Dec 5th: We had another visit from
CouchSurfer Alexis from Vancouver, who was visiting Robin McKim
at Marilyn's house, and stumbled over our names in their
guestbook. He was surprised to discover that we know
Marilyn, Andy and Robin McKim so well, and we were surprised to
learn that he's been friends with Robin since they met in
Australia. Apparently they've bumped into each other
serendipitously in four different cities around the globe, a
fascinating string of co-incidence.
Deb lunched with Rocio from Lima,
we attended Moe Scott's book launch, and we had wine and cheese
with Pat and Clare.
We performed a jazz choir
mini-concert at the Starbucks with the fireplace at Waverley and
Queen, which was enthusiastically delivered and received.
I did a bucket mute trumpet solo in the middle of Blue Skies,
and Laura did a scat solo right afterward. That was a fun
event!
The HYC guitar circle is up and
running and they have a good beginning set of tunes printed in
booklets. I see a schism forming already along the lines
of acoustic vs electric, but even more so because of differing
tastes in music: country/folk western vs more modern rock
tunes. Maybe in time they might have to set up two
separate nights, one for electric rock and the other for
acoustic folk, pop and C&W.
We had some hiccups with the new
little Acer mini-laptop, which we hope to travel with. We
returned the first one for exchange, although I realized
afterward that I might have solved its problems with Windows
updates. I overcame a problem with the operating system of
the second one and also sped it up by doing that, and by dumping
all the junk software that comes with the laptop, and removing
programs from start-up. The door-crasher sale price was
certainly okay, and it works, for our needs, much better than
the Playbook did.
Other than those events, we're
just watching the days shorten and grow colder, as our sports
and musical activities all grind slowly to a halt for the season
and our friends are beginning to prepare for their weeks of
Christmas and New Year celebration with their families.
Nov 26th. In the last two weeks it has
been warm enough to play tennis until just the past two
days. Now it has turned cold n the mornings, hitting minus
digits overnight, although we still enjoy 5 or 6 degree highs
later in the day. That puts a crimp in morning tennis, but
our musical pursuits continue.
Lissy came to check out the Tuesday
jazz choir, which delighted me. We made a new Chinese
Peruvian friend named Rocio who is a vivacious, loquacious
personality, great for keeping up her end of the conversation
with Deb.
The main event for this week was Sol's
90th anniversary, which we held at the yacht club. He
enchanted the club members sitting in the Sailor's Lounge down
on the main floor, and when he danced down the staircase asking
them for the broom so he could help us clean up after the party,
no-one would believe this nimble, flirtatious, bowling maniac is
ninety.
Deb's sister Judi drove down from
Montreal with her sons Matthew and Michael, and they stayed
overnight. I hadn't seen them in ten years, so it was good
to see how they'd grown. They're a couple of fine young
men now. There were lots of interesting people at the
party - new ones, and some I hadn't seen for a very long time.
Deb's cousins Nathan and Barry, and Gordie, Melissa and Brendon
and their spouses and children were there, to name a few.
We pulled down the dart boards and had some fevered competition,
and we stood on the deck in the cold wind and threw sandwich
bread to the ducks, which delighted the little boys. The
winter ducks have arrived in Toronto. The first I've seen
are the Buffleheads,
who have arrived in their best dress tuxedos. There were
eight of them in front of the clubhouse, but they never come
close enough to humans to enjoy our bread offerings. We
had three spectacularly coloured Mallards
with glossy green heads that came right up to participate in
Communion, and then eventually an army of seagulls,
unsurprisingly. We have resident Trumpeter swans, but they
didn't attend the party.
Nov 13th. The boats are both tarped,
the plants are cut back and transplanting is finished in the
garden. We look forward to seeing how it all comes up in
the spring. I had a pleasant tennis game on Friday, and it
was 16 degrees over the weekend, but now it has cooled off and
dips to zero overnight. We made the most of the weather by
gardening, doing our neighbour Marg's eaves for her, winterizing
the outboards, etc.
We had Ian and Ursula over for dinner on Friday, and attended the Commodore's Ball on
Saturday evening, where we watched all our racers accept their
awards and trophies, including Mike Bauer, who I introduced to
sailing a decade ago. He entered the Ontario 300 race as a
newbie in his own boat this summer, and came first in his
division. His cup was as big as the Stanley Cup.
On Sunday afternoon we attended Silken's
concert at the Telus Koerner Hall. I thought I was going
to hear her Madrigal Singers, but they massed four different
university choirs and then added the Latvian Radio Choir, who
dominated the program with their "modern" choral music.
They are renowned, but I was unimpressed . I think the guy
who designed the program should be taken out and shot. It
always puzzles me that composers who spark no interest in the
public at large and have faded away from consciousness since
they created a short-lived media splash sixty years ago are
still fed to concert-goers as "contemporary". There were
just three pieces that were okay. One even approached
"thrilling", but that was the finale piece with massed
choirs.
John Cage had a
very irreverent Wikipedia entry (which has since disappeared)
and another more serious one which isn't much more
assuring. He admits having "no feeling for
harmony". His teacher Schoenberg describes him as "not a
composer", but an inventor. Supposedly a genius, and not
just a bore who exploited unconventionality to its extreme,
but that doesn't satisfy a man who has bought expensive fifth
row tickets to a concert, hoping to hear actual music with
melody, emotion, drama, a story, and soaring vocal harmonies.
The only two composers still living were
present for the performance last night. One appeared in
his unkempt hair, Pee Wee Herman jacket and bright yellow pants,
the other in her oh-so-Bohemian plaid skirt and boots.
I spent some time reflecting on the flat,
joyless faces of the choirs. Their vocal and choral
technique was certainly close enough to call perfect but their
expressions ranged from vacuous to depressed. I couldn't help
wondering if any of them volunarily chose to these songs on
their iPods. We got to spend about sixty seconds with
Silken in the hallway after the concert, which was a pleasant,
if brief, re-connection. She sang extremely well, of
course.
