. I bumped into a teacher from Myron and Penny's Montessori school. She was riding around the city on her bicycle and had taken some remarkable photographs. Her roommate was filming the police action with her cellphone.

And then the rest of them were kids, local guys and girls, many of them just out of high school and doing their best impersonation of the black bloc members they'd seen on the Internet. Many of these people were indignant about the police action's infringement of their civil liberties. Toward the line’s north end the police were cutting off pedestrian traffic and to do this they had to push forward a few of the folks there. One of them got indignant about it. "Fuck you!" the kid screamed into the shield. "Fuck you!" shouted back the cop. The profanity excited the crowd. "I told you there'd be some fun tonight," one kid crowed to his buddy.

Now little skirmishes were happening up and down the line. Now helicopters thrummed above. Now word of this disturbance was being tweeted and status-updated. Within the universe of the G20 disobedience, Queen and Spadina existed now like a flypaper, a honeypot attracting those buzzing around town, looking for action. And with each second more balaclavas and hoodies arrived.

I thought about the rhetorical spiral that preceded the G20—the anarchist rumours, and the chest-beating conducted by the police in response, and the way the media chattered and chirped every confrontational vow. Would that our society could act with more maturity. But both sides seemed to be spoiling for a fight. The kids at the line were 21-year-old boys with too much testosterone, and the police were acting like 21-year-old boys with too much testosterone. And now at Queen and Spadina I saw the way the police action perpetuated itself, the way each coordinated action of these black-clad shock troops provoked something similar from the civilian side. I wondered whether the police were contributing to the chaos—whether, if the police dispersed, the crowd would have, too. But no, the police couldn’t. The rhetoric from the previous week had ramped up to the point that conflict wasn’t just inevitable—it was necessary.

There was one guy in the centre of Queen who shouted a little more loudly, a little closer to the cops. He turned his back on them for a second and three of the police rushed forward, snatched him, and sucked him back, past the line, presumably to be zip-tied and processed and dispatched to the temporary jail over on Eastern Ave. Now the civilian side grew more indignant. They had no right, they muttered to themselves. Something had to be done. Some members of the crowd began creeping toward the police. For the first time, I wondered about my own safety.

And then from far off I heard a familiar sound, a sound I initially dismissed as my own imagination, a sound I’d been hearing for weeks over the television but I thought was impossible now. Wasn’t it? How could someone have one all the way over here? Soon it grew hard to ignore, and seconds later I saw the guy creating it—a normal-looking kid, maybe 18, in standard-issue shorts and a T-shirt and blowing with pursed lips, he was even with me, now he was past me, he went right up to the cop line and with all his might blew into the deafening plastic bugle known as the South African vuvuzela. The cops just looked at him, stone-faced as he kept it up. Meanwhile, many in the crowd were smiling. The vuvuzela's arrival worked to ease some of the tension. It seemed a perfect symbol for the hubbub at Queen and Spadina. This wasn’t a demonstration. This didn’t have anything to do with global politics. As were other things that attracted the bellow of the World Cup's plastic bugle, this was an activity for boys of a certain age. This was a spectacle. This was sport—one, I realized as I turned and headed for home, that didn’t interest me.

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Above pic is from BlogTO's photostream. And if you're in the mood for another alternative look at the G20 protest, check out Craig Silverman's story about Steve Paikin's Tweet-reports from a similar disturbance. Plus here's an illuminating clip from the scene on Sunday at Queen and Spadina, where my sister's boyfriend was caught in the cordon and spent four hours zip-tied in the rain. And here's another great compilation of street-level coverage from Torontoist.

Dead Ball Situation

Great moments in life: I'm sitting on the couch watching the World Cup, Korea v. Uruguay, with Penny sleeping next to me and Myron in the kitchen painting on kraft paper. One of the best investments I've ever made, that kraft paper. You buy huge rolls of it at Rotblott's on Adelaide and then whenever it's rainy, as it is today, just unspool a few metres of it and let the kids go nuts with the paints.

