Rss

Football, At Your Age?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2007
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , ,

Another absurdly bright, uncannily warm autumn day found me crossing a football field this morning. Again. One of my main routes on the ankle express takes me through the grounds of the community centre on Donald Street. Behind it is a small gem of a gridiron, lighted and perfectly crowned, with that familiar blend of short tufts of green mixed with worn turf where the cleat marks dimple the dirt. Beyond the end zone on either end remain the baseball backstops that were the original anchors of this mid-city sports park. However, the football goalposts in shallow centre field, the bleachers along the chalked sideline, and the blocking sled which, outside practice grunting time, just blocks the right-field line make it clear: it is autumn, and Football is King. It has been all summer.

Some people never grow up, it seems. I found myself walking across the quiet field, local seniors doing their laps around the perimeter. I may have appeared to be just strolling, too, but actually I was running instant replays of gridiron exploits recorded nowhere but in my jumbled memory. The highlight reel starts a bit bumpily: getting thrown around by a crazy corner linebacker in my first high school practices; being flung by an opposing lineman, like a rag doll in the jaws of a Doberman, as an undersized rookie slotback on his first run with the ball (and trying to wipe the phlegm off my face before I got back to the huddle); getting wide open on our terrible team’s first-play fly pattern, and watching our beleaguered QB’s beautiful touchdown spiral bounce off the shoulder pads I’d never worn playing sandlot ball on the town square. There were 54-0 and 63-0 thrashings by the bigger schools down the road. But it got better. We won more than we lost by the time I was a senior, and there were solid tackles and touchdowns and one particular leaning sideline catch that meant little in the context of a losing match but made me feel like a pro. For a minute or two at the time, but forever in my mind. The older I get, the more spectacular it was.

Yup, the hands used to work. They still do, but mostly for laundry and dishwashing and driveway basketball with children. (Yes, and typing, certainement.) And, likely thanks to a decision to put aside football after high school, I have pretty good knees for an old guy. But basketball left me with high maintenance ankles that whine and creak every morning, and so I’ve noticed something different about this fall, and perhaps the last few.

Time was when the cooling nights and the falling leaves meant only one thing, and this long after I’d hung up my helmet: time to run. Not just to run, but to juke, cutback, straight-arm a hapless linebacker, lower my shoulder and stretch for the first down. 20. 25. 30! He’s headed for the 35, the 40… Yup, even after I’d passed the 40-year marker, I’d be minding my own business, going for a slow old jog down any old street, red and yellow leaves along the curbside, and suddenly I’d be possessed. I’d feel a pointed leather spheroid under my arm, my eyes would widen, and the urge to hit the hole and get outside and turn it upfield overwhelmed me. Well, almost. I wasn’t highstepping past any helpless pedestrians or spinning out of the grasp of the postman. I’m a fairly sane neighbour. But every once in awhile, on a dark and quiet street, I would make a sweet little cut to avoid a looming mud-puddle. And there was that dog two blocks over, left yapping at only air…

But this morning I noticed something different. Even crossing a football field, even when I tried to get the old motor fantasies running, I couldn’t. The thought of making a sharp change of direction makes my ankles ache. I can still hear the plastic cacophony of pads and helmets popping as an 18-year-old ballcarrier – me – is gang-tackled to the ground. I can still re-visit the perverse joy of that socially approved violence, but I wouldn’t want to live there again. I can imagine coaching that game. Maybe. (Barely. And rarely.)

As in this park near me, baseball is sidelined. Televisions will turn to the MLB now that October is here, maybe even mine. I hear there was an exciting play-in game last night, the Rockies knocking off the Padres. (Can you name their cities?) There must be some baseball played somewhere in my city, but I never see kids playing it in my part of town. Now there’s a game I miss. I miss it even better than football, maybe ’cause I played it into my 30s. And even in mid-life, I can still imagine a nice pick, a quick throw (though my shoulder might groan for a week afterward) and, especially, swinging that bat. Even with that more easy-going game, though, I’d be best off playing it in the theatre of the mind. No pulled hamstrings there. No ice-bucket evenings. I’ve had my fill of those.

