Monday, February 22, 2016

Calgary

Barclay, Sully, and I headed off to Calgary last week – Barclay had a work thing he had to be at and I hate being left behind. Besides: it’d been a while since I last went to the big city. I had some stuff to pick up at IKEA. 
The first thing we did was forget the stroller at home. Good one. We’d picked a hotel downtown specifically so Barclay could take the car to his work thing and Sully and I could explore – a plan which suddenly seemed impossible due to the length of my two-year-old’s legs. 

But let me tell you something: Sullivan is my kid.
If the whole childbirth thing wasn’t proof enough, I know it now with absolute certainty. This kid can walk for hours – literally, hours. He loves skyscrapers. He likes walking beneath them, craning his neck back at a strange angle, mouth open, pointing and exclaiming loudly. He likes watching people, he likes exploring new places, he likes escalators. He likes sharing his experiences with others – most of the time he held his stuffed bear by the neck straight out in front of him and showed it the things that caught his attention. “Look, Bear! A red truck! Look, Bear! A Schkyschreeper! Look, Bear! A guy!”

At one point, after about two hours of straight trucking, when I told him we needed to stop for a snack, he frowned and said, “No sank you. I just walk.” 

And my heart was like, “YEEEEAAAAAHHHH.” 

We don’t need no stroller. 
Anyway, it was a short but sweet trip. We got lots of coffee, found a good doughnut shop, spent way too long trying to navigate IKEA, visited some music stores, and stopped at Lindt for free chocolate samples. Ate ice cream at Village and burgers at Clive. Hit up the mall and bought three pairs of socks. Had supper with some good friends (twice!). Even ran into my grandparents and some of my cousins and aunts and spent an afternoon with them – they don’t live there; they were just passing through, stopped to eat at the mall food court and stumbled over me and Sully downing our Jugo Juice on a bench. What are the chances? 
Calgary is one of those cities I’ve been to probably a hundred times, but had never really taken the time to explore before. I need to do more of this sightseeing-close-to-home business. It’s good.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Sad-Faced Backwards Guy

The other day, I went to the Cathedral Village – that’s where all the interesting people go. 

(And me.)

I was stepping out of my vehicle when I looked up and saw the back of a man approaching. I thought he was walking away, at first, but then I saw that he wasn’t. He was going along at a normal gait; he must have had a remarkable amount of confidence in his ability to walk in a straight line and in the goodness of his fellow man – I would’ve been worried about someone sticking their foot in my path.

He looked dismal, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of him – which was also the sidewalk behind him, sort of. His head hung at an uncomfortable-looking angle, and he had one of his hands shoved half into his coat pocket. Everything about him was sad but otherwise unremarkable. Everything except the way that his body faced the direction he wasn’t headed in. 

I watched him come and I watched him go, down the sidewalk, across the street, and around the corner. He barely made eye contact with me as he passed. He didn’t smile or nod. He was distracted, to be fair. I wondered if he was distracted by the way that he was walking, or if he was walking that way to distract himself from something else. Maybe he had discovered, once upon a time, that walking backwards was an effective coping mechanism when life became dreary or overwhelming. Or maybe he was just a big weirdo. 

A shop owner was out in front of his store scraping the snow away from his door. I made a face at him that said, “Did you just see that too?” 

But either the shop owner didn’t see it or the shop owner didn’t care or the shop owner didn’t feel like bonding with me over someone else’s public display of peculiarity, so the shop owner averted his eyes, finished his job, and went back inside.