Parties, Paintball, and Whiskey

How white trash is that for a title? Actually, despite the questionable content implied therein, the last month and a half has been wonderfully family-friendly – and thank goodness! After a year of academically imposed hermitage, it has been glorious to start catching up with family and friends. Here are the highlights.


Bowling for Sexagenarians

A few weeks after finishing my student-teaching stint in Guelph, I was back in the Royal City with Jeanette to celebrate her dad’s 60th birthday. She had craftily arranged a surprise party for Gary, who thought he was just meeting us for lunch. Instead, he was met by a bowling alley full of family and friends. Despite threatening to take Jeanette out of the will, Gary was all grins through an afternoon of grandkids, good friends, gutter balls, and gâteau. I was thrilled to see him have such a good time, but I was especially moved to see how happy Jeanette was in organizing the whole affair. It made me all the more eager to move closer to both sets of folks that we might make more time for these kinds of family gatherings.

Paintball by Numbers

The weekend after shooting the breeze with Jeanette’s side of the family at the bowling alley, I threw a party for my cousin that involved shooting of a different kind. Anton gets married later this month in Long Island, but he flew back to Toronto last month for his bachelor party. As his best man, I arranged for an action-packed morning of paintball at an outdoor venue in Bowmanville. Five of us made the early morning drive on a Saturday morning, uncertain of what kind of paint-splattered experience lay before us. All the guys except me had played before at least once with mixed results. This day we’d be sharing the field with strangers (five is not enough for a private game), and when we arrived and saw players – men and boys! – suiting up in thousands of dollars worth of combat gear, we feared the worst.

Once the games began, however, we had a ball (pun intended). The referees fairly mixed the teams, a variety of scenarios (team elimination, storm the tower, defend the fort) kept things interesting, and no game lasted more than 15 minutes with plenty of rest time in between. By lunchtime we were all hot and exhausted, with aching quads from all that crouching and with more than a few welts from high-powered paintball impacts, but we were also abuzz with tales of our valiant victories and inglorious defeats. As Anton had hoped, it was an exciting testosterone-based bonding experience for guys who didn’t know each other very well. And, as one of the other guys observed, it was just plain fun to run around outside and get dirty.

After an afternoon of napping and getting cleaned up, we reconvened for an evening of dinner and carousing at Toronto’s trendy Drake Hotel. This portion of the party was arranged by Anton’s good friend David J., an expert in all aspects of T.O. nightlife. I’d been to the Drake by day for work functions, but had no idea what a popular nightspot it was. I doff my hat to Dave for getting nine guys into the dining room and onto the rooftop patio bar on the busiest night of the week. Indeed, I was especially glad to have his hosting expertise when I hit the wall shortly after midnight. Since my cancer treatment, evenings have not been my prime time, and the early morning paintball pandemonium quickly caught up to me. I went from best man to need-a-rest man in a matter of minutes, and Anton was gracious in letting me bail and head home to bed. I hear the guys went on to have a great time into the wee smalls and I salute their constitutions for outlasting the groom and showing him a great time in the process. Anton is now back in New York and the countdown is on until we join him there for the wedding!


A Long Overdue Drink of Big Whiskey

Although now absent from Toronto, Anton was nevertheless instrumental to another huge recent highlight: the Dave Matthews Band concert at the Molson Amphitheatre last Tuesday night. As mentioned above, I’m not one for the nightlife these days, and I have never been much of a concert guy. Of the dozen or so concerts I have attended in my life, only two have lived up to the incredible experience I always feel concerts should be. One was seeing Spirit of the West with Ashley MacIsaac at York University’s intimate pub The Underground. The other was Tuesday night’s concert promoting the DMB’s new album Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King.

Whatever your feelings about their music, I personally have a special place in my heart for Dave and his band. Anton introduced me to their music in the summer of 2000 when I tagged along with him to see them in concert in Buffalo. I didn’t know any of their songs then, and so my experience of the concert was typical – about halfway through my inner codger emerged cold, hungry, tired and wondering when it would be over. Nevertheless, I was impressed enough with their show that I later picked up their live album Listener Supported. Little did I know it would become my anthem album for 2001, one of the most important years of my life. I played it all through that winter as I made plans to travel the world. It was in my CD player everyday that summer as Jeanette and I began dating and fell in love. It was my comfort music that fall after I moved to Japan when homesickness threatened to overwhelm me.

Today, the music of the DMB is such a touchstone of comfort for me that Jeanette complains how often I play their music. Her complaints only make me love her more, given the irony that that these songs remind me both of falling in love with her and being so far away from her. Appropriate too, then, that she was stuck at work Tuesday night when I headed down to the concert on my own, having dropped everything when, by fluke, I discovered they were performing that very night. Dave and the boys didn’t disappoint and I felt their familiar songs wrap around me like the arms of an old friend. Meanwhile, their new stuff was rocking and conveniently spaced for regular trips to the bathroom. In fact, washroom breaks were the only appearance by my inner old coot, and I experienced the rare sensation of being truly disappointed when the concert eventually ended. In the words of a loud fan audible at the end of #40 on Listener Supported, “Thank you. Thank you, Dave.”


A Summer of Stories
In between the above events, I’ve been completing the first of my two summer courses at OISE. This first course was a children’s literature course, so obviously I’ve been in heaven. I was especially impressed by Professor Judy Caulfield’s focus on storytelling. While I have had plenty of experience reading books aloud, telling a purely oral version of a children’s book was a new experience for me and I am fascinated by how this change in perspective has enriched my understanding of such stories. Indeed, this course and all the learning I’ve done this year, both at the university and in elementary school classrooms, have loaded me with ideas that I’m excited to bring back to Annick Press, who have very generously hired me back for the summer. How incredibly lucky I am to be so thoroughly wrapped up in work that excites me! Bring on the summer!