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| A View From Belmont Street |
| What's wrong with that boy?! |
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Think you know me do ya? Well okay, maybe you do, but surely there'll be somebody who comes here who doesn't know me from a can of paint.......alas, here's the info:
HOME SWEET HOME
I can remember back when I was five, I don't think I was quite in school yet.....I was in the parking lot of the brand new Dud James Arena right by my house, and Kiwanis Baseball Park was built right beside it with an accompanying swimming pool. I met some friends there named the Lirettes. Cammy was the first one that I got to know, he was closest to my age. Then his brother Dennis right behind him, and Bobby was a very young boy. Their parents kept a close eye on them, and they weren't allowed much beyond their backyard, which bordered the parking lot to the Arena.
My brother Rick and sister Cindy made the area basically a hangout with the rest of the neighbourhood, and so I could go kick around in the parking lot or around the bleachers of the ball field whenever I felt like it. I got to know Cammy and Dennis better as time went on. We'd play baseball games on the asphalt parking lot of the Dud James with other kids in the neighbourhood, hit tennis balls against the outside arena wall with a tennis racket, play soccer, what have you. Often we'd just hang out and do nothing but talk. A big guy named Keith entered the picture eventually, who moved into a house three buildings up from me on Emmerson Street. Darren was there too, who lived on the same street as the Lirettes did at the time, and there was Chris across the street from me, the Longphees, the Bourques, I could go on and on. It was quite a little community. Everybody knew each other. Not a whole lot of weird stuff went on because everything was right there in front of everyone else to see. I met Lise, probably my first real big crush, who actually had a thing for Jason Longphee, and I was jealous of it. But Jason was a good friend of mine too, so it was cool, you know?
Eventually, Lise got to like me enough to want to go out on a date with me, when we were around thirteen years old. I had never been on a date before. Lise was the hot chick of the block, basically, and she wanted a date with ME? My buddy Keith also had a semi-steady thing going with a girl named Maryann, and so we set the double date to go to a movie at the Highfield Square Cinemas in Moncton. I remember how thrilled my mom was that I was going on a date, my very first one. Her little boy was growing up! She made sure I looked my very best before I left the house for the big event, and when I did, I was a sharp dressed kid. I had the whole thing goin' on, man. The cool duds, the sharp hair, the confident attitude.....and when I got to my buddy Keith's place to go from there to pick up the girls, he informed me that Maryann isn't allowed to go out on a date with anyone until she's at least 16. What a drag for Keith! He was really into Maryann, and she was really into him, and they couldn't do this. But they'd see each other again. In the meantime, I still had my date with Lise. But now I was a little bit more nervous.
Keith then talked to Maryann on the phone when I got to his house, and she told him that Lise didn't want to go out if they couldn't, so she called it off. First date, first stand-up. It was never rescheduled, and though I remained friends with Lise for a little while after that, I never quite recovered from it for years. Ah, growing up sucked sometimes.
But Lise was still a part of the gang, so was Maryann, and a girl named Belinda entered the picture too. I'm rattling these names off for, if nothing else, so that I will remember them when I look back on these little typed stories in the years to come when they may be fading from memory. There used to be a group of us...me, Dennis, Cammy, Keith, Lise, Maryann, Stacey, Carla, Chris and sometimes others, and we'd play a game called "Chase", that was always boys against the girls. We would all be confined to a block of six houses, and couldn't go beyond it, and we'd play the hunter and the hunted. When the girls hunted the boys, all the girls had to get together and concentrate on catching one guy at a time and bringing him back to a 'prison cell', or Maryann's garage, until all the guys were captured, and then it would be the boys' turn to hunt. It was amazing fun for us. I was always the last guy to be caught, and I was quite the slippery fellow. The girls would have me surrounded, and I would grab a tree branch or something and jump over a charging girl and take off running the other way while the guys cheered me on to not get caught, because if the guys lasted longer in not getting caught, we would win. I was a fast runner in them days!
That little block of houses is just across the street from where I live now. Funny how things come around full circle like that sometimes. When I go for a walk in the summertime around the neighbourhood here, I still feel the childhood spirits of us all running around the park, the arena, and the streets that we lived on. It lasted for what seemed like forever at the time. I used to get calls from Keith saying we were going to get a game of Chase going, to call Cammy and Dennis, and he was going to get the girls together and we were going to have some fun. Sometimes in the summer, we'd take revenge on the Junebugs scaring the holy hell out of us and have a Junebug roast, catching the little bastards and cooking them into little crispy critters. We'd sit around and talk. Walk around the parks......just enjoy each others' company. There was always somewhere to go. Just hang out at Kiwanis Park in the bleachers, or in the winter go to the arena and talk to the friendly guys that took care of the rink or the canteen folks, sipping on hot chocolate, maybe doing errands in the arena to get treats. At Kiwanis Park in the summertime, I used to chase foul baseballs that flew into the parking lot during baseball games and get two bucks a game. I remember that was enough for a couple of comics, a bottle of pop, a bar and a chip. I'd be all set then. That was life as a kid; pure innocence and fun, surrounded by everything that a kid could possibly ever want to grow up around.
Now, where there used to be Canadian National Railways train car shops, a place where my dad used to work where train cars would be made and fixed, there is what's called a Fourplex, where there are four ice arenas in one building, with a coffee shop, restaurant, and windows that allowed you to see into all the ice surface areas. But you can only go take seats in two of them. There was more than just the Dud James Arena in its heyday; there were identically built arenas around the city called the Carroll Arena and the Kay Arena, and they had ballparks around them too. That made for communities like the one that I enjoyed when I grew up. All of those arenas and ballparks are now going to be shut down in the near future in favor of the consolidated Fourplex and accompanying ballfields that are built around it. People who can't afford cars (and with the price of gas and insurance nowadays, the numbers of those people are growing) will not be able to get to this complex to bring their kids very often. Communities are being killed. Kids are going to get bored, and I think trouble is going to flourish. God knows, families have a tougher time staying together these days, with both parents needing to work to support a household, and with lots of single parent families happening, the aid of a community isn't going to be there to help parents raise kids. It's a sad time that we live in. The best you can do is try to keep your head above water, well above, and try to provide your family with what you can with the dwindling resources of what used to be close-knit neighbourhoods.
I have to wonder how Alexandra is going to be getting along where we live when everything around us shuts down in favor of the conglomoration of fun places in Moncton. If you want to spend some time in recreation, there's a secluded spot in town you can go to to do that. Otherwise, if you have rollerblades or a skateboard or a hockey net, you better be prepared to pay the fines issued by the city police for using them.
God bless us. I think we're going to need it as the future forges ahead. I have to hope better times are still to come.
(April 14, 2003)
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Demons
Every so often, you know, I get to thinking too much. I stop to think about what if's, and what if that never happened, things like that. The last week or two has been like that. I'd credit all this weird thinking to the winter doldrums, where the weather outside just sucks so bad and makes summertime seem so far off that it feels hopeless. I say it all the time, too, be thankful for what you've got, because God could've given you a completely different life somewhere else on this planet. Still, everyone ponders things once in a while.
Something not a whole lot of people know about me, namely my family members, is that I was sexually abused when I was 12. More than once. I didn't tell anyone out of fear, I guess. This person is no longer in my life, and hasn't been since those years. Haven't seen him since. Yes, "him". It's ugly to look back upon. And it left a very ugly scar on my soul from the point that it happened onward.
As I was growing up as a little boy, I used to go to the corner store for my mom or for myself, and there was this clerk at Tapp's, I think I can even remember her name was Brenda, that used to say I looked like a girl all the time. I look back on some pictures that were taken of me back then, and probably the years between when I was eight and thirteen years old, that may have been somewhat true. But it was nothing I could do anything about. I took after my mother early on in physical appearance, and then when puberty hit, I began to grow and take on a more masculine form. I think a lot of kids go through that same thing. I talked to a friend about that experience I'd had where I was abused, and he told me it happens to a lot of kids and they just don't talk about it. Not that he was justifying it, just that I'm not alone. Although when something like that happens to you, you certainly ARE alone.
And I am alone with my thoughts a lot, as we all are, wrestling with some of the demons of the past. I had a really hard time with girls growing up. When I was a teenager, I had so many names hurled at me that any confidence I might have had was decimated. I used to go to these dances, because I had quite a few friends really, and they'd prod me into going to them so we could all hang out. I'd go, and when the waltzes happened, there I was, sitting down or leaning against something, watching all my friends up on the dance floor with a girl. So many girls had called me down that I had no guts at all to ask anyone for a dance. As a matter of fact, there was a little clique of girls that would tease me and point fingers to the point where if a girl did get seen with me, she'd probably be ridiculed too, guilty by association. The way I saw it was, after what happened when I was a twelve year old, I never had any luck getting girls' attention up to that point for a reason; and that's that I wasn't "man enough" to be seen as a male to begin with. I was seen as girlish, not boyish. That carried over into my teens and then adulthood, all the way up to now even. From time to time I question my masculinity, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, wondering how I'm seen in the eyes of my female counterparts. I don't have a gay bone in my body. But that's something that some friends and even family members had wondered about me in the past. Just more reasons to bring back the nightmare that happened when I was a twelve year old. I'd wonder why things happened the way they did, that if fate is really set out for you, what's supposed to be the end result. Others have had it far worse, of course. I'll say that much, but this is what I have to deal with, myself.
To this day, I don't take very many compliments seriously, and I don't completely trust a single person on earth. Actually, I think that's a good thing, to not completely trust everyone. People will follow their human nature, after all, from time to time---and do what it takes to make themselves happy, no matter how bad the act might be. Myself included. I'm no angel; but I do also know that there are aspects of human nature that must be resisted to maintain civility and decency. But back to taking compliments....I can't remember the last one that I took seriously. As soon as I hear someone say something nice, right away I ask myself what the ulterior motives for saying it were. "You look good today, Mike!" Uh huh. What do you want? It's a familiar retort, one that everyone asks themselves when they hear a nice comment. But from the time I was a kid going to Tapp's store at the corner, to the time I was violated when I was a twelve year old, to all the name-calling and finger pointing I took when I was at school and at dances, to my first serious girlfriend Michelle telling me she'd be there for me forever only to fuck around on me not once but twice, etc., I don't believe it. In fact, the only compliments I've taken seriously are from gay guys from when I used to work at a store where a lot of them lived in town. A gay person giving me a compliment seemed the most sincere, since I'd had a history of sexual intrusion by a male "friend" of mine to begin with. Nothing against gay people. In fact, among the sexual orientations, they seem like probably the most honest in terms of offering opinions.
But in the end, I have a wife who I love and loves me, and actually felt that way since high school. The problem with us getting together was we had so many obstacles in the forms of other relationships that I've had with other women. Amazingly, most girls I've been with have cheated on me. Guys are supposed to be the "dogs". Well, either I got really unlucky, or I'm living proof that people can be "dogs", not one gender or the other. But Janice has been devoted to me from the time we began seeing each other, and I believe I've found the mate that I was meant to be with all my life. And we have a beautiful daughter that adds cement to that foundation. I don't have a whole lot of friends that I'm really close to though, but the ones I do keep in touch with I feel are sincere enough to really be called friends of mine. If you're reading this, or you got an invitation to come to my site, you can count yourself among them.
