NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

It seems endless winter. Grumpy times! I feel like I'm starring in a rheumatism commercial for liniment.
Mary announces that she needs to shop for a few items. I just want to stay warm.
The fact that she has never shopped "for a few items" in her life makes me realize I'm about to waste some time. The fact it is frigid time doesn't improve my mood.
So I find myself in the little battered plaza that is a few days away from bulldozers so another forgettable condo/commercial development can be built. All in the name of progress!
Half the shelves are empty already in the chain grocery store that is advertising that you can buy the rest for 30% off. Which Mary proceeds to do. So I find a seat on a bag of dog food and wait and watch the clerks. Some seem to be sleep walking, others hide behind gallows humour.
The woman efficiently processes Mary's collection of bargains and calls to a colleague to come help bag because you're not doing anything.
I have overhead what she said to a regular customer. So you've been here 29 years, I ask? Do you have a new job? No, she says, and forces a smile. She motions to the emotionless man bagging Mary's haul. He's been here more than 20 years. And he doesn't have a job either.
I have feeble suggestions, but then we turn away, pushing the broken shopping cart out of the store, past the black-and-white mongrel shaking and looking anxiously for its master.
I think of those awful unemployment stats and shiver despite my layers.
But why?
I am not one of those who for half their lives have come to a humbler part of town and now the familiar trip is gone forever. They face the great unknown, a maze of cold streets, and, if they beat the odds, a new job to replace the one they thought they had forever.
It is not a time to feel sorry for myself. 

JUST MORE RED TAPE PRIVACY NONSENSE

NOT PROTECTING US BUT THEMSELVES

I was doing a small shopping at Costco - anything under $100 is small with that giant - and presented the check-out clerk my American Express Costco credit card and a $40 Costco redemption cheque.
The clerk frowned and said I couldn't use the cheque  because it was issued in my wife's name and she hadn't signed it.
I said that since it was a joint account and I was using one of the two credit cards that Costco and Amex had issued for the account, I didn't see the problem.
She said they couldn't do it because of "privacy" laws. Nonsense, I said, this has nothing to do with privacy laws. My wife and I have a membership account with you, I am using a card with my picture on it that is issued for that account, and you say that's not good enough.
So she called a supervisor who once again waved the "privacy' excuse. No, I said, this has nothing to do with any so-called Canadian "privacy" law but everything to do with your policy. For heaven's sake, the whole transaction is backed up by a credit card that you are allowing me to use to pay for $90 in groceries.
As I left, another supervisor, who had watched warily from a distance, came up and went through the whole "privacy" song-and-dance argument again.
Everyone was polite but firm. And all of them finally admitted that it was store policy and not some "privacy" law that that they couldn't have recalled if it earned them a Bahamas vacation.
"Privacy" laws are brandished at us so routinely, you wonder why it is always so one-way, always making life simpler for the company but never for the customer. It doesn't matter whether you are armed with all the PINs, passwords, customer numbers, questions (where were you born?)  SIN numbers etc.,  just trying to do some simple business, like checking a phone charge, when it is your spouse who set up the account or the bill comes in their name, and it's mission impossible.
Maybe the companies hiding behind the "privacy" excuse should be in charge of the do-not-call list because I get at least three illegal sales calls a day and I have never yet got around the "privacy" blockade without dragging Mary into it.
Since in the last few years, there have been stretches for both Mary and me when we can't be trotted to a store or a phone because the incapacitated spouse is the name on the account, it has become frustrating.
I realize there is a lot of fraud around. The scamming letters from Nigeria keep coming, and every two months there is another attempt to trick me into revealing key numbers for my bank accounts and credit cards.
But I have a warning for companies that really want to make it difficult for a couple to do some simple changes, like amending a billing address. The customer can just stop doing business with you. After all, there is always another store, or telephone company, or credit card, or bank etc.
Years ago I set up an account for me and an account for Mary with ING, the on-line bank. I routinely have transferred money in and out, or established GIC accounts, and there never has been a problem.   There has always been a problem with Mary's account, so much so that we have switched PINs, passwords, and questions on several occasions.  A few weeks ago, I thought I would double-check the data on-line with the statement that Mary had been mailed.  Once again, I was told there was a problem. I phoned but they refused to deal with me because I was a man, even thought I had all the necessary numbers and codes. So I got Mary on the phone too. Her old PIN wouldn't work, again, so she went through the procedure to establish a new PIN. It wouldn't work either. Tried four times.
Finally, I said to the ING rep, could this be because we are talking on two phone? Yes, he said, that would be it. I then asked why he hadn't mentioned this when he said Mary had to be on the phone too. Did he think we would be holding one phone between our two heads?
At this point, Mary ended several bouts of frustration with this one account by cancelling it. She told ING just to move the money to her regular account. She just didn't need this hassle every time. Which ING did, after only two more phone calls.
My warning message about these extra hassles by lazy companies is not protected by "privacy" laws either real or imagined! If you want to keep my business, you better smarten up because if you make it too difficult to perform even a simple chore, you're toast!