Lara leaves for Vancouver tomorrow, to
workshop a play. She's been very busy auditioning during
her final days in Toronto. Maybe she hopes to come
back. It's pleasant having her around. The guitar
circle at HYC is going well, but it was a little too electrified
last night, so we've decided to go completely "unplugged" next
week. The jazz choirs are both still fun. This is
our repertoire for the salon on the 27th: The Nearness of You, Blue Skies, In the Mood, Fly Me
to the Moon, My Funny Valentine, and Slap That
Bass by Larry Shackley - a cool little tune that you
almost never hear. I'll be playing
the trumpet solo in Blue Skies
Nov 7th. We got our travel vaccines,
and we started up with the Tuesday jazz choir. It's quite
nice, well organized, and I have a trumpet solo already
assigned. We'll have a "salon" at the Record Vault on the
27th. I'm singing tenor, though, which is, at least on one
song, quite a long, sustained strain on my vocal chords.
We did a temporary repair of the shingles on
our shed roof. Next summer I'll have to do a proper
re-shingling. The shingles are getting really old, curled
and brittle.
Deborah went to Montreal for the weekend with
Sol and Marcy, and attended Luch's funeral. Lara moved in
with us on Saturday for ten days. I had meetings with
Connie and Banuji about tennis house league for next year, with
Chris about rebuilding the HYC website, and met Alan Harman re
the Alma Foundation chores he wants done in Peru plus a
discussion of the suitability of his Scotia McLeod socially
responsible investing portfolio for AMSF.
I started my Movember moustache a week
ago. I got a laptop from Lara that she was going to toss
out, and cleaned it up. It runs pretty well. We
started up a guitar circle at HYC. The first night was
fun, exploratory; I'll try to get some organization happening
next.
Oct 28th: Today was HYC Haul-out.
I did my cold, wet shift on the docks yesterday, starting at
first light. I put on slings while the rain dripped into
my shoes, until the crane blew a hydraulic hose at 11 a.m. and I
sat for two more hours until my shift was finally over. The day
before, Deb and I dropped the mast on Tiger Moth. I'd
spent several days doing the woodwork and washing it, and taking
photos to build a web page to advertise it in the spring.
My 60th birthday was on
the 9th, but we didn't celebrate. Deborah says she's
taking me to Ecuador and Peru for my birthday. I got home
late from driving cancer patients to treatment. Oncologist
appointments get backed up, and radiation machines go down and
need servicing in the middle of the day. By the time I got
home I was no longer keen enough to go out for a free birthday
meal. On another evening, though,
we had dinner with Laurence and Joan, and lunch again the next
day. They brought over stuff we'd forgotten to serve at
dinner, and we ate it at our house. We met another couple
at dinner, CBC alumni, and talked about our Peruvian travel this
winter. We've finally got the dates and flights and costs
nailed down, and we will purchase our tickets tomorrow.
The jazz choir is going
well and the Beaches Jam group is now the RV All-Stars, meeting
at the Record Vault beside the Beacher Café. Last Thursday
Rebecca
Jenkins wandered into the store with her Mom and sister
when they heard us from the street. They stayed for a
half-hour, and sang Summertime for us. Rebecca did a
harmony to her sister's lead, and I improvised a third harmony.
We continue to prep the garden slowly for
winter. Our next job is to turn the soil while it is still
soft and wet. We have to rush to clean our eaves and fill
carboys with water tomorrow, because "Frankenstorm" is coming -
Hurricane Sandy, which will meet the cold front we have sitting
on us right now. All hell will break loose,
meteorology-wise. We're anticipating up to ten centimetres
of rain, high winds which might result in downed trees and power
lines, and possibly bit of water in our basement again.
Time to "batten down the hatches".
Oct 8th: This weekend
we had two
couchsurfers: Alexis from Paris via Vancouver, and a former
host of ours in Australia two years ago, Ben Holland, who is
riding his Kawasaki across Canada. It is his third
major bike ride through N. America. Last night's dinner was a Thanksgiving
theme, with four at the table. We had Deb's turkey
soup from last weekend's turkey, the biggest, handsomest
squash from the garden, and pumpkin pie. Neither of our guests had had pumpkin
pie before.
The previous night's dinner and breakfast yesterday
morning were savoury and sweet crêpes made by Alexis. It's
turned really cold here for a few days, but we've been
stuffed and content, getting sleepy from overeating, telling travel stories, laughing about
connections and disconnections between French vs Quebecois,
and English.
This week coming I'll be delivering
cancer patients to appointments on
Tuesday. The BBNC Christmas charity organization starts
its operations for this season. I have to lay out and
publish a newsletter for the yacht club, and get the boat ready
for haul-out before it gets too cold. We need to get the
mast off before they put out the cradles in the parking lot, and
finish the woodwork and trailer painting I want to get done on
the smaller sailboat in the driveway. We will participate
in our usual round of jazz choir, ukulele jam, guitar circle,
and socializing with friends, including a Peruvian theme dinner
this coming Friday, where one of the guests will give us more
info on our winter destination. I'll try to get a free
dinner for my birthday tomorrow from one of the restaurants that
continues to keep that old tradition.
Oct 1st:
My labrynthitis continues but isn't keeping me off my
feet. I've played some long, hard tennis games with Don
Davies and Jim Sawada.
Sept 21st: I appear to be suffering from
"labrynthitis", so called because it affects the labrynth of
passages of the inner ear. There's no pain, but it makes
you walk around like a dizzy drunk, with a touch of nausea from
the dizziness. Probably viral, and should be gone in a
week, but it's an interesting ailment for me that I've never had
before.
