Life sucks sometimes

I was once a real manager, office and everything. I once had to lay people off. I'd known each of the people since I was a kid. It was the worst thing I've had to do in my career.

Today the guy who replaced me had to do the same thing. He had to let an old friend go. He also had to lay off someone he hired, someone who was really good at her job. The layoff had nothing to do with the quality of his management or the relative health of the business he works for, in this case a small daily newspaper.

Daily newspapers are a mess right now. Part of it is the economy, part of it the changing tastes in media consumption. A unacknowledged part of it is corporate greed. Most of these businesses do make money, pretty good money in many cases. But not enough for the corporations that own them. You wouldn't know that these papers are profitable from the way this story gets covered. Nor would you know it from what these papers actually look like. There are not very many people employed to put them out. Hence, there is not a lot of stuff in them anymore.

It makes me sick to watch and read. My hometown deserves better. My family used to own the paper. Since we sold it a decade ago has been disappearing like Monty Python's Black Knight, one chunk at a time.

What I would do for a bailout of my own, a big lottery win, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

On boredom

I've been sitting around nursing a flu for a few days now. 

It's one of the clingy viruses that started in my throat and radiated to other places. Usually chest and nose. I trudged to work for four days last week, in progressively declining health. By Wednesday night I was left essentially voiceless, a problem for a radio editor. 

So I've been sitting around a fair bit.

I've been one to lament not being sick on days when I didn't want to be at the office. But when the "gift" comes along, the problem is that you're sick. You don't feel like doing anything. It is hard to enjoy ill health when you're ill. I've read a bit, but concentration is a hassle. Watched some TV, but there isn't a whole lot worth watching (although Holmes on Homes never disappoints with its parade of renovation horrors and heroic rescues). I dozed through a baseball game yesterday and ended up watching a fair bit of a CFL game on Friday night when a  coughing jag wouldn't let up and I decided to spare Q the periodic bedquakes. As it was she slept through it all, but I wasn't sure at the time. I just kept coughing until I couldn't cough anymore and went back to bed. Cheaper than Benalyn, but it takes more time to work.

I'm trying to count the blessings. It's warm out, so I can wear shorts and a T-shirt rather than having to bundle up against a winter chill. It's moist, so my sore throat is not made worse by low humidity. If I want to test my legs, I can walk five minutes to the grocery store. I've also been able to listen to the radio a fair bit. Gordon Pinsent is a perfect host for the extended audio obit called The Late Show. I heard it this morning. I'm not sure if it has a late-evening broadcast too, but it ought to. There is nothing like hearing about the truncated lives of others to put your own woes into perspective. 

On that theme, I read an amazing piece in the NYT Magazine this morning by the paper's media writer David Carr. It turns out he was once a crackhead and drunk too. His memoir of life in the gutter is another "but for the grace of God go I" moment that makes me feel a bit less sorry for myself as hack up another lungful of ick.

I'm full of caffeine and a bit of energy at the moment. It will soon give way to the afternoon dead-zone, which is exacerbated by the virus. That cotton-headed feeling where you can't decide whether or not to flake out on the couch or retire to the bedroom or stay upright in a chair.

The world is a lot smaller right now. 

With the Mexicans

We took in another TFC game a couple of weeks ago, Pachuca the opponents.

I've seen Pachuca play three times now and they've never lost. Beat Pumas 1-0 in the Liguilla in 2006, then Chivas 1-0 in 2007 Clausura, now TFC on penalties.

It was an interesting game. For once the home team had more fans than the visitors, although the visitors were in full voice. We had a knot of lads sitting near us in green, red and white and they were in full voice, delightfully quick and self-deprecating. True charmers as Mexicans are. An interesting contrast to the blunderbuss humour of the increasingly-drunk Canadians who they bested time and again in the rhetorical sweeps. 

The football was fair to middling. FC played an experimental squad. Pachuca had some of its stars on display. Bruno Marioni and Christian Gimenez were the guys I was watching (both Argentine) and Marioni missed a couple of sitters in the first half.

What struck me most in the first 45 was how the visitor played the ground game. Short, quick passes, constant ball support, seldom playing themselves into blind alleys and corners where possession was given away cheaply. It could have been 4-0 at the half.

TFC was less fluid. Robert missed Amado Guevera's support. Attacks fizzled on the flanks as the midfielders were unable to support the forwards, the backs not backing up the middies. Ball support, the essence of the modern game just as puck support is what makes a good hockey team sing. 

It struck me afterward that a full-up FC would have had its hands full with a side like Pachuca, the gap between the best Mexican teams and the middle-of-the-pack MLS sides is still visible. 

Give it time. We'll get there.

Warm

About 15 years ago I spent a winter in Montreal. It was really, really cold. After that I thought I was done with winter. I got over it and ended up spending six in Ottawa. Not much difference there. Winter seemed manageable.

I never considered myself a warm-weather person. I have memories of sweating myself to sleep in a second-floor apartment on Queen West in Toronto in the middle of the summer. No escape from the thick, stagnant air. I hated it. I've gone to movies to escape the mid-summer heat. I've taken rides in air conditioned cars for a break. 

This morning I walked out of the office to grab a coffee and there was a damp chill in the air. It was probably 20 degrees out, but cloudy and that off-the-lake breeze that is surprisingly brisk. I kind of shuddered a bit. The mere hint of cool sends me back three months to shorter days and longer sleeves. 

The one thing I like about the change of seasons is that the one you're in prepares you for the one that follows. You're ready for spring, you're ready for summer, you're ready for fall and more-or-less OK with the onset of winter. 

What I notice now is that my tolerance for the low-light, low-temp extremes from December to March is a lot lower and my thirst for heat and humidity is much higher. Readiness for the new season does not mean acceptance of its full duration.

The other day I was walking home along Queen East in a dark, long-sleeved dress shirt, feeling the heat against my back and grateful for the sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. I want the warmth. I want the green. I want the light. I am not ready for a change.

Pain

I'm sitting here flipping between a couple of ballgames and game six of the NBA Finals. I like to see championships won. There is something about the "last game" that makes it special, one of those shared moments. 

I was feeling the same way yesterday as I watched the end of the US Open. I'm not much of a golf fan but I do enjoy seeing Tiger Woods play. He's like Gretzky to me, one of those athletes who is a category-killer. He draws in the casual fan because he is so good, so dominant, so capable of things that others just can't do. What made his OT win so interesting to me was that he was golfing on a bad knee. Whenever I've golfed it's my back that kills me afterwards, my knees usually survive OK. But I have not had chronic knee problems or three surgeries, one a just a couple of months ago. The TV guys were really good at showing how Tiger's left knee was woven into the mechanics of his swing and how the pain he was clearly enduring was effecting it. The winces, especially in the third round, looked real. 

As the holes went by, it got me thinking about pain, the physical variety, and what we put up with for our sports. 

After eight months of basketball, what are the genetic freaks on the Celtics and Lakers carrying around tonight? Hips, knees, backs, toes? I was watching a bit of the France-Italy game this afternoon and it occurred to me that some of those players out there, the guys who play top-flight club football, plus Champions League, plus for their country; will be approaching seventy or eight matches this season. That has to take its toll.

Then, of course, there is the rest of us. 

I learned an important lesson about pain 15 years ago. I was 30 then, and reading a copy of Esquire. The story I remember was about being a jock in your 40s. I don't remember a lot of the detail of the piece, but I do remember this piece of advice: take your anti-inflammatories BEFORE you work out, not afterwards. That rule has worked for me ever since. And it speaks to the reality of the aging athlete: it isn't about preventing pain, it is about managing it. 

Throughout my life I have played sports. Mostly team sports, a few years of really bad tennis and many summers sailing. Now I mostly run, with some soccer, hockey and softball thrown in for variety. 

At my age, I cannot play any of them without paying for it in some way afterwards. When I run, my knees and hips get sore. Hockey? My back. Soccer? Quads, knees, feet. Even softball has left me sore, these days it's a wonky knee that doesn't respond well to stopping and starting. When I am training for a marathon, I simply resign myself to the fact I will be sore a lot. If I play a hockey tournament, I can count on needing three or four days to fully recover. 

"Recover" is really the important word here. I remember being sore after playing soccer when I was 20-years-old, but it never lasted long, a few hours. I remember some back pain from hockey, but it would go away pretty quickly, usually overnight, even well into my 30s. I recovered quickly, and I could go out and do it again.

About six years ago I took up running more seriously. Over time I added miles. I started running marathons. I have nine under my belt now and I don't intend to stop. At points (last fall for instance) I have been in tremendous condition. I have managed to attain and maintain a level of fitness I haven't had since my mid-20s. I'm 30 pounds lighter than at my peak in late 2001. So it would take a lot, I mean A LOT, to give up the fitness, the three inches on my waist and the two suit sizes. 

