Brad Rines's Blog

  There was an urban myth, way back in the mid-1970s, that certain teachers at my high school liked to perpetuate.   It went like this:   Somewhere, in some other city, a smart-ass kid felt it would be cool to falsely pull the fire alarm at school.   In so doing, a fire engine was dispatched.   During the race to the scene, the fire engine broadsided a car in a busy intersection.   Both occupants of the car were killed.   They were the parents of the kid who pulled the fire alarm.   It was meant to be a deterrent, of course.   The red fire alarm pulls, regularly spaced along the hallways, were always there, daring us.   Someone would succumb to temptation at least once a year. Chemistry class was the most thrilling and dangerous, and our teacher seemed to thrive on minor spectacle.   After demonstrating the power of concentrated acids, he added a dash of hydrochloric acid to a beaker of water and drank it.   There were gasps.   Hydrochloric acid is naturally produced in the stomach.

It was 1976 in south eastern Ontario and my friends, Steve and Greg, and I were entering our senior year at high school.   We were average kids, not the most recognizable or popular, just a nondescript bunch blending in with the general school population.   And like many boys our age, our thoughts revolved around cars, girls and beer. Steve had two older brothers already at university studying engineering, as evidenced by the crude dune buggy parked at the side of his parent's garage, a Volkswagen beetle with the body removed and the chassis shortened by a foot and a half where the rear seats used to be, and in the basement rec room by the home-made strobe light consisting of a wooden box, three feet per side, with a six-inch diameter hole in the front.   Inside was a cardboard disk with a matching hole, an old turntable motor and a light bulb.   It had two speeds:   45 and 78.   It was in this rec room, listening to The Doobie Brothers, Santana and Grand Funk Railroad, and playi

  “Peanuts.” “What?” The screen door clapped shut. “In the yard.” She stopped mixing the tuna.   “Salted?” “In the shell, scattered.” “Oh.”   Her eyes dropped to the mat by the door, the big red shoes sat there, looking innocent. Gary slid onto a kitchen chair, tossed his cap onto the table, wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.   “That was always my favourite part.” Karen laid out some slices of bread.   “Favourite part?” “At the company’s family picnics dad would take us to, or the Victoria Day picnics the city would hold at Lake Ontario Park.   The peanut scramble was my favourite.   Herbie the Hobo would suddenly appear, and all the kids would be trailing after him.   He tossed them right at me once. That and sandcastles.”   “The clown threw sand?”   “No. Near the water’s edge, you’d dig a moat around your castle and water would seep in from below and fill it.   And fireworks, of course.” She took some sprouts from the fridge. “I guess they’re illeg