RIP Johnny Hirtle

They say somewhere inside anybody celebrating their 70th birthday, there’s a 17 year old wondering what the hell happened. You gotta admit that it’s really hard to deny your age when it starts with the number seven. As it happened, it was just a few months after my 70th I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and it was just a few months before his 70th that Johnny was diagnosed with lung cancer. Almost seems like our meters are running down about the same rate. Which should not come as a surprise. We are, after all, descended from the same hardy Prussian gene pool. Technically, we were second cousins, his family emmigrating from the same Bavarian village a year or two after mine (if your wondering how Prussians ended up in Bavaria you’ve got some reading to do). For the first year or two we all shared the same roof, first on Derry Street, and then on Neeve Street in the Ward. The Derry place was a rental, and new immigrants had to do what they do to this day; stall the landlord at the front door while spiriting a dozen non-existent guests out the back door whenever he stops by for a look around! In due course the Hirtles found themselves out of the Ward and in a new house in the northern ‘burbs. My family became the country bumpkins, or at least that’s what I thought, whereas my cousins were sophisticated urbanites! When we all hit driving age it was only natural I’d be hanging out in town more. In the first few years I spent many winter hours playing pick-up hockey at the rink behind the local school. It was nothing for Johnny to spend eight hours a day with his skates on in those years. Of course, playing hockey on an outdoor rink past midnight wasn’t the only urban temptation city life offered. Wasn’t long before Johnny and his peer group were eagerly experimenting with the cornucopia of new recreational drugs that were flooding the market. In fact, John and Tim McIvor were my tour guides on my first-ever LSD trip! You cannot imagine a more loving pair of shepherds helping a neophyte through an entire night of utterly bonkers halucinations. Ya right… anyway, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As we outgrew the worst excesses of our youth, Johnny and I got married aound the same age, bought houses around the same time, started families around the same time, and suffered marital collapse around the same time. By that time life had taken us in radically different directions. Johnny stuck with GE-Westinghouse-ABB till the bitter end, and it was bitter alright. I, on the other hand, had the dumb luck to transfer to a teaching career. I figured it would be awhile before they could move teaching jobs to Mexico, whereas most of our industrial base was already gone. Ironically, I recently read an article about the difficulties facing America’s re-shoring of heavy transformer production, because the dumbfucks have realized Mexico and China cannot be relied on. One of the critical bottlenecks is the absence of skilled core-winders. Imagine that! An entire craft tossed in the trash as redundant, and then back in high demand when it’s too late. That was a workforce that had been under threat for so long I think many convinced themselves it would never happen. Just months before the shit hit the fan I recall Johnny telling me he’d switched to steady day shift so he could spend more time with Kellan and Kari. He was planniing his life around the employer right till the employer destroyed his livelihood. I know it’s pointless to go over the might-have-beens once somebody’s gone, but my late father, who spent way too much time haunting any arena where his sons might be playing, to the point where he was almost an unofficial hockey scout, often saw John play, and opined regularly that Johnny could have gone places. Indeed, Johnny played until his 50′s in a Guelph beer league packed with guys who had played Jr. A or professionally, so who knows? It was a detached retina that put an end to that, and at least I can admit he beat me to that milestone by about ten years! I’d only seen John intermittently in recent years, usually on the rare occassion when he attended a family get together. I was shocked when I was forwarded an email from his sister Reg last September announcing John could be in hospice in a matter of days. The last time I saw Johnny was a few days after I got that email. I arrived unannouned and rang the buzzer a dozen times, to no avail. I go knock on his patio door. “Oh Dieter! Come on in!” The guy who was hospice bound was remarkably cheerful. He was busy changing the bandages on his legs. He was looking forward… to the Blue Jays game that night, to the Jays maybe in the World Series, to the Raptors season, to the Leafs… I left him that afternoon convinced a guy with so much to look forward to had a few years left, for sure. Sorry I was wrong. Happy trails to ya, Johnny! I’m hoping someday we’ll get together again with a 500 horsepwer SuperBee and a straight stretch of road. Love you, bro!