Creatures of the Night

It has been hot in Calgary for the past few days, far hotter than we are used to. We have been having Ontario weather, without the humidity of course. Normally on a summer night we sit inside and often close the windows against the night time cold. The furnace will often come on to warm the house up. Unlike a lot of places in the warm season, we don’t sit out at night and if we do it is around a fire pit with long pants, a hot drink and more than likely a fleece jacket.

 For the past week or so, it has been quite warm after dark. Did we take advantage of the warmth? Hell no! I am a creature of habit and quite frankly I wouldn’t know what to do outside at night. I have taken a hot tea and a book out, but the tea got cold and it is hard to read in the dark. I guess I could have lit a candle or a lantern and pretended that I was living 150 years in the past. Sometimes that’s fun, but only until you need to use the bathroom. Sanitary facilities 150 years ago were less than enjoyable.

Last night I took a walk to pick up a paper. Well, the paper was the excuse; I just decided that I needed to take a walk at 10:30 on a Thursday night. Walking late at night isn’t very much different than walking in the early morning. It is darker of course, but there is coolness to the air just like early morning. Evening coolness seems to be a little more tired than morning cool, it has had to get hot and then cool off to reach this point. It was just perfect and took me back to when I was a teenager in Toronto.

Teenagers really have no where to go at night, home is full of parents and siblings and friends homes are full of their parents and siblings. That left walking the streets for entertainment. We would make vague promises about meeting up, but more often than not most of the evening was involved with trying to find my buddies. I suppose it is possible that my buddies were spending most of their evenings avoiding me. When we did eventually meet up, there was the interminable “What do you wanna do?”. “I don’t know, what do you wanna do?” Rarely did we ever decide what to do.

There were hours and hours walking and talking. We would walk to a friends place to see if he had any ideas, only to be told that he went out looking for us. Now we had a plan! We have to find Mike!

We walked to the plaza, to the school, to the playground and to other friend’s places only to find that they were looking for us. If we were lucky, we would smoke a joint or two while we walked, eventually forgetting what we were doing. We’d keep walking till we wore off the high and eventually head home to bed.

The next day, it would turn out that Mike just told his parents he was hanging with us when in fact he was at Shirl’s place. The other friends went to the 99¢ Roxy to watch the Marx Bros. in “Duck Soup”. Next time, I am going to make plans for Friday and Saturday night. Maybe we can spend Friday night making Saturday night plans.

Yeah…that should work just so long as we have something to smoke.