Do you ever experience something when you’re alone that’s so incredible, you just have to share it with someone else? It happened to me the other day, kind of. I was strolling along the waterfront trail when came across an elderly man who was sitting on a bench facing the water. He turned to me and I smiled and he said to me, “Do you want to see something?”
I said, “Sure,” and walked over to where he was sitting.
He pointed at a heron, standing close by on the rocky shore. “They don’t normally let you get this close,” he said to me. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
I agreed and then I respectfully oohed and aahed; I hadn’t the heart to tell him I’d been even closer to one of the huge, majestic birds just a few days before. When I walked away I felt good that I had been the one to share his wonderful discovery with him.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
I used to go there as a kid. My friends and I spent hours there, or sometimes I’d just go alone and sit. The locks were unused even back then – the place was run down and at the end of a dusty old road that went no where, it was rare to see people there. That was my experience of Newmarket, Ontario, Canada in the seventies. It was where I spent most of my time.
The picture was taken two and a half years ago. I went back, on my own just to see how much had changed.
They’ve turned it into a public trail now. “Beautified” it–in my estimation it was beautiful when it was solitary. There were so many people walking across the bridge on the day I was there, but few came down to my spot under the tree where I would sit and contemplate life and make up stories as a kid.
I could barely hear them over the sound of the rushing water, so I felt at peace still. I remember sitting on the big final step with my legs dangling over, wondering how cold the water was. There were rumours that people had drowned in the current – I doubt it’s very deep, but you never know. In years gone by there was water running down the other side too… the level was much higher back then.
Now the fence prevents anyone from exploring like I used to. There was no fence back then. Just the drop.
That day two years ago I remember not wanting to leave. I must have sat on that concrete slab for two hours or more. I kept saying to myself, “I don’t want to go.”
It’s a bitter-sweet feeling, revisiting a place that means so much – that so much of the past can be remembered by. The sharp scent of iron in the water, the constant, unending shush of the waterfall, the birds chirping in the trees, the heat of the summer rising humidly from the ground.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to leave that spot; I knew I had to get up and go eventually.
I think you have to have spent a lifetime in a climate such as the one we have in Southern Ontario, Canada, in order to be able to say with a straight face,
“It’s snowin’ like a bugger, but at least it’s not cold out!” and mean it.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Right on the heels of my trip to Japan, I’ve already started planning my next adventure. No, not London, or Paris, or even Beijing. I’m going to beautiful Kingston, Ontario. Less than an hour’s drive away. In July.
Call me crazy, but I wanted to make sure I get a good, cheap room close enough to downtown that I’ll be able to walk to where all the action is – to the Busker’s Festival and on my annual pilgrimage to the setting of my novel, The Great Dagmaru. This will be my third year in a row if you count the hospital-ridden disaster last year was. Which brings me to my next point.
Booking.com. I decided to try them out last year, taking them at their word that if I booked a hotel with them I could cancel any time. Well, last year I had to cancel. At the very last second. And it didn’t cost me a cent for the hotel. So I thought great – I’ll take a chance and book with them again for my trip to Tokyo. Again, smooth as silk. All my bookings were exactly as planned, no upfront fees.
And that’s why I already have a B & B booked for July 9th at $140/night and two nights at the Queen’s University campus in a two bedroom suite for $99/night.
What kills me? The most I paid in one of the biggest cities in the world – Tokyo – was less than $90/night. The cheapest, and it was a nice hotel, came to $66 for the night.
Canada is damned expensive. Even if you book half a year in advance.
In light of the shootings yesterday in the city of Ottawa, and the subsequent statements I keep hearing that our country has changed, I can’t not say something.
As a nation of people who are often accused of having an identity crisis, we ourselves wonder who we are, and how we fit in. With our English spellings and our love of American television, we have been known as the “51st State,” though when we go to court, it’s us against the Crown. When asked to define Canada we come up with adjectives like, “big,” “culturally diverse,” or “the place where poutine and insulin were invented.” We are a nation of coffee-drinking hockey players who talk about the weather and say “sorry” when someone bumps into us.
Ours is a land populated with people who care about their towns, their cities, their neighbours and their country. We’re proud of our peacefulness. So can one act of violence change that? I’m here to say, quite loudly, NO.