Other than that, there hasn't been much
that's new in the past two weeks. It's been of a return to
the familiar routine. Tennis continues, with Frostbite
League until the end of October. The jazz choir has met
again for the first time, and I took Lissy to meet our friend
Sheila Brand, the conductor of our jazz choir, for some vocal
coaching. Lissy is auditioning for a part in a community
theatre musical tomorrow. Our attendance at the Corktown
uke jam is a bit sporadic, mostly because it is too popular and
we have to arrive awfully early just to get a seat where we can
see the screen. It is usually lots of fun when we
go. It's just more fun playing and singing in a group than
it is at home alone, even if you get more personally focused
skill development by working alone. We got to see Lara
this week, and fed her our special cherry tomato/basil/chopped
walnut/chopped olives salad. We had a couple of
couchsurfers from Belgium and France, and took them sailing for
a morning. I'm back to driving cancer patients one to
appointments one day each week, usually to the Odette Cancer
Centre. We held a garage sale that went surprisingly well
for a fall Saturday. We're actively communicating with
people in Ecuador and Peru, and a friend who winters in S.E.
Asia, to plan and decide where we'll escape to for the coldest
months of winter.
The next few weeks will be spent continuing
those activities while squeezing in some sailing, and then
preparing the sailboat for haul-out, as well as having
get-togethers with as many close friends as possible while the
weather is still lovely.
Sept 5th: This has been a week of
decompressing and getting back into the swing of things here at
home. Many of our friends have returned to teaching school
this week. We've been to the ukulele jam and an
all-morning workshop called Ukulele Campuccino where the
workshop leader served us capuccinos during the breaks.
This evening we'll go to a uke jam Beatles "theme night".
Dozens of performers are clamouring to solo their favourite
Beatles songs at the open mic.
I played my last evening of house league
tennis, a four hour round robin stretch. Boy, was I sore
the next day.
We took our friend and neighbour Marg out for
a sail.
Deb and I are researching our winter
travel. Our destination is beginning to look like Ecuador,
which is a surprise for me, but the more we look into it, the
more attractive it seems. There are Helpx and Couchsurfing
hosts who seem very friendly; and tourist accommodation and food
costs are not too high.
We'll hold a garage sale this Saturday and
try to move more stuff out of our basement. Over the
summer we've had a steady stream of buyers for items we've
posted on Craigslist and Kijiji. The next step is to build
a web page to sell Tiger Moth, then maybe Awelyn, and then maybe
our house.
We will host two couchsurfers for the
weekend, a couple from Belgium and France who are touring Canada
in a rental car.
Deb's latest recipe is a cherry tomato,
basil, chopped walnuts and olive oil salad, using cherry
tomatoes and basil from our garden, of course. I've
prepared my garden plan for next year: fewer tomatoes, more
beans, eggplant, okra, and a new flower bed in the front for our
hydrangea, German irises and some very tall, multi-coloured
cosmos flowers that we've seen in the neighbourhood which bloom
at this time of year and seem to do very well. The
blossoms last more than a month. The only other blossoms
we're still waiting for in our garden are two of the mums, which
seem to bloom at the tail end of summer. We've done well
at having our perennials timed so that there's something fresh
happening every month of the spring and summer.
Aug 27th: Whew! What a whirlwind
month. We drove from Edmonton to Osoyoos for Kenton's and
Sarah's wedding. That was a day each way with three days
of being there in bracketed between. Two of those nights
were in a great bed'n'breakfast that Peter's Roni set up before
they split up. It was a great wedding, but the photos we
took are shared with family in our private Facebook group, and
on our hard drive. We'll back them up and save them, but
there's no point posting them here. Same with the next
set, of Lis' and Ryan's wedding in Nestleton, for which six of
my family flew in from Edmonton and Vancouver. Five of
them slept here on my main floor. We didn't need to set up
our air bed and frame, because Heather and Ed brought their own
air mattresses. Between those and the couch, and Mom and
Dianne sharing the double futon, everyone seemed very
comfortable. That's a record: 7 of us in this tiny
cottage. Except for having a galley kitchen and one
bathroom, we were comfortable. We even all sat around the
same table at once. We could have put a couple of extra
people in the basement, or in tents on the lawn, but it wasn't
necessary.
We saw Rob and Cynthia and met many new
people on Ryan's side of the family - his Dad Ian and Mom Wendy,
grandparents Pat and Sheenia (sp?); and many people related to
Lissy through her mother Linda. We met Jennifer and
Kevin's Morgyn, and Owen, Shawn and Finton. I played
guitar with Aiden who sang to the crowd on the patio, along with
Andy, a newfie relative of Linda's who had a fiddle and a very
nice sounding guitar that I got to play.
We saw Mom's brother Robert, and we got to
take Mom, Dianne, Ed and Heather out for a sail on No Egrets,
with a great BBQ picnic lunch at the club afterward.
Now we're going to rest and get back to our
normal routine of tennis, music, and lots of sailing through
September and October. We'll gradually put the garden to
bed for the winter, turning over the soil as the plants each get
to the end of their production days, and setting up our compost
pile for the winter, ready to lay down before we plant again
next spring. We're planning which plants we'll put in, and
where - less of this, more of that. I'll extend the garden
and create more new beds up front, as well. Next year we
might want to show the house, so we'll make sure it looks its
best. And I'll get the sailboats both spruced up and
advertise them to be sold in the spring, too. We'll keep
whichever one doesn't sell first for next season's sailing, I
guess.
Aug 14th: I'm into my third day of
dismantling my Dad's "Angolan" greenhouses. I call them
that because they were built of scraps of wood, plastic, metal
and cast off windows, all very third-world. I'm filling my
third bucket of screws. It's like peeling layers of an
onion - the main greenhouse was double-walled with styrofoam
sheets between the walls for insulation. Originally it had
transparent roof panels that could be opened to reduce the heat
inside and to improve ventilation, to keep mold-inducing
moisture down, but something - perhaps summer storms that
threatened to tear them off - persuaded him to pile even more
heavy windows and some metal bars on top of those, instead.
