I used this song for a montage when Pace turned six but really think of it as “Sasha’s song” since it was the first song I sang to her in the delivery room after she was born.
Pace’s first song was more planned – I knew I wanted to play him John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” and that’s what he heard in the car as I white-knuckled him home from the hospital, scared shitless about driving with a “Baby on Board” for the first time in my life!
I don’t know what I had planned to play/sing for Sasha but when I first held her, this song came to mind and though it’s short and sweet, it’s also perfect (well, nearly perfect – I always insert one extra line after the “bad” and “sad” ones to use another natural rhyme that fits quite well: “There are things that make me glad/You seem to be one of them” before the final kicker of a line “There are things that make me dad/You seem to be all of them”.)
Shea recently saw on FB that two local restaurants – the Capitol Jazz Club and the Lancaster Pub – were re-creating some favourites from the iconic 1990’s Regina sub shop, California Subs – for a limited time.
So when we had plans to go out for the evening, it was no question where our first stop would be (well, second stop – we went to The Lancaster first and it was packed so we had to run to The Capitol instead.)
Lots of fond memories of late night snacks in our college years…
I was heading downtown for a different social event after work yesterday when I decided to pop into Rebellion Brewing to have “a couple” samples from the many unique brews at their 4th Annual Cask Fest before carrying on my way.
Rebellion is a great local craft brewery but I don’t think their tap room allows kids [edit: I think their license has changed so kids can go during the daytime] so I rarely get to go unless we have a sitter and make specific plans to head there.
Instead, I usually get my fix from their off-sale or growler fills (it wasn’t “daily” but I stopped in an embarrassing amount of times last December for growler fills in the lead-up to Christmas.)
Anyhow, the tap room was packed and I was resigned to standing along a wall, awkwardly sipping my samples when a regular who’d earlier introduced himself, waved me over to an extra seat he’d found at the bar.
We talked beer for a while over some different samples, he introduced me to a few other people he knew including some of the staff, then he left to wander and his seat was quickly filled by someone else.
While chatting with this new person, we realised we shared an acquaintance – someone who I used to work with at RPL is her cousin. (And coincidentally, when I’d looked at the FB event page for Cask Fest, the cousin had indicated she was interested in attending – though it turns out she wasn’t going to be there that day.)
That person left with her friend to go to a “Girl’s Night” and once again the seat was quickly filled by another person. Somehow, this conversation quickly became about his many visits to Hawaii (possibly inspired by my recommendation of Rebellion’s own entry in Cask Fest, “Tropical Milkshake“? Oh, and I may have been biased with it being a Rebellion event but “Tropical Milkshake” also got my vote for best beer of the ones that I sampled.)
[Edit: A few days after Cask Fest, I saw that “Lemon Meringue” beer from Medicine Hat Brewing which is run by Mitch who was the long-time head brewmaster at Bushwakkers and who has won Cask Fest two out of the three previous years, was this year’s winner.)
By this point, I decided I’d had too much to drive to the other event (honestly, twenty years ago, I might have but with the current DUI rules, you can barely drink a single pint without risking having your vehicle impounded, let alone the equivalent of three or four) so decided to try a Designated Driver service for the first time (I’m not positive but think Rebellion had partnered with First Choice Designated Driving to offer a $25 max flat rate ride home anywhere in the city.)
As opposed to a cab, these services send a team of two people – one who drives your vehicle home for you and one in a trailing vehicle who picks up the driver when they get you home. Plus I ended up having another fascinating conversation – this time, covering everything from current economic conditions in Regina to the opiate addiction epidemic to testicular cancer! 🙂
It was slightly more expensive than a cab would be but cheaper than taking a cab both ways (or taking one home then having the inconvenience of going back for your car the next day) so all was well worth it to have my car safe and sound in the driveway this morning.
(Oh, and should also note that it was cool to see Rebellion using buns from my hometown Indian Head Bakery for their bratwurst & sauerkraut special!)