(February 22, 2003)
The Twilight Zone
Janice and I recently watched "Signs" on DVD after we bought it with a gift certificate we got for Christmas from our friends Pete and Doriane. When we got done seeing it, we talked again about it like it was the first time, even though it was actually the third. We discussed how actually freaky some coincidences are, and one popped up that we talked about which made us wonder about the subject matter in this movie. Allow me to elaborate:
One Friday night back in early spring of 1996, Janice and me went to visit a couple of friends of ours, Tim and Kelly, at the basement apartment of a house on Cedar Street here in Moncton. We'd always had a good time with the two of them, and we stayed late. Janice was pregnant with Lexy at the time, who was going to be born only a month or two later. I would talk to Tim about hockey or music or whatever else interested us at the time, and Janice and Kelly carried on their kid-oriented conversations.
The time came for us to leave as midnight approached, and we got dressed and headed for the door. Just then Tim stopped us from leaving, because he wanted me to see a sports highlight he'd seen earlier on Sportsdesk, which was going to be on at midnight. After a little hemming and hawing, I sat down while Janice waited to leave at the door, and a minute or so later, we heard this huge boom that actually shook the house. Tim and myself thought someone was trying to break in upstairs, so we very cautiously proceeded outside. What we found was horrifying.
Outside the door lay an axle from a pickup truck in the driveway, and the rest of the truck was strewn across the property of the house we were in and the one next door. There was a staircase outside of the building that led to a third floor outside, and about twelve or so steps up the staircase lay a bloodied man making very haunting, barely human sounds. In the pickup truck, seatbelted into the passenger side, sat a man conscious looking out in disbelief, obviously in shock. He appeared okay despite that, but his friend that was apparently vaulted through the windshield up into the staircase was not. Tim told me to go into the house and get a cloth to help stop the bleeding of the driver and call authorities, so I got some towels and got Kelly and Janice to call the police and an ambulance. The breath on the driver was completely alcohol laden. This was clearly a case of drinking and driving, with the consequences of such stupidity obvious before our eyes, but we thought these guys made a huge mistake and they're paying a huge price, so let's help them through this. We kept the driver conscious until medical help arrived. We noticed a car on the road that was completely totalled, and figured what must have happened was, these guys were speeding down the street and recklessly smashed into a car parked on the road, which was so close to the car we'd parked in front of the house it was amazing our car never got touched. If only that were the truth.
As it turns out, what had actually come to pass was these men were foolishly frolicking speedily down Cedar Street in their truck and ran a stopsign, which smashed into a car coming the other way and sent it about 150 feet down the road, while the pickup went out of control and smashed into the house we were visiting in the driveway. The occupant of the car was a woman in her early 20's who was on her way home from an evening shift at the Moncton Hospital, and was killed instantly upon impact of the accident by the drunk driver. Once Tim and I had learned the full story, we were so disgusted and filled with anger, we wished we'd never helped the men that were involved in this tragedy. Indeed, I was tempted to go over and kick the driver in the head several times, I was so angry. What's worse, when the court case was heard later, these guys tried in vain to proclaim their innocence to the event. These guys are sad excuses for human beings. And that's paying a compliment.
The anti-climax, sort of, being here that had Tim not stopped us so I could see this sports replay that night, it's likely Janice and me would not be here today, and certainly Alexandra would have been killed, still inside her mom's belly. Our car, which seemed directly in the line of this accident, was completely unscathed. Only mere seconds separated us from being a part of this catastrophe, seconds that were provided to us via TSN's Sportsdesk and Tim's insistence that I watch it. That's quite a coincidence.
The more we'd thought about it, the more we had to think how strange it was that it all happened. How it seemed like some kind of metaphysical protective veil was placed over us to shield us from the tragic event yet to take place. It's more remarkable in retrospect to us than it was at its present time, and seeing "Signs" made us ask questions to ourselves about a lot of strange coincidences in our lives. We really always have believed that fate has been set out for us, but sometimes there are startling things that take place in our lives to make this more abundantly clear. There really is something else out there. It doesn't matter if you believe it or I believe it.
But we definitely do. (January 18, 2003)
Rick Pony's Up
I've got a brother named Rick. Or as I remember from the younger years, Ricky. He HATES being called "Ricky". Eventually, everyone relented, except maybe our relatives who live in the Miramichi here in New Brunswick, and "Ricky" became "Rick" on a more permanent basis. Unless he needed a ribbing.
Let me tell you, Rick is one of the most giving people on earth you could ever meet. This is a guy who seemingly has no limits in his capacity to give, and he'll put forth whatever effort it takes to get the job done for you should you call on him for help. This is a trait that exists in all my family, but on a more personal level on my end, I've called upon Rick probably more than anybody else for assistance, and every single time he was there. Without fail. There didn't seem to be a task too daunting for him to give you a hand with.
Of the dozens upon dozens of times Rick has given me a hand with whatever dilemmas I was faced with, one that comes to mind was when I owned a car, a Hyundai Pony. Straight up, this thing was a shitbox. I didn't know what I was doing when I got the thing. I paid way too much for it, and though it did work well for me for the first number of months and always started in the most freezing weather because of its manual choke, it broke down more times than I could possibly remember. And whenever I was in a bind on a road somewhere far from home, I'd call upon good 'ol Rick and to the rescue he came. Whether it was in the freezing cold or the boiling heat or pouring rain, he was there, opening up the hood and figuring out a way to at least get the beast going. One night though, it couldn't be revived, and I needed to get it towed to a garage.
On this night, the alternator was ready to kick the bucket, and we'd give the thing a boost, it would run for a minute or two, we'd boost it again, go a little farther, until eventually there was nothing short of divine intervention that would make it go again. Rick took it upon himself to ride the Pony down the road at night with no lights because it would kill the battery, which wasn't charging because of the bad alternator, so everyone going the other way would flash their lights at Rick to kindly tell him he forgot to turn his lights on. I followed driving his car behind him, and I remember laughing pretty hard at everybody flashing their lights at Rick, knowing why they were. The last time Rick got out, he said he was getting fed up with everyone flashing their lights at him like he was some kind of idiot. I thought I was going to split my sides laughing that night.
So we came down to the conclusion that the Pony had to be towed the rest of the way, about two miles. Rick had a tow rope in the car for just the occasion, and while I sat in the Pony, Rick would tow it in the car in front of him to the garage. I was pretty green about this kind of ordeal. We'd get going, I'd be steering my car while Rick pulled it ahead of me, and my foot was pressing the brake to varying degrees all the way there. When we finally made it to the garage, Rick lit up like a roman candle. "What the hell were you doing anyway?!" How come? "The engine in my car's ready to go nuclear on me! Were you braking?" Noooooo............!
That little unscheduled tug-of-war between Rick's car and mine was an essential lesson in how to tow or be towed by another car. Thankfully, my Hydoonie, as Rick affectionately called it, didn't drag Rick's car down to hell with it. Ironically enough, when I was ready to trade that lemon in for an even bigger lemon (which Rick was at my beck and call with as well), Rick was in need of a car and I gave it to him for, I think it was, $300, maybe less. That car lasted Rick a couple of years, I think, surprisingly enough. The one that I got nearly drove me to insanity. It was the one after that which I went mad with. But that's a whole other story.
These days, I haven't had to call Rick on account of car trouble since I found the ultimate solution: I gave up cars. I have a company van that gets me from A to B that suits me fine, with a contribution of gas to compensate what I do with it. All the time Rick's put in to help me fix my automobile problems would add up to enough mechanic's charges to buy a good chunk of a garage. But he never, ever once asked anything in return. Appreciation and recognition for his deeds seemed to be more than enough to him.
And it's been a long time since I've called him "Ricky"!
(January 3, 2003)
You Say You Want a Resolution?
Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Our own, at the very least. What's going to be your resolution for 2003? Are you even going to have one?
Most people I talk to on this subject will give me a bullshit answer. Like, "my resolution is to lose ten pounds" or whatever. Even if they do in fact follow through with it, normally they gain twice the amount of weight back later. Losing weight is more often than not a lifelong thing. You can't just go on a "diet", lose the weight and be done with it. If and when indeed you do lose that weight, you need to actually change the way you're living your life to keep it off. That's a huge commitment! It really is. So what a tough resolution that is.
Some people who smoke will resolve to quit smoking. Wow, little do they know what they're in for if it's their first attempt at quitting. Nicotine is a narcotic, truth be told, and to break the habit of an addictive narcotic like that is easier said than done. I think it's safe to say that if you become a smoker, you're a smoker for life, even if you quit. Much like an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, even if they give up the booze, because they always have that yearning for a drink all their lives. All these things are pretty tall orders to give up. More so than meets the eye.
I was one of those people to fall into the trap of going to the gym in the New Year to shed off some excess pounds. I've done it more than once in the past. And make no mistake; I actually succeeded. Every time. And I put the weight back on too. Every time. That, again, is something that has to be made a habit of, going to the gym all the time the rest of your life, or the results you get just will not stick. Ultimately I got fed up with the gym, of being stuck on a machine for twenty minutes before moving on to the next one, watching weights go up and down above me while I was working on my own homemade hernia. I envisioned myself as Mr. Muscle one day. Just keep at it, Mike! One day you'll wow 'em all! What a crock of shit. If I did manage to do all that, I'd have to do a lot of suffering first, the bulk of which was becoming incredibly bored. Working out bored the snot out of me. I brought a discman, I brought my wife, read books and magazines, there's just no way around it. The gym is a DRAG. So, in short, this is another dumb resolution. At least to me.
What about giving up TV? I really like watching it. In fact, I admittedly watch likely too much of it. But I don't care! What else is there to do when the kid's in bed, the wife's at work and I have all this time to while away? Well, if "24" is on, or "Everybody Loves Raymond", WWE's "Raw" or "Smackdown", the news, some intriguing music special or any array of other shows that I like to see, then I'm gonna watch it. Until the hair grows back around my belly button so it can collect lint that I can pick out of it, I've got nothing better to do.
I know what to do for a Resolution........I'll take U2's advice. Watch more TV!
(December 26)
What Goes Around....
Just recently I taught my daughter the difference between "modesty" and "cockiness". She's a very, very bright girl who is always willing to learn something new from her mom and dad, and on such matters as this I'm more than willing to enlighten her on the subject. She had gotten her yellow belt at Tae Kwon Do about two months ago, and then the next month, her mom, Janice, got her yellow stripe belt, which is one notch below yellow. When Janice picked up Alexandra at school after a noon testing with Master Lessard to earn her yellow stripe belt, she was eager to tell Lexy the news.
"Guess what Alexandra?" She excitedly exclaimed.
"What, Mommy?"
"I got my yellow stripe belt today!" Janice wasn't quite sure what kind of an answer to expect with the news after telling her this.
"Well that's nothing, Mommy, I've got a yellow belt." Ah, we basically expected this. She's only six, after all.
After learning of this little exchange, I gently explained to our daughter how too much pride in one's self can amount to cockiness. She basically understood, but is learning as she goes and is more gracious toward others regarding their accomplishments now. I'd say that's good for a person her age.
When I was that young, I didn't have Tae Kwon Do classes, or baseball teams to play on, skates to skate in rinks with......actually I did have skates, but stopped going to the Dud James Arena skating rink after other kids picked on me to the point where I got beaten up when I went. It was certainly a different world back then. It was a time when bullies were just seen as a part of growing up, and you had to take your lumps to earn your stripes in life. I just wound up taking a lot of lumps. I earned my stripes later.