But Christ, do I get sore now. When I run I feel it in my knees, sometimes my lower back. My rule is no Advil for any run less than an hour (Advil works best for me, but kills my stomach). But these days it doesn't take as much to make me sore. The pain I feel when I run isn't the kind that yells at me to stop. I would pay attention to that. It's the kind that nags. It tells that I am going to feel it when I stop. That is what bugs me. 

The pain you feel when you compete is the earned variety. You can mask it in the service of performance (Aleve gets me through a marathon, Advil a soccer or hockey tournament), and there is a good pain that comes when the game or race is over. Post-marathon pain is especially sweet. Finishing 26.2 miles is an accomplishment. Period. Three or four days of shredded quads are a badge of honour, not a medical emergency. 

But it's the other pain I have trouble with, the kind that is asking me some tough questions. Can I keep on doing this? Is this really good for me? Should I slow down? 

There is no cure for aging. I seem to have hit a wall of sorts in the last six months or so. I am staying sore longer. I have lost flexibility. I notice my performance decays if I miss a few days on the road. You can't win! Take a break from the grind to let your body recover and your body starts to revert to couch potato status. Not fair. 

I simply can't keep on doing the things I like to do without doing some things that help my body recover. I don't take enough hot baths, or cold ones either. I don't ice my knees frequently enough. I should try yoga for runners. I should get more massages. I should stretch more. I should probably do more strength training. I should remember to take my glucosamine three times a day EVERY day. And the occasional Advil would help too. 

The last thing? I have to remember. When I'm moaning at my aches and pain, I have to remember how good it feels to run well, to score a goal, to make a good pass. How good it feels to push my body past its comfort zone. How good it feels to find the runner's high.

The pain is a pain, and it is part of being active as you get older. Nobody is immune. But it isn't the end of the world, or the end of game or the race. It's just what you live with. 

Nostalgia or remembering?

Last week I went to a birthday party for a radio show.

World Report turned 40, sort of. CBC Radio's main morning newscast first went on the air as The World at Eight back in the early spring of 1968, and added editions at 6 and 7 a.m. sometime in the late-1970s (I think).

The party was a low-key affair, very Radio. There were newspaper clips documenting the program's history, snapshots taken by staff over the years and the people, working and retired, who put the program to air. 

I actually ran the show for a brief period in the mid-1990s, and worked as an editor on it for during my first few years at the CBC. It's where I cut my teeth in Radio and I have a great fondness for that time in my life, if not for the horrible hours working on a morning newscast requires. 

There was a short audio presentation, a bit of a "greatest hits" package of stories that aired on the program over the years. It was a short history of major events: MLK's assassination, the October Crisis, repatriating the Constitution, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Referendum Number Two. All worthy signposts of late-20th century Canada and the world. 

And there were a few speeches. 

Inevitably, the speeches focus on the people we worked with. Characters. Events were the backdrop for the people with whom we shared early morning misery. Afterall, we were not where the news was happening. We were packaging it. So it makes perfect sense to focus on the people we worked with rather than the stories we were well distanced from. 

Such is the difference between editors and reporters. When you get a group of reporters together, they will talk about colleagues, but they will also talk about stories; what they're working on, trips they've taken or preparing for. The guts of the reporting business. Go drinking with editors and the subjects tend to be more limited; colleagues, the mechanics of getting a program to air ("Did you hear the first three items were missing because of a computer crash?" etc.), moaning about shifts, bosses, missed opportunities.

One of the underrated things in operations like the one I work in is institutional memory. Experience is valued up to a point, but if an older, more expensive employee can be pensioned off in the interest of the bottom line, he's out the door. Oftentimes the experienced end up as cranks too, which tends to undermine the value of memory in a workplace. The last thing you want to face everyday is a know-it-all who has seen it all. 

I remember being at a retirement party 18 years ago for Rex Loring, one of the original hosts of World Report. Rex was an amazing performer. He could take badly written crap and make it sound like poetry on the air. He also had that voice of authority that is not so sought after now, but was a comfort to awake to. When he retired, the Big Bosses came down to toast his departure. The crowd spanned the generations: from pups like me in their 20s, through to people whose careers began after the Second World War when Radio was still king. A smart person would have grabbed a tape recorder and started interviewing the greybeards. They carried the memory of decades in the life of the Radio news service. That didn't happen, which is too bad. While the "history" of the program is recorded in the newscasts in the Archives, the history of the newsroom is oral, passed down from generation to generation, and usually embellished in the telling. 

Friday's party got me thinking about something else; how experience is sometimes seen as an impediment to change. People with experience (cranks or not) have seen things before, they remember what worked, what failed and what disrupted. They ask uncomfortable questions of Deciders whose worth is measured by their ability to change the things they manage. Sometimes the experienced end up as roadkill, like old Mr. Fezziwig, who chose not to sell out to the Vested Interests and found himself run out of business by Scrooge and Marley. But sometimes they are right. Things were working just fine, now they are screwed up. But the change happens and a great victory is declared. 

World Report is based on a pretty simple premise. It tells people what happened overnight and what is going on right now. It tries to answer the question, "Is it OK to get out of bed?" Delivering on that premise is a lot more complicated, and the way it is done has evolved considerably over the four decades the show has been on the air. We seldom put a phoned-in item on the radio now. We've long since abandoned quarter-inch tape. The language we use on the air is more modern and colloquial. The omniscient "Voice of Authority" has given way to something more conversational. The stories attempt to more on the lives of the decidees rather than the deciders. The show has adapted to its time as times have changed.

The show has adapted just like we do as we mark the years. We know that pal pictured in the wide-legged jeans and permed hair in 1978 is still the same person who is in front of us today in middle age. He's just packaged a bit differently. We're different, we're the same. We've evolved, we're true to ourselves.

Finally!

Manchester United is the only truly winning team I have ever cheered for. I can thank Robert Poole. 

Robert was a friend who moved to England in Grade Four and came back to Canada two years later with an accent and as a rabid Man U supporter. At first we teased him about his new affection, but when he showed me his incredible scrapbook of United memorabilia: pictures, articles, cards etc, and I got the story of the Busby Babes, the Best years, the fall to Division Two and the quick return to the top flight, I was hooked. 

Ever since I have followed United's fortunes as closely as I could from this side of the pond. The closest I ever got to seeing them play was seeing United old boys Jimmy Nichol and Jimmy Greenhoff playing for the Toronto Blizzard. A trip to Old Trafford is on my life list.

 

Since Alex Ferguson arrived to manage the side 21 years ago, the trophies have rolled in. Leagues, Cups, Doubles, The Treble of 99. And today, another Double; the Premiership and Champions League. I thought United was full measure for the win, the game really should have been done at half time, but Petr Cech made sure it wasn't. It is ironic that John Terry ended up being the goat during penalties, since he saved Chelsea's bacon in extra time when he cleared Ryan Giggs' poke off the line. 

The most significant thing for me in today's victory is that this is the first time I have been on the winning side of a penalty shootout. My memories of these things are foul: Italy 1990, Euros 1996, France 1998: Stuart Pierce, Gareth Southgate. "God must be a German," was the appalled reaction of a colleague after we watched Germany knock out England in 1996 at Wembley. (I'd missed England do the same to Spain a few days earlier.)

I'll admit I couldn't watch John Terry today. By the time I turned the TV back on, it was over and my side had won. The shootout just kills me, but when I saw the guys in red jumping up and down, I joined them, and I was relieved. 

Thanks old Bobby, it's good to cheer for a winner. 

More images from the parental archive

I meant to put this up a couple of weeks ago, May 4th to be precise. It was taken on that very date 43 years ago. That's my second birthday cake and my mom in the cat's eye specs. She is hugely pregnant with my sister, who would be delivered 25 days later. Note the late-term cigaret in her hand. My sister, a healthy and well-balanced person, seems no worse the wear for the gestational nicotine. Oh, and that's me in the high-chair. I note that my hair is about the same length, just a different colour.

New York on the St. Lawrence

When I was a kid I believed that downtown Brockville was where it all happened. It was my New York. 

It helped that I come from a family with deep roots in the area, with a habit of sexing up the place. Being descended from four generations of newspaper publishers might explain my family's innate ability to make something mundane seem interesting. My mother, in particular, had a way of making her childhood, her early working days - the past - seem romantic and glamourous. 

We'd often flip through old family photo albums, black and white, and I would marvel at the well-dressed newspaper folks nursing highballs and waving their cigarets in the air. There was a picture of her mother with the Prime Minister, or meeting Princess Elizabeth. It all seemed so jazzy and important.

The Eastern Ontario portion of the 401 was finally completed in the mid-60s, but when I was little, a lot of traffic still went down Highway 2, right past my front door. Brockville's downtown was the centre of the universe. The main mall had not yet been built, the one shopping centre in town was not large enough to displace the services that gathered in the old downtown core. There was still industry on the waterfront: canaller ships docked at the Reynolds Coal docks or at Central Canada Coal to load and offload coal; the Ault Milk plant churned out butter. The big oil tanks by St. Paul Street were still there. 

