LOOKING BEHIND II

I wish I knew more of dad’s affiliation with a four or five Italian guys who often ate at our house, sometimes late at night…I knew these ‘uncles’ quite well but never knew what they did for a living…my Mom could prepare a spaghetti dinner faster than I could recite penance…it was the duty of a French Canadian wife according to Italian men…

Later on when my daughters were older they would talk to their Nana about such treatment by husbands but Nana never changed her ways…“she was born to serve” she always said, no doubt looking back…

Going to the cemetery every Sunday morning was a routine…after Mass we’d jump in the Buick and head off to Mount Royal Cemetery meeting our uncles and aunts to visit dead relatives…relatives in the ground watched us pray and eat lunches packed with pepperoni, provolone and Greek olives soaked in olive oil with sprinkles of cayenne pepper, Dad had a habit of passing out his loose change to my cousins…only now do I wonder if the money came out of his portion of the slot machine pickings or if he’d stolen my stash…

After kneeling and saying a few prayers and finishing our picnic food we would roam the cemetery with our cousins admiring tombstones, some ten feet high and as wide, some scary with ornate ornamental iron gates, gargoyles and cherubs sitting on the roofs and hanging from every corner…it may have been the fashion in those days made by the survivors of those dead people who thought they had a lot of class, or money, even if the deceased couldn't take it to Heaven, Hell, Limbo or Purgatory …Catholics were thought they’d be sent to one of these places if they died with sins on their souls…this rule left no one going straight to Heaven…if you went to Purgatory it would mean Heaven would be attained after years of ‘burning’ there…an un-baptized person’s soul would be banished to Limbo to stay there forever…later the Catholic Church abolished Purgatory and Limbo… I often wonder if the ones who died and spent time in Limbo or Purgatory, before the Catholic rules abolished them, ever made it out of wherever they were…looking behind can be spooky.

IT'S DIABOLICAL I TELL YA

(Portions by Wlm. Thomas, Toronto, Canada)

A good walk spoiled...Mark Twain

It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did that in one afternoon on the golf course... Hank Aaron

When I play golf there's no opponents to foul, no teammates to blame...it's me against my worst enemy...my ego...me

My advice to golfers, quit...quit immediately...cold turkey...there's a chaise lounge under a shade tree somewhere with a large drink near a great book within your reach...

If you can't give it up there's hopefully a golf patch coming out soon that fits behind the ear...

I've booked a tee-time for the day after I expire...because playing golf after I'm dead is marginally better than going straight to hell...

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I KNEW EVERYTHING

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, (GRHC) the North American green roof industry association,is pleased to announce that the City of Toronto passed a new green roof by-law with overwhelming support yesterday. The green roof by-law consists of a green roof construction standard and a mandatory requirement for green roofs on all classes of new buildings.

BORROWED FROM JULIE's BLOG

She wrote that she stole it from someone else…

Childhood memories…

What music takes you back to childhood? My Dad singing Old Italian Songs playing the guitar…

What were favorite games? When I was real young we didn’t have TV yet in Montreal…so we were happy playing hockey in the streets or on frozen ponds in neighbors’ back yards…during summers I played cards with neighbor kids…canasta, rummy, hearts…I don’t recall if board games had been invented then but no one had any…

Favorite bedtime stories? My Dad telling me stories about ‘The Mafia being a fictitious organization perpetrated by the government to discriminate against Italians'…

Favorite TV shows? Didn’t have a TV until I was around 10 or 11…when TV arrived we watched whatever was on…maybe only a few hours a day and almost all shows came from the U.S…

Was I popular? Maybe, but not because I was a nice kid…my Dad always bought me the latest and greatest toys, guns and rifles, hockey sticks, gloves, pads, toboggans…all cool stuff…bringing home comic books almost every day was a treat for me and friends…I remember a Schwinn bike with balloon tires, fringe at end of handle bars, a light and a bell…probably cost a fortune in those days…

