Makes scents

Ever notice how certain smells instantly transport you to another time or place, or bring back an old memory so vividly it seems like yesterday? Smell might just be the most potent and evocative of the senses. It’s actually quite amazing what those olfactory glands can drive us to do, or to avoid. Remember the last time you were mowing the lawn and smelled the next door neighbor’s barbeque? You had steak for dinner that night, didn’t you. What about when you were walking home and caught the acrid but unmistakable aroma of hot chicken grease. Did you finish the walk with a bucket full of Kentucky duck under your arm? The sense of suggestion a familiar smell can carry is sometimes overpowering. My wife actually had a friend who once offered to rent us a million-dollar mansion for next to nothing on the condition that we would bake fresh bread twice a week because he was trying to sell the house and wanted it to have a home-cooking smell. Crazy, isn’t it?
It also works on the other side of the equation. If something smells bad, it usually doesn’t matter how good it looks; you’re not going near it. One of my favourite fast-food restaurants is Quiznos sandwiches, and I came very close to never eating there at all. The first time I walked into the place, it smelled like burning animal hair and I truly wanted to turn right around and walk back out. The only thing that kept me there was my lunch friends from work, who were hell-bent on getting their black angus steak sandwiches. Turns out the burning smell is from the toaster oven they use to toast their sandwiches and it actually makes them taste much better than any other sub I’ve eaten, but the scent of it just about drove me away to start with. Thankfully, I’ve been to several other locations since then and none of them smell like the restaurant of my original encounter.
Smells can stay with you, too. Especially bad ones. Many times I’ve been woken up early by a screaming child needing their diaper changed. The problem with this is that once that nasty poop smell gets in my nose, I can smell it for the rest of the day. Sometimes it’s intense enough that I start washing my hands over and over Macbeth-style out of fear that I’ve somehow gotten poop on them that I can’t seem to get rid of. More than likely, it’s just my brain punishing me for the early morning assault on my nose by not letting me forget that rancid stench.
It is truly amazing how clearly the smell comes back, as well. In fact, even just writing this spurred my senses into thinking I caught a whiff of that rotten diaper smell. That has to be a sure sign that it is time to move on.
Smells are powerful enough that they can immediately recall certain places, people, or things. For me there are several that do this. The scent of cold pine trees means skiing, hot diesel exhaust is a cab ride in a locomotive. My first serious girlfriend used to wear Liz Claiborne perfume, which at the time drove me completely crazy. To this day, every time I smell Liz Claliborne it reminds me of her. I haven’t seen or even heard from her in years and I’m not sure where she is or if she even wears Liz Claiborne anymore, (I doubt it) but for me, that scent will be forever and inextricably linked to her. Likewise with Cool Water cologne. I had never worn cologne until I discovered Cool Water, but I liked it so much I immediately bought a bottle. This was right before I left for France, and my closest friends had arranged one last “guys’ day out” before my departure. We went up to the mountains and wandered around with .22s all day, blasting every gopher we saw. I had just purchased two things that morning; the Legends of the Fall soundtrack, and my first bottle of Cool Water. As with any new scent, I was smelling the Cool Water all day. That was eleven years ago and I am now so used to Cool Water that I can’t even smell it on myself anymore, but to this day the smell of it brings back memories of the mountains, Legends of the Fall, and that day I spent with my friends.
Some of the most peculiar scents seem to do a double whammy on your senses. Case in point: cream soda. Am I the only one out there who has noticed that this stuff tastes exactly like it smells? It was once my favourite soft drink, (back in the days before I discovered Dr. Pepper) and I guzzled the stuff constantly. It wasn’t until I was on a family picnic one day and my little brother beat me to the last can. Oh, I wanted that can of cream soda. He knew perfectly well that I wanted it, too, and I watched with envy as he slowly popped the top, enjoying the moment, and took a long, purposeful drink, pausing at the end to smack his lips to show me exactly how much he was enjoying my cream soda. Then something strange happened. He put the can down next to my plate where he knew it would be just within my reach, and gave me a devious look like he was daring me to make a grab for it. I looked at the can, and through the open top I could smell the sweet drink inside. At first I thought it would make me want it all the more, but to my surprise, once I had smelled it I felt like I had just taken a drink of it. I thought that maybe I was losing my mind, so I leaned a little closer and smelled it again. Again, I felt as though I had just taken a big swallow of it. At this point my brother started to get a little freaked out, wondering what I was doing sniffing his pop. He grabbed the can and moved away from me, probably fearing an attempt to steal it. Unknown to him, I had absolutely no intentions of trying to swipe the cream soda. As far as I was concerned, I had already finished the can. It was after that incident that I started paying more attention to the smell of everything, and found that like cream soda, there are many things that taste exactly like they smell.
Here at work, everything including our air is run through a complex filtration system that sucks everything impure out of it. It stops us from getting sick as much, but it also removes any scents or odours that could be distracting. About the only time I smell anything around here is when I go to the kitchen and some sadistic individual has decided to microwave the fish they brought for lunch. As anyone who has ever smelled microwaved fish will understand, that’s usually when I turn right back around and come back to my desk where everything is semi-sterile. At least here I can pick and choose what I want to think about, and the smells I remember are controlled by the memories I select and not the other way around.
Hmmm. You know, it’s kind of dry in here. I think I want a cream soda now.

