Winnipeg Candy Hearts

A little break from writing… kinda sorta. With Valentine's Day approaching, love – and Loveday, when the wind is right – is in the Winnipeg air. It's a time when lovers of all stripes in my hometown make way for romance – be it skating on the river, sipping together on ruby-red cream soda Slurpees, or cheapskating with some February 13th and 15th dinner reservations.

Click on the image to view the whole thing slightly larger. This exercise in Photoshoppery was partially inspired by my friend Carl Shura's fantastic downtown Winnipeg-themed Valentine's Day cards. 

ZOOMBUM!

ZOOMBUM [zoom-BUHM] – 1. interjection: an exclamation of joy, thrill, etc. 2. verb: to go, to move fast. 3. noun: playground slide (archaic).

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Scout sometimes lets loose two equally intriguing and relatively long-lasting catch-phrases – BUCKAWUZZIE [pr. buh-kuh-WUH-zee] and ZOOMBUM – the latter being, personally, my favourite word in the world. Whereas BUCKAWUZZIE can be described as entirely abstract with, to this day, no known etymological background, ZOOMBUM at least has traceable origins. A friend had a similarly-aged daughter who referred to playground slides as whee-bums, and it may have resulted from using and modifying this term during Scout's introduction to slides – which now rate high among her favourite things in the world.

Initially, ZOOMBUM was used as a physical description of a slide, but as time passed the term also became a declaration that a slide attempt was commencing (i.e., READY SET ZOOMBUM). Zoom to present day, and the word has pretty much lost its connection to slides and has integrated itself into Scout's lexicon, associated with speed in any form. Examples include backing the car into the alley, navigating the icy ruts in the alley, and scooting around on one's bare bum in the bathtub.

I have also likely prolonged Scout's usage of the word by using it so often myself, in hopes she will repeat it back to me. It doesn't always succeed, and I now dread the oncoming day when she learns to roll her eyes and tell me I'm being lame.

Big Girl

DADDIE BIG BOY?

"That's right. Daddy's a big boy. I'm a man."

MOMMIE BIG BOY?

"No, Mommy's a big girl. And Scout is a big girl, too. Scout, are you a big girl?"

Pause. NO.

There's a lot to be read into how our daughter responds to this frequently-asked question, as we drill the concept of becoming and being a big girl. In one week she will be two years old, and deemed ready to leave the infant room at her daycare to fend with the general population of a preschool room. She has visited this room plenty over the course of the winter with her infant-room caregivers, but not until this past week has she been led to the new space and left solo in attempts to intermingle with the older kids, new digs and different staff. The transition, I am told, has been slow. The tone in which I am told lead me to believe she is adapting warily and not without struggle. There have been tears.

A year ago, our family faced a much rougher scenario. Kerry, returning to work after lengthy maternity and parental leaves. Scout wading into daycare for the first time. The three of us, out of home over a month for extended renovations. A winter that would not die. Scout's initial fresh-meat weeks at daycare were riddled with illness. But then, like now, we knew it to only be a matter of time for her to gain trust and routine in the new, next stage of her life.

Scout is a big girl and she knows it, despite the occasional protest over the label. She puts items on the table if we ask her to put something on the table. She may or may not put away toys at the end of the evening. During her first weeks at daycare she was the only crawler; now she's the infant room's elder stateswoman. Approaching two years of age is the clinical, statistical, most obvious sign that she's ready for the move up. She simply has to be.

I'm told that while spending time in the preschool space, she is perhaps lonely. She misses her mate Walter, they say. The new room has more kids. Bigger kids. Different staff. Less structure. It's precisely like that flailing leap from elementary school to junior high, but with each kid advancing at their own set time. I relished that move to high school; many of my friends joined me, and I had allies in the older grades through my brother and sister.

She will adapt. I'm not concerned about this. But there are moments I stop and consider that my daughter's world is constructed primarily of three working parts (and the people who operate them): the house, the car and the infant room. Remove one of these pillars and I then understand her current shift in attitude. It's stressful. Hopefully within a couple of weeks she'll be entrenched in the new space. 

It has a water table after all. And Walter will still come by for visits.

White Whale

I beak here about birds a lot; I've been keen on them since I was eight years old. At the crest of my early fandom, I kept a mental list of local species I considered must-sees based solely on how colourful they appeared in my Audobon guidebook, and how cool they were to reproduce with my Crayolas. Over time I eventually spotted and life-listed several: the American avocet, the evening grosbeak, the ruddy duck, the ruddy turnstone… the ruddy anything, really. But the blackburnian warbler – that miniscule, black-white-and-orange, canopy-dwelling white whale to my birdwatching Captain Ahab – continued to evade me until I was ready to concede ever seeing one.