Ice Dreams

Posted by :James Howden On : January 17, 2007
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I grew up in a little Canadian town where we played ball near cornfields or in leafy squares, and got the hockey sticks out in late September. For reasons that I still can’t entirely explain, I became a hoops hostage in my mid-teens. I officially became a Basketball Guy, I think, during the UCLA Bruins’ astounding 88-game winning streak. I was a fan of Bill Walton and his Gang (and, later, of their coach, the legendary John Wooden), who were by early 1974 pursuing their third straight undefeated championship season. I remember my anguished disbelief when Notre Dame knocked off the Bruins in February to end the streak – it was a big enough game to actually be on television – and again two months later, when NC State (and the gloriously soaring David Thompson) beat them in the NCAA finals. (Or was that the semis?)

I had played the game for about a year and half by then. I was a grade 11 and thought I was getting good, but Haldimand County clay didn’t exactly ooze with hardwood competition. Or hardwood, for that matter: I played mainly on tile and that sort of parquet floor where the fingers of wood are always coming loose. I’ll bet there weren’t more than ten people in my town who even watched the Final Four that year, and most of them were the oddballs on my team whose skates were dusty, who believed that playing basketball was The Thing.

But before all that – with my Red River cereal and Riverview Dairy milk (home delivered!) – I ate and drank other sports: Hamilton Tiger Cat (and four-boy) football, Montreal Expos baseball (and endless games of “scrub” on the town square) and, especially, hockey (every kind, everywhere). I worshipped Gordie Howe from afar and the impossibly big and fast young men of the Junior D Caledonia Corvairs from as close as I could get. (I’d stick my nose right through the iron fencing that ran around the end boards.) The Sutherland Street Hockey League was fabulous in those days, and the games never stopped for long.

I don’t watch a lot of hockey in the regular season anymore, though I still pay attention. (I know the Ducks are no longer Mighty, and that Alexander the Great plays wing for the Washington Capitals.) But when CBC ran its annual Hockey Day in Canada last Saturday, I had cranked our coal-fired television up to watch. The Canadian hockey Goliath has often been something I wanted to take my slingshot to, but there’s still so much to love about the sport. I saw parts of all three games, but what grabs me by the heartstrings is what comes in between on Hockey Day: the grateful words of NHL players remembering their roots, the interview with that grinning guy who kept outdoor hockey alive in his Quebec town for 40 years, the rink that is the best hope of a struggling northern Saskatchewan community. I eat it up. It moves me to my sports-loving core. Gosh, I even got misty over the Tim Horton’s ad — yes, I insist on the comma! — with Sidney Crosby laughing and stickhandling with all the little fellas. I used to be one of those wee sprouts on skates, before Timbits or full facemasks had even been invented. And now, at an age where I should perhaps have outgrown these things, this ol’ basketball coach still has occasional hockey dreams: all that speed, the cool wind on my face, maybe one more great glove save from my goalie days…

Back in my hometown, there is a new twin-pad arena complex that has the town pretty excited. (Somebody had the smarts to get a new library built in the bargain. Come on, boys, you can read, too! ) I hope kids smile when they play, that they’re taught the speed and skill of that wonderful game, not just systems and corner grit. I hope the parents have some perspective. (I often had too lofty ambtions for my basketball coaching back in what folks always insisted was a hockey town, but there was one benefit: nobody thought their kid was going to the NBA.) The great Canuck poet Al Purdy described professional hockey as “this combination of ballet and murder”. True. But at its purest, and in the deepest caves of my memory, it’s a cool and an ever-gorgeous game. (And there are no goons, and no uptight, gum-chomping coaches. And I get to play forward whenever I want. And man, I can really fly out there…)

ODY: Week 10. 70/365. But I Never Played for my Mother…

Posted by :James Howden On : November 2, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday. Gordon (the guitar) and I had a nice long bedward session. Michael Enright was interviewing the astonishingly young, beautiful and good Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the radio. (In Half of a Yellow Sun, she writes of the birth of Biafra in the ‘60s. Sounds powerful.) I like my right hand. I can get much more into the BlissyZone with finger picking than with chord changes. Male multi-tasking!

