"IF YOU TELL THE TRUTH YOU DON'T HAVE TO REMEMBER ANYTHING!"

            I have always been a fan of Olympic sports and I have great admiration for the dedication, perseverance and the sacrifice that Olympic caliber athletes have to make in order to get to that level of competition. I have watched a fair amount of television coverage of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games over the last two weeks and there were some amazing athletic performances from so many athletes. Particularly our Canadian athletes as Canada tied its best ever medal haul. Thank you Canadian Olympians.

            Unfortunately, the athletes’ performances seem like secondary news to the media covering the games what with all of the standard Olympic sized scandals happening on a daily basis. Right off the bat there was a big scandal as a top ranking Irish IOC member was arrested in a ticket scalping scheme and if the Olympics are on there HAS to be a doping scandal or twelve and Rio was no exception.

Again, it isn’t an Olympic games if a judge or two hasn’t thrown his integrity away for a few bucks or blatantly cheated for his/her own country. I am not being cynical here as the evidence of cheating is overwhelming when it comes to international sports competition. It always happens.

            There will forever be a debate over the excesses of The Games. Zillion dollar facilities being put up while nearby residents are living in squalor. Athletes raking in millions upon millions of dollars in incentives and endorsements because they can run fast or jump high while the construction workers building the stadiums and fields are working for peanuts. I am sure these injustices have been debated at every Olympic Games for decades.  

Then there were the American swimmers who were partying hardy and made up a story of being held up by gunpoint only to have the whole story blow up in their faces once the truth came out. And the truth always comes out which reminds me of one of my favourite Mark Twain quotes, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” Hmmm….remember that.

It also reminds me of something my Dad drilled into me while I was growing up and that is that lying about the deed is usually worse than the deed itself. Own up to your stupidity, take it like a man and admit you were wrong. Lying will only exacerbate the situation and prolong the misery.

            I don’t have enough room for all of the details but the story goes something like this: there were four American swimmers who were out partying and went to a convenience store to use the bathroom and upon finding the bathroom door locked they proceeded to kick it down. The convenient store attendant called Security and the swimmers were confronted about their actions. One of the swimmers claimed that they were held up at gunpoint with a gun being held to his forehead. He has since apologized for his “exaggerated” version of the story and he is paying a dear price for his “immature behaviour”, or lying as it were, as he has lost all of his major endorsements and is looking at further discipline from the United States Olympic Committee. Truth or consequences, man. 

            I still have great admiration for the hundreds of athletes who cleanly participated in The Games to the best of their abilities while sacrificing so much. My feeling is that the few that bring the integrity level down should not be given the biggest spotlight but that’s not how our world works, is it?   

“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”-Mark Twain.

LOTS OF BEAUTIFUL SPOTS!

            There were some advantages and some disadvantages to being a PK (Preacher’s Kid) following Dad and Mom around moving from one community to another and from one province to another every few years. Finding new friends and fitting into new schools presented challenges but on the flip side we got to see a lot of different geographical areas within the two provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

            There are 778 kms or 484 miles between Lethbridge Alberta, where the family started and Kipling, Saskatchewan, where I ended up. That’s a lot of area to cover with a lot of diverse topography in between. Even though the entire area is within the Western Canadian Prairie region the rivers, lakes, hills and plains give very distinct characteristics to the individual communities and the land that surrounds them.

I may have mentioned in a previous column or two that Mom and Dad loved to picnic and their kids loved to swim and play at the beach so we found our way to a lot of different watering holes over the years. From Indian Battle Park and Henderson Lake around Lethbridge to Shamrock Regional Park near Gravelbourg to Bisant Regional Park and Buffalo Pound Provincial Park near Marquis and Kenosee Lake near Kipling. Each spot was unique and beautiful in its own way.

This past weekend 50 members of Rose and Lowell Hubbard’s family gathered at one of those unique and beautiful places, Wakamow Valley in Moose Jaw, for our annual family get-together. It’s a jewel of a place along the Moose Jaw River ideally suited for that type of family gathering. There are a lot of fine facilities and recreational activities to be enjoyed within Kiwanis River Park at Wakamow Valley. You should check it out sometime.