At the moment we are reacting, and yes, it is deeply disturbing that on an ordinary day in the nation’s capital, a soldier standing on honour guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier could be shot and killed. But while we are reacting, we are focusing on the family of the man who was lost. Because that is who we are.
It is in our nature as Canadians to pull together, to care for each other. And for all Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s statement that, “we will not be intimidated,” might refer to our government, it stands for our citizens as well. We CAN not be intimidated. We are nation of 35 million who feel the responsibility to protect one another.
That is something about Canada that will never change.
Now that I’ve written the official Queen and Adam Lambert concert review, it’s time to relate the story of my trip.
We arrived in Toronto with about four and a half hours to spare before the show so we decided to do some walking. And some lunch. We chose a nice English pub downtown and sat down to have a beer with our meal. This is only notable because it marked the first time I’ve ever had a beer with my son in a restaurant. But I didn’t feel old AT ALL. I’ll just keep telling myself that.
After lunch we walked until our legs gave out (and no, it wasn’t just me). We sat on a flight of steps in Yonge-Dundas Square for a rest. Whilst there, we watched as a member of the security crew poured a bucket of soapy water on a rectangle of chalk that a group of kids had drawn on the pavement. Then, another employee came along with a broom and mopped it up. Can’t be too careful about that graffiti here in Canada I tell ya.
Of course, that called for a coffee. Since there were no tables available at the first Tim’s we went to, we walked a little more and then stopped to sit beside a fountain. There I took a picture of my traveling companions:
My eldest son Fred and my best friend John
We got to the Air Canada Centre long before the concert started and got to listen to some really annoying people behind us, who complained about everything: their own seats, other people’s seats, the line-ups, when was the concert going to start… I had had a headache all day and these people weren’t helping it to go away. But you know what did make my headache go away? Queen!
I didn’t think about what putting my hands above my head for almost two hours was going to do to my poor shoulder, let alone what singing at the top of my lungs was going to do to my throat. Strangely enough, my shoulder hasn’t felt better since January. Funny what adrenaline can do.
We got back home at 1:00am on the dot and I was still feeling the effects of being tired yesterday. Today I seem to have finally recovered. Not only am I fully awake, but I no longer sound like a teenaged boy whose voice is cracking either.
But you know what? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
…and spectacularly happy I am that Queen and Adam Lambert decided to make last night’s final North American concert stop at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre.
As a long-time fan of Queen’s guitarist, Dr. Brian May, I made sure to secure seats at stage left. Not since March 2006 have I seen a more exhilarating show and that was, you guessed it, Queen with Paul Rodgers. Adam Lambert adds a whole set of unique talents to the concert however. His sense of style is so very much like the late, great, Freddie Mercury’s and yet different enough that I didn’t get the impression that he was trying to step into the fondly missed singer’s shoes. Instead he managed to make the show his own, even as he sang the songs faithfully as we all know them so well from hours and hours of listening.
The set list covered many of their most popular tunes, and some of the lesser played favourites. I had the feeling that quite a number of the younger members of the audience (and there were quite a number!) didn’t recognize the older tunes, though that didn’t seem to suppress their enjoyment. Included here were “The Seven Seas of Rhye” and “In The Lap of the Gods…Revisited,” both of which I’m honoured to have heard live. I was thrilled when Brian began to hint that “’39” was coming up as it’s my personal favourite from the album A Night at the Opera.
Dr. May’s guitar solo, as always, was truly amazing. The things that man can do with a guitar are nothing less than astounding. There are few guitarists on this planet who play with such heart and pitch that their music can pierce the soul and bring tears to the listeners’ eyes. Brian May is indeed one of them. And speaking of tears there was, of course, his solo performance of “Love Of My Life.” Enough said.
In the end, the show was made in the performance of the final three songs. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was powerful, and heart-wrenching as well when a video of our beloved Freddie was shown on the big screen, singing and playing the piano. For the encore, the band played, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions.” Anyone lucky enough to experience these three songs live… To attempt to put it into words: it’s spiritual; like being surrounded by a sense of all-encompassing love in the form of heavenly sound and to know that the very hands which played THAT MUSIC–the songs you’ll always remember where you were and what you were doing the first time you heard them–are standing before you in the same room, is just incredible! There is the a reason Queen are referred to as rock Gods. This is it.
If you ever have a chance to see Queen perform live, do it. No matter what the monetary cost, no matter how far you have to travel. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.
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