The architecture of the main drag spoke to the city's stature. On either side of the main commercial area on King Street were substantial residential areas. On King St. East was Millionaires Row, a line of Georgian, Second Empire, Queen Anne and Greek revival piles erected by our very own Gilded Age Robber Barons with last names like Fulford, Hardy and Comstock. They tended to make their fortunes off of dodgy medicines like "Indian Root Pills" or "Pink Pills For Pale People (which were still on sale when I was a kid, amazingly).

On King Street West, the houses were not so grand and didn't have river access, but they were solid, often substantial. At the western gateway to the city was the Phillips Cables plant. To the east, it was the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, each in their own ways, foundations of the local economy.

But it was the downtown that always impressed me. The late-Victorian facades that hung over King Street symbolized wealth and industry. To a boy, they were high-rises. Walkers, an Eaton's offshoot, sat on the southwest corner of King and Broad Streets. It had an elevator, an unheard of luxury, but then it had four floors of shopping. Every spring and fall my mother would do a massive shop there, laying in our summer clothes in May and my fall and winter wardrobe in early September. When I got older had a bit of money to spend, I would buy LPs in their record shop, or drool over the possibilities if I was short on cash. Even the newer buildings, like the Woolworths, had their own cachet, in its case, a fabulous lunch counter and an awesome neon sign out front. 

(There was great neon in the downtown, at night the place positively glowed, from the blinking ball in front of the New York Restaurant to minimalist neon at Ker's Mens Wear.)

When you stood at the corner of King and Court House Avenue you had a view of the four points of the local compass. To the north, the limestone courthouse; to the south, the St. Lawrence River. East was City Hall, the Manitonna Hotel, the newspaper, and the rise in the street that led toward the Cavalcade of Huge Houses. Look west, and it was the rest of the main commercial district; busy, vital, alive.

It isn't like that anymore. The retail core has moved north, where there is land for big stores and parking for the people who drive to them. The vacancy rate for downtown storefronts is around 15 per cent. My last trip into Walkers must have been in 1977 or 78. Now the building is cut up into various offices, retail and administrative. There is a pool hall in the basement. The flats that are above the shops no longer provide homes for the shops owners. In many cases, the apartments are empty or provide low-rent housing, with its intendant complications. Fire and decay have removed many landmarks from the streetscape in the last 30 years from the old Capitol Theatre, to the Manitonna, the Revere Hotel, to Dailey's Leather Goods. Many of those buildings have been replaced, and served to freshen and modernize the look, but without much reference to more ornate architecture which they replaced. 

Most of the neon is gone too (The New York Restaurant being one big exception there), as businesses have gone low-tech retro with carved and painted heritage signs made of wood. 

The big houses on King Street are still there, but some of them are cut up into apartments now, and the lots which once reached the river have been severed and developed. 

Most of all, the downtown is quieter. There are fewer people living and working there. The energy that animated it when I was a boy has dribbled away as the coal docks were turned into parkland, the milk plant demolished and a condo erected where it once stood. Even the newspaper packed up and moved into an industrial park. More importantly, that energy picked up and moved to another part of town along with new stores that people preferred to shop at.

Gone is that sense of specialness, or uniqueness that was possible in the days before globalization and the chain store. We once had our own specialty food shop, the Gourmet Court. It went up in flames with the Revere. Furniture you could get at Sheridans or Babcock's. Now it's Leons. The busiest restaurants are the chains now: Kelsey's, Boston Pizza, East Side Marios, all in the north end. There are some laudable locally-owned holdouts downtown: Boboli and Thousand Islands Pizza among them, but I bet the Pizza Pizza does more business than  both. 

The downtown is what it is and it is a lot better than it was in the late 1990s when it seemed it was going to evaporate before our eyes. It is being reinvented as a slower, prettier and more eclectic alternative to the familiar commercial experience in the north end. The days of downtown by default are long gone now. The facades are still there, but a child seeing it now would never imagine it as his own New York as I once did. 

In FC Land

My very cool birthday present from Q was a pair of tix to see TFC play New York Red Bull last Thursday. 

I've been to one soccer game at the National Soccer Stadium down at the Ex, Canada v Costa Rica last fall, a 1-1 draw. I have a lot of good memories of football by the lake, my first live game was a Toronto Blizzard - New York Cosmos match in 1979. There were 29,000 people in the stands at the old Exhibition stadium that night and Giorgio Chinaglia got the goal for the Bad Guys. About 48 hours later the Blizzard played San Diego and I went and about 5,000 people were there. Back then the stars drew crowds, not the home team.

Such was life for young soccer fans in the 70s and 80s. The Blizzard was a decent side most seasons and played for the Soccer Bowl twice, losing inexplicably to Tulsa in 1983 and then to Chicago as the old NASL breathed its last a year later. But I got to see some pretty good players thanks to the Blizzard: Peter Lorimer, Jimmy Greenhoff, Jimmy Nicholl, Jomo Sono, Roberto Bettega, Bruce Wilson and many many more. And the friendlies were good too: Notts Forest when Cloughie and Taylor were in charge, Juve too. 

One of the best moves the team made under Clive Toye's management was moving from the Ex to Varsity Stadium for its final seasons. It was a great place to watch a game: grass, intimacy, easy access, loud even if the crowd was small. Most nights I remember between 8 and 11,000 people in the stands and I like to think that the seeds of TFC's present-day success were planted in those final fitful seasons of the NASL. 

If you went to a Blizzard game at Varsity there was a small knot of fans that sat at one end of the stadium all kitted out in red and white, with banners and scarves and singing and cheering for the entire 90 minutes. They were a novelty. Blizzard crowds were like Leaf crowds: watchers for the most part, maintaining a certain distance from the team on the field. But these guys were the real deal, there was no distance between them and the players they cheered for.

It's that lack of distance that makes the TFC experience so much fun. I saw a bit of it at the Canada-Costa Rica game. For once the home fans were louder than the visitors (I remember the 1994 World Cup qualifier at Varsity between Canada and Mexico which we lost and had to take a back seat to the noisy supporters of the Tri. Adding insult to injury was being in Mexico at the time and having to listen to the locals party away the night with their ticket to USA 94 booked.), and there were a lot of Canadian fans who were coloured up: scarves, flags and jerseys.

Of course I have seen TFC on TV and have friends who have season tickets so the experience of a game at the stadium is not a mystery. But seeing it up close was fun and an education.

It was a cold, wet night, people were wearing their scarves as hoods. The Red Patch Boys and their south-end kin were singing up a storm and every Red Bull corner was greeted with a hail of red and white streamers. The singing, drumming, chanting, stomping, clapping, drinking and laughing never stopped. I was also struck by the prodigious quantities of beer that was drunk, notwithstanding its extortionate cost ($9 a can!).

The product on the field had its moments. The conditions weren't ideal, it was windy and the artificial surface at BMO Field is an abomination especially when it gets slick. The good players could still do their thing, so Laurent Robert and Amado Guevera showed flashes. Robert's free kick set up the first goal of the game. Juan Pablo Angel had a couple of nice touches and showed his soft feet and good vision. 

But it wasn't the Premiership for sure, even if some of the players had competed there. The speed of the game was one thing that stood out. There were moments of good, fluid touches, the triangles that make the game move forward. But more often, especially with TFC, the attacks were predictably Championship in quality, the long ball to the targetman rather than building pressure with possession, width and speed. Ball support was lacking on both teams. Players would find themselves without options for passing, so would either be caught in possession or forced to play a speculative ball into a crowd. It was an interesting contrast with the best of the best we saw on TV the day before from Stamford Bridge (well, almost best, that was on Tuesday from Old Trafford). The best clubs in Europe play with pace and intelligence that leaves our side here in the dust.

But nobody is comparing MLS with the Champions League.

How about the Mexican league?

I've seen enough Mexican football to say, that on balance, the best Mexican sides (Chivas, Cruz Azul, America, Pumas, Pachuca, Santos) would be among the elite in MLS. The skill level is a bit better, the tactics superior at the moment. The football is sweeter to watch, for sure. My best evidence of that is the CONCACAF club championships, which has yet to produce an MLS champion. The winner goes to the World Club Championships. Pachuca is going back to Japan in December as cannon-fodder for either Chelsea or Man U as well as the winner of the Copa Libertadores. Clubs on our continent have not managed to win these sorts of games and MLS clubs haven't even managed to get there yet. There remains a ways to go to compete with the big boys at mid-season form. The Mexicans clubs compete in the Libertadores now, and I'd love to see MLS sides play in that tournament as well. It would give us a really good benchmark to measure our league against. 

But any TFC fan (or a fan of a Championship side in England, or Serie B side in Italy) will tell you, that's not what it is all about. This is OUR team, that is the message from the 20,000 who fill the seats at BMO Field 15-plus times a season. The "show-me" distance that marked Toronto's relationship with the Blizzard is gone. This side is at one with its supporters, no separation there at all. Real fans. The little knot of Blizzard singers in the corner of Varsity has been cloned into the mass of FC Nation. 

