The sun was just rising when I hopped on my bike to head to out. Only -15ºC this morning, roads were almost clear, and there would be hot coffee and breakfast just moments away. Coming from north of Bloor Street, every road is downhill in Toronto which makes life easy when zipping down the back streets to make it to meet the YCI staff on time. Clipping my bike to the iron fence outside, a minute later I was overheating with all my layers, toque, gloves, and long-johns.
Fun Day commences.
“Fun Day?” you might ask. ”What could a group of young office workers need with a Fun Day?” Ah, dear reader, the Fun Day is a time honoured tradition in the world of spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, papers and photocopiers: to leave the office for one day to let loose and, as they say, “break it down.”
Now, I’m sure you’ve gotten the wrong idea already. We don’t work in a typical office. No, no, no. The office that houses Youth Challenge International, tropical heat blasting from ancient heaters, half-cut walls that allow quirky conversations and beckoning calls to check out wild snaps from the field, not to mention the constant unleashing of jokes, quips, cracks, and rib-ticklers.
Yes, we work. Of course we work. We work so hard, in fact, that we have been planning this Fun Day for nearly a year!
We start at Cora’s Restaurant, close to the SkyDome where I was boiling in my thermal underwear after riding my bike in. Dragon was there already, talking with Erin (sporting a very fashionable, yet affordable apres ski sweater, complete with neck-de-turtle and kaleidoscope Charlie Brown zig-zag around the shoulders) and sipping back a bottomless cup of coffee. Ryan and Ben amble in a bit later (our resident semi-amateur hockey player staff members who regularly refuse after work pints for games of shinny at the park) followed by Rebecca. We felt awful that Laura was at home sick, and that Jane was working from home in Hamilton that day.
Breakfast was our strategy against the winds and snow squalls that raged outside. The coffee our imperative fuel, the jovial chatter a necessary insulation from the bitter elements that awaited us. (I had the brie, mushroom omelette, which was exquisite).
On we go, into the snowstorm. Most cars drove at painful trolls, not a snowplow to be seen. But further we travailed through in the winter wonderland (wondering what we were doing outside, that is) to our final destination: Harbour Front Centre…
Skating. Yes, skating. Like the back of a Canadian $5, or those last three kids who still want to one day play for the Leafs, we were going to lace up specially made boots with slabs of steel embedded into them. Skating. A study from Oxford University suggests that the earliest ice skating happened in Southern Finland about 4000 years ago (so says Wikipedia). This was our Fun Day. I haven’t been on skates since a traumatic experience in grade three, nearly 21 years ago. It’s been a while for this lanky, unbalanced man to have been on thin pieces of metal on very slick, very hard ice.
But we went. The snow stopped, the rambunctious teeny-boppers from the school group left, and the EZ rock thundered out of the mounted speakers like some demented Hair Bands on Ice. I’m talking Scorpions, Vanilla Ice (I’m not even joking), and Toto.
Ben and Ryan helped Dragon around on the rink,
Amanda and Erin glided around like a pair of Cindy Klassens.
With ankles buckling under the stress, arms flailing and grasping for balance, I brought my 6′5″ frame across the rubberized walkway and hesitated like a kid about to jump into the lake in early spring. Calculating quickly in my head how many feet my ass would fall at 32 feet per second squared, I wondered more about the bruise that would form on said buttocks and the following days at my desk, sitting uncomfortably, and suspended fear for that brief second to step out on the ice.
If you’ve ever watched a hockey game, winter Olympics, or even been out on a frozen pond or arena yourself, you know that there’s a very specific sound that is made by skates on ice. A slicing sound, higher pitched, but with a scraping. I was so pleased to have heard this sound rather than the large crack of bones that I expected.
We skated around that rink for hours, giggling, sliding through the accumulated powdery snow, sliding into the light drifts, and thanking the gods of winter that we weren’t that Japanese tourist who spent more time flat on his back that up on those blades. With “Rock Me Like a Hurricane” blaring out, air guitar in hand, I felt like a modern day Kurt Browning (he’s still around, right?) I teetered my way across the rink with my excitable co-workers and broadly smiled that it was Fun Day. For us, those who work in an overly heated office, working with partners in Tanzania or Vanuatu, or Guyana, tropical sun and palm trees typically enter into the mind. This Fun Day it was clear that we had embraced every minute of a perfect Canadian afternoon overlooking Lake Ontario with our apres patinage waiting for us at the pub down the street.
It was a very fun day.
Steve Sloot