Tuesday. It was game 3 of the World Series, the first of the playoffs that I’d seen. First of the year. (Unbelievable. I still love that strange, timeless, slow game. I raced home from October school days to watch the Series as a kid. I played seriously into my 30s. I can still feel the bat in my hands, awake or asleep, in a way that I doubt a guitar will ever match.) Carpenter pitched brilliantly, and that turned the Series for the Cards. I watched over at my friends’ house, where I found not only a working television but that my buddy Fanfan is learning to play bass. Potential collaborator. I played long and lots. Had the room to myself ‘til the seventh inning, then the bullpen got too loud. These folks, two of them born in Canada, knew far less about baseball than I did about guitar two months ago. I tried to save them.

Wednesday. Lesson Night at the Ol’ Ottawa Folklore Corral, and it was a good night in the Old Dog guitar saddle. (How’s that for a mangled metaphor?) Asked questions. Got answers. Further to my mind-boggled reaction to the chords from last week’s “Study in E”, GG (Kurt the Guitar Guru) was able to quickly teach me the remarkable “E minor 11th” chord, which can also be played as “G 6-9”. It’s the opening chord to “Hard Day’s Night”, for one thing, and I’ve got it. Sounds good, right? Actually, it doesn’t. It’s ridiculously primitive. It’s just a brainless right-hand strum without a finger on the fretboard. (Ohh. I knew that.) The GG had lots to say about more significant things, like finger shapes. Learning to feel the chord shapes is the key. Sliding from one chord to another based on shapes, not notes, means that skilled guitarists are sometimes seen as “idiot savants” by other classically trained musicians. While they have had to learn the individual notes to a chord, good guitarists can intuit new chords quickly by adjusting their finger shapes or moving them up or down the fretboard. (I think that’s what the GG said. Musicians, forgive me when I know not quite what I am talking about.) 

And then came Thursday. “I think you should come right away,” Big Sister said. Our dear Mum has been in steady physical decline for the past several years, and it looked like she was doing her final taxi toward spiritual takeoff. And she was. I took care of what I thought I needed to, including being ready for a funeral, packing for my youngest son and preparing to practise the guitar for however long we would be away from home. I grabbed Gordon, met Calvin Junior (and his own versions of Hobbes) at the school bus stop and hit the road running. We didn’t quite make it, but I had some quiet moments of reflection in her room, where her body still lay.

I didn’t think much about music. Aside from her love for hymns and her comically poor singing of them, music was never a big part of our life together. Baseball? Hockey? Books and books? Absolutely. When I was a kid, though, Mum would make occasional reference to my hands: “Look at those fingers! You’re going to either be a surgeon or a concert pianist.” Well, I did almost get into medical school one year, but musical virtuosity was unlikely since lessons were never even suggested. It occurs to me that my impracticality stems more from my mother than I had thought. She’s always been a woman of grand dreams, and her vision of a generous, funny and welcoming family life was realized in the most vivid way, especially in the generation of her 13 grand-kids. Later, as we shared Enid stories, someone told of a young writer friend who had told Mum of an ambition: to win a (remotely conceivable) literary prize. (It might have been the Pulitzer.) Mum’s response was characteristic and quick. “Why not the Nobel?” Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? (Enid Howden quoting Robert Browning. Time and again. Burden and blessing.)

So, decades after I began to notice my own rabid interest in music, and after years of fascination and envy at the musical progress and accomplishments and satisfactions of my own kids, I embarked on this Old Dog Year. I decided to do something about a hypothesis I’d had for awhile. Maybe I am a bit musical. And with my athletic ability in free-fall, maybe I should work at something I can get better at in mid-life, without a need for youth or functional ankles. ‘Cause they ain’t comin’ back. I now feel that among the many lofty and wonderfully principled ideas my Mum had planted in me, this seed of musicianship was among them. It wasn’t well-nourished, mind you, but it was there. It was the classic “castle in the air”, which another strain of my childhood had derided. Quit your dreaming, boy. Get down to business. What a little absent-minded professor he is! And I hated that stuff, that accusation that I was cloud-bound, impractical, a dreamer.  