I am fairly well acquainted with Moose Jaw, having lived only twenty miles north of the city for five years in the 60’s, I spent a year there in the 70’s while I attended STI and I have two siblings who settled in Moose Jaw so we still see the city quite often during our family visitations. I like all of the history of Moose Jaw and the city is very unique in so many ways and I’d have to say that it is one of my favourite places on the planet.

Like most cities and towns around it’s “street repair and construction time” so the access to the park was diverted through an area of the city that I didn’t even know existed. It was a rough ride over patchy streets and broken pavement, over the train tracks, through an old neighbourhood, along a bit of a gravelly road and then…boom…you drop down into this lush park. You’d be surprised at how many places there are like that in this province.

Travelling about with Mom and Dad and now traveling on our own we have been quite fortunate to have seen so many of these nice little spots. I’m going to keep on looking because I am sure that as many as I have been to there are probably twice as many that I haven’t.

“When you leave a beautiful place, you carry it with you wherever you go.”-Alexandra Stoddard-(1941-).

KENOSSEE LAKE MEMORIES

 

            Soon after our family moved to Kipling in July of 1970 we found our way to Kenosee Lake at Moose Mountain Provincial Park. Dad and Mom loved nothing better than packing up the family and spending a Saturday or Sunday picnicking and playing in the park. We’d load up the old Hibatchi barbeque, the charcoal briquettes and a cooler full of food and beverages and off we’d go to join the thousands of other like-minded people at the resort.

            I remember the first time we crested the big hill by the golf course and took our first glimpses of the massive parking lot filled with cars. Wow! There wasn’t a lot of pavement showing in that huge parking area, I can tell you that much. It was wall to wall vehicles. Back then it seemed like every family had a minimum of seven children and everybody went to the beach. I haven’t done any real data tracking or anything but I seem to recall hearing that on the July 1^st weekend during the 1960’s and ‘70’s Kenossee Lake had the third highest population in the province after Regina and Saskatoon. No wonder there was little room for vehicle or people parking.

            I also remember the big slide that was in the lake at the main beach. Chances were pretty high that it would be a long wait for your turn to go down that slide and on the really, really hot days the metal slide would heat up so much between riders that it felt like you were burning your exposed skin off all the way down. That was if you could get going at all. Youch.

I am at or nearing the “uphill both ways” age and I have started my share of conversations with “remember when”…but remember when those summer days were so hot the pavement was melting? It was! Really! I know that it probably does that now, too, but I just don’t go barefoot on pavement as much as I used to so I don’t really notice it as much now.

You know, it just didn’t seem like a successful trip to the lake if you didn’t come home with some tar burnt into the bottoms of your feet. Ditto the hot sand on the beach! Yowza! Remember digging your feet deep into the sand until you found the cool stuff? Ahhhh, relief.

            I’ve got another “remember when” moment for you…remember when there were so many frogs everywhere down there that the vehicle traffic on the highway sounded like they were driving on rain-wet pavement? True story. It was like an actual version of a Twilight Zone episode. Yuck!

            A lot has changed in the past four-plus decades since I first visited Kenossee Lake and it remains one of the most beautiful places in the province. They may not get the huge numbers that they did back in the old heyday but the amenities are just as good, or better, and there are still a lot of familiar faces. Older faces, mind you, but still the same people you swam with, played football at the beach on Sunday afternoons with, went to Grandison Hall’s dances with, sang around the campfire with or got tossed out of Kenossee Garden’s when Jones and Leipert thought that you had had enough. Oh, right, that was someone else’s memory not mine. Whoops.

            I don’t get down there as often as I used to but when I do go the old memories flood back and I’m taken right back to the old happy times. Such a beautiful prairie oasis. Good old Kenossee…gotta love it!

“The sand may brush off, The salt may wash away, The tans may fade. But the memories will last forever.”-beachblissliving.com. 

DID YOU FORGET EVERYTHING THE DRIVER TRAINER TAUGHT YOU??

