Two Ritas at the beach

It was another one of those heat warning days, so the Farm Manager and I decamped to our favorite beach in the early afternoon.

As beaches go, this one kinda sucks. First of all, if your kids want to build a sand-castle, this is the wrong beach for you. This beach is all rocks, no sand.

It does, however, enjoy the distinction of never having been closed during this time of pestilence. I think that's mainly because they ran out of signs before they got this far out of town, but who cares? At least it's open.

It's also a lot smaller than it used to be. Even five years ago you had a good twenty feet of shore between the trees and the water. Now you got nothing in a lot of places, and in what's left you're lucky to find a few feet where you can set up your lawn chairs.

Funny how our "news" studiously avoids discussing water levels on the Great Lakes. You'd think that's at least as relevant to the local community as the latest covid case numbers or Trump's latest tweet.

Ten years ago a lot of places were talking about dredging their harbours because the big boats couldn't get in anymore. Now they're talking about building dikes. If the water keeps coming up the way it has the past few years, we'll be well past the talking stage.

And of course we'll be caught completely unprepared...

But I digress.

The park has maybe a quarter mile of waterfront. There weren't more than three or four cars parked, so we were able to stake out a lovely spot that had complete privacy.

Until Rita and her friend Rita showed up.

It takes the ballsiest of people to set up right next to you when the entire park is practically deserted. That happened to us once at a campground in Montreal River. That's a very picturesque spot on Lake Superior  with about twenty or thirty campsites. We had the whole glorious place to ourselves... until this gigantic Harley pulls in.

Those people had the entire park to choose from, but they decided their best bet was to pitch their tent right next to us. I just hate when people do that. Nevertheless, it turned into quite the interesting encounter.

My first observation was that they had more shit in the various saddle-bags and trunks on that Harley than what we had in our Toyota. They had a bigger tent. They had fishing poles. I was half expecting them to pull a canoe out of somewhere.

Turns out Buddy was a big cheese in one of those "outlaw motorcycle gangs" you read about in the paper all the time. He'd been to Winnipeg for some sort of national business meeting. He was from Montreal, and spoke with a heavy French accent, as did his partner. Do they still call them "old ladys?"

I thought those people prefer the comfort of the finer hotels these days, but obviously some of them still go in for old-school tent camping. As much as I didn't appreciate the proximity at first blush, they were great neighbours.

So there we were, luxuriating on our private ten square feet of beachfront, when these two middle-aged damsels come wandering down the path. Why?... you've got the whole f@cking quarter mile of waterfront, and you're gonna come right down this particular path and keep us company???

Why? Why? Why?...

It was Rita and her friend Rita. In a voluptuous East European accent, Rita 1 holds up a shopping bag and announces, "Zeez are my sweeming shoes. I sweem in Reechmund Heel this morning."

Holy shit! They're from Richmond Hill?! My dear daughter lived there for years! I know the place. If I had to live in the city, anywhere within a few blocks of Mill Pond Park would work for me.

We get to talking with these obnoxious people. The FM pegged them as Jews almost from the get go. There ensued a lively conversation about the merits and demerits of various synagogues in the Richmond Hill area, because the FM spent twenty years just south of Steeles.

Turns out they were originally from Ukraine. They emigrated to Israel and then moved on to Canada.

Always keen on showing off my knowledge of current events, I enquired as to how they felt now that Ukraine had a Jewish PM.

Rita 2 says, "Ya ya, Jewish funny guy. Have comedy show on TV. He funny all right - funniest man in zee world..."



I think I detected a note of sarcasm.