I just came from my latest checkup by my doctor and he was really pleased. Apparently, I am going to live forever. He didn’t exactly use those words but I am a very perceptive person, always have been, and I am sure that is what he meant to say.
I don’t mind the prospect of living forever – my family will be spared the funeral costs – but I can see my would-be heirs getting a little cranky when they can’t get their hands on Dad’s fortune. I feel badly for them but I will defer to my buddy Warren Buffett who says he wants his kids to have enough that they can do something, but not so much that they can do nothing.
At least by living forever, I will probably get a mention in any number of record books as the centuries go by and that has always been my dream. I want to be unforgettable and living forever will probably help that goal come about.
The other piece of good news, as if living forever wasn’t enough, is, by all estimations, I keep getting better looking each year.
Yay for me!
All those unfortunate young women who threw me overboard for some other more-promising adonis, must be weeping big tears now!
I sat down at the computer this morning to discover that about 60,000 emails were missing. I had them all neatly divided into about 20 folders according to category, from business, to banking, to family history and friends. The proper response to something like this, of course, is to go stark raving nuts and so that is what I did.
I tore apart my filing cabinet looking for the name of a person at my Internet company and her email finally in hand, I sent off a sharply worded message which contained only about three Canadian “sorry to bother you’s” as opposed to my usual number. I think she got the message because I also used the words “nasty surprise.” That will tune her in, I surmised.
Then I found her phone number and called but had to leave a message. My barely contained rage properly seeped into my message which started off with an apology, of course, and I might have also repeated “nasty surprise”. The woman did not immediately call me back, as she probably rushed into her boss’s office to resign as soon as she heard my enraged voice on her message machine.
So, I called another woman who I spoke to before she forwarded me to a third woman for whom I left what was by now a familiar anger-tinged and panicky message.
Finally, the first woman called me back, after apparently having reconsidered her decision to quit her job, and she listened patiently as I raved on about my important emails and then she put me through to technical support. A very nice man then tried to walk me through the whole mess and he could honestly not figure out why my email folders were gone.
But, he told me not to worry, they would be somewhere on my computer. And right about then, and his mentioning “my computer”, a little light went on. Sometimes, it is very dark in my brain but now and then, there is a dim illumination. Low wattage, kind of like a night light. And this light told me I was not at MY COMPUTER but instead had sat down at my wife’s machine where, of course, my email folders would never be.
I thanked the young fella, ran downstairs to my computer and presto changeo, there were my emails. Almost twice as many as Hillary Clinton deleted so long ago.
So, three poor women and an unfortunate man, suffered the barely contained Wrath of Jim. Which, on reflection, does not surprise me. Two days ago, my cat died.
I won’t speak for other men, but that’s often how this one reacts to this sort of loss. I would gladly lose two million emails if I could have my little buddy back again.
I recently wrote about the first personal computer I bought in 1994 and how the one I have now has 500 times the amount of RAM that my first one had and how its hard drive is 2,000 times bigger.
My first computer cost $4,000; my newest one cost $400. If my newest one was priced the same as the first one but the price was based on the amount of RAM, it would have cost me two million dollars.
If the price was based on the size of the hard drive, it would have cost eight million dollars.
Now, let’s go the other way. My newest computer which I bought in 2011 cost me only 10 per cent of what I paid for my first one. If that trend continues, a computer I buy in 2028, should cost me between 20 cents and 80 cents and, of course, be between 500 and 2,000 times more powerful than my newest one.
But here’s the sad thing. I might not be able to afford a new one, even at those low prices, by then.
My admiration for Stephen Hawking just keeps going up and up. Today, a headline says Hawking may have just unlocked one of science’s biggest mysteries.
Appearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on Tuesday, the acclaimed physicist presented his theory before a packed house of scientists.
Here is his discovery: When particles enter a black hole they leave traces of their information on the event horizon. When the particles leave, they carry some of that information back out. This phenomenon has been called “Hawking Radiation.”
I don’t want to puff myself up but I had a similar theory a long time ago. However, nobody took me seriously when I told them.
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon,” Hawking said. “The event horizon is the sort of shell around a black hole, past which all matter will be drawn into the dense object’s powerful embrace.”
He continued: “The information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the ingoing particles [from the source star] cause. The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. For all practical purposes the info is lost.”