I'm sure that if he was watching as I chipped
away at his construction, he must have chuckled. I'd once
asked him how he was going to deal with all of his office and
garden accumulation, to which he responded, "Why, that'll be
your problem, won't it?" I couldn't be too annoyed at my
task, though. My work dealing with his aftermath, after
all, is payback for all the
pet cages, and Cleo's dog pen, that he'd constructed for us kids
over the years.
The rest of my time is spent visiting
siblings and friends, and reading some of the Angola library in
Dad's office,. We'll have to get around to sanding and
painting the office once the greenhouse is completely
dismantled.
Deep
Thoughts, Aug 10th: Rob recently asked me what my
"faith" consisted of. He might have meant, rather, "What
do you believe in", but I did explain my "faith" to him in
words that I think I'll record here as well, for future
reference...that being what a diary is for:
My
faith is completely mysterious and unfathomable to most
"believers". It doesn't hinge on a personified God, or
someone in the sky I can beg favours from, for myself or
anyone else. I believe in the knowable - eventually -
but still unfathomable universe, possibly parallel
universes, evolution for sure, and the gradual evolution of
human knowledge, which is a form of cultural evolution that
happens a million times faster than physical evolution but
is leap-frogging humans into a form of species immortality
if we handle it right - glasses for improved eyesight,
cars to replace legs, rifles to replace stones, factories to
replace our hands and make useful new things with
unimaginable quantity and speed. And of course, medicine.
We
humans are the only ones left of several hominid cousins
that went extinct, and we almost experienced species
extinction ourselves five times. At one point we were
down to only two thousand humans left in the entire
world. One group of us escaped from Africa, but then
there was an ice age that shut off the remaining people on
that continent. Eventually it melted enough to release
another group, who passed through a land in Saudi Arabia
near the coast of the Red Sea that they referred to as the
Garden of Eden. All those legends remain in various
retold forms in the Bible and other places. And all
the other Bible stories, including most of those told about
Jesus, existed in previous religions of Mithra and
others. The documentary Zeitgeist describes many
examples.
So
basically, all religions, as far as I can see, just tell and
retell stories that make them feel good and function just
like the creation stories of African tribes. The
stories aren't wrong or bad. It's just what we do, as
humans. It seems to be important to our psychological
and social survival. I'm fascinated by it all, but
little distanced from it, to be honest, and still open to
continue to learn more about what people believe and
why. I feel that there's a giant curtain between us
and the after-world. I can't pretend to see beyond it
well enough to be sure that the after-world even exists, or
what form it might take, and that doesn't bother me.
The world I live in right now has been enough for me, and
I'm awfully pleased and grateful for the experience.
If there's more afterward, that's just pure icing.
If I was a Muslim, I'd be a Sufi, even though they are
derided by all other Muslims.
If I lived in miserable poverty in Pakistan and my only
school was the Madrasa, and my neighbour would certainly
kill me if I looked any further than his daughter's comely
eyes (if I could even see them through the burkha), I'd
demand my afterlife and my 72 virgins.
In Scotland a hundred years ago the miserable cold cottage
and tough life of a coal miner, stone cutter or weaver of
stockings would make stories of heaven seem awfully
attractive, and missionary service in "the white man's
grave" would seem worth the heavenly reward. That
very Protestant religious tradition continued for two
hundred years and included an army of men and women from
the New World as well, in a great outpouring of sacrifice
and sharing that sprung from their faith even when they
were giving up lives of great comfort and security.
I don't share their Bible-based belief system. I
share their desire for honesty and universal justice and
well-being. I'm a humanist rather than a
church-going believer.
I've
had a rich, adventurous, comfortable, sunshine-filled,
visual, musical, sensual life. Heaven can wait, as far
as I'm concerned. I can't imagine a place more lovely
- if you pick and choose carefully and make the right
choices at this marvelous buffet - than the world I'm living
in right now. I've had my heartaches and moments of
guilt, shame or terror, and physical aches and pains (more
numerous with age); but still, if this turns out to be all
there ever was, it's been pretty mind-blowing.
Aug 4th - 6th: The overnight at Pat and
Clare's up in the Muskokas was pleasant. No music
happened, but we met all of Pat's eight siblings, the Wilbur
Gang, who had gathered for the occasion. On Sunday evening
we attended the Curry Invitational at HYC - Deb made Ghanaian
stew and added curry for a tasty new culinary invention.
I began reading Angola Torchbearers by Maria
Chela Chikueka. It's a good, fast read, and she reminded
me once again of the enormous load of work that Grandpa Sid
accomplished during his years after WWII, as well as the whole
history of Protestant missions in Angola. That's a
forgotten corner of rich, dramatic history with tremendous story
potential. I wish I'd read it earlier, but it's one of the
stack of books that was waiting for my retirement. I'm
halfway through it already, and it is a pretty thick book.
We had a mid-week BBQ and music night with
Don and Jacqueline Davies. I did my cancer driving
volunteer day, and we went to the Corktown Ukulele Jam where I
paid $8 for a glass of cider - sticker shock! I'm glad I
make my own ginger-and-lime beer for pennies a glass.
We reconnected with our old friend Andrew
Chung, the gifted trumpeter and conductor, who has been
accepted to teacher's college in September. We did yard
work at Rod's house while he is in Spain, studied mandolin on
Youtube, and joined Ian and Ursula for their regular Friday
Sausage Night event. Blanca and Steve were there and we
met Steve's "intended", a vivacious young Scottish teacher named
Sarah who comes from the same neighbourhood as our
ancestors. She had just picked up a new puppy from
Lesmahagow within the last few weeks, in fact.
Carribana has exploded into happy colour and
music in downtown Toronto. Mas Euphoria, it has been
called, a great pun hinging on the mas bands and enormous floats
reminiscent of Carnival in Rio - but I have taken on fourteen
hours of OD duty at the club, instead. At odd
moments down at the club, and in the evenings at home, we catch
the highlights of Canada's Olympic showing in London,
England. Chris Johnson and Jennifer will join
us there for a BBQ picnic, but there's a small craft warning so
we won't be sailing today. We'll transpose some songs for
Chris, who plays guitar at the Thursday evening jam. His
day job is Webmaster for the Toronto Humane Society.
