Rose's Cantina

The kid's name was Nick Zselaniak. He was a classmate of mine at West Park Secondary School and he died trying to out run a train in my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario. The man's name was Steve. He was my neighbor growing up. His 18-wheeler stalled on the train tracks and he miraculously survived, though he spent a year in the hospital. I babysat his kids and held his wife's hand through the terrible ordeal. And then there was Donnie, the son of a good friend. He couldn't live with himself anymore and he walked in front of a train at the very place six people died yesterday in Ottawa in a horrific bus-train accident. I told Scott yesterday, if you live long enough you'll know somebody who died in an argument with a train. With the exception of the Lac Megantic tragedy, death by train is rarely the fault of the train. In the majority of cases, the incidents are caused by someone driving a vehicle or walking on the tracks. In the end, it really doesn't m...

Squeaky was my best friend growing up on the farm. Unlike the other boys who spent their days playing softball and lacrosse on our huge back lawn, Squeaky was an indoor boy who preferred to play cards or Monopoly or watch the Rifleman. Today, he would have been a video game nerd. Occasionally, Squeaky and I would venture out of the canvas tent we constructed in the backyard to go hunting for tadpoles over at Cole's Farm which had a dangerous little pond with all kinds of warning signs, "Keep Out" and "Danger" but it wasn't very well secured. So it was a complete magnet for kids like us equipped with mason jars for the trapping of all kinds of vermin. Our quest was to catch the taddies then watch them grow to be regular frogs which would, no doubt, fall victim to the older boys who liked to blow their heads off with firecrackers. Squeaky and I weren't exactly Steve Irwin. We always trapped too many and by the time we got home, they were nothing b...

She may not have reached the magic age,  but my granddaughter is already in the terrible twos. I remember the phase well. It's the "do the opposite" phase. No sooner does grandma tells her to keep her sticky hands off the remote than she's grabbing it, sliming it and running with it. Tell her to stay away from the barbeque and she's got her head in it. Ask her not to play with her food and she mangles it, smears it on her face and then drops it. She won't let me comb her hair. She sticks her tongue out to push out the broccoli so it lands on the floor and she pulls Gordie's tail. And just, just when Grandma is getting ready to send her off into the corner, she does a little jig and all is forgiven. All I can say is "could be worse". Her father was a real piece of work at this age. We had to put an alarm on his door because he would get up in the middle of the night, go to the pantry and eat Kool Aid by the handful. Put him to bed and h...

Like most families, I've been blessed with an assortment of colorful relatives. This gives me plenty of fodder for blogging -- which is much, much cheaper than therapy. I have two family stories to tell you about today. One involves a murder, the other a Darwinian accident. First, the murder. My cousin Walt was married to a woman named Monica, who seemed to my tender young eyes to be not unlike a school marm. But you know what they say about school marms. Monica and Walt had some marital issues -- as most people do -- and decided to separate. One day, Walt's sister Norma arrived at the farm to inform us that Monica had been murdered. Apparently, she had been strangled. This was pretty big doin's for our family whose only scandal to date was that my Uncle Tom had a "housekeeper" named Vi. Anyways, Monica was dispatched and a man was convicted of manslaughter. I thought, in my little pea brain, that he got off pretty easy considering strangulation ...