For the record, the sign is announcing an impending Beach Party.
When you’re walking down a sidewalk fighting off a windchill of -25°, just about anything associated with the concept of warmth sounds like a good deal.
As Canadian as I am, and as durable a soul as I like to think that I am, the idea of beach sand and waves lapping along the shoreline does the heart a kindness. The cruelty comes with the knowledge that I’m apparently the only person in all of Canada who doesn’t take a winter vacation of some sort down south.
I guess somebody’s got to stay back and keep those driveways cleared, the fires burning, the economy pumping along. So, if you were ever wondering, that’s me. I do all of that. While you go south.
This past week has been plenty cold, so the sign was a beacon straight into my heart. A Beach Party, right here in Renfrewtown, at the Armouries. A place for me to go if the Canadian winter gets to weigh on me a little too much for my liking. But my thinking is, who else will be there if the rest of you are all off in Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and all those other places in the Caribbean, South Pacific, and along the Mediterranean? Like, who’s left?
It doesn’t really matter, I guess, so long as they have a pavilion where you can sit in a lawn chair and have one of those machine-gun sprinklers pound away at you. Now that I don’t smoke anymore, that sounds like it would be fun. It was a bitch when you were trying to enjoy a dart with the experience.
A bit of frisbee toss would be nice, I guess, although I’m roughly forty years removed from my last frisbee toss, which may well be the makings of a night at RVH. Perhaps I’ll leave the frisbee for the young ones.
I don’t drink anymore. How in the hell am I supposed to enjoy all of this without drinking? I mean, c’mon! Do I just sit there with a fake smile and a little cup with an umbrella sticking out of it, and maybe a little straw? That’s not the beach I remember.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m absolutely grateful this event is planned. And I’ll bet it’s a real winner, no reason to think otherwise.
Colourful attire, calypso music, the Beach Boys here and there, maybe even some of that old Dick Clark style dancing on the beach action, where I feel I’d really shine. I’ll bet it’ll be a lot of fun.
I guess for me, though, it might be necessary to not draw on my past beach experiences and attempt to translate them to this beach experience. I do, however, need to keep in mind that it’s the beach and the people that are the two critical elements. All the rest of it is decoration.
So if I can master that, I ought to be okay.
COVER PHOTO: Image by quanghieu_st1 from Pixabay
NEWSMAGRENFREW 