Jennifer is a costumer for the theatre, currently based in
Picton. She also plays piano, and Chris recently bought
her a keyboard.
The weather has been stinking hot and humid
until it broke a bit overnight, and we have some intermittent
showers today with stretches of sunshine. The drought on
the continent has been compared to the one that led into the
Great Depression, and there are many other eery economic
similarities to that time. In Toronto the drought has
manifested as a prolonged heat wave, and most of the rain we've
got comes in severe and sudden storms that result in fast
run-off and soggy basements instead of a slow, gentle rain that
soaks properly into the ground. My success in the garden
came from soil amendment, and daily watering with soaker hoses
running under landscaping plastic that eliminates most of the
weeds and sharply reduces water loss from evaporation and
heat-baked soil.
Straw is not a good mulch - not even for
strawberries, I've decided. Large grassy weeds seem to
grow up right through it. Wood chips might be better, but
hard to obtain around here, expensive to buy by the bag, and I'm
worried about creating an extra chore for myself when I want to
lift the chips to amend the soil again later. Black
landscaping plastic is perforated for air and rainwater to pass
through, it's cheap, readily available, and can be rolled up and
trashed afterward, although I'm going to try to use it for more
than one season. Deborah says it is biodegradable, which
eliminates one further concern I had about the stuff.
Aug 6th: I just finished a huge unwelcome
surprise chore: the city is replacing the water mains, and
warned us that they might have to dig up my front bed of peony
bush, tiger and stella d'oro lilies, canas, hostas, etc - right
in the middle of our trip west. They couldn't tell us for
sure whether we had the requisite 3/4" water supply pipe
already, and wouldn't know themselves until they opened up the
mains under the road. They'd reach our home on about the
16th. So to be on the safe side, we had to enlarge the
front bed in a different direction, and transplant many of those
plants now, before they showed up to make a mess of the flower
bed and front lawn. That took several hours.
Deborah can't cook fast enough to keep up
with the produce we're getting, especially the tomatoes.
We're giving them to neighbours and friends, but we're also
enjoying them every day ourselves. This morning's
breakfast was salmon quiche with a salsa of tomato freshly
plucked from the vine and sprinkled with green jalapeño
sauce. You could add a little
grated ginger, chopped green onion, possibly a squeeze of
lemon...but none of these are really necessary.
Yum.. It's good to have a wife whose chief hobby is
cooking, and a great kitchen garden to supply her with
inspiration.
With global warming and the strange
weather we've been having, I wonder what the future will
bring. A good little market garden along the lakefront for
a constant, ready source of sweet water, with municipal water
pressure if possible, seems like an ideal place on the globe to
be. I'm gradually extending my kitchen garden to take over
more and more of the sunniest area of my back lawn. After
all, we don't play soccer or croquet there, in fact we don't do
anything with the darn lawn except continually mow it.
This place is the same latitude as Rome,
Italy, and has a high average of sunshine hours and days in
summer. As the heat increases and the growing
season extends, Rob's property seems perfect in
several ways, and has made me wonder if I could locate one to
buy that is quite similar, but closer to the services and
attractions of the GTA, and if possible connected to the city's
water and electrical supply. That would also be better
situated if one grew too much to eat and wanted to market the
rest, even if just in a road-side stand. Or one could
trade the excess with growers of other fruit and veggies, or
fresh eggs. I could even see swapping some of my fresh
tomatoes for a meal in a local curry shop, for example.
You could be on the grid and enjoy its benefits as long as they
last, but successfully independent of the grid if it ever
fails. Beats the scary photos I've seen this summer of the
dust bowl in the midwest. I'd be able to keep my sailboat
at hand, do a little fishing, maybe even fish-farming.
I've seen great circular protein self-sufficiency ideas that
include kitchen gardens, chickens and their manure, and tilapia.
July 27th: This was a great
week. We went sailing with Don and his grand kids, Jack
and Mary. We sold the sailing dinghy to Amos and his son Neil, a
young man of about eleven who didn't say a word but beamed from
ear to ear when he sat in the dinghy and Don took him for his
first ride. Karen Yan, a couchsurfer from Buffalo, stayed
with us for two nights and we went sailing, had a good meal and
a good visit together. She's talked us into visiting
another host in Chautauqua
soon, a retired teacher.
Rod left for Spain, and on Thursday Don
came over and we raised the mast on Tiger Moth so that I can
begin to clean it and spruce it up, and probably offer it for
sale. That evening I went with Deborah to the
Corktown
Ukulele Jam, and had a blast. There were about 150
people playing and singing along to a screen at the front of the
room, and a handful going to the open mic to perform.
Yesterday we went to the home of Bill and Jan
from our jazz choir, who live about four houses south of Queen
Street, a short drive from our house. We had a few drinks
and snacks there, and then walked Queen Street for a couple of
hours enjoying the Beaches
Jazz Festival, an annual celebration (24th annual, this
year) that spans at least thirty blocks and about sixty bands
playing on the street which is closed to traffic to create a
pedestrian mall. We stood six feet away from top
musicians like Johannes
Linstead and our old friend Mike
Hawker (who we hadn't seen for a donkey's age), and many
other bands playing jazz, latin, fusion, blues, rock, a 24 piece
Salsa Squad, big bands and swing bands.
We've had tons of rain, the grass is greening
and growing again; soon I'll have to break out the lawnmower
once more. It's great for the produce and flowers.
The tomatoes have come on thick and fast. We eat them
every day and share them with friends every chance we get, along
with eggplant, beans, swiss chard and zucchini. The Greek
"Bifsteak" plants have been a resounding success. Deb's
been making a delicious ratatouille.
