Roger Pires March 3, 2011
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
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Falling for the past
I hate porridge. Have since I was a kid. I don’t normally harbour such intense feelings towards breakfast food, but I’ve made an exception for something created in the devil’s own kitchen. This acute dread of the noxious goop was cultivated over a couple of summers spent at Camp Hades (real name withheld to protect the guilty). I don’t remember where it was or what we did there. I do remember the outdoor plumbing and the bed-wetter in the upper bunk (at first I thought it was a leaky roof but that’s a whole other nightmare). And I remember the porridge: battleship gray and lumpier than a severe case of chicken pox, the stuff was better suited to fixing sidewalks than feeding starving, young suburbanites.
In fact, the whole breakfast scene was right out of Dickens: hollow-eyed urchins sitting on wooden benches around long, wobbly tables. We waited in fearful silence for our gruel. When it arrived, the bravest of us endeavored to eat it; the rest simply played with it. We invented the “flagpole” game. We’d stand a teaspoon in the middle of the bowl and time how long it took to fall over against the edge. Since we only had half-an-hour for breakfast, we never found the answer. I tried pouring milk on it to soften it up but the stuff was impenetrable; the milk just floated over top as if held back by some force field.
It took me years but I’ve been able to put these night terrors behind me. Porridge is verboten in our house. I’m glad to know my kids will never suffer at the breakfast table like I did. Summer camp menus in this enlightened age are pulled from the Canada Food Guide, not the Home Depot catalogue. But we can never fully escape our past. It always lurks somewhere in the hidden recesses of our psyche. Whether by device or circumstance, we may be forced to relive it – sometimes by the most unexpected of events.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I returned from an engagement in town. It was a Thursday night, average in all respects right down to the mob of dirty dishes that never remember the route to the dishwasher. My wife hung up her coat and headed to the laundry room to check on the machines. Upon opening the door, she hit a note rarely heard outside the world’s great opera houses. I leaned in to see what had inspired her little aria: the laundry room floor was covered in porridge.
No, this wasn’t an outtake from Poltergeist. Moisture from a sudden thaw had leaked in under the shingles and saturated the drywall beneath. My laundry room ceiling now lay on the floor in lumps of loose insulation and wet gyprock. The soggy, misshapen rubble resembled breakfast from summer camps past. While my wife assessed the damage, I was having flashbacks. It was Camp Hades all over again.
Once I fast-forwarded back to reality, I remembered that even the mushiest clouds of construction fodder can have a silver lining. To clean the mess we would have to strip the walls back to the studs and start over. We live in an old farmhouse and we’d done some research into its lineage. The old shack has a lengthy past of its own. We believe its builder had been a reeve of Scott Township and the owner of a small, local empire. Among his assets were a general store and a cheese factory. This wouldn’t exactly launch him into the Forbes Top 100. But perhaps the cheddar mogul had socked away some hidden treasures behind those walls. A box of gold coins or at least a pearl-edged cutting board. As we peeled away layer after layer of construction porridge, it became clear that this particular goose wasn’t about to cough up a golden egg – a hair ball, maybe. The room is an addition, tacked on by a subsequent owner.
We didn’t unearth a tycoon’s secret fortune but we did recover a lucky penny whose guarantee of good karma had obviously passed the best-before date. The only gem was a yellowed copy of the Toronto Star’s entertainment section that took us on an abbreviated walk down memory lane. The faded headline read: “Dylan and McCartney”. The icons were in their forties and each had just released an album. In those days, Dylan was still somewhat intelligible and Sir Paul had barnyard animals parading through the living room of his Scottish mansion. The Empire Strikes Back was playing in theatres and Burl Ives had an extended run at Roy Thompson Hall. There was no mention of the latest DVDs, no advertisements for game systems, and the Internet was still a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. There was however, a whole page of book releases – none of them at “Chapters”.
Funny, 1983 doesn’t seem like that long ago. But the summers at Camp Hades sure do. Or did, at least. I now have an ample collection of garbage bags full of wet insulation. They won’t be nearly as difficult to dispose of as memories of old porridge.