UPDATE: I WAS WRONG!

As you can read in the comments, I got WAY ahead of myself on the MLS and CONCACAF Club tourney. The LA Galaxy has won it and was deprived of the chance to play in the World Club because of its cancellation in 2002. DC United won it too, in 1998, has also had success against South American competition with a win against the Libertadores holder Vasco da Gama in the InterAmerican Cup.

Thanks to rumourmill for the corrections. 

Those results tell me that MLS is further along that I'd thought, and I would still love to see MLS clubs in the Libertadores. It also tells me that our region's club competitions deserve more attention!

Roma fell in a morning

So this is haircut day. 

I walked the 25 minutes or so to the Beaches and am about to head into the barber shop and I see there are two customers waiting, with one in the chair in the early stages of a shave. I continue my stroll and do a bit of shopping. 

About 15 minutes later I check in again. The line is longer. Three guys waiting, one in the chair, just getting going. Old Mr. Roma is not blazingly fast with the clippers, comb and scissors, so I decide to head home. 

But I still want a haircut. 

So I stop at barber shop at Woodbine and Queen. 

It was without customers, but not without business as the unswept hair attests to.

I parked in the chair and the barber went to work. He was a lot younger than Mr. Roma, although about the same height, 5'6 or so and quite chatty. He started his career working for his dad at a shop on Parliament. They worked seven days a week. His father still cuts on Mondays, traditionally a day off in the hair trade. As he was chatting, he went to work with a set of clippers, mowing down the sides and the neckline. He pulled out a different set for the top of my head, trimming with the help of a comb. He gave my head a bit of shape, rather than buzzing down too closely. He also said I was going bald the right way. I breathed a sigh of relief at that news.

He said in his business you know the guys in your neighbourhood; who cuts slow, who cuts fast, who's been around longest. Whenever someone retires, he finds out, because he gets customers. 

As he wrapped up his clipping he asked if I wanted a straight razor on my neckline. No problem with that. He said he used a fresh blade on every cut and made a point of showing me his technique for loading up the straight razor with a new blade. His hand was steady and the line was straight. 

I'm accustomed to being in the chair for about half-an-hour for my haircut at Mr. Roma's. He is a deliberate craftsman. Plus, he gives you that massage at the end. No massage this morning, but I did get one of the things that a barber cut should offer you: speed. It took 15 minutes for my new barber, Chris is his name, he gave me his card, to clean me up.

Clearly Mr. Roma isn't hurting for business, so my decision to switch to a shop that's about 10 minutes closer to home and twice as fast in the chair is entirely pragmatic. I would also add that my new guy actually did a better job on my head, which made the $14 haircut worth every penny (it was two bucks more than a Roma job). And he could talk sports, which strikes me a right of all men who choose to go to a barber shop. 

So no guilt in this corner. When it's time for the next trim, Chris will get the call.

The Long View

Journalism, or what people call "Main Stream Media" takes a real beating on this continent. There seems to be more effort expended in critiquing what gets said, shown or written than is put into the original product itself. 

I guess you can add me to the list, in a way. 

I just finished a lovely little book called "Are We Rome?" by former Atlantic editor Cullen Murphy. The book's subject is explained by the title, a 200 page romp through 2000-plus years of history. The caveats are many, but the essential point is clear. The United States has something to learn from the rise, decline and eventual disintegration of the Roman Empire.

I like to read history and I like it best when it tells a story and does so in clear, accessible language. Murphy's tome succeeds on both fronts. 

I won't get into the guts of his argument, read the book for that. What struck me as I was reading it was my growing gratitude that the writer was a journalist. He doesn't have a PhD in classics (as far as I know), I've read him mostly on US politics. He has an amateur's interest in antiquity and a curiosity about where his own country sits in the continuum of history. The result is a book that provides an entertaining Cole's notes version of Gibbon in parallel with a lament for current state of American politics. The narrative is punctuated by that journalistic standby: the telling detail. 

This is not academic history, and no doubt there are academic historians who would sniff at some mere magazine hack who dares to play in their sandbox and make money doing it. Think of the abuse Pierre Berton took from academic historians for the sin of popularity (and being a journalist doing popular history). But what this book has going for it is what all good history manages: there is a point behind the stories. He has something to say. 

My brother is a historian and I have always been struck by his ability to connect the dots. He draws things together into a coherent whole. Well-used deep knowledge does not get lost in the subjunctive, it brings clarity. (You can read some of his stuff here: http://theshtick.blogspot.com/) 

One of my favorite academic historians is Donald Creighton. He wrote a fabulous two-volume biography of Sir John A MacDonald, our first Prime Minister. It is very much a product of its time, the 1950s. The salacious bits, such as Sir John A's prodigious drinking, the fate of his first wife, take a back seat to his many qualities as a politician. But the books, all 800-plus pages of them, paint a picture of a man and a time and tell today's Canadians a lot about our national reflexes, why we are the way we are as a nation and as people. In fact, it was after reading Creighton that I came to understand some essential truths about the Canadian character that the passage of time and the evolution of the country have not yet erased. That is great history writing.

I am aware that an academic can devote an entire career to studying, say, the contents of a Roman latrine in northern Britain. And I suspect the work would be pretty interesting. But the real test would come from the writing that emerges from the research. It would, no doubt, adhere to academic conventions and advance its argument with detail after accrued detail. And if it is done especially well, it may tell us not just about where we've been, but how it relates to where we are. But will a general audience get it? Probably not. 

Which is too bad. If more historians had Murphy's, or Berton's (or my brother's) storytelling gifts, more history might be read. And perhaps the we would make fewer of the same mistakes, over and over again. Oh, and my brother's first job was as a reporter.

Le tire, le but!

There is a clear correlation between playing a sport and enjoying watching it. 

I got that point proven to me again on the weekend.

I played hockey for the first time in two years on Sunday, a tournament that demanded three games in a day out of me. I survived.

My team was made up of work colleagues. It's an annual ritual, one I missed last year on account of being in Mexico, that features teams from various media outlets in Toronto. Some teams take it more seriously than others. There was much scuttlebutt around the glass that the Toronto Star was liberally peppered with ringers. When we watched CTV and the National Post play before our first game, it was a sign of how the higher-rent teams handled themselves. They were both pretty good for a couple of pickup squads.

I used to play a couple of times a week, but it's been about three years since I've played regularly. I am fast approaching the age when it is increasingly difficult to just go out and play and not make an ass of yourself. No amount of knowledge, training, experience or even skill can compensate for a body that can no longer respond. Happily, that was not my entire experience. 

I am slower, I am not as strong as I used to be and my vision is not as sharp. But since a good proportion of my teammates are similarly aging, we're all getting slower together. It's all relative. 

The goal in my first game was not to embarrass myself and in that I was successful. I took all the necessary middle-aged precautions: Advil BEFORE taking the ice, a deliberate warmup, a bit of time with the puck on my stick just to remember how it felt. It felt good, even if kept sliding from my control like a drop of mercury on a piece of paper. And to skate again was a delight. I skate well, if a bit stiffly, I can still turn to the left and the right and stop without falling down. 

But in pickup hockey, the difference between being a hole-filler and useful to your team tends to come down to speed and conditioning. Good puck handling is a bonus. Speed allows you to cover the ice: attack and defend. Conditioning allows you to do it for more than the first shift. I was pretty much resigned to the fact my puck handling would suck. Two years of rust will see to that. 

My speed is not what it once was, so my ability to play in both ends was limited. But my conditioning, which is pretty good, let me be more-or-less in the right position most of the day. 

We lost our first game in overtime and won our second in a shootout. By the time we got to our third game we'd all learned each others names and were playing on regular lines.

As the games unfolded, I noticed something: my hockey brain and hockey body were beginning to get reacquainted. It's the small things, taking a pass and moving the puck ahead quickly while pivoting 90 degrees and keeping your head up. Seeing the player you're supposed to check and staying on top of him. Finding yourself in open ice in a position to take a pass for a shot. It's a kind of muscle memory that was shaken loose through repetition.

We played the Post in our last game. I'd seen them play twice. They lost their first game in a shootout to CTV and they creamed CP in their second game. I watched a bit of their second game and it was obvious that a number of their players were familiar to one another. They moved the puck easily, wingers stayed in their lanes and backchecked. Defencemen didn't pinch in unless they knew they had a play. Against us, the game was over pretty quickly. I think it finished 7-1. Even though we were being thoroughly trounced, I actually felt pretty good. First of all my lungs weren't burning, neither were my legs. The running held me in good stead there. And the game started to slow down a bit. I wasn't handling the puck like it was a hand grenade. When it was over, I was pleased. My modest pickup hockey career is not over. 

