I wrote this piece two years ago and have just reread it after my friend Bob Butler recently went through a life threatening medical emergency. I’ll save you the details other than to say he is well on his way to a full recovery, about which we are all thrilled. He is the same Bob Butler I wrote about two years ago in this blog, the man I nicknamed ‘Stand Up’, a man with a huge sense of humour, a vivid man with an insatiable appetite for the life he has been given and a man who will not go quietly into the night. Well played Bob, see you soon.

“Getting older son, is not for the faint of heart.” I’ve never forgotten my father’s words to me. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself and he wan’t seeking pity. He was a soldier and was just reciting a statement of fact, as he understood it.

Well actually, when you think about it getting older is for the faint of heart! It’s exactly what getting older is all about. Although, that’s just being cheeky, something my father would not have appreciated. My dad was not given to exaggeration, no more ‘straight forward, look you in the eye, tell you what he thought’ man have I ever known. He was a good man, born into a generation who went off to war at the age of eighteen returning six years later, changed. He had reason to be bitter and angry through it all. I can’t say I wouldn’t have been had I lived his life. But he wasn’t. Through to his dying days he lived his life square to the wind, taking it all in stride, bravely and with humour. With humour.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard my father saying it though. Turns out he was a wise old owl after all. Sure got my attention. What did I know, I was forty-four years old? Wet behind the ears! It felt like some old mariners warning about rough weather ahead. And what’s worse it appeared, if I was hearing my father correctly, no course correction was available. He seemed to be saying, no navigational adjustment would avoid this ‘rough weather’ of which he spoke.

So now, nearly thirty years on, it is safe to say I am steaming through these very same ‘rough waters’ about which dad was warning me. I need to say this right off the top. I don’t know much about anything. I don’t enjoy any particular navigational wisdoms, never have. If I did I surely to God would have used them to avoid some of my more memorable ‘car crashes’. No, I am just an ordinary man, still blessed with a reasonable capacity to think for myself with which I chart my course through the waters ahead. I know, I’m not in complete control of the course and that the journey at some point will be stormy but right now, in this moment, I’m good to go.

I’ve always had the ability to be a miserable old prick! I always loved a good argument and I lived with visibility. Each of my four children will recall me saying, ‘Stand up for something from time to time. Or stand for nothing.‘ I still think that. So from time to time, I drew ‘heat’, not necessarily the good heat, the comforting warming kind of heat. No, this was more like the scalding kind of heat I’m talking about. But that’s okay, it’s kind of how I wanted it. But now that I’m seventy-two my appetite has changed. I’ve become less opinionated and more observational and in those observations I have realized one thing: We are funny. And the older we get the funnier we are. For me, it helps. It helps me navigate the choppy seas and rough water my father warned me about so long ago. And that surely is what our sense of humour is for, to be used as a salve, something to give us comfort and respite. Without humour I’m simply left with sore knees, declining health and ever diminishing prospects for a long life. Some combination of meds and laughter is my prescription. Controlled meds, endless amounts of laughter.

“You know you’re getting old when you bend over to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.” George Burns

In the summer of 2020 I received a Telegram from the Dark Side, at least that’s what I came to call it, once the dust had settled. The short version is that one morning out of nowhere I had a frightening episode, something they call Transient Global Amnesia, let’s say TGA going forward. Google it, it’s a thing. The Cole’s notes? It mimics a stroke (see how I did the cross generational references, Cole’s and Google). It was early one morning and I had just finished sending some radio voice work to my producer. When my wife Mac came to find me I was sitting looking nowhere in particular with a very ‘spaced out’ look in my eye. She’s a nurse and thought immediately that I was having a stroke. My son Toby is a firefighter, a first responder and he thought the same thing; my symptoms classically mimicked a stroke. So, they rushed me to the Nanaimo General Hospital. Within a few minutes (I’m told all of this because to this day I have no recollection of this part of the event), I was being examined by an emergency room doctor. He had me count back from one hundred in sevens, move my limbs on command and he engaged me in conversation (so I am told). He sent me for a CAT scan and spoke to my wife, who by this time thought our lives, going forward, had changed forever. When I returned the doctor said to Mac,

“I don’t think it’s a stroke, it’s TGA.”

