'Don't let it get ya down, Matt' is what I said when I looked out the
window this morning. Cold. And more cold coming. Frost creeping
in from the outside and lacquering my door seam and windowpane.
A solid 2 feet of snow of the grass. Signs nearly buried. Plows
unable to find pavement under their scraping steel teeth that spark
the angry concrete.
I'm in a place of indecision simply because I don't have the means
physically to get anywhere. We're in for winter. And a harsh one.
Commuters are risking life and limb for a measley 12 bucks an
hour (after tax and gas comes out of their cheque). Double knit
mitts and toques don't seem to do the trick, warmth-wise.
I'm reminded lately of a phrase that Ollie and I found one summer.
We were out in Chateau bay, fishing for beer bottles from some
folks who decided that pitching their empties into the lake would
be a good idea. 3 staff were fired from the camp for drinking on
property of a Christian premises and Ollie and I were hired to be the
cops. We found all of the bottles - all but four or five. Ollie waded
out further than me with a snorkel and flippers yelling 'Got one!'
and holding high, with a resounding splash, each brown glass
container he found. We giggled at the absurdity of what was
going on - but still understood that something needed to be done.
Drink off property? In a bar somewhere? At someone's house?
Sure. But on the property - with young kids around - and kids
who could step on the shards of the glass in the bay - it
seemed a bit much. Still - I've done worse.
After we rounded up all of the bottles, we went inside the
Chateau cabin for a look around at the oldest and creepiest
building on the whole camp property. It was the first cabin ever
used by the camp back in 1956 and it's a pretty desolate,
dilapidated structure. Upstairs, on the old wood paneling walls
that were painted hospital white back in '55, a phrase was written
in black permanent marker (probably from an angry leader-in-
training who hated being cooped up in such a tiny shack all
summer) that read:
'BE SURE - YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT.'
How fitting. How fitting indeed. For all of us.