I got so much attention as a young boy before entering school, that it went to my head. A monster was created! My sister Debbie and her friend/cousin Anne would take me around and see me as some kind of real-life doll. I don't remember much of it, but I hear odd stories and see pictures I didn't realize I was ever in. Something I do remember, though, is being a massive fan of Bill Cosby. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, Cosby was releasing comedy albums that sold like hotcakes that everyone loved, young and old alike. There were two albums of his in particular, To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With and The Best Of Bill Cosby that I loved to the point that I memorized them, somewhat word for word, and my family would have me put on "shows" in front of company that came over where I would earn a quarter or a couple of dimes for reciting the full length of the albums complete with my own little mannerisms and substitutes of sounds or words, where I didn't know what Cosby was saying on the record. Before long, the neighbours on Emmerson Street were putting in requests, and I was making enough with each performance to get a whole bottle of pop, a chip and a comic book with my earnings! Life was good as a performing artist.
But eventually it would all come to an end. I'd get older and go to school as a very tired kid everyday, like Rick and Cindy, due to Dad's relentless renditions of old war songs and talking...make that YELLING...at old ghosts at three and four o'clock in the morning. My grades in school didn't really make it up to par. I was always a 'C' student. Only in grade four was I a 'B' student, for whatever reason.
With the shortfall in attention via the Bill Cosby record recitals and nothing to replace it, came the stealing. As a little boy I stole from corner stores and the Dominion grocery store near the school, and would go to school with my nettings and give the loot, mostly in the form of packs of gum, to my friends and enemies alike. I had this big Parka jacket that was likely two sizes too big for me, and holes in the pockets inside so I could dump all these packs of gum into them without it showing. Eventually I got caught stealing. Again and again and again. Punishment didn't seem to stop me. Threats of calling the police on me scared me for about a half hour, then I'd be plotting my next conquest. I remember the last thing I stole, I was twelve, and it was at the Irving corner store up the street from where I lived. My mom had given me money to get cheese slices for sloppy joes she was making for supper, and I wore my trusty Parka and got out of the store safely and kept the money. Then the clerk, I think her name was Nancy, told the boss and he called my mother, who was at the end of her rope with getting calls about my stealing. I remember how sad she was and felt helpless and hopeless about my kleptomania. It finally clicked in, at that point, that I had to stop this miserably annoying habit of stealing.
For now.
Then there were the Lenten folders, in which you'd insert a quarter in each day of Lent, a period around Easter for Catholics, and hand in the full folder at the end of Lent to the church for a donation. I'm in my mid teens here, carrying a paper route and an out-of-control addiction to pinball and video game machines. I found out that with those folders, you could insert a nickel instead of a quarter and it was hardly noticeable. I got a lot of pinball and video games out of those Lent folders. Until my brother Rick one day blew the whistle, and all fingers pointed at me for the quarters mysteriously disappearing in favor of the almighty nickels. Again, mom was devastated. You would have thought she must have been just about ready to give up on me. But no way; not Thora Cook of Emmerson Street. She's had tougher challenges than this, most notably surviving a marriage with a husband infected with alcoholism. Mom never punished me. Not then or ever, really. Her real punishment was in her sheer and obvious disappointment of me, and she made it really obvious. That hurt more than any whuppin' or grounding ever could. Her patience and faith in me paid off in the end, and eventually I got a job, found responsiblity with money and respect for others' belongings, and a deep spirituality in my conscience that finally allowed me to feel guilty for wronging others.
In the end, I guess it really all comes down to attention. It can be not unlike drugs, in that you can't heap it onto someone and then take it all away suddenly, or things can go wrong. Suddenly you're finding ways to get it regardless of how shady those ways may be. When you're a youngster, the amount of praise and criticism to administer is so delicate in balance that you find out as an adult how tough it really can be to be a parent. And you only realize that when you become one yourself.
I didn't get the chance to repay Mom for everything she did for me, because by the time I realized my new life with Janice as parents to our daughter, her mind was playing cruel tricks on her via her dimentia. It's a massive regret of mine that I could never really convey to Mom how valuable everything she taught me really was. Make that is.
But I know she's reading this. I know she's looking over my shoulder right now as tears well up in my eyes, smiling proudly upon her baby boy. Mom......thank you so much!
| Weeeee! |
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| Goin' down on the big slide at Charlottetown Driving Park's midway |
My name, truthfully, in all honesty so help me God, is Randall Michael Cook. But you can call me Mike. See, legend has it that my mom somehow fouled up my birth certificate and got my name backwards, which left me a Randy individual. But she and dad called me Mike anyway. I like that. Nowadays can you imagine the jokes a guy named Randy would get?
It was allegedly a stormy December 26 in 1965 that I introduced myself to mankind as we know it. Clearly when I showed up in my mom's belly I was kind of an unexpected guest, as mom was a cool 40 years old when I began to take over her uterus. There are six other kids that were born before me to my mom and dad: The next youngest being sister Cindy, then brother Rick, sister Debbie, and then brothers Greg, Roy and Peter. Both my parents are together again in the afterlife after my mother died in 1998, and dad left us in 1978.
I've now migrated from the old Emmerson Street residence (now the God-awful named Cassidy Street) to Belmont Street three streets over. I'm married to who I believe is the ultimate woman for me, Janice, beyond the shadow of a doubt; and together we've produced a child whose name is Alexandra Spring. Our lovely daughter is now six years old as of this day in July, 2002, and is about to enter her first year of school after completing kindergarten last year. She's a yellow stripe belt in Tae Kwon Do, and her mom and dad are following in her footsteps, after we've joined in with her over the summer. We're gonna kick some MAJOR ass!
We also have one very fine feline named Rocky the cat, aka Bubba, Tubby, Fatboy, Old Man, Buttmunch, etc. He's an old guy, 14 or 15 years old, and still refuses to act his age. Geez, I hope when I get old I'm as immature as he is. So far so good. Heh!
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| L-R: Bro Pete's woman Bonnie, Lexy and Janice |
Moncton, New Brunswick is where I was born and raised and have lived here for the entirety of my life. I will die here too, I love where I am and have no plans to change my address at any time in my life. But you know how things are, "life" is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So who knows. It's nice to be back living in the same neighbourhood that I grew up in, just three streets over from where I was raised. And I know now what it means when people say 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'. And I'm grateful that that's true.
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Our lovely model Lexy is displaying the 1995 Chevy Astro with BJ's Subs and Catering logo along with Premiere Lamination Inc. Total value of this lovely vehicle is.........let's not go there, K? |
It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it
For me the glass is always full. Sometimes you know, like everyone, I'll hit a hole in the road and whine like everyone, but DAMN I'm lucky. I've got everything I want, including a great job.
I work for a place called BJ's Subs and Catering, where I drive around all day and deliver sandwiches to hospitals, stores and cater to businesses and residences. I love driving. In over six years of putting on at least 35,000 km on the road a year, I've only been involved in two accidents, neither of which were caused by me. And I'm still alive to talk about it. Even more dangerously, there's a whole shop full of women that I have to go back to when the job is done. And hey, when I can't take the heat in there, I WILL get out of the kitchen. Seriously, I can't go without mentioning the stalwarts that have been there since I've been there, like Lucy, Jeanette, Elise, Carla and almost fitting that bill, Nicole, Rose Mai and Stacey. Lots of people have come and gone, and for the most part, I consider myself fortunate for having known everyone. But let's face it....some were out to lunch. And they ate it at BJ's.
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Once Upon a Time....
Not everyone who knows me knows a whole lot about my medical history or the things that happened that make my history somewhat medical. Care to bite into this one?
When I was around 12 years old, I was a bat boy for a local senior baseball league team called the A&W's. It was an extremely fun time in my young life as I got to see all the ball games for free, hang out with the team and do errands and stuff for them, but most of all I got to go on the road with the guys when the games were away, within the province. We'd go to Fredericton, Saint John, Chatham, Edmundston, and maybe a few others that I can't quite recall. For me it was an all expenses paid round trip, and it was a blast.
There was one night in Edmundston though that it was literally a blast. I was sitting alongside the ball field while one of our guys was at the plate during the game, and he drilled a fastball foul.....right straight at my head, and right between the eyes. No kidding. I don't know how fast that ball was going, but it must've been close to the 150-200 mph range. I remember everything spinning, and falling over as I tried to stand, and hearing the collective gasp in the baseball field. Everybody gathered around me to see if I was okay. This is the kind of thing that kills a lot of people, especially a twelve year old, and there was plenty of concern in the dugout that night. I was sent to the hospital to be looked over.
They didn't take a catscan or anything, just looked into my eyes with a light, asked me some questions and basically said I was okay. I couldn't believe it. How could I have taken a smash into the head with a hard baseball like that and gone through without a scratch inside or outside?? Of course I must have suffered at least a concussion, but wasn't told so. I was released and went back to the ballgame, still in progress.
We had stayed overnight the night before because it was a doubleheader, and so after that game we hit the road home and drove straight back to Moncton. I stayed awake the whole night during the ride home, and we arrived somewhere around three o'clock or so. I'd headed back to my house on Emmerson Street, and my mom was away in Ontario to see Engelbert Humperdinck or something or another, I remember, so I didn't have anyone to tell what happened to me that I cared to tell at that time of the night. I flopped myself down on the couch, and before I knew it, it was over 20 hours later. Something had happened. I might have been in a coma, but I don't know. All I know is that a lot of time passed by that day that I thought was unaccounted for. I do remember my sister Cindy yelling at me for being on the couch, not knowing of course that I'd just gotten corked in the head by a speeding baseball.
One day when I was thirteen, my mom went to my brother Roy's house while he was still living here in Moncton to babysit for him for a few days while he and his then-wife Anne were away for whatever reason. I got lonely for my momma and decided to bike the two or three miles or so from our house to Roy's to go see her. On the way back after the visit, I found out the hard way that cars don't magically pass through bicycles when you drive your bike out in front of them and said hello to a windshield and took the express route to the pavement. An ambulance took me to the hospital to check me out but I was okay. It was more or less just a dust up. Scary nonetheless.
At fourteen, in the summertime, I was riding my tenspeed up Vaughn Harvey Boulevard here in Moncton towards Mountain Road, against traffic, when I approached a corner and once again tested the integrity of a vehicle's windshield, this time a Volkswagen van, and my head made history of the entire pane of glass. Consequently, the glass made pain for me, but didn't make me history. It knocked me cold for a few minutes, and the last thing I'd remembered was sitting in an ambulance, asking over and over what time it was and whether or not I could go home. The answer to the latter was no. I was sent to the hospital and admitted overnight for observation after being administered two stitches to the head, and went home the next day. I'd suffered a concussion, but nothing I couldn't get over. I think. After all, I did have that line drive baseball to the head to think about. This would be number two.
I was sixteen years old when Christmas was coming around, and it was in December that I'd headed to the arcade with my newspaper collection money to feed my addiction for the video and pinball machines. I was in trouble with the newspaper collection office for not submitting my dues. I took the long walk to the bowling alley where the arcade was on the dark and rainy night and blew all the money I'd had, after my so-called friends hadn't even shown up, and walked home. But when I went to cross the street on the corner of Mountain Road and Killam Drive, I was hit by a car crossing the crosswalk. This one was so bad I don't even remember being hit. I was knocked out cold instantly with the back of my head smashing to the pavement. I was unconcious for a long time, I was told. I was in a coma until the overnight hours when I came to, supposedly with my mother by my side. I don't remember. I was on such heavy drugs that I didn't have my right of mind whatsoever. My face was blackened around the eyes, and they'd taken a catscan and discovered a serious concussion. I was to be kept in the hospital in case, I'm guessing, of hemorraging. Two weeks I was in. I remember a few days into my stay hearing that John Lennon had been killed. I thought it was all part of this bad dream I'd been having that I was hit by a car and I was in the hospital for a long time. But it was real, unfortunately, and I didn't believe it about Lennon until I was actually out of the hospital.