Did I go to Camp? No, but we traveled a lot, drove and flew to New York City many times, Florida, Atlantic City and places in Quebec and Ontario…I joined Cub Scouts once, went to one meeting and found it kind of dorky…I wore my Cub Scout clothes under my hockey shirt…

Most magical part of childhood? None totally magical …but I had great times going to pro hockey games to watch the Montreal Canadiens and semi pro baseball games…the Montreal Royals were a farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers and we saw the best players who went on to play for the Dodgers…I have to confess I had some semi-magical days tho…my Dad bought me Lionel Trains with steam locomotives (dropping a pill in the smoke stack produced smoke), I had all sorts of railroad cars and cabooses…Dad had someone build a lighted village with train tracks all around the table…with my huge engineer’s cap on I got pretty high playing with my choo-choos.(and I wasn’t sniffing the smoke)…spending hours away from my parents and sister in our basement was the best…

What mementos do I have from childhood? ONE…My parents were different than my friends’ parents…let’s leave it at different…My Dad was a travelling salesman and always hated driving during the winter…I remember shoveling snow off our one car driveway almost every morning…Without telling us of his prior intentions one day he came home from work with visas and passports for all of us and a month later we were on our way to California…our parents had never said a thing to us about moving before that day.. All the house furniture and stuff was either sold or given away…my Lionel trains went to a cousin…(Today some of those engines go for $15,000 to $20,000 each), my Comic book collection disappeared… I lost my Roy Rogers six guns, holsters and Cowboy hats that my daughters never got to play with! I don’t know why I let all my good stuff disappear; I was probably thinking how happy I’d be not shoveling snow in California…

We drove to California in a brand new Buick Roadmaster with a car carrier thing on top…nothing else made it to California…

 We had a dog named Prince, a long haired mutt that we loved…I wanted to name him King but my Dad told me to stop whining or he’d put a hit on me…the dog made it to Calif. but I never knew or asked how he got there…

One of the best things my Dad ever bought for me was one of the first Kodak 35 mm cameras…I still have it…I have thousands of slides of our family, vacations and relatives but only a few of myself, and that is cool...

What were my favorite books? I spent hours a day reading and still do to this day…favorites back then where The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Man in the Iron Mask and Robinson Crusoe…ironically all but one of these were condemned by the Church because the plots were about revenge...kind of like Godfather movies today...now that I think about it Moby Dick was a revenge novel but I guess hunting whales was OK with the Church..

What were my favorite foods? Three guesses and the first two don’t count…Italian food! Pasta almost every supper either with meat balls, chicken and occasionally pig tails… (I learned to like them but I wouldn’t touch them these days); On Fridays my mother made meatless meals like salmon casseroles, fish, lotsa fish…Was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays in those days...today it isn't a sin, but I often think of the Catholics who did and died...did they go to hell or were they redeemed when the rules were changed?

Happiest days of my life? Wedding day and when each daughter was born…

RESTING PEACE

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Over the weekend we spent several hours at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery visiting my parents, brother and other relatives…and made a few new friends too...

We thought bringing gardening tools to clean out the metal vases that hold water was a bright idea so we could add flowers to the graves, but it didn’t turn out that way at all...With temps in the 90’s I dug and dug to no avail…

We rested…

Began digging again when a man ‘visiting’ his family nearby brought his crowbar over to help us pry the vases out of the ground…but to no avail…

We rested…and sweated…would have given a buck or two for a hat…

After digging, digging and crowbar-ing for almost an hour the metal vases popped out…

The man and I rested again while Donas went to fill them with water…

and I thought we were done…

Later, on our way home we thought maybe the man was an angel, but this man was dripping wet and carried a crowbar...

After washing up we walked to our car to discover it was locked with the keys and cell phones on the front seat…Hell, Shit and Damn...With no time to rest we walked around a while and found a man with a cell phone willing to let us call AAA…he thought we were calling AA we looked so ragged and wasted, until he heard me talking to  the operator who had no clue where this cemetery was...