Yesterday before dinner the kids and I were in the schoolyard across the street, teaching Penny how to go on her push bike, and this little girl came over, Layla, and a carful of Portugal fans drove by honking their horn and Layla kind of went, pshaw, and said, "I don't know why they're honking. They only tied." This girl being like, six years old. We talked a bit about the Portugal-Brazil game, how neither of the sides were trying all that hard because they didn't have anything at stake. She really knew her stuff. To see how far she could go I asked who she thought would win this morning -- Korea or Uruguay? "Korean Republic," she said, without any hesitation. "I think South Korea is Korea DPR," I said. "No it isn't," she said. "DPR is North Korea." I checked later, and she was right.

Went swimming again earlier this week with the kids and it went way better. The key was the banana bread snack we bought from Ella's Uncle on the way over. They went into the pool with full stomachs and we stayed nearly an hour. After we even had the time to tour the Luminato installation in the park, Ship O' Fools, this Chinese Junk crammed full of fascinating little noise-making devices. So maybe I've mastered the swimming.

I have not, however, mastered taking the kids out to dinner to restaurants. We went to my sister's birthday dinner on Thursday night at Julie's Snack Bar, off Dovercourt? Full-scale disaster. I'd fed them before the actual dinner, I took them for walks when they got restless, I got them cool drinks with swords and maraschino cherries and still they couldn't sit still for more than five consecutive seconds. The night ended with Penny playing at the door and she lost it when I took her away from what really was a dangerous, finger-amputating swinging mechanism, and then when Myron realized we were leaving, he lost it, so that as we left I had a wailing kid on each arm and basically sprinted for the car.

Later, Isaac, my sister's fiance, realized Myron actually had a legitimate beef, he was freaking out the way he did because he wanted to stay for cake, cake that he and Isaac had picked out earlier in the day at the bakery down Dundas. So Isaac saved a piece for each of the three of us and we had them the next morning. But yeah, I think I'm going to give up on the eating-out-with-kids tip. Not when it's just me. It just isn't worth it. Remember that Chris!

Myron took the top photo, a section of the table from Julie's Snack Bar. I think he's broken the camera. The wages of letting your 3.75-year-old learn on your family camera, I suppose. If you click on the images you can just see what's depicted has all these horizontal bars on them. Also the sensor is having trouble dealing with light.

 

Myron's tower, the tallest yet.

Another courtesy of Myron from Julie's Snack Bar. Notice the blurriness? Also, whoa, I'm noticing this whole growing-my-hair thing may be getting out of control. I was aiming for Jack Nicholson from Five Easy Pieces but I think things are creeping toward Peter Tork circa the Monkees. 

Oh, one more thing, about the post title -- just as I started this the announcer noticed that the South Koreans are great at "dead ball situations." Corner kicks and free kicks, I guess. What a great phrase.

New Adventures Can Be Kind Of Scary

Post title a line I just heard from Caillou. A surprisingly wise toddler, Caillou. Last night I went grocery shopping and for a change, rather than orange juice, picked up Tropicana Tropics' Mango-Citrus blend. This morning I gave it to the kids and one of them is rejecting it. Won't even try it! Now I feel insulted. It's really good stuff! Just try it, damn it! What's it going to hurt? But no. Please? No.

Clearly I'm spending too much time around my kids. No end in sight, however, as Friday was their last day of Montessori and Natalie's summer break doesn't start until June 29. Yesterday they spent a lot of time at Julie's place. I took them swimming in the 11-1 window at Trinity Bellwoods and at first it was like parent-kid heaven in the toddler pool, with Penny on my back and Myron experimenting with underwater swimming, successfully, and I let them convince me to stay until 12:30 and then once I wrapped them up in their towels and got them standing on the changeroom stall bench in T-B it was rapid dissolution into tears until noise in the stall rivaled the volume of a couple of G20 sound cannons.

The family stalls at T-B are just off the pool. They are open at the top and bottom like in a normal public washroom and the entire pool area must have been able to hear every intonation in the warbles and wails. And lots of other parents were out there. Speed was the best tactic here, I figured, yeah, once I got them dressed I would sprint from the pool area with my eyes on the ground, the better to avoid other parents' glances. So I tried to speed-wrestle Penny into her tights but three minutes into that strategy only one leg was on her and both of them were generating heretofore unknown levels of audio energy. I tried pleading. Then I gave up. I looked at the floor. Yeah, with me already feeling like the world's worst human being, this was just awesome. Maybe I couldn't figure out what they needed, but I knew what I needed: I needed a hug. I gathered them both into my arms and hugged my sobbing children to my chest. We stood like that awhile. They were crying, but it seemed to be decreasing, if only a little bit. Myron managed two words: "I'm cold," he said. Then: "I'm too cold to put my clothes on." And then, finally: "I'm hungry."

