Little Joys of Life on the Road Between Two Places of No Special Repute

The Thanksgiving holiday for me has now come to an end.  Our annual November trip to London, Ontario is over.  What the trip is about is complicated.  Initially it was about avoiding the pain of loss.  That was more than 20 years ago. When the person you spent the holiday dies sometimes it is just too much to overcome. Since then the jaunt has morphed into just an escape from the excesses of Thursday the turkey rules and Friday the money rules. Eventually it just became tradition.  We go because we enjoy it.

What we do is relatively simple.  We get into town.  We go for a late lunch at the Church Key.  We settle into our room and then we go to a movie. Not a very complicated ritual but it is our ritual.  We try to see the lighting of the Christmas trees in Victoria Park.  This year it rained so we instead divided up into duos and went and got some food.  We shop a bit.  On Saturday, there is a trip to the London Farmer’s Market for French bread, for pulled pork and for various little treats.  Finally, there was a run to the Black Walnut down in Old South off Wortley for a frittata and really, really good coffee. 

Yeah, it isn’t much but it is our ritual.  It is a family ritual.  We like this period we spend together.

This time we added on a trip to a nondescript bar in Sarnia called Lizards.  We ended up there in part because the name of the place is the same as that of a bar we used to frequent in our college days in East Lansing.  The Lizards we loved is gone.  The Lizards in Sarnia lives on.  From the outside you got the impression the place was a dive, a total dive.  Parking was miserable and the door was so nondescript that we weren’t sure we should even go in.

But once inside the bar was clean and bright and a band was setting up for an evening set.  The bar was sold out for the evening.  We ordered a variety of salads and burgers The food was very, very good for bar food. 

It is things like the serendipity of finding a bar by chance that really turns out to be a gem that keeps up doing this.  Sometimes you have to find joy in the boring and mundane spaces of the world. 

British Crime Dramas with Older and Younger Viewers

British Police Programmes

Last night my youngest son and I were searching for something on the television.  The criteria were that it had to be something we had not seen on Netflix and it could not be a farce.  In the end, we settled on a British police drama, Paranoid. Paranoid is about a group of police investigating a murder of a mother in a playground in full view of many, many children.  The vicious assailant, this was a knife attack, wears a hoodie and flees off into the distance after the incident.

My son at about the 15-minute mark began to go on about the nature of British police dramas. He was aggravated by their tendency to be very talky and to provide tons of exposition in lieu of actual action.  He reeled off vehicles like Inspector Lewis and the David Tenant abducted child thriller of recent years. 

He is right.  A great deal of the story progress in these tele dramas comes from the actors talking about the individual officer’s personal crises and the social reasons for the abhorrent state of life in the UK.  The thing is I enjoy the dialog, the conversation.  It deals with stress and anxiety and the whys of things.  I guess that is the difference between being 19 years old and 60 years old.  At 19 you want people to get on with it, to show you a story with cinematography and with guns and action.  At 60 you want to hear why things have played out as they have. Yeah aging changes your perspective.

Off to the Granite Town

Last night was a night away from home.  I went and saw Arrival.  Nice take on the science fiction genre. They’re here is the mantra of this film but it is not a phrase of horror exactly.  I think most of the theatre left scratching their head.  Arrival had a Terrance Malick feel to it but with a more accessible overall nature.

When we got back to the room here in the Forrest City we watched an old John Wayne film, the Shootist.  It was fun to see this again.  Good acting from John Wayne and Lauren Bacall.  The movie was really a solid mediation on mortality and fame.  Geesh you think John Wayne was trying to say something as he was approaching his death from lung cancer?

About midnight I headed off to sleep.  My dreams were odd.  That is not to say that my dreams ever follow a normal path.  The first dream that I had was of writing a children’s’ book. It was about four hedgehogs who were heading down to a frozen pond to play hockey. It was a warm fuzzy tale of team work and overcoming adversity. They were of course playing their arch rivals the weasels.

Must be because I am in Canada, eh?

The other dream that I remember, and I know there were many more that I do not have even the traces of to cogently put down, was about reading over my senior yearbook.  Of course, it was not really my high school senior yearbook but some phantasm yearbook that my mind concocted.  As I looked through the pictures the AV club shot looked like something out of a Fritz Lang silent movie with odd and painful looking gear. I kept thinking if I knew then what I know about now about life and about the people in these shots how differently I would have behaved.

My thought is that this dream was occasioned by seeing The Shootist.  There is a part where Lauren Bacall is trying to get the gunfighter Wayne is playing to meet with her minister.  Wayne says something along the line that his church is the mountains and the sky of the high country and that he is pretty content with who he is and what he has done.  Content is not the right term.  He is accepting of those things, yes that seems more like what was communicated by the words, the stance and the tone.

Yeah, maybe I would have behaved differently if I knew some of the facts of human behavior I have learned over the years, but nobody gets that chance do they?

In a short time, I will be headed off to the tiny town of St. Mary’s and then a little bit later I will head on to Stratford.  Backroads Ontario away from people and lustful consumerism, that is where I need to be today.