I got something else out of my day's exercise: a renewed appreciation for the pro game. The playoff games were on the TVs in the arena restaurant, and I was glued to the Rangers and Devils as I sipped a Coke after our second game. It seemed faster to me, the skill level beyond anything I had seen. Then came the subtle things; the footwork, close passing, the positioning, the use of the body. The scrums along the boards made sense, so did the cycling the in offensive end. And the routine failures of the greatest players in the world, the shots that went wide, the missed passes, the players out of position. A much faster, skilled and vastly better compensated version of our little tourney. And games that end with the same sorts of scores, 4-3, 3-2, and 7-1.  

It's all relative. They play at their pace, we play at ours. The pleasure I take in playing with my peers lets me to appreciate the pros' skills all the more. (You just have to watch one of these guys going slowly to see what I mean. Watch the Alexei Kovalev stickhandling exhibition on U-Tube and you get the picture. Pros live in another universe, George Plimpton notwithstanding.)

It's a reminder, a happy reminder, that when you play the sport, you are not just a fan. You are part of it. You might not make a living doing it, but you're a big reason why the game lives in the first place. Take away the weekend hackers like us, and you starve the roots that let the pro game flourish. Why is it hard to sell hockey in Nashville? Not because the game is bad, but because there are not enough people like us, the ones who drag their gear to the rink, hit a clean sheet of ice and share the magic.

More from the past

My father took this shot sometime in the late-1950s, '58 or '59. Obviously an intercollegiate trackmeet. I don't know my British Columbia landmarks, but I think it was at the University of British Columbia. He took a lot of track pictures, he ran the 200 himself, but was a better swimmer. He did the butterfly. I love this shot, the sprinters getting ready to lean into the tape, the spectators leaning in to watch the finish, the crowd in the stands. A nice sports shot. 

They once were young

My parents separated 27 years ago and my dad has been dead for more than a decade now. But once upon a time they were young, and they looked like this. This photo dates from 1962, I figure, sometime in late-April or early May. 

The River news

I just got back from a few days down in Brockville. A month makes a huge difference. 

Then I was facing enormous snowdrifts, cold temperatures and a river full of ice. 

This time I was able to run in my shorts, ditch the ski-jacket and walk right to the front door without a shovel. 

Winter's aftermath was everywhere. The snow isn't gone, there are piles all over, one of the largest in front of the shed door which would have required a god chunk of time to dig out. As the snow retreats, the dog turds are revealed, a considerable number. They belong to the neighbour's black lab. There is a lot of windfall: oak branches, maple, pine. There is one tree on the back end of the property that is missing its top 30 feet. The ground is not entirely thawed, so a misstep can send you skidding along the muddy surface. The runoff is keeping the sump pump busy.

The neighbours to my east, Liz and Dave, the longest-serving of the full-timers out there at 34 years, tell me the ice coming down river was the thickest they had ever seen. Evidence of it's force was visible at my other neighbour's (owner of the property-lined challenged lab). George is the guy with the helipad dock that is slung out over the water (you can see it in the bottom right corner of the picture). I can report that the dock survived, it's still sitting there, but is missing most of the wooden planks that constitute its skirt. The ice just peeled it away. The replacement wood is sitting on the deck, waiting to be hammered on, presumably when the water is a bit warmer. 

The fauna is of the season too. Woodpeckers everywhere, their hammering a constant rhythm. The robins are nesting, the red-wing blackbirds are in abundance, the chipmunks are back and digging.

It was the woodpeckers that caught my eye, especially when I took a look at the west wall of the house. It's full of holes. The birds have hammered out perfect circles, about two inches across, yanked out the insulation and are preparing to nest. They pecked through the outer skin of stained cedar, then through the sublayer of coated particle board and into the fibreglass. The wall looks like someone has been taking target practice on it. 

We don't want birds nesting IN the house, so I got the ladder and began to inspect inside the holes. No nests. I got some old bits of hardwood flooring and hammered them over the holes. I was distracted at one point by a starling that exited from one of the holes, ever the squatter, but his hole was too high up to cover. 

The flowerbeds are still covered with leaves and some snow, so it's too early to get the rake out (if I could, it's snowed-in still). The big clean up will have to wait for next time. 

The buzz at Roma

Tuesday was haircut day.

I go once a month these days, a frequency dictated by my hairs' length, or lack thereof. 

This time a year ago, my mop was pretty long, as the picture to your right demonstrates. I was on a leave from work, with no particular sartorial requirements upon me, so I decided to grow it longish. At some point last fall, I recognized a couple of things. First, long hair doesn't need to be cut all that often, but it needs to be cut well. Second, my hairline was moving away from it's roots enough to be noticeable. 

So in early December I had it cut off. 

I decided to forego the usual "stylist" for the more prosaic barber. I chose a one-chair place on Queen St in the Beach called Roma. I'd walked past it a few times and it looked credible. Customers in the chair or waiting. A stack of magazines. A barber pole out front. 

My first trip was the most time-consuming. Me and my barber negotiated our way through what I meant by "short". In the end, it was a two part process, the initial scything followed by a touch-up. 

When it was done I still looked like myself, but he evidence of my thinning hair was laid bare. I don't know if I'll keep it quite this short, but I do know it won't be that long again for fear of presenting a comb-over-in-training. 

Tuesday was my fourth return visit, evidence of my satisfaction as a customer. By now my barber recognizes me and the cut I want. Over the months I haven't managed to get the guy's name, but I have learned he's been cutting hair in this place for 30 years. While the shop is named Roma, he is from Napoli. He's a tiny guy with a head like a lightbulb and jet-black hair that gets its colour from somewhere other than the follicle. This week he had about a half-inch of gray root showing. The top is thinning so he combs it over. On my first visit we got talking about hair a bit, and he complained that kids these days, they all want to be "stylists". They don't know how to cut hair really, they don't know how to shave someone, they don't know how to use clippers. He is a dying breed.

There are regulars. One day a young guy, a kid in baggy pants and a hoodie came in. He hung out for a bit then left. He was third in line. 

"That kid came in last week and got me to shave his head, and he wants me to do it again," Mr. Roma said, "I don't know why, he must be joining the army or something."

My memories of barber shops are mildly traumatic. I hated getting my hair cut as a kid, it was like going to the dentist. I had one barber, an really old guy who'd had throat cancer and breathed through a hole in his neck. He had no voice box, so he had a gizmo that looked like a microphone that he held up to his throat and then burped out his words. He sounded like a robot and scared the hell out of me. One time he did such a terrible hack job on my head that my mother ordered my father to find someone else to clean up the mess and get it done before dinner. Two haircuts in one day. 

We finally settled on Bob Greenwood, who ran the Playboy barber shop. He cut my hair until I was 20, and again for awhile in my 30s. 

Bob's shop, and most of the others that I can remember, were tidy. The bottles of Barbicide with combs and scissors soaking, the blue-light sterilizer, the U-fronted hair-washing sink, the spritzer bottle full of water, the capes on pegs, a broom in the corner, a radio. Then there was the sporty wall art: posters of hockey players, baseball players, football players, sometimes a girl in a bikini or a pin-up calendar.

Roma is a bit different. 

There is the Barbicide, three bottles I counted. The soaking combs, the broom and capes. Stacks of magazines running the gamut from Maxim for the lads to Sky and Telescope for the star-watchers. 

But look a bit closer and the shambolic side of things becomes clearer. No sporty posters, just a collection of faded and dog-eared starving artist prints of Italian scenes: the Alps, Rome, the countryside. There's an old newspaper clipping of a boy getting first first unhappy cut. There is a calendar, a current calendar, from an Italian real estate agent. A price list tacked to the mirror. A radio is there too, in the corner, playing the classical music station. 

My barber has a system. It begins with the chair wipedown. When the customer before me is all done, the Mr Roma spritzes down the chair, tears a chunk of paper towel off the roll and wipes it down. He seats you, then goes to a crooked drawer in an old low-hung beige birch-veneer sideboard and tears another chunk of paper towel off another roll. He tears that one in half and then tucks it around your neck. Then he puts on the cape and secures it with a metal clip. 

He uses clippers to fix me. They live, blades down, in the top drawer of the sideboard. He reaches in and pulls out the big ones first, brushes them down, then commences the main cut. When he's done that, he repeats the exercise with a smaller set, and does the fine editing. The scissors do come out eventually, but first a dip in the Barbicide then a trim of my nose hairs and eyebrows.  

As I am sitting there watching him work, I begin to notice all the stuff. The aforementioned posters. The gel bottles, shampoo, rubbing alcohol, skin lotion, a can of shaving cream, a coffee maker with no pot but something sitting on the burner. The stuff is piled on both sides of the mirror in no apparent order. 

When the clipping and scissoring is done, he goes over to the coffee maker and flips it on. He then reaches into one of the drawers of the sideboard and grabs a few squares of toilet paper, and then dips it into the container that sits on the burner. He takes a shot of shaving cream and mixes it with his forefinger into the wet paper. He then rubs the warm lather on my neck and sideburns and then takes a straight razor out of the Barbicide and cleans up the loose ends along my hairline and sideburns. 