OK. They weren't being demon children—I'd overextended them. Plus after an hour of pool time, they were exhausted. Sure. Of course. I rubbed Penny's back through her towel and huh, wait a second, straight from all-out tears: Was that... a giggle? Intense towel rubbing with Myron prompted more giggles, now from both of them. They were still crying, but now they also were laughing. Amid this mess I worked the other leg through Penner's tights. Summit talks between Myron and I convinced him to trade his wet bathing suit for his jeans. I changed from my suit to my jeans, gathered the rest of the stuff, the diaper bag, the towel bag, and a half-hour after we'd climbed from the pool I picked up shirtless Myron and half-dressed Penny and staggered out to the car. (The car, because we'd been doing errands pre-swim.) Penny fell asleep on the two-block drive home. Myron ate 1.5 grilled cheese sandwiches—for my non-eating boy, an amount like something out of a Roman  feast.

So, resolved: Today, I will structure the day with a set schedule that ensures the kids are well-fed before what I'll limit to a max of 40 minutes swim time. We'll see how that goes.

The Conversation

Hey, so Natalie’s back. We picked her up at about noon yesterday. That’s a 27-hour long birth. Then she slept yesterday from noon to 7 p.m. It sucks being apart for so long—for her, what sucks is the sleep deprivation, and for me, I’d say it’s dealing with the total absence of any information. When is my wife getting home? Is she OK? How’s she holding up? Is she finding the time to eat, for example? I can’t ask her any of that. I can’t call her during these marathon births—she’s busy helping the birthing woman. So that’s the bad. The good stuff is, reunions. Once she woke up last night, she went off to do the home visit and then came back and we had a long conversation where we got each other up to speed on current events. You know, our World Cup picks, status of the renovation, activities with children and then, holy crap, the fallout of the big disclosure. 

So: My parents. Why did I wait so long to tell them what my book was about? At first it was because I didn’t want to be thinking about their reactions while I was writing it. I wrote the thing as a form of therapy, and for that exercise to work it had to be honest, and for it to be honest I had to put off the conversation with them. All right—that excuse is valid until say early this year, when I finished the writing. Once I finished the writing I meant to tell them. Gah. I especially meant to once we finalized the subtitle, once we decided on the cover art, once my editor drafted the catalogue copy, once Amazon and Indigo posted their listings of the book.

But can we stop this exercise for a second and consider how absurd was my task? To two people who consider their son a relatively stable, upstanding guy, a pretty good father, a loving husband—I had to break the news not only that I had had a drug problem, but that the drug was crack. That is pretty bad. I figured that’d be enough of a shock. One slightly mollify-able by the fact that I wasn’t doing the stuff anymore, that I quit the drinking and the drugs and the whole going out thing, that I might as well be a Minor Threat poster child, these days, I’m so boring and straight edge. But then, on top of that, I had to break the news to them THAT I’D WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT IT. Having a drug problem is bad enough, in their estimate. But you don’t tell anyone about it. You certainly don’t go and write a book about it!

So then came the Globe thing. There were a lot of long pauses in the ensuing conversations, late that Saturday afternoon. My mom was first. I should have told you, I said, I intended on telling you, I’m sorry you found out through the Globe. Cocaine, Chris? she said. Where do you even get that? When did it happen? I told her the story in broad brush strokes and then told her they should read the book, which I'd send off on Monday. Which I did. They should get it today. That definitely foretells another cringe-inducing conversation. But for now, when it comes down to it, the heartbreaking thing was, how badly I’d misjudged my parents. There were three themes to their reaction: 

1. Anger that I didn’t tell them. But can you blame them? As my mom wrote in an email yesterday, “I guess when one's child did something so incredibly stupid as to risk his life and marriage and try a highly addicting dangerous drug that belongs on skid row and then write a book about it but not tell you about it until you read it in the paper with a million other people some anger may be understandable.”