It's only natural then, that three decades later – and a few years ago – I was raking the goop and sand left behind by winter from my lawn when my white whale beached itself along my sidewalk on the fringe of downtown Winnipeg. My thankless job was complete, and I headed inside to cop the reward. I returned to the front steps with a drink. A watched pot never boils, and a sought-after bird never presents itself until you say fine, I'm just gonna go ahead and sit on my stoop and enjoy this fine bottle of beer. As I drank – and I swear to you, it was just the one – a most brilliant blackburnian warbler in its Sunday-best breeding plumage descended from the elms above and promptly set about pecking at the detritus from my clean-up. Only a few metres away, in the flesh (and feather).

Right then and there, with a beer in my hand and my favourite bird on the lawn I thought: Life's a pretty sweet fruit. The end.

The Civic Has Landed

I've worked here sixteen years, commuting the circumference of the Earth nine times, and counting. The highway travel is easy, until it isn't. The city is a bear though, full of other people – and other people are the worst. The roads out here are arrow-straight. Three turns only – day in, day out – that I can perform in my sleep. Right at the lights. Left at the barn. Right at the gate.

Zero incidents. OK, an asterisk: zero incidents as a driver. 

Fine. Another asterisk: zero that anyone else saw. 

One morning, wintry and slick, wind whipping snowy ghosts across the highway. The roads out here are arrow-straight, to a fault. I can sense the ice, but there's no reason to test it, to prove this theory. I turn onto the final run of road, the home stretch. I'm listening to the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," a boisterous treat for this day in the car on my own. I'm goin' to Wichita, far from this opera for evermore. Gaining speed. Fifty, sixty, seventy. Kilometers, Americans; I'm in a Civic, and am no maniac. A shift, maybe a hit of wind, and the car begins to turn. No, not turn. Slide. This is happening. And I'm bleeding, and I'm bleeding, and I'm bleeding right before the Lord. Still moving, but sideways. I look at the ditch, brimming with snow. This won't be too bad. I correct. Too much. Sideways again, facing the opposite direction. This ditch looks worse. All the words are gonna bleed from me, and I will think no more. I correct the correction. Sideways, a third time, slowing down. If this fails it will be a soft landing, like the Eagle into the powder of the moon. The Civic has landed. But the wheels strike the gravel shoulder, a reprieve. I brake to a crawl, then a full stop. The stains coming from my blood tell me go back ho…

Shut the music off, and look back. No one in sight. I turn the radio back on, switch to the classical music station.

Dear Diary: January 22-February 1, 1985

January 22, 1985

We went skiing today. It was my first time going skiing in my entire life! I liked it. It was really fun! Goodbye!

It remains really fun to this day. The sport left such an impression that not long afterward, my mom procured a single pair of used skis and boots that somehow all three of us siblings fit into, and then fought over. We used them sparingly, most memorably during the Blizzard of 1986. I then entered a great period of skiing darkness, emerging five years ago when Kerry and I bought matching skis for Christmas.

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January 25, 1985

Me and my brother Jacob or Jake went on his paper route and then we went to the North Star Theatre to see the movie 2010 "the year we make contact". Whatever "contact" means. All of my friends at school are Kien, Ken, Brian, Chad, Dwight, K.C. and Patrick. Patrick gave me a real neat rock. Nobody knows what kind of rock it is. Anyway… goodbye!

I love how I felt the need to clarify to my dimwit diary – 25 days into the calendar year – that the Jacob I keep referring to is my brother, and that he also goes by the name Jake. I love how the two of us, aged 9 and 11, could go downtown by ourselves to watch a movie – and what a movie, I recall thinking, unaware of the existence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wasn't yet old enough to grasp a whole lot of pop culture. Like when I saw Labyrinth the next year, and came away as the Number One Fan of an actor named David Bowie.

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January 26, 1985

Okla and Ija are going to get face transplants and Ija is going to get a hair due. Mouse, Mouse and Elmkah survived. Anyway, good bye.

These were the names of three of my ookpiks, small leather and rabbit-fur toys that defined my childhood. I didn't go into great detail as to what happened for good reason: it was one of the worst days of my life. I popped three ookpiks (and two plushie mice) in the microwave, pretending it was an inter-dimensional portal to their imaginary world. I programmed them for a minute on power-setting zero, believing it the equivalent of a blast of room-temperature air. Zero defaulted to full power, and in 20 to 30 seconds there was burning leather and rabbit fur. My mom wasn't home; my sister was in command, and after much yelling and tears, we agreed on a cover-up story of a terrible accident in which the ookpiks were lit by an element on the gas range. We believed this to be a much lesser charge to plead guilty to.