But although I function reasonably well in this allegedly Real World, I came to understand as an adult that I clearly was all of those things, and an idealist and a hope-filled romantic, too. So was my Mum. And like me, she would have loved Thoreau’s take on dreamers in Walden: “If you build castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now build foundations under them.”  So I do, in this case by pulling out my guitar every day. I thought later that I should’ve taken Gordon up and played a little in the stillness of her second-to-last room, but that wasn’t really us. (Among those souls I called upon that night to welcome Mum, though, was the old Cleveland Indians star Rocky Colavito. She’d been a great fan, and it seemed fun; the only problem was my discovery that he’s still alive. Ah, well.) Instead, I pulled out the guitar later at Big Brother’s place, where the clan gathered late into the evening, ostensibly to plan but mainly to remember. I softly fingered all the bits I can do without thinking. It felt a little like love.

Maybe all this explains, in part, why I’ve taken the long way ‘round to being a musician. (Wow. I just said I was a musician. It hardly even hurt! I do feel a giggle coming on, though.) It also took me a long while to become a writer. Chez Howden, it was reading, not writing; baseball, not music; and, in a larger sense, principles that regularly overrode pragmatism. I felt a certain joy in Mum’s passing. It was release from a limited and painful life for her. It was a superb family reunion: everybody was there, and the laughs were legion. But there was more than that, a sense of personal relief and of eagerness to live that I attribute to Mum’s example of both. Relief and contentment at the end of a well-lived and loving day, and a current of eagerness to do what I might to realize her hopes for all of us.

Right this moment, odd as it is, messing around with a guitar seems to be part of that. Amid stories and photographs, I picked some more at Little Sister and Silent Paul’s place the next night. I was a late-night guitar vampire for the next few days, using the quiet of Big Sister’s living room to go through my exercises and exercise my memories. At times it was a welcome escape from thinking, yet at others I felt as mindful as I could be. It was a rhythmically stumbling kind of meditation, peaceful moments to linger on the kindness of dear old friends and vaguely familiar faces from the old home town. Sorry for your loss. Condolences to you and your family. Enid was a great lady…

We stood by her grave — right next to my Dad’s — in the sweet sunlight of a warming autumn day, laying roses and praying and singing. (It was just the Howdens, and we actually sang pretty well, thanks.) I walked by my grandfather’s grave, past my old high school, around some of my favourite tree-lined and leaf-scented streets. Back by the fireplace at Big Brother’s, I spent a good part of the afternoon playing, including a welcome bit of stern rehearsal time with the Itinerant Artist. My eldest son, the IA, is a genuine musician, the Real Instrumental Deal, and has taught guitar for several years. He applied the Kenny Werner learning triangle – got to play slowly, and eventually combine the ability to play perfectly, at tempo and all the way through – in very specific ways to my practising. He beat out a very slow tempo, and insisted I match it. He showed me a technique for practising chord changes that avoids frozen frustration and encourages gradual acquisition of speed. It was sweet, personalized guidance and attention. (He also played, after my fingers were numb, many of the pieces I’ve struggled with, giving me some sense for how it sounds.) I’ve never felt so much at home with playing music.

That night, at a wonderful memorial for Enid H., our words of memory and tribute were in the forefront, but so was music. “How Great Thou Art” was sung with chest-busting force and beauty by a large congregation (there was a stealth tenor among the guests, and we rode his thunder. Wow.). And there are real live musicians in the next generation. Representing them, niece Bethany played a sweetly feeling “Fairest Lord Jesus” on the piano, and the IA followed later with a gorgeous solo trombone rendition – a bit jazzier than that small-town Baptish church has likely heard before – of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”. I’m decades behind, and didn’t even think of playing guitar on that bill. But I’m on the job, I’m learning, and “if a job’s worth doing,” as Mum reminded us all ad infinitum, “it’s worth doing well.” I never played for my mother, but that’s okay. I am playing for her now, and hope to do it well.

World Series? What World Are You Talking About?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 21, 2006
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , ,

My buddy Fanfan didn’t have a clue. (Work on your French nasal “a-n” if you want to pronounce his name properly in your head.) Though he loves sport, and was my video connection, player biographer and technical guide to the World Cup last summer, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. “Hé, Fanfan, tu es excité pour le début de la Série du Monde?” His face was delightfully blank. “La Série du Monde. World Series. Tu sais, le championnat de baseball?”  His growing grin said why do I need to know anything about that?