Lord of the Geeks

OK, back to the strange habits. You know, you get to thinking that you’re a relatively normal person until you start writing about yourself regularly and it suddenly becomes very apparent that you have a lot of quirks. Maybe I should stop this altogether before I develop a complex.
When I was in my late teens, a card game called Magic: the Gathering became popular. It wasn’t a regular card game like poker or cheat or go fish; this one needed special cards that you had to buy at gaming stores and pay a ridiculous amount of money for. Being billed as a “trading card game”, the marketing was pure genius. If you wanted to win, you needed the good cards in your deck. The good cards, of course, were the rare and uncommon cards, which obviously cost more than the common cards. Sometimes a lot more. Alot of my friends (actually, almost all of them) got caught up in the game and started building decks to compete against each other. One of my friends in particular had gotten really into it and had literally hundreds of cards. He lived in his parents’ garage, which they had converted to a makeshift apartment, and he hosted tournaments that would go late into the night.
At first I had absolutely no interest in the game whatsoever. Everyone else had been playing it for over six months by the time I even bothered to find out what it was about. With all of my friends engrossed in it, it seemed like anytime I wanted to go do something I had to wait for them to finish playing cards first. Even after the cards were put away and we were off somewhere else, the conversation inevitably turned to who had beaten who and what great newcard someone had seen the last time they were at the card shop. It was really starting to get under my skin. At the time I was spending as much time as possible on my mountain bike and was getting a little irritated that all of my friends seemed to be more interested in sitting around playing cards than getting out and doing something worthwhile; something, I reasoned, like mountain biking.
My introduction to the game was somewhat accidental. We were supposed to be meeting at my friend’s house, (not the garage this time; his parents were away and he actually had control of the real house) then going out to meet some girls and get something to eat. I showed up a few minutes late and to my surprise found the house already full of people; most of them clustered around the kitchen table playing Magic. I groaned inwardly in anticipation of the hour-long struggle I was going to have convincing them to put the cards away so we could leave. Then something interesting happened. I noticed that one of the players was a girl that I was kind of interested in, and suddenly I wasn’t in such a hurry to be going anywhere. I sat down and began to watch. The game made no sense to me. It seemed like everyone was playing out of turn, and all of the cards looked funny and had symbols and numbers printed all over them that obviously meant something important, but to me might as well have been printed in Russian. I tried to look confused in the hopes of getting the girl (her name was Stephanie) to feel sorry for me and offer an explanation. It worked, but before long I regretted making the effort. The idea behind the game, she told me, is that you are a powerful wizard doing battle with other wizards for control of the country you live in. Your only weapons are the magic spells you control, which are fuelled by energy called mana that you draw from the land. Different spells do different things. Some hurt your enemies, some protect you, and some summon creatures that you command. As a general rule, the more powerful a spell is, the more mana it costs to play it. She then went on to show me all the cards. Some cards had pictures of landscapes on them; these were the ones you used to get your energy. Other cards had pictures of fireballs, lightning bolts, dragons, and skeletons that you could apparently use to damage your opponents. My head was beginning to hurt.
I’ve never really been all that interested in fantasy games or novels; as a child I was always more interested in space and adventure. Now here I was sitting with a bunch of people who were totally engrossed in this game they were playing, and I was pretty sure I wanted nothing to do with any of it. It seemed cheesy to me, and I secretly felt like they were all acting like a bunch of geeks wasting their time. I spent the rest of the night watching Stephanie get blasted with lightning bolts by the other “wizards” or eaten by their firebreathing dragons, wondering who on earth these people were and if they didn’t have my real friends locked up in a closet somewhere. We never did go out.
I held out for about three more weeks, until the same thing happened on a Friday night after a particularly long week. This time, however, I walked into an ambush. Instead of finding my friends all sitting in the midst of a heated duel, I found five of them waiting for me with an empty chair and a stack of cards on the table in front of it. I got a twenty-minute crash course on the rules of the game: I would start out with 20 life points and when they were gone I was eliminated from the game. There were five kinds of land: swamps, islands, forests, plains, and mountains. Each one produced one point of a different kind of energy, or mana: black, blue, green, white, and red, respectively. Each creature or spell required a different number or combination of mana points, depending on what it did. The object of the game was to use the mana to cast spells or summon creatures that would damage the other players and ultimately reduce their life points to zero so they would be eliminated. Basically, I had to eliminate everyone else before they eliminated me.
I had no desire to learn, or to play the game. The only thing that kept me sitting there was that I was too tired to argue, so before I knew it I was face to face with a handful of cards with names like “Uthden Troll”, “Hurloon Minotaur”, and “Disintegrate”. My friends weren’t showing any signs of wanting to leave or do anything else, so rather than watch them play all night, I caved in.
The first few rounds were a disaster. I had no idea what I was doing, and since I really wasn’t interested, I didn’t really try all that hard to learn. As the night progressed, however, the game started to make sense a little more and I began to get a feel for when to play which kind of card and how to catch my opponents off guard with a well-timed fireball. By the time we wrapped it up for the night, I was making it into the last two or three players every round. Driving home that night, I was a little taken aback to realize that in spite of myself, I had kind of enjoyed playing the game.
Smelling blood in the water, my friends cornered me again the next night. Knowing that I would never go out and buy my own cards, they all donated from their own collections to build me a deck that would compete with their own. It was kind of like drug pushers giving a kid a free sample so he’ll get hooked and they’ll have a new customer. Within two weeks, I was following them to the card shop and actually began building a collection of my own. I was playing with them all the time now, and I was winning. I liked winning. Before I knew it, I had over a thousand cards and I was a full-fledged Magic geek.
Luckily for me, it would be short-lived. Less than a year later I left for France, where I would live for over two years. Upon arriving there, I was amazed to learn that the Magic card phenomenon was sweeping Europe as well, and I had my friends mail my cards to me there. It wasn’t the same. What I enjoyed the most about playing was the time trash-talking my friends, sitting around and yapping about girls and music and whatever else was on the agenda that night. Without them, it was just a goofy card game that I played against a bunch of real geeks that took it way too seriously. I reasoned that by the time I returned home all my friends would have outgrown the game, so I sold my cards to a kid named Raphael and bought a new camera. I figured I would never touch a Magic card again.
I figured wrong. I was right that all of my friends had outgrown the game by the time I got home, and all of us more or less forgot about it. It wasn’t until nearly six years later that I was wandering through a mall with the same friend who had once hosted the garage-house Magic tournaments when we saw a tiny sign in the corner of a comic store window advertising Magic cards for sale. I looked at him, he looked at me, and both of us emerged from the store a few minutes later with a pack of cards. Just for old times’ sake, we rationalized. His wife laughed at us and called us geeks as we excitedly tore open the cards and compared our uncommons and rares. She stopped laughing and started shaking her head in disgust when we got back to my condo and actually tried to play a game. We had a good laugh over it, then he went home and the cards went in a dresser drawer and were forgotten once again.
Years went by. I got married and moved to the other end of the country, then moved back. My friend and I stayed close but rarely saw each other. The cards I had forgotten in the drawer disappeared in one of the many moves my wife and I made, and I never saw them again. It wasn’t until last summer, when my wife was in the hospital after the birth of our daughter, that Magic once again inserted itself into my life. I called my friend, who had a startling announcement: while cleaning his basement, he had found his twelve-year old card collection. He brought them over, and soon we were building decks and playing one-on-one duels. Next it was a trip to the card shop we had once frequented, where we each purchased ready-made theme decks. Before I knew it, it was like I had time-warped back to my late teens, and the only thing missing was the garage house itself.
My friend is now a school teacher and I am middle management for a railway. We look all grown up,but we are still playing Magic. Last fall I made a startling discovery. My youngest brother had once been addicted to the game as well, and once he found out we were playing again, he showed up with a deck of his own. This game infects everyone it touches. Both my brother and my friend have gotten back into the game in a big way and have hundreds of cards. I have a few different decks to choose from, and that is good enough for me. I simply don’t have the time or the desire to do that, and I only play when I’m with them. It drives my wife crazy. As soon as we arrive in Lethbridge, my friend and my brother are knocking on the door within minutes, and out come the cards. She thinks, probably not incorrectly, that Magic is a geek game.
So are we geeks? Probably. And do you know what? I think I can live with that. Geek game or not, it has provided me with years of enjoyment, kept a close friendship even closer, and closed a gap with a younger brother I thought I had nothing in common with. Maybe it is ridiculous for grown men to be playing a fantasy card game. Maybe it is a colossal waste of time and money. Oh well. I can think of worse ways to be spending both. Like any other good pastime, it promotes friendship, encourages socialization, and makes you forget about all the stress and challenges waiting for you outside the door. That alone, some would say, is magic.

