Stone

    As I navigate around this blog, I quite often find myself stopped at the title picture.
   It is a picture of me standing on a rocky outcrop at one end of the beach just below the house owned by my grandparents in Gibsons, B.C.  back in the thirties to the seventies. It is the beach I played on when I was a young boy visiting them and essentially was my favourite spot on earth.
   My recollections of it over the years since I have been away have become almost mythical, to the point where I almost have come to doubt them. 
   In the picture, my hands are upraised, almost in supplication. My thought at this very moment was, "I'm back!" Right where I somehow felt I belonged.

The same outcrop I am standing on, above. All being explored by the Dafoe boys.

   It is never very easy to go back. I am old enough now to go re-visit many of the places I knew as a young boy. Invariably, they are different; buildings have been demolished, streets have been re-routed, high rises have been erected, the people you knew have grown old (if, in fact, they are still alive).
   Here, though, at what we call Gran's beach, things are the same now as they were back in the sixties, when the Baker boys visited. And they are the same because rock and stone do not change in the space of a person's (or many persons') lifetimes. I suspect they are also still the same as they were back in the thirties, when my Dad was a kid there. The pools, outcrops and crevices are all exactly in the same place they always have been. The bluff at one end of the beach is essentially the same one my Dad and his cousins dove off when kids. The one thing that is markedly different is that the bluff now has a home on top of it.

The Bluff-at a certain point in high tide my Dad used to dive from it.

   Somewhere there is a black and white picture of my Dad standing just behind where I am standing, on the outcrop. He is holding up a freshly caught salmon. Behind him, there is a blurry glimpse of a young boy. The image is blurry because the boy was caught, in full flight, as he leaped across one of the many crevices there. I am not even sure who the boy is, he may have been one of my cousins. But everywhere my Dad was standing is still exactly the same now, and I was almost able to stand in his footprints when I was there. The concrete steps leading down to the beach from Gran's house are still there and are still exactly the same although the wooden steps and railings that led up from them are gone or overgrown. It is hard to be there and not almost choke on the history. Even the islands you see in the horizon are exactly the same as the ones you saw as a boy. That is only because they are stone, rising up from the ocean.
   I imagine you are wondering why this is so important to me, why I would even bother to sit and write about it. I guess it all gets back to me looking at that title picture; it has such a profound effect on me that it almost stops me in my tracks any time our paths cross. It reconnects me with anything I thought was truly important when I was a young boy. In a world where almost nothing else from my childhood has survived intact, this little part of it remains virtually untouched. For that reason, I write.
   I am thankful to stone. I am thankful for its continuity and what it preserves. I am thankful for even the man-made things of stone, like old buildings and monuments.  Left alone, they as well provide opportunities to go back and re-visit the familiar things that are still important to us.

   A couple of weeks ago, Doralyn and I, her cousin and a couple of our kids were walking down Danforth Street, in Toronto. We came across a gigantic, old church, made principally of stone. Its size was such that, from the street directly in front of it, it was impossible to fully take it in. Its cornerstone was directly in front of us and read "March 14, 1926". The other date read "November 14, 1915". These dates struck us, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the first date was my Dad's birthday. But not just his birthday, it was the actual day of his birth! The second date was Doralyn's birthday. Surely a startling co-incidence and all preserved there in stone, for almost a hundred years now and likely there for a hundred years more.

   I drive by a cemetery in Lambeth often. Every time I do I pass by the grave of my great-great-great-great grandfather. What marks this for me as I pass by is a slender, white stone which has been there since 1826. Much like the rock on the beach, this stone rises up out of the ground and, decade after decade, has stood there in continuum.
   As we age, we struggle to hold on to whatever we can of the "olden" things. Because of this we value any virtually indestructible signpost which still has the power to take us back to a period in our lives which was seminal.
   Because of this I love stone. I love the mountains. I love passing by grassy fields and noticing, right there in the middle of them, that a rocky dome rises above the grass. I love being at the beach, picking up smooth stones and trying to imagine the thousands of years it took to make them that way...just before I crouch down low, fling them out just above the waves and watch them skip.