The Wortley Roadhouse Day 3

 

Yes, you would think that after 2 days, nothing much different would happen in there. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a Tuesday around 1:30 in the afternoon, and it wasn't tremendously busy, and yet things were already hopping.

I was talking to Hogan (not his real name) about several things and about fishing the Thames River. Some spots here in London (in Canada, not England) and I looked over and saw a group of about 8 folks having a good time seated at the long strip bar that might be able to seat 16 and one person looked very familiar. So I asked Joe the Bartender (his real name), " Is that Dale Hunter over there?

Dale is a former NHL player with the Washington Capitals and now owner and head coach of the very successful London Knights franchise, along with his brother Mark, who was drafted 7th in the first round by the Montreal Canadiens in 1981. ( I don't think he was there.) But Dale, who is obviously a public figure (my exception to not using real names), was kind of getting into a Crazy Guggenheim mode with a gal who just came in the door, with Dale pulling a harmless prank on her since it turned out it was his wife (so someone told me later that they met at The Wortley Roadhouse). They were all just having a good time, and I didn't bother them. (We have several people in common going back to when Dale was 12 years old and later.)

In walks Brother Bieber, whom I met yesterday, and we immediately start going into an old married couple back-and-forth. Bieb's has back issues and was on medication after sleeping for 12 hours. He wouldn't eat anything, just drinking his Stella's, and kept twisting his back to look outside at what was going on while I mostly just focused on what was going on in the bar. 

Charlene, waitress at TWR, walks by and always has a smile. (Her name might be spelled with an S, and I get her attention singing Oh Charlena, which is a song her dad sang to her. I'm probably 3 times her age. (If you click on the link, you will see Barry Lloyd, the organist for the group, and they practiced a block up the street since, in any band those days, you generally practiced at the house of the band member who had the heaviest piece of equipment and that Hammond M-series wasn't as heavy as the B3 but still took two guys to move it.)

Well, Bieb's and I are still going at it, trying to get him to eat something and stop aggravating his back by twisting and looking outside. Yes, it was probably interesting, but his back got worse and worse, and he finally just left with half a beer still unfinished. I ended up breaking a glass for the first time in my life, flailing around my hands like a drunken Italian, and I only had one beer, so I could see why others in the bar moved away from our position because we were totally out of step with the normal activity in TWR.

 

So, it's a hot August day, and in walks a gal with a lot of tattoos and orange hair who can barely see over the bar and asks if she could have a bowl of water for her dog. So Johnny, who is the bartender, jumps right on it (his shift hasn't started just yet since it's not quite 5:00) and gets her the water in a nice dog-sized soup bowl. She wasn't going to buy anything, but she was part of the neighbourhood, so she needed assistance. That was so Awesome!!! I could barely hold back the tears. That is just how they roll at TWR every freakin' day!!!!

So I mostly finish my second beer and go across the street to the local Tremblett's Your Independent Grocery store since I made an ass of myself enough already and went in to the store for the very first time. Right off the bat, fresh peaches and cream corn, all kinds of options, fresh bread, a deli counter, on and on eye-popping stuff. It's got the same vibe as TWR right across the street.

So I'm trying to find the smaller packages of No-name (actually a registered brand) Thompson raisins and prunes, and Winter, a wonderful gal (also closer to a 3rd of my age), helps me try and find them. She sees that they are probably sold out since the 375 gram is much more popular than the 750, which is also on the bottom shelf, so my back and left leg are starting to kill me. We talked for 15 or 20 minutes about her life and my life and shared a few ideas just like neighbours who hadn't seen each other for a while, and I told her that I was going to be at TWR's for a specific reason, and she said, I'll see you there since she is going there with her friends. Just Awesome.

So I go outside and find a bench and just plop my tired old large butt and pull out my brand new cellphone (1 day) and get out the app for London Taxi and order a cab via text, which I am about at the level of a 3-4 year old. The keys are way too small for me. I used the address of TWR, and it is right across the road, explaining that I was at the grocery store across the street. So shortly after, a cab pulls up in front of TWR, and I walk over thinking there might be a little screw-up on the order, but it actually turned out to be Dale Hunter's cab, and I said to him that we need to talk some time about people we have in common, and now is not the time. He just gave a very polite OK and got into his cab with his wife after they had a day to remember at TWR.

So I go back to the bench, plant my fat ass down and try to use the app to order a cab again, and I think I screwed up and gave them my destination instead of pick-up point. They have a GPS positioning thingy that will tell them exactly where I am, but they still like street and number first. So two cabs pull up, and I'm too tired to look at what cab number was assigned to me, so I get into the small-sized SUV, which turns out to be someone else's, and the other cab is a Toyota Corolla, which is worse than climbing in and out of a NASCAR stock car (which are the farthest thing removed from stock). London taxis should just make their entire fleet small SUVs because you can see the damage: the floor moulding under the rear passenger door is being pulled up out of its mountings, since I am not the only one having difficulty with those back seats. Oh, for the days of Checker cabs.

So how was your day? 

The corn was just wonderful, cooked in the air fryer. It took me half an hour to get out of the bathtub to take a bubble bath because everything got so slippery that I was trapped. I finally grunted myself out by using a towel, repositioning the bath mat, and wiping down as many slippery surfaces as possible.

Growing old sucks, but I slept like a baby that night.