We enjoyed resting in the shade of a tree for forty five minutes until the truck arrived…

Nothing's better than a Sunday afternoon visit to the park...next time I'm bringing a hat, a pitching wedge and a few balls...

MORE BITS AND PIECES /REFUGE OF AN OLDER MAN

 

The golf vacation…

Having recently been fortunate at the time to purchase a 1986 911 Carerra we could hardly wait to drive up Hi Way 1 up the coast to meet three golf couples in Pebble Beach… Instead of battling the two lane road they had decided to drove up Hi Way 101… the curves and out of state traffic  followed the contours of the coastline were always congested and slow…the ocean views were and still are incredible and if you’ve never driven it, you gotta do it at least once…

For several miles we’d been following a car pulling a trailer, with Nebraska plates, if it matters, going about fifteen miles an hour…the driver and passenger had to be world class gawkers…I could picture the driver saying “Look Martha, on the rocks below, those must be California seals we’ve heard about”…first chance I had I dropped into 3^rd gear, stomped on it and before I noticed we were going 105 miles an hour…now THAT was a cheap and fun thrill!

After meeting up with our friends in Monterey and enjoying a fabulous dinner we made it to our hotel to get ready for the next day…

We played our first round at Pebble Beach then at two nearby seaside courses…I won’t bore you with hole by hole accounts even though some days we played through what seemed like all four seasons…the only thing tougher than escaping those seaside sand bunkers was the restaurants in town…

On our way back, having played three days in a row, playing golf was the least interesting thing for me…but with no regrets about the food and wine…

And, as we pulled into our driveway, I could hardly wait to play the next week…

BITS AND PIECES OF…

things our kids probably never knew…

When I was a little kid way back in Montreal, between ages of 8 and 12, I was an altar boy …Favorite time was sneaking sips of altar wine every chance we had…I never mentioned this ‘sin’ in the confessional for fear of having to say a bunch of rosaries for penance and alerting the priests of our behavior…at the time I thought tasting the wine was a cool thing to do and it was delicious even though it was probably made near Montreal by monks in the hills who had vowed an oath of silence…

Another favorite pastime, cheap thrills for me started at a young age, was ringing bells by hand at communion time waking up the dozing Catholics…the Mass was said in Latin in those days and we had to memorize responses to the priest…we had small cheat sheets and pretended not to look at them…our backs were to the parishioners who never said a word but followed the Mass in English or French in their missals...

 HAD A CAR REPOSSESSED…

• In 1963 we lived in Anaheim while I worked for an architect my father knew,only not that well…I’d invested in his company to discover he left town one day and left us moneyless and jobless…
  

Unfortunately we had just bought a new car, couldn’t make the payments and had it repossessed right out of our garage…About the same time JFK was assassinated…Julie was six months old at the time…

·        Left with no wheels was unreal…but God in his mysterious ways sent us a phone call from old friends who were looking for a babysitter for their kids…when we told them of our wheeless situation they offered us the use of an old Ford they even had and a room we could stay in…

·        We were loaned a 1958 Ford with only two gears…stick shift on the column…I bet some of you don’t even know what that means…the car made screaming noises in both gears but was otherwise OK…

·        I found a job working in Santa Ana for an architect and parked the screaming car a few blocks away from the office…embarrassing as hell to be caught driving it…

·        Soon bought next car, a old Opel station wagon…cheapest and oddest car, barely adequate for our family…we went everywhere in it…even up north to visit grandparents near Sacramento…one time, driving  back, hiway 99 was closed for whatever reason…we took a two lane bypass West to the 101…passed thru a huge gathering of Hell’s Angels on the way…loads of them piled in staked trucks and zillions of motorcycles…

·         I was ready to die protecting wife and daughter if they stopped us…but nothing happened… none of the men and ladies? even glanced at us as we passed by… this was in the 60’s hippie era and I hoped and prayed our family looked way too nerdy to fuss with…

·        Short hair, dorky glasses and a dumb-ass Opel…nothing happened with the Angels…or the priests!