Golden

As the 2006 Winter Olympic games in Torino, Italy begin to wind down, I find myself more and more impressed with the accomplishments of the athletes competing in them. I have always liked the Olympics, especially the winter games, but there is something in the current edition that seems to have gotten through to me more than ever before.
Canada is enjoying its best Olympic showing ever, with 19 medals and counting. Surprisingly, many of these medals have come in events that are not typically Canadian specialties: mogul skiing, skeleton, and cross-country skiiing. Some of the stories of these athletes are truly remarkable.
Last night on CBC they aired a lengthy interview with Chandra Crawford, the women’s cross-country sprint gold medallist. I don’t think I have ever seen someone so enthusiastic and genuinely happy about her sport and her victory before. She didn’t come across as a gushing airhead or an overconfident diva trying to give off an air of modesty either. Watching her light up the TV with a ten thousand kilowatt smile while she gave thanks to all those who have supported her, there was no doubt in my mind that her reaction was 100% pure and sincere. As a Canadian, it made me very proud. As a parent, it made me wonder what it would be like to stand there beside some frozen race course on another continent watching your kid ski their guts out for a chance at glory. It gave me a sense of how excited they would be to see the group coming around the last turn and the feeling of ecstatic disbelief that they would have, realizing that their little girl was winning the race. It made me share a little bit of how proud they would be to see her cross the finish line and throw her arms in the air, knowing that years of sacrifice and determination had finally paid off. I can’t imagine the time that must be required for these athletes to get to that level, but I’m sure it would be worth it to climb on top of that podium and know that in that particular moment, you were the very best person in the entire world at what you just did.
In addition to the record medal haul, Canada has turned in an astounding number of fourth and fifth-place finishes. I wonder if they keep stats on that, because it seems to me that for every event we have medalled in, there has been at least as many in which we have placed fourth or fifth. Even though there is no hardware to take home with a fourth-place finish, in my eyes that it still a mammoth achievement. To compete in a field of hundreds of top athletes from all over the world and be fourth out of all of them should be gratifying. In my opinion, anything in the top ten is stellar. Unfortunately, with the emphasis that gets placed on the medals, fourth place is quite possible the most cruel finish in all of professional sports. I hope that the athletes who are ending up in fourth or fifth at these games will have the drive to look forward to the 2010 games in Vancouver and will better their finishes there.
Watching these people give their all to their respective sports has also made me evaluate my own life and accomplishments. The comparison may be unfair, as I have never aspired to be a professional athlete and as such have never placed much priority on sports, preferring to persue them in a recreational context only. That said, it makes me wonder, even if only for a moment, what I might have accomplished if I had channeled my energies into cross-country skiing or hockey. What if I had tried luge or bobsleigh, or even kept up with my mountain bike racing instead of quitting racing competitively? The best I ever managed was a ninth overall and two third-place finishes in my age category, but who knows what could have happened if I had kept up with it? Is it too late for me to do something now, if I decided I wanted to go to the Olympics? Most likely it is. To take up a completely new sport at 30 years of age and attempt to be successful on an international level might be asking a little much. Then again, the gold medal winner in the men’s skeleton event was 39 years old- a winter olympic record. Maybe it’s not too late after all.
I very much doubt that I will ever take up an Olympic sport, (other than maybe playing the occasional game of pickup hockey) let alone go to the Olympics. Maybe it’s just simply not what I’m destined for, but it has been an inspiration for me this week to watch these people realize their dreams, or at least chase them. While I envy them for the experience thay are living, I realize that I probably don’t have the discipline to spend hours every night and weekend training instead of with my family, and I don’t have the money or the desire to spend weeks away from home competing. To remain so committed to their sport, these athletes must truly love what they do. I’m relatively sure that if I was going to love something enough to be that devoted to it, I would have found it already, so perhaps all of this just isn’t for me. Maybe, however, there is someone reading this who had the time ahead of them, and the desire to use it to go after an Olympic medal. Maybe one of my kids will one day climb to the top of a podium and get to hear our national anthem played as they hold the gold medal that acknowledges them as the very best in the world at whatever task they have just completed. If they do, rest assured that I’ll be right there with them, bursting with pride the whole time.
A good friend of mine once asked me what I would do if I found out tomorrow that I had one year to live. After I finished listing off all the things I would try and cram into my remaining 365 days, she looked at me and said: “If those things are so important to you that you would want to make sure you did them before you died, why aren’t you doing them now?”
You know, that’s a good question. I guess I’d better get to them.

