Tag: family

CHILD SAFETY AT PLAY

He was at the very top, a boy, maybe six, perhaps seven years old.  His mom, or the person responsible for his safety, was at the bottom, looking up.  He seemed unsure of himself.

The boy was at the very top of a play structure, a modern one, by all appearances state of the art.  His hesitancy involved coming down a ladder-type feature, with rungs, where a climber could move down or up, depending on which way a child might want to go.

Sometimes the climb up is easier than the climb down because, well, you start low and work yourself high.  And you’re not necessarily realizing fully how far up off the ground you might be climbing, what with your eyes being directed upwards, towards the top.  But when you’re at the top looking down, you become more fully aware of the drop, and of the reality of elevation, and the further reality of gravity, and what it might do to you if you make some sort of mis-step on the way down, or even before you begin the journey down.

It’s a play structure, though, for heaven’s sake, and so safety was obviously top-of-mind for the people who designed it and manufactured it, not to mention the people who researched it and procured it, in this case on the part of the municipality.  And so, as a play structure in a public park, one swarming with kids at times, the assumption is that there is no danger here.

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FEEDING KIDS AT SCHOOL

You can go ahead and call me crazy if you want, but I’m adamant in my belief that Catholic kids have the same right to eat as their non-Catholic counterparts.

And, of course, who’s going to argue with that?

Times are tough all over, as the saying goes, and when times are tough, it’s often children that bear the brunt of it.  And sadly, they often pay the price for tough times by going hungry more often than they should.

It’s easy to say that no child should ever go hungry, ever, but the sad truth of it is that it happens all the time.  Derelect adults, neglectful parents, down and out care-givers more concerned with their next fix or hit, all of this kind of stuff happens in the world, and you’d have to be wilfully blind to think that it does’t happen right here in Renfrew.

Right under our noses.

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THE BED BLOCKERS

By now, pretty-much every one of us has some understanding of the acute shortages that plague our health care system.   Doctors, nurses, and medical technicians make the news on a semi-regular basis, so much so that the general public kind of tunes out on the issue, unless they happen to be someone who is either in hospital, awaiting a hospital stay or surgery, or have a loved one in that situation.  But the rest of us, somewhat unfortunately, have no idea, or if we do, it gets kicked back into the back seat of our brain.

What I haven’t mentioned is the acute shortage of beds in hospitals.  While doctors, nurses, and technicians are absolutely essential, hospitals are usually measured in the currency of beds, as in how many they have.  And then after that, how many they have open.  Which is generally not many.

In hospital medicine, while not an official philosophy or anything, it’s generally accepted that the rule of thumb is “get them in, get them fixed, then get them out.”  What you don’t want if you can avoid it is the prospect of a long-term stay, which removes a bed from the equation.  And given the number of people awaiting a hospital bed, it’s a rather crucial workflow concept.

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BEACH PARTY AT THE ARMOURIES

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

CHRISTMAS DAY

It’s Christmas morning.

For as long as I’ve been alive, this morning has had a magic for me.  As a kid, I was just like any other kid, eagerly anticipating the dawn of this particular morning, believing in Santa early on, then not caring as I grew older, so long as those presents kept appearing under the tree.

It was Christmas morning where I was exposed as a fraud, or a con-boy.  I was the youngest child, so all my older siblings, eight, ten, and twelve years older than me, gave me money to buy Christmas gifts for the family.  The only condition was that I not say anything, a condition I had no problem with, given how I was collecting cash from them all.

I proceeded in a business-like fashion, finding the cheapest of gifts, purchasing them, and pocketing the difference.  Hai Karate cologne for my brother Jeff.  Curlers for my sister Karen, who happened to have curly hair.  Janice got a scarf.  I can’t remember what I got my parents but a lightbulb wouldn’t be out of the question.  One for each.  It’s not like I’m gonna make my mom and dad share a lightbulb.

Then I sunk my hard-earned profits into myself, buying several books from the Hardy Boys series, which, in retrospect was probably a sound self-investment.  But it was a self-investment rooted in graft, in chicanery, and in the nastiness of childhood fraud schemes.

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SCOTT’S HARDWARE DELIVERS CHRISTMAS AFTER ALL

I knew when I saw the boys working in the window, there was going to be trouble.

The calendar had just turned, and the march towards Christmas was on.  Yet it wasn’t.  Because the window at Scott’s Hardware in Renfrew was still decidedly not Christmasy in appearance, which was pretty odd because Scott’s has an iconic Christmas window, one known far and wide, a fixture along Renfrew’s main drag.

But on this day, nothing.  Except the two employees, Connor and Jackson, rifling through some boxes in the window, Connor holding up a forlorn Santa who didn’t look as happy as the one at the mall.

“Jeff, what’s up with the window?” was the best I could come up with as I passed by on my Saturday morning walk.  Jeff Scott is the owner of the place, the guy who’s been setting up a fabulous chunk of Christmas in his store window for years.  I guess I just figured he’d know what I was asking about, and I was right, he did.

He told me that he felt a little tired this time out, that maybe he didn’t have it in him to put up the beautiful display that I’ve seen at this location for the thirty plus years that I’ve lived in this place.  I still remember my first Christmas in Renfrew, and part of that memory was the window at Scott’s.  It just gave you that ultimate warm feeling of what Christmas is all about.  It was wonderful.  

And now he’s talking about not putting it up at all.

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