The Concrete Frog

Concrete frog and raspberries on our little back patio. 

I've been lugging that frog around for almost 30 years. He belonged to my uncle, Alan, dead since the late 80s of a heroin OD when a big batch of ultra pure arrived and took down a lot of junkies. He was a borderline psychopath of the rascally type and many are the tales, most of them funny on top and sad underneath. He spent some years in federal pen for two counts of conspiracy to import heroin through the mail, one from the UK and one from Sri Lanka. Before that he and some cohorts opened up an ice cream shop in Victoria's Market Square called "Sweet Tooth Saloon" that didn't last long, really just a front for shady financial activity. He was around a fair bit when I was a baby and toddler, but only sporadically after that. My memories of him when I was a kid are generally positive, but coloured now by the knowledge that he was usually smacked up on some level. I remember being perplexed by his sleepiness on more than one occasion. When I was 13, The Elephant Man was released in theatres, and for some reason Alan took me to see it. My very first David Lynch film, now that I think about it. Anyway, we got into our seats, Alan went to the bathroom, came back, and slept through the film. It took me a while to figure that one out. Nodding out at holiday dinners with the family, or puking in the bathroom on Christmas morning. Heroin - so glamorous.

This frog, though. As you can see, he's actually a water fountain with a spigot in its mouth. The story is that he belonged to Alan and some friends in the late sixties. They put him on the roof of their house (a renovated gas station, I think), had him hooked up to a hose, and used him to squirt people arriving at the front door. Hilarious. I sometimes worry that I'm losing my sense of humour as I get older, but I'm pretty sure that would only be really funny to a child. The frog got passed along to his sister, my mother, when he went to prison. Then, when she moved from our four bedroom house in Victoria next to the Jubilee Hospital to a two bedroom condo near the University, he got passed along to me. Somewhere around 1990, that would have been. By then I was living in Vancouver and going to UBC, married to my first wife, Katherine, settled first in a 2 bedroom basement suite in Kitsilano and then on a 38' boat moored at a marina on the Fraser River on the Richmond/Queensborough border. The frog came with.

It could very well be that my affinity with frogs started with this guy. For a few years there I collected them, or at least it became known within the family that a little frog figurine was an acceptable gift for me if they were otherwise drawing a blank. The default gift. It started to get out of hand and I had to officially put an end to it when I started having thoughts about display options. The concrete frog, though, always had a prominent place in whatever outdoor setup I had going at the moment. Usually in the garden, but a couple of times by the doorway. He was always a part of the mix.

My Recovery garden on Clinton St

The hard knocks started when we moved in to our place on Clinton St in Burnaby. It was a three bedroom basement suite in a pleasant area, the top of the easternmost end of the South Slope (if you are familiar with Burnaby). The rent was absurdly cheap, the landlord was very nice, and the place had a small but very lovely little backyard with a couple large beds. I parked the frog and planted a few flowers in a little rock garden next to the steps that led down to our place. He was very happy there until the wee hellions upstairs started whacking on him with whatever was handy. Damage was done, and I talked to the mom and grandparents about it. The two young boys were pretty much allowed to run amok with no discipline at all, however, so more damage was done.

During this period, I got sober and the Pandemic happened. I started to think of that little rock garden with its flowers and succulents as a Recovery garden. When face coverings became a thing, in the very early days when bandanas were still kind of an option, I bought a camouflage-style Corona beer bandana to use for that purpose as a dark joke. Fortunately, Lisa talked me out of it and the bandana was tied around the frog's neck. As you can see, it's still there.

The boys eventually got bored with beating on the frog, but their incessant high-pitched screaming and wall-kicking, sometimes to midnight, eventually drove us out. This is a story that has been touched on earlier in this blog.

The garden on Curragh St

We found a place about twelve blocks away on Curragh Street in an unusual neighbourhood that was mostly small businesses and garages with a few old residences sprinkled throughout. On one side a two-storey medical records storage business, and on the other a storage yard for a landscaping company. It was another three bedroom basement suite, also absurdly cheap, but dark and with a low ceiling, and one tiny bathroom with no bath, just a shower stall. Far from ideal, but the price was right, it was still in the neighbourhood of the boys' schools, and it had a very good, medium-sized lawn in the backyard with almost complete privacy. At the end of that lawn was a bed that the landlord had filled with roses and hydrangeas, and into that bed went the frog along with a bunch of our plants in pots and directly in the dirt.

The next round of insults suffered by the concrete frog were the result of the particularly cold winter of 2021. We experienced a drastic cold snap just before Christmas followed by a huge dump of snow. This was all very unusual for Vancouver, for the timing as much as the novelty of huge amounts of dry, powdery snow rather than the wet blanket we typically get. That cold snap must have penetrated quite deeply into the concrete frog, freezing solid water that had seeped in through cracks, and snapping off a few bits of detail. I considered gluing them back on, especially a large piece of its left foreleg, but in the end decided against it. I kind of like him with the war wounds, truth be told. They resulted in this blog post, after all.

We got very politely given notice at the Curragh house around June of 2023. Our landlord wanted to move his business into the house, giving us six months notice. That was a very difficult time for us with immense amounts of stress. On the one hand, we were losing a three bedroom that only cost $1,225 a month. On the other hand, mice were becoming a real problem. On the other-other hand, the rental market had soared to ludicrous levels, meaning the cheapest three bedroom we were likely to find in the area (or anywhere in town, really) would be around $3,000 to $3,500 a month, and competition for those would be fierce. On yet another hand, our very cool upstairs neighbour had a massive health crisis that landed him in the hospital, possibly indefinitely, and a friend of his son's then fatally overdosed upstairs over Christmas. A very complicated stew.

We applied to BC Housing for subsidized housing, hoping that having a son with Down Syndrome and Autism who requires 24/7 care would bump us up the list. No such luck - they're too swamped and the wait lists are too long. We were getting very concerned by the time October rolled around, when our luck changed for the better. A member of my Home Group in AA happens to volunteer for the board of a local charitable club, and became aware of an opening at one of their developments in the city. He put in a good word, and we moved in to a two-storey, three bedroom, two bathroom townhouse just before Jan 01, 2024. The place has a small footprint, and so each of the rooms is correspondingly small, but there is much storage space, there's a full-sized tub, the place got a renovation before we moved in, and it faces backwards to the woods for maximum privacy and quiet. It's quite a bit farther to go getting Rowan to school, but that's a small price to pay.

And now the frog adorns the small back ground-level patio we have at this newest and current home, next to some large tubs filled with industrious raspberry canes gifted to us by a neighbour moving away back at Clinton Street. He is chipped and scarred, home to some contented mosses, still wearing that joke bandana, a testament to survival, distress, family, poor choices, recovery, and a lot more. He's not going anywhere.