I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.
Everybody jokes about blind dates. There is something exciting, if also a bit frightening, about going out for an evening with someone you have never met, with an unspoken expectation that maybe these two total strangers could become a couple.
I went on a few blind dates in my younger days. Some were good, some not so great. The truth is, I forget now almost all the details of those dates except for the one where my female companion said goodnight by telling me what an awful person I was.
But nothing I experienced back then compares to the poor man in Arizona who went out on one date with a woman and then decided not to pursue a relationship. The woman, however, fell in love, found her soulmate, said he completed her.
To emphasize the strength of her feelings for him, she sent him 65,000 text messages including 500 in one day. Things really got out of hand when he came home one day to find her freshening up in his bathtub. A lot of people (me included) might be delighted to discover a blind date freshening up in their bathtub, but this woman had never been to her date’s house and didn’t have a key.
Police found a very long butcher knife in her car. If she couldn’t have him …
On second thought, all my blind dates were simply wonderful.
It is an enduring stereotype that describes Canadians as too polite. I see that idea challenged regularly by road ragers on Canadian highways, but, in general, it seems to be true that we are a patient nation.
I don’t have to look far to find proof of the too polite notion. On Sunday, I went out in my backyard with the weekly flyers from two hardware stores. Others have their novels; I have my flyers. As a consumer, I am always on the lookout to consume something but I want to do my consuming as cheaply as possible, another well-noted Canadian characteristic.
I didn’t get too far along in my reading and had just started checking out the bargains on garden hoses when a family member dropped in. When I got up for some reason, he sat down in my lawnchair. No worries, as they say in Australia. I chose another chair.
As we chatted, I started loading up our firepit with twigs to maybe get a little inferno going. My guest loves backyard fires and immediately got in on the act. If he somehow ended up on the moon, he’d have a campfire going within an hour of leaving his spacecraft.
Eager to help, he picked up my unread flyers and started ripping them to pieces and rolling them up, sticking them under the twigs in preparation for starting the blaze.
Now, this is where I realized how Canadian I really am. I didn’t say a word as I watched my cherished flyers disappear. Ten feet away, there was a box of old papers that could have been used, but I just couldn’t bring myself to ask the flyer shredder to stop destroying my reading material.
It was a nice fire my family and I enjoyed Sunday night.
I picked up a two-by-four at the Two By Four Store today. Here is what the two-by-four specialists did with my new board before they put it in my car. And they are quite open about it if you ask them.
First, they fired up a bulldozer and ran over it six times. Then they went to a gym downtown and fetched the biggest body builder they could find and hired him to come and whack my two-by-four a dozen times with a sledgehammer. For fun before he left, he took a heavy chain to it and gave it 12 more beatings.
Then they took my board up to the highest part of the roof and threw it into a pile of rocks. Finally, they shut down the Two By Four Store for a while and every staff member came outside and jumped up and down on my board for five minutes.
“Is this one okay?” asked the young man as he slid the poor wooden mess into my car. I looked it over carefully.
“Yes, that’ll be fine,” I said, and as I drove away, because I was born and raised in Canada and am not allowed to emigrate to another country, I called out the window to him as I drove away, “Thanks!”
And as I did, my receipt for the board flew out my open window and now I couldn’t take it back, even if I did find something wrong with it when I got it home.
A fitness place has opened up next door to my house. Not five doors down – next door. Among the members of this establishment are about 25 young, beautiful women who need fitness training like I need caramel popcorn training. And on several days of the week and at various times of the day, these women emerge from the fitness centre wearing skintight outfits and jog up and down the sidewalk right in front of my house, about 20 feet away from me. They all lope like pony-tailed gazelles down to the end of the street, then turn around and jog past my house again, return to the fitness place and then do this all over. Ten or 20 times at a stretch. They don’t run as a big group, but one at a time with about 10 paces between them, like a speeded up fashion runway, if the fashions were all painted on.
I have never spent much time on our front porch. It is too hot there in the afternoon when the sun beats down. But lately it’s been hot out there in the morning and evening too, and yet I find myself sitting out there a lot more than I ever have in the past. Pop and chocolate bar in hand, dog by my side, unread book at the ready.
I swear I didn’t train him to do this but the dog sits by the front window all day and barks like mad when the joggers start, which is our cue to go out for some fresh air. Doggy appears to sense that an outside visit at those particular times seems to have the effect of improving my mood.
Sadly, now and then, a group of young men replace the women for a while so I text a neighbour a few houses up the street and she goes out on her porch to catch the parade. I go inside to refresh my drink. In a world that depends on good systems to keep society functioning well, this arrangement seems to have few if any flaws. I do not believe there is a statute anywhere in the Criminal Code which forbids a man from sitting on his front porch and looking towards his street from there. On the other hand, if I went to a fitness centre downtown, sat in a lawnchair by the door and took in the scenery, my lawnchair and I would be arrested inside of five minutes.
There are a few thousand houses in my town. Almost none of them has a fitness place right next door to them. I can’t explain it. Just another happy Mystery of the Universe. There must be someone, somewhere out there that I need to thank for this.
