Canadas at Play in 2000

Snow Comes to Laurinburg

January 2000: I don't think of myself as a nostalgic person, especially when it comes to snow. Before moving to North Carolina in 1992, I spent the first 26 winters of my life in Indiana, where I became really, really tired of snow. I shoveled it, I drove in it, and, yes, I really did walk nearly a mile to school in it. Later, when Lisa and I were living in Fort Wayne without a car, I again walked through it to get to work. I seem to remember trick-or-treating in snow when I was a kid, and I know I remember snow falling on the day Lisa and I graduated from Indiana University--in May. We came to North Carolina partly to escape from Indiana winters.

It worked. We hardly ever see--or shovel or drive in or trudge through--snow here, and I don't miss it a bit. Last night, however, something strange happened. It snowed. Then something stranger happened. It touched me--only lightly at first, like the big white flakes that fluttered down on my jacket as I walked out of church. I hardly noticed. But when I walked up our driveway and heard a creak under my foot, I felt it. Then, this morning, I built Essie a snowman, the first one I've made in probably two decades, and I felt it again. I won't call it nostalgia, but just an eerie flash of recognition, like the feeling I get when I smell freshly cut grass or new asphalt. It's a sense that makes me think that we don't have to love home or even to miss it, but there are times when we cannot help but feel it.

Two days later, after the first batch was almost entirely gone, we woke up to more snow, about a foot of it. School was closed, of course, so I got to stay home with Lisa and Essie. Our friends Jesse Peters and Susan Cannata joined us, and we threw snowballs, took pictures, and pulled Essie in Susan's toboggan. Later, we came inside for hot chocolate, soup, and an afternoon by the fireplace.

Personal Trainer

Winter: Essie and I have been workout buddies ever since she was just a few months old. At first, she just rode along in her stroller during my runs around the neighborhood. Later, she joined me for my bike rides and even hopped along with me when I jumped rope in the carport. It was only recently, though, that she promoted herself to my personal trainer. A few days ago, when the recent snowstorm had closed the gym, I had to work out at home, and I enlisted Essie as my free weight. Though she had been content to sit back and enjoy the ride when I ran or rode, she turned into a taskmaster when it came to weight training. Riding on my back while I did push-ups, she called, "Up! Down! Up! Down!" Not content with merely being my makeshift curl bar, she decided to count out loud as I lifted her, but took a sneaky approach obviously designed to squeeze a few extra reps out of me. She called out: "One, two, three, four, five, four, five . . ." As if that wasn't bad enough, no sooner had I set her down than she insisted, "Again!" I know that she simply wants to draw out my best, but I don't know how long I can keep this up, especially since I suspect her sneakiest trick is yet to come--I think my free weight is going to get heavier.

Square Dancing

April: About year ago, we received an invitation to come and square dance at a club here in Laurinburg. Although neither of us had promenaded or do-sa-doed since elementary school, we accepted. For the first few weeks, the caller used to step up to us and drop little bits of square-dance trivia. "Did you know," he would begin, bypassing any attempt at casual conversation, "that square dancing burns more calories than water skiing?" I showed the appropriate amazement. A little later that night or the following week, he would corner one of us again. "For people in their 80s," he would say, "square dancing is the number-one contributor to a healthy mind." I don't remember the exact facts, but none carried much weight with me--an exercise fanatic still decades away from retirement. If Charlie had known me better, he would have said, "You will learn something new every week."

For someone who loves to learn, that promise would have been the best enticement anyone could have offered, and it would have been true. Since joining the club, we have learned something new--and sometimes four or five new things--at most of the meetings. We still have a long way to go. After all, thanks to Charlie, we know that square dancing has more than 4,000 steps, about 3,998 more than we learned back in elementary school. Still, at least for me, there is something very satisfying about hearing the words "flutter wheel" or "load the boat" and knowing exactly what to do. On top of that, we have made some wonderful new friends and had a lot of fun. We even have attended a few regional dances and performed at a local rest home on Valentine's Day.

Of course, there is a price to education, and we have paid it. Through my 12 years of public schooling and even my college years, I had largely avoided it, but eventually my luck ran out. I'm talking, of course, about hazing, square-dancing's secret sin. On the night of our graduation, the night when we would earn our green-and-white name tags, we endured a harrowing initiation ceremony that involved, among other things, wearing cardboard boxes while we performed the "box circulate" and going through an entire dance with blindfolds on while a pan of shaving cream reportedly was in the center of the square. Now we know why all those octogenarian square dancers are so sharp. They have to be.

Something in the Air

May: When it comes to flying kites, I've had as much success as Charlie Brown. The last attempt ended when I--in a misguided and, to be honest, unintentional attempt to give the kite its freedom--let the string run out. Nevertheless, Lisa, as any good friend should, has more confidence in me than I have in myself, and this Easter I found another kite in my basket. She suggested that Essie and I fly it together.

About a week later, as if on cue, there came a sunny, blue, warm, and breezy day, a day for flying kites if ever there was one. It was, in fact, May 1, May Day. There must have been something in the air because Essie, who knows virtually nothing about kites, could talk about nothing else. "I want fly kite," she kept saying. As a matter of fact, so did I. Lisa had an exam in her cooking class that day, so Es and I set out on our own, driving over to St. Andrews College campus and finding an open area. Essie sat patiently in her car seat while I assembled the kite, and minutes later we were soaring, all three of us. Only kids are supposed to feel the way I felt that afternoon, first watching Essie holding the string and beaming, then flying the kite myself and beaming a bit myself, at least on the inside.

Anyone who knows about Charlie Brown's trouble with kites also knows the villain in the saga, perhaps the only villain in the Peanuts chronicles: the kite-eating tree. After a few minutes of bliss, I met that tree. I had let the string out too far--an old habit--and our kite had dived right into its waiting mouth. Already feeling like a kid, I climbed the tree, the first I had scaled in a couple of decades, and shook the branch violently while a man who had noticed our plight yanked on the string. The tree's jaws, though, were clamped shut. I returned to earth and set the man free. Then I yanked some more. At this point, I had little to lose. Then another miracle occurred: a branch broke, and the kite came down.

Extra cautious, I launched it again 50 yards from the nearest tree. By now, Essie had moved on to other things, but I spent several more minutes airborne, experimenting with various techniques and dreaming that I just might become a kite aficionado. Whether I will I doubt, but what mattered then was not what I would become, but what I was--flying.