Today we'll have dinner with Sol and Marcy,
and tomorrow we'll go to Uffington overnight for Pat and Clare's
40th Wedding Anniversary party at their lovely huge
"cottage". Definitely a week to commit to the diary, and
look back on fondly.
July 18th: Deep thought for this week -
I've noticed that there may be a disconnect between what I
think I want to do and what I really want to do, evidenced by
how I actually spend my time. I think that I want to
sail, to spend time being a sailor, yet for months my focus
has been on anything but sailing - doing music, volunteer
work, selling off belongings, monitoring investments, dealing
with tennis club issues, staying connected with family, and
gardening. Is it possible that we know ourselves and
what we really want far less than we think we do? And
that we have a self-image that is at odds with what really
gives us contentment? Perhaps the urge to sail is wrapped up
in a desire for blissful escape from the noise of these other
activities, yet the other activities are what actually give me
a constant sense of purpose and satisfaction.
It has been awfully hot, and some days there's been little
wind. Maybe during the second half of the summer the
lake will turn out to be more inviting. Sailing in
September on Lake Ontario has always been lovely.
5 p.m.,
same day: heh, heh...or lol, as the kids would text
these days...wrote the above, then immediately got a call from
Don, and spent the entire afternoon out on the lake browning
my forearms.
This evening Deborah is
trying something new. She's gone to a "Corktown ukulele
jam". Apparently they'll put the chords and lyrics to a
song on a screen at the front of the room, and they'll play it
together. I'd love to do that with a guitar group. I
betcha she'll have a few songs to perform for us at our next
family camp-out.
July 17th: we endured record heat today: 36.4
Celcius, which is 97.54 Fahrenheit. As night fell, so did
the temperature, two degrees every hour all the way down to a 22
degree low by one a.m. I sat naked to the waist on the
Muskoka bench under our tiny grove of four cedar trees, feeling
secure and private inside our front hedge while observing our
pleasant street of houses and lush trees gradually becoming an
ink and water colour night scene. The wind raced past my
arms and shoulders, chasing the thermals and gradually drying my
fevered skin. As I sipped my glass of Steve's Evil Pink
Juice, a dove on an overhead wire spread his wings in the dusk
and left his perch, highlighted by the streetlamp, his wings a
blur like a child's snow-angel. My
cat-who-will-never-be-tamed stayed within six feet, lolling on
the grass and coming back for frequent rubbing and
petting. Together we looked past the black
locust tree towering above us and watched a spectacular show of
lightning to the south. It was a rapid-fire fireworks
display, pyrotechnics only a second apart, but so far away that
we never heard the thunder. As the streetlamps illuminated
the tree branches in riveting contrast, I blessed my optometrist
and reflected on all the corners of the world that are as fine
as this one. I've seen a good many, but few that are
better.
July
15th: What a week. We sold lots of stuff on Craigslist and
Kijiji, and I played music until I woke up one morning with a
painful forearm, which I thought was a tennis injury, but I'd
been taking a rest from tennis. It was my left arm...how
weird...I finally realized it was from contorting my fingers
into jazzy guitar chords, exacerbated by more piano playing than
usual. That boogie-woogie bass puts a bit of strain on the
left forearm. Seems like I'm getting too old to do much
of anything I used to do, anymore!
Deborah has a new set of five foster kittens,
this time from different litters, sans mommy cats. They're
only a week away from getting spayed and adopted out, but
apparently they all needed a week's vacation from the shelter
and their small accommodations while renovations happen
there. Here they share the spare room, and she lets them
have the run of the main floor once in a while, so they're
enjoying an adventure similar to the new homes they'll have
eventually.
On Saturday we saw Odysseo with Rob and
Cynthia. That was a pretty impressive Cirque du Soleil
kind of show focused on trained horses, trick-riding, and human
acrobats. Here's a six
minute
highlight reel.
Today Brian and Theresa drove down from
Barrie to have lunch with us. We'd considered going for a
sail but there was a threat of rain, so we waited. Sure
enough, the skies opened, and we had a downpour of Biblical
proportions, so much that the city storm drains couldn't handle
it. We got 75 mm in less than an hour. Our weeping
tile was beyond tears, emotionally devastated, it couldn't take
the pressure. I'm sure there were flooded basements all
over the city, and ours got a little soppy too.
Brian, who has been working twelve to sixteen
hour days moving furniture for the DND base closing in Barrie,
couldn't keep his eyes open, and had already fallen into a deep
nap on our couch. Theresa and I walked in the garden and
noted that my garden and lawn had turned into a rice paddy, the
wheelbarrow was filled to the brim with water, and so was the
cockpit in the sailboat on the trailer in the driveway.
Then Deborah came out wearing her rubber boots and said, "We
have a problem." Not that it was Theresa's problem, but
bless her soul, she rolled up her sleeves, kicked off her shoes
and helped us bail eight pails of water out of our basement,
while Brian slept on, his snores indistinguishable from the
thunder rolling around outside the house.
Finally, after we'd bailed what we could, he
woke up. We ate fish and quinoa salad, with
zucchini, tomato and swiss chard from our garden, and had
Theresa's delicious peach pie for dessert, . We took a
short drive down to the yacht club just to give them the quick
cook's tour. Perhaps it didn't make up for not being able
to go for a sail, but it was better than nothing. Then we
said goodbye and they headed home.
July 8th: I pulled a calf muscle playing
tennis, so I might have to sit out for a few weeks. That's
too bad, it's the only exercise I stay committed to week after
week.
We went to Rob's yesterday. We had
roast chicken and Cynthia's delicious potato salad plus her
homemade ice cream in honour of her birthday, and we went to see
Madagascar 3. We met Buck, the new German Shepherd ("East
German border guard dog"). Rob's new veggie garden is
huge, like the envelope to my little postage stamp. My
garden is a little Findhorn, but his approaches commercial
market garden status. He will be able to host a healthy
family feast in a couple of months.
