Bird, lived at the entrance to a park, called Oakes’ Park, in the small southern Ontario town of Fort Erie. The park was created by guy named Harry Oakes, who was actually a rich guy from Niagara Falls, some twenty miles north of Fort Erie.
The park was divided into two areas, separated by one of the main streets in the town, called Central Avenue. The western side was just called The Park and it had two baseball diamonds, one for hardball, one for softball, a lawn bowling green, where the old folks hung out, a football field where the high school team played, a pair of tennis courts, that were used more for street hockey than for tennis and lots of open green space for doing whatever you wanted to do.
The eastern side of the park was called The Sugar Bowl because it was built in a depression in the land. It too had two baseball diamonds, scaled for little league play, a large wading pool with swings, see-saws, and other playground stuff. Over on the far side of the hill, there was a band shell that anyone could book for an open-air concert. The sides of the depression were steep enough that you could sleigh or toboggan down them in the winter, and just roll down them in the summer.
Bird spent a lot of his time in his younger years, from like age five to about twelve in the park, because it was right beside his house, playing all kinds of sports, climbing the Maple trees that grew along the ring road, and shagging foul baseballs and softballs over in the Horton Steel storage area. It was a lot of fence climbing, but a good way to earn half a buck, which was a lot back then.
Unlike most of the kids in the town, who stuck pretty much to their own end of the place, Bird liked to travel. He would have, in today’s world, been diagnosed with ADD, but back then nobody knew anything about that kind of psychiatry. And if ever confronted with a diagnosis like that, Bird would simply have laughed and told you you didn’t know shit about him.
It was only much, much later in his life that Bird came to understand his restlessness as nothing more or less than the search for new experiences, which, it very much appeared, he could not get enough of.
As a result of all this gypsy-like behaviour, Bird became well-known over the town. He used his intrapersonal skills to organize baseball games, touch football games, and road hockey games with people from other neighbourhoods. These games were a lot of fun, mainly because they were all kids and the town was too small to have anything remotely resembling a gang of any kind. Gangs were just things that he saw in movies like West Side Story and The Wild Ones, which Bird would go across the river to Buffalo to see, charming his way past the ticket-takers who could have busted him for being underage.
Bird’s life had always been one of complete freedom. He could not remember a time when he was ever told to stay in his yard or had been grounded for coming home late. Bird’s parents were in the process of discovering that they were not really meant for each other. They hung in, Bird figured, a couple of years longer than they should have. But then again, in retrospect, breaking up was a lot trickier back then. Eventually, it happened, about two years later.
For Bird, it was no skin off his nose so to speak, because he was intuitive enough to see it coming. He only wondered why they took so long. It also didn’t matter much because from about the age of ten or eleven, Bird had pretty much carved out his own existence. And a lot of that existence was spent outside his house.
Bird grew up Catholic. He was an altar boy at his parish church when he was a lot younger. He went to a Catholic school called Our Lady Of Victory. Nobody ever told him what the Victory part really meant and he never asked. He was a member of a young man’s group called The Columbian Squires and would have been expected to join the Knights of Columbus when he got to be eighteen.
One summer day, Bird and his pal, Rick, rode up into the woods across the railway yard, at the far west end of town to a place they affectionately dubbed Strawberry Lane, for the vast field of wild strawberries that grew there.
Bird and Rick would sit there in the middle of the strawberries, after having filled their stomachs and the paper bags they brought with them, and talk about things.
“You know,” Bird said one day. “I think I have pretty much had it with being a Catholic.”
“You’re pretty darn Catholic, Bird. Do you think you can just walk away from it?” Rick asked.
“I don’t know,” Bird said. “I think I can.” Bird stopped to munch a berry. “We go to church and sit around with a bunch of old people. I mean, look at this place. Strawberries growing everywhere. And look at those apple trees over there. I think there’s way more of God in all this than anything I’ve ever seen in a church.”
“I kind of enjoy going to church,” Rick said. He was a Presbyterian, and their church was right on the river and made of really old stone. It looked like it had been there forever. “It’s kind of peaceful there,” he said.
“But is it any more peaceful than it is here?” Bird asked.
Rick had no answer for that. Bird wrote it off to different strokes. Then Rick said. “Well, we each have to ride our own roads, Bird.”
“Yep. We do. And mine is gonna take me far from here.”
Rick was probably the best friend Bird had back then. He kind of understood where Bird was coming from, and never really judged anyone. He was a born politician, which is what he actually grew up to become.
A few days later, Bird announced his decision to his mother, who always insisted on him making up his own mind about things. She was, much to Bird’s surprise, alright with that. Then he went to church for one last mass, turned in his alter boy outfit, and told Father Murray what he had decided.
At the end of the school year, Bird went around to all the nuns who had taught him over the years and politely thanked them, and informed them that he was leaving the church. It was hard work, emotionally, but Bird had the strength of his conviction and on the last day at Our Lady Of Victory, he left the last vestige of his religion behind.
There was nothing in the way of withdrawal pain for him. If anything, there was only relief and more time for him to figure out the rest of his life. At thirteen years old, that would be quite a daunting task he figured.
Since Bird had made the commitment to leave the church, he decided to use his Sunday mornings for something more than just sleeping in. So each Sunday from the spring to the late fall. He got on his bike and started to explore a different area of the woods that surrounded the town. When he found a thick wooded area, he would lock his bike to a tree and head into it. He would study the kind of insects he saw there and the various types of trees that grew there. Once he found a clearing he would sit down and have a drink from his water bottle and just look and listen and think.
Bird thought about a lot of different things. But mostly he thought about what his life would be like as he grew older. At thirteen nobody was expected to have their whole life all mapped out. Getting to fourteen was about as far as most thirteen-year-olds could see. But Bird wanted more than that. He wanted to see sixteen, and twenty-one. He wanted to see who he would fall in love with and eventually marry. He wanted to see what kind of job he would have and whether he would love it or hate it. After an hour or so of this, Bird started to feel a bit lightheaded, almost like all that thinking would make him dizzy or knock him out.
Finally, Bird thought about god. He only had this one version of god in his head. The one that he got from going to church every Sunday and being educated by nuns. It was really hard to imagine some other kind of god. One that wasn’t in the image of human beings. One that was more like a beautiful cloud or the flower that he had casually plucked from the patch he was sitting beside.
Then one day, later on in the summer it came to him. God wasn’t just one thing. God was everything. This whole world that Bird lived in, the woods, the people, the flowers, the rivers, lakes and oceans, the sky, the other planets. It was all God. It really was the only thing that made sense to him. It was an all-or-nothing deal. And because Bird could not imagine the nothing part. It was all God all the time.
Bird stopped going to the woods on Sunday mornings after that. Instead, he just went out into the middle of the park behind his house, laid on the grass, and stared up at the sky. He was one with God now. He was one with the whole universe, although he never really thought of it that way. Hell, he was only thirteen years old. But he was on the road to enlightenment, even if he had only taken a few short steps.
( Part 2 of 6 ….To be continued)