Is there nothing this man can’t figure out?
I will be totally with him once I find out how all that music gets inside my transistor radio and comes back out again. Sometimes it feels like my brain is a black hole, where information goes in but can never get out again. It would not surprise me to learn that Hawking had something to do with that.
I grew up in Canada on what was called a “mixed farm” although almost all of the varied things that were raised and grown were gone by the time I came along.
But even though they were gone, we would play in the empty henhouse where the chickens had been. There were unused beehives sitting beside the garage. I know we used to have geese as my Dad was attacked by a gander when he was five years old. He grabbed the big bird by its neck and hung on till the vicious pecking was over.
We had pigs, cows, beef cattle and horses along with the geese and the chickens. And in a 10-acre field west of the house there was a large orchard, all the trees in neat rows, though the fruit was never taken care of in my day and was often scabby. There were lots of apple trees of many varieties from red apples (maybe macs?) to yellow harvest apples and these huge “cooking” apples that were terrible to eat – very pulpy – but good for making pies and cider. The darned things were half way between a very large apple and a small pumpkin.
There were also some plum and pear trees in the orchard though the season was usually too short for the fruit on those trees to ripen. The branches of the trees hung low and when a friend brought his pony around one day and I got on it to ride a horse for the first time, the little dickens headed straight for the fruit trees at a fair clip knowing the branches would scrape me off its back, which they did.
My favourite fruit tree of all was a cherry tree located near the road. I remember the red cherries would be ripe by the last day of school in June and I would climb up there and fight the birds – and sometimes my siblings – for them. The birds were easier to chase away than the siblings. Even when the cherries were gone I would sit up in the tree and watch people come and go on the road. I always thought they couldn’t see me so that was kind of thrilling and mysterious.
All of these things were features of the way my grandparents farmed and they gradually went out of use when their day passed along with the mixed farm. One thing that did remain was a massive vegetable garden. That was a great place to go with a salt shaker. I’d pick tomatoes, wet them with my tongue, cover them with salt and eat them. Heaven.
The mixed farm is long gone almost everywhere now but can still be found in Mennonite Country north of where I grew up. It isn’t just their clothing and horses and buggies that harken back to a much earlier, simpler, quieter time. Most of them have no hydro, though some of their “modern” neighbours and relatives do. Their yards are impeccable and their fences are built with wooden posts and woven wire. And most of them have all the creatures my ancestors had including pigs, geese, chickens, cows and horses. Lots of horses.
Some may even “keep” bees. The only sweetener in the old days was honey. Even in my grandparents’ time, white sugar was not allowed on the table during our meals.
For years, I have been driving to the city every six months for treatment and examination by a medical specialist. She is a marvelous doctor and a wonderful person. She always asks about my family and from one visit to the next, she somehow remembers details of what we talked about, no small challenge given the number of patients she sees every day.
I really enjoy our encounters but they are always too brief. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, she disappears from the room. I expect her to come back, but she doesn’t. She never says goodbye. I suppose if she ever does say goodbye, it might be because she expects to never see me again. For some awful reason I don’t want to think about.
Finally, a nurse comes in and shoos me away. This doctor, besides being very interested in my life and the lives of my wife, son and daughter, has a great sense of humour and is also very wise. I always have food for thought on my one-hour journey home after each appointment.
Last week, she was a bit concerned about something she saw and did a biopsy on me. Her nurse would call me with the results she told me just before she bolted from the room.
The nurse called this week with the all clear. I am going to live to be at least 125. While I took in that good news and breathed a sigh of relief, I was crestfallen at the rest of her message to me.
“The doctor would like to see you in a year’s time,” she said, before setting a date for the visit.
In the last 15 years, this will be the first time I will go a full year without seeing the doctor. Normally, I would assume, a person would be over the moon at the news they don’t have to see their specialist for another year. And with most specialists, I guess, I would be too.
But darn it, this is going to be a long 12 months.
When I look out my kitchen window in the evening, or even in the middle of the night when I sometimes get out of bed for a snack, I can see a light in the upstairs window of a neighbour’s house behind us and a few doors down. I don’t know why, but that light gives me comfort.
The light shines through a green curtain, so it isn’t vivid; it’s nice and soft. I think it might be coming from a kitchen, maybe a light over a stove (this is an upstairs apartment in a house, the first floor is a business office.) I don’t know who lives there. I’ve never seen anyone in the window and don’t expect I ever will.
