I wouldn't have thought possible...

I know that Roger gets sick and tired of hearing it; but I just can’t help myself.  Any time we drive to Toronto, I’m asking the meaningless rhetorical question of how anyone could spend their life in this grid lock that seems to paralyse every road, street and highway.  Roger has heard all this from me hundreds of time.  He patiently ignores by outbursts and waits for me to return to normalcy.  Which usually happens when the car is pointed back towards Waterloo.

It is a bright and sunny spring morning in Waterloo County.  I have picked up Roger and we’re driving into work – chatting about everything and nothing as we always do.  I’m only half listening.  Slowly my attention is drawn to Roger complaining about the amount of salt the Township puts on the winter roads.  Here it is May and we are talking about the salt they used last winter?  Apparently so.

A few years ago, Roger was so consumed with this irritant that he put together a petition demanding that the Township either stop, or severely restrict, the amount of salt used on the winter roads.  The salt usage was being accused of destroying a strip of grass and landscaping that bordered the properties on Roger’s street.  Roger got all his neighbours to sign the petition.  That, in and of itself, doesn’t mean anything.  Wouldn’t you sign just about anything to get an angry crazed 7 foot 800 pound man who is frothing at the mouth back out your front door?

 Roger took his petition to the Township office where he was directed to the lowest possible level of clerk to discuss the “salt issue”.  “Oh, we couldn’t possibly stop using salt on the winter roads.  We would be sued if anything ever happened....”  And it slid downhill from there (I guess they hadn’t used enough salt).  Talk about “rubbing salt into the wound”.  And proving, again, you can’t fight City Hall.

The only outcome of the petition was that Roger’s anger towards road salt has been intensified and continues to roil and boil within him.  Even to the point where, on a glorious beautiful day, when all we should be thinking about is how good it is to be alive, we are nagging about salt on the roads.  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.