My wife is away for a girls weekend at the spa. Weekend meaning they stay over for one night. She will come back by noon today all relaxed and pampered with a host of funny stories.

So I had Friday evening to myself but since I hadn't planned anything, all my friends were busy. So on my wild bachelor night I picked up a couple of movies from Blockbuster that Linda would hate (Rambo and Bourne III); made myself a pile of Kraft Dinner for supper; put a couple of bottles of fine German beer on ice; and then spent an hour on the phone with my brother talking about cartoonist Neal Adams theory that the planet is expanding in size (type Neal Adams into YouTube if you're interested).

I watched the Tonight Show and went to bed where I slept on my own side, despite the luxury of vast acres of empty space on Linda's side.

Linda will be home by noon today and we are going out with my brother and his wife (whose name is also Lynda) for dinner and to see Richard Thomas in the Twelve Angry Men this evening.

Richard Thomas, of course was John Boy on The Waltons (or at least the early episodes) It will be interesting to see how age has treated him (under 5 inches of theatrical makeup).

Twelve Angry Men is a 1950's drama by Reginald Rose that takes place entirely within a jury room after closing arguments have been presented in a murder case. According to American law (both then and now), the verdict must be unanimous. The question they are deciding is whether the defendant, a young teenage boy from the city slum, murdered his father. The jury is further instructed that a guilty verdict will be accompanied by a mandatory death sentence — the electric chair. The jury of twelve move to the jury room, where they begin to become acquainted with each others' personalities and discuss the case.

It is playing at Toronto's Newest Theatre, the massive Princess of Wales Theatre that was built for the musical Miss Saigon (anyone remember that?) where they landed a full sized helicoper on stage.

It will be interesting to see how an intimate drama fares on such a vast stage. The play has been getting excellent reviews.

The tag line at the end of The Waltons shows their home from the outside in the late evening dusk, only one light lit, and each member of the family calling out goodnight to each other, ending with "Goodnight John Boy".

And since Linda isn't here, let me say instead "goodnight to you!"

In talking with my parents, one of the parental responsibilities they dreaded the most was talking to my brother's and I about sex.

To them it was the end of innocence. Like revealing that Santa Claus doesn't exist and this is how the presents really get under the tree. So they put it off until I was thirteen. By that time I'd already known for three years.

My sex education came at the hands of an eleven year old girl. She and a girl friend were playing tea and making mud pies in their sand box while my parents were visiting their home and I was told to go out and play with them while the adults visited.

I never understood the passion for making tea and mud pies. I was more into playing cowboys and Indians. But they didn't want to play tea either.

The older girl wanted to share her new knowledge of where babies came from. She showed me in clinical detail with diagrams drawn in the mud. Drawings quickly erased when her mother came out with lemonade for us all.

After her mother left, and the girl was certain I had mastered the details of the sex act, which seemed a pretty stupid way to make babies to me, she wanted to know if I'd like to go to her room to make a baby. Then we could have a baby of our very own. Her friend was very enthusiastic about the idea.

If playing tea and making mud pies was a passion I didn't understand, having an actual baby to look after was right up there with finding the Frankenstein monster standing in your bedroom closet. There was no indication from either girl that the sex act itself was in any way pleasurable. It was just the exciting gateway to having a baby of their own to look after, instead of inanimate dolls.

As a seduction, the girls had a bit to learn about technique.

Geez, girls were so stupid. They just didn't know how to have fun.

So I went into the house and bugged my parents to take me home and that's how I learned babies weren't found in a cabbage patch.

I have a strange job with few routines, although I usually find myself at our headoffice in downtown Toronto one or more days a week. When I go downtown, I seldom drive because parking alone is much more expensive than public transportation. Instead I take a combination of the the GO commuter train and the subway. Timed right, I can get from my house to my desk in under 45 minutes. The same on the way home.

These are usually uneventful trips, even on hot muggy days like we've been having all week.

However, on Monday after work I arrived at Union Station to discover the 5 pm GO had been canceled due to mechanical problems. The 5:30 Express to Oshawa had been changed to a local run to accommodate. That meant an extra half hour to wait and two train loads of rush hour commuters crammed into one train.

Great.

The hoards and I lined up and squeezed ourselves into the train, whose sides (I'm sad to say) did not bulge out like in cartoons. Normally I'm guaranteed a seat and can relax and read a book, but no such luck on Monday. Naturally, the air conditioning was out in the car I chose and before the doors closed people were already fanning themselves. Because the air conditioning is supposed to work, GO train windows don't open.

Suddenly my bad luck turned for the better when the woman I was standing beside suddenly turned green and leaped from her seat and pushed her way through the crowd just as the train doors began to close. She was last seen throwing up in the garbage bin on the train platform as we pulled slowly out of the station.

I looked at the empty seat. I looked at the people around me. I found no one more deserving of that seat than I was and sat down.

There were three other people in our little area, all a little shaken by the heat and the dramatic exit of the ill woman. They included a very serious black businesswoman with thick rimmed glasses, a young pretty blond and a heavy set woman with short cropped white hair.

To break the tension, I said something funny about the heat and the unfortunate woman who had just vacated the train. The women smiled ruefully.

That only encouraged me. So I said something even funnier about the GO service. and now they laughed. In the seats across the isle I could see the people pretending not to listen and was encouraged even further to say something even funnier. And the woman across the isle who had been sipping a coke snorted and blew cola out her nose in a refreshing spray. Now everyone seated and standing was laughing.

But realizing my powers had dangerous side effects, I decided to say no more. And no one else picked up the thread of conversation.

The hot train chugged on deeper into suburbia.