Still, just knowing that light is there makes me feel good. All is right with the world.
In the winter, when I am watering our backyard skating rink at 2 a.m., I glance up at the light and feel warm, despite the cold.
Once in a while, sometimes on weekends, I look out my window to see the light is not on and strangely enough, I feel slightly ill at ease. I assume whoever lives there has gone away for the weekend.
I don’t know where this comes from, this need for this kind of comfort. Maybe it’s a leftover thing from my early days on the farm when houses seemed so far apart and a yard light or light from a window was nice to see. Or maybe it’s a caveman thing – the light from the fire would keep the predators away at night.
I just hope my neighbour doesn’t move out some day and is replaced by an energy-saving tenant who prefers to live in the dark.
I met Tom about 30 years ago. For the rest of this column, I will refer to him as Tom (because that is his name.) I think at that first meeting, we were sitting in a coffee shop near my place, and he looked over with a big smile and said “Hi.” As it turns out, that is the one and only thing he has ever said to me that I have completely understood.
On that first evening, he talked and I listened and nodded. Every “conversation” we have had since that time, and we’ve had about a dozen of them, went the same way. Tom talked and I nodded. Because he seems to be a genius and I seem to not be a genius, it has been like a dog explaining barking to a cat. But maybe I am a good listener.
Tom knows all about two things very, very well: short wave radio and cars. I know very little about either one. For a long time, I thought a cattle littick converter was an instrument we used on the farm to turn a bull into not a bull. (That was fun.)
So, he talked radio and he talked the inner workings of cars and I felt like a Martian trying to understand a St. Patrick’s Day parade. (Or maybe only a Martian could.) I am polite, so I never interrupted him. Also, nothing he has ever said to me interested me enough to want to know more about it so I asked few questions.
But here’s the funny thing.
I didn’t mind listening to Tom. It was almost like watching a nice sunset. You don’t understand it, so you just enjoy it. Maybe I didn’t absolutely love every one of these sessions, to be honest, but there was something about his unrelenting enthusiasm for his two main interests in life that was infectious.
However, I usually walked away from every conversation wondering if, in fact, I am actually a stupid human being. I am not convinced that I am not. Why can’t I get any of this stuff after all these years?
Tom and I haven’t run into each other in almost a decade. Today, I pulled into a parking lot right beside him. I had my window down, he had his down and we faced each other. Tom started talking to me as though we had spent two hours in the coffee shop last night and were just completing a subject we had started. He seemed to think in his mind that he was picking up exactly where we left off talking in our last meeting 10 years ago. And who knows? He is so brilliant, maybe he does remember exactly where we left off. As for me, I can’t remember whether or not I showered this morning.
So, for 15 minutes, Tom told me about cars and short wave radios and I understood exactly as much as I did at our first meeting 30 years ago and at every subsequent meeting. But it’s the darndest thing. When he pulled out of the parking lot, my day seemed a little brighter. I had said four words, he had said 4,000 but I would say I came out ahead. Not any smarter, just somehow a little happier.
I just hope I can remember where we left off when we next talk-listen 10 years from now or so. I am sure that he will and that I won’t. And that it won’t matter.
It won’t take me long to get up to speed because when we are together, I am travelling about two miles an hour. I guess I am kind of like a long-wave radio, if there is such a thing. You know, the kind of station you can hardly hear late at night because it’s being crowded out by all the biggest stations.
I had a stress test one recent Saturday. I had thought living in the city in a small house in 2014 with a wife, two teens, five gerbils, two cats, a dog, two cars and more bills than a pond full of ducks was a sort of 24/7 stress test but apparently the authorities did not think that was official enough.
So off I went in loose-fitting clothing (at 65, is there any other kind?) to find a clinic in a nearby city, an office I’d never been to. Driving up and down a busy four-lane street looking for a number on a building was the start of the stress test, I guess. When I finally found it, I rushed in the door to a lobby filled with older people, half of them with great big intravenous syringes sticking out of their forearms. Well, that’s too bad for them, I thought, but that wouldn’t be happening to me. I was just here to go running around on a treadmill.
