My friend Phil grabbed this picture of a happy sailor as I pushed his brother's boat across Lake Ontario on a perfect sailing day.Let the re-immersion begin.
We stayed at my sister Rose's home in St. George, Ontario, Canada, where she is in a nice little ghetto of Scots folk. I have always suspected she and they sit around at weekly meetings where they re-enforce each other's Scots accents. And so it turned out to be.
She put on a party on Sunday night and in they all came....wonderful folks who had come over from Auchinleck in Ayrshire, Sorce, next door to Robbie Burns' hangout, and Aberdeen and Penecuik in the center of the country. And, just to be fair, she invited a man who had grown up in Nottingham, England. It was a regular hootenanny with everyone reverting to their local colloquialisms as they talked about “loonies” (boys if you come from Aberdeen) and “quinies” (girls) and lots of other phrases. Poor Jo felt like a foreigner as she tried to disentangle herself from all the Scots who spoke far too fast for her to keep up.
Rose tends to call all women friends “hen” which I always believed to be a male form of Scottish endearment for a woman. So Rose had all her hens bring strawberry tarts and chocolate cake and other tasty treats.
The man from Nottingham had painted the inside of her house and had that typically English double entendre in his speech – most of it smoothly semi-sexual in nature. The hens seemed to give as good and he dished out and there was a night of laughter and great camaraderie.
The day before this in-gathering, Jo and I drove the car to Toronto – about 85 miles to the east. There we met up with Beverley and Phil Tweedie, old friends from Cambodia. Phil and his brother Stan took me out sailing while Bev and Jo took off for the inner harbor area where there was an African musical festival.
We sailed briskly across the harbor and entered the ring of protective islands, passing Buggery Bay, as Phil called the nudist beach which seems to have been taken over by the gay and lesbians population of Toronto. Stand handed me the wheel and out we went into the outer harbor on a sparkling day with smart winds that had us driving that 35-foot sailboat at hull speed across a calm lake. Ah, what a way to restore the spirit.
Phil still wanders the globe, teaching English and western culture, as he did while we were together in Phnom Penh. He currently is negotiating with the Chinese to return there for a year in the fall. It's always good to meet someone who has even itchier feet than I have.
We had dinner with the ladies when we returned to the yacht club, then escaped the city before the fireworks program so we could avoid the thousands of cars making their way home from that waterfront event. Actually, we came to our escape route and found it to be a parking lot, eight lanes wide. There had been a five-car accident and we moved very slowly until we passed the mess.
We came back across the border and came to a private campground in New York state. It was a comedy to watch the registration process. Our hosts were full-time campers Denny and Dianne whom we met in Florida. Denny came with us to sign in. The woman behind the counter refused to take my money. Our host, Denny, she said, had to pay for us. So I stood there bemused until Denny reached out a took my cash which he then handed to the woman. She gave me the change. She then asked for additional money from Denny which I handed to him and he handed to her. She then handed him four red cards which he (not I) had to fill out with our names and addresses.
The park is built around an old stone quarry and has pristine spring-fed lakes.
Now we link up with Jo's brother John, whom she calls “Junior” because John also was her father's name. He, on the other hand, hates being referred to as Junior. She'll have to watch that!