2. Relief the problem is over. Are you sure you’re OK? Maybe you should go to AA or something. That must have been so hard for Natalie. Yep. It was. And we're still working through that.

3. We're proud of you. Whoa, wha? Yeah, that's unexpected. And boy, does that sting. My dad says, “It’s not how you start the race, it’s how you finish it.” They say they're proud I had the courage to stop the drugs. That's something I'm not ready for. The idea makes me uncomfortable, I suspect because I'm still dealing with the fact I allowed myself to have the problem in the first place. But anyway, my dad made a point of telling his golfing buddies he’s proud of me. That must have been hard. I wish I hadn't put him in the sort of position where he had to make that clear. I wish that was implied. Regardless, this isn't word service to something they think they have to say. It seems real.

In light of all this, I've been wondering, could I be as supportive of my kids as my parents have been to me? I’ve tried to think how I’d react if one of my kids put me in the situation I've placed my own parents. Would I be as supportive if my own kids got themselves addicted to a dangerous drug? But that doesn’t accurately convey the situation. They'd have to do something I found totally tough to understand—maybe something like the Alex P. Keaton scenario, but even more so—they'd have to become born-again Christians in a fundamentalist church that hates homosexuals and believes women are subservient to men. That would be kind of analogous. And would I still be able to love them, to tell them I’m proud of them? I think so. Sure I would. But it would be tough. And if that ever happened, I hope that I would conduct myself with the grace and strength of character with which my parents have conducted themselves, through the whole course of this absurd and bound-to-be-painful situation. (Top photo is by Myron F. Shulgan. Below is a pic from our trip to Toy Story 3.)

About that "oh shit" and the weekend in general

A bit of a weird weekend in the Shulgan household. One thing was that a client of Natalie's had an induction on Saturday afternoon. I always thought when you induce someone for a birth that it took pretty much immediately. Induce labour, get baby. But actually it seems to take a lot longer. Nater was gone Saturday night until something like 2 a.m., then we dropped her off first thing Sunday morning, at 8 a.m., and now, on Monday morning at 6:40 a.m., she's still gone. How many hours is that... 23 hours. For one birth! The poor woman who is having this baby! And my poor midwife of a wife! I talked to her last night around 10 p.m. and she figured it would go well into the night. I hope she got some sleep somehow. Last time this happened she didn't. Cripes!

So once we dropped off Natalie at Mount Sinai I spent my Father's Day solo with the kids. We watched some World Cup, went to the park to lounge on a blanket, came home for a late lunch and naps and then after a quick dinner we headed to see Toy Story 3. Myron has figured out how to use the camera and since then he's constantly picking it up and taking pictures of me. The pics of me on this blog post are his--usually, they're preceded by him commanding me, "Say cheese, dada." I figure if I'm able to post random tidbits about him on this blog, then he should also be able to post some terrible pics of me on it. Pictures of me looking like a dork courtesy of Myron F. Shulgan. (Naw, actually, for someone who is three-and-three-quarters? He's a great photographer.)

And while Natalie was gone I was dealing with the fallout from something I've been worrying about for ages. So Saturday morning I woke up and my mother had sent me an email, subject heading "Paper," that said, "Could you call when the kids aren't around?" That set the spider sense tingling. Maybe an hour or two later Martha my agent sent me an email saying, hey, nice job on being a buzz book in the Globe. By that point I still hadn't had time to read the paper. I got it off the front stoop, took a look at the Books section, felt excited, then felt sick, then called my mother. Voice mail. "I expect you want to talk about what was in the Globe," I said. "Call me back when you get a second."

I just felt sick. There are some things you don't want your parents to know about you. And their friends! Cripes! And the conversations they'd have! My poor parents! How mortifying for them! You know how I wrote this book about my crack problem? And having kids? And how the two things intersected when Natalie got pregnant? Well, until Saturday my parents didn't have more than a general idea what the book was about. They knew I quit drinking two years ago. But we didn't really talk about it. They're great parents and very sophisticated about some topics—current cinema, popular literature, my dad on Detroit sports teams—but drugs don't register on their radar. Like at all. Neither of them can fathom why anyone would even touch drugs.