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January 29, 1985

Tommorrow is a very busy day. We have swimming at 9:30 to 11:30, open gym, 8:20 to 8:50, Science club 12:00 to 12:50 1:00, other kids have team handball 12:00 to 12:30 and gym, and a spelling test. Today I got Team 1's chart, I got 20 stars, Sarah and Kien got 19, Tejinder got around 16 and Brian had 4. Good bye.

I kicked ass in these performance charts. A gold star sticker was added after each aced pop spelling or math quiz, and winning resulted in a selection of our choice from a box of free books. I won so many of these books that come spring I opted for a second copy of Anne Of Green Gables to give as a present. Pity poor Brian and his meagre four stars, but ignore the irony that I misspelled "tomorrow" in my diary post about it.

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February 1, 1985

I had a terrible day. In the morning I got a stomachache. In the afternoon I stayed home because I got Jake's flu. I threw up 3 times. Good bye.

Jake, back in my bad graces. Circle of life.

Walter Did It

I arrive at daycare after work. Everything seems normal, but I am about to discover that I'm wrong. Dead wrong.

I see Scout playing in the back of the infant room with Walter, often the only other kid who's there this late in the day. Scout sees me, and races into my arms. Such a happy cat. Nothing in the world is amiss. Her caregiver hands me a slip of paper, and a pen.

"There's been an incident," she says slowly and quietly.

Confused. I glance at my daughter, double-checking. She's moving. Breathing. She inhales and exhales. Like any honest parent, my next instinct is Scout, what the hell did you do. She is not yet even two years old, so I do not say this out loud.

The paper lays bare a clinical retelling of the incident. That another child took his/her teeth and sunk them into Scout's upper arm, that the act itself was not seen but the fallout was loud and immediate. No blood or punctures, but there were tears, and an application of the proper salve. No names. I look at her arm and there it is: a perfect little horseshoe of teeth marks. The caregiver sees the wheels creaking in my head, and offers instruction. Sign the form.

Heading home, everything seems normal. "Scout, what did you do today?"

WALTY.

"Walter? You played with Walter?"

YEAH.

I cut to the chase. "Scout, did someone bite you?"

YEAH. OWWIEEEE.

"Who bit you?"

BITE. OWWIEEEE.

I begin naming names. "Walter?"

WALTY.

"Walter bit you?"

WALTY.

"Walter did it?"

WALTY DID IT.

At home, Scout dishes to Kerry. WALTY DID IT. Neither of us can believe what we're hearing; Scout and Walter have been daycare mates for almost a year, and are as good a pair of friends as children this young have a concept of. Walter, always smiling, always helpful, passing me Scout's diaper bag as I nudge her boots on. Walter's a biter. He bites little kids.

The next morning I joke with daycare staff about their no-names policy, explaining to them how Scout outed her assailant. "Walter? No. It wasn't him. Walter's such a good boy. No, it's one of the newer children; we always have to keep an eye on this one."

Scout, you lied to me.

That evening, I ask her again. "Scout, who bit you yesterday?"

BITE. OWWIEEEE.

"Who bit you?"

CALEB DID IT.

Coming To A Boil

Scout came home recently with a swath of hair stained red from a cooperative artistic venture gone awry. I dug it though, it was kinda punk. But with an unprecedented city-wide boil water advisory in effect, the best effort we could muster in doing away with it was Kerry squeezing Scout between her legs and wiping her with a damp cloth. Our child guzzles bathwater with a quickness – like any opportune almost-two-year-old does – and her nightly bath ritual was suddenly a no-splash zone.

Now in the advisory's third stupefying day, a cavalier attitude I inherited as a kid regarding water quality – combined with a disdain for the cultural and generational shift that effectively bubble-wraps children – has my childhood definition of common sense butting heads with 21st-century common sense.

I ate snow. I sucked on icicles plucked from back-alley garages. I drank from the garden hose. I dipped my metal cup in and glugged tea-toned water from rivers in the Whiteshell (only swift-moving water; no bogs or lakes with motorboats). Tumbling mountain streams were fair game during a family vacation to the Rockies, despite the posted warning signs. I'd seen enough beer commercials in my time to know that if cold, crisp, glacier-fed water was good enough for Labatt Ice or Old Vienna, it was gonna be good enough for a growing boy. 

As the popular saying goes, I turned out all right.