STUPID SPORTS/ OLYMPIC BUREAUCRATS

DUMB, DUMBER, DUMBEST

Why is it that the arrogant barons of sport pay more attention to their free hotel suites and caterers than they do to weather and the real world where mere athletes have to play in silly conditions?
Of course I am referring to the Australian Open of tennis, where temperatures have soared past 40C - which is hot even for those of us who still love Farenheit calculations. So Frank Dancevic of Canada sees visions of cartoon characters rather than the ball, and then passes out, and players spend more time thinking of their next drink of cold water than the next serve.
(Reminds me of playing tennis in July in Houston. We played under shed roofs, which gave us protection from the sun but not the incredible humidity. The guy in the next shed had a heart attack. Which was all the excuse I needed to stop.)
My introduction to the smug world of the badgers, in control more because of the old boys' network than common sense or ability, came when they were considering Toronto as a possible Olympic site.
I dug out the fact that they wanted to hold the Summer Olympics later in the Toronto summer, which would kill the CNE that year and probably other activities like the Royal. After all, Exhibition Place was supposed to be one of the main sites for activities, not that all the smug men and women running around to mount our bid paid any attention to actually consulting those of us who were directors or governors of the fair and its landlord.
Now the Ex may have been fifth in the world in annual fairs, but it is considered small potatoes compared to the Olympics, which sucks billions in taxes out of countries in a galling continuation of the rulers of ancient Rome who kept the masses happy with bread and circuses.
I can understand that the Olympics were far more important, but just  moving the Games forward a few weeks would have meant that all the other activities that happened in August and September in all the proposed Olympic sites besides just the Ex would not have had to be mothballed for a year.
Turns out that anyone offering advice other than insiders, well paid in either money or grand PR, was delusional. The Olympic people really didn't give a damn about any of us at the Ex and my idea that we tell the International Olympic Committee that it would make better sense to have the Olympics in June  when, as the records show, the weather is nicer for athletics than in the hotter weeks that follow, complete with more thunderstorms.
Toronto lost its bid, for political reasons, and I for one was happy because I figured taxpayers dodged the bullet. No make that, when it comes to buildings left behind where new uses have to be contrived, we dodged broadsides from machine guns. By some miracle, councillors are actually doing the right thing by putting another Olympic bid on hold, and are not excited about bidding for an Expo. The big expositions have gone downhill since Montreal in 1967, which was one of the best in the history of world's fairs which were once the diamonds of history.
But back to sports, where money has always been important than picking the best weather for staging the event.  The sportscrats insist on having contests when they may get the biggest TV audience. So they play football championships in blizzards where passes wobble like wounded ducks. (I remember playing on a frozen field so hard, the lineman next to me got a concussion just falling down.)
There is concern because of this tennis open about playing the World Cup of football/soccer in Qatar where peak temperatures will match those now broiling the Australian Open.  Apart from the fact it seems a silly place to have a world event, it doesn't concern me that much because by then, if you believe Popular Mechanics, each of us will have our own individual clothing cocoon that would insulate us from weather extremes, but probably not the Canadian winter or the stupider decisions of the fatcats who run sport.