When I finally quit messing with the coke and the crack and the drinking, the only reason they knew anything had changed in my life was because I quit having wine during holiday dinners. Eventually my mother asked me what was up and I mumbled something about going out at night preventing me from being the sort of father I wanted to be. We didn't talk more about it. They sensed there was more to it than that. They sensed I was going through some heavy, life-transforming stuff. But they figured I would talk to them if I needed to. They seemed to regard my decision not to drink like a house of cards. They didn't want to nudge it too much, because maybe a question or a comment might push me off this straight-edge thing I was doing. Ultimately, they were there if I needed them. And as always, their house near Windsor was open as a place of solace, a spot I went with the kids when I needed to get away from stuff in Toronto.

And then on Saturday the Globe outed me as a "crackhead." Well, the Globe didn't. I did—by doing the drugs, then writing a book about quitting doing the drugs. I've been home twice in the last month and each time I brought the book intending on giving it to them and each time I couldn't bring myself to do it. I certainly intended telling them before there was any mention of the book in the newspapers. I just didn't expect the book to get mentioned until, like, September, when it came out. Anyway, the Globe invadvertently prompted the difficult conversation I've been putting off for going on a year now. That seems like a pretty good spot to stop this blog post. Both my kids are up now and I've been staving them off with Cheerios but now I need to get going on the scrambled eggs. More on this later.

Anti-Father's Day Fare

I was kind of astonished when I opened the Globe and Mail's books section this morning to find Superdad positioned as the "buzz book." The book won't be in stores for three months. But I guess thanks to the father-holiday connection, there it was, with the cover photo on the upper left hand corner of the opening page, along with a nice little complimentary blurb. And then I thought, oh shit. I'll get to that "oh shit" in a later blog post. For now, here's the blurb from the Globe:

"This anti-Father's Day fare from the author of The Soviet Ambassador turns the urban dad story on its head—and then rights it again. Beneath Shulgan's outwardly loving life with his young family in a hip part of Toronto lurked a darkness; Shulgan was a hard drinker—and something of a crackhead. In an unsparing, but also comic, account of his ventures into the deep woods off the parental path, he explores his own notions of fatherhood. And challenges ours."

Fishing in the local indoor pool

Things have been pretty go go go around here lately. Sick kids, renovation fun, Natalie went to Windsor this past weekend for two showers for my sister's upcoming wedding and hey hey today I think the heating contractor finished the total overhaul of our heating and cooling system. My man Gord from Basic Heating. Funny, but with the two of us working in the same house for about a month, I'm going to miss him. Now it's 30 minutes before midnight and I'm sitting in the kitchen as my midwife of a wife prepares some food and coffee and makes phone calls because it's looking like one of her clients is going to have a baby tonight. There's an air of nervous energy around our place as my wife paces back and forth while she and her preceptor midwife decide whether the client should go now to the hospital, should she wait, what. Meanwhile I'm going to use this as an opportunity to post some photos from my latest adventure in fatherhood, fishing in the Scadding Court Pool.

It sounds kind of insane, but somebody filled a local pool with fresh water and stocked it with dozens and dozens of rainbow trout, in something called the Gone Fishin' Project. For $3 a person the organizers give you a fishing rod and let you fish in the pool that usually accommodates lap swimmers and lifeguards. Until I was in the pool and saw the trout in the deep end I wasn't convinced. Was this going to be a joke? Some sort of installation art exhibit? Nope, here's your rod, here's the other fishing rod, here you go.

 

What a cool thing. Who dreamed this up? And how did the city ever let this happen? Hey, someone said, let's put fish in the public pool and let kids try to snag them. You'd think some city bureaucrat would say no, that's crazy. Instead, some city bureaucrat said, sure, why not. This is one of the reasons I love this town. We rolled into the pool around 4 p.m. It took maybe ten minutes to explain to the kids how they couldn't stand too close to the pool edge. Pretty soon Myron had his routine down—winding up the reel, letting out the line until the lure hit the bottom, then winding it back up. Penny and I wrestled around a bit as she tried to cast the line and I grew nervous about the hook — I have this complex about sharp things around my eyes. But pretty soon even Penner was sitting in my lap, looking into the water, watching the dark shapes flit around.

