loading docks of my youth
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With considerable alarm Ruth and I had to jump on a plane recently to tend to my father in Mississauga, who had suddenly grown gravely ill, after what was supposed to have been routine surgery. We sat with him for a week, as he lay unconscious in the ICU, viscous fluids bubbling in and out of him through a maze of clear plastic tubing, his life rhythms governed by an army microprocessors and chirping screens. He is recovering, albeit in the slowest of increments, having recently regained consciousness.
As one might expect, being around a critically ill parent brings up a lot of emotions around one’s own childhood and I found myself oddly nostalgic for the terrain vague of my youth. This rather unremarkable looking shopping plaza figured prominently in the psycho-geography of my family. I trekked across its windswept parking lot for seven years on my way to and from school. My mother and I each spent long hours working in its 24 hour grocery store; she for many years as an afternoon shift cashier and I, for a shorter stint, working nights as a meat room clean up attendant, pressure hosing blood off the white tiled walls and extracting balls of gristle from the clogged floor drains.
They weren’t the easiest of jobs but the money was good and they helped us survive. I spent a lot of time working by myself in the loading dock, where I would prepare yellow plastic buckets of offal to be sent to a pet food factory. Sometimes, with the corrugated steel doors rolled open and the residual rumbling of a Great Lakes thunderstorm still ricocheting off the nearby apartment towers, I’d look out onto the glistening tarmac of the parking lot and think that life was magic. Perhaps it really was.
