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.
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 it as cheaply as possible.
I didn’t get too far along in my reading when a family member dropped in. When I got up for some reason, he sat down in my chair. 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 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 unread, colourful 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 was a little quieter than I normally am.
My chance at hardware greatness had been put on hold. And, of course, I had only myself to blame. I certainly couldn’t blame anyone else. If I was tempted to do so, I would have to do that silently because blurting out accusations against others just wouldn’t be polite.
Sometimes being a Canuck can be a touch aggravating.
Last week, I received a lovely eight-page, handwritten letter from my oldest sister Betty who lives in another city. She always sends letters and greeting cards where every inch of blank space is filled with her news.
Betty is not a fan of computers and doesn’t use email. I don’t believe she has ever sent one, though her husband prints out ones that are sent to her and brings them to her.
She doesn’t have a smartphone and not even a regular cellphone. She uses her landline.
But she loves her flatscreen TV and sits in the evenings, remote control firmly in hand.
After I receive one of my sister’s letters, I call her and we talk for two hours. But this time, I decided to respond in kind. So I sat down and handwrote her an 11-page letter.
It was tough slogging. My handwriting, which used to be so good I won awards at fall fairs for it, has gone downhill. And it was a real effort to form all the letters and make them legible. My left hand kept wearing out on me and I would have to set down the pen and massage it back into shape.
The problem was I was trying to write like I type on my keyboards – very quickly. I couldn’t slow down and my hand was very tense.
But, the job finally done, I stuffed my treatise into an envelope, addressed and stamped it and took it to the mailbox down the street.
I felt pretty good about myself and tried to figure out when the last time was that I handwrote someone a letter. It might have been 50 years ago when I would write home for money to keep me going in university. They were very carefully written letters, something a defence attorney might present to a jury to try to keep his client from going to jail. The better I presented my argument, the more money I might score.
Then there was the summer I wrote a love letter every day to my girlfriend at the time who took the opportunity to get away from me by going to summer camp. Those letters, looking back, were probably sappy enough to cause rock music icon Roy Orbison, who specialized in writing sad songs, to admonish me and tell me to, “Cheer up, for ‘Crying’ out loud!”
In any case, yesterday my sister called me with some news and I asked her if she’d gotten my letter yet. She hadn’t and was all excited to have been sent one.
“I will read it over and over and treasure it,” she said.
And I know she will.
Next up: Sending her photos of our family. She sends us photos all the time in the mail and we never send any back. That will soon change.
In this fast-paced society we live in, Betty’s feet are still on the ground.
And I am grateful they are.
My feet, on the other hand (can your feet be on your other hand?) are somewhere between clouds seven and nine. Fresh off this victory, one of these days I am going to walk right past our shower stall and lay me down into a piping hot, soapy puddle waiting for me in our bathtub. It might take me two days to get out of the damn thing, but it will be worth it. Back in the day, I used to smoke cigarettes and read a book in the tub. It’s a right bugger trying to do either one of those things, or both, in the shower. However, I have given a lot more shower concerts than I ever have done in the bathtub.
And it seems like forever since I fell asleep in the shower.
There is a place most of us have driven past from time to time and some of us have taken up residence there. It is a cute, tree-lined town where everything is seemingly in order but if you spend any time there at all, you will get a feeling that there is a disturbing rumbling underground, like the entire community was built on top of a simmering volcano. There are lots of smiles on the faces of the people there but they sometimes seem more painted on than real.
If you wonder whether or not you are heading to a life in Curmudgeonville, here are a few signposts that might tell you it is probably just over the next hill or two.
1. You start a lot of sentences, “When I was young …”.
2. Today’s music is crap. You know this even though you have never listened to today’s music.
3. Everything was so much better in the good old days.
4. You start a lot of sentences, “Young people today …”.
5. You worry about immigrants. You don’t know any immigrants, but they worry you. A lot.
6. Today’s TV shows are crap. You know this even though you never watch today’s TV shows. Ditto movies.
7. Nobody respects anybody anymore, especially their elders.
8. Teachers. (Fill in complaints here.)
9. Too much sex, sex, sex everywhere (except in your own bedroom.)
10. Human beings are toast and our planet is doomed.
11. You worry a lot about people swearing too much and ignoring God.
12. Too many people are living on free money, unlike you who works hard for every last red cent.
13. Cops, firefighters, postal workers (fill in complaints here).
14. Nobody knows their “place” anymore and we’d all be much happier if we did. Your place, for example, is a nice little house in the heart of Curmudgeonville, where there are double locks on all your doors, you pay $1.50 a year in taxes and riff raff are never seen or heard from.