 

We got a couple of bites. The fish in the pool ranged from maybe six inches to a good foot and a half. I kept trying to get one of the Moby Dick-looking swimmers and figured I had one snagged but as soon as I jerked the rod the hook came out of the mouth. I ended up getting one that weighed maybe a half pound. Now the challenge was getting one for the kids. Penny was kind of oblivious about the catching aspect of the fishing. Myron seemed to want to get one, however. So I kept trying and failing to get one for him. After maybe a half hour the kids were getting bored and the son of the dude who seemed to be running things, this 16-year-old kid, he sauntered over and gently extricated Myron's rod from his hands in this very nice way and I don't know what this kid was doing that was so different from what I'd been doing, but he had a fish on the line inside 20 seconds.

I had visions of eating the trout. I had visions of being all manly, of walking into the house with the kids and the fish and announcing to Natalie that we'd gone out and gotten ourselves some dinner. And then frying the fish with some lemon or something.

 

But when it comes right down to it, fish are kind of gross. I never liked you, fish. You smell bad. You smell like fish. My kids were kind of fascinated, however. So there was this service, if you paid an extra 75 cents there was a guy who'd clean the fish -- throw out the guts, basically. We did that. The guy handed us a bag. A bag of fish.

 

Then we rolled the wagon home and I tried to fillet the fish, except I learned a butcher's knife doesn't function well for that. We conducted some anatomy lessons with the fish eyes and the gills and the mouth, and then I cut the head off one of them, the fish I mean, which seemed kind of wrong, and then when Myron asked to do it, it seemed even more wrong, I watched him work the blade through the fish spine and kept thinking about the story I'd read recently, about the study tying cruelty to animals to violent adults. Or something. Where is the line between cruelty to animals and just wanting to enjoy a good dinner? Anyway, because by this point I was fairly grossed out, I made a mess of the fish frying. This was the result.

We didn't end up eating them. Next year, when the Shulgan family visits the Gone Fishin' project, it's strictly catch and release.

Myron's First Soccer Game

You know how I said in the previous post how nervous I was about coaching my first soccer game? Well, the next day the nervousness continued. We had to eat early because the game was at 6:30 p.m. and our kitchen is a mess from the renovation -- dust covers the counters like fresh snowfall -- and so we went to Bitondo's for dinner and of course because it was early neither kid ate. Oh, and I let them have chocolate milk. So they were a bit nuts as we got ready for the game. Getting Myron into his uniform went surprisingly smoothly:

But then I noticed we were running late and then it was racing around for drinks and a snack at the game and I recalled the way when I was a kid coaches always gave us cut-up orange sections at halftime and maybe I should cut up some oranges wait a second we don't have any oranges and oh yeah the kitchen's a disaster area and I was thinking about oranges as we were getting in the car, everyone strapped in, shoot, running a bit late, shoot, shit, I forgot the soccer balls and the pylons, ran back inside, returned to the car and as I was pulling away from the curb I thought, you know, you're so stressed about this, relax asshole, yes this is your first time coaching soccer but it also happens to be Myron's first soccer game and try to be make it fun for him. I took a few deep breaths and put the CD player to Broken Bells, the first song, which is so great, and Penny started dancing in the back and I focussed on the kids rather than myself and as we approached the game the stress kind of melted away. 

 

Myron was so excited. The other parents were cool. And the actual game was hilarious. Soccer when you're three-and-a-half is nothing like the game that everyone knows. It's more like rugby, full of scrums, except rather than carrying the ball everyone just kicks it, and each other. Our team name is Sweden and we were playing Chile, who, it should be said, had several more five-year-olds than we did, and we got absolutely creamed. Absolutely creamed!

 

"Hey Dad, I'm tired," Myron's saying in this photo. I got him a drink and then he went back into the game. Natalie arrived from the clinic and took Penny, and Myron spent the final quarter-hour of the game running around and tackling his friend Kate. He scored a goal -- he was happy about that. And now he seems to understand more about the game than he did. After, Natalie and Penny and Myron and I went to the ice cream truck parked by the field and the kids had ice cream. Since then Myron's kept his ball around him and whenever there's an opportunity he gets this look of concentration and runs at the ball. He's learning about sportsmanship and the game of soccer, and I'm learning how to concentrate on what's important. Yeah, I think this soccer season will be a learning experience for both of us.

 

(Thanks to Monique Montgomery for taking many of the game-time photos.)