by Ian Haysom
“Bad dog,” I’d say. “Never run away again.” But he did.
He hated to be on a leash and would happily lunge at other dogs just about every time we took him for a walk. He didn’t like to be constrained, or restrained, and would suddenly pull you halfway across the street as he tried to engage with a Doberman or a schnauzer or some such. Little dogs didn’t seem to worry him as much, probably because he mistook them for dish towels.
He is in his element in the local doggie parks, where he can be off-leash and running. Tucker is fast and loves to “run” other dogs . . . meaning he will nudge them on the neck, run a few metres away, then challenge them to run after him. Most of them do. Some of the older dogs, whose running days are over, look at him, sigh and tell him to sod off, in doggy language. He gets the message and goes off to find a likelier running buddy, a greyhound or a German shepherd.
And then they run and run and run. In circles, in zigzags, as though possessed. They stop. Pant. And then run again. And then other dogs join them, and suddenly five or six dogs are running out of control, in absolute ecstasy.
Once in a while one of the older dogs will harrumph and decide, what the hell, and join in as their owners look on in amazement and tell me that they haven’t seen their dogs run like this in years, watching their Timber or Charlie (modern-day dog owners pick very human names) careen towards a heart attack—like those geriatric joggers who waddle along on old bones and always seem to be on the verge of collapse.
Afterwards, I put Tucker on his leash, and we leave the park and he lunges at an Afghan hound.
Our other granddog is Bauer, owned by son Tim and his partner Jacy. He is their surrogate child. A Bernese mountain dog mixed with a little bit of Swiss mountain dog, which apparently makes him the most adorable dog on the planet.
When he was a puppy, I would sometimes take him out for a walk and every beautiful young woman en route wanted to stop and hug and kiss and pet him and tell him how adorable he was. Nobody ever did that to me. Even when I was a puppy. He still gets plenty of admiring comments and much patting and stroking when we go out, but he’s a lot bigger now.
A lot bigger.
Bauer now weighs about 140 pounds, which is much heavier than my wife and only slightly lighter than me. Okay, me when I was nineteen years old—but I still live in hope and 33-inch khakis—32 inches on a good day. Okay, 34 inches.
Bauer bowls us over when he comes to stay, body going back and forth and tail wagging so rapidly that vases are knocked off side tables. Bauer bowls me over en route to my wife, who he adores. The feeling is pretty mutual. We don’t have favourites, when it comes to kids and grandkids and granddogs, but apparently dogs do do—doo-doo?—favourites. Bauer loves his human mom and dad, but Beth makes him into a massive bowl of canine jelly, sloppy, wobbly, and if I may say so, rather soppy for a giant of a dog.
While Tucker is magnetically attracted to other dogs, Bauer has a cursory sniff of other dogs’ butts and carries on along trails and roads, more interested in plants and sniffing territorial pee deposited by other dogs.
He is, however, attracted to water. Lakes, ponds, rivers, ocean—if it’s wet, so is he. He rushes headlong into the water, splashing and swimming and creating liquid havoc. We keep him away from nesting birds in the spring, since dogs can apparently disrupt the delicate ecosystem that shore birds require. But Bauer is a one-dog ecological wrecking ball, so birds everywhere scatter when he’s near.
The first time we doggie-sat Bauer, we took him for a walk along the seashore near our home. He gallumped and splashed around the water’s edge, nuzzling stones and seaweed and was irresistibly cute.
Cute, that is, until three in the morning when I awoke and smelled something. I turned on the light and found doggie diarrhea on the carpet on the upstairs landing and all the way down the hall stairs. The smell was horrific, and I found myself gagging. Now, as you know, I’ve had my fill of diapers—four kids and three grandkids mean you have a pretty strong stomach—but doggie seaweedy diarrhea in the middle of the night is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, except maybe Donald Trump and that guy who cut me off on the highway this morning.
I cleaned and comforted Bauer as best I could, but he seemed fine. He’d done his business. The carpets needed professional cleaning. And Bauer seemed to learn his lesson—he has never eaten seaweed again.
Tucker and Bauer are an important part of our lives. We love them when they’re with us. And we love them even more when we give them back. Just like—well, you know.
12. Go, Red Team
My son-in-law, Chris, and I were watching the Superbowl. We were not huge football fans, but it was the Superbowl, and the grandkids were at swimming lessons, so it was the thing to do.
“You going for Kansas or San Francisco?” I asked.
“Kansas,” he said. “They’re the underdogs.”
I told him I kinda like San Francisco but would have preferred Seattle or Green Bay. Man talk. I couldn’t name one player on either team, but that’s okay. I’m an older guy. I can fake things.
Then we watched the halftime show. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. They are spectacular dancers and singers, and the show was over-the-top Americana at its best, and then Jennifer Lopez was, somehow, holding herself horizontal on a stripper’s pole.
“That’s very impressive,” I said.
“Yes, and she’s in her fifties.”
“No,” I said, and we checked online and she was exactly fifty.
“Crikey,” I said. “I interviewed her once, at a movie junket in Los Angeles for the movie U Turn. The Oliver Stone movie.” And then I realized that was more than twenty years ago.