15. Drugs. OMG. Drugs.
P.S. You don’t have to be old to live in Curmudgeonville.
P.P.S. I have hung around there a few times myself.
You try to hang onto a little bit of your former coolness as the years fly by, as hard a task as that is, and when a Grade 9 student asks if she can take your hat to school to show the other students, you feel kinda proud of yourself. You aren’t exactly like all the other dads and that makes you smile inside.
“Why do you want to take my hat?” you ask, just to hear her say she wants to impress her friends with her Dad’s cool choice of chapeau. But, alas, that isn’t it at all.
“It’s for history class,” she says. “We’re doing a segment on how people dressed in the forties and fifties and your hat is exactly the kind that paper boys from back then wore.”
Your mid-life crisis is long behind you (I was 46 when she was born) so this only hurts a little. But when history students are examining your wardrobe like archaeologists sifting through Tut’s tomb, it might be time for an extreme makeover.
(Update 2023: I wrote this piece 12 years ago and since then there have been so many style changes, I can’t keep up. I often tell my family I feel like a stranger in a strange land. There is no judgment implied in that comment. Just an observation that so many things keep changing around me all the time and it is sometimes hard to absorb the new ways. But change is inevitable and I welcome it all. I have nothing but complete faith in the generations coming up behind mine, though I know some people my age don’t agree society is heading in a good direction. But for me, as the Beatles sang, “It’s getting better all the time.” To illustrate. Yesterday I was about to settle up at the dentist’s office after some surgery, when a tall young man was doing the same with another receptionist. He was in shorts and a tee shirt. Every square inch of his exposed skin, except for his face and maybe his hands, was covered in intricate tattoos. He was polite and happy and doesn’t need my approval to carry on. If he doesn’t have that, he at least doesn’t have my disapproval. Like the Beatles, I let my hair grow long for a while. That didn’t always go down well with the elders. I was mocked a few times as a girl and other times, as a hippie. I remember a tough guy in our community who made it his mission to beat up hippies. I would see him now and then in the bar where I was working as a waiter. He left me alone as I am sure having his beer brought to him on demand mattered more than whatever it might have been about me he didn’t like. It’s kind of funny how well many barkeeps are treated for that very reason. And a dozen years later, now and then, I still wear the cap that was shown in history class. Just like its owner, perhaps, it’s become a little rough around the edges.)
Take heed, all ye apartment dwellers, and stay right where you are. You could be worse off. You could be in jail or living in an alley.
Or, even worse, you could be a homeowner.
When you own a house, you spend so much time in building supply stores other customers often take you for staff and start asking you questions about prices, where things are kept and how to use the various building materials on display. What’s even scarier is the fact that you’re able to tell them the answers. When the hardware store owner asks you to lock up behind you when you leave Saturday night, you know you’re in big trouble.
You spend the rest of your free time in banks begging for loans to pay for the house, at work trying to make enough money to pay back the loans and at relatives eating meals you can’t afford to buy for yourself because you took out loans to buy a house.
But these are all minor irritations. Compared to the major ones, these sometimes look like the joys of home ownership.
There are some benefits to owning a home, I guess – you can play the one Beatles record you possess as loudly as you like and you don’t have a balcony to fall off of, but still, there’s that one big drawback you just can’t get around: When you own a home, you don’t have a landlord. You’ve got nobody to scream at on the phone when the taps leak or the furnace quits. No one to castigate, blame and berate. Or sue.
And there are times you really need somebody like that.
For me, Monday night was one of those times.
By 9:30, the dishes were done, cats fed, house cleaned up and garbage taken out. I was heading to bed early for the first time in months. Nothing could stand in my way. Unless it could be the phone call I got from a neighbour at 9:45 p.m.
“Did you know the guy plowing snow in the parking lot next to you has dug up the lawn by your house and buried your telephone box in snow?” I was asked.
“WHAT?” I yelled. At 10 p.m., I was bundled up and standing by a truck next to my home, arguing with a snow plower I’d never met before about the dug up lawn, holding clumps of sod in my hands and engaged in a philosophical discussion about whether in the scheme of things, a lawn wrecked by a snow plower matters very much. He was of the opinion it doesn’t and I differed, of course.
So, we chatted on about this until his boss arrived in another truck to take part in the talks as well. At 10:20 p.m., the discussion was over and I was back in the house. By 10:45 p.m., I was calmed down and ready for bed again.