Here’s an odd little sporting artefact of history and geography. Fanfan comes from Haiti. On his half of a small Caribbean island, le foot is everything. The other half is the Dominican Republic, an absolute assembly line (no wait, an open pit mine) for baseball players. (It is estimated that one in seven major leaguers, and an incredible thirty percent of minor league ballplayers in the U.S., come from this poor and tiny nation. For a politically charged view of this, take a trip to the edge of sports .) Fanfan was a bit surprised to learn how dominant the D.R. is in baseball, because “when we play them, we win 10-0, 15-0.” He was talking soccer, of course. Has anybody written the history of the island in sporting terms? Are there any geographical reasons for the ancestors of slaves to have talented feet in the west of Hispaniola and beautiful hands in the eastern half of the island? What colonial distinctions led to Haiti siding with the world’s athletic consensus, while the Dominican turned its sporting eyes to the great American pastime? (Am I the only one who thinks about stuff like this?)

Be that as it may, Fanfan couldn’t name a single baseball player, I don’t think, let alone know that the Detroit Tigers were facing the St. Louis Cardinals. (Small “World”!) He knew everything there was to know about the big game between Manchester United and Liverpool, mind you, and he could have given me a detailed breakdown of the title race in the German Bundesliga. But baseball? Who cares? Well, in the communities he’s involved with, there’s pretty much nobody except me. It’s funny: baseball is more international than it has ever been, with many Asian players alongside the majority of American and Latin American ones. (Also, there are more significant Canadian players than there may ever have been, even though the Cards lost Larry Walker to retirement.) But in an international city like Ottawa, there have probably not been pockets of apathy this deep about baseball since, oh, World War II.

I still have baseball dreams, though. I don’t follow it as avidly as I used to, but hey, it’s the World Series! I may not know the complete starting lineup of either team, but I do have a lot to teach my footy Haitian friend about the mysteries of bat and glove. Besides, he has a way better TV than me.

I’m Trying Out for the METS, Now?

Posted by :James Howden On : September 14, 2006
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , ,

It begins with me walking out of a friend’s house. Stephen Downs was his name. I’m wearing the off-white pants with the thin black stripe down the side, and the skimpy green T-shirt that was our uniform top. Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 154, lettered in white across the chest, no identity lettered across my upper back. (We didn’t have numbers, so you couldn’t tell the players even with a program.) (No program, either. Who would read it?) It was the last ballclub I played on as a teenager. We were pretty good, winning a B-level provincial championship that year.(Wait, Steve wasn’t on that team!) I played centre field and a little shortstop, and hit mainly leadoff. Now I’m walking along streets that aren’t as familiar as they should be. My sneakers are unlaced. I’m not carrying my spikes.

I’m chilly in that skin-tight T, but I guess I look okay and there’s a bounce in my step. It feels like fall and rain, but I have my glove under my arm and I’m excited. I get to play! I get to shag and run and hit. I feel ready, but there’s a vague realization that it has been awhile. I walk into the park. Two guys are throwing. They’re wearing a very different uniform, much better than mine. The other team. Except that one of them looked familiar from the corner of my averted eye and his belated ‘hey’ confirms that he is a friend and, I guess, teammate. And then I see Monte (remember Monte? Good writer, a cafeteria kibitzer, could’ve been a decent basketball player), and he’s wearing that same high-quality Mets pinstriped uni. I don’t get it. Since when are we the Mets?

I’m not so sure about this. When was the last time I played? And why am I just getting started in September? Something about Monte being here, tall and splendid-splinter slim in his ‘stripes, makes me question: can I still do this? I still can’t find my spikes, my glove looks dry and flat, and it dawns on me in slow but inevitable motion that I’m a long way past 19, or even 29. I’m twenty-five pounds heavy with a rusty right shoulder. My ancient ankles make the wide swing before first base, and that hard cut across the inside of the bag, painful to imagine. I remember now. It’s a cruel, cruel dream. I’ve had it before, about tryouts for basketball and football teams that I suddenly realize I’m far too old for. It’s a reminder, as if I needed it in my friggin’ sleep, that my sporting days lie far behind. It hurts every time.