When he's done he cleans the hair and lather off the razor, dunks it back in the Barbicide and gets another few squares of toilet paper and squirts some rubbing alcohol into it and rubs it into the areas he shaved.

You think this would be the end. It isn't. He reaches over to his left and grabs a contraption with his right hand and flicks it on. It's a hand-massager. He leans into my shoulders one at a time and runs it along my upper back. I'm tall, so he has to grab a stool and gets up on his knee so he can lean into me a bit. This goes on for a couple of minutes, then he shuts it down and cleans me up. No fancy brush, just your standard-issue kitchen whisk. 

He grabs a mirror, shows me the back of my head, I nod, and he spins me in the chair so I can dismount and while I am reaching for my wallet, he's spritzing the chair for the next client. 

The cut costs $12, but I give him $15 and don't want the change.  

The next guy in line is a big ruddy-faced fellow in overalls. 

"Made your life easier," he says when he walks is, "I cut off the pony tail last night. My mom passed away and we decided to put it in a dream-catcher."

"What's a dream catcher?" Mr. Roma replied. The guy tried to explain but couldn't make him understand. 

"Well, at least I have less to cut, I can fix it," he says as he finishes wiping down the chair.

I bid my farewell and rub my hands through my stubble as I walk out the door. 

Major minor

One of the great things about my partner is that she's a gamer. Up for just about anything. Well almost anything. Hockey on TV? Not a chance. Hockey live? She'll buy the tickets.

My Easter present was a pair to see the Toronto Marlies. This is our AHL team, one level below the NHL; a league of coming talent, guys playing out the string and career nearly-men. 

The Marlies name has a long history here. It was the Leaf's major junior team for decades. The Leafs played Saturday night at the Gardens, the Marlies on Sunday afternoon. It provided a steady stream of talent for the parent club until the beginning of the open draft era. The last great Marlies team of the mid-70s sent two stars to the Leafs: John Anderson and George Ferguson.  

These pro Marlies have their own arena, the Ricoh Coliseum down at the Ex. It's a cozy new barn, seating just under 8,000. A roomy, no frills sort of place to watch a game. Our seats were excellent, about 30 feet from the ice, between the centre line and the north blue line. Just about perfect.

The game was a bit of a dud for a neutral, but the home fans were happy. The Marlies scored four times in the first period against the Lake Erie Monsters (who hail from near Cleveland) and cruised to a 6-1 win. 

It's been a good season for the Marlies. They're first in their division. The team has a lot of veteran players to go with the prospects. Some of those prospects have spent a fair bit of time in the Bigs this season too. I don't really understand how championships are won in a developmental league like the AHL, I do remember that the last time Toronto's farm team did well, in the early 90s, it was a harbinger of good times for the senior side. So here's hoping the Marlies go deep this spring.

Hockey aside, the most interesting thing there was the crowd. I figure the arena was a bit under half full. There are clearly some hardcore fans in their Marlie jerseys, but we saw lots of Leafs jerseys too. Perhaps most touching was a trio of older guys in their St. John's Maple Leaf jerseys, one of them a former 14 year season ticket holder with the ex-franchise. But what stood out was the number of kids. There were entire minor hockey teams in their jerseys. Children running around the concourses, others high-fiving Duke the Dog, the team's mascot. In front of us was a dad with his two young daughters. He was, by turns, watching the game, feeding the kids, entertaining the kids, checking out their coloring book. Behind us, another family with youngsters. 

I see parents and kids heading off the Leafs games every Saturday night, actually it's mainly dads and sons and I'll see them pull into the parking lot across from work in pretty spiffy cars. 

We paid $30 each for our seats, the top ticket at Ricoh is $38. Imagine bringing two or three kids, with food, parking, a program. For the Marlies the bill would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $175 for the game. That buys you one less than one comparable seat at the ACC. 

NHL hockey up close is amazing. The quality of play, even for middling teams like Toronto's is excellent. TV captures some of that skill and speed, but there nothing like being able to see the whole ice from a good vantage point. You see the game in a different way. For most of us, it is a rare treat.

The AHL isn't the NHL, but it is pretty good. There aren't too many players on the ice who haven't been in an NHL camp or at had a cup of coffee at the top of the heap. The players don't make big league money, but they play like they want to. In some cities, it's the only game in town and the crowds are excellent, the media coverage considerable. 

Toronto doesn't happen to be one of those cities, and that doesn't make much sense to me. The families who populate the fan-base seem to get it. The team could just use more of them. Our media really only pays attention to the Leafs. Anything else is second-rate, even if it wins. Ironic, given this is the top farm team in the system.

But more importantly, the team gives fans something the Leafs doesn't: an affordable way to watch quality hockey. I could get to four Marlies games for the price of one gold at the ACC. And the odds are pretty good that in those four games the home team would win. I wouldn't make the same bet on the Leafs.

Most Canadians watch pro hockey on the tube. In-the-arena fandom at the

What is a weekend?

These days I am two things professionally: a shift worker and a weekend worker. 

The former identifies me as a member of a class of people that lives beyond the 9 to 5 existence that tends to define comfortable middle class-dom. The latter puts me in a select group of those that work outside the lines of a conventional career.

I work Thursday to Sunday. Two regular days on the ends, well regular in the sense that they're an eight-hour shift. Two long days in the middle, 12 hours each. Friday nights end at 10 p.m. Same for Saturday. 

From Friday morning on, the conventional weekend is shot.

The payback for this is an extra day off. My "weekend" is Monday to Wednesday. I've been doing this job for a little over six months now. 

I have worked weekends before, early in my career when saying no to crazy shifts was career-limiting. I was living with a Monday to Friday person, and over time the non-compatible schedule I kept got to me. I agitated to get off of it. 

Since then, weekend work has been episodic: major events, occasional backfill, a rotation. Something to be endured and sometimes embraced when the event was interesting, but not my life. 

Now I'm back into it. 

The work itself is not especially interesting. I am an assignment editor for a news department for a radio broadcaster. I tell reporters what to do. I make decisions, in concert with others, about what our organization should cover. I am a bit player in all this. There are others more senior who get to make more decisions. The bulk of mine are confined to the weekend and as such are limited in scope. I don't have anyone to assign. Ours is a Monday-to-Friday operation.

So once Friday afternoon rolls around and the A-Team sashays out for its conventional weekend, I am there to make sure nothing bad happens, or more accurately to make something happen if something bad happens. If the Space Shuttle plunges from the sky or a politician is assassinated or an earthquake strikes, I am the sure, experienced hand that will help lead my colleagues through the first crazy moments and get our news service pointed in the right direction. I am there essentially to react to events.

The rest of the time is really about treading water.

There is some planning, some talking, some editing, some chasing, a bit of thinking and a lot of watching. Watching TVs, computer screens, and out the window when the electronic screens give me a headache. 

The difference between weekdays and the weekend is striking. On Thursday and Friday there are people around. The shops nearby are open, all the lights are on, the building's ventilation system is functioning. By about 9 p.m. on Fridays, it's like a neutron bomb went off inside. People evaporate. The phones don't ring. Escalators are shut off until Monday morning. The lights all over the building get turned down and the air inside gets stale. The bathrooms start to smell bad. An mostly-empty office tower doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's designed to be used, not left fallow, so best to shut 'er down. 

Sometimes when you work in a place off-hours, it's possible to take a kind of special ownership: the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Not here. You have the run of the place, but you can't actually do much with it. You can't start ordering people to cover this and that, those people work Monday to Friday. It is its own special hell, Marley's Ghost tossing handfuls of money into the wind. 

For me, the strangest experience is leaving the office on Fridays and Saturdays. I head out the door and into the teeth of Toronto's entertainment district. Many Saturday nights I go just as Leaf fans are pulling out of the Air Canada Centre, or the theatres are disgorging their patrons. On the side streets, the lines are forming outside the nightclubs. Taxis crawl along trolling for tolls. Me? I have my bag slung over my shoulder and I am going home after work. 

Pulling a 12 hour shift pretty much guarantees that you're not going to want to party when it's over. You want to sleep, unwind, breathe fresh air. Watching people enjoying their time off  is like wandering through a beer commercial. I've grown out of the night-clubbing thing, but I have really missed the pleasures of a Saturday night out, or an end-of-week pint with colleagues, and sometimes resent my inability to partake. 

When I've done shift work before, one of the fringe benefits, such as they were, was the shared misery. There were usually other people working the same hours as you. At the end of the shift you could go off together to grab breakfast or a ridiculously early drink. There is no shared misery in this job, it's all mine. I come in alone and leave alone. That is perhaps the worst part of it. It's given me a new appreciation for those who toil alone at strange hours. 