            As of today we are officially halfway through summer/vacation/road construction season. Have you been travelling Saskatchewan’s highways and byways this summer, too? Isn’t that something? Mind you, there are only so many days in a year that are conducive to new highway construction and road repair so it’s a case of short-term pain for long-term gain. We have to put up with the delays if we want to drive on better roads, don’t you think?

            We recently travelled to Macklin, SK, with our Eden Valley Senators baseball team for the annual Saskatchewan Baseball Association’s “Geezerball” Master’s Twilighter Tournament. If you don’t know where Macklin, Saskatchewan is, I can tell you that it is approximately 1330 kilometers, or about 7 hours of one-way continuous travelling time, northwest of Kipling, right on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border 250 klicks west of Saskatoon. It’s a bit of a drive but we did see our share of beautiful Saskatchewan landscapes with the brilliantly coloured fields of yellows, blues and greens of canola, flax and cereal crops oftentimes while sitting in a queue of traffic waiting for the flag-person to flip the sign from “stop” to “slow”.

            While travelling, our truck runs on regular and I run on Dark Roast so one has to be ever so careful when it comes to mapping out our pit stops, if you know what I mean. I can’t be stuck in traffic too long with my intake of liquids. To accommodate these frequent stops and to find the route least-likely to interrupt the drive I Googled a construction map of Saskatchewan and on the map every construction zone is marked by an orange pylon. The entire map appeared orange! Take your pick. It’s going to be painful anyway you go.

            But, you know, it is what it is and road construction is a part of travel but there are still road ethics to be followed. We’re all in this together, aren’t we? If we are all a little patient and cooperate with one another we will all get where we are going eventually. But noooooooo. There are always those one or two drivers who are completely selfish and think that road rules never apply to their “don’t you know who I am?” attitudes. “I am so much more important than you! “Zipper merging” is not even in my vocabulary! Why should I wait for you peons? Outta my way!”  

Then the faceless jerk flies down the suicide lane thinking all sixty-eight of the cars in the lineup must be out of gas, or something, or are just sitting there taking in the scenery and as I see him blowing by the passenger door of our truck I’m thinking…don’t let him in, don’t let him in, don’t let him in…but somebody always does and like the proverbial spoiled child the !*$%#@# gets his way and does not learn anything from his bad behaviour and poor judgment.

             I am far from a perfect driver but I’ll compare my 40+years of driving stats with anyone’s, and, having said that, I cannot believe how many dangerous and stupid drivers there are out on our roads. Did they forget everything they were taught in Driver’s Ed?

You know what? In many areas of life one needs to perform continuing education. Whether you are a teacher or doctor or fitness trainer or whatever there are courses one takes yearly to keep you engaged and reinforce lessons learned. I would propose to SGI that there be a mandatory bi-annual driver’s refresher clinic to review proper driving practices and to enhance one’s driving skills. They don’t even need to retest everyone just put them through the paces so they don’t forget everything they learned moments after the driver tester handed them their first driver’s license.

So if you are going to be out travelling the Saskatchewan roads sometime in the remainder of the summer please be careful on our highways and be kind to your fellow travelers because all they want is to reach their destination safely and in a timely manner as well. Don’t we all?

“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.” -Dave Barry, (1947-).

IT'S SASKATOON BERRY TIME!

            To some, this is a pretty exciting time of the year. They’ve waited and waited and waited and they have scouted out all of the good spots and now it’s time to gather up the pails, the bug spray, the picnic baskets, the iced tea, (or beverage of choice), and head for the bushes…the Saskatoon bushes, that is.

Yup, it’s berry picking time again and I’m so excited for all you berry pickers. Be careful and have fun out there. You know, I’d sure like to join you but I’ve got this sore toe. You go ahead…knock yourselves out.

Like so many things it really depends on how you were raised, I suppose. Take my wife for instance. Her family made berry picking a whole day family outing. Not just one small family, either, many family members would gather and travel to the best berry bushes they knew of and they would pick and play and picnic and have loads of fun. They would even make picking through the full pails of berries and washing them up after they got home loads of fun, if you can imagine.