My equilibrium has not been the same since that last accident. I can't tolerate circus rides any more or any other kind of spinning motion. Sometimes I notice a difficulty in concentrating. When Janice, Lexy and I are on a road trip, and I need directions, I ask Janice to get them from a gas station attendant, not because of pride; I could give a shit less. But because sometimes I just can't seem to get things straight. I'm certainly a better writer than I am a talker.
The mid eighties right up to the mid nineties saw me go through a bout of depression. To the point that I'd needed help or it was going to be all over. More concussions ensued through those years. Though the grace of God, though, I got the courage to get the guidance I needed to get my life on track for perhaps the first time. I'm at the point in my life in the last few years where it's never been better. Since Lexy was born, I knew I had to take hold of my demons and choke them out. My daughter gave me a new lease on life, and actually really gave me a life. And I wound up with a wife that couldn't possibly be more understanding, or more for me. Were it not for her, I really doubt that I'd be alive right now.
I'd often wondered what's been keeping me alive all these years, if I'd been meant for something, if fate has something in store for me that I'm meant to inherit for the better of those around me. I can't help but believe that. I can hope it at least. And try to make a difference in the lives of those around me.
Love Stinks.....but only if it's rotten
It was with some trepidation that I thought about adding this little column to my website, but seeing as this is called the "What's Wrong With That Boy?!" page (a tip of the hat to Bill Cosby's To Russell, My Brother.... comedy album from the 60's, by the way), I figure I may as well explain some things that are probably wrong with me. Relax! This is NOT a self-pity thing. Everybody has their demons. But not everyone has a website to discuss them on. Alas, here I go with the roots of my love life......
When I was a boy, in the five year old range, I was often told I looked like a girl. My hair was blonde and rather flippant looking. I had no real female tendencies though, that I know of or can remember, and the fact that girls began to get me "excited" at the tender age of around seven kind of backs that up.
There was a girl in the neighbourhood named Sherry. When I was around 12 years old, I saw her, and she was around 17ish. In the summertime she wore these really short shorts and tight t-shirts, and I saw her basically as God's gift to male eyeballs. Making a long story short, Sherry found out I had this crush on her and made fun of me in the neighbourhood about it, and not in a fun way. She'd back away from me like I was this gross thing when I was around, and make it very obvious to anyone around she was doing so. Eventually I felt like I was the ugly guy around because of this. It led me to begin a lifelong journey of low self-confidence that I deal with to this day, but these days I don't let it win like I once did.
I met Marie through a friend of mine when I was 16, in the summertime. We dated (my first date) a few times, up until she decided that I 'wasn't ready to have a girlfriend' at that point. Maybe I wasn't, but she certainly wasn't in the know much herself. So, I was left to ponder that for a little while.....
This same friend that hooked me up with Marie introduced me to other girls, basically all of whom found me probably a little hard on the eyes. I had bad acne growing up in my teen years, and often that's all other kids would see. Nothing serious ever happened between me and a girl for a long time. Dates were broken, not on my part, and rejection happened over and over, time after time, to a point where I basically gave up and became frightened to socialize with females altogether.
Enter Patcy. I met her at Mathieu Martin High School one day when I tagged along with my friend who was going there to see his girlfriend, Debbie, who went there. Debbie introduced Patcy to me. "Hi there!!" She said, as she punched me in the shoulder so hard it nearly knocked me off my seat to the floor. I was in love! Seriously! She sat down right beside me and began to carry on a conversation. This beautiful attractive girl was talking to me. Something wasn't right. Was she put up to this? Did someone pay her off out of pity for me? No. Patcy made a connection with me from the first day we met. And she was the kind of girl that I felt was the unattainable type; so good looking and hot that she was out of my league. Well, she brought me into her league if that was the case. This at a time when my acne problem was at its very worst, because I'd been taking the drug Accutane at the time which makes the acne problem far worse before it makes it better. She saw through it all, though, and took a liking to me. Phone calls between us happened, with a few dates, but Patcy's aspirations at the time were to join the army, which took her out of town and into the far reaches of Canada. We kept in touch as friends through the years. She lives closer now and we still talk from time to time.
After Patcy had left for the army, I met someone in the most unique way. In Mr. Gould's English class in Harrison Trimble High School, I'd sat at a desk that was ripe for writing on it, and me being the big KISS fan I was drew a KISS logo on the desk with "Lick It Up" inscribed underneath it, the band's current album at the time. The day after I'd done that, someone wrote "It's only right now" underneath it. That's the next line of the song in the chorus of "Lick It Up", the title song on the band's album, which was played a lot on the radio around here. I decided to play along some more....so I wrote, "Don't wanna wait till you know me better", the first line in the song. The next day, "Let's just be glad for the time together" appeared after it. Then I wrote...."you have good taste in music! what's your name?" To which it was replied, "Thanks! And the same to you! Michelle. And what's yours?" Anyway, we carried on a small conversation on the schooldesk that led to lengthy letters that we left inside them, and we finally planned on meeting each other blindly at a school dance. Michelle's mutual friend, Debbie, brought her over to me and introduced me to her, and we stuck together like glue on glue for the rest of the night. We committed to each other (or we were 'going out' as you might call it), and basically laid the groundwork in our minds as to how and how not to treat a partner.
Michelle and I broke up several times during the seven years we were together. One time we broke up was when I found out she cheated on me. She didn't deny it. It tore me apart emotionally. I was really quite immature with the relationship thing, but she was to a certain extent too, and she was led astray by 'friends' to show her what a so-called real boyfriend should treat her like. I would assume she thought that I wouldn't get another girlfriend for a long, long time.
About a week after I broke up with Michelle I met Kim. Kim was attractive, with an especially killer body! She had the long curly hair, soft lips that could hypnotize the meanest SOB on earth, and legs that seemed as long as a lot of girls were tall. She expressed interest in me when my band at the time was jamming in my friend Pete's basement. Kim and I went together for about three months, and called it off mutually and remained friends. In fact, I set her up with a friend of mine, Carl, whom she wound up marrying and is happy with to this day.
A week or two after I'd broken up with Kim I met Natalie. Natalie was really pretty, with a curvy, well put together body that made a lot of guys envious of whoever she was with. She'd taken a liking to me too, after I'd met her through a friend. We saw each other for about a week and a half, though, and we too remained friends, though I haven't seen or heard from her now in years. In the middle of our weeklong affair, though, Michelle's relationship had long gone sour, and she came to the store I was working at on the night shift to try to get me back. She hadn't realized that I wasn't lonely or not crushed by my breakup with her anymore. She got upset when I told her about my relationships since we'd been together. As boastful as this might sound, I actually felt my heart tugging me back towards Michelle, and after Natalie and I had ended our brief liason, Michelle and I got back together.
Fast forward to the end of the relationship between Michelle and myself....she'd cheated on me again, and I broke up with her for good. Ironically enough, the same friend that coaxed her to have an affair the last time did it again this time. I don't really hold Michelle responsible for the breakup as much as I do her peers. But a lot of emotional investment in that relationship was up in flames when she cheated a second time. I'd had a good job at a tissue plant here in Moncton which had just opened up, was making great money, and even began making plans to ask her to marry me, then I broke my foot at the plant, took time off work to heal and then this thing with Michelle happened. Shortly after that, I was blacklisted by the Irving Tissue Plant because I was their first industrial accident, and I was laid off from my job permanently. To make matters worse, it was then that my family found out that mom had a brain disease called "Pix", which is a Alzheimer's-like dimentia that has no cure, and is fatal after five or ten years. Shortly after finding that out, my Aunt May died, whom my whole family loved dearly. She was one of the best people who I'd ever known, never harboured ill will toward anyone ever. Truly inspirational. Then my step-grandmother Greta became ill with heart and kidney trouble. It seemed like things were exploding, and Michelle had left right where the fuse had been lit.
Janice was a friend I'd known for years, and we'd been really good friends too. We could talk about anything and everything. I met Janice around 1986 at Green Gables convenience store here in the city, where I'd worked for quite a while under Don Goguen, whom I still have employment ties with, and is the best boss ever, by the way. Janice eventually took over that store, and shortly after she did I left, after not having been offered to work day shift when I'd worked midnight shifts for years. A few months later I got the job at the tissue plant, and a few months after that, I was unemployed again. Janice had left Green Gables to work driving for BJ's Subs, which Don had just bought and left Green Gables to run. Green Gables Convenience went bankrupt, and the stores and the Green Gables name was bought by TRA Foods, who also owns the Sobey's grocery store chain in Canada. After working for Don for the summer, Janice was offered a store by TRA Foods, which she took, and the BJ's driving job was taken by someone else. Janice later ran into trouble keeping reliable midnight staff at her new location of Green Gables, and I'd offered to help her out. Well, before you know it, I was 'doing' the boss, Janice and I became a permanent item, we left Green Gables in the dust, I got the job at BJ's, coincidentally, that she'd once had, we have a beautiful child, I'd solved my depression problems, and life became sweeeeeeeeeet!
It just goes to show, boys and girls, that the true love of your life could be right under your nose, and at the right time, if fate will have it like it did for us, it could smack you right in the heart when you need it the most, IF you let it. And no matter how bad life gets, it will get better, as long as you keep fighting back. Sooner or later, something's got to give. And what you'll get in return can be priceless. Here's a little song I wrote.
You might want to sing it note for note, but don't worry.....I won't!
Some time ago, not long after Alexandra was born, I was in a band with my friend Pete, and we were writing songs for it. Before we quit doing it, I'd come up with this song, with the point of view of me singing to Alexandra. I've got music to go with this and a melody and everything---it's something that I've kept in my head for years and won't forget it.
Originally called "Life Saver", I didn't want it to get confused with me singing about the little holey candies, so I changed 'saver' to 'angel', which makes it far more fitting, and called the song "Full Circle". I believe that most people can only truly come into their own by having a child of their own, and re-live childhood through the eyes of their own precious ones. I truly felt like I became a man and 'grew up' the night Lexy was born.
On the day Janice and me found out she was pregnant, she cried out of fear of me leaving. That's "the pain of her doubt" that she couldn't disguise. And when I talked to Lexy through her mommy's belly before she was born, I 'felt' her heart through her mother's, knowing they were one and the same. When she was born and the nurses handed her to me, it changed my life forever for the better.
FULL CIRCLE
I'd been wandering around
I'd been feeling down
And I'd wondered 'bout the worth of me
Then I got the news
I'd be seeing you
Didn't know just how I'd feel
But when I looked in her eyes
She couldn't disguise
The pain of her doubt
But when I felt her heart beating,
I could feel your heart beating, yeah
You're my life, angel
You're the fire in my heart
You're the river to my ocean
You're the light when it's dark
You're my life, angel
It was late at night
Everything felt alright
I got to be a man
I came full circle
When I felt that miracle
In the palms of my hands
When I looked in her eyes
She couldn't disguise
The pain of her doubt
But when I felt her heart beating
I could feel your heart beating, yeah
You're my life, angel
You're the fire in my heart
You're the river to my ocean
You're the light when it's dark
You're my life, angel
You melted a heart of stone
You made our house a home
Now that you're here
We'll never be alone
You're my life angel
You're the fire in my heart
You're the river to my ocean
You're the light when it's dark
You're my life, angel
You're my courage when there's fear
You're the angel I'll watch over
Forever, dear (posted December 5, 2002)
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Innocent Till Proven Grownup
There were times when I was a kid that I went through a lot of stuff that would make you wonder how I got through it, but truth is, it was all spread out over such a long time that it made it somewhat easier to get through. That doesn't make it necessarily any easier, but there was still room for good times. And LOTS of time to cause trouble of my own.
