I took a serious fall recently and cracked my head open on a piece of concrete furniture. Ambulance. Hospital. Deep wound. Injured shoulder. Tendon separated from a knuckle on my left ring finger.
My wife said “You need to buy a lottery ticket.”
Vegas is a dystopian distortion of reality but you know that before you arrive so you get ready for the ‘shock’ that it is. Even with that though, I have to say that the image of a very heavy man wearing a blond Trump wig, an American flag vest, cowboy boots and NOTHING else was quite a sight.
Author’s Note: I introduced Edith and Finn, the young French Bulldog and Labrador with my first children’s book “Edith and Finn: Adventures with a Capital A’. And then along came Frankie, a beautiful black Labradane. She joined in with Edith and Winnie as though they’d known each other all their lives, which given that they were all puppies had not been very long.
In real life, Edith and Finn were two young puppies and they inspired me to write children’s books. My first is called: ‘Edith and Finn Adventures with a Capital A’ and this is an excerpt. The books ‘Edith and Finn Adventures with a Capital A’ and ‘Edith and Frankie More Adventures with a Capital A’ are a great read for children between 7 – 12 years of age. They are available through any bookstore or online at Amazon.ca etc by title or author name, Tony Peyton.
It took me a moment to absorb the absurdity of it all. If I was to understand the Homesense clerk correctly, we were to go online and try to find the specific lock for that cabinet which as it turns out had been made in India. What were the chances!? Alternatively, one imagines she thought we might get in our car and go from hardware store to hardware store until we located an equivalent lock. For which we were to receive a $10 discount. The mind reels at the possibilities.
My granddaughter Rowe is just eighteen months old and she calls me ‘Bumpy’. It’s the best! It makes me feel younger, more lighthearted every time she says it. And that’s a good thing because the fact is I’m barreling down a one way track which if I’m to believe the pessimists among us, has a dead end. What a drag. I’ve never been happier bad knees, relentless peeing and general grumpiness notwithstanding. Never been happier. And now! NOW I’m supposed to be good with it all ending?! I don’t think so.
A young Canadian woman in this century is free and empowered in ways that her predecessors could only ever dream of. So here’s the thing, if you don’t know where that came from, how hard it was to achieve, what sacrifices needed to be made you may take it all for granted.
But here’s another thing: If you don’t protect it, value it and guard it, fight for it the way others before you did, we will take it back!
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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