In 2007 Kerry and I set out on a road trip that touched on four of the five Great Lakes, and during a muggy day-hike we came upon a pristine, postcard-worthy stretch of Lake Superior coastline (see photo above). I splashed my face with the cold, clear water. Then I chugged it. Kerry was aghast, but it just looked so good. Beer commercial good. I recall my defense: I wouldn't do this in any of the other Great Lakes. There's no science behind my decision-making, mostly gut instinct. So long as my gut doesn't rot from lake pollution or cryptosporidium, my gut is usually right.

I know our water's OK. You know it, too. You know it. I know you know it. (Breaking news: the City knows it too, as of 3:30PM CST.) But I'm a parent now, and I need all the arms of Vishnu from keeping Scout from tasting that sweet, tepid bathwater. Young children know not what they do, E. coli is a bitch and fortunately enough, boiling water has only become easier in this high-tech day and age. So yes, I did boil up some mighty pots of water. But I also gulped from the tap after brushing my teeth.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: If you're gonna drink straight from a Great Lake, make sure it's Lake Superior, and you'll be golden. Probably.

The Birds And The Birds

A couple of years ago some co-workers of mine engaged in a Big Year challenge, which for bird-nerds like myself is the nerdiest, birdiest, bird-nerdiest thing a bird-nerd can engage in and OK, you don't care anymore. But I joined in, and for a year in which my daughter was born and my birding time fluttered out our drafty chimney, I tallied 122 species. Many days were squandered in a zombie-like state, and I probably wouldn't have been able to differentiate a black-backed woodpecker from a three-toed woodpecker even if a rep from each species was woodpecking right into my eye sockets.

I identified 133 species during the second year of keeping track, including three I'd never spotted before (brown creeper, long-eared owl and Nashville warbler). I also saw a harmless black-backed woodpecker, pecking a tree. Three dozen or so of these birds passed directly by my office window, merely requiring a crane of my neck and a subtle shift of my duff (a Harris' sparrow ambled onto my ledge and peered in one blustery spring afternoon – I opened my file and dutifully typed Harris' sparrow). I'm sure I've mentioned before that I work in a marsh – otherwise my annual list would consist of 1) pigeon, 2) house sparrow and 3) Toucan Sam.

These types of numbers wouldn't impress the hardcore, or even above-average birdwatcher. I'm no Claes-Göran Cederlund. I can't tell my thrushes apart, let alone my confusing fall warblers. And hawks? Empidonax flycatchers? Forget about it/them. But I'm keeping a log once more this year. It always starts off tremendously slow, when it's just us and the resident hard-asses and crazy-asses holding court until spring when the migrants return. I've listed 11 species this month, and that likely won't change until the snow and ice begin to ebb. A Northern hawk owl has been the lone standout so far, and that was actually pretty cool.

What The Cat Saw

I often see these two, passing by the window of the bookstore – the dad and the little girl. On their way to the bakery on Saturday mornings for a morning glory muffin. Sometimes just the dad, racing to meet his carpoolies. When he's not in a rush he taps the glass, and I let out a majestic yawn. He likes that. The kid loves it. She'll squeal, or hide her face in her dad's chest. I can hear her through the glass. Kitty, she'd exclaim back in the day, but lately she says Hi, Dos. She knows my name. Her dad must have taught her that trick. Once they came through the door and she touched my nose. I wasn't so keen on that.

Friday evening they stop by, and I hop from the counter by the cash register and meet them at the window. Looks like a pleasant night out there, really too warm for this time of year. The dad's wearing a different jacket, a nice one, and a black flat cap. Not his usual grubby toque and parka combo. The little girl has her pink winter coat on, speckled with tiny white hearts. Her hat with the chinstrap. A neck-warmer.

Something's a little off with her tonight – I don't think either of them realize it. I squeeze through the tchotchkes and get right up to the glass and blink. I could let out a majestic yawn, bare my fangs, but she might get too excited for her own good. Dad's trying to get a rise out of her. He points at me. He grabs her arm and waves it. Hi, Dos, he says, hoping she'll do the same. But her eyes glaze. She tucks into his neck.

He should get her home. I think he's enjoying the hug, or what he thinks is a hug. He gives her a little boost, securing her in the crook of his arm. She looks at me. Poor thing, I think. She lets loose a torrent of barf, down the front of her coat. Beige stuff. Looks like muffins and apple pie filling. Dad's eyes balloon, but neither of them make a sound. It keeps coming, and coming. On both their coats now, and their pants. They should get moving. It's a block or so to their house, but dad's feet won't work. My stars, it isn't stopping. Someone passes by. They face me to hide the spectacle. Dad looks around. Looks like he has his wits back. About time. They bolt, and veer sharply into the back lane.