At 10:50 p.m., while turning off lights in the den, my wife found water dripping profusely through the ceiling in a closet there. After removing everything from the closet, I climbed up into the cold attic, armed with a tiny, disposable flashlight, the only one I could find. During Monday’s storm, snow had blown in through a gable vent and covered about 10 batts of pink insulation. The snow was now melting and coming through the ceiling.
At 11:10 p.m., I was on the phone to a friend who’s been a homeowner longer than I have, asking what to do.
At 11:30, I was back in the attic, shivering, scraping snow off a catwalk and off insulation.
By 11:45, I had removed most of the wet insulation and handed it down to my wife to carry to the basement to dry.
At 12:15 a.m., itchy from the insulation and angry from the aggravation, I finally crawled into bed.
My cat Mario and I have a lot in common. We are more alike than you might think a man and a cat could ever be.
To begin with, we are both old now, more days behind us than ahead of us. He is almost 18 in cat years and I am a little more than 10 in dog years.
We both have a touch of arthritis. We are incredibly picky eaters and very lucky guys to have found people to love us in spite of our quirky ways and our tendency to occasional outbursts of crankiness.
We have both lost brothers and are sometimes lost ourselves in our loneliness. We’ve given up a lot of the things of our youth. Neither one of us spends much time playing any more. That doesn’t mean we are unhappy, just that we’ve lost interest in some of the things that used to captivate us.
Mario still goes outside and enjoys doing so but he never leaves the property now and I rarely do as well. Our worlds are shrinking and I like to think that is by choice. We both love our backyard these days and when Mario sees me lounging in a lawnchair under one of our maple trees, he reaches for me to pick him up and sit him in my lap so I do.
Sometimes he sunbathes on the patio and falls asleep. I lie back in my chair and saw off in the shade.
But we do differ in some ways. He has a couple of more legs than I have and a long tail. All I can offer concerning his latter feature is a tailbone. Had I been ripping around the planet a few million years ago, who knows? I might have had a tail longer than his.
Mario isn’t much interested in human food and he doesn’t have to worry that I will eat his. He will still chase a rodent if one makes the mistake of crossing his path but his skills in that field have gone downhill. I haven’t hunted a wily groundhog since my days on the farm though I did chase one out of our yard a few years ago.
Mario sits on more laps than I ever do. He sleeps all day and wanders around at night. I napped during the day more in my twenties than I do in my seventies but like my younger self, I am still a nighthawk. As I write this, it is 4:45 a.m.
Added to these differences are our medications. He gets rabies shots once a year, I get a flu shot. We give him a little paste which helps reduce his furballs. I have no issue with furballs. I also don’t have to take any substance to ward off fleas. Flies and bees follow me around like rockstar groupies when I am outside but the fleas leave me alone.
But there is one major medication area where we are totally alike. (You knew something just had to be coming after reading all this, didn’t you.)
Mario and I both take the same laxative. It is made for humans but the vet recommended it for the cat as well. I pick it up at the pharmacy. We hide his in his soft food so he won’t detect it and refuse to consume it.
But I am braver than my cat. I pour mine in a saucer and lap it up.
Cat and man do have our issues but, all in all, we’re just a couple of totally regular guys.
That is one of my favourite sayings, describing, as it does so succinctly, the inevitable stages of many people’s lives.
But I think the world is in need of another new nugget regarding the aging process and I suggest this ripoff of the adage in the first paragraph: Once long hair, twice a buzz cut.
There are little signposts along the journey that let you know this is a one-way trip you’re on and the day you are told, by the person who looks after your hair, that you don’t really need to come back any more, you feel yourself in semi-shock.
“When you’re using the trimmer on your beard,” says the hair stylist, “just keep on going over the rest of your head.”
She fires up her clippers and takes a run at it, just to show me the way.
Suddenly, l am transported back to Fred Guy’s barbershop in the little village of Monkton near our farm home and the simplicity of what was known back then as a “brush cut.” A few waves of his magic wand and I was back in peak trim.
It’s a bit sad, of course, to be rounding this turn, but a bit liberating as well. I now have one black comb (a bit bent) and one blue brush (fairly new) for sale and expect to earn a fair sum for both. I no longer have to worry about my hair getting “mussed up” and my baseball caps have never fit better.
My total outlay from here on in on hair dryers I expect to add up, with both taxes added on, to zero. A bonus, I suppose, is that some people have been telling me all week that I look much neater. It was never one of my life’s goals to look neater, but I guess if this is considered a positive quality, then I’ll take it.