This was the first time I managed to make it to Cask Fest but it won’t be the last. I’m already looking forward to trying some very unique beers next year! 😉
Another example of “going viral” for positive social change is the GoFundMe set up in the wake of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy which has now passed $8 million raised (contrary to the updated number in the screen grab above which appears the goal was $4 million, it’s wild that the actual initial goal was only $10,000 on the night of the accident when first posted!)
So I wanted to feature something else today instead.
Luckily, Shea passed along this video of a song by a Regina band which had just been released recently.
It was shot in her hometown arena and in many ways, it’s the complete opposite of the Tom Cochrane song. While that one is introspective and tragic, this one is fun and light-hearted, celebrating the joy of hockey as well as all those people who toil behind the scenes to make games happen in the first place.
I put this on Facebook before the Humboldt Broncos Vigil tonight (and after some time has passed, I may share some other thoughts on that) but wanted to capture it here too since Facebook sucks. 😉
I’m not unusual in Canada for how much hockey has meant to me my whole life.
I was never the greatest player (I literally managed to break my *own* leg with no one else around me while playing beer league hockey a few years back!) but I still loved everything about the game since I was a kid – playing it on the street, in the school gym and on the ice, watching it live or on TV, reading about it obsessively in newspapers, books and eventually web sites.
Whether I was playing beginners or beer league, the memories of the freezing arenas, the stinky locker rooms, the camaraderie with my teammates are some of the best memories of my life.
I never made it to a level where I rode a team bus. But I still traveled miles on winter roads with my mom and dad or with the other parents or coaches they entrusted me to.
This song, based on a true story (http://bit.ly/2qfTGIR), has been on repeat in my head all weekend:
“When he was a kid, he’d be up at five,
Take shots till eight, make the thing drive.
Out after school, back on ice,
That was his life, he was gonna play in the big league.”
We all have a story, we all have a connection to this tragedy.
Politicians put aside their differences to come together for the greater good as in this tweet where Sask NDP Leader, Ryan Meili retweets important information from Premier Scott Moe of the Saskatchewan Party who he normally sits across from in Opposition in the Saskatchewan Legislature…
Entire communities – whether that’s a town, a province, a country or everyone bonded together by a single sport – will rally together in amazing ways.
But if you’re a librarian, what can you do to help?
Depending on the library and its proximity to a major news event, I’ve seen a range of responses including things like libraries providing information services to setting up computer labs to providing books and children’s programming for people who need them. (During the La Ronge evacuations due to wildfires a few years ago, Regina Public Library did all of these things setting up what were basically makeshift libraries in the arenas where evacuees were staying until they could return home.)
My own response wasn’t to that level but today when I got to work, I wanted to do something to acknowledge the tragedy as I knew it would be front-of-mind for many patrons coming into my branch.
I decided to set-up a display of books right inside our front doors, picking a selection of books about hockey, about grieving and about spirituality as well as a few about related topics – Saskatchewan small towns and Canada in general.
Knowing emotions could be raw (mine definitely were!), I purposely chose to make my display low-key – no big signs to indicate what it was about, no pictures of the team or even the team logo, no books with titles that might bother people (we happened to have a book in the library about the eerily similar 1986 Swift Current Broncos bus accident that killed four players but since that book’s title is “Sudden Death“, I decided not to put it out. I didn’t even put any books whose might be similarly misconstrued or cause unintentional offense which means I chose not to include Wendel Clark’s “Bleeding Blue” in my display even though Wendel Clark is the prototypical small-town Saskatchewan boy who made it to the show.)
Below is a photo of the display I created and though I’m not sure how much it helped, I did note with interest that we closed today that a few of the books had circulated already – interestingly, more of the hockey books than any other kind I put out.
And in a strange way, I thought that was a reassuring sign that as horrible as this tragedy was and is, the thing that people were looking for the most (at least at my library, at least today) were reminders of just how wonderful and amazing the game of hockey truly is and how important it is to us as a province and a country.