SNORES ABOUT SLEEPCOUNTRY

GOOD MATTRESS, BAD EVERYTHING ELSE

The SleepCountry ads, stressing the company is Proudly Canadian and growing, certainly send a reassuring message. So does the Wikipedia story on it which is so nice that the Wikipedia monitors complain it reads like an ad.
Still, the last thing I wanted to do on the last day of the year was go to one of its 161 stores to buy a mattress.
But any husband who has been married for 52 years knows that some things are just not negotiable when SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED wants to sail into the new year with no hollows in the master bed.
So there I was at the east end of Bloor West Village trying to find some place to park where Mary, cane and all, could actually manoeuvre through the Himalayas of ice that merchants and the city leave behind when they pretend to clear the sidewalks and a few roads.
We marched into 2100 Bloor Street West and right to the back. My duty, I was told sternly, was to recline on the chosen king-sized foam mattress, verify Mary had made the right choice as to softness, take out my Visa, and leave.
Only one clerk. A Michael Wright. Called a sales associate. But you could have called him anything because as he informed me later in cold tones, he was THE staff
He remembered Mary from the first scouting visit and verified what mattress I was supposed to sample as a sleep dummy. I laid down, told Mary it was okay, and felt for my charge card.
But in walked a woman that Wright immediately left to serve. They wandered around most of the store.  As they came near us, I said as sarcastically as I could muster - and Mary says I can be bad -  just go ahead and serve her while we wait.
Which he did.
 So I had plenty of opportunity to ask just how much comparison shopping Mary had done. After all, the price seemed high even for a sale. But I knew nothing about such prices. And Mary and Yolanda, the daughter-in-law, seemed to be talking about mattress prices for most of this decade as Mary wanted  one for her birthday, or anniversary, or Christmas etc.

I no longer get involved since I did research, including Consumers Report, on a new fridge, stove and dishwasher, and Mary bought the ones I said should be avoided. Then there is the sofa and love seat in our living room covered with what I said was the material I liked least. But that's the way it goes in a long marriage.
Our discussion was interrupted by the clerk-sales associate-manager-caretaker who shouted from half the store away his opinions about mattress sales and stores like the Brick.
About 15 minutes later, he finally finished a small sale and turned to us. I asked about the staffing. He was here alone, he said, because some days there were few customers, even stretches of several hours with no one.
I said I was surprised that such a chain operation with all those repetitious ads starring one owner, Christine Magee, would not have more staff around, considering all the unemployment and their preening about all the accolades they said they have received.
I asked if the customer he had served instead of us was just following up on a previous visit. He said she was new, but with so few people coming in, he had to deal with her too even if we were first.
Besides, he said, we hadn't been inconvenienced. Did I really have something else to do? An interesting tactic, I thought, his gambit was it was a weekday afternoon and obviously we were old farts, so why was I making a fuss? I said I did have other things to do. He went from chilly to hostile. He said he had never heard of anything as ridiculous as what I had said and why didn't I take my business elsewhere.
Fine, I said, and turned for the door. But Mary at that point was prepared to go through a war to get a new mattress, and paid the $2,247.42 on her Visa. Then she paid another $226 for new sheets, which I grumpily compared to gilding the lily or something.
 I thought that was the end of it, although I now knew I was dealing with a chain so successful that the clerk-sales associate- manager-caretaker could tell a customer with charge card in hand to take a hike, even when he knew I was a  journalist.
It was impressed on us that the next Wednesday at 8 a.m., we would be phoned and given the three-hour window for delivery that day.
This fact was told me again, several times, on Sunday morning when SleepCountry called. Strange timing, I thought.
On Wednesday, the early call said they would be there between noon and 3 p.m..
Two chaps with a big delivery truck that they parked practically in the middle of the street arrived inconveniently half an hour early. They played a good cop-bad cop routine, one informing me they couldn't get the mattress up the stairs to the second floor, the second saying they would do it if we signed a waiver to cover the expected damage.
I pointed out that over the years we have had two king-sized foam mattresses taken up the same stairs and pointed to the last one as proof. They said it was thinner than what we had bought, indeed a piece of junk
So I said let's just forget the whole thing and you take the mattress back. They glared.  Mary donned battle helmet and flak jacket and indicated she would wade through hellfire to keep this mattress.
So we were ordered to remove 29 paintings, family pictures and Donato cartoons along the carry route, and to remove their supporting hooks and nails too. Then they grunted, folded, pulled, huffed and puffed, and at one point almost swore at me for trying to help. (Once my job was moving machinery, each of which weighed several tonnes and were much more awkward than a bendable mattress.)
It really wasn't that much of a problem. So Mary's new bed was installed, and I imagine that somewhere trumpets sounded.
Off they went with the old mattress - we were charged a $10 "green" recycling fee - and the old frame was left strewn like dinosaur bones across the bedroom carpet. Some wrapping was still stuck to the mattress.
I laid down for the second time on Mary's dream and contemplated the ceiling as they drove away and no longer blocked the street to most traffic. My immediate thought was I must tell my family what a wonderful business SleepCountry is in, and maybe they should try to get into it too. After all, a clerk-sales associate-manager-caretaker and  delivery guys felt things are so prosperous with the company, they could tell some guy to go away with his $2,247.42 business. Plus $226 for sheets.
Not a great experience. I contemplated sleeping on the couch as a protest against it.  Except the mattress was so comfortable, I had a nap instead.

