All Good Things (1)

I'm home.

This trip north was originally supposed to be all about my Dad's 70th birthday. That got nixed in no uncertain terms: those two numbers are hitting him hard, and he didn't want any kind of celebration of them. Seventy, he informs me, is when you're an old man.

Well, he's my old man, but he'll die young at a hundred and ten, as far as I'm concerned. He's the same man he always was: his day isn't complete without copious quantities of laughter. That keeps him young, whatever his body says.

It was, in some respects, a trying trip. I found it not-so-surprisingly difficult to adapt to a day schedule after fourteen months straight on solid nights. At one point I slept five hours in fifty. I'm a right bastard when I'm that tired.

We went, first night, to a roast beef dinner at the Legion Hall in "downtown" Britt. (Aside: Location Services on my iPhone refers to Britt as a "city". That's amusing: its population was 321 in 2011 and it's probably declined since.)
Anyway, that Legion hall was crowded with about 40-50 older people who seemed, to my tired mind and ears, as if they were all trying to out-yell each other. I have a touch of social anxiety and in crowds like that and noise like that and exhaustion like that it's maybe more than a touch. I'm sure I made a lovely impression on the citizens of Britt.

I have completely lost track of which day was which for a bit after that. Hazard of life on holidays in a place where time doesn't mean much and sleep was almost impossible to come by at first. It was either Sunday night or Monday night when I went to help crush cans for the Lions' Club.

It's actually FRIGHTENING just how many cans there are in Britt and area. This is only three weeks or so worth--thirteen Hefty Bags of THOROUGHLY crushed popcans, along with just shy of 400 beer cans (and that's not much; least time it was four times that, I seem to recall). Watching a front-end loader run over these things a few dozen times is kind of awe-inspiring.

After that I went home, took two sleeping pills and played dead very convincingly for eight hours. I woke up feeling almost human.

The highlight of the trip for both my father and I was a trip to see the Jays beat the Arizona Diamondbacks. Even the trip down was a blast. Dad hadn't been on the subway for as long as he could remember. We were decked out in our Britt and Area Fire Department hats and shirts

(I still think it should have been called the Britt and Area Rescue Fire Emergency Department, BARFED for short, but Dad's acronym -- the "Bad Ass Fire Department" -- works too.)

We got our tokens for the subway and the attendant said firefighters ride free. Now, only one Ken Breadner is a Fire Captain, but Junior was playing one on TV and was loth to correct the nice attendant.

 Our seats were by far the best I've had at a game: three rows from the field, right at first base. These were also the best seats Dad had ever had by virtue of the fact it was his first game!

The Jays won, 5-2. Martin, Encarnacion and Tulowitzki homered for our side. We had primo seats for what ended up being the second out of the ninth inning after a lengthy review. No foul balls, but that was only because Dad brought his glove. Had he not done that, I'm sure a foul ball would have taken off my head and his left arm.

Both of us ran our phone batteries into the ground. Well, I'd been doing that all trip long, to my dad's mixed amusement and exasperation. Keeping in touch, you understand. Keeping connected. I tried and probably failed to explain that to my father, just how critical it is for me. Dad's not on Facebook, though if he were, he would have hundreds of friends and he'd know every one of them. I don't have hundreds of friends, but I have many more than I ever expected to have, and some of them are very, very close. Dad was chagrined (and to be honest, so am I) that I have turned into one of those people who hears a ding and automatically reaches...Damn it, I swore up and down that would never be me. I get it, though. I would much rather talk to people then text them, but nobody wants to talk on the phone any more. Regardless, when you're on a phone and somebody says something, you don't sit there silent for minutes or hours, you say something back. Likewise if you are in a text conversation, it's kind of rude to just ignore whatever it was your conversational partner just said. You answer it.

Besides the textual tethers, I got in even more deck time than usual. It was very windy for a a couple of days -- whitecaps windy -- and so I kept dodging between sun and wind, trying to strike a balance. Only a bit of a burn on my arms, and most of that came at the game.
The best times, though, are just after sunrise, when the river is like glass and the first of the day's heaping helping of motorboats has yet to poison the air with its insectile buzzing.

Only one medical call, no fire calls, although the fire danger is now extreme there and unless rain happens, there will be no fireworks on Canada Day this year. It's too bad, in a way, that there were no fires. My dad respond to a fire call is something to behold, and it belies the age he says he feels so harshly.

Eva was up for a very short time, but at least she made it up. We took Dad to St Amant's (pronounced in the Britt vernacular that so confused Eva for a time, "Santimaws") for a delicious dinner. And we came home the next morning, but not before Eva got a little deck time of her own:

And so that trip is at an end. It was wonderful. Thank you, Dad, for having me. Love you very much.