Roger Pires Sept. 22, 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.
Previous
The first day
It’s official. No more rumours, no more innuendo. When our youngest stepped out the front door on his first day of high school, it was signed, sealed, and delivered.
I’m old.
Over the years, my kids have compiled enough evidence of my antiquity to keep a team of archaeologists salivating for the next decade. Vinyl records, black-and-white TV, riding my bike without a helmet. Sometimes I’d play it up. Introducing the concept of 8-tracks while they’re still trying to wrap their over-stimulated brains around the turntable vaulted me from amusing curmudgeon to living artifact. I redeemed myself somewhat when I told them how we hung disco albums from the hockey net for target practice. Even Jurassic Dad can have moments of coolness.
My wife often joins in the ribbing, usually when I’m neck-deep in my now infamous struggles with modern technology (a fine state of affairs for a software developer). She’ll see me pawing at the latest gadget like some post-modern caveman and point out that my problems would be solved if I just read the damned instructions. I in turn point out that by the time I finish reading the multi-volume manual, the darn thing will be obsolete.
And it’s not just the kids and the missus. My own body reminds me on a daily basis that my best-before date is fading in the rear-view mirror. We of a certain vintage often suffer from those mysterious sleeping injuries. The ones where you wake up and your knees are throbbing for no apparent reason. When I was young enough to need a comb, I blew my left knee out playing rugby. I rehabbed it in a matter of weeks and never heard from it again. Until I became a relic. Now it pops in and out of joint like a skeleton at a Halloween party.
This catalogue of frailty was brought into sharp focus as I watched my son shuffle down the driveway on that fateful morning. The teenager: amazing creature, really. A stage of life or its own sub-species? Discuss amongst yourselves. The workings of the teenaged brain should be an area of study unto itself. It’s a paradox, a contradiction. At times, it seems to function in spite of itself. It displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the week’s TV programming. I’ve often been amazed by the adolescent mastery of multiple levels of the most complex video games. Then simply flabbergasted by its inability to remember that dirty socks go IN the hamper and not on the floor beside it. That all this intricate firing of synapses can be fuelled by mountains of barbeque chips and popcorn is one of the eight natural wonders of the world.
It’s this last point that’s most amazing of all and one I can still relate to. My son has the metabolism of a nuclear plant. Every night, I watch he and his buddies take the scorched earth approach to cleaning out the refrigerator. At mealtimes the rest of us are exposed to a shock-and-awe campaign against whatever steaming carcass has been offered up for consumption. As we watch Schwarzkopf inhale a side of beef, we count our fingers and cutlery to make sure none of it got sucked into the vortex. And I smile. The karmic wheel has done a full turn. I remember being in his growing shoes, eating my parents out of their hard-earned vacation money.
His friend was waiting for him when he reached the end of the driveway. The two of them stood there lugging their bloated backpacks. What’s in those things? Field rations? A Volkswagen? I watched them for a couple of minutes: the two amigos, several parts cool with a hefty dose of nerves. I tried to harken back to the primordial ooze when my buddies and I took our first, memorable steps into high school. Actually, I recall nothing of my first day. So much for memorable. Although I do retain a vague recollection of writing out dictionary pages as punishment for some alleged infraction.
The amigos were soon joined by other youths, all of whom were plugged into iPods and Touchpads while texting their friends and holding various simultaneous conversations (our idea of multitasking was playing Pong while eating a bag of Doritos). In their youthful distraction, they didn’t notice the school bus had arrived and the driver was calling out the window for them to get on. It probably made them feel like rebels. It just made me feel really old.