Mind you, Debbie and her siblings sometimes accompanied their grandmothers in to the pastures and surrounding fields of the family farm picking various wild fruits and flowers and making it a great bonding and learning experience. An enjoyable experience, if you will.

My recollections of the berry picking experience were a little different. My Mom packed a lunch and cool beverages and she tried to make it fun for everyone, too, but ten-year-old wired up boys are not the best people to take to the berry patch. I was bored to near-death in about three-and-a-half minutes and I was more than happy to share that information with anyone…a lot. The constant bizzzz, bizzzz, bizzzz, of the mosquitoes, horseflies and black flies combined with the oppressive heat and the clock moving backwards only reinforced in me that berry picking is barely this side of torture. You know what my behaviour got me, though, don’t you? That’s right. It got me the first available ticket to every berry picking tour we ever went on again. Snivel and whine all you want but you’re coming along!!

Now, with today’s U-Pick-Em orchard farms the all-day picnic-type events are fewer and far between. In fact, for a miniscule fee the U-Pick-Ems will even pick ‘em for you so all of that tortuous labour has been removed. How nice is that? Delicious berries without the purple fingers or the odd worm in your mouth or the boredom or the mosquito bites or the sunstroke…

If you’re interested, I know that Tom and Maxine Sugden have a U-Pick ‘Em farm right on the western outskirts of Kipling and Drew and Pat Balfour also have an orchard off of the 711 grid near #9 highway. To name a couple.

No matter how the little purple berries end up in your fridge, freezer or pie they are just about the tastiest wild berry there is, don’t you think? The plant we call the Saskatoon is an Amelanchier alnifolia, and it’s native to North America from Alaska across most of western Canada and in the western and north-central United States.

There are so many things to like about a Saskatchewan July but the unique tastes provided us through the various products produced from somebody’s Saskatoon berry picking labour are a welcome reminder of so many summers past.

“I like to do things quickly because I’m easily bored.” Karl Lagerfeld (1933-).

WHERE DID THE TIME GO?

            In this weekly column I quite often lament the swiftness of the passage of time. In fact, I’m sure that I have even described science’s interpretation of how time actually slows down and speeds up and why it really seems to speed up as we age. It’s all in the perception, I believe, but regardless the reasoning…time flies! All too quickly.

            For example I cannot believe that it was already twelve months ago when we were sitting on a beach in Peachland, BC on Canada Day, 2015, watching an unbelievable fireworks display over Okanagan Lake. Where the heck did that year go?

            It is truly unfathomable, as well, that we are approaching the 4^th anniversary of the untimely passing of Bobby Vargo. Four years already? Wow. The family has just wrapped up the fourth edition of the Bobby Vargo Memorial Slo-Pitch Tournament and what a success it was. Combining all of the things that Bobby loved into one event is a great way to honour his too-short lived life. He loved family, he loved friends, he loved sports and he loved community and this event brings them all together. And on top of that the tournament’s events helped many community organizations raise some much needed funds for their groups. Over $16,000.00 in total, I’m told! What a great legacy. Congratulations Vargo family.

            Again, overstating the obvious, but it was a decade ago that Kyle MacDonald made the last of his fourteen trades from One Red Paperclip to a house in Kipling! Ten years! How come it seems such a short time ago?

            Mind you, the whole summer of 2006 was full of excitement around Kipling. Among other events, that was the year that Pat Beaujot discovered the pedophile harbouring two young males in an abandoned yard near Pat’s home and it was also the summer that the Kipling Industries building north of town completely burnt down and then the momentum of the “One Red Paperclip” phenomenon led to that summer’s wrap-up with “Saskatchewan’s Biggest House Warming Party” on the Labour Day Weekend in Kipling, which led to the auditions for a part in a Corbin Bernsen movie, which our son Nolan won, by the way. What a summer to remember!

            Can you imagine that it really is forty-six years ago that Dad and Mom and their three youngest children moved to Kipling? I guess it is. What a pivotal moment in my life that turned out to be. I was thirteen years old at the time and I didn’t want to move here at all. We had lived in three other communities prior to that and I was sick of moving and finding new friends and fitting into new schools and everything.