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS

NEVER KNEW THE GRINCH DID IT WITH ICE

A lot of years have passed since the word magician Dr. Seuss introduced us to the Grinch in 1957. But nothing happened this bad to Christmas until the Grinch seduced Mother Nature into freezing every last damn tree and Hydro pole in Ontario.
They became Evil Twins. I will never forgive them because Christmas is sacred magic.
 I love everything about it, even the bloody commercialism that starts just after Thanksgiving. Even when the politically correct jerks try to turn Merry Christmas into the offensively bland Season's Greetings, I can still smile while I contemplate shoving a large icicle where the sun doesn't shine.
To me the central message, which should be acceptable to all except arms manufacturers, of peace on earth good will to men, is one that we should all cherish, even the feminists, because peace on earth good will to persons just doesn't work.
I guess all the scribes drafting the wonderful language of the King James Version of the Bible just didn't think they had to kowtow to feminism because every woman thinks, starting at five in kindergarten, that they really run the world while the men wonder about other unimportant topics like is there enough beer to last through Boxing Day.
I had a few years after my cousins suggested it was time for me to live downtown in a rooming house when I really didn't have much of a Christmas. Both my sisters lived on farms with long, long, long lanes, and just getting there in my Austin Healey, which could get hung up on a snowflake, was an advanture. But I always managed to salvage something out of the day, which I guess prepared me for this Christmas which was so cold that I even forgot what day it was when I managed to get my joints bending enough for me to totter down the stairs.
I wasn't saying ho ho ho, I was saying uh uh ooh.
My tradition of staying close to the hearth hung with stockings and not doing much has worked, but unfortunately not all the time.
I have made it a rule never to go out Christmas Eve, which was ruined once by Immigration when they found in a refugee camp the husband of one of the boat people families I had sponsored into Canada and flew him here on Christmas Eve.
It would be, they thought, a great story for the newspaper on Christmas Day. Except newspapers don't publish on Christmas, something everyone knew except for the Immigration.
So I drove through a storm to Pearson, collected him, drove him to the eastend, reunited him with his family, who paid no attention to me for obvious reasons, and then went back home not having heard English spoken for several hours or having any nog.
 I got up on Christmas Day, wrote the story, skidded to the Sun in the slush, gave them the film and story, and was rewarded on Boxing Day with the Page One photograph being credited to a photographer who never even was forced to leave his blasted house.
So the Grinch has taken a few runs over the years. I would say warmup runs but there is nothing warm about the creature.
There was a sad time devoid of any humour,  the terrible night I left the house by the side door to play Santa to some neighbourhood kids. I emerged into the flashing red glares of emergency lights.  A neighbour on his way to his church to sing carols had been struck by a hit-and-run driver who was never found. He ended his life in a coma that lasted for years.
We start each Christmas Day with smoked salmon while we play John McDermott, my colleague from the glory Sun days, who becomes one of the angels bending down from the heavens with his carols.
No music this year. We ate the salmon  huddled around the gas fireplace, and then Mary said she had to be driven to Mass. I said hopefully that I thought the power was off at Our Lady of Sorrows but those Catholics faced down the Grinch and worshipped and even dared to use the word which derives from the first Christ Mass.
What I liked about the aftermath to the Grinch's tomfoolery with frozen water this year is that some radio stations were still playing carols on the weekend  in recognition, I think, that many of us were robbed of our carol fix this year by the blackout. Instead of playing carols nonstop for a  couple of days on the CD player, I was just trying not to freeze.
I am already looking forward to Christmas next year. I was going to look for generators in the Boxing Day sales but I suspect most of Ontario no longer trusts Hydro and are buying every generator, flashlight and battery in sight.
I have left the holiday with one grateful memory. At least my phone worked. All  those smug kids waving their smart phones at me and telling me that landlines are used only by silly old farts just learned a new lesson. Don't put all your faith in new technology until you are really sure it  will work all the time.
Look at the lesson we just learned about electricity. We have had it in homes for more than a century but obviously there are still problems. Give Hydro a few more decades and it may actually work all of the time, and the electricrats will work all, or most, of the time, especially when overbilling.


