In April 1975, I completed recruit school at Canadian Forces Base Cornwallis in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia and went on to CFB Borden in south-central Ontario for trade training, originally in the Military Police.

That was the summer when my visual deficits became obvious even to the Canadian Forces, thanks to my inability to discern the form of a camouflaged two-and-a-half-ton truck quickly enough to avoid T-boning it (at low speed, fortunately) on a curve in a narrow dirt road in the wooded training area. The very next day, I failed to determine the distance between the front passenger-side wing of the truck I was driving and the rear driver's-side quarter of the truck I was attempting to park beside, and my fate was sealed -- the life of a Meathead was not in my future. So I spent the rest of the summer (a very long, hot summer) doing joe jobs while I waited to start the six-month course of training that would turn me into a medic.

I cleaned weapons, washed trucks, typed letters, filed papers, answered telephones and carried messages. I adjusted to barracks life, a complex system of restrictions, compromises and surprising freedoms (from responsibility, most notably), and established the letter-based relationship with my mother that made it possible for us to tolerate each other. I learned to get along in a testosterone-heavy environment where women were always seen as interlopers, despite undeniable -- and undenied -- skills and abilities.

Amusements included movies at the base cinemas -- there were two, showing something different (if not good) every night -- and disco dancing at the junior ranks' club where the booze was cheap and the company tolerant, if not socially sophisticated. Barred from the television room by my dislike of cigarette smoke, I read my way through the contents of the base library. With other denizens of the shacks (barracks), I piled into ramshackle tobacco-stinking cars for trips to Wasaga Beach, my first experience of a summer resort. On the long weekends (Dominion Day, as it then was, and the August Civic Holiday), I took the train from Barrie to Toronto to take a peek at the Big City, fleeing back to base on Sunday afternoon glad to have a few bucks left and no bruises to show for my weekend of high living. I ate Oysters Rockefeller in a Toronto hotel dining room and got my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon on Yorkville Avenue. The oysters were good -- I wonder now where in blazes they came from; that was years before oyster-farming -- but the haircut was too expensive and not up to military standards; I had to get the back trimmed at the barbershop on my return to base.

I went back to Ottawa on leave for a couple of weeks in August, and fully realized for the first time that my parents' house was not my home any more; they kindly offered me hospitality, and it was my duty and responsibility to accept it graciously and be a good guest. I now know that some adult children never quite hoist in that fact, to the detriment of their later relations with their closest relatives, so I'm grateful now that joining the CF separated me so sharply from my family that I actually noticed the transition.

I turned 21 in September of that year, and that was the end of adolescence for me.