You know what, though, it didn’t take long…mere weeks, in fact, before I had made some new friends and by the end of that first year in Kipling I was entrenched. I was home. This was it.

The friendships that I made in those first weeks in Kipling were to form a tight-knit circle of friends that remain very close to this day. Life, geography and other factors have made the visitations fewer and fewer but when we do get together the years fall away and we are transported right back to the good old days of fun, fun, fun.

The core peer group started with six friends and we expanded and contracted that number over the years but the six of us were always linked as one. One of the core members of that circle was Brian Gallagher. Brian is the first one of the six of us to have passed on after his recent battle with cancer. Another fine example of “the good die young”. This one stings. Bad.

We can lament the too-fast passing of time. We can complain that life is too short and there is never enough time to enjoy all the things we want to enjoy. If there are any positives that can be taken from losing friends and family members like Bobby and Brian it is that we have to make the time to do the important things in life. We have to make the time. I know that we pledge these things every time we lose a close personal friend or family member but we must. We must follow through because before you no it…time has slipped away.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”- William Penn (1644-1718).

SUMMER IS HERE!

          I see by the calendar that we have arrived at the Summer Solstice making today the longest day of the year. Or, more accurately, the day which has the longest period of daylight in the year. However you want to label it …hurray, hurray, hurray…summer is on the way!! It is the most glorious time of the year and here’s hoping that it’s going to be a long, long beautiful summer.

          Do you know what else today is? It’s also a Strawberry Full Moon, that’s what it is. What is a "Strawberry Full Moon", you ask? According to the "Old Farmer’s Almanac" they call it a Strawberry Full Moon because Algonquin tribes saw it as a signal to start gathering ripe fruit.

          Seeing as how you are going to be reading this long after the event I hope you had a chance to catch the Strawberry Full Moon on the same day as the Summer Solstice because it is a rare event indeed. In fact having a full moon on the same day as the Summer Solstice hasn’t happened in Western Canada since 1986 but those in Atlantic Canada haven’t seen a summer solstice full moon since 1967 and still others in North America since 1948!

          The Strawberry Moon/Summer Solstice will be broadcast on You Tube so if you missed it live or it was cloudy in your area restricting your view, or something, bring it up and have a look. As mentioned, these celestial events are very rare so it is a pretty neat way of welcoming the summer.

Today may be the "real" first day of summer but it is usually the day after the last day of school which signifies the "unofficial" start to summer. Way back when, during my school days, the town became nearly deserted after the last day of school as many folks packed up and took off on vacations or went to the cabin at the lake. They still do, I am sure, but now the town is not nearly deserted at all. With the many varied recreation facilities and activities to be had right here in town one needn’t travel to have access to relaxation and recreation. It’s always nice to get away but if one cannot or does not want to travel there’s lots to do right here.

          Kicking off the summer events will be the 4^th Annual Bobby Vargo Memorial Slo-Pitch Tournament on the Canada Day Long Weekend of July 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd. Glen and Lynn Vargo, their children, Ashely Couette and Austin, as well as many other family members and friends, have organized and ran this tournament every year since their son and brother Bobby’s untimely passing in 2012.

          The Bobby Vargo Memorial Slo-Pitch Tournament is a great family event that provides a fun-filled weekend while contributing much needed funds to the community’s recreation facilities. After moving the event around in the calendar year a couple of times the tournament has now secured a home around the Canada Day holiday. What a great way to combine memorializing a life too short-lived, celebrate the birthday of the greatest country in the world while raising funds for a most worthy cause. It’s a full weekend of activities, too, including a pancake breakfast, a Dunk Tank, a Kid’s Bouncy House, Kid Care Jail & Bail, a Canada Day Cabaret and so much more. Check out the Bobby Vargo Memorial Slo-Pitch Tournament Facebook page for details or look for posters and ads.

          Whatever your plans for this upcoming summer, may you all have a safe and happy summer season. I will be making a wish for all of us, on this Strawberry Full Moon/Summer Solstice Day, for the greatest summer ever!

"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."　–Thomas Campbell (1777-1844).