Let me talk to you about one of my prime targets when I was a yung'un. My sister Cindy went through her share of rough times when she was a kid, like a lot of us do. I won't elaborate on the tough times she had to endure, except to say that it's made her tough over the years and forced her to relate to her "Cook side" more than her "Gould side", that being that she's had to steel herself over the years. In her younger years, it at times made her somewhat bitter perhaps, through my eyes, and wary of people's intentions toward her when they did treat her with respect.
Cindy is the second youngest of the family. Theory has it when you're the youngest in your clan, you're the most spoiled. So maybe when I came along and took that title from Cindy, it subconciously had something to do with the sibling rivalry that existed between us as we were growing up together in the same household. Maybe not, but it's a theory to ponder. Nonetheless, it's just natural evolution within a family, and as soon as family members disperse and create their own lives and families, absence makes the heart grow fonder for your brothers and sisters, and you realize the friction you have sometimes with them really is a part of growing up and experiencing self-realization.
Ah, but the memories! I won't deny being a true troublemaker in Cindy's life when she was growing up in her teen years. I didn't always make it easy for her love life. She had this boyfriend once named Chuck, I think his name was, and he was a really kid-friendly person. I don't know what problems arose between Chuck and Cindy to cause them to split, it was likely the usual stuff. Chuck was big on art, he drew a lot, and taught me early on to draw myself. When I took to drawing as a kid, this is where it all began. I remember Cindy and myself drawing together when Chuck wasn't around. Despite some of the stuff I talk about in this little writeup, the good times far outnumbered the bad between my sister and me, but right now maybe some of the crap I caused makes for entertaining reading!
In the pre-Chuck days, there was this other guy that Cindy brought home to meet Mom once. I don't remember his name. But after the initial visit when he left, I remember overhearing Mom telling Cindy that she didn't get a very good impression of him and didn't think too fondly of him. Cindy was understandably and predictably defensive. Who wouldn't be? So when this guy came back a second time, when he walked in the door, I made it a point to tell him that Mom didn't like him. "My mom doesn't like you, you know." It took the guy aback! "Oh really?" It was a bit of a shock that this little kid who looked so cute and innocent spewed such ugly truth. Cindy was livid at my remarks. But what'd I do wrong? I didn't lie or anything! Man, if there was a time where Cindy could've hauled off and sent me through the squares of our livingroom window, that'd be one of them. But there were a heck of a lot more than just one!
George came along much later on in Cindy's late teens. George is a guy who's very keen on reasoning and able to sort things out for what they are more than just how he feels about them, where Cindy is driven on emotion, so they counterbalance each other very well. So well that they got married and are together to this day. George is a really smart guy; he built a house once, and hired me to help him bang some nails into the walls of his project. It was a learning experience. I learned that I'll never be a carpenter! Farmers have their green thumbs and I had my blue ones with carpentry. George is also an electrician, which is the career path that he chose for the rest of his life. Growing up around George when he was with Cindy, I learned a lot in terms of work ethic. I could never be as dedicated as he is, I don't think, but his determination to get things done is quite inspirational.
But in the early going, George wasn't Chuck. Chuck used to give me drawing books and pencils, probably to suck up to look better to Cindy and Mom. Not long after Cindy started seeing George, I remember being at the top of the staircase and yelling down to Cindy in the kitchen at our house, saying I don't like George. "What's wrong with George?!" Cindy yelled back. I stopped and thought about the answer that would best piss her off...."he never gives me anything!" Well Cindy probably lit up like Hiroshima at that point. Mission accomplished! I heard her yell and shout at me from the top of the stairs and grinned from ear to ear at the fact that I made her blow her top yet again!
Cindy had a stereo that we all saw at the time as state-of-the-art, but it was just a cheap turntable with a console that had a radio, eight track and a bunch of useless buttons that affect the sound. The turntable played records too fast, but at the time, as far as I was concerned, all the other turntables in the world were just too slow. I played with that thing a lot. Cindy let me, too, and never said anything. Up until the time the plastic cover for her turntable found itself the victim of one of my flying buttsplashes and cracked through the middle. That prompted Cindy to get her electrically inclined boyfriend George to rig the stereo unusable with a fuse in the back of it that she could take out and keep me from using it. Nonetheless, Cindy was a softie beneath that sometimes hard exterior back then, and she let me use the turntable anyway. And endured the scratched records, messy rooms and broken this and thats that came with it.
Now we're all growed up! Through the years, Cindy followed a spiritual calling and softened her "hard exterior", and as all siblings do when they grow up, we can look back and understand some of the things we did to each other and attribute most of it just to growing up. Marriages don't last these days between two people, so to have a house of seven kids and two parents to all get along is something that's just too much to ask for. But we had a remarkably strong mother who saw us through everything, playing referee a whole lot more than probably she should have, and she now lives through all of us in the Cook family. Unmistakably through Cindy, especially. Cindy is a devout Catholic who devotes a huge portion of her time to charitable causes and making things right in the world through her own devices, such as love and reasoning. When I got my house here on Belmont Street, the place was a disaster. Anyone else would have looked at it and turned up their noses at the idea of buying it. Shortly after my mother died is when we moved in. In what seems like divine intervention, Janice and I surveyed the house and came up with a dollar amount that it would take to get the house livable. When Cindy asked what it would take to get it that way, I said the amount was around $1600 or so.......the exact same amount that our mother had left in her estate to be shared in the family. Cindy appealed to the Cooks to let us use the money to get our Belmont Street residence livable, and everyone in the family accepted the idea with open arms. I could not be more grateful. I had a bit of pride to swallow in accepting such a handout, but when you stop to wonder if some things were meant to be, this is one of those things that stand out. I feel like Mom was working through Cindy and the rest of the family. And today, I see it in her eyes, her expressions, her actions and intentions.
Thank God she can see past the little piss ant in her teenage years in me, though, eh?
(March 22, 2003)
Years Questioning Music............
Music was always a huge part of my life. Listening to it, writing it, playing it, everything. Mostly though, listening to my records in my bedroom at home. But around one Christmas, my brother Greg, with permission from my mother, went out and got me my first set of drums for my birthday at age 13. He knew of my intense interest in them, with my imitating Peter Criss from the "KISS Alive!" drum solo on cardboard boxes and pillows with my homemade drumsticks, and he took it upon hiumself to forward the evolution of my fascination with the skins one large step further.
I remember the drums as clear as day. It was a somewhat confusing setup, though it was completely normal to the layman, with a bass drum, hi-hat and stand, and snare drum which was inverted, with the batter skin on top but the strainers over the top as well, where the strainers on a snare drum go on the bottom with a thinner skin to resonate the sound of a strike to the batter on top. Nonetheless, it was a drumset, and I played my heart out for months and months. I had no idea whatsoever how to play them. I thought the bass drum was pretty useless. It had a pedal, but I didn't know why other than it hits the drum. When I watched drummers play on TV, I never saw a bass drum being played or how it was played. It was all stuff that I had to figure out on my own. Just like the high hat; I had no clue as to why its stand had a pedal that made one of the two cymbals go up and down. Eventually, though, I put it all together, and I figured out how to play "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen.
It was around this time that I became friends with a guy named Larry, who played guitar his own funny way similarly to the way I played drums my own special way. It was wrong, but we didn't care. If we could make noise that somehow resembled music, then it was fun. Larry was a left handed guitar player, with his strings upside-down for a left handed player, with two strings tuned the same instead of standard tuning. But he got by playing the way he did very well. Of all the guitar players I've played with over the years, Larry was one of the funnest. Even though he couldn't quite always nail the right notes of a song, he'd wing it anyway and we'd just have fun with it. But as time went on and my knowledge and playing improved, it became tougher to find a bass player or another guitar player to play with us, because of his own style of tuning. Still, we played for years, and I still have lots of cassette tape of our teen years of honing our skills to look back on.
I remember trying the patience of my mother, where I'd keep track of when she'd go out so I could tell Larry when it was okay to come over with his guitar and practice amp so we could jam. We'd play until my mom came home, and she'd turn the lights on and off in the basement to let us know she'd arrived. She wasn't entirely fond of Larry. She saw him as a bad influence on me, I think, and looking back, I can see why. But he had his own issues with his own family that helped steer him down the wrong forks in the road in life. He and I kept in touch from our budding teen years up until I was 21 or so, when I met a couple of friends named Pam and Kim, the former of whom I went out with for a couple of months. Larry got together with Pam, and they had a child together, but Larry soon after bailed out leaving Pam to raise their daughter, Amanda, by herself. I became friends with Pam as time went on, and to this day, she's one of my best. Larry, on the other hand, I completely lost touch with, and I have no idea if he's even still in town or what he's doing.
As time continued beyond "the Larry years" musically, I became good friends with a guy named Pete, and we formed numerous groups together covering eighties metal bands and really just having fun with playing. We put together a band with another friend of ours, Wayne, and tried out a guitar player named, well.....Wayne, a different one, whom we'd nicknamed "Tweak", because of his penchant for turning his guitar volume knobs down so the other guys would turn down also, then he'd suddenly jack his volume back up. It was unintentional, but funny, and a well-earned nickname. Wayne played guitar sometimes when it was called for, but mostly sang and fronted the band, and very well; not being shy about how our audience was, which was both funny and refreshing. We called ourselves Asylum, after what we thought was a great KISS album at the time. We later figured out it was one of the worst KISS albums ever, but the name was still cool. We played a few gigs, including a Battle of the Bands where we placed fifth out of something like twelve or so bands, had a lot of fun, but it was short lived with Pete in the fold. He left after about a year after becoming rather bored with the songs being chosen and the lack of the band wanting to do original music. The rest of us stayed intact, and we got a guy named Wallace to replace Pete on bass. With that lineup, we played a few more gigs, actually made some money, but then I got disenchanted with the band with the way the music scene was changing at the time, and the covers we wound up doing. I left, and Tweak and Wayne continued for a little longer before starting something different altogether.
I played in a few other bands after that, though none of them had gigs or did anything particularly productive. Then Pete and I got together again and actually started writing our own stuff. A guy named John played with us on guitar and Pete played bass, until we could find a guy to play bass so Pete could play guitar. We wound up recording a demo on a four-track recorder with four songs on it that we released locally on cassette, called "Hello, Earthlings" under the band name of YQM, which is the travel code denoting the city of Moncton. Pete was friends with a guy named Jody that he worked with at a Jungle Jim's restaurant here in town, and he convinced him to learn to play bass. The three of us solidified the band, and we wrote and rehearsed a bunch of songs over a period of two years that culminated in a CD that we relased locally. It was done on a very amateur level by the three of us. After having recorded and wrapped the CD, we realized there were proabably a lot of changes we should have made to make it seem a lot better. We had a guy who'd just come out of recording engineering school named Chris, who was relatively green to the process of making a CD at the time, but he'd done an absolutely fabulous job at making us sound a lot better than we actually were. But the outside, unbiased set of ears was not with us to keep certain things in check, and the rather half-baked CD was made. But it sold surprisingly well around town via the band and a local record store at Champlain Place shopping mall here in Moncton, and we played a gig for charity at the University of Moncton with a few other bands in the winter of '97.
YQM gave up the ghost, though, with inactivity and the departure of Jody back to Newfoundland where he came from. Pete and myself still keep in touch on a regular basis, and we always bring up the idea of writing and recording again, if only for our own self-gratification. Now I'm looking at selling the drums that I've had since my Asylum days for a smaller, simpler, better sounding kit to perhaps get serious about playing again. God knows the world awaits us!