The serious black woman opened her briefcase and began working on a document. The pretty blond took out her cell phone and began calling friends to tell them about her nightmare train ride. The heavy set woman next to me either closed her eyes in meditation or had died.

I was fascinated by her. In favour of death, she didn't seem to be breathing. In favour of meditation she was still sitting upright.

Everyone was sweating and fanning themselves but as we reached station after station the crowds began to thin and I eventually reached Guildwood alive.

After dragging my weary body out of the broiler into the cooler air on the platform, I looked up at the train windows as it pulled slowly out of the station with its burden of sweating commuters and caught the white haired woman looking out at me. She, too, was alive! Suddenly she smiled and waved.

I waved back. We had become friends through adversity, too late. And it was never to be.

And that's how I got home from work on Monday.

The sky ignites and thunder rattles the house. After my experiences on the weekend, I won't be taking Lindsay for her run this morning. The storm snuck up on me then, it won't get a second chance today.

There is another deafening crack of thunder and rain comes crashing against the front window in torrents.



Shivering at my feet, Lindsay is also in no mood to experience the great outdoors. We had a little too much nature in the raw this week to satisfy us both. I pet her and her shivering quiets; she lays down, her head resting on my foot.

Helping her has helped me. I don't jump at the next crack of thunder, instead I settle down to enjoy the show.

The relationship between dogs and man goes back a long way. While we take credit for becoming the dominant specie on the planet, we've had a lot of help from our dogs. And our cats and our horses. They have helped us hunt, warned us of danger, rid our homes of rodents and given us the power to travel vast distances at a rapid pace.

But they have also given us affection. They calm us. Perhaps they even humanize us. When dogs and cats are part of our life, we have less stress and live longer. To a lesser extent, the same holds true for the plants that fill our homes and gardens, the fish that swim in our aquariums and the birds that sing from their cages in our living rooms.

I'm reading a review of Richard Louv's book "The Last child In The Woods" in the London times:

"Our new word for this week is “biophilia”: the innate need and sensitivity that human beings have for other living things. Put simply, we have been hugging trees for millennia, so it is dumb to stop now. We have a biological need, created by centuries of proximity, for nature. And denying our biophilia makes us behave very oddly indeed. I refer in particular to children – the small, slightly irascible, bug-eyed creatures you find lurking indoors in small groups around the television, computer, fridge or X-box. Pale and biophobic, these children are suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder, an epidemic recently identified in America. Long ago, children roamed in grubby, half-clad packs across the landscape, hitting one another with sticks, making mud pies and hiding in bushes. Now, in the Dark Ages, most of these activities are illegal, or considered downright dangerous. Last month, the online magazine Salon lamented “the decline in kids’ contact with nature and the rising obesity epidemic; the criminalisation of old-fashioned play; and the loss of the simple pleasure of having dirty hands and wet feet.”

Of course we live in an urban landscape and our kids need to learn to be street smart. It's a more dangerous world out there than the one I grew up in. As even Louv acknowledges, we can't "...bring back the free-range childhood of the 1950s". We were kicked out of Eden long ago and there is no way back.

Still, as Lalepop pointed out in his comments yesterday, we are an amazingly adaptive specie. Our kids have learned to get a lot of their need for adventure inwardly, electronically. I remember when Alvin Tofflier wrote that book "Future Shock", claiming we would all be paralyzed by the pace of change. That was back in the 60's and here we still are, the pace of change faster than ever. Human resilience and adaptability is an amazing thing.

Still, Louv has accumulated some serious evidence that our kids are paying a high price for getting their adventures electronically instead of naturally.

Outside the storm is letting up and Lindsay will get a run after all; only it will be on her leash and around our block, not along the top of the bluffs today. We compromise and go on.

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Please check out the cool video Bohemian left in the comments section today

A car full of teens roars out of the East Points parking lot, rubber tires smoking. They shoot past me a great speed and hit the small climb up to the train tracks with enough momentum to get air. I hear them land on the other side and the squeal as the driver fights for control before the sound of the car fades into the distance.

Being early in the morning the parking lot is empty of other cars and the tarmac is burned with the memory of successive wheelies. All three of the garbage bins have been mangled, knocked over and garbage is scattered everywhere. I recall a fleeting glimpse of the damaged front end of the Honda Civic and can now tell how that happened.

They've been playing.

With someone else's car.

I pull out my cell phone and call police. A lot of Lindsay's walk time is eaten up talking with them.

"Kids today," says the Officer in disgust. "I don't know what's the matter with them! They have no respect for anything."

Lindsay's patience has run out and she pulls me away and down the trail to the beach at the bottom of the bluffs. There is a warm breeze in my face and the waves echo against the bluffs as they crash onto the shore. A flight of geese circles overhead. My feet sink into the sand as I walk.

Gradually my anger eases and lets go.

I think back to an article I was just reading about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors. Child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation (he calls it nature-deficit disorder) to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, violence and depression.

His book is called "Last Child in the Woods" and is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults.

My brothers and I grew up playing in the bush at the end of our street. We climbed trees, rolled down hills, caught toads and frogs, built rafts, brought home the blue shells of robin's eggs, swam in the river.

Ate my parents out of house and home, went to bed exhausted and slept the night through. And were as skinny as rakes.

The bush I used to play in is now a subdivision. There are fewer "wild places" left for kids to explore. They are getting out of touch with nature and if you're out of touch with nature, you're out of touch with reality.

As Louv says, "Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment—but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That's exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child.

"As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move."

I'm not convinced Louv has the whole answer, but as I watch the swallows soaring overhead, I have to think he's on the right track.