Stay on target….

I originally had great plans for this blog. It was going to be relevant and insightful, vibrant and thought-provoking. I wanted to discuss current events and world politics, and to provide points of view that were somewhat different from the norm. I wanted something dynamic and gripping that people would return to day after day to see what pearls of wisdom were being offered. Who was I trying to kid.
The focus of this blog has completely changed in the few short weeks I’ve been writing it, and I fully expect it to continue to evolve. In keeping with that expectation, I am abandoning all efforts to try and keep it reined into a certain vein of thought. The reality of it is this: some days are just thoroughly boring. There is nothing you can do about it, and you can only write so much about your kid learning to say a new word or some deep thought that popped into your head while you were watching The Amazing Race. So what do you do in that situation? How do you keep the adoring throngs encapsulated in your experiences? If you figure it out, please let me know.
In the meantime, I’m going to change it up a little. This blog has taken the form of a personal journal, which I guess is fitting because that is what blogs were originally designed to be. The downside of this is that the nuances of my personal life are probably not as riveting as I would like them to be, so I’m going to try and spice things up a bit by turning this into kind of a creative outlet. I’ve written dozens of short stories, songs, and even poetry, all of which has ultimately found its way to a black leather folder where it has been carefully hidden away from prying eyes. Some of it is about to find its way here. You may love it or you may hate it, but feel free to comment. I promise I won’t take it personally. I may include sketches or photographs, and I promise they won’t all be of trains.
Hang on, this might be interesting.