 

But I don’t need a flat belly and quick feet to play guitar.

A Little Nightmare Down Home

Posted by :James Howden On : May 31, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

It’s a sleepy place, with a languid river running through it. People have nice lawns and enjoy quiet. But in 1996, I was taking my new wife, a city girl, home to live in my little town, and she was worried. “Does anything happen there? Will there be any interesting people?” I understood, but my roots were deep and everything was there – my mother, my kids, and teaching and coaching at my alma mater high school – so we packed up our honeymoon kit (and the caboodle) and moved back – to Caledonia, Ontario, “a Grand place!”

Prodigal son that I am, I’d always thought so, but I’d also come to see how suburban sprawling my childhood village had become. (Caledonia is three times bigger now, yet its downtown has suffered. There are three stoplights and two Timmy’s on the main drag. Too much!) Diana fit right in with my family and bore up well under all that local history, but she found interesting conversations hard to come by, never mind excitement. Now that Caledonia and its eternal neighbour, the Six Nations reserve, are at the centre of Canadian attention, Diana flings her hands in mock dismay.

“I lived there for six years and now it gets interesting?!” I know how she feels. I spent the better part of my life in Caledonia, and wish I was there now. I always tried to convince my students and my children (and myself) that Real Life is right where we live; there’s no magic source of delight and importance Somewhere Else. Well, town and reserve teens can’t complain about boredom now, and I have the small sour pleasure of not having to explain that I grew up “in southern Ontario, near Hamilton, you know, about an hour from Toronto”. (I also lived and taught in Hagersville during the Great Tire Fire. It’s small-town vindication of a weird and ironic sort.)

Here’s the thing: I know these people, on both sides of the now-famous barricades. For our shared six years in Caledonia, Diana and I lived around the corner from them in the town’s first condominiums. They had been built by Jack Henning (father of John and Don, the developers stuck in the current dispute) about 1970. Then, to this chauvinistic north-side kid, they seemed a ridiculous distance south of the river, since the downtown, the arena, older homes and the original stoplight were on my side of town. Now, the Zehrs and Canadian Tire superstores that appear in newscasts are farther south still, along with the new rink, library, high school and streets (Laird, Tartan, Douglas, McKinnon) in this Scots-flavoured town. Dear old Caledonia Baptist, my north-side childhood church, has its new south-end sanctuary right next to the disputed housing development.

John Henning played first base in the age group below mine, and was the first kid I knew to have a proper trapper. (Rumour was that it cost forty bucks. John had the country habit of spitting and rubbing in its pocket between pitches; it stank to baseball heaven.) He was a rookie on the Caledonia High football team in my glorious senior year – we won several games after years of being pounded – and became a touchdown machine when the Blue Devils dominated.

Listen: John and I, like his brother Don and generations of white kids from Caledonia, shared science labs, hallways and playing fields with kids from the upper end of Six Nations who came to town for high school. I played four years of football with Ben Thomas and Alfred Logan, and was a teammate of various Hills and Bomberrys, Porters and Thomases. So were the Hennings. I wonder how these young men from a parallel world, guys we “went to war” with as adolescent athletes, have felt about those barricades.

For too long, they separated a quiet town and the proud and struggling nations that have watched it grow, from a single mill, along the banks of their cherished Grand River. The barriers were tangible, often tense and angry, but they weren’t exactly new, just obvious. It used to be that, if you wanted to, you could pretend such divides didn’t exist. I’d spent enough broiling afternoons running the bases at the Ohsweken fairgrounds, enough road trips with Martins and Montours, enough basketball refereeing at J.C. Hill school, that parts of Six Nations were clear (and dear) to me. Until I got to high school, though, much of it was mystery. Some still is.

For some Caledonians, though, it has been easy to live as if the reserve wasn’t there. That time is over, and that’s not all bad. Suspicions and stereotypes have deepened, and buried antagonisms have surfaced right on TV. (To think it all happened on Argyle Street!) However, this is also an opportunity to build understanding of a more than merely tolerant kind. (“Tolerance”: something we have for bad smells or uncomfortable shoes.) We need to better know and cherish the tangled history along the banks of that lazy river, and the needs and hopes of the communities that share it.