The way home was a drive down Memory
Lane. We passed Gilchrist Lane, of course, on our way to
gas up the truck at the duty-free gas station on Mohawk
land. We took the Belleville bridge off the island and
turned immediately onto the road past the front of Albert
College, the residential school I attended when I was fifteen
and sixteen. We passed through Newcastle, where our first
boat the old steel collander Lomar was purchased in dry
dock. We passed West Hill United Church on our way home
through Scarborough, where Dad worked, and where he married me
off to Deborah.
Today (Sunday) Deb's father Sol and
lady-friend Marcy came for lunch, and I spotted our first three
ripe cherry tomatoes of the season to go along with Deb's salad
(Rob's lettuce from our garden) and delicious smoked salmon and
leek quiche. Life is good.
This week's reflection, inspired by Richard
Dawkins: Man is the only creature in the universe,
as far as we know, that has evolved a brain capable of
abstracting the concept of permanence, and extrapolating
that to human permanence in the form of
immortality. Having imagined it, he craves it, and
is easily convinced that it actually exists.
Humans want to live forever, and failing that, they want
heaven, and the reassurance of eternity, which is one of
the central selling points of all religions.
The rest of the universe
knows that there is no such thing. Everything –
the flower, the iceberg, the mountain, quantum
particles, the universe itself – experiences change and
decay. Like everything else that we share our
universe with, we are temporary, ephemeral beings.
We have but one quick chance to love who we are and
where we are, and those we share it with.
That recognition ought to
short-circuit a lot of the religiously inspired and
sanctioned evil in the world, the teachings that trick
young men into taking lives and giving up their own
brief moment of worldly consciousness and joy.
Faith in an afterlife somehow devalues the life we have,
and justifies too many evils perpetrated in the name of
various religions. How much precious life has been
squandered, and murder abetted, by the belief in an
afterlife? If we all woke up to the transient
priceless nature of what we all have, what a kind,
friendly, sharing, blissful world we might begin to live
in.
|
July 1st: This is our wedding
anniversary. We've had a pleasant week of dinghy
restoration, tennis, BBQ's with friends and family, the rest of
our list of current summer activities, including
gardening. Our zucchinis are almost large enough to pick,
and we have enormous tomatoes that'll be turning red very
shortly. We're in the middle of a stretch of weather that
hits thirty degrees every afternoon for four hours, higher with
the humidex on most days, and drops to a low of only nineteen at
night. This stretch could last two weeks. It's very
pleasant as long as one plans one's activities around the daily
heat peaks.
Yesterday we took Lis, Ryan and Lara out for
a sail. It was a very brisk day on the water, with 30 knot
wind gusts, but Deborah was skipper and did fine on the lake
under mainsail only. The weeds were a big problem in the
harbour. We ate and drank at the club, walked around to
see the other clubs, and then the three of them went down to the
beach for a swim. They claim the water was "freezing", but
they seemed to have enjoyed their day, and I certainly enjoyed
connecting with them all again.
Today we had supper at the club again with
Ian and Ursula, and ate the first zucchini from our garden -
very tasty - and lettuce, with fish baked on the BBQ, and potato
salad. After dark there was a fireworks show at
BPYC, so we wandered over, sat at a picnic table thirty feet
from the ignition zone, and watched a great display just above
our heads.
Thoughts I've had to
work through this week: Neil
Armstrong was once asked by an interviewer, “If you
learned that there was a malfunction on the air
scrubbers in the space capsule and that in fifteen
minutes the CO2 would rise to poisonous levels in the
cabin, how would you spend those fifteen minutes? Would you pray? Would you speak to your wife
and family on the radiophone? How
would you prepare for such an eventuality?”
Armstrong answered, “I don’t
know what you or most people would do, but I’m damned
sure I’d spend my last fifteen minutes trying to
repair the air scrubbers.”
In doing so, I’m also pretty
sure he’d trust the scientists at NASA, rather than
looking around for little green men who might be
saviours of the human race.
When faced with a slim chance of
survival versus a very much slimmer chance, why do so
many non-scientists challenge conventional science and
waste their time on “alternatives”?
In doing so, they risk their own lives and
potentially mislead loved ones into doing the same
thing. What is it about humans that we have
developed a logical mind unparalleled in the universe
as far as we know, yet we are so willing to throw
logic out the window and emotionally chase hope from
the most fanciful and bizarre explanations of
chemistry, biochemistry and medicine, not to mention
the origins of life, the universe and everything? I keep returning to the
question, “Who do you trust, and why do you trust
them?”
Richard Dawkins has helped me
understand the psychology of people who believe the
charlatans, the homeopaths, the witch-doctors, the
snake-oil salesmen. I
still have no idea how one would begin to dissuade
them, and I’m beginning to wonder if it would be
irresponsible to continue to try once you encounter
resistance to your first attempts.
It seems to be a primal human response,
instinctive and ingrained, that looks to “belief”
rather than knowing. It may be an ancient way
that humans are able to self-heal, to boost their
immune systems – positive thinking, with a suitable
placebo, can be, some say, up to 30% effective
compared to other cures; lower than evidence-based
therapies, yet well above a failure rate. It’s a real puzzle, but
clearly there are two distinct approaches to healing:
faith-based medicine, and evidence-based medicine. I would always choose the
latter, but where a person distrusts and rejects
evidence-based medicine, the corollary of the placebo
effect suggests that a patient’s belief system might
occasionally be strong enough to replace the benefit
that evidence-based therapies might be expected to
provide.