(January 26, 2003)
Mama's Boy!
I won't make any bones about it, I was a Mama's boy.
It might shock some people who don't quite know me, and to others it'll make them shake their heads. But what I'm about to write in here, I have no regrets about. I'm thankful for everything I've got, and although I may have come up short of some people's expectations, the bottom line is I've got my house, my little girl, and a wife that I don't doubt will be there with me forever. What more could anyone want?
My dad died when I was 12. I have six siblings, four brothers and two sisters, all of whom I love dearly, like family ought to. Mom was a true hero to us in that she carried the torch for us, to which we would have our paths enlightened. Dad fell into a pit of alcoholism that wound up killing him, and several times very much tried the strength of his and Mom's marriage. From what I understand, it was shortly after I was born that my father started drinking. I have fond memories of him. He took me just about everywhere. He never had a car, but we trekked wherever we could by whatever means it took. Some of my fondest memories are going to the grocery store with Dad, where I could con him into buying all the junk that I liked. We'd come home with jars of peanut butter and ice cream and cookies and maybe, amongst all the junk, there'd be a loaf of bread and a quart of milk. Now I bring Lexy to the grocery store and I find her pulling the same tricks on me!
When I became a teenager, it came down to my brother Rick and my sister Cindy left in the house to live with Mom and me. As the years passed and we all trudged through high school, Rick left the fold and shortly after, Cindy met her future husband and got married and left also. Leaving me alone with mom at Emmerson Street. I worked at a convenience store for a long time, making enough money to keep a car running and to buy most of the food that I would eat at the house. I was with my high school sweetheart, Michelle, right up until a half year before I left Emmerson Street. Michelle had her own place too, and a lot of people continued to wonder why I was still living at home. I'm in my mid twenties and I'm still living with Mom. What TLC would call a "scrub". I rarely paid any money for room and board, something I feel guilty about today. There's obviously several things a lot of us would do differently if we had to do them over, and paying room and board in my mom's house is certainly one of them. I wasn't really good with money in my younger years, but I would be taught numerous lessons in the future that would remedy that situation. There were, though, a few other things that kept me at the house.
At one point I was ready to move in with Michelle. I'd packed everything I had and brought it to her apartment and was ready to make the commitment. When Mom got wind of it, she became sad and somewhat distraught, but I didn't think it was something she couldn't get over. I'm sure she felt the same way when all the kids left. But when I bunkered down with Michelle for that first day, all my things moved in by late afternoon, she came home from work and I was....well, let's say 'enlightened'. I got a startling vision of the future.
"Now that you're living with me, you have to make sure you live by MY rules. I won't have any of your clothes on the floor, put your toothbrush away at night, keep the apartment clean, don't take up too much space on my side of the bed, make the bed in the morning, don't play your music too loud when I'm around, henpeckhenpeckhenpeckhenpeckhenpeck......." you get the idea.
HOLY SHIT, WHAT HAVE I DONE???? I've got to get out of here before I'm stuck with a life full of this!! I moved into Michelle's place and moved back home the very same day. Talk about scary. I came a hair's breadth away from marrying this girl. Don't get me wrong, there's really nothing wrong with her, but our chemistry was, let's say, unbalanced.
Mom was glad that I chose to stay home though. And she expressed it. She used to tell me I was meant to be with her, that God sent me as an "angel" to be with her once all the other kids were gone. I don't know about the "angel" part, because I caused my share of trouble and despair in my not-so-finer moments. But I always tried to make Mom laugh everyday, always tried to make her smile. And she always showed her appreciation. Anyone who knew her would attest to that.
My mother eventually was found to have Pix disease, an Alzheimer's like dimentia that would eventually leave her incapacitated and unable to look after herself. She was told that she would have to leave her house on Emmerson Street, the house she raised us all in for some forty years. I was there until the very end. In Mom's last year at the house, she'd done strange things, like have a meal in a toaster oven smoking and ready to light up the kitchen, turn the heat up alarmingly high in the house, and claim to have heard burglars attempt to break into the house at night. I was there at least. I remember one night mom running into my room, saying she was afraid she was having a heart attack, her heart was beating so fast. I put my arm around Mom, and calmed her down. It was one time I felt that our roles reversed, where my mother ran to me in the night for comfort, which I did so much as a young boy.
She was put into a special care home shortly after her diagnosis with her disease, and after she was allowed to spend one more Christmas at home. It was a terribly sad time for all of us. I looked into buying the house with Janice, whom I was getting serious with right about that time, but by the time we decided to go after it, it got sold. I visited the Emmerson Street residence, empty and clean of all Cook-ness save for the spirits, one last time before the new owners took over. I took pictures of every room. I remember giving the wall a big hug before I exited and saying goodbye, like an old friend--or better yet, family member. And I moved in with my then-girlfriend Janice immediately after.
Mom's condition deteriorated over time until she passed away in the summer of 1998. The imprint she left on all of us was undeniable, though, and her spirit lives not only with God, but through all of her kids. I see Debbie, my sister, and see a sparkling resemblance to Mom's mannerisms and expressions. In Cindy I see her thoughtfulness and the shimmering hope of her mother in her eye. And with all the boys, I see the love, patience and understanding that she taught us all to do the best to be the strongest pillars of our own families that we could be, just like Mom herself was.
Emmerson Street is now named Cassidy Street, due to the illogical logic of the City of Moncton planners. It's just as well. Emmerson Street, as we know it, will never be the same now that all the Cooks have uprooted and gone on. But most of all, Thora Cook has moved into a much greater palace.
We'll be home someday soon, Mom. And we all love you more than ever.
Par for the Course
There's not a whole lot of people in the world who will really give you the shirt of their backs. Let's face it, you hear that expression a lot. But really, when you get right down to it, probably 90% of the time you hear this expression, it's more of an exagerration than anything else. But there are exceptions, and one of them is my brother Greg.
I remember being, I think, around twelve or thirteen years old, and Greg was working the night shift for CN Rail here in Canada at the Humpyard, if memory serves me correctly. Sleep was not something that came to Greg with ease. Working graveyard shifts take their toll on a human being's body, and they certainly did to Greg, who eventually wound up with a bleeding ulcer that he had to have surgically repaired due to the lack of knowledge in medicine about that kind of condition at the time. But despite his ailments and drawbacks in health at times, there was nothing this guy wouldn't do for anyone.
One time he'd promised me that on a certain Tuesday he'd bring me to a golf course in Moncton called "Par 3", where beginner golfers go to begin cutting their teeth on the greens. I was incredibly excited. I'd always watched golfers on TV and wanted to try to do what they do, settling at the time for taking the half mile hike up the road from where I lived to visit Arnold Palmer's Putting Course and play miniature golf often by myself. Now I had the chance to do the real thing! I was counting the days till Tuesday came. But unfortunately, Greg must've lost count.
When Tuesday had come, I called the apartment that Greg had lived at, to discover no answer. It was around two in the afternoon, a bright sunny day, perfect for the golf course. I figured he might be sleeping. I called and let the phone ring probably fifty times.
"H-h-h-helllllooo?" Greg answered wearily.
"Hey Greg, are we still going to the golf course?" I yelped excitedly, not taking into account my brother on the other end of the line probably got an hour or two of sleep and likely couldn't peel himself off the mattress to keep his appointment with his little brother.
"Ooohhhh yeah," he exclaimed with half-drowsy commitment. Make that totally drowsy. "I'll be there in a half hour, okay Mike?" Okay Greg!! Oboy, we're gonna go golfing!
Mom caught wind of the conversation on the phone. "Who were you talking to?" She wondered.
"I called Greg to go golfing. We're going golfing Mom!" I cried excitedly.
"Don't tell me you woke up Greg to go golfing? That poor kid's never going to get any sleep!" And at that point, as Mom was so good at doing, she instantly made me realize that the selfish side of me was peeking through. It took countless lessons from dear old Mom to teach her youngest son how to think of others first, but eventually I did learn, and that day was one of the first lessons.
When Greg arrived at the house to bring me to Par 3, I was excited anyway, and Greg himself - as tired and groggy as he was - fed off of my excitement. He was happy to see me happy, and as soon as he saw the wonder and eagerness in my big brown eyes, he'd spring to life and become somewhat of a kid himself, and an earnest big brother, about to embark on one of countless adventures with little Mike in tow. We played our golf game, and he taught me how to hold a club, whack the ball as best a 12 year old could, and have fun no matter what the outcome. It was a time I would never forget. He realized that the smallest things that you do for a kid can create irreplacable memories that can be looked back upon like the most picturesque of photo albums.
Every time I see Greg or my other four brothers now, I see my four dads, the guys who turned it up a notch when my father died and gave me the attention that a dad should give to his kid. Greg would bring me out with his girlfriend bowling or to his place and just hang out, and just spend quality time with his little brother. And let me tell you, his little brother Mike did not forget all the times his loving brother gave him the attention he desperately needed after dad died. And even as I got older, to this day, Greg is always there when I'm in need of a lifeline, and no favour seemed to be too great.
If you ever need a shirt, Greg, take mine. It's the least that I owe you.
| Brothers in arms |
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| Greg, right, with brother Rick |
Not a phone-y guy
Am I an introvert or an extrovert?
Probably I wouldn't answer to either, but if pushed, I'd have to say I'm an introvert. That's no secret to anyone who's known me.
One of the telling symptoms that I'm an introvert, a person who is mostly a home dweller who keeps to himself, is my fear of phones. Telephones. I can't specifically tell you why I'm so anti-phone, but I can delve into it a wee bit.
The first time I can remember a frightening experience on the phone is with a girl named Evelyn. She was a girl I'd met through a friend named Larry, and I remember he had claimed that he set me up with her. So, this pimply faced shy teenager named Mike meets Evelyn who is with her friend, Debby, who happens to be Larry's girlfriend, and we exchange a few pleasant words but nothing too elaborate. Skipping a long, boring part of the story, I eventually get the guts to call Evelyn. You know, I'd dial the number, all six digits until I lost the nerve and then hung up. But one time I pressed that seventh digit of her number, and stayed on the phone long enough to talk even.....
"Hello, is Evelyn there?"
"Speaking," she answers back, not shocked or matter of factly even, just quite normally.
"Hi, this is Mike, remember I met you last week?" I half stammered. I broke my side of the ice finally. But her side was a lot thicker, as I was to find out.
"Ooohhhh. Hi," she breathed, sounding politely interested, the kind of 'interested' that you try to sound when you're really not.
"How are you doing? It was really good meeting you! How long have you known Debby?"
"Quite a while."
"Yeah? Well she's pretty cool. It's not hard to make friends with her. You guys meet in school?" I was wondering how long I'd be able to keep it up.
"Yes." Immediately I began to sense that I might be beating a dead horse in keeping a conversation going. But I never call girls on the phone, so I'd better get used to it. After all, I'm not that bad of a guy. Hey, I'm a real catch. Or am I?
"So you're in grade 11 right now then? Are you going to go to college when you're done high school?" I asked, with genuine interest.
"I don't know."
What followed was about five seconds of silence. Five seconds seemed like five years. It became more clear now that I wasn't going to get anywhere in this futile attempt at getting a date with Evelyn. She seemed so for me, at least I thought at the time. She was about five foot six or so, slender build, tanned, dark hair and fairly pretty. She took care of herself. She wasn't a health enthusiast or anything, but she could turn a guy's head if she walked by in the summer. Right now, though, I was turning her ear.
I attempted the conversation for about another five minutes of two or three sentence bursts to be followed by her one or two word responses, or silence. After I'd hung up the phone, I was mortified that I'd even thought of attempting at doing what I just did.