Another sign that time is moving ever so aggressively on has to do with a man’s “trousers” (as they call them in civilized, English-speaking nations) and how well they resist the pull of gravity.
I remember many years ago having a good chuckle watching a pair of pants fall down around the ankles of an “old” man next door. First of all, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he suddenly had a lot of extra baggage hovering just above his sock lines and secondly, upon discovering this fact, he seemed not to care one whit about it.
The other night, while racing to move some backyard topsoil before the sun went completely down, I bent to heave some rocks when I felt a “pop” followed by a loosening around the waist, sure signs that a button had fled the scene.
But hurry is a terrible thing, with the sun in such a rush to disappear, and so I decided to carry on. While hustling across the lawn with a wheelbarrow full of soil, I suddenly felt much cooler around the leg, thigh and groinal areas and knew that I had been struck by my karma: What we mock, we shall become!
Standing there in the middle of my yard with buzz cut above and no pants below, I had my “aha!” moment: Middle age seemed suddenly in my rear-view mirror.
My only possible salvation is the prospect that I might get in on a little of that “not caring a whit” attitude my neighbour seemed to have. Day by day, I feel that coming on and I can only think that that must be nature’s major compensation for all these completely undeserved changes.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that “Mother” Nature has a cruel streak.
I hate to be pessimistic, but it is getting to be an awful world out there. Bombings, torture, arson, assassinations. Environmental crimes. Hate crimes.
Our fellow humans are losing their minds and it is downright scary. What is all this mayhem leading to?
This is what we can look forward to. A woman in Maryland stole three french fries and, incredibly, ate them. She ate them right in front of the man she had stolen them from. You are reading that right. But take heart. The woman was not only hungry and lacked any moral compass, she was stupid enough to steal them in a restaurant from a plate which belonged to a police officer.
Wow!
Thank God, however, that the law moves decisively and quickly in our modern society. The officer arrested her right away and carted her off to jail where she belongs. She has been charged with second-degree theft.
On the arrest sheet, the fast-acting cop listed the items stolen as “French Fried Potato…quantity 3.”
Some might say this is too trivial an event for jail and a subsequent court appearance. Are you kidding me? Across the world, french fry theft is on the increase and out of control. Do you not read the news?
And if you think this is over the top, ask yourself this: Will french fry thieves stop at potatoes? Will they? No, they won’t. Left unchecked, they’ll go on to nab onion rings, salad fixins, gravy containers.
I hope this doesn’t sound like fear mongering, but sooner or later, they will drink your pop!
Good work Maryland police officer. In your honour, I am coining this new slogan: “French Fries Matter.”
I can’t wait for summer so I can get out into the Great Outdoors. The quality of my life will go up about 500 per cent when that blessed day comes that I can don shorts and sandals and venture out of doors (what a strange expression).
Fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away.
Groovin’, on a Sunday afternoon.
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of suuummarr!
Summer arrives soon and I’ll be there, on my front porch, to welcome it with wide open arms – arms that have been slathered with greasy, smelly sunscreen. I will look skyward and feel the warmth on my face and neck, both areas treated in the same fashion as my arms.
I will catch a glimpse of the sun, but not look directly into it, as I wear my UV ray deflecting clip-on sunglasses. My wide-brimmed hat will prevent that same golden globe in the heavens from toasting up the top of my head like a Sunday morning omelette in a frypan.
Yes, I will slide on my $40 sandals, which have more straps, sticky fasteners and clips than the average parachute. The straps will cut into my feet as I walk along, leading me to wonder how long I will be able to hold out on the inevitable fashion faux pas that lies in my future – the socks and sandals horror that befalls so many aging males on our direct and irreversible descent into total uncoolness.
On this day off work, I will glory in bending and stooping to pick up dog dung, tree twigs, discarded pop cans, chip bags and stones from my front lawn. I will water wildflowers and weeds alike and try to figure out which is which, taking a guess and yanking things out that look like they shouldn’t be there. I will err most of the time.
I will climb atop my stepladder and dig out by hand the heavy layer of maple keys and other rotted crap lining the insides of my eavestroughs and as I do I will enjoy the earwigs that slither down my arms and neck as they protest being disturbed from their beds.
From the interlocking paving stones below, I will sweep up the keys and the small mountains of sand that have been excavated and elevatored to the surface by the millions of ants that live in their underground towns and villages, maybe even cities, in my yard.
