Fumiko and Ainsley
Authors note: I spend most of my summers in Deep Bay BC. It’s a beautiful secret and I know how lucky I am. It is easy to imagine times gone by and the people who were there and make up stories about them. Fumiko is an imagination. Ainsley is not. When I wrote this they were both ten.
Aaarrrggghhh!
So let me be clear this is not just a miserable old man spitting into the wind about ‘this modern world’. This is a 74 year old man observing that for all of our extraordinary capacity to communicate we are running the risk of losing our ability to communicate. We have allowed machines to replace our ability to communicate and we have allowed the makers of these machines to persuade us that they are better at communicating than we are. It is brilliant marketing but it rings hollow.
Don’t Kick the Bucket
So here’s my thesis. I think old men are undervalued and unseen for the most part. So for the past few years I have been watching old men, observing them in their natural habitat. That became all that much easier the moment I became an old man myself.
Oooophing
This morning when I got up I made a sound. No not that sound. That sound squeezes from all of us no matter the age, from an early age. No this sound is more like an ‘Ooooph’. It started a few years ago, I’d say around sixty-five.
Pussy Wash
I have to say though that watching the unfolding campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has triggered memories of a time when I tried politics. It was 1967 and I ran for Student Council at the University of Victoria.
My Most Favourite Post
I hope you’ll accept this rather weak, shallow and opportunistic explanation for this week’s blog. You see my wife Mac and I have been moving into our new townhouse. Is there a more loathsome task? That is a rhetorical question and in case you’re not good with rhetoric, the answer is NO! I should acknowledge lest you think I am just a miserable old man …
Time Passages
I tell you what, this getting old thing is relentless and has changed the way I think. There are endless euphemisms of course, usually employed in some desperate attempt to avoid the ‘old’ word: The Golden Years, Well Seasoned, Experienced, Mature.
My ass! The word is ‘old’. Time to embrace it.
My American Friends
As I write America may be on the verge of the most impactful social, cultural and political change in a century. Vice President Kamala Harris may be elected as the 47th President. It is change long since past due. There will be pain and disruption of course, there is too much at stake for power to be handed over easily.
The Builder
“My mistress, the Countess Bubna-Litic does not dither around the question. She has had a dream for some time now to build a magnificent destination resort hotel on the shores of Lake Okanagan. She has picked out the land and now she wants to build her hotel and that is what she wants to talk to you about.”
Micro Glimmering
I told you he was eighty, his body the predictable vestibule for things that ache and break in any eighty year old. But he wasn’t eighty, nope in that moment he was twelve, if even for just few minutes he was the twelve year old boy who had always loved being Silly.