THE BREAKFAST CLUB

Turning 40 is a pivotal moment in most people’s lives. I actually found turning 30 a lot harder. On my 30th birthday I barely acknowledged the people who called me. I am super lucky to have so many great friends that call on my birthday but that year I just wanted to crawl under the covers and wake up the next day. I can’t explain why turning 40 wasn’t a big deal. Maybe it is because I still feel 20 and not a lot has changed in my life, I am not married, don’t have any kids that I gave birth to (lots of surrogates and god kids though) and I still get to work at Cleves. Actually when I was 20 all of that was true, so I guess absolutely nothing has changed except that I am in bed at 10:30 pm and at the office by about 7:00 am, instead of going out at 10:30 pm and coming home at 7:00 am as my Mom was heading to work announcing what breakfast food there was out her car window!! I have to say those were some fun days. I have been very lucky to spend every summer of my life here and I guess having just opened has made me feel very grateful and nostalgic. Maybe Cleves is Neverland and I get to be Peter Pan!!

I am amazed how so many things that we all used to do, wear, partake in at Cleves back in the 80s just keep coming back around. I wore a pair of plaid shorts the other day to a family dinner and almost everybody there commented on them. I had to laugh, I was dressed exactly like I would have been 25 years ago but I just bought those shorts so apparently plaid is back but obviously so are polo shirts and popped collars. I have to smile when a dining room server comes to work with a popped collar and I casually go up behind them and flatten it!!

I am a little horrified to admit that I like some of the music the staff listens to now. Many of you obviously remember the music we used to listen to at Cleves in the 80’s. Who can forget Rockin’ Roy, everybody’s favourite 70 year old DJ who spun a mean ‘Rock Lobster’, ‘Celebration’, ‘Le Freak’ and ‘Super Freak’ in that adorable plaid suit he used to wear on Wednesday’s Masquerade Nights (don’t worry Masquerade Night will be discussed in great detail some time in the near future!!). How about the summer of 1982 with 'Men at Work', 1983 when ‘Dancing in Heaven’ was all the rage or in 1989 when all we played was ‘The Hip’ but most people hadn’t had the pleasure of hearing them yet! I am sure if I looked hard enough I could find my mixed tapes full of Duran Duran, Howard Jones, New Order, The Thompson Twins, INXS, Simple Minds and the Cult. I can’t bring myself to get rid of my CDs even though all of them were put on my iPod years ago. My iPod by the way, is still full of ‘mixes’ they are just in the form of ‘Playlists’ now with titles that all mean something ranging from ‘Almost Forty Something’ to ‘Be Right Back’ (the summer I had my first back surgery in 2006) and the latest one I am filling up called ‘Titanium Rocks’ a tribute to the success of the last back surgery!!

One of my New Years Resolutions this year was to scan all of my photos into my computer. Believe me that is not an easy undertaking. I have about 20 albums to plow through and I am not even close to being finished but the entire process has brought back some amazing Cleves memories and smiles like the aforementioned Masquerade Nights and the Inn on the Bay (lesson learned - how to have the most amount of fun in the biggest dump ever built!!!). I was really comforted to find the pictures of all of us hanging out at the end of the dock day after day. That tradition began when my parents first started working here and it still continues today, the difference is that my parents used iodine in baby oil on their skin and I am sure we used some sort of SPF even if it was just a 2!!!

The new staff just arrived and were trained this week. This is a great time of year for me, the newbies are too scared to cause any problems and are rarely late. For the first year ever the servers will be punching in on the terminals in the dining room. I will really miss the familiar sound of the back door flying open, somebody running to the clock outside my office to punch in for the breakfast shift they are super late for and me yelling ‘I HEARD THAT’ as they shriek and run to work! As the season goes on though the fear fades and I inevitably have to drag some kids into my office to give them shit for some offense they committed. I absolutely love it when they give me this big song and dance about why they did what they did and I just chuckle and say ‘did you not see the name on the door of this office - I wrote that one!!’

...AND THIS ONE IS JUST RIGHT!!

Before I bought my first house, I lived at Mom and Dads. It was actually great. It was super close to Cleves so I could be back down there in a heartbeat if necessary and I had the whole top floor to myself. My room ran along the front of the house facing the road. During the summer months I am in the office pretty early every morning so for those first few years after I became a manager I saw some amazing things out my window as I was getting ready in the morning. Many days I would see somebody walking up or down the road from Dodds past the house before 6:30 am. It was super obvious that they were sheepishly looking out the corner of their eyes to see if anybody was awake at the Cornell house. Every time I saw somebody walking very quickly up or down that road I quietly opened one of my bedroom windows and screamed at the top of my lungs ‘YOU ARE DOING THE WALK OF SHAME AND YOU ARE SO BUSTED!!!’ The person in question would always scream and bolt. That never got old.

A few years ago the mother of all ‘Walks of Shame’ happened. It was my day off and at about 10:30 am my phone rang. I could tell it was the office calling, which is not a surprise because I don’t think a day off goes by when at least one person doesn’t call me about something, which I am totally fine with. I answered the phone to Ted’s voice, which actually was very strange and he said ‘I don’t mean to alarm you and I waited as long as possible before I called but we can’t find “Erin”’ (again I have changed the name...). Now I am panicking. Erin was a department manager and was NEVER late, not once in the many seasons she worked at Cleves. I started my usual round of ‘filling in the blanks for somebody the day after’ questioning. Yes he had talked to lots of people she was with the night before and she had gone missing somewhere between a cottage close by and Cleves. I could feel my heart racing and actually thought about when I should call my OPP friend to start getting serious about this. Ted just wanted me to know what was going on and promised he would keep me posted.

To say the next hour was a very long one would be an understatement but he did call me to say that Erin had arrived at work and was being pretty quiet about what had happened. The story about what had happened was eventually told and it went something like this.... It was getting late and the cottage she and a bunch of other Cleves staff were at was really close by. Nobody was in any condition to drive but nobody else was ready to leave yet either. She really wanted to sleep in her own bed so she decided to walk back to Cleves alone. About 15 minutes after she started her hike back to the resort it started to pour rain. She was a lot closer to the cottage she had just left then she was to Cleves so she turned around and headed back. When she got back to the cottage all of the lights were off because everybody had gone to bed so she quietly went in and just crashed on the couch in the living room.

Imagine how horrified she was when she opened her eyes the next morning to find a blanket on her while she lay on a couch she didn’t recognize, in a cottage she didn’t recognize, in front of a family she didn’t recognize....she had gone in the wrong cottage and crashed... It almost killed me to wait several days to call her and ask if Goldilocks would come and see me in my office and that I hoped the pink leather chair in there was just right!!!