One track mind

OK, I admit it. I have some funny habits. For those of you who know me, this will come as no surprise as you’ve been harrassing me about them for years. For those of you who only know me through these posts, your opinion of me may be about to change.
I have a strange, inexplicable fascination with trains. In recent years the interest has extended to all things railroad-associated, including history, politics, equipment, and geography. Sometimes it seems like much more than a harmless interest. I read books about trains, watch videos about trains, and belong to internet discussion groups focused on trains. I have written magazine articles about trains and even took up photography so I could take pictures of trains. I collect model trains and work part time at a hobby shop that sells model trains. I am a partner in another store that is focused completely on model trains and railroad memorabilia. As if that weren’t excessive enough, I work full-time for a class one railway. It is not a stretch at all to say that my career, and in a large part my life, revolves around trains. Sound like an obsession yet?
I’m not really sure where it came from. I come from a long line of cattle ranchers and farmers who if anything hated the railroad and all it stood for. My family may be the only one I know of that does not include a single person who at some point worked for a railway. Neither of my parents know a track spike from a flagpole. I am a bonafide first-generation railroader; somewhat of a rarity in the 21st century. There really is no rhyme or reason to it.
I can remember as a child always being captivated by trains. I don’t know if it was the size, or the noise, or some other intangible that I will never be able to explain, but I loved them from the moment I laid eyes on them. I drew pictures of them, built steam engines out of my blocks, and spent hours travel time with my eyes fixed intently on the tracks beside the highway in hopes that a train would materialize. My parents recognized the magnitude of my interest in railroads and did their best to be supportive. When I was about four years old I desperately wanted an electric train. My parents came through with an HO scale set that included an oval of track, a diesel engine, and about a half a dozen freight cars. My dad helped me set it up in the basement, where it enjoyed a relatively short life. Being four years old and inquisitive, I promptly tried to take it apart to see how it worked and destroyed the locomotive. My parents took this as a sign that I was too young for electric trains and boxed the set up. Despite my continued assertions that I had learned my lesson, I would not be able to convince them to allow me to buy another locomotive until I was eight. Still, I remain appreciative of their efforts. When I was about six, we came to Calgary for a few days to visit some family friends. During that time, my parents took me to Banff for the day aboard the Via Rail incarnation of Canadian Pacific’s legendary “Canadian”. We arrived in Banff before lunch, spent the afternoon at the hot springs (where, incidentally, I almost drowned) and returned to Calgary late that night on the eastbound section of the same train. I remember standing on the platform in the cooling summer night looking up at the yellow nose of the locomotive and smelling the creosote of the sun-baked ties and the hot grease and diesel exhaust of the train as the porters milled about collecting the new passengers’ luggage and the recently de-trained patrons like ourselves hurried off to wherever they were going. It all seemed so mysterious to me, and so intriguing. I remember asking my father where the train was going next and why we couldn’t go too. I remember not wanting to leave and being glad for the experience I had just lived, but sad that it was now over. My parents could not have known it at the time, but the experience would soon be impossible to replicate. In 1990, when I was fourteen years old, the routing of the Canadian was changed to follow the Canadian National main line through Edmonton. For a child of my age and means, it might as well have been the moon. In my corner of the world, passenger trains had been relegated to the history books.
My parents continued to surprise me. When I was twelve, I got an unexpected Christmas gift from them that turned out to be another memorable and irreplaceable experience. My father somehow arranged with the local management at CPR to allow me and a friend to ride in the cab of a local train from Coalhurst back to Lethbridge, crossing the famous High Level Bridge over the Oldman River valley. The whole ride was all of ten miles long, but when my parents picked us up at the industrial park in north Lethbridge, I’m sure my smile was as big as the engine itself. Sadly, with the changes in the world today and the increased security around the post-911 transportation industry, it is now next to impossible to do this sort of thing.
Throughout most of my childhood I was a certifiable train nut, but as I grew older and entered my mid to late teens, trains took a back seat to sports, cars, and girls. It wasn’t until I was nineteen and landed in Europe where the railway is an important part of everyday life that the interest was rekindled. When I returned home in 1997 I began to collect HO scale trains again, and I haven’t looked back since.
My wife has always been outwardly supportive of my passion for these steel-wheeled giants, but I wonder sometimes what she really thinks. Even I can understand that it may seem strange to some that a grown man would be so passionate about something that many would consider childish, so it made makes appreciative that she will dutifully admire my latest model of a flatcar or covered hopper that she really isn’t interested in, or will sit and listen to me spew railroad jargon that must sound like a foreign language to her. She even allowed me to take her to the mountains, eight months pregnant, for a day of chasing and photographing trains. The woman is amazing.
About four years ago, my love of trains justified itself somewhat when it suddenly provided me with a career. My wife had asked me on countless occasions why I didn’t apply to work for the railway, and I had always hesitated. Trains were fun and interesting for me, and I didn’t want to ruin that by making them my job. One fateful day at the University of Calgary changed all that. I was between classes and had a few hours to kill, and saw a sign for a recruiting session for Canadian Pacific Railway. I slipped quietly into the back row and watched the last twenty minutes of the presentation, then decided to mingle a bit and ended up talking to some of the recruiting officers. I finally cornered one of the ladies who seemed to be a senior and told her I was a student and was looking for something in the evenings and weekends. I figured that given the 24/7 nature of railroad operations, they were sure to have plenty of off-hours work that nobody would want. I was surprised when she informed me that most of the positions they were trying to fill required regular business hours. Besides, she continued, they were only looking for university graduates, so I should finish my degree before I thought about applying. I’m not sure what it was about the way she said it that set me off, but I left the room determined to apply immediately. To make a long story even longer, I was hired six weeks later and now occupy a mid-level management position with CPR’s operations department. Trains, it seems, have taken over my life.
Luckily, this hasn’t destroyed my interest in the industry and if anything has helped me become good at what I do. I still collect model trains, and still enjoy chasing the real ones around and taking pictures of them. I still can’t explain what drives it all. There is something about hearing the haunting echo of a diesel horn echo through a lonely mountain valley that stirs up feelings deep inside of me, and I can’t help but watch a seemingly endless string of grain hoppers roll by and listen to the creak of the couplers and the screech of steel flanges tell stories of the thousands, maybe millions of miles they have traveled. Standing on the old, weatherbeaten ties of a prairie branch line and watching the setting sun glint from the wobbly strands of jointed rail that stretch out drunkenly to the horizon, I can feel the weight of decades of crops planted, raised, harvested, and shipped to the same Pacific tidewater ports that for many of the farming families that grew them were the first sight of the land that they would come to call home. Last year, I visited Rogers Pass for the first time. As I watched a sixteen thousand-ton coal train claw its way up the side of the mountain, felt the ground shake beneath my feet and felt my pulse quicken as the locomotives screamed out their frustration with gravity to the clear mountain sky, I realized that railroading had somehow found its way into my blood. However it managed to get there, it will always be a part of me now.

Left wingy

WARNING: Rant Alert!