There are lots of people who work weird hours who have satisfying careers. When I look on with a certain envy at the people who work on Hockey Night or the NFL or NCAA football, I have to remind myself that they are working a weekend too. It's just that their job seems a lot cooler than mine. I watch the morning TV people I am in awe of their ability to be so energetic at that time of day, and I'm glad they're there. It's reassuring. I wonder, though, how many of them are single? 

The weekend/shift-worker badge is something I wear with a certain grumpy pride, but it isn't one I intend to wear forever. All jobs teach you something, this one has taught me when I want to work. 

Friday is Good?

When I was a kid Good Friday was a lot like Christmas. It was a day where nothing happened. 

Schools were closed, so were stores, banks and offices. In my hometown, people seemed to keep to themselves and those who were looking for companionship went to church.

It was a day for quiet contemplation, the austere interlude before the colourful pageant of Easter.

My strongest memories of Good Friday were from my days singing in my church choir. The Good Friday service was as funereal as the day it marked. We sang a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. The altar was stripped, no flowers, no decorations. When the service was over I don't really remember much of what we did. I assume I played road hockey or watched TV or shot some hoops in the driveway, but really, I don't remember. Good Friday was a day where nothing happened.

This Good Friday I worked. 

It's a stat holiday in my workplace, and the managers weren't around but lots of working stiffs were. It felt like one of those long weekends that governments take off but the private sector doesn't. You can buy a car, but you can't get it licensed. The newspapers published as usual, public transit was working, there were people in the street. A not quite normal day, but not a day where nothing was happening either. 

I work a long shift on Fridays, 12 hours. When I book off around 10 p.m., I walk through the guts of Toronto's entertainment district on my way up to Queen Street to catch my streetcar. This Friday there didn't seem to be any action at Roy Thomson Hall or the Royal Alex, but the bars in the neighbourhod were open and the clubs on the side streets definitely were. The lineups were a bit shorter than usual for a Friday, but they were open. The faces of the nightclubbers looked about the same as usual; the polyglot mix of multi-culti Toronto. 

I found the experience disorienting. I guess I was expecting something, what? Deader. A Good Friday night where the city rolled up the sidewalks and went to bed early. Instead, I saw most of the restaurants on Queen Street open and doing a brisk business. Gawkers were checking out the Condom Shack. When I got off at Queen and Leslie Streets, the Duke was doing a good business as were the trio of restos on the north side of the street. 

It was a real contrast with a year ago in Mexico City. 

A Catholic country like that takes Holy Week very seriously. It is a week for travel, family and ritual. The air in Mexico City is breathable, the mountains that rings the city are in full view. The traffic is manageable. The signs of Easter are everywhere. Good Friday is quiet. And it felt familiar.

I'm not much of a church-goer anymore. I don't hold a particular place for Christian holidays in my calendar. But I do like the idea of stopping a few times a year, and when I mean stopping I mean everyone stopping. A day where you can't do any of the "normal" things: work, eat out, shop. You are left to your own devices. Christmas is still like this, but the Christmas season is not. Boxing Day is a shopping day now and December 24th is pretty busy too. It's only the 24 hours of December 25th that constitute a shut-down anymore. 

I can see how people of other faiths or cultural background would find all this frustrating. These communities have their own holidays and often have to take time off to mark them. Why do we have to take a day that is one religion's high holiday?

At least in the case of Christmas, I can argue that it has morphed into something more pagan, a winter fiesta of sorts: Happy Holidays and all that. But Good Friday is still fundamentally religious. It's hard to imagine this stat holiday turning into something secular or even ecumenical. It is about as Christian as you get, just like Passover is for a Jew or Ramadan to a Muslim. 

Way back when, when Good Friday became a day off, it was a religious holiday. Canada was overwhelmingly Christian and largely observant. It all made sense. My vestigal Christian reflexes let me be part of the day even if I am not actually Part of it anymore. But all the action on what was once my Day of the Dead tells me it doesn't make sense anymore. Good Friday belongs to the Christians, but it doesn't belong to modern Canada. We need a new day to do nothing together.

One of those moments

I'm listening to Barack Obama right now, speaking in Philadelphia on the subject of race. 

The speech is up on Chicago Public Radio, the hometown station giving voice to its favourite son. 

A delicate dance here. It's hard to smooth over the incendiary words of a powerful preacher in full flight. I bet a lot of people in the Democratic base probably agree with what the pastor has to say too. Obama has to distance himself from the flame-throwing without tossing over the church he's belonged to for 20 years.

He's trying for sure. Actually, he's doing a pretty good job, all things considered. Some truth-telling going on about the myriad small ways race works in the American psyche, and the big ways that race still haunts the country. A history lesson, an attempt at contextualizing, re-framing the discussion. 

One line jumped out at me.

"The most segregated hour in America is between 11:00 and 12:00 on Sunday mornings."

Quade and I saw that last year.

We were on day-three of our drive back from Mexico and spent a day in Memphis. On the Sunday morning we planned to take in a service at a Baptist mega-church off the interstate. We were staying in a Days Inn, the free breakfasts and pet-friendly policy were big draws. When we got to the "dining room" such as it was, there was a church service in full swing in the adjoining banquet room. It was a black service. The music was great, a palpable buzz coming through the walls. A preacher was on our side of the door getting prepared to deliver his sermon. Impeccably dressed, dignified, clearly focused. 

We finished eating, loaded up the car and hit the road. 

When we got to the church we were greeted by traffic marshals directing traffic in an emormous parking lot, comparable to a good sized mall. 

The church building was equally impressive: modern, clean, sprawling. From outside it didn't exactly code "church" in the classical way, but it did project wealth and a certain piety. Inside it overwhelmed. High ceilings, wide staircases, signs directing you to the church itself, meeting rooms, the bookstore, the restaurant. 

The church itself was like a high-end theatre. It seated about 5,000 and was about two-thirds full on a mid-July Sunday. The seats were large and comfortable, the sightlines excellent from anywhere. If you wanted a close up of the pastor, two jumbotrons duly provided. There was a baptismal pool located above the choir and altar at the back of the sanctuary. When we came in, some new congregants were being dunked whole-body into membership, again, visible on the big-screen.

For a high-Anglican like me, the morning unfolded in a decidedly casual way, one of the attractions, I suspect, of these sorts of places. The church had its own airs for sure; the attire of the front-row parishioners, the well-thumbed Bibles with weekly sermon notes. But on balance, it was a pretty open place. It was also overwhelmingly white.

The choir was excellent, smoothly moving from old-time stemwinder hymns to more contemporary Christian sounds. 

Then there was the sermon.

The preacher was a middle-aged white guy, a former football player at the University of Arkansas, as he reminded us a few times. His subject was "Spiritual Warfare" and his main source was, of course, that paragon of tolerance, Paul. The essence of his message this day is that Christians of his flavour have to battle for souls against those who would snatch them first. There were segues into football imagery, Biblical stories, current events, a riff on anti-Christian imagery in Harry Potter. A nice package, compellingly delivered. But about two-thirds the way through, he lost us.

"I do not believe there is such thing as a homosexual," he said. 

He went on to talk about how gays choose their lifestyle and that choice can be reversed. He talked about the threat it posed. Threat to what? 

One of the undercurrents of the sermon was victimhood, the idea that Christians are in a battle to hold ground against their enemies. They are not the majority culture, but somehow oppressed. It is a common refrain among evangelical Christians. The sky is falling, head to the ramparts! The "gays aren't gay" passage drove that home for me. It is a preposterous position, but has enormous emotional power in a hermetically sealed community of the like-minded. 

When it was over, another hymn and then a few more announcements. The pastor prayed for a parish group that was doing missionary work and community building in Africa. I don't know what sort of evangelizing they are doing, but it is clear they are doing aid work of some sort. A living faith. 

When we left the service and made our way back to the car, we talked about what we'd seen and heard and were both struck by the extremes. The hard moral core, the intolerance of genetic difference, the monochromatic congregation. Also the good works. I was prepared to be appalled by what I saw, but I wasn't. It was a caring community that clearly looked after the souls who committed to it, and was prepared to look after those who had not. It also needed a strong dose of tolerance in areas where misunderstood theology works hand-in-hand with fear of difference.  Like all of us, it is a work in progress. 

I guess the point here is a version of the one Obama was making today. You can take the U-Tube moment and run with it, or you can attempt to view a place in its fuller context. I'm grateful for having gone to the service, I learned a lot about that part of America, I got a better picture. I still think they're wrong on some things, but there are a lot of good people in there.

I understood what Obama was trying to do today, it is a nuanced argument. Let's see if there is room for nuance in this electoral cycle. 

St. Patrick's Day

Eleven years ago today, my father died. 

It was right about now, shortly after 6 p.m. in a hospital in Kingston, Ontario. The weather was even a bit like today; late winter chill, clear day, snow still on the ground.