Cardiac arrest might be just around the corner, but what a way to go!
My life insurance company, not content with their monthly haul from our home, wants to sell me another policy which will pay $250,000 to my estate if I die accidentally. No medical tests necessary. So, I read the fine print. Apparently, it will be no slam dunk for my family to collect on this policy after I accidentally kick the bucket.
For starters, I can’t die while breaking into a bank, which is likely to happen in the absence of the $250,000, kind of a Catch 22 if there ever was one. Presumably, I will be shot by police during the heist or fall out of a window on my head.
I also cannot die while involved in any other criminal activity so I am going out tonight to disassemble my meth lab. As well, the company won’t pay if I take my own life “while sane or insane.” But what if I am not sane or insane when I do it?
I can’t use illicit drugs to die, although it looks like I can make it work if I can talk my doctor into giving me something deadly. I can’t swallow any poison around the house “whether voluntarily or otherwise.” That means if some rat poison accidentally gets mixed into my spaghetti sauce (not an impossible development), and I eat it not knowing it’s there, no dollars.
How is that fair?
I can’t inhale any type of gas “voluntarily or involuntarily” so there goes the whole car in the garage thing.
If I die during a visit to the dentist, the company won’t pay up. How do they know what my dentist is like, I wonder. No mention of who pays if my dentist dies during one of my visits.
I can’t die after contracting an infection so I may as well go back to washing my hands after changing the kitty litter before meals.
And this one gets me. If I fall out of an airplane or the plane crashes and I die, too bad, so sad – no moolah for my family. (This does not apply if I pay a fare and am on a regularly scheduled flight.)
And to top it all off, if I get killed in a war, no money. So, if the U.S. decides to retaliate for losing the war against Canada exactly 200 years ago this year and invades us, I’d better quick build a bomb shelter and get in it or the insurance company gets off scot free.
In other words, where can I sign up for this policy? It’s just too darned good to pass up!
I need to confess something, not that it is a thing that will earn me jail time, just a thing that’s always been my thing. I love artificial light. Ever since I was a kid, pushing a button or pulling a chain and having light instantly appear, has fascinated me.
So, imagine how my mind blew when I discovered a few years ago that light bulb inventor Thomas Edison used to live in a rented house just up the street from the school my kids would eventually attend in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, where I was born. Tommy, as I affectionately refer to him, was only 18 when he lived in my town and hadn’t invented artificial light at that point, but it had to have been on his mind where, no doubt, a light bulb went off in his head one day, just like in the cartoons.
Anyway, long story short (too late), I have never seen a lamp I didn’t want to turn on, daytime, nighttime, no matter. You can keep your sun if you want it – all it ever did for me was burn my skin and hurt my eyes. Artificial light is where it’s at, Baby, and in my advanced years now, I get to call pretty much everybody I see Baby.
So here is the problem, and, of course, there has to always be a problem.
For the past almost 30 years (I will be married 30 years this fall), there has been an invisible force following along behind me turning off all the lamps I turn on, especially during the day. During all this time, I have never actually witnessed this taking place, and a times, I thought my eyes were playing tricks, or maybe a lot of bulbs were mysteriously burning out on their own, but, no, it really has been happening.
A half hour ago, for example, at 10:30 a.m., I turned on two lamps beside my computer by the kitchen window through which a truckload of natural light was pouring. I went outside to sneeze and when I came back in, my beautiful lamps, the ones Tommy and I worked so hard to invent, were extinguished. And yet, no sign of a human being anywhere, so that couldn’t have been the cause of this sad turn of events.
Some sort of evil light killer is following me around all day and to be honest, it’s beginning to freak me out.
Oh boy do I wish Tommy were here. He’d know what to do. He’d probably invent a lamp that couldn’t be turned off.
I am not sure who is the sharpest tool in the toolbox. I know it isn’t me.
The other day I complained to my family about a fitness centre located next door to my house. I noticed that the members of the centre started gathering for their morning’s workout shortly after 6 a.m., which seemed to me a ridiculous hour, coming as it does exactly one hour after 5 a.m.
“Why do they even go there?” I asked at the supper table. “They all look in great shape, none of them seem to need it.” I thought my reasoning was airtight.
My daughter replied, “They look that way because they go to the fitness centre, Dad.” Well, that thought hadn’t occurred to me.
On the other hand, I am not the dumbest guy on the planet. And maybe this guy isn’t either but he’s in the running for the title.
The Florida man to whom I refer leaned in to kiss a rattlesnake the other day. The eastern diamondback snake, I guess, was resistant to the man’s romantic offer of a kiss on the lips and it bit the rattlesnake whisperer on the tongue. The man had to be air lifted to hospital.
I feel some sympathy for the man as no one appears to have gotten him to slow down long enough to advise him in the matter. I was fortunate to be raised better, and I say that without bragging. I do not know how many times my father told me not to kiss a rattlesnake on the lips. I’m not aware if there is anywhere else on a rattlesnake to safely plant a harmless buss but my Dad’s warnings sort of put me off rattlesnakes, at least as objects of potential romance.