I

HYDRO BOSSES: STUPID COMPETENCE

JUST TELL US WOTINHILL IS  THE REAL PLAN

I will not waste your time swearing about our ghastly Christmas when Mother Nature froze our Christmas balls and our limbs and our (good) will and any respect we might still have for the people who say they are in charge of our city and our province and our power.
After all, too many have experienced what the Downings endured. And you may have had it worse, not having a gas fireplace, which didn't put that much heat into the rec room because the blower, of course, was not working, or the fireplace in the living room which didn't produce much heat besides  smoke because it was built 70 years ago before heatalators were common.
So before the temperature on the thermostat gave up the ghost, our house temp may have been 11  (or 52 in the F temperature that I still use.)  And that was a hot spot. I thought our bedrooms would become ice caves complete with stalactites.  When our bones felt like frozen pork chops, we took baths because the gas water tank doesn't need electricity like the furnace.
I got a savage pleasure out of trying to burn some of the icy limbs from the giant Chinese elm on city property out front which savaged our power line and wiped out the neighbour  before Hydro turned off all the power east of Royal York and south of Bloor for  four days.
As I type, my fingers still stiff, I am waiting for the lights and all the electric gadgets of civilization to die again when Hydro finally shows up to help the neighour still in a frigid dark. (They came after eight days.)
Thank heavens we could escape to a crowded pub although most of the staff seemed trapped away from work. The trip was dangerous because most traffic lights were out and some idiots just drove through smaller signalized intersections without even pretending to stop. Probably Hydro bosses!
Firefighters blocked the street on either side of our driveway with yellow emergency police tape, but it was ripped down within a day by motorists or pedestrians who didn't give a damn.
It was heaven - but I would have settled for hellfire - to go to my son Brett's house, where after lovely dinners on Christmas Eve and the grand day itself, they seemed a trifle worried we may well be there into 2014.
However, I do want to make some points instead of just ranting at the people who are supposed to provide my house and cottage with electricity most of the time and have failed.
The excuse always is that it was the storm of the century or the worst ice storm in city history or the most rain that has ever fallen on T.O. since Noah tried to build beside the Humber. Maybe they could buy transformers that don't blow up whenever raindrops keep falling on my head.
I wrote a blog/column on July 10 headlined Drowning Remaining Confidence In Hydro.  Anyone who wants to spend an interesting time can meander via Goggle to columns I have written about blackouts and Hydro billing and general arrogance that even annoys Liberal premiers  - and gawd knows they're used to crap.
Why do they call them emergencies when they're routine?
Just in recent years at the cottage,  we have had outages that have lasted three and five days, and the only reason our food survived once is a nice neighbour who runs a grocery store put our food in its freezers. During this summer and the record excuse of a rain storm, our city food putrefied during the blackout for three days of hot weather. Now with the record excuse of an ice storm, it sits in drums out on the porch and we're not reloading the fridges until either March or some Hydro heads roll.
I listened while screaming curses at 680, the all-news station, where the first advice was to dump food from the fridge if power had been out a few hours. I observed to Mary and most of Elsfield Rd. that if the dumb so-called expert promulgating that advice actually lived in the real world of Southern Ontario, they would be throwing good food into the garbage on a regular basis because outages have become too common.
If power is out for part of the day at Burnt Point on the Trent north of Campbellford, we don't really notice.  I don't get as mad as at the current corrupt billing of Ontario Hydro where its so-called "smart" meters are so crazy, I have actually paid much more for electricity to our second cottage than for the main cottage. And the "bunkie' wasn't being used.
(I know the hydrocrats tried to distract us by renaming themselves Hydro One, but it's the same outfit which can't run an electric system without huge debts and absurd overbilling.)
My son Mark urged me to write about the obvious discrimination in what areas get power restored first. Last summer, when Toronto had the worst rain fall since the earth crust cooled, it seemed every last street got power before we did. They probably restored power to Martians living along their canals before us.
So this time lights from the junior school across the road shone into our chilly bedrooms, and the streets south and north of us even flaunted Christmas lights, while the press conferences told us vaguely that power had just been restored in some vast areas or maybe above the Arctic Circle.
Hydro had these maps you could see on your computers which never seemed to change. Of course most of us couldn't use our computers and smart phones were going kaput every second as batteries died. Yet Hydro urged us to report downed power lines via the Internet not the phone.
Do I really have to tell the bloody fools at Hydro, and the banks and Rogers which are charging for paper bills, that there are still a substantial number who don't use computers, particularly when there is no electricity, and compulsory use of the Internet should be against the law, particularly when there is a blackout, and telling people to use computers at such a time does not constitute "service" or "response".
Such emergencies should be golden opportunity for the forgotten medium of AM radio. Instead 680 recycled general info, for example that the premier was going to speak in careful generalities, and 1010 was in its usual talk-show hangup where callers have no info but just want to yammer so they can tell friends they actually inflicted their views on a few more people than just suffering neighbours.