“TGA?” asked Mac, “I’ve been a nurse for nearly forty years, I’ve never heard of TGA.”

“I know” said the doc, “It’s rare but it happens to men Tony’s age sometimes. It’s not a stroke it’s called Transient Global Amnesia.”

“Is there any damage?”

“No, none at all. These things come and go in a few hours.”

Mac was thrilled. She was certain I’d had a stroke and we would be leaving that hospital to a very different reality.

“So we should get a follow up neurological?”

“Can if you want” said the doc, “but it’s not needed.”

So I have no memory of any of this, all of this I’ve been told, so you’ll understand if it lacks for detail. But I’ll never forget my very first recollection after the TGA.

“Here let me take that off your face” the doctor spoke to me and reached over to remove a red face mask I had worn into the hospital (it was the Time of Covid and one of the requirements), “It’s not right to wear your wife’s underwear on your face in here.”

And there it was. Humour. I do recall laughing out loud. In that moment, in that place, that was funny. Perhaps the doctor was testing me to see if I had a sense of humour, to see if I was ‘present’ again or perhaps he just knew the power of humour to help patients under stress. I remember it vividly. I was scared at the time and the sound of my own laughter was comforting to me, a kind of ‘you’re okay Tony, you’ve got this’. In any event, it worked and for me it remains as good an example of just how important laughter is.

Now I have read as much as I can about humour and laughter. My youngest granddaughter Rowe is just five months old as I write. Absolutely adorable BTW. And she laughs. She laughs a real ‘now that’s funny’ laugh and not just from obvious physical stimulation like tickling. Rowe laughs out loud, a real giggle, at funny faces and classic games like Peek a Boo. And of course I’m not suggesting Rowe is special or gifted although she is of course. All babies laugh and they do so as much as a year before they talk. So what is it about laughing. There is no doubt in my mind that she is communicating, her sense of humour developed way ahead of other communications skills. And that makes sense to me. Humans use humour and laughter to connect with one another from the earliest age, communicating a sense of safety and relationship and trust and belonging, the simple sound giving comfort to an anxious young parent. It is not a learned behaviour, it is as though we come with the laughter ‘app’ embedded. Birth to death humans use humour to help ourselves along the path.

We have a summer place in Deep Bay on Vancouver Island. It’s a humble adobe but a magnificent escape for those of us lucky enough to spend our summer months there. Most of our neighbours are seventy plus and if there was a place where humour thrives it is at the Deep Bay RV Park in Bowser BC. Think ‘Schitt’s Creek meets a seniors home‘. One of our neighbours is Bob Butler. He and his wife Jodi welcomed us with open arms when we first arrived telling us “if the campfire is on, you’re welcome to come over“. Little did we know that Bob and Jodi’s campfire is always on and we have spent many, many hours around that campfire each summer, telling stories and laughing. Always laughing. It feels healthy because it is healthy. I nicknamed Bob ‘Stand Up’ and for good reason. He loves his pot and he would always stand up around their campfire, all lit up, regaling his guests with tales from his glory years. And he is funny, always cooking something up. Literally. He had a smoker, two barbecues, an outdoor kitchen and pot, lots and lots of pot. In fact, he was a pot smoker from way back, preferring the generational baby boomer distrust of government, always hiding his joints in the palm of his left hand, notwithstanding pot had been legalized years earlier, the burn marks on the palm of his hand the scarred testament.

“Hey Stand Up!”

‘What Tony?”

“You know pot is legal now. You don’t need to hide the joint in the palm of your hand anymore.”

“Yeh Tony, I know” he replied with that ever present Bobby smile, a laugh gathering in his chest, “but I just can’t get used to it.” And out it came, all coiled and ready he laughed out loud. See, here’s the thing. Bob gets it. He understands, quite apart from whatever is going to get him eventually that humour and laughter make a huge difference, every day, to that voyage.

Knowing Bobby Butler is a wee bit like humour. For those of us lucky enough to know him, he may not make any difference in how long we live but without any doubt he makes our lives different. And we’re all the better for it.

SUBSCRIBE: If you would like to subscribe to my weekly blog visit http://www.tonywithacapitalt.ca There is no cost of course, something which exists in direct relation to its value.