A few days ago, I had a happy meeting with my fellow
Shenzhen teacher friend, Amanda: we shared coffees, crabmeat sandwiches, and latest news, when she came over the border to
go to the Sheung Shui post office.
When we first met a few years ago, at the Rainbow School in Futian, we
hit it off right away, based on family roots in rural Ontario - the beautiful Muskoka Lakes region. Both our families owned
summer houses in this area, where we spent childhood holiday times.
I tried to tell her of my excitement at discovering
the vast variety of soft drink flavors that existed then, never in boring tin cans, but always in large outdoors coolers,
adjacent to gasoline pumps.
As we approached the country lanes that led to my grandmother's waterfront cottage, we stopped for
gas in Bobcaygeon. We ran to the huge coolers, always red, decorated with the Coca Cola logo.
Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper,
dark brown fluids. Orange Crush, orange. Grapefruit, yellow-green. Cherry, bright red. Cream soda and root beer.
Snapping off the circular metallic tops. A more lengthy ritual in those days.
Amanda had different memories.
She remembered a famous waterfall, where she could ride over the tumbling rapids, and also her first boating experiences on
her father's large boat, more than 45 feet long.
We both knew the drive in movie theatre at Lindsay, Ontario, and the dairy food treats from the famous
Kawartha Dairies. Ontario had orange ice cream, really creamy rich ice cream, unlike the austere orange sorbet my mother
liked to buy at Steinberg's Supermarket back home in Montreal.
Ontario stood for orange ice cream, and a chance to earn my first career money, caddying my father's
golf clubs. I didn't leave the area around my grandmother's cottage too often, as there was a lot of playing to do.
I told Amanda about the kerosene
lamps, the water from our own well, the party line telephone, the ice to make the fridge work, the woodpile to make the stove
work, and the outside toilet, an outhouse with lime to block the stench. She too remembered the primitive conditions
in one of her family's cottage, before a family reunion inspired modernization.
Two houses? said Amanda, as we laughed about
our students seeing vast wealth in our family trees - for owning a house in town, and a house in the countryside of Canada.
And Amanda and I then talked
about the Work Ethic then, how she enjoyed her first job as a paper girl, tossing newspapers around her neighborhood.
And me adding up the cost of
two large comics, and one small chocolate bar, my daily wage for pushing Dad's golf cart about, in our first unblemished Ontario
summers.
Later, both our parents' marriages were to suffer the chaos and heartache of vehement divorces, but the roots of
our lives had some tenacity and freshness to them.