I have come to the realization that I am a staunch conservative. Some of you may decide to stop reading right now and seek out something you will deem to be more worthy of your open-minded, enlightened state. All right then, go find it.
I have always tried to look at things objectively. I have always tried to understand every different angle to a story or situation, even if I didn’t agree. I have made a concerted effort to always form my own opinions and to found them in fact and logic rather than emotion. Unfortunately, I am beginning to wonder if I have somehow erred along the way. The country that I live in is extremely liberal minded. I have no problem with being open-minded and tolerant, but I have to admit that I have been very uneasy with some of the things that a steady string of Liberal governments have done to my society. I am now faced with the unpleasant process of deciding what I should accept and what I should reject. I firmly believe that everyone has a right to an opinion and that that right should be accepted regardless of whether or not I am in agreeance. That said, when does it become injust and even immoral to accept a principle that you are opposed to just because it is someone else’s opinion?
One of the big issues in the recent federal election was gay marriage. Ramrodded into reality by another Liberal government, it has never sat well with me. I am not one of those gun toting deliverance-type rednecks who like to drag homosexuals around behind their pickup trucks, but I do take issue with ay marriage being legalized. I understand that many people believe that it is a basic human right to marry whoever you want regardless of sex, and I respect their right to view it as such but I strongly disagree. If this stream of logic were true, then I should be able to marry my sister or even my own mother. Some will point out the possibility of complications due to inbreeding, and indicate that incestuous relationships are illegal due to the potential harm in breeding. OK, fair enough. Now tell me how a gay marriage is any more healthy. A same-sex couple cannot reproduce on their own, and in my opinion can not provide the gender role modelling that a child requires. This makes the situation every bit as dangerous to a child introduced to it. Physiologically, gay relationships do not make sense. The parts simply don’t fit together. I understand that there are many theories regarding the chemical makeup of the brain of a gay person and their inclination towards that behaviour. Many now contend that it is a physical condition inherent to the individual and that they have no choice in the matter. Again, I cannot agree. I will concede that someone may be born with homosexual tendencies, but I still believe that they have the choice whether to act on those tendencies or not. Many people are born with a predisposition towards alcoholism that they fight with for their entire lives; how is this any different?
The gay marriage issue is just one of many where I find myself at odds with these supposedly enlightened, liberal minded people who somehow seem to have developed a stranglehold over my country. My biggest problem with them now, is that as much as they profess to have an open mind, they refuse to accept any opinion that does not coincide with their own. Because I oppose gay marriage, I must surely be a bigot. Because I make a comment that I disagree with the way Muslims around the world are reacting to the present issues regarding religious cartoons that are offensive to them, I am now a racist. Please. I do not think my comments or my beliefs are out of line. I think that what these people are doing is ridiculous, and is an atrocity. If you don’t agree with something, by all means stand up and say so. Yell if you want to, or wave a flag or something. Don’t build bombs and start killing innocent people just because they happen to be from the same country as a cartoonist who drew something that you found offensive. But who am I to speak out on this. Obviously, I just don’t understand all the issues, or I’m not educated, or something like that. Any reason to discredit any point of view I may have that falls outside the typical free love for everyone diatribes these people love so much.
Why is it that anyone who agrees with them is an intelligent free thinker, but anyone who doesn’t is a racist, a bigot, or uneducated? I made the mistake of getting into a discussion on gay marriage with some people at work, and was actually told flat out that I shouldn’t have the right to raise children because they would surely grow up tainted with my bigoted, ultraconservative views and would never have a chance to see the world for “the way it really is”. I’m sorry, but this is garbage. I’ve already said that I have no problem being accepting and tolerant, but sometimes you’ve got to just call a spade a spade. Want to brand me as a bigot because of it? OK, I guess I’m a bigot then. There are just too many things I can no longer back away from in good conscience, regardless of whether or not my opinions on these issues are popular or en vogue or not. I do not agree with gay marriage. I do not agree with the gay lifestyle at all, but if someone wants to act that way in the confines of their own home, they have that right. I do not believe that they have the right to force my to live in a society where I have to agree with what they are doing or I am branded as hateful and intolerant. I resent that I am forced to raise my children in a society where they will be forced to accept ideals and behaviours that are not correct or in my opinion, moral or healthy. I do not hate gays. I know several of them, and I work with them and even associate socially with them. They are great people. I simply do not agree with the lifestyle they have chosen. If they want to live together, fine. I just do not believe that they should be legally married. I do not agree with it now, and I never will. Regardess of anyone else’s thoughts on the matter, I have the right to my own as well.
I have come to the somewhat painful realization that in many ways I will have to defend my own rights and opinions because society will not do it for me. I will have to fight to be able to raise my children with the values that I feel they should have, and I will more than likely have to endure many arguments and possibly physical disputes because of those values. Still, I will do this because it is important. Sometimes, you have to draw a line in the sand and decide which side of it you want to stand on. I am thankful that my ideals are becoming clearer as I grow older, and that I am comfortable enough with myself and my world to be able to stand up for what I believe. Wish me luck.