At lunch, I will attempt to barbecue and finding my propane tank empty, will carry the light container across the street to the gas station and haul the very heavy full one back, enjoying the sensation of the sharp steel cutting into my hand and the dead-heavy canister pulling my arm from its socket.
Finally, a family lunch of burgers, corn on the cob and watermelon out of doors which we share under the maple tree around the plastic table and chairs from which I have spent half an hour with water pail, sponge and garden hose removing bird droppings.
Eating this tasty meal will involve a lot of handwaving and vigilance to ensure that part of the diet does not involve those little black beer bugs or strawberry beetles or whatever they are. I don’t like those guys.
Finally, after an afternoon of cutting lawn, trimming bushes, cleaning shed and garage and swallowing gallons of cold liquid to replenish my dehydrated body, all the while trying to avoid the intense interest of bumblebees the size of hummingbirds and wasps with murder in their hearts, there is time for a little front porch sitdown to enjoy the setting sun.
But first, all exposed skin must be slathered with insect repellent – making sure it has DEET – to avoid those mosquito bites that could pass on to me a lively dose of West Nile Virus. Having missed a spot or two, I will spend some time later administering calamine lotion on the lucky targets those flying finks found before going to bed to enjoy tossing and turning during the long, hot, humid night.
This is a tale of tragedy, trickery, treachery and maybe even treason. Most of all, betrayal.
You might have to follow the bouncing ball here a bit but I promise I would not relate this story to you unless it was of some vital importance. And I am still a little too emotionally overwrought to write clearly.
Last night my wife and I attended a very nice event and sat down to a wonderful banquet, served at our table which we shared with several others. The most important feature of the meal was the gravy, of course. It is commonly known that if there is no gravy, it is usually not worth the effort to even pick up your knife and fork.
When this wonderful food was consumed and enjoyed, we were advised by the wait staff to hang onto our forks, that we would need them. That is a very encouraging sign at any meal. It means there is dessert on its way. The main course, after all, is just something to get out of the way so that you can have dessert. Tale as old as time.
I need to preface the rest of the story by setting some ground rules. People insist on concocting desserts, pies very often, out of various organic materials that were never intended to be served up to humans as an after-dinner confection. Here are some “foods” that are not suitable for consuming at any time, especially after a meal. Rhubarb tops the list, of course. What depraved person first looked at a rhubarb plant and thought, “That would make an excellent pie.”? Similarly, raspberries, suitable for jam only, are wholly wrong in a pie. Apples are a wonderful fruit but to use them in any way other than their natural form is just wrong.
And, it doesn’t even need to be said, that people who bake pumpkin pies should be incarcerated, hopefully with a breaking rocks schedule added to their sentence specifics.
But the good news is, the humble cherry can be used in any of a hundred ways and not one of them is wrong. The cherry pie is the human’s ultimate achievement, moon landing a distant second place. The first person to ever bake up a cherry cheesecake needs to be given sainthood status by the Pope.
Dessert came.
What the hell?
Two fluffy cake-like affairs that were unidentifiable and it is a truism that if a thing cannot be identified, it should not be consumed.
My wife was helpful. The dessert I had been randomly assigned was some sort of rhubarb affair. Oh no! It had a redness to it that was not appealing. Little red things sticking out here and there.
The stranger across the table from me had some other substance. My wife declared that it was an apple cake of some horrific assembly.
“I like rhubarb,” said the man across from me, obviously deranged. He scared me a little.
I generously switched desserts with him. He could have my bloodshot rhubarb disaster and I would take his apple monstrosity. He tore into his newfound gift, I laboured over mine.
When he was close to finished, he got a closer look at everything and declared, “Hey, this isn’t rhubarb. It’s cherry!”
I looked more closely at my dessert. There were green things sticking out of it, items that seemed horribly familiar. They were rhubarb chunks.
I had had a wonderful cherry dessert delivered to me and traded it away, on the erroneous information supplied to me by my own wife, for a rhubarb cake.
Here is the definition of hell. You eat a rhubarb cake, feel faint as you most assuredly would, then fall face first into a pumpkin pie. Fortunately, there were no pumpkins involved in this affair. The authorities have been keeping a close watch on the kitchen staff at this place, which has served pumpkin in the past and been warned not to do it again.
As you might expect me to do and will congratulate me for having the courage to do it, I made a big stink right there and then about my betrayal. The display of righteous indignation paid off. There was one more cherry dessert left in the kitchen and it was brought out in a special container and given to me for later.
There was silence between my wife and I all the way home in the car following the dinner. I am hoping we will be speaking again by Thanksgiving.
