Most of my friends at the time were poor, but they got REAL goalie gloves for Christmas. They didn’t have to use their old baseball glove while playing net in street hockey. Gordie and Glen, a couple native kids next door to us, got store bought goalie pads one year and gave me their old ones made from the foam of a hacked up couch cushion. Playing goalie was maybe the one time I was kind of glad to be poor. When you didn’t make the save, I mean when you didn’t even see the ball coming and blocked it by pure fluke with one of the unpadded areas on your body, for example, the crotch, you were always glad when it was a cheap old fuzzy tennis ball and not the more expensive, orange, frozen manhood missile euphemistically called a “hockey ball.” Except, as any Canadian kid knows, when you’ve played enough street hockey that most of the players have slivers of Superblade so thin you could slice cheese with them and the fuzz on the tennis ball had become stringy and all fallen off leaving the black, rubber, oversized squash ball that was only slightly better than old “Orange Jewelless.”
Some of my friends got running shoes that weren’t blank on the sides but had the swirls and stripes that cost enough to be cool. I remember eating over at the McCollough’s place one time and tasting genuine Kraft Dinner, not the eight-for-a-dollar kind of macaroni and cheese. What was the name of that eight-for-a-dollar kind anyway? I think it was Eight For A Dollar brand macaroni in cheese in fact. THERE’S a company with a serious lack of foresight! But I heard they’ll make a comeback soon as One For Eight Dollar brand.
One of my early memories from childhood, (in almost all my childhood memories I’m 7), was sitting on the curb in the hot summer sun with my 9-year-old brother, Rob. For all I know it was after a game of street hockey but probably not because we were in front of the townhouse three townhouses down the street from ours and we usually played with the guys from our own townhouse and MAYBE the guys across the street. We could have been looking for pop bottles; maybe Mom told us to go get a jug of milk from Pete’s Variety; it might have been one of the times we ran away from home. It doesn’t matter what we were doing there. I remember it like it was - a helluva long time ago. But I distinctly remember daydreaming, like you do on a hot, summer holiday afternoon. I said to Rob, “You know what would be so cool?!” He probably didn’t answer being hot, lazy and two years older. “It would be so cool,” I continued completely undeterred, “to have a WHOLE bottle of Coke!”
And I recall I wasn’t talking about one of those stubby, short bottles. Remember them? If, as the story goes, the curves on the regular bottle of Coke were designed after the figure of Marilyn Munroe, the bottles I wasn’t talking about would have been, let’s say, the Paula Abdul bottles. Though at the time she wasn’t even famous. I had HAD a couple Paula Abdul bottles of Coke to myself by the time I was seven. They were nice, but they were no Marilyn Munroe! Incidentally I read somewhere that the Marilyn Munroe story was total bunk. The bottle was designed to look like the cocoa pod, an ingredient not even IN Coke. Some guys who didn’t have the internet way back then, were going to design it after the Kola leaf or the coca plant but couldn’t find a book in the library with a picture. And to add an aside to an aside, while visiting some countries in Asia I discovered where all those Paula Abdul bottles went! Now, because careful product testing, threshold market indicators and average household income tend to reflect a viable market, Cambodians, Thais, Filipinos and Viet Namese can get a tantalizing taste of “the real thing” just like we did in Canada way back when.
Where were we? Oh yes, the bottle I was referring to was the big bottle. What were they 67, 68 fluid ounces? Back in the days when Canadian liquids traveled in fluid ounces. I think Rob knew what I was talking about. So I continued. “And even though I wouldn’t be thirsty any more I could keep on drinking the WHOLE thing without sharing with anyone!” At that point Rob actually said, “Yeah.” Then I think we got carried away talking about abandoned ice cream trucks and having chocolate-ray vision. Or that could just be the way I have it in my head. It’s a good memory.
It wasn’t long until my wish came true. My Grandmother picked up my Mom, my brothers and me, and took us all to Windsor for a weekend trip to visit a relative of ours I had never met before. He was a chartered accountant or CPA or CPPA or whatever acronym was mandated by the accountant branch of the Cosa Nostra of Canada: government regulators back then. At least THAT hasn’t changed. There are STILL, in ANY line of work in Canada, certifications to buy, courses to take, taxes to pay, regulations to follow and bagmen to grease in order to practice “in their neighbourhood.”
Our Uncle Dave had two boys, Matt and Jeff, and a fridge full of Coke. It looked more like a slot machine to me and the fridge door handle was the one-armed-bandit’s arm. Only this baby was paying out! Matt and Jeff told me they could have a Coke any time they wanted! And while I was there I had about four or five myself. Though I wasn’t comfortable unless I took them sneakily. It wasn’t without a cost, however. I didn’t sleep the whole night. Partly because of the caffeine I suppose but mostly because I spent half the night dispensing the Coke, slot-machine-like, into the toilet. My weak stomach may have been partly why I didn’t see much of Uncle Dave, if I saw him at all, for the rest of my life. Other relatives knew. I was a five alarm nog risk at Christmas. Thanksgiving dinner at most places was served to me at the table nearest the bathroom with cranberries, stuffing and a bucket. I must have been dreaded by my relatives! But they took precautions and invited us all anyway. Most of them. Uncle Dave didn’t know that most things go into my mouth with the speed of a guy with three brothers and usually enough seconds for one: the first to finish firsts. He also didn’t know that with the pretty formidable rate that I could put food and drink down, both had a tendency to come up even faster. And everything Uncle Dave owned, being of higher quality than other family members of mine, was susceptible to many times the price in vomit damage. Anyway, the upshot of the whole story was, Aunt Elaine, (Uncle Dave’s wife), gave me something to settle my stomach: a bottle of Coke! “Just sip it slowly,” she told me. I have a lot of hospitable relatives who just wish I could have.
Matt and Jeff had all the toys even the RICHEST of the kids in our neighbourhood didn’t have. They had a pinball machine for crying out loud! And if that wasn’t enough, they had a swimming pool in the back yard. I had an inkling to that point in life that the world just might not be fair but it hit home to me when I visited Uncle Dave’s house. Matt and Jeff seemed no different from any of my brothers or me. We were in the same family. How did they get so lucky? I never thought the envy, desire and acid-tasting jealousy could be more intense in my soul, (or even anyone’s), than it was that weekend! Even with the endless Coke this was one of the bad memories from my childhood.
Now I’m a security guard. My job is to take care of things. Higher quality things. For people who are concerned that those expensive things might be damaged or even stolen by those people who aren’t used to having nice things.
“The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. Attachment leads to
jealousy. The shadow of greed that is.” Yoda.
If people could train themselves to let go of everything they fear to lose I’d have no job. Paladin, and all security companies like it, wouldn’t be booming. There wouldn’t be need for more prisons and laws to make more prisoners.
I think back to when I was a boy and the all-consuming jealousy with which I viewed other people who had the things I wanted to have. Could it be that if I were to somehow acquire all of those sought after possessions, the jealousy I guarded them with just might be even stronger?
I am drinking a Coke right now. If I want, I can go to the fridge and get another. If some guy just walked into my house, grabbed my bottle of Coke and ran away, I believe I would chase him down and beat him senseless. Who knows if I’d be able to control my rage enough to stop there?
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