Free The Vinyl Café Notebooks by Stuart Mclean

April, and when I do, I am going to be cranky, and hungry, so you better be careful .
    I don’t care what the kids do. The kids can stay up if they want. That’s what they always want to do anyway. They can do science experiments with me as far as I care. They can stick my hand in a bucket of warm water to see what happens; makes no matter, I am just going to keep on snoring.
    How much would I pay for that gene? I don’t know, but I know I’d be buying.
    I think my plan would be to get up just in time for the playoffs, which is pretty much how it works now anyway.
    3 March 2002

SALT OF THE EARTH
    There seems to be more salt on the streets this winter than there used to be. Or at least on the sidewalks. Or at least on the sidewalks of my neighbourhood. My evidence for this observation is purely anecdotal and would not impress a scientist. I rest my claim not on the back of rigorous observation but on the back of my dog. Or, rather, her paws. Barely a night passes when I am out with the dog that she doesn’t begin to limp, and we don’t have to stop. We have worked out a routine that we both understand. She holds up the leg that hurts, I take off my glove and pick out the salt crystal that is causing her distress.
    Some nights, when it is too cold for a sensible man to be squatting on the sidewalk cleaning his dog’s feet with his bare hands, I have wondered about buying her a set of the little dog boots you see small dogs wearing from time to time in the city, but I can’t bring myself to do that. We may live in the city, and I may enjoy my city life, but I have worked on a farm, and it is hard for me to do anything that might bring a smirk to the face of a farmer.
    Here in the city where I live, homeowners are responsible for shovelling the public sidewalk in front of their houses. Agrowing number of my neighbours, it seems, are turning to salt, rather than shovels, to fulfill their civic duty.
    You can hardly blame them. That’s the tactic the city has chosen to keep the roads clear. Salt has become the first, rather than the last, line of defence in the war against snow.
    Toronto is so committed to salt that the city is ringed with seven salt camps. These camps are set up like army bivouacs and include trailers that are staffed around the clock, complete with cots and kitchens—camps of truck drivers paid to stand by so the moment snow begins to fall, they can run for their salt trucks. City officials expect them to be on the road within five minutes of the first snowflakes.
    The same officials say they have tested and rejected other alternatives. Calcium magnesium acetate is too expensive. Sand, I am told, is not without its own environmental problems. They even tried a liquid called MAGIC, a byproduct of the beer industry that they sprayed on the streets, with mixed results, sadly.
    Toronto has 118 salt trucks in service this winter, and those trucks will dump in the neighbourhood of 125,000 tons of salt on city streets. My neighbours will add to that.
    It is a practice the ancients would find beyond belief. Homer called salt divine . Plato named it a substance dear to the gods .
    But Homer and Plato lived in warmer climes and at a time when salt was so highly prized, and so difficult to obtain, that religious significance was attached to it. A meal where salt was served was sacred. It created connections and the Arabic phrase, There is salt between us .
    The Greeks, the Romans and the ancient Jews all used salt in sacred ways. While the Germans fought wars over saline streams.
    Some academics believe the oldest roads were the salt roads that the clattering salt caravans followed through the Sahara and the deserts of Libya. One of the oldest roads in Italy is the Via Salaria.
    So it seems that in some way salt has always been linked to roadways, although in the ancient days the roads were there for the salt, rather than the other way around.
    Today, Canada is the fourth largest producer of salt in the world.