A & W

In high school in the nineteen-fifties I frequented the first A&W in Edmonton, maybe in Alberta.

Today it’s an antique. Then it sparkled.

Carhops, cool and good looking, expertly handled the heavily loaded trays while fending off carloads of testosterone time bombs masquerading as personable young men.

Hotrods, chariots errant zealously slaved over in Scona Comp’s automotive shop, and the stars of moonlit drag strips, paraded with outlaw-tinted glamour.

Your music blasting from somewhere, from everywhere. Tunes so bewitching that you were barely aware of a train whistling on a nearby track.

Bill Haley, Ivory Joe Hunter, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Richie Valens, on top of the world with his mega hit, La Bamba, dead at seventeen. Buddy Holly, gone at twenty-two.

For romancing the beauty beside you on the comfortable bench seat there were the artfully smooth Everly Brothers, The Platters and Fats Domino.

For two sixteen-year-olds locked onto the pull of Saturday night, the A&W was the cool place on the South Side. Cocooned in its ambience, a thrilling pulse told you that you were at the beginning of a mercurial age.

It was true, you were. And it would be intoxicating.

Your parents were doing well thanks to the oil boom ushered in by the discoveries at Leduc, a few minutes down the road. They assumed you would take part in the prosperity. A geologist. A petroleum engineer.

But what they planned for you would not survive the tumult of the sweet and sour sixties with its evolutionary ideas and fresh attitudes.

A brand-new driver’s license in your wallet and money to spend on the girl glued to your side, you approached the drive-in with trepidation but also confidence.

You knew the place was built for you. You just had to chance upon an empty slot. You circled the building tailing a lowered Mercury with rear fender skirts, purring chromed exhausts, and a spare tire kit that made it seem as long as a freight car.

A spot opened. Carefully, slowly, you nosed into it. On your left was a metallic gold ‘32 deux coupe rag top, on your right a two-tone blue and white ’57 Chevy Bel Air, just off the production line and already a star for the ages.

A carhop hurried to your window.

Savory meat and abundant condiments merging in your mouth for the first time proved richly satisfying.

The syrupy sweet but peppery root beer in frosted mugs went perfectly with the burgers.

For me, though, the most desirable items on the menu were the milkshakes. A skinny kid always feeling half-starved, I might owe my life to A&W milkshakes.

Full, mellow and happy, you exited the drive-in’s ambience reluctantly. Now where? A drive-in movie or just roaming the highways and back roads, her shampooed hair fragrant on your shoulder?

Sweet options beneath a white ghost moon in the lingering northern light.

Two things were certain. One was that childhood was falling from us like a shed skin. The second was that we would be back at the A&Dub again and again all that short and fragile northern summer long.

The Old and the Young

Sure, when you’re old you will recall the terrors. The waves of panic as you almost drowned. Or your foot, unruly appendage, slipping, leaving you breathless on the cold mountain ledge. Or colliding with a tree branch on a black diamond run at Slippery Slopes. Not to mention the many things you are sorry for doing or saying; that load of regrets that we carry.

But the residue of shock accompanying such ghost recollections will not subvert a mind packed with fragments of old happiness that bubble up like Yellowstone paint pots or laughter from a gilded heart.

The old have done much, seen much. They have loved and if they are lucky still love, if only those who went before.

The old paint, sculpt, sing. They play a mean guitar, a sultry sax. Knock, commandingly, a little dimpled sphere into a tin cup. Hit balls of various sizes and shapes back and forth, back and forth, on courts.

They have experienced life profoundly. Their wins and losses. The great loss that in the end no one escapes. Some write about it. Oh, how the old can write. Often grandparents understand the young better than their parents do. And they have compassion for them. They appreciate their wisdom and understand their dilemmas and fears.

The young are wary of the future. They know about plagues, about climate catastrophes. Some in their vivid imaginations visualize Earth as shaking us off like water drops from a dog after a swim.

They travel the world almost by instinct, subconsciously imitating outliers of ancient tribes who scattered in search of promising new territory. Old habits never die. They just take on different disguises.

I know seven of them. They are all in their twenties. Between them they have logged air miles from Korea to Mexico City, Iceland, Europe and the Emirates, South America, the U.S. and I don’t know where else. Who can keep up?