What I would have found useful is a press conference for the first 10 minutes of every hour where experts - not Rob Ford telling us it wasn't an emergency - told us where power was about to be restored to specific streets. And they would group them into north, west, centre, east, etc, and you could listen and learn whether you were about to get the same electricity being enjoyed  by the richer neighbourhoods around you which apparently have more clout with the councillors.
There must have been plans. Surely they weren't fixing randomly. Since the electronic media give us info only in shallow bites where a whole minute is an eternity, the newspapers should have stopped firing people and started listing plans by the pages. They could have listed major intersections and told us what was happening there: Nothing? Maybe by Friday? Maybe by June?
Surely there were listings of needs besides the obvious ones of hospitals. There was an impromptu flavour to too much of it.  I know of  one nearby street that had power except for a few houses.. One man who had been told he would have to wait until the weekend stopped a Hydro crew heading to another street and persuaded them to fix his house first.
I realize a lot of constables, firefighters and Hydro crews spent long, dangerous and frigid stretches of what should have been an easy holiday time helping the rest of us. Good for them! God bless them, merry gentlemen (and ladies too.)  But I just wish more bureaucrats and politicians supposedly in charge realized that what the public yearned for was real information. Surely those battalions of PR flaks and officials whose main function now is to sanitize messages and block the routine flow of useful info could actually earn their keep and figure out how to get useful info to the public.
Instead we were told, for example,  that 115,000 homes were still without service, and it was believed that they were located somewhere on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Useless as tits on a bull! Which is an expression dating from the earlier days where great expanses of the city without power for days because of rain and snow would have had the utility commissioners elected to supervise the supply firing bosses and telling the spokesmen that they sure as hell better have something to say more useful than it might get normal some time this century.
Never has this city had more ways to get real messages out. Never has this city and its power agencies and the provincial government failed so utterly in telling us exactly how long we would have to suffer.
For shame! If I was one of those men and women who had to work so long helping us and restoring power in such difficult conditions, my bosses would embarrass me.
If I was Canadian Tire, I would stock up on a lot more generators, and make them big ones. Maybe we should bring back Civil Defence. The first enemy we would guard against would be Hydro.

