Why is it Canadians are always so polite? While obviously a stereotype, there is still some truth in the general assumption that Canadians are polite people. Canadians will often say sorry if someone bumps into them, as if it was their fault for ever existing and being in someone’s way. Everything from ATM machines to receipts in Canada say thank you, and all this just because you used them.
I was part of an alumni soccer tournament this weekend, featuring two boy’s teams from my college as well as a team of past graduates, hence ‘the alumni tournament.’ During one of the games, two players from opposite sides vying for the ball in the air happened to knock heads. The student was fine and seemed completely unhurt, but the alumni, we were told later, had broken his cheek bone in three places. Immediately he started to bleed out of his nose. He will actually be undergoing surgery tomorrow because of it. However, despite the fact that the man had just broken his cheek bone into pieces, he walked off the field past the spectators saying, “Sorry if I bleed on you.” It still makes me laugh to think of how polite and considerate he could be despite being in pain and bleeding so profusely.
Teenagers
I hate the stigma that comes with being a teenager. It seems all people need to know is to see you and know your age before they have decided that you must be an absolute basket-case of a child, rebelling against your parents and hating the world. Straight away they figure that your clothes must be piled in heaps across the floor of your dirty room where you sleep until midday, only to stumble around the house like a zombie, warning people of your approach by your deafening death metal blasting out of the headphones that are beginning to form cobwebs between themselves and your ears.
But, what annoys me more than any of this stereotype profiling is the fact that people are so often correct. We teenagers don’t seem to do much for ourselves by swaggering into a store with the look of a guilty thief, hoody pulled over our head. Is it that we like being the laughing-stock of the world, stuck in an in-between stage when the games of childhood are no longer enjoyable and the pursuits of adults are too much work and seriousness for us to handle. Did we think that we could wear a shirt peppered with dismembered human heads which have rotten through to the bone and not scare people away? Maybe we think that the skulls of dead people must really be attractive to others or that we are being cleverly symbolic by visual representing the way our brains were when we bought the shirt. Or perhaps teenagers are really soft inside. They hate the stares of the outside world, and as a jet fires off its flares to protect itself from missiles, they pierce their faces with small metal trinkets, hoping that when they talk, the moving studs and hoops will distract the listener from the fact that they never actually made it through their tenth grade English class.
At some point in our life, teenagers decide to take off the skulls, turn down the blaring music and get down to working a real job. Perhaps it comes when we see that there’s nothing to prove and no one to prove it to. When we find ourselves all alone, rebelling against a world that got on with their lives years ago. Perhaps it’s when we realize that the biggest thing confining us from reaching our dreams and desires is ourselves.
SLOW
I went running today out at a small lake a ways from my house. I took my bike, rode through a winding path and eventually arrived at the lake where I chained my bike to a nearby bench. There is a path that runs around the lake and I had decided to run along the path and arrive back at the bench where I had left my bike.
I obviously need to go running more often, since I grew tired very quickly as I ran. I was getting especially tired when I passed the most aggravating sign. It read ‘SLOW.’ Perhaps under normal conditions this sign is merely a caution, telling cars or bicycles to travel slow as they go around the corner where the visibility was low. However, for me, travelling on foot, it served more as a declaration than a caution. How depressing it was to be breathing heavily, pushing myself along a small dirt path to see a sign telling me that I was going slow. Thank you very much! Maybe next time the town could think of something a bit more encouraging to say as I struggle along my run.
The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree
I went over with my parents a few days ago to help clean out some of the food that my grandma had been keeping in her cupboards, and had long since expired. It was not a pleasant experience. She had boxes and boxes of food that she didn’t need, old spaghetti that had been forgotten and cans and cans of soup which she never ate.
I got the wonderful job of taking the jars of food that was past the expiry date and dumping them into the compost bin outside my grandma’s apartment. Standing in front of the bin with a cardboard box full of jars and a plastic spoon in my hand, I couldn’t help but wish I didn’t have to be there. I should have been eating my grandma’s homemade cookies or having tea with her in her sitting room. That would have been more normal. But instead, I was leaning over a compost bin, watching old salsa and jam plop into the pile of decomposing slop that already filled the bin.
I couldn’t decide if I preferred the runny jars or the solid ones. The runny ones would dribble out, splattering into the bin like vomit or diarrhoea, which was sickening to hear. But at the same time, the more solid ones would hit the bottom with a plop, their jelly sides wobbling as they oozed into the pile. And as I stood there leaning over the compost bin, dumping out a jar of pickled herrings that should have long since been eaten, I hoped I would never end up like my grandma in my old age, hoarding away food to forget about it and let it go stale with negligence. I know an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I really hope that this one gets whipped far away by the wind.
Free Spirit
When we arrived at our place in St. Thomas, Ontario, where my family and I would stay for a part of the summer, one of the first things we did was pull out our bikes. My dad went over to our old house where my uncle and aunt are living, to bring over the few bikes we had stored there as well as two that we were borrowing from my uncle and aunt.
When the bikes arrived in the back of the truck, my brother and I were asked to go and help my dad clean them all up and get them ready for riding. We hadn’t seen most of the bikes at all, and when we did, were we ever surprised. The two bikes from my uncle and aunt were shiny and new, mountain bikes in their prime. They had enough gears to keep you changing all day and looked too good to even ride. My dad’s bike on the other hand, had seen a much different life. Dragged out of someone’s garbage, it was rusty, cheap and far past its prime, if it ever had one! Then there was my bike, or my sister’s; we weren’t quite sure. It looked like a kid’s bike, painted burgundy, used here and there and nothing special in any way. However, the bike that caught my attention was not any of these. Instead, it was my mum’s old ten-speed racing bike from high school. It’s thin frame and tires looked used and enjoyed while its old chrome joints wore the rust of time. ‘Free Spirit’ was painted on the frame in thin white letters.
Looking at the bike and reading those words, it struck me that this bike was a relic of the past. Other bikes had ‘Mountain Tamer,’ ‘Ridge Rider,’ and ‘Trailblazer’ written across them, but it seemed to me, a completely different approach. These new mountain bikes were well oiled machines, made to conquer nature, climb the highest mountain and tear down into valley. But in my mum’s blue racing bike was something else: a free spirit. It echoed a breath of fresh air from the past. It was the kind of bike that seemed to camouflage into whichever weathered fence it leaned against. It seemed at home wherever it was. It didn’t shout out its existence, but faded into a quite place of being without screaming. Its rusted frame asked only to be free, to fly across paths, not bending nature to itself, but simply enjoying it. It held a spirit, not of conquering but of enjoying.
I saw in that bike a desire that I had longed to fulfil. One of being. Not being loud, not being noticed but just being. To me, that bike was freedom; freedom to roam wherever I pleased and to enjoy nature as a part of it. It was there, riding on my mum’s old bike from high school; a bike that had been around long before I was born, that I felt truly free; a ‘Free Spirit.’