I have not lived an exciting life but I also have picked up not even one rattlesnake bite along the way. Swallowed a few flying bugs by accident, but that’s about it.
I love garage sales, as long as I am the buyer and not the seller.
A few years ago, we held a sale in our driveway with less than stellar results. We should have done better – it was a mini-block sale with two houses across from ours both participating. We kept an eye on the progress of those sales and were embarrassed to see that the stuff was flying off the tables over at their homes.
It hurts when strangers turn their noses up at your crap even when it was you who turned your nose up at it first. These are people out looking to buy glorified throwaways and to think that yours isn’t worth a second glance kinda hurts.
We watched in dismay all morning as shoppers parked along the street, took a quick look at what we had on display in our humble driveway and then strolled over to the much better selection at our neighbours.
One neighbour in particular was selling his stuff like crazy and we watched as item by item, he was cleaned right out.
But that wasn’t the worst part. As he was packing up, he started to take down the table on which all his hot bargains had been arrayed before being hauled away in the trunks of a lot of cars. Sure enough, someone came along and made him an offer on the table he was busy putting away and he sold it right there and then.
We were a bit surprised someone didn’t make an offer on the clothes he was wearing, leaving him naked at the end of the day. Or the toothpick he was chewing on the whole while.
Four winters ago, the speedometer in our car quit. It just sat there on zero and wouldn’t move, no matter how fast we would drive it down the highway, at whatever speed we were driving it, who knows?
It was a dilemma. So, as I do with most dilemmas of this nature, I sat down to figure it out. And this is what I concluded.
1. This thing was unfixable. No question about it. Speedometers cannot be fixed.
2. On the unlikely chance that it could be fixed, it would probably cost at least $1,000 to fix it, maybe more. Maybe $2,000. That latter figure is about what the car was worth at the time.
3. Anyone, supposing he or she had the smarts, who could do the improbable and fix the speedometer, would likely have a shop in California or somewhere in northern British Columbia. It would cost another $2,000 to go to either of these shops to have it fixed.
4. And finally, and most importantly, this thing was unfixable. Even if I drove to California, the guy there would look it over and tell me he couldn’t fix it.
So, what to do, what to do?
Given all the above certainties, it was obvious that the only thing to do was drive the car into the ground without the benefit of a speedometer. There is a certain art to that, a skill I learned in time.
Other family members were not so adept at judging speeds without the benefit of a speedometer, and the speeding tickets began piling up. I paid them dutifully as the cost of doing business.
But a revolt was underway and I could see it coming. Finally, no one but me would drive the car. Fortunately, we had another car with a functioning speedometer and so that one saw a lot of use.
But this could not go on.
I dropped into a car dealership one day and asked them about fixing it. As I expected, repairing a speedometer in a car like this involves pretty much the same level of skill as leaving the space shuttle on a tether to jig a broken windshield wiper.
However, this news. There is a place an hour’s drive away called Canada Speedometer.
That was encouraging to hear and so I spent another month thinking about that.
Thursday, I phoned them and arranged to take the car in on Friday morning. I drove there, handed a young man my keys and that was the last I saw of my car. I sat in the waiting room as he examined the unfixable speedometer, and waited patiently for him to return with the bad news.
An hour after I gave him my keys, the lad came into the room and handed them back to me.
“You’re all set,” he said.
Had he said, “It’s twins, a boy and girl. Congratulations,” I could not have been happier. But I didn’t understand.
“You mean it’s fixed?” I asked, and as he explained how he had fixed the unfixable thing, I stood there stunned, thinking up names for the twins. I was leaning toward Kenneth and Carol. I have always liked Carol.
The bill was $226. And the speedometer is guaranteed for as long as I own the car, which, coincidentally, is now worth $226.
But I have found that life is pretty much one big, long regret. Had I gone to the phone five minutes after the speedometer broke four years ago, I would have been up and running and could have avoided endless hours of worry, multiple brushes with the law and a near violent revolt by members of my family, even the one who vowed to love me and support me till I am dead.
I have not been able to stay out of the car since Friday. I am out driving up and down the roads just for the pleasure of seeing that speedometer rise to 20, then 60, then 80 …
I remember bits and pieces of our wedding rehearsal party in 1989. Nothing too wild stands out. Went to the church, maybe had some sandwiches after. Pretty dull affair, I guess, compared to some that are held these days.
Like the one in New York recently where a massive brawl broke out, started by a brother of the bride-to-be who punched a brother of her future husband square in the face.
Before long, like in a movie, the whole group was smacking away, including the two fathers involved who also squared off.
The $350,000 wedding, scheduled for the next day, was called off. A pity, really, as this was obviously a match made in Heaven.
Lawsuits are flying back and forth and the poor would-be husband wants to be paid back for the $125,000 he spent on his fiancé’s ring.
Unfortunately, both families were brought low by a terrible attack of affluenza.
I am grateful nothing like this took place at our rehearsal party. Being a longtime, registered, card-carrying scaredy-cat, I would have jumped in my car and took off. I might still be out there driving around, 28 years later.