Fun with little kids

This weekend there is a massive model train show here in Calgary; the largest in Canada, I’m told. Normally this isn’t really news to me, because normally I’m in it. For the past three years I’ve been exhibiting as part of a three-man group and have devoted the entire weekend to the show. This year, however, is different. Last year the show was frustrating for a couple of reasons, and some of them ended up being significant enough that we decided not to attend again this year. My wife and I would be celebrating our five year anniversary anyway, so I was happy enough to keep the weekend clear. We made plans to leave the kids with my parents and go away to spend a quiet weekend together. Unfortunately, a couple of wrinkles came up. In November, my friend and railroad co-conspirator Jered abruptly changed his mind and decided that he wanted to do the show this year after all. Normally this wouldn’t have been an issue, but I had already made plans to take my wife out of town and wouldn’t be able to change them without it turning into an international incident. The problem is that there are only three guys in our group, and our display is a monster. Being short a man would be a serious issue to them. Still, I stuck to my guns and told them I wouldn’t be available.
Three weeks ago, Moosie got sick and landed in the hospital. We are now frightened enough that we weren’t willing to take off and leave him in someone else’s care for the weekend quite yet. This effectively killed our anniversary weekend plans, but opened the door for me to attend the show. With Jered and Mal pushing hard for the extra help and my wife letting me know exactly how she felt about the situation, I decided that making it to six years was more important than the show. My wife, ever the diplomat, struck a compromise. Friday we would spend the day together and leave Jered and Mal to set up the display on their own. Saturday, we would have a family outing and take the kids -all three of them- to the train show. This was actually my wife’s idea, but I was more than happy to take her up on it. Usually I’m so busy doing the show that I don’t get much of an opportunity to see any of the rest of it. Sunday, we decided, I would head back to the trenches and help out Jered and Mal.
The plan seemed brilliant, and was executing nicely until we got to the part where we were supposed to take the kids to the show. We couldn’t get them to put their shoes on, then they wouldn’t wear their coats. Under great duress, they finally got dressed to the point where they could venture outside without catching immediate hypothermia, then they proceeded to pull everything off again. It took us 40 minutes to wrangle the three of them into the car and actually leave.
The show was a nightmare. The Frog, as usual, was good as gold and never made a sound until Moosie inadventently head-butted her whilst in the throes of one of his many tantrums. The Bear was pretty good for a three year-old in a crowded room filled with lots of expensive toys, but suddenly developed an inability to walk for more than three steps without being picked up. Once picked up, of course, he wanted to walk again. When faced with the impossibility of walking while being held, he started whining. Few things in this world are more annoying than a three year-old whining. Amazingly, he didn’t touch anything, although we nearly needed dynamite and crowbars to remove him, kicking and screaming, from an animated display featuring a lego backhoe that actually scooped and dumped little black pellets that looked like coal. Left to his own devices, I’m sure he would have spent the night there watching the thing go back and forth.
Moosie provided a textbook example of why families with multiple young children don’t go out very often. He whined in the car. He whined in the stroller. He threw a collossal tantrum when we tried to feed him lunch and ended up with bits of hotdog strewn from here to Moose Jaw. With the exception of one display that had a working model of Thomas the Tank Engine, nothing held his attention for more than about thirty seconds. Once that thirty second grace period expired, he would scream. We gave him books to read, which he promptly began hurling out of the stroller with surprising force. Fearing casualties and associated lawsuits, we took the books away. He screamed. We gave him a soft pretzel to eat, which he screamed at until we managed to get a few bites into his mouth and he realized it was actually quite good. He ate about half of it, then began systematically shredding the remainder and scarttering it over his baby sister. We took it away. He screamed. My wife took him to the washroom to change his diaper, and he threw another collossal tantrum at being taken out of the stroller. When he returned, subdued and clean a few minutes later, all it took was an attempt to put him back in the stroller to unleash his full fury once again. we let him walk for a few minutes, which consisted of his dragging my wife around in circles, screaming whenever she tried to alter his course. We decided that enough was enough and it was time to go, and he let loose with the mother of all tantrums. He thrashed so violently that he was very close to overturning the stroller. This was the one that resulted in the Frog getting blindsided, and we cracked down on the Moose hard. Young as he is, he does understand threats.
The day was very difficult for me. I take my obligations seriously and felt like I should have been there to help Mal and Jered. That said, my family are priority number one and must always take precedence. Our little episode with Moosie recently has underscored this and made me realize anew that I must be clear with where my priorities lie. Still, the outing today sucked. I didn’t enjoy it, I still didn’t have a chance to see the show myself, I was worried the whole time about my wife being bored, and I felt like Linden didn’t really get to see what he wanted to either because we were having to move constantly to keep Moosie from screaming the walls down. It felt like a waste. As a parent, you want to have fun with your kids and provide them with experiences that they will remember and cherish. Ideally, they might even learn from them. You have visions in your head about family outings where everyone has a good time and enjoys the day together. Today was not any of those things, which made giving up working the show seem all that much harder.
Kids, as great as they are, can be very challenging. I suppose that as a parent you have to be willing to give of your time and energy without any hope of anything in return, even if all you were hoping for was to form some happy memories. On the way back to the car, my wife and remarked to each other that it would be a frosty friday in hell before we attempted something like that again. Hopefully, it won’t be. Hopefully, next time will be better.

All work and no play makes Adam a dull boy

Quote of the Day: “Don’t be so busy making a living for yourself that you forget to make a life for yourself”

Usually a sports station is not where I turn for philosophical insight, but this one just seemed to make a lot of sense. Kudos to the Fan 960 for making me raise an eyebrow. This quote is especially relevant right now because I am working days, and it is insane. I almost look forward to the relative calm of the night shifts I’ll be going back to next week. When you wake up at 4 am, go to work at 5:30, stay there until 6 pm and don’t get home until around 6:30, a job can seem to devour your entire life. I was going to come home tonight and get started on a project for work that I’ve been putting off, but then I heard that quote on the radio and decided to do something I want to do instead. I’m going to go to the shop and play with some trains for a while, and forget about work for the next few days.
These sports guys really do know what is best.