With gusto they take what the world has to offer and live with the contradiction, as older generations do as well: what they consume makes the world less healthy. The planet aches as it shoulders the burden of us.

What the young need is a common purpose. Greta writ large. Greta’s everywhere.

Left, right, center, politics does not divide the young as it does the older generations. They are too wise for that. They know catastrophes bring people together. And that catastrophes can happen anywhere.

For most of the twenty-somethings getting away from the daily grind is a daydream, as far from their grasp as the spy satellites overhead. For a few there is the endless supply of drugs that enrich corporations and cartels. Drugs drug. They mask pain but cause it too. Euphoria then the collapse of personality.

The threat of nuclear war, the rumblings of extremists, knifings and shooting of innocents, form part of the soundtrack to their lives.

The old recall the U.S. atom bomb tests. For protection against radiation that was expected to come north into Alberta from Nevada we practiced hiding under our desks. It was a strategy we all knew was useless.

The old recall the Cuban missile crisis. On the lip of destruction common sense saved us. Will it again? Common sense is not such a common commodity. I hope the young have more of it than their elders do.

My Texas

Born and bred in Canada, and thankful for it, my roots, which I am also thankful for, go back centuries in the U.S.

One of my most memorable experiences was a family trip to visit the American relatives. My mom organized the tour as a gift to my father’s parents.

Spreading from Boston and New York City, the family colonized the interior with the vigor and persistence of the imported English Sparrow.

Our itinerary included North Dakota, where my grandmother attended university, and Minnesota, where she was born; Iowa to visit my grandfather’s brother; Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas; Colorado and Wyoming. Then Idaho and Montana and north to where we started.

I was sixteen. With my precious, just earned license in my wallet, I shared the driving with my father. The distances were great but as a new driver I found them anything but tedious.

Most of the relatives were elderly, the visiting boring. But in Texas, after endless reminders of home, the immense farms and ranches, the oilfield pump jacks slavishly pushing and pulling sucker rods, I struck teenage gold.

I want to make certain things clear. There are fundamental aspects of the cliched Texan character that do not appeal to me. I am not a fan of rabid political conservatism or country music. Nor am I religious in the Southern Baptist sense.

But this is about what I like, not what displeases me.

At sixteen, I was a car freak and hyper aware of girls. So a ride in my cousin’s shiny yellow, chopped and channeled ’32 Ford coup, top down in the warm evening, produced a cache of memories that has lasted a lifetime.

I can almost feel the thrilling acceleration and drag strip speed reached on a highway from Fort Worth into Dallas, my left arm around Dan’s sixteen year old, extremely alluring sister who was squeezed between us on the narrow bench seat.

Jill’s dress was yellow, a shade lighter than the car to both match it and be distinct from it. With the air whipping past and the exhaust rumbling, the rod was not designed for chatting. (Did I say that at sixteen I was hyper-aware of girls? And, really, she was a second cousin, not a first.)

Dan dropped Jill and I off at a Tex-Mex restaurant. As we stepped from the vicious rogue masterpiece we were the coolest couple in Dallas.

Sitting face to face in the restaurant, sparks of attraction flying from my eyes to hers and from her eyes to mine, we forgot to be cool.

We giggled joyously at each other’s accent. That released some of our excitement and we settled in to talk spiritedly over the hottest, most punishing food I had ever eaten. (But I ate it. What the heck, I was enchanted. Would have walked through fire to prove my fearlessness.)

Oh, young love. So innocent yet fraught with adult fervor.

We knew we were fated never to see each other again so we compressed what became a life-long captivation into a burst of acutely lived moments.

Catching each other’s eye, holding the gaze a few beats longer than normal - a glance that could have told our parents everything - we talked about sixteen year old’s stuff. I don’t remember what. But our words expressed just one important thing: that with our swollen emotions and heightened awareness we were completely alive and enfolded in the moment.

Dan came for us. Reluctantly we left the table that had become our nest.

We drove back to Fort Worth, taking the highway through the dark green belt sedately. Under the sky’s narcotic rapture of stars, I sat beside her, my left arm in front of me but our shoulders and upper arms pressed together more tightly, more erotically, than the car’s dimensions made strictly necessary.

And that was it.

With Jill, her longish hair, comely face and teenage vivacity, with a hot rod of the kind I had only ever seen in car magazines, with insanely spiced food, even just the coddling summer air, how could I not still be in love with my Texas?