I went into a reverie. She may be the only celebrity that I’ve actually interviewed who is still, so to speak, centre stage. Or centre stadium in this case. Over the years, I’ve interviewed many famous people, but at that precise moment I couldn’t think of any who were still active. Or even alive. For some bizarre reason the only person who came to mind was Gregory Peck.
And then the kids arrived. Mayhem. Much leaping on the sofa on top of us and running around. Their hair was still wet from swimming. Being modern guys, we had prepared dinner—a winter pot-pie I found in an old Moosewood recipe book, roast potatoes, and broccoli—and it would soon be ready.
“Who’s winning?” asked Emma.
“It’s a tie,” said her dad.
“Come on, the red team,” Emma said. “Go reds. Go reds. Go reds.”
“Do you pick your favourite team because of the colour of their shirts?” I asked.
“Of course, Grandad.” She looked at me as if I was crazy. “Red is the best colour.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Canada’s colour.”
Suddenly I started supporting Kansas too. Red became a very attractive colour. Actually, when you think about it, that is just as legitimate reason as any to support a team. I have been to Kansas and San Francisco and like both cities, but I don’t live there, have no particular attachment to either city, and frankly just wanted to see a good game.
When dinner was ready, we turned down the sound and ate our food and talked about the swimming and about a party they’d been to that morning, and my daughter asked about our recent weekend in Vancouver, talked about their upcoming holiday to Mexico, and suddenly the game had disappeared. Well, not totally. My son-in-law had been keeping an eye on things. When we’d all finished eating, he returned to his place in front of the TV.
“Four minutes to go. Exciting finish.”
We piled onto the sofa again, and in an instant Kansas was in the lead. Emma, Linden, and I started doing football moves in the family room. They had to try and get by me before I could tackle them. This went on for quite a long time while Chris tried to watch the TV around us as we zigged and zagged and knocked over quite a few things.
Then the Kansas players d
umped a tub of Gatorade over the coach. This, as sports fans will know, is an old tradition. The grandkids were stunned. They’d never seen grown men dump a whole bunch of energy drink over a much older man.
“Why’d they do that?” asked Emma in horror.
“Because they won. They’re happy,” said her dad.
“Is the old man crying?” asked Linden, quite concerned. “Did he know they were going to make him wet?”
Once we had reassured them that everything was fine, and that, yes, it was a very sticky drink, but the coach had a rain jacket so maybe he half-expected to be drenched, we put on the half-time show, which we’d recorded.
The show was mesmerizing. Both women wore next to nothing, and all the men seemed to be wearing baggy pants. “I want equal time,” said my wife. “Why don’t the men wear skimpy costumes?”
Jani was singing away to Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, and Linden was enjoying the fireworks onscreen, and though it was somewhat R-rated at times, with much bum wiggling and pelvis thrusting, we all agreed it was the best half-time show ever. At one point, after we’d been watching all the on-screen acrobatics, and maybe because I’d mentioned at least ten times that Jennifer Lopez was fifty, Beth said she’d read a piece in the newspaper that said if you could stand up from a cross-legged sitting position it proved you’d live a long time.
So Beth and Jani took turns trying to stand up without touching the ground with neither hands nor knees touching the ground. Jani did it. Beth almost. I had problems even sitting down cross-legged so abandoned the exercise.
“I interviewed Jennifer Lopez once,” I bragged to Emma, seeking grandad cred. A pause. “Do you know who Jennifer Lopez is?”
“No,” said Emma. “Can we watch that bit where they poured drink over that old man again?”
We did. The best Superbowl ever. I need to remind them not to pour energy drink over my head.
Coaching Sports
On many Saturday mornings in winter, I can be found standing beside a soccer field yelling at my young granddaughters.
“Come on, Emma.”
“Kick it, Mayana. Watch out, there’s a player behind you.”
Watching my granddaughters play soccer is one of the pleasures of my life, even though I usually do so in freezing cold or rainy weather since this is the West Coast of Canada in the dead of winter.
Sure, it’s fun to watch them at a dance recital or singing at a Christmas concert or doing gymnastics, but soccer is what I did for fun when I was their age (though we called it football, being in England), and their mothers played it at their age, and now they’re playing too.
The circle of life. Or kicking off of a tradition.
There are a few differences between the games I played then and they play now. The ball is certainly lighter these days and doesn’t hurt your foot or, more crucially, your noggin when you kick or head it. Our balls were made of leather and for some reason attracted thick globs of mud like a magnet. Kicking a ball, which also became fossilized dead weight in cold weather, was excruciatingly painful. Today, thankfully, the ball is lighter, made of polyurethane or polyvinyl chloride, which you probably wouldn’t want to eat, but won’t hurt you if kicked. Our balls, just to punctuate the pain we had to endure, were stitched with laces. If those laces came into contact with your forehead, they would often leave a red mark, a tattoo of honour, sure, but your ears were still ringing minutes later.
I coached all four of my kids at soccer and enjoyed the experience. My favourite moment came while I was coaching Amy and her team, the Rainbows. (The girls picked the name. I had wanted the Sharks or something more aggressive, but I bowed to democracy.)