I introduced myself at the front desk and was given a “release” to read and sign. For maybe the first time in my life, I read something I was about to affix my John Henry to and the blood rushed from my head to my toes as I took in the words on the page. “This test,” one sentence read, “occasionally results in a heart attack and very rarely, death.” Okay, I thought, this piece of paper must be a clever beginning to the stress test. A doctor, somewhere, watching me on a monitor fed by a hidden camera, was looking for my reaction to the news that I was about to sign a piece of paper which said to the authorities, “Yes, go ahead and kill me and see if I care.” If they wanted me to tense up, mission accomplished.
It was all becoming clear to me now in an instant. On the phone with a sister the day before, I was planning a family Christmas party for Sunday. “But aren’t you having a stress test on Saturday?” she asked, as though she knew I would not be at the party. That was also why my wife wanted to come with me – so she could drive the car home as she knew I wouldn’t be. And why she called on my cellphone before I went into the clinic to say, “I love you.”
OH MY GOD! THIS IS IT!
It occurred to me to set down the paper and run out of the building but I have been trained to trust the authorities in all matters and so I signed it and said my prayers. One by one the syringe people were called into another room but I don’t remember seeing them coming back out. They were probably being taken out the back door and driven away in hearses.
Finally, as in a dream, I heard my name being called. And a few minutes later, I was sitting back in the lobby with a great big syringe taped to my arm, about the size they’d use to inoculate a giraffe. An hour later (do you know how many thoughts can go through a person’s head in an hour? I don’t either because there was only one in mine: I AM GOING TO DIE!!!) I was called back into the other room which was very pleasant looking, almost like a fitness centre or a very modern mortuary. I was placed on my back in this tube-like thing to have my heart photographed so they could recognize it later after taking it out and putting it in a cooler, I thought. I was told to lie perfectly still with my arms above my head for 15 minutes and under no circumstances, was I to fall asleep. So, I fell right to sleep. I often do that when I am COMPLETELY STRESSED OUT.
Back to the lobby for another hour to mull over my impending doom along with the doctor’s scolding for my having fallen asleep. Called back in finally, I went into a small room with a very nice-looking young woman with the most intoxicating smile I’ve ever seen. The first thing she did was pull off my sweatshirt which was a struggle as she had to somehow get the sleeve over the IV in my arm without yanking it out.
“Women are always trying to get my clothes off,” I joked with her. “Well, it looks like I was successful,” she laughed as the top finally popped off.
“Believe me,” I replied, “any women who try to get my clothes off are always successful!”
She seemed to think that was a reasonable reply so to punish me she put me on a treadmill. After a few minutes of huffing and puffing I thought they may as well warm up their hearse. But the worst was yet to come. This nice young woman, obviously offended by my low-brow humour, kept speeding up the treadmill and tilting it higher and higher till I felt like one of those fancy dancers in Singing in the Rain who somehow dances right up the side of a wall.
A doctor came in and started taking my blood pressure every few minutes. In my imagination, I thought I heard a great big Cadillac – the kind funeral homes like to use – warming up in the parking lot. But eventually, just when I thought St. Peter would soon be giving me a scolding, the treadmill slowed down and stopped, the nurse smiled at me and handed me my top and she told me my fast was over and that I could go out and eat whatever I wanted to.
Like all health-conscious people who’ve just had a heart test do, I headed straight to a restaurant for a pizza and can of pop.
A week later, my doctor called to tell me the results: My heart is as good as new. When the Toronto Maple Leafs call me up, I’ll be ready.
Years ago, a farmer in southern Canada not far from where I live made a series of very bad decisions one night.
The first one was to leave a local hotel in a drunken state and start up his car for the ride home. His second foolish move was to try to outrun the police who attempted to pull him over. A high-speed chase ensued through the countryside.
The farmer drove straight (well, maybe not so straight) home, in the laneway and right up his barn bank. He jumped out of his car and following another very bad bright idea he had, he hauled open the gigantic doors at the top of the bank and drove his car into the upstairs of his barn. He then closed the doors. The perfect crime.
The police, still in hot pursuit, would never find him.
In one final dumb decision for the ages, the farmer then climbed back into his car to move it ahead but tramped too hard on the gas and crashed right through another set of doors on the other side of the barn. The car went flying out the second storey of the barn and landed in a huge pile of cow manure in the barnyard.
I am not sure of the outcome of the whole sordid episode but I do know he had landed himself in deep shit.