Dad had cancer. Who knows where it started, by the time it was diagnosed, he was a dead man. It was in his stomach, colon and bowel. There was no medical miracle waiting for him. It was a little over three months from diagnosis to death. 

He did not go happily. The night he got the news, he was angry. He'd gone into an exploratory surgery to try to deal with a mass that had been detected on an ultrasound. He expected he would lose part of his stomach. Instead, the doctors saw cancer everywhere and just closed him up and then gave him the news. 

By the time I was allowed to see him, he was propped up on his bed, in his hospital greens, disheveled and mildly disoriented from the general anaesthetic. He was on the phone with his mother in Victoria.

"No, mother, I am going to starve to death," I heard him snap as I came in. 

I don't really remember much of that evening. He went home with his partner. I must have stayed over, I was living in Toronto at the time. So I guess I must have driven them back. I do remember him over the next few days, sitting in his Lazy Boy, staring out the window of his living room, saying little. 

His last months were busy. He got married (again), this time to his high-school sweetheart. I was his best man. The ceremony took place against the backdrop of the biggest snowstorm in Victoria's history. I hardly saw him, marooned as I was at a cousin's place. 

He got back to Kingston, re-wrote his will, began to get his finances in order, returned to work for a valedictory spin, made amends with some people. 

Then a week before he died, he decided he wanted to live a little longer. He asked his oncologist for chemo. He hadn't had any treatment at all save palliatives: morphine, some stomach meds. The Wednesday before he died, he went in for a dose. I drove up from Brockville to say hi and he was in bed feeling pretty bad. We managed a few words, but I spent most of the time with my stepmother drinking tea and talking about the cat they'd bought. 

That weekend, my girlfriend and I were supposed to fly to Cuba. I drove down again the day before we were supposed to fly, and he was out of it. I decided I couldn't go. I came down the next day, a Sunday, and we took him into the hospital, a two-car convoy to Hotel Dieu. We got him into the emergency triage. He nearly died there. I remember him thanking me for all my help, one of the last lucid moments I remember. We got him into a private room in the early evening and the doctors said he was stable. 

That night I called my mother and told her to tell my brother and sister to get here asap. 

I drove back up the next day; a Monday just like this, a sunny day just like this, a cool day just like this. 

In the morning a man from the Palliative Care department came by to offer his services, later the oncologist paid a visit. He said something, vaguely along the lines of "well, that didn't work, did it?" 

At one point I ducked into the bathroom and I heard Dad bark.

"Davy, bring that bag of cement over here!"

He knew I was there, but where "there" was was not a hospital room.

Around 5 p.m. he was laying on his side, looking out over Kingston harbour and out into Lake Ontario. He rolled over onto his back and said something.

"I'm going out to sea."

About 5:45 an orderly came in and took a look at dad. 

"He needs to get cleaned up, he's looking pretty scruffy," he said.

He pulled out a razor and started shaving him. Dad could grow a decent beard between morning shave and dinner, so three days of growth was pretty impressive. 

The orderly was expert. In a few minutes dad was tidied up. He was on his back, breathing shallowly. A nurse took his pulse.

"It's feathery, I can barely feel it," she said. Dad had a DNR, if his heart stopped, it was not going to be re-started. 

A minute or two later, my stepmother slipped out. A minute or two after that, I looked over at my father and I could see he was gone. 

Winter and all that

I just got back from my home near Brockville. It's a great place on the St. Lawrence River. It's also buried in snow. 

You don't get a lot for your taxes in the rural township where my house is. One thing you do get, however, is decent snow clearance. The plows and sanders seem to hit the road while a storm is underway and once it's done the heavy gear comes out to finish the job. 

I've never seen this much snow there this late in the season. The 7:30 p.m. sunsets make it all the more disorienting. This is light I would see in late-September. The sun is so high and warm now that all it takes is exposing the concrete or wood or granite and the natural heat does the rest, the snow just melts away. For all the perceived permanence of the white blanket, shovel away a bit and your realize pretty quickly, the snow is the interloper here. The sun is the truth-teller.  

Still, the conditions are confusing. Take the waterbirds. The Canada geese are arriving back after the winter down south. In these parts they are accustomed to open water and nice shallows to feed in. But there is still a lot of ice in the river, the northern ducks: old squaw, mergansers and the like, are still here. So is the bald eagle. I saw one confused flock do circles around its usual landing spot and head for open water. This morning a group of about 20 geese were working the shore by my place, navigating through chunks of ice. We'll see if they suffer for lack of food.

The other thing I noticed was my neighbour. George has a dock that is cantilevered out over the fast moving water. It looks like a helipad. It's a vulnerable place. This time of year, ice starts heading down the river and water levels begin to rise. I remember high-water years as a kid, seeing docks torn from their moorings gliding toward Montreal. George has been lucky over the years. Spring water levels have been low, ice has mostly melted before it gets to us. He's lost the odd plank, never anything more serious. This year might be a sterner test for the dock's construction. Yesterday he was down on the dock, looking over the edge, looking west toward the wider part of the river where it's frozen from shore to shore. The Seaway opens in a couple of week and the ice breakers will have to open things up first. The ice will arrive soon, and the high water won't be far behind.

When I pulled out this morning it was snowing lightly. About two inches of new powder was on the ground. It felt like February and looked like it too. The snow let up shortly after Kingston and soon the sky was mostly clear. The sun was on my left shoulder and I was warming up quite nicely. The sun was telling the truth.

The misery of others

It's still winter. I still am bundled up like a walking sleeping bag. We got a foot of snow yesterday and there is no immediate sign of its disappearance.

In this weather I wear my black Man U toque, a gift from my sister when she lived in the UK some years ago. On Saturday morning I was in the Starbucks across the street from work when the barista asked me if I wanted to know the score.

"They lost to Pompey?" I asked.

"1-0, a penalty. They dominated the entire game, hit the post, had the ball cleared off the line, but they lost," he told me.

"Well, all there is to hope for now is for Chelsea to the lose," I told him.

United crashed out of the FA Cup Saturday morning losing 1-0 to Portsmouth in the quarter finals. I couldn't see the game, but checked the result online and read the game summary. Pretty much as my coffee slinger described. As I settled into my chair and got ready for my 12-hour shift, I gradually got over my feelings of shock and dismay and remembered that my team is second in the Premiership and doing well in the Champion's League. Yeah, this isn't 1999 all over again, but it's a good year in the making. And there was the Chelsea tie to look forward to.

One of the essential realities of fandom is that there is going to be another team that you hate almost as much as you love the one you cheer for. In football, that used to be Arsenal because it was the only other team that gave United much trouble. Now that team is Chelsea. The Russian-made mini-dynasty is tribute to the power of money in modern sport and at times the side can actually be a pleasure to watch, but that is the exception. Its steady rise to domination is a tribute to the tactical wisdom of Jose Mourino. He knows how to neutralize another side and played his pieces on the field accordingly. The New Jersey Devils of soccer. Successful but without style. Now the Chosen One is gone, and the team has lost some of its grinding swagger. 

Saturday afternoon it was away to Barnsley, a side in a lower division and a prohibitive underdog. As the game wore on I'd check the BBC Sport(s) site for the score and was stunned to see that the home side had scored. From then on I was clicking back about every five minutes for updates. Low and behold the minnow ate the whale! 

My morning misery was gone in a flash. Yeah, my team lost. At least it was to another Premiership side. Chelsea? Gonged by a Championship team in danger of relegation to League One. They don't make upsets much bigger than that. 

My partner asks me from time to time why I take so much pleasure from seeing my sporting enemies stumble: Chelsea, the Ottawa Senators, Dallas Cowboys, others come along as needs be. My answer does not satisfy her. I want my team to win. The odds of my team always winning are about zero. I don't want my biggest rivals to win. They all face the same odds of perpetual victory, but will occasionally grab the brass ring. That hurts. It's a fundamental injustice. Those victories are never deserved, just as mine are the product of brilliance and imagination.

Even more confusing for the uninitiated is the hierarchy of sports hatred. The further away you get from real rivalry or perceived usurper status, the easier it is to accept defeat or be gracious in the success of others. Arsenal? A stylish, attractive side that has done wonders for English football. I hope they do well, though not too well. The Montreal Canadiens? It's important for pro hockey for the Habs to do well. Montreal is a fantastic hockey town and two decades of relative mediocrity has served to humble the Habs Nation. They don't go around acting like they own the Stanley Cup anymore. Plus, they aren't the Senators. 

I suspect that there are people who will never understand this instinct. But it comes from a primal place. Seeing the mighty fail or my enemy's enemy vanquished are both satisfying. Think about the New York Football Giants. Didn't that upset feel good? And didn't it feel good to see the New England Geniuses laid low by people just as smart as them? And when your team loses to an arch enemy, doesn't it feel good to see that side kayoed in the next round? Yup. 

I'm not above these base feelings if they can soothe my failures, make me feel better about my fan choices, and give me faith that next time, my team will be perfect.