I, revised

I have been married for five years as of this weekend. Unremarkable in the face of those who can claim twenty, thirty, or even fifty years of matrimonial bliss, but for me a pretty big deal. This coming from a guy who once held fast to a concrete certainty that he would never marry. Life, it seems, has a way of making a liar out of me.
Being married has been great. Sure, it has not always gone exactly as I had envisioned. I had no idea going into this that I would never have any money ever again, or that my treasured days of skiing and mountain biking were about to be added to the endangered species list. It took me a while to warm up to the fact that my wife hates camping, and that any family holidays would likely be spent in a hotel. I struggled desperately to come to terms with a Mariah Carey CD finding it’s way into the hallowed rows of my music collection. In some ways, marriage has been compromise indeed. In others, however, it has been better than I ever imagined. We don’t fight. We never really have. Cheesy though it may sound, my wife really is my best friend. She even watches hockey and action movies. She cleans up after me, she loves to cook and is great at it, and she is doing a fantastic job of raising our children. She loves being a wife and a mom and takes her role in the home very seriously. Some of you are probably reading this and thinking “what a pig; that’s so old school.” Before you jump to any conclusions, let me just tell you that she chose this. I have never insisted that she stay home and have always encouraged her to develop herself and her career when possible. She does work part time and is extremely good at what she does. The woman is the total package. Because of her, the last five years of my life have been some of the best.
Milestones like this have a curious effect on me sometimes. It is very gratifying to be able to look back with a sense of accomplishment and fulfulment, yet at the same time it makes me very aware of the person I am vs the person I was then, and of how much I have changed. Everyone always said that marriage would be this cataclysmic, life altering experience, but surprisingly, for us it wasn’t. There was the obvious adjustment of having someone else in your face all the time, but since we pretty much spent every waking moment together as it was, even that seemed relatively minor. Kids were another story. The Bear showed up as I was struggling through a semester of University, living on student loans. My wife had such a terrible pregnancy with him that she had been unable to work much either, and consequently I was working three part-time jobs in addition to being a full-time student just to keep the family afloat. I was exhausted, and no matter how much we tried to cut corners we still never seemed to have any money. Our bank account balance was spiralling towards zero at a frightening rate when the Bear actually showed up in late November, and by that point I was just praying that we would have enough left to get us through to Christmas. Between the expenses of school and the money required to cover the family’s needs, we were into almost $11,000.00 of student loan debt by the middle of January, and I decided to pull the pin and go back to work. I was lucky enough to find a job that I liked that paid fairly well, and was back to work full-time by the first of February. The idea at the time was to try and finish my degree by taking night classes, but we didn’t have the money to do it at that point and decided to wait a year so we could pay down some debt. Unfortunately, that fell through as well. By the time I was in a position to resume my studies, my wife was pregnant again. Moosie showed up in August 2004, and by December we were shocked, amazed, and a little bit horrified to learn that my wife, who is apparently the most fertile thing in Alberta, was with child yet again.
Looking back now, I’m glad that our kids showed up when they did and I obviously wouldn’t trade them now. That said, the effects of having three children in four years were emotionally, physically, and financially devastating. As I have said before, a family truly permeates every aspect of your life, which brings me to the crux of this posting.
Sometimes, after five years of difficult, beautiful, frustrating, rewarding, and exhausting marriage, I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore. I look at myself in the mirror and have a hard time recognizing the face that looks back. As work, kids, and other responsibilities compete for my time, things like hiking, running, and mountain biking have gotten the axe. Consequently, I now carry about twenty extra pounds around that I would love to get rid of. My guitars and amplifier, once a mainstay of my daily routine, are gathering dust in a corner of the basement. I actually pulled the acoustic out about three months ago and tried to remember a few old songs, but could barely string four chords together. I was only able to play for about twenty minutes before my hands began to bleed. The once-heavy callouses on my fingers have long disappeared, I no longer have the time to write, or even to learn new songs, and on the rare occasions that I am able to hoard a half-hour for myself, there is invariably a child sleeping, which in our tiny home immediately precludes any guitar playing. The circuits of my beautiful black semi hollow-bodied electric haven’t felt the hum of power in over three years.
My time and efforts are almost completely concentrated on my wife, my children, and their support and happiness. I don’t resent that; on the contrary I feel very strongly about my duties as a husband and father. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I’ve lost myself a little bit in the transition. Sometimes, like tonight, I’ll be driving home and I’ll look out the window and see the clouds forming into a storm front, and I’ll remember standing alone in the middle of the night in a raging thunderstorm on the top of a hill and I’ll suddenly feel the electricity down the back of my neck all over again. I’ll smell the rain in the distance and remember sitting on the rocky shores of Waterton lake at 3 am, playing “Disarm” by the Smashing Pumpkins on my guitar over and over again. I’ll see the twilight spreading it’s golden warmth over the walls of a distant building and remember the burn of my lungs as a pedaled like a madman down some rock-strewn mountain trail, trying desperately to make it back to the car before I ran out of daylight. They would all be empty memories but for two common elements: they are absent from my life now, and they are some of the few things that made me feel truly alive.
I feel sometimes like I have abandoned spontaneity, forsaken recklessness in the name of reliability and responsibility. Have I become boring in the process? I can remember performing live, feeling the rush of the crowd swelling with the music and the smouldering feeling of being apart from them but still a key element of the moment. I remember being amazed at how quiet and still a crowded bar could become as we built towards the high point of Live’s “Lightning Crashes” and how good it felt to know that I had every person in the room hanging on my every word. It was a truly powerful means of expression, and I feel sometimes like I will never find anything that effective again. I feel at times like the person I was then is dead and gone now; buried out of necessity and nothing more than a faraway shadow of traits and faults that I no longer permit myself to possess. Sometimes, if only for a moment, I miss it very much.
The tradeoffs are great, and I am not unhappy with my life. As important as those things were to me then, they could never complete with the joy of having a loving wife and three wonderful children. I am not so naive as to think that my life would still be like that anyway. Five years is a long time, and unless we are lucky enough to be named Peter Pan, we all have to grow up sometime.
I wonder if I will ever start playing guitar again. I daydream that when the kids are older I’ll have a studio in the basement and I’ll be able to start writing again. Maybe I won’t play live, but at least I’ll have it for me. I wonder if I’ll be able to ride again. Of all the things I’ve given up, I miss that the most. To smell the pine trees roasting in the summer sun, hear the crunch of my tires fighting for traction, and feel the fire in my chest as I suck on the thin air cresting a long climb is truly nirvana for me. Flying down a tight, winding singletrack with my fingers cramping from the brake extension and sensing every vibration in the bike like it is an extension of my own body; that is true release. I watch the uniform grey skies gather as the snow begins to fall and I wonder if I’ll ever ski the way I did before, and if I’ll appreciate it as much then as I would right now.
I wonder if somewhere out there among the trees and clouds and fading sunlight of a good life changed by circumstance, I’ll be able to find myself again one day.

Family Ties

Our kids are finally back from their Grandparents’ houses, where they have been staying while Moosie was in the hospital. It’s wild at home again, but nice to have them back. Both sets of Grandparents came up this weekend to help us and the kids settle back in, which was nice. It’s going to be a bit of an adjustment for all of us to get back to where we were before.
Having family relatively close by has been such a huge blessing for us. I can’t even imagine what we would have done if we had been living in New York State or somewhere like that when all this happened. Working for the railway, I guess you never really know where you’re going to end up so I should probably enjoy this while I can.
They say that you should always try and take away something positive out of every negative experience. If there is anything positive to be drawn from this, it is that I feel like my priorities are much clearer now. Family will always be number one. There is simply nothing in this life that could ever be more important, and what more can be said than that?