When I talked to Debby about my attempt at making conversation with Evelyn, she got very defensive on my behalf. She told me that Evelyn wasn't worth my time and I could do better. I think she even stopped speaking to Evelyn after that, or shortly after that point anyway. Come to find out, after talking with Debby about the whole situation, Larry never set me up with Evelyn at all. She just happened to be tagging along with Debby one day, while I was there under the impression that she was my date. How's that for embarassment? It's not the first time he had done that. He'd done that with other girls, named Lena, Nancy, and Patcy, although Patcy became a legitimate friend, and we actually dated in spite of Larry's bullshit couplings. Of course, he'd tell you that he deserves credit for me knowing her.
But phone talking never really became something that I loved doing, except when I worked the night shift at a convenience store for too many years in the late 80's. During that shift, girls actually called me. Angie, Debby, Pam, Kim, lots of others......but none of them were intimate relationships. All of us were 'pals'. I liked all of them enough to go out with them at one time or another, but all of them, except for Pam who's been a friend throughout the years, have fallen by the wayside.
Pam introduced me to a girl named Robin in the middle of one of my single spells, after I'd broken up with Michelle. Robin was a physical specimen, no question. Her arms were solid, her legs were solid, she had cute looks, and was quite the opposite of shy, something I probably needed. Then things went amok. Robin and I were talking on the phone one day, and she began singing "Tears From Heaven" by Eric Clapton to me, a song I outwardly did not like. In the middle of her rendition, I began to chuckle, telling her I never liked that song.
"WOULDYOUBEQUIETCAN'TYOUTELLI'MSINGINGTOYOOOOUUUUU!!!!!!"
Yikes.
These mood swings would show themselves a bit more frequently over time and, though I was falling big time for this tough chick who turned me on with her physical prowess, her mental prowess did the opposite.
Other phone scares included threats on my life at the convenience store I worked at by total strangers, bill collectors threatening to sever any joy I had left in my life unless I paid back my entire student loan tomorrow, and frequent prank calls to the house I used to live at on my answering machine telling me how much of a loser I was. Ultimately, it came down to using the damn phone only when absolutely necessary, which is the rule I use today, no matter who is on the other end.
So if you want to give me a call, if you can somehow get my number out of me, go ahead. Janice will answer if she's here, and she'll probably force me to talk on it, but beyond that you won't ever hear me answer it. Sorry!
After all, how do I know you're not Robin or Evelyn?
The Times of My Life
There are points in your life that happen that etch into your mind and you never forget, and they stay with you forever. This little column will discuss a few that are with me in my head. And wow, there's so many, as there are with everyone.
This time I'm going to focus on my brother Peter, the eldest of the Cook clan, and in my humble opinion one of the most fun-loving. Pete's always looking for a good time somewhere, and always looking to bring somebody along with him to share it with. Here's a guy who's looking to share his good experiences with someone and you'll most likely not see him having a good time without someone by his side.
When I was a little guy in the pre-school years, Pete had already left Moncton for the promised land of Welland, Ontario. From what I understand, it was a bit of a risk taking on his part, as he went out there with his enhanced education to seek out work that would pay more than what there was being offered here in the then-modest town of Moncton. It was much to my mother's dismay that Peter left for a place so far away, and she worried incessantly about his well being, and not being able to keep close contact. Pete called mom often to assuage her fears of the worst, but he did make it on his own, landed a job at a Union Carbide plant in Welland, and settling in nicely and building a pretty good life for himself.
Every Christmas Pete would come home to visit, and usually during the summertime too. I remember when I was a squirt around five to ten years old, every time he came home for a visit he'd bring me these big jars full of pennies, and I used to think that was like gold. I don't think it was the value of the pennies that mattered as much as the fact that Pete thought of his baby brother, that he put them aside just for me, and he never forgot to bring them home. I never expected him to do it everytime, but he did. I'd love to have seen my face on those days he'd hand me those jars of pennies back then.
One Christmas Pete couldn't make it home, and I remember my mom being heartbroken about it. Being her firstborn, there was a special attachment to Pete that mom felt, as she did with all of us, but of course her firstborn child being a one-of-a-kind relationship. Not seeing Peter that Christmas was going to be tough on her. Dad missed Pete all the time too, but of course being a man, wouldn't express it to the extent that mom would.
Then Cindy and Rick, still living in the Cook household with Greg and me, would spill the beans to me that Pete was going to surprise mom by coming home for Christmas after all. Being such a young feller, I was all excited, and nearly blew the surprise by telling her something really good was going to happen that'll make her very happy. With mom feeling down about Peter not coming home, there's only a few things that would make her happy.
Pete walked through the front door of the Cook house with mom watching him come in, and in a fit of happy tears rushed to Pete and hugged him like he'd just cheated death. Pete was home for the holidays, mom was happy, I was thrilled to see my big brother again, and everyone celebrated the season happily together again.
Nowadays Pete still comes home for the summertime in August, and sometimes at Christmas too, and every time he does, that sparkle of my childhood of when my big brother handed me those jars of pennies and made my mom cry with joy would shine through again.
| Two thumbs up! |
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| Brother Pete gives the approval sign for 'Belmont Street' |
My brother Roy was not only a brother but a true pal to me in my very young years. With my father suffering from alcoholism, and my mom somewhat overwhelmed with the job of raising seven kids practically by herself, when I was born my brothers and sisters stepped up to the plate to sort of take over parenting duties to ease the strain on mom once I hit the scene. As a little boy, I was a platinum blonde, supercute shit-disturber, who got away with a lot because I was the youngest kid of a large family.
I was always fascinated with airplanes. Whenever a plane would fly by, I would stare at the sky in wonder, knowing that there's actually people on the planes that flew overhead, and wondering what it must be like to be in there. We weren't a very well-off family, and most of us didn't get to fly until the years went by and our individual financial situations leveled off. Maybe not being able to be on a plane added to the mysterious magical wonder of a boy who imagined what it would be like to fly.
Roy was the same way as I was about planes. Old enough to be my dad, he was one of my brothers I looked to as sort of a father figure, although at the time I didn't really realize it. Moncton was a much smaller city than it is today back when I was five. In those days, a five year old could easily walk up to the corner store and get some candy or whatever without really being threatened by strangers. There was a store called Tapp's around the corner from where we lived, and it was a wonderful place to go to get anything. It had a store section in one half of the ground-level of the building, and the other half consisted of an ice cream and shake bar, not unlike the Choklit Shoppe in the Archie Comics. There were stools you could sit at as you enjoyed a homemade shake in one of the old-fashioned glass shake cups, while you picked a song on one of the countertop juke boxes and maybe read a comic from the huge magazine rack from the wall behind you in the middle of the large checkered floor.
One day I walked the short walk to Tapp's from our house, and it was only something like a three or four minute walk at most. As I turned the corner one day on Lockhart and Limerick Streets to head up to the store, Roy pulled up on the road in his maroon Dodge Dart and rolled down the passenger-side window.
"There you are! I've been looking all over for you!" I knew he wasn't mad or anything because he was beaming from ear to ear. Roy was a fresh-faced, ready-to-take-on-the-world young man at the time and still had a lot of kid in him. "Get in and let's go see the planes at the airport!"
Music to my ears! I jumped in the car and we drove out to the Moncton Airport where my brother and me gazed in amazement at the jets and planes landing and taking off from the modest runway. The loud, searing rumble of the jets as they warmed up to go to this day brings me back to the old days when my brother Roy used to bring me out to the Airport and indulge in the innocent wonder of the man-made featherless birds taking to the skies. We would watch for hours, sometimes patiently as there were often lengthy waits between takeoffs and landings. But it was always worth it once we heard the roar of a jet taking off, or the sonic boom of one landing.
Roy's all set now. He lives in Ottawa and can see all the huge aircraft around anytime he wants coming and going. And I don't doubt from time to time he still does. Here in Moncton, I still do the same, and with the recent branding of the newly re-built Moncton Airport and upgrading to International status, looking at planes in the sky is about to become even more wondrous to kids and kids at heart. The wonder of aircraft never wore off Roy or myself, and even to this day a plane flying overhead hearkens back to a time for me when the days were simpler and full of curiousity, a time when my family was budding from its chrysalis, about to discover independence and the struggles of what it was to be adults.
But we're all still kids at heart. Eh, Roy?
| The Dynamic Duo |
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| An all-growed-up Roy and Mike ready to take on eeeevuhllll. |
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| All In the Family.....the seven deadly Cooks |
Music is something that I've basically centered my life upon. Like a lot of us in the Cook family, and of course many people in general, albums have come along to be the soundtracks to our lives. For my brothers, it's been the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Guess Who, Deep Purple and others of that time. For me it's been a lot of that and others too. I love late-period Beatles, Led Zeppelin and some of the guilty pleasures of the sixties and seventies. But the band that really got me through the girlfriend breakups and teenage rejection years was none other than KISS. I could always count on Love Gun or Creatures of the Night or a live album of theirs to pick my mood up when things got rough. My three piece tile mirror by my bedroom window reflecting my air guitar stylings to the classic three-chord riffs, windmills and all, always made me smile when I needed it the most. I also loved my old Aerosmith albums, April Wine, AC/DC, Boston, the Cars, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Billy Joel, the Police, Pink Floyd, Platinum Blonde, Ozzy Osbourne, Queen, Styx, U2, Van Halen, and tons more. I wore so many of those records out. I can safely say I could still put one of those on the old turntable right now and rock out with it as much as I did when it first came out. I know I'm getting old. The music that's out now and my disdain for it is a constant reminder of that fact. Still, I'll hear a bonafide gem on the radio or from a friend from time to time, add it to a small collection that I pile up in my hard drive here from Morpheus and I-Mesh and compile them on a CD when there's enough to warrant it and create new memories, a soundtrack to the present day life that I'll look back on years from now. Music has a nice way of taking snapshots of your life like that, bringing you right back to where you once were when you first heard your Beatles or KISS or Sum41 songs. Or Travis, eh Steve?
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| Lexy, ready for the Firefighter's Challenge |
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Building the foundation
When Janice and I first met each other, it was long before we ever committed to anything resembling a date. It was back around 1986 when I first saw her, and I was working at a convenience store called Green Gables just up the street from where I lived. One evening when I was working, this rather forward girl came in with crutches and a cast on her leg, and got something at the counter. She was quite friendly and seemed aggressive, traits that I really like in a woman. At the time I was going out with Michelle, my high school sweetheart. My relationship with Michelle was stormy at best, with so many ups and downs that we broke up and made up several times. Michelle was the jealous type, and whenever I'd so much as glance at another girl she'd become upset. It was something I learned from for future relationships.
Janice applied to Green Gables for a job and got it, and joined the staff to my delight. We got along great, and as I worked my night shifts she would often come in and we'd talk at length about anything and everything. We became very good friends, and Janice befriended Michelle, and with our pal Greg we would all go bowling or whatever and just have a lot of fun together. Greg came to Green Gables a lot. He became close friends with Janice; so close that most people assumed he and Janice were an item. Janice always said that they'd never amount to more than friends, though. But I think Greg always wished for more than that.
Eventually, Janice moved her way up the ladder at Green Gables and earned her spot as manager of the place. During the last year that I was working there in 1990, I became rather disenchanted with being there so long and decided it was time to move on to something else. One night I went into the store when her sister Jennifer was working. Jennifer said to me, "you better watch out Mike, she's out to get you!" A big grin stretched across her face and Janice emerged from the back of the counter. With her rather strong frame, she forced me to the floor and hooked my neck between her calves in nylon stockings and held me there, laughing it up, while Jennifer watched and customers came through the door! Eventually she let me up, and I was on my way to Michelle's to watch hockey, so I got the junk food I went to get there to get and left. It was at that point that I remember first having feelings for Janice. I guess you could say I got a crush on her after she put a crush on me.
