{"id":1157,"date":"2026-06-17T13:34:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T13:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2026-06-17T13:38:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T13:38:49","slug":"growing-up-is-hard-to-do-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/2026\/06\/17\/growing-up-is-hard-to-do-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing up is hard to do – part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Neil Sedaka sang “Breaking up is hard to do.” It was 1962, I was 14 years old, too socially inept to have a girlfriend so never experienced the hardship of breaking up. But the title inspired me to think about how growing up is hard to do.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

From farm to town.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I farmed until I was four.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

And likely would have made a life of it had my parents not decided it was enough and moved to a Northern town in the middle of the pre-Cambrian shield.<\/p>\r\n

It was a place where hard rock that belonged hundreds of feet below ground was surfaced by the harsh scraping of glacial ice thousands of years ago. A place that truly deserved a Hard Rock Cafe.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I soon forgot about farm life and was content to be a small-town guy.<\/p>\r\n

Playing outside was an incredible adventure. A kid could run for miles on top of the box tunnels snaking along over the endless contours of rock formations. I didn’t know they contained all the sewer and water lines for residents and businesses.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It was an exciting day when town engineers and trucks converged on a vacant lot to prepare it for house construction. Powerful drills bore holes into the rock. Dynamite sticks slid down into the holes. Heavy tarps and rope blankets covered up everything.<\/p>\r\n

Workers shouted for us kids to get far back. Then a huge “Boom!” and the blankets all lifted up in the air then settled down again. Machines loaded pieces of rock into trucks and workers left. The new crater in the rock was ready for building a basement and house.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We kids swarmed in again to look for something that was always scattered on the ground after these Boom times. Pieces of tar we could chew like gum. We didn’t know where the tar came from or that it kept the blasting caps dry to ignite the dynamite sticks. We also didn’t know about the carcinogen chemicals that were in the tar. It was cheap gum even if it didn’t taste very good.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The strap that wouldn’t stay gone.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be<\/em>, Canadian author Farley Mowat introduced a dog who didn’t think it was a dog. I’m going with Farley in saying ‘who’ instead of ‘that’ since the dog thought it was human. I’ll get to my own dog story shortly.<\/p>\r\n

In my childhood years, I lived with a strap that wouldn’t stay gone.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Forewarning: I realize the events of this next section are reprehensible in today’s society. Yet they actually occurred and I cannot offer a revisionist history.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I wasn’t a bad kid. Just normal.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

And my Dad and Mom were just normal Ukrainian parents who believed in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’ So they asked the local shoemaker to make a spanking strap out of stiff leather. A lot of things I don’t remember about those years but the dimensions of that strap I do.<\/p>\r\n

It was about 15 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. And they asked the shoemaker to punch a hole near one end so they could hang it on a hook at the end of the kitchen cupboard. Looking back, I have always thought that hole in the end was a particularly nasty statement of adding insult to injury.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

To allay the tremors of disgust that you may be experiencing right now, I can say that the strap was seldom used. When some shenanigan deserved attention, Mom would exclaim, “Where’s that strap!.” I could never figure out why she said that. Everyone could see it right there, hanging on a hook at the end of the kitchen cupboard. Had she forgotten? Did she want me to go and get it for her?<\/p>\r\n

Most of the time, that declaration was enough to shift the order of things adequately to prevent a further escalation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Something I cannot figure out to this day is how that strap kept coming back.<\/strong> I personally removed it several times yet it wouldn’t stay gone. I’m wondering now if the best I knew how to do at that age wasn’t good enough. I put it in the kitchen garbage can under the sink, a place Mom used several times every day. That would have been like simply handing it to her in person.<\/p>\r\n

Not the smartest disposal artist was I.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I had a dog.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

My dog, Boots, knew he was a dog. Some kind of mix between terrier and mutt. I’m going with ‘he’ not ‘it.’ If I wasn’t capable of having a girlfriend, I could at least have a dog friend.<\/p>\r\n

Actually, in addition to Boots, I did have one human friend.<\/strong> Henry was even more socially inept than me, to the extent that he thought I was pretty cool. Everyone wants someone to think they are cool. So, around Henry, I tried to act cool. And since he was a short, pudgy guy – even shorter and pudgier than I was – I enjoyed intimidating him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We would often walk to school together, poster boys for the fellowship of misfits. One cold morning, when I felt like being cool, I said to Henry, “You know, Henry, I would beat you up right now. But it would mean taking off my gloves.” It was too cold that morning to be cool.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Back to Boots.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

If I didn’t have a girlfriend to spend time with, I could at least have a paper route. And Boots loved to go with me. He would run far ahead then turn around and race back to me with short legs just flying through the air. I wish there was a happy ending to this story but there isn’t. Boots died a very unpleasant death.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Our family came from the farm where dogs and cats just wandered around. You gave cattle and horses all the preventive medical shots they needed but certainly not to dogs. So Boots had no resistance when distemper and cholera hit him. I still see his little body twitching as seizures caused him to lay on his side and writhe in circles on the floor, frothing at the mouth.<\/p>\r\n

I wish I had known better how to look after him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

My Boots story isn’t a pleasant way to sign off.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I will do so, however, to avoid undue length of this piece. Part 2 will pick up the story of “growing up is hard to do.”\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Breaking up. Growing up. All hard to do. But the nostalgia of memories is so worthwhile.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neil Sedaka sang “Breaking up is hard to do.” It was 1962, I was 14 years old, too socially inept to have a girlfriend so never experienced the hardship of breaking up. But the title inspired me to think about how growing up is hard to do. From farm to town. I farmed until I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3370,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/3370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miles2go.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}