One Saturday morning we were playing on an all-weather pitch (essentially dirt and gravel) in a driving rainstorm. We coaches were urging the girls to run and run, though we’d all have rather been sitting warm and dry indoors, when the ball went into a puddle. At which point the girls on both teams, all aged about seven, ran to the edge of the puddle. And stopped.
“Get in there,” I shouted.
“Get the ball,” yelled the other coach.
At which point the girls looked at the ball, looked at each other, looked up at us, and resolutely refused to budge.
We yelled some more. Amy, to her credit, made a move to jump in the puddle, but thought better of it and looked at the other girls, and dared someone else to get it.
After a few more seconds of this, the referee, being about twelve years old, blew her whistle, shouted “drop ball,” waded into the puddle and picked up the offending item, and carried it ten paces away onto a relatively dry surface.
Fast forward to 2015. Mayana was five years old and about to play her first game in a tournament with her new soccer team. My wife and I drove her to the field, and since we were running late, my wife ran with her onto the field while I parked the car.
About five minutes later, I got to the pitch in time for the warm-up to see my wife carrying Mayana and running a drill with the rest of the team. Up and down they went, in and out of some cones, and eventually the coach called in the girls for a pre-game pep talk.
“What happened?” I asked Beth.
“She got stage fright. She’s scared. Most of the girls are bigger than her.”
“Are you playing instead of her, then? Or just carrying her every time she goes on?
In the event, and tempted by the rumour of half-time team doughnuts, Mayana went on, played well and even scored a goal, even though it did appear to come off her knee when she was trying to avoid the ball. That didn’t stop us punching the air and shouting “May-ana May-ana.”
She now plays regularly, is no longer the smallest on the team, and scores goals with her feet. And I still cheer loudly, win, lose, or draw.
Linden isn’t playing yet, not competitively, but he loves kicking a ball. Emma is in her second season playing, and it’s cool to see her dad coaching her. She’s quite the player for a six-year-old. I’ve already pencilled her in for a future Olympics.
Last year, she was a little less dynamic. One morning, before her game, I showed her a fancy soccer move, a la Cristiano Ronaldo who, if you aren’t a soccer fan you should know has some of the best moves, dribbling and wiggling, in the soccer-playing world. The move had me wiggling one way, then the next, then running past the flummoxed defender and heading to goal to score.
“Practise with me,” I said.
“Okay, Grandad.”
And she wiggled and swivelled in front of me.
In the game, Emma—then aged five—had her father (the coach) and grandfather (the frustrated former coach) shouting sometimes contradictory instructions at her. I shut up after a while, mostly because of some glares from her dad. I was only trying to help.
Emma was playing defence. At one point, when the ball was at the other end of the pitch, I called to her. And did the Ronaldo swivel. Emma did it too. In fact she kept doing it, on the spot, as a player on the opposing team ran towards her, looked up in confusion at this young girl apparently trying to do the Twist, or similar dance in the middle of the game, ran around her and scored an easy goal.
After the game, she said, “Did you see my move, Grandad?”
And she did it again. A work in progress.
Too Many Screens
Here’s the biggest difference our lives and our grandchildren’s lives: screens.
The only screen we were likely to see was a small black-and-white television. We watched it through squinty eyes and then we went out to play because, frankly, there wasn’t too much to see there.
Our grandkids grow up in a world full of screens. Television, computers, tablets, mobile phones all playing Frozen and video games and music and other irresistible distractions. During my summer with Mayana, apart from the aforementioned TV moments, I tried to keep Mayana screen-free.
It was tough. Today it’s part of a
toddler’s DNA. They already know their way around a mobile phone and where to find YouTube because it’s always been there.
Not so long ago a survey by a British book company said that bedtime stories were dying out. Children, it claimed, have declining attention spans and are much more interested in on-screen activities.
They’re spending at least four times as much time in front of a screen than reading. Scariest finding of all? Children today don’t think reading is cool.
Some years ago, when I was a newspaper editor in Vancouver—before the Internet took over the planet—I introduced author Jim Trelease at a lecture called “What Turns Kids On to Reading.”
Trelease, author of the bestseller Read Aloud Handbook, told the six hundred or so parents and teachers at the lecture that the best way to turn kids on to reading—and living—was to turn the TV off.
He asked us to consider what a child misses during the fifteen thousand hours (from birth to age seventeen) that he or she spends in front of the TV screen—and this was long before tablets and iPhones. The child is not working in the garage or garden with his parents. Not reading or collecting stamps . . . not listening to a discussion about community politics among his parents and their friends. Not playing baseball or going fishing or painting pictures. The screen is hijacking our kids’ lives as they grow up.
Trelease didn’t want us to ban television in our homes. That, he says, would be elitist. Television, used properly and rationed effectively, can be a valuable medium, and I concur. Most of us, however, are prime-time TVholics. Game shows, sitcoms, reality shows, soaps, and other such pap form our steady diet. When was the last time you watched anything on PBS?
Some of Trelease’s points:
Television is the direct opposite of reading. In breaking its programs into eight-minute commercial segments, it requires and fosters a short attention span. Good children’s books hold children’s attention, they don’t interrupt it.