I left Green Gables at the end of the year and searched for a job with better pay, and found it in Irving Tissue. I dropped into Green Gables from time to time, but generally lost touch with Janice, Jennifer, Greg and the gang that went there regularly. I got the big job, finally, and now I was looking at a marriage proposal with Michelle around her birthday, November 8, or maybe Christmas with an engagement ring. I had the catalog number to the ring she liked and everything. I looked forward to the time coming. Then, after four months at Irving Tissue, I broke my foot and was laid off from the company and basically was blacklisted from ever going back, as I was their first accident. Not long after losing my job at Irving, Michelle left me for another guy. Janice had earlier lost her store, too, and worked as a driver at BJ's Subs, the job I have now. Green Gables had gone bankrupt, and Janice left her store at that point while her apprentice there at the time scooped the store up like a vulture when the opportunity came, as the Green Gables chain was bought out by TRA, the corporation that owns Sobey's grocery stores and numerous Quik-Way convenience stores. Janice was down, but not out.
Opportunity arose for Janice to assume control of another store in Moncton, not far from where she had her first. Things were certainly different though. Managers became "franchisees", and any control that the former managers had deteriorated over time to the point where the only things Janice could do were hiring, bank deposits and grocery orders, and she had no say as to what was coming into the store and how much of something was being shipped in. It became tough as time went on. Near the beginning of her tenure with High Street Green Gables, she had a midnight shift worker who was shady with his dealings, and Janice got rid of him after she found out he was stealing, and that I was looking for work. I happily took the spot, seeing the opportunity to join the gang again. It was just like old times.
As time went on while I worked at Green Gables on High Street with Janice, we got close, dated a few times during one summer and finally got together for good in September of '92. It was a long courtship, and it paid off. We knew each other like the backs of our hands, with a lot of knowing each other coming from working together. When we moved in together, we had a good idea of what to expect of one another, because we'd often spent twelve to sixteen hours together at the store. When I asked Janice to go out with me, too, I made sure with her that she would know how I was: I made it clear that I'm a guy who "looks", like all guys do, at all women, and it doesn't mean anything except I like looking. If she had a problem with that, it might not be a good idea to get together. But she accepted it, and does to this day. I would guess that a lot of relationships have their trust broken this way in that guys have to admire other women behind their signifigant others' backs, breeding prohibition, which also breeds rebellion. Eventually guys will do it in spite of the "rules" that say they can't do it. I've always said, let guys be guys, or else guys will be "dogs".
Like a lot of couples, though, we ran into financial difficulty in finding our way. Upper level management with TRA was breathing down Janice's neck for not making continuous profit growths annually, and it came down to them investigating Janice as to why that was so. The fact of the matter is, her store was in a low traffic area, and it had reached its peak level of business, and there was no where to go but down at one point. In Christmas of '93, the store closed for Christmas Day, and overnight the store was broken into and cleaned out of cigarettes, an expensive commodity in Canada. A suspicious eye was cast on all of us who worked there. When TV crews came by to do an article on the break-in, Janice gave a few brief minutes of interview time, as crime was reaching a high point at that time of the year. When it aired on the local news, TRA got wind of it and were furious with Janice for having done it. They were on her back about it right up until she left Green Gables, and ever since that TV article, countless Green Gables stores were broken into with their franchisees doing interviews and 20 questions and whatever else that the camera crews wanted, without reprimand. Go figure. It irritated us. That, coupled with the fact of rising costs of maintaining car expenses and insurance, as well as rent and bank loans, the intense hours of working at the store were just not paying off anymore, and we left the store, along with the entire staff that worked for us, in May of '94.
Janice didn't have a great deal of a problem finding work again, but finding a good job is another story. She worked for a rinkydink outfit called Treats at a shopping mall, a couple of Tim Horton's coffee shops, a gas bar, a bowling alley and then finally wound up at Superstore, where she still is. But there were lean times to survive before she wound up there. I could not find work nearly as easily. I did work for a janitorial outfit part time, and we barely covered the bills between that and Janice's work. Often we couldn't make the rent on time, and we were lucky to have a very sympathetic landlord to our situation. Debts piled up. We'd lost our phone, had credit card people threatening us, had our furniture repossessed, we had ratty clothes that we couldn't replace, and we lost our vehicle. We lived on the edge of town, so getting to work was either by foot or, if we were lucky, by bus, if we had the money to take it.
I lost my janitorial job around mid '95. It got to crunch time; do or die, find a job or go on welfare. Something I never wanted to do in my life ever. For a couple of weeks, Janice and I lived strictly on grilled cheese sandwiches, because we couldn't afford groceries. I remember one night, not long before I lost my janitorial job in the wintertime of early '95, Janice came with me to a gym that I was cleaning. It was freezing cold out. We were in the city, so we stayed the evening at a mall or something, and went right to the gym in the evening after everyone had left and cleaned the place, and shortly past midnight we began to walk home. It was approxiamately two to three miles of a walk, and it was freezing cold, around minus 15 or twenty degrees celcius. But we were happy together. We love each other's company so much, that it would take a lot to bring us down. When we were about ten minutes from home, we were approaching a closed Metro gas station at the old Moncton Mall near where we lived, and it had a pop machine. As I saw the Metro from a distance through my frost-covered glasses, I asked Janice if she had any change for the pop machine. She had a quarter, and I had two quarters, just barely enough for a can of Pepsi. We were dry and freezing after a long walk in the wintery weather and could use a drink, and we rejoiced in the fact we were getting a can of pop; and drank it gleefully between the gas station and the apartment. It was the best can of pop the both of us ever drank in our lives!
During the summer, Janice was missing her periods, and we began to suspect she might be pregnant. It became increasingly obvious that she was, but she needed to go for a test to be sure. I can remember lying in bed the night before finding out the results, staring at the ceiling in our bedroom, repeating "I don't want to be a father! I don't want to be a father!" Janice was worried. Understandably, in retrospect, I think she might have thought I was thinking of bailing out on her if she was pregnant. The next morning, when she found out she was, I asked her, and she affirmed. Tears welled up in her eyes instantly and she sobbed. It was then, I think, that I finally began to become a man. Now it's reality. Now we find out what life is really all about. Now I stand up like a man for my woman. I put my arm around my future wife, and said, "it's okay....we're gonna have a baby!"
Later in the summer of 1995, I made the decision to go back to school, after applying to so many places and not getting a job, much less an interview. Without much research, to my discredit, I got a $4,000 loan to take a course for a diploma from the Academy of Learning, a place that specialized in computer business education. I got a diploma in microcomputer business applications, and eagerly searched for work. I sent out somewhere between sixty and seventy five resumes, and got two calls for work, both from UPS, ultimately leading to nothing. I became incredibly discouraged. The Omista Credit Union that gave me my student loan was demanding payments or they'd hand over my file to a collections agency, but I had no money to give to anyone, and bills continued to pile up on us. In the fall of that year, Janice had been with a place called Plaza Bowl bowling alley, where she'd been for over a year and enjoyed it. I went there often because I couldn't find work, and I would meet Janice and we would walk home from there, which was an hour long walk. I got to know the management at the place, and wound up getting a part time job behind the counter. I continued looking for work though, and finally, through a temporary services outfit called Kelly Temporary Services, I got a three month stint at Purolator Courier answering phones. When I told them this at Plaza Bowl, I was let go the next day. I had my job at the bowling alley for a whole 24 hours or less. Even though I told them I'd still work around it with my temporary Purolator job, they still dropped me. It was a day I'd never forget. I remember coming home from Plaza Bowl that evening to Janice, who was waiting for me with baby visibly beginning to show signs of growth in her tummy, and I sat down beside her on our ratty old couch and told her I lost my job. I broke down. What's wrong with me, anyway?? I got the education, I sent out the applications and resumes, pounded the pavement, did EVERYTHING, and nothing. Nothing! And I got fired from a measely bowling alley job after one day. I cried. And cried. And cried. Janice cried with me. We were both uncertain as to what kind of future we were going to be able to provide our little one, if any future at all. I rubbed her belly and cried, beginning to believe I wasn't going to be a provider for our child.
But I did in fact still have my Purolator work for three months. That would get us through Christmas, at least. I remember the Christmas before that when I didn't have any work, with Janice's modest earnings we bought tins of fudge from a kiosk at a shopping mall for everyone. We couldn't afford to get each other anything. We said we would just wait until money came in, but it never did then. But this Christmas would be different. We got half decent gifts for our friends and family that year, and for each other. I continued to talk to the baby in Janice's belly every night, singing songs, and telling the little one we couldn't wait for his or her arrival. Most every night I would talk to what would prove to be our little Lexy. Sometimes she kicked at the sound of my voice, almost like a response.
In the following January, the Purolator job ended. The collections agency began to take over duties in getting money from us for my student loan. The Credit Union hadn't even warned us that they were dropping us. We got calls almost every day with them looking for money from us, when we barely had enough to feed ourselves. Then I found out my friend Don Goguen was looking for a driver at his business, BJ's Subs and Catering. Not really thinking I'd get the job, he'd hired me in an instant, since I'd worked for him for years while he ran the Green Gables store that was my first job. It became a job that I loved. I love driving, to begin with, and being on my own most of the day was icing on the cake. Now I've not only got a job, but I've got a FUN job.
On a chilly Sunday night on April 21 at Plaza Bowl, Janice was at or near her due date. I was bowling on a league at the time and in the middle of my game when Janice's water broke. I remember whipping off the rest of my bowling frames, strike after strike after strike (by fluke or divine intervention, I'm not sure), and Janice and I left for the Moncton Hospital to usher in the arrival of our brand new baby. Janice went through roughly four hours of labour, and at 2:15 AM on that Monday morning, Alexandra Spring Cook was born. She came out crying to the nurses as I watched beside Janice in the delivery room, as they put Lexy onto Janice's belly for a brief moment. They then took her and tried to calm her down, to no effect, then they passed her to me. I looked into Lexy's teary little eyes. "Hello, sweety! Oh my, it's so good to see you! Our little pumpkin's here! How are you??" As Janice is my witness, as soon as I spoke to her, she stopped crying right then and there. Her eyes opened for the first time as she looked up at me, and from that moment on till forever she stole my heart. I felt like I'd finally come full circle and become a man once and for all. A miracle was in my hands, and I'd become someone else. I'd become a daddy!
The following summer, Janice got her job with Real Atlantic Superstore that paid her good money, and things began to finally level off. Our baby girl was happy and healthy, her parents were too, and barring our little bumps on the road in the way of some health issues between Janice and myself, we got around everything and made our own little paradise for ourselves. We don't have riches, but we're not in rags. We don't even have a nest egg or a small fortune tucked away, but we've got a house of our own, families that love us and a pretty bright future ahead for our now six and a half year old baby girl. The old cliche that I think the Captain and Tennille made up in the '70's, "love will keep us together", proved right in our case. It's true. Love does conquer all. Faith, hope and love. We're shining examples.
I'm a firm believer that things happen for a reason. As tough as times have been for us in the past, I think it just helped us prepare for anything that would happen in the future. It toughened us up, thickened our skins, so to speak. We deal with things now better than we ever have. And we know that as bad as things get, they could always be worse, and you count your blessings.
But I can't count that high. (Nov. 23, 2002)
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