MARATHONS OF THE HEART

ALWAYS A GRUELING 26 MILES

The Year of the Marathon has become one of THE Downing dates.
Every family has a special calendar warmly etched in their memories. It starts with Mom and Dad but then the kids no longer sluff events off and start circling dates in their growing nostalgia too.
The first time you saw her or him. The day you married. The day of the first real job. The day you moved to your house. When you found the cottage. The birthday of the first child, then the special days of Number Two and Number Three (who you never refer to that way if you're smart.)  The days they made you proud.
 Then the birthdays of the grandkids. And the great circle of life begins again.
And of course you mark the good years and, sadly, the disastrous ones.
As 2013 slips into the memory banks, which occasionally are more memory blanks, I remember the Marathon. Boston, of course, because it has always been THE race for me. And my oldest son who ran   in memory of my mother, which brings tears twice. And the bloody finish this year which is bludgeoned into the calendar  of the world too.
On April 15, two makeshift but deadly pressure-cooker bombs exploded there, killing three and maiming more than 250, many standing near my daughter-in-law Marie and grandson John Henry Francis waiting for my son to finish.
My family will not believe what I write now, because they claim I never miss a chance to tell a story again. My defence is I used to get paid to do exactly that. There was the time my son Mark wrote in a Toronto Sun feature on me that the family don't mind listening to the good old stories because they want to hear how they turn out this time. (I thought that hilarious but the editor wondered whether he should cut it.)
 So instead of waxing eloquent here in case you don't have the time right now,  I direct you to what I wrote about John Henry training for the race and then the awful time as he approached the finish line and the bombs. I think you will find them interesting whenever you get around to it, no matter what the family thinks.
 On Jan. 18, I wrote, nostalgically, a blog/column titled Marathon of a Vanished Life. And then, sadly, on April 20, Surviving The Bloody Marathon.
John Henry has decided to run again. He didn't finish Boston in the conventional way but he got the medal and organizers want him back. So he's training, when the 2013 race was supposed to have been his grand finale at 51 to all the marathons he has run, the proof of which is shown above
The Boston medal is in the centre, as unique as the unicorn on blue, one I can cherish since John Henry gave it to me.  Maybe in memory of the first great adventure when he and brother Brett and I walked further than a marathon in the second of the great charity ordeals that started it all in Toronto, Miles for Millions.
The "finisher" medals start in January, 2007, and include 30 events:  5 marathons, 7 half marathons,  5 century bike rides, 5 triathlons, including the Iron Vineman and the St. George Ironman.  The legendary iron endurances total 140.6 miles in one brutal day . That is a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride and then the 26.2 mile marathon.
As John Henry recalled the other day, with a touch of irritation,  only a few of those events were in ideal weather. You always hope that the weather is not going to be an added problem to the question of your endurance.. He did have ideal weather for his Vineman in Sonoma Valley, California, and that would have been his best overall time but he broke his big toe and that became a big problem over 140.6 miles. But he finished.
Then came the great crush of Boston. The weather was great. The cause of leukemia research was a grand one. His family was with him. It was going to be his best marathon until those bombs sent a wave of anguish and police to block his official finish. So he went to next street over from the chaos, because there was nothing he could do there, and painfully finished, then made his way, shivering, some distance to the hotel to be reunited with a terrified Marie.
Since January, 2007, John Henry had trained over a distance equal to most of the way around the world. That's 18,153 miles in swimming, running, walking and spin/biking. That  means in the last five years, his time out there pounding the streets while I'm shifting to a new position as a couch potato has averaged just over 65 miles a week.
And now he hopes to break four hours in Boston "if I don't injure anything else."  John Henry and his charity team have to buy their "bibs' for the Marathon, which is something now done around the world to keep out the phonies and pretend runners. If you would like to help, the link is
http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/boston14/jdownincbx