{"id":103,"date":"2007-12-09T23:08:58","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T06:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/?p=102"},"modified":"2009-05-03T18:39:52","modified_gmt":"2009-05-03T18:39:52","slug":"loading-docks-of-my-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"loading docks of my youth"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"float\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2105\/2073534417_857c8401a5.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_2719.JPG\" width=\"200\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"width: 200px;\"><small>panorama 1<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"float\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2051\/2073534311_f1f99a16e2.jpg\" alt=\"loading dock\" width=\"200\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"width: 200px;\"><small>panorama 2<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"float\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2143\/2074326284_c1e6db3079.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_2717.JPG\" width=\"200\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"width: 200px;\"><small>panorama 3<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>With considerable alarm Ruth and I had to jump on a plane recently to tend to my father in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mississauga\" target=\"_blank\">Mississauga<\/a>, who had suddenly grown gravely ill, after what was supposed to have been routine surgery.  We sat with him for a week, as he lay unconscious in the ICU, viscous fluids bubbling in and out of him through a maze of clear plastic tubing, his life rhythms governed by an army microprocessors and chirping screens. He is recovering, albeit in the slowest of increments, having recently regained consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>As one might expect, being around a critically ill parent brings up a lot of emotions around one&#8217;s own childhood and I found myself oddly nostalgic for the <em>terrain vague<\/em> of my youth. This rather unremarkable looking shopping plaza figured prominently in the psycho-geography of my family. I trekked across its windswept parking lot for seven years on my way to and from school. My mother and I each spent long hours working in its 24 hour grocery store; she for many years as an afternoon shift cashier and I, for a shorter stint, working nights as a meat room clean up attendant, pressure hosing blood off the white tiled walls and extracting balls of gristle from the clogged floor drains.<\/p>\n<p>They weren&#8217;t the easiest of jobs but the money was good and they helped us survive.  I spent a lot of time working by myself in the loading dock, where I would prepare yellow plastic buckets of offal to be sent to a pet food factory. Sometimes, with the corrugated steel doors rolled open and the residual rumbling of a Great Lakes thunderstorm still ricocheting off the nearby apartment towers, I&#8217;d look out onto the glistening tarmac of the parking lot and think that life was magic. Perhaps it really was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>panorama 1 panorama 2 panorama 3 With considerable alarm Ruth and I had to jump on a plane recently to tend to my father in Mississauga, who had suddenly grown gravely ill, after what was supposed to have been routine surgery. We sat with him for a week, as he lay unconscious in the ICU, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}