Sept. 8: The Big H

 Note: The Surgeon General warns you that this note is being written about a week late. Here is the reason: Shteevie lost his full-time job at the newspaper where he worked and he needed time to sulk. Now he is done sulking. This note has emerged from his sulkiness.)

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Toward the end of high school, Ozi thought it would be funny to make a movie called The Two Guys Who Couldn't Find Each Other. I had just received a video camera as a high school graduation present and was still dealing with the messy breakup I was going through with my girlfriend. Ozi thought that a few hours of silliness would get my mind off of things.

He was right.

The movie was filmed at Calgary's Heritage Park, home of the infamous Big H. The premise can be inferred through the title - two guys who can't find each other. Ozi filmed me trying to find him; I filmed him trying to find me. We were 18, so the movie was peppered with the most unbelievable profanity. We went through an entire pack of cigarettes while filming (a neat trick, since I don't even smoke.) Both of our characters were named Logan, so much of the movie consisted of us standing alone in various parts of Heritage Park, screaming out the word "LOGAN!!!!"

I am aware that this is not funny. It is one of those "you had to be there" kind of things.

Still, in the years following high school, I was amazed at the cultlike status that The Two Guys Who Couldn't Find Each Other earned among our peers. We'd be at a party somewhere and someone would urge me to go out to the car and get the videotape.

Yes, kids. The early 1990s was an era when you had to watch homemade movies on video, not by sharing viral youtube or Facebook clips.

Ozi is dead now. So it goes.

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The Big H stands at the western end of Heritage Drive. It is the most iconic landmark at Heritage Park, which is a sort of pioneer theme park for Calgarians. There is a general store and a Ferris Wheel and a grand hotel and a choo choo train and a blacksmith shop and I suppose the whole thing is to show us how people lived in the latter part of the 19th century. 

When we were kids, Heritage Park was a popular field trip destination. Our teachers would always herd us into the one-room schoolhouses, where they would tell us in hushed apocalyptic tones about how, in the olden days, everyone in school had to share one big room and it didn't matter what grade you were in. The mere prospect of that terrified me. When I was in Grade 3, the Grade 6 kids were impossibly big and mean-looking; the Grade 9s were like mythic ogres. I figured they'd probably beat all us little kids up the second the teacher left the room.

"And there was no electricity back then," the old lady actor playing the schoolmarm would say. "When it was cold, you had to put a lump of coal in the stove."

How archaic. We were all grateful to be going to school in the 1980s, thank you very much. None of us wanted to be Anne of Green Gables or Anne of the Glenmore Reservoir.

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My son has been to Heritage Park. Stardate: July, 2022. He liked it, though he likely didn't appreciate the historical mindset the park wanted to highlight. He mostly cared about the swings and the rides, especially the Ferris wheel.

By the way, the picture at the very top was taken sometime in 1999, my last day in Calgary before embarking on a career as a journalist, which is something I have done, more or less, ever since. There were periods of time since then when I was not a practising journalist, but altogether, I don't think I spent more than one month not being a reporter.

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My friend, Char, spent a recent birthday at Heritage Park, which is, apparently, her favourite part of the city. I don't think she likes the park itself; I think she likes its outskirts. Heritage Park abuts the Glenmore Reservoir, which is where Calgarians get their drinking water. There are walking paths and trees and benches and birds and nature. 

Heritage Park is a fine place to be alive, whether you're in the park or lollygagging outside of it.