PullUpAChair NoLongerWorkin'ForTheWeekendVille
Ever since I was a kid I've loved Saturday mornings.
Why?
Because it's like the first day of summer vacation every single week.
All that time and possibility that stretches out before you for the next two days just seems to open my head up to all that can possibly be done, most of it fun.
So I like to get up early to chart all that can, and hopefully will, be done.
These days it usually involves some household project that has to be done (last Saturday it was nailing up 96 -yes 96! - pickets to the back deck railing....followed by something with the kids.....and sandwiched in between will be a post or two wrapped around writing the discussion of a paper on non-mesenchymal-mediated cell migration (or some such thing) that I'm going to have done, for sure, by Sunday night.
All of which is pretty mundane, of course (although this weekend Bigger E. and I plan to get together with one of her friends to work out a new song - I'm going to use my shiny new 'lectric guitar that my girls got me for my last birthday).
But, back when I was a kid?
Oh boy.
There are so many stories, but when I saw the first leaves hit the ground on the ride to work yesterday it made me think of all those Saturdays of my dreams playing road hockey on the red brick wall-lined playgrounds of Monterey School followed by the almost/sorta/kinda real thing in the middle of the night at Memorial Arena in Victoria.
We'd spend all morning getting stuff ready doing things like curving the superblades and gutting out the bleach bottle goalie masks.....then we'd go, go, go, go.....all afternoon 'till it started getting dark......then it was off to to the corner store for chips and RC Cola (trying to win the free ones) while sitting on the front steps followed by the burping contests.....after that we'd often head to D.M.'s house for a HNIC-pump-up with his Mom's granola-type dinners between the 2nd and 3rd periods (games always started at 5:00pm on the left coast) which we never ate, followed by getting out the Kiss records and lying on the shag rug eating hidden pop-tarts (D.M.'s answer to his Mom's health food conspiracy) while trying to stay up until 2:00am when we'd sling our duffle bags over our shoulders, hop on our bikes, and head for the arena...... I remember screaming down Pandora Ave. which was wide open with no cars by then, filled with the anticipatory excitement of the coming ice time and thinking that this was the greatest, most fantastic thing that anybody could ever possibly do without parents.....D.M. and I played on the same Bantam house team at a time when there were only two sheets of ice in all of Victoria.... Neither of us was very good, but man, was it fun, especially when the practice was over and we would line up on the blue lines for games of hip-check over and over and over again until somebody got hurt or the Zamboni guy finally kicked us off the ice.....but, truth be told, it is all kind of shadowy boy-men on a shadowy planet in my memory because back then when you played in the middle of the night in that big old barn that is no longer there (my Dad played in it when he was a kid too) it was always dark and dingy because they turned half the lights off to save money.....afterwards we rarely went home right away, instead we went down to Paul's Motor Inn where we sat around eating French Fries and drinking watered-down cokes listening to the war/girl stories from the coaches who seemed so grown up/sorta scary at 18 (there was no going to MacDonald's back then, although a scant few years later D.M. would be working at the Clown's place where he once tried to eat 10 Big Macs in a single sitting - he didn't make it - only got to 7)....riding home at 6 a.m. up that Pandora Hill with scratchy eyes and gurgling stomach was not so much fun......funny thing is, I don't remember the Sunday days much although I can definitely remember the dread of ignored homework that always started to come on somewhere 'round dinnertime.....
Anyway, time to go and get on with things in the here and now.....I've got all kinds of wild-eyed, crazy-man window caulking to do (and Joey Ramone's version of Louis Armstrong's 'It's a Wonderful World' to tab).....
Have a great weekend everyone.
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HockeyStickChair from TreeHugger.com
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