I remember during the Christmas holidays how my parents would raise a toast to ‘Absent Friends’. It was not a passing moment either, they would both privately linger obviously thinking back and remembering. I joined them of course but I didn’t get it, not really. How could I? I was a callow teenager. I had no absent friends.
These Stories from Afar are not important stories, they are just my stories, little nuggets from a lifetime of living. I hope that in the listening they offer some pleasure, some amusement and some insight to my place in time, the path I trod and who I am to you be that as a parent, grandparent, a friend or a stranger.
So it’s December again, which at my age is a good thing, and I’ve decided to lighten up for the entire month. Enough with my bloviating ‘this – es and thats!’ It’s time we smiled and laughed (if we can) and simply count our blessings. Mine are too many to mention. Although that has never stopped me before. So why start now?
I wrote this some years ago and read it each year at our family Christmas table. I have learned how to love. I have strived and failed and succeeded in no particular order and I have been humbled. Through it all my family has always been there, teaching me, unwavering.
America is a country bitterly divided by racial hatred. History shows us that great powers, great empires aren’t defeated in battle by foreign enemies, they are defeated from within. As with any cancer. From within the battle rages.
As I am writing this my house is very quiet. Well, other than the rythmic snoring of our French Bulldog Edith that is. My wife is away for the week on a course and our house is empty. Empty and so quiet and after just a few days that emptiness has washed over me. I feel uneasy in my loneliness.
I am writing a novel, an historical fiction called ‘Bubna’. It is a story about one of the most eccentric and impactful women to have ever emigrated to Canada. She arrived in 1914, eventually settling in Kelowna BC to build the Hotel Eldorado on the shores of Lake Okanagan. It was an astonishing achievement one of many in her life
‘Go Canada Go!’
It’s not exactly your heart pounding populist mantra. Even drunk it’s tough to get all lathered up about it. I know I’ve tried it. A few times. It’s so humiliating. Even ‘Go Canada Go’ is nice. Fact is we are nice. And it is more than just a few nice people, Canadians as a whole are nice. Our country is nice. And it is a good thing. My mother was wrong.
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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