I was back home on Victoria Day. I was among the hundreds waiting by the barricades. I hoped for calm; some didn’t. I was ashamed by the lobbed insults, sorry for the cops, and sickened by the certainty of greater violence. I cursed the damage to community relations, and my own helplessness. Diana and I drove to Ottawa that night with foreboding, awakened grateful that riots hadn’t enflamed a darkened town, and were astonished that the barricades came down later that day.

So peace is possible. So Caledonia is an interesting place. (Who knew?) It’s a piece of geography that speaks of Canada, and the months and years to come will tell us a whole lot more.

A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the Forum section of the Hamilton Spectator on May 29.

Caledonia Gets Interesting

Posted by :James Howden On : April 21, 2006
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , ,

Back in 1996, when I was dragging my new wife back to my little town, she was worried. A city girl, she wondered, “Does anything happen there? Will there be any interesting people?” But my roots were deep and my sons were there, as was my job teaching and coaching at my alma mater high school, so we packed up our honeymoon kit (and the caboodle) and moved back to Caledonia, Ontario. “A Grand place to live!”

I’d always thought so, but influenced by my Diana, an environmentalist and Jane Jacobs admirer, I’d come to see how suburban sprawling my childhood village had become. (It’s three times bigger than when I was a boy, but its downtown struggles. There were, as of our 2002 move to Ottawa, three stoplights in town. Too much!) And my bride did find it dull, and though there were lots of JamesHowdenHistory and family there, interesting people were hard to come by, let alone excitement. Now that Caledonia and its eternal neighbour, the Six Nations reserve, are at the centre of Canadian attention, Diana flings her hands in mock dismay.

“I lived there for six years and now it gets interesting?!” Well, my blissful life sentence in Caledonia was commuted after thirty years, so I know what she’s talking about. And I’d like to be there right now. I know these people, on both sides of the barricades. For our shared six years, Diana and I lived in the town’s first condominiums, built by Jack Henning (father of John and Don, the developers at the centre of the current dispute) in the 1970s at what then seemed an absurd distance south of the river; the town’s business area and its older homes were all on the north side. Now, the Zehrs and Canadian Tire superstores that have been appearing in national newscasts are farther south still.

John Henning played first base on Caledonia baseball teams the age group below mine, and was the first kid I knew to have a proper trapper. (Rumour was it had cost forty bucks. John also had the country habit of spitting and rubbing in its pocket while he played; it stank to baseball heaven.) He was a rookie on the Caledonia High football team in my glorious senior year – we nearly won the league after years of being a patsy against larger schools – and became a touchdown machine as the star running back when the Blue Devils actually won.

And John and I, like his brother Don and generations of white kids from Caledonia, had the experience of sharing science labs, hallways and playing fields with guys from the upper end of Six Nations who came to town for high school. I played four years of football with Ben Thomas and Alfred Logan, and was a teammate for shorter periods with various Hills and Bomberrys, Porters and Martins. So were the Hennings. And I can’t help but wonder who, among these young men from a parallel world with whom we all “went to war” as adolescent athletes, might now be on the other side of that barricade.

It’s a divide between the town and the proud and struggling nations that have watched it grow from nothing along the banks of their cherished Grand River. Today, the barrier is vivid and tangible, tense and angry, but it is not new. It just used to be quieter. It used to be that, if you wanted to, you could pretend it didn’t exist. For some Caledonians, like many Canadians, it was easy to live as if the reserve itself wasn’t there.

That time is over, for now, and that’s not all bad. There’s great potential for entrenching suspicions and stereotypes in the heat of this conflict, but – and call me naïve, if you like – there is also the chance in this standoff to build understanding: of the tangled history along the banks of this lazy river, and of the needs and aspirations of the two communities that share it. It’s an interesting place now. It’s a piece of geography that shows us a great deal about Canada, and what happens in the days and months to come will tell us a whole lot more.

[This entry was later expanded into a Hamilton Spectator Forum piece that you can find here.]