Running for Your Life: Canada!

Sign in Hepworth, Ont., ten minutes drive from my parents’ year-round home at Sauble Beach, often voted as the province’s best beach, seven miles of brown sugar-pack sand, its texture ideal in summer for sculpture, our favorites on Friday, July 22, is Ella’s Mermaid with sea turtle neighbor and a smooth-skinned nude sand goddess torso done by a blond-haired, blue-eyed male sculptor in his early thirties, even feathered the ribs under her perky breasts, head slightly turned away, looking toward the entrance, a flirt, thinking a brown sexpot, say Brad SandPit, will arrive anytime now, and yes, it reminds of Winterbourne, a blonde beauty herself, but oh so real, and oh so long ago, who has chosen me, a boy three years her elder, the privilege of putting tanning lotion on her back and thighs, my homeboys watching as I slather the lotion on my hands then press them down on Winterbourne’s shapely back, moving up and around when suddenly she shrieks and darts out of my grasp like a fish, shouting, “L! What are you doing? That really hurts! . . . Let me see your hands.” Well, yes, they were full of sand, and her back where I’d massaged her is beet red from the coarse rub she’d suffered from the boy she’d no longer have anything to do with; our friend the sculptor, though, is much older than I was then, and by the looks of him, keen to reel in some lovin’ of his own, perhaps one of the Winterbourne-like girls who are standing around, chatting him up, struck by the sly wonder of the sand goddess, maybe, one asks, Will you do a sculpture of me? Yes, he says, I will. But please, first, come to my place, I’ll need to make a cast. That is what I did to make this one. It won’t take but a minute . . . “Save Our Jails,” the hand-written sign says. “Save Our Jails.”

M and K and I are traveling to my childhood home in Grey-Bruce counties in southwestern Ontario. Home to Alice Munro fiction (well, Huron County, but it’s the spirit of the place), the nature abstract artist Tom Thomson, underappreciated outside of Canada, http://bit.ly/qYnLBI, born and raised in Owen Sound, the World War I flying ace Billy Bishop, without whom Snoopy wouldn’t have had a model from which to draw his Red Baron dogfight fantasies, and the food truck of food trucks, Eighth Street Chip Wagon, where for generations Owen Sounders have been dining out on deep fried potatoes, doused with salt and white vinegar, a stone’s throw from the public library and the art museum devoted to the work of Tom Thomson, tragically dead during that Great War years, hard-pressed to think of what to say about Owen Sound since then except the advent of the Ginger Press, a bookstore and publisher of histories that otherwise would’ve been lost except within the talkative families of which there are very few, and the organic prepared food and baked good delights of Market Side, where the greens and ingredients come – a good deal of them anyway – from where I once stood looking down at snails criss-crossing the lane into the wet grass (see Running for Your Life: Week Two, Sept. 1, 2010), now the urban garden where the green beans and lettuce and tomatoes and bean sprouts grow to be chopped up and served in delicious dishes for sale at the Market Side on main street, proprietor of the former O’Connor homestead. Where so many of these blog-dreams began.

To be in Grey-Bruce is to not just feel the past. But to live in it alongside the present. As Faulkner said, “The Past Isn’t Dead. It Isn’t Even Past.” Perhaps it’s why Munro stays. Memory springs from taste: in my case the French fries on Eighth Street, the sugary-goo of butter tarts (NO RAISINS!), dental ID in every bite, throw a wrapping in the ditch by the side of the road, and it’s there next year, the year after, in the shade and depending on the weight, the inorganic quality of the wrapping, say, the shiny metallic of an Oh Henry! bar and it may never vanish. A state of decay, the farmhouses, abandoned barns still standing but barely, how long, pray tell, can they do this, a place so steady in its decomposition that it defies the laws of physics, enters the realm of philosophy, what is the language of the place, where every signpost and red brick is just as it’s always been.

I’m tired, a poor night’s sleep yesterday (July 21), anticipating, excited, longing to just be in Grey-Bruce, to live moment to moment because it won’t be long, only a couple of days really, no time at all, as I invited myself and my wife and daughter into a world that is never-changing. Owen Sound. The Centennial Tower, where my pals and I from its parapet for not often, or not so measured against a working life of daily train rides from Brooklyn to Midtown, coming on twenty years now, but those nights in the open-air tower, one built as part of a school project in my time http://bit.ly/qWZB8G, boundless energy and laughter and serious talk, wise before our time, we felt. It’s all coming back to me as we drive by the tower, when we raced down the stairs after singing at the top of our lungs a ditty from a TV and radio commercial for the soda bottler Pop Shoppe, and it seems those spirits are still racing along the wooden walkway to waiting getaway cars, thrilled at the prospect of another night on the run.

Next: Running for Your Life: Dog day delights