Apr 16
I’M NOT SURE what possessed me to sign up for a VO2 max test at the University of Guelph recently. Curiosity? Fascination with numbers? Vanity? Nothing better to do at 5 pm on a Thursday after a sedentary day at the office?
TERRY AND KYLE MOORE are ecstatic. After learning the ropes of maple syrup production each spring for five years, they’re finally cashing in. The sap has been flowing briskly all weekend. Their assortment of high- and low-tech gear is working perfectly. And they’ve got the boiling technique down pat. They started at 9 am this Monday morning and by 7:30 pm they’re pouring off jar after jar of rich, amber syrup. It’s a bumper year, more than double the production of any previous spring. Neither guy can stop grinning at their magical good fortune.
CURLING IS ONE of those games you don’t take seriously at first. Everything about it seems bizarre – the non-athletic look of its participants, the peculiar equipment, the glacial pace, and of course the hyper-urgent shouted instructions between thrower and sweepers while the rock is in motion (“Hurry hard!”).
WE LOST SARAH last Sunday. It was crushing. At one point, there were 13 of us in the Hamilton ICU waiting room, visiting Sarah briefly in pairs as she struggled for her life. We could stretch past the monitors, ventilator and over the IV lines to whisper in her ear, hold her hand, tell her we loved her – but nothing we could do, nor the best efforts of the doctors and nursing staff, could halt the downward spiral that began sometime after her first operation on Friday morning. By Sunday afternoon, she was gone.
BACK IN OUR university days my friends and I lucked upon a cheap housing deal – a rural house situated on an abandoned farm just north of Trent University near Peterborough, Ontario. The digs had been passed down from student to student, with the university as landlord, and carried the name “Total Loss Farm” – taken from a 1970s back-to-the-land memoir.
ITS CROWDED DOWN HERE in the birth canal! I reach the start line first, before my sister Beth, but then things get screwed up. I’m sure it’s not my fault I’ve turned breach. But it jams things up for both of us when I get stuck the wrong way around. My mother is exhausted from two days of labour. Her small town Alberta doctor panics. The result? A Caesarian. And so I’m suddenly at the end of the line instead of the head. My sister is lifted out first, leaving me in second place. A rivalry is born.
the write stuff 