The key is "a need to
believe". If science-based practitioners, bound
by their honesty, tell you that statistical odds of
success are quite low, but you need to believe that
you have a much higher chance of a cure, where would
you turn but to those who have no scruples about
teasing you with that hope? It is my contention
and fear that the realm of faith-based cures is
riddled with unscrupulous and ignorant agents, and
that sailing through those waters is like trying to
dodge rocky shoals with no charts. Perhaps the
appearance that those shoals seem closer to the safety
of shore is what keeps the fearful and desperate willing to take those greater risks which
seem like lesser risks. For many, faith
is centrally important to their lives and belief
systems to begin with. That, and the sense that the
"science" or "logic" behind them seems simpler to
understand, therefore the patient feels somehow more
in control of their own destiny by embracing those
beliefs. That sense of control seems an
important part of the formula for positivism.
And paradoxically, the embrace of belief, regardless
of the validity of its basis, may buttress the immune
system and lead to increased success for
patients. That would suggest that some
combination of evidence-based and faith-based
therapies should create the most fertile conditions
for cures. |
June 24th: This has been a busy time full of
tennis twice a week, jazz choir, gardening, driving cancer
patients for treatment, and dinghy restoration. I went
back to the Thursday evening living room jam group last week,
and this week the choir performed at the teachers gala awards
banquet (great dinner and wine, and I had to sing a short
solo. I hoped that there'd be a video, but I never saw
it. For the past two days we've had our guests from
Kentucky for their second annual stay in our house. We had
a visit from an old friend of Deborah's that we hadn't seen for
a few years, and then Ed LeMaster and his daughter Cathy stayed
in our bedrooms for two nights while we shifted to sleep over on
the boat down at the club.
During those two days we drove across the
city to Humbervale for the AMSF AGM and meals, culminating in a
BBQ at Marilyn McKim's last night. I had to write up the
investment portfolio report and deliver it first to the
directors for questioning and approval, and then to the
membership. The AGM included a special remembrance service
for Dad. Today we get to rest, catch up to newspapers and
other chores around the house, mow lawns and hoe weeds. We
already have beans and jalapeño peppers, eggplant beginning to
fruit, very large green tomatoes, new flame lilies, and our
first red raspberries. The strawberries are finished, but
the lettuce seedlings Rob gave us are now large and providing
regular salad greens. The garden continues its seasonal
evolution.
June 14th: my last entry was on the day my
Dad used to celebrate his birthday. I have thought about
him almost daily through the entire winter, and he's a often a
focus of moments of meditation, almost but not quite an
obsession: who he was, what shaped him, what he really felt and
thought about things, which were not always the same
thing. How he fought to see past the bounds of training
and expectations to become more fully aware, more original, more
authentic, more honest. Remembering him as he was while
mind and body were young, vital, bursting with confidence or at
least a desire to live large and stamp his presence on earth
with a patina of significance, while still free from the
weakness and anxiety generated by the disease that plagued his
final years.
Last Saturday
Deb and I attended HYC's Sail Past. We went out
on my friend Don Davie's boat instead of our
own. Here we are luffing the head sail in salute
to the Commodore. I'm on the bow, with Don's
granddaughter Courtney in front of the mast.
|
|

At dinner, I had Deb's laptop at
my elbow and we watched our goddaughter Una receiving
four awards and her certificate of graduation from Gulf
Islands Secondary School, live streaming over the
internet. She was pretty excited, with good
reason: if she gets accepted into med school, one of the
scholarships will pay her entire costs. |
The next day, Deb went off to Montreal for
the week, while I gardened and played around at restoring
dinghies. On Tuesdays I drive cancer patients to
treatments.
This week that became a twelve hour day of negotiating rush hour
downtown traffic over four trips, with a lot of waiting, napping
in chairs and reading time in between. It was good that my
final client was very pleased and excited about his positive
chemo response. That made it easier to feel good about my
day by the time it finally drew to a close.
Life goes on: a June concert, sailing,
BBQ's and tennis. Pretty soon we'll spend time with
teacher friends who've been busy with report cards and end of
year activities this month. I'm ready for a change,
something new; balancing my age and energy level with some sort
of new challenge. I'm not sure what form it will take, but
I'm watching the ocean like a look-out in the crow's nest.
This
week's thoughts: Meditation continued from
last week's best thought had me thinking about
what it is that we want to pass on, who we
want to pass it on to, and why. It
doesn't have to be material. We live in
a time when material needs of the next
generation are well provided for, especially
by the time we reach a ripe old age - much
riper now than in previous decades.
Between welfare, health care, the good fortune
of being born into a bountiful society, and
the extra years to get themselves established
before they watch us pass on, the next
generation doesn't need much in the way of
material support. What's left?
Most of them, at their age, probably don't
believe there's much else the previous
generation can give them, but I know
differently now, having lived through those
years to this age. By the time they make
it as far as I have, they will often have
wished for the body of wisdom, experience,
memories, and a good example of how to live
and how to die, that we ahead of them can and
should provide - not foisted upon them, but
left handy, lying around where they can lay
their hands and hearts on it at moments of
crisis and uncertainty, when they suddenly
feel the need.
I'll continue to live
my life like an open book, recorded and
available; and continue compiling family
history for them. There is a season in
the lives of most people when they suddenly
crave knowledge of their roots. I will
make sure that there is much more available to
the descendants of my siblings than there was
to satisfy my own craving when it began to
emerge.
Like I do, I hope
they will all have passions and interests that
keep them active and cheerful, as well as ways
to "give back", to provide service. If
you belong to a club, you don't just ride on
the coattails of others. You participate
in the executive chores. You don't just
throw money at charitable causes, you give
time and caring as well.
Equally important:
You don't take friends and family for granted;
you cultivate them, to make them into a garden
of relationships that give you pleasure
instead of a vacant lot full of random, barely
noticeable weeds. I've heard the
resentful whine, "you can choose your friends,
but you can't choose family"; but one can
choose to be-friend family and make those
relationships richer. Those
relationships are different than friendships,
quite often, but still interesting and
emotionally enriching in their own way.
While young, the non-family relationships upon
which careers, community and family-building
pivot take centre stage. As we age, some
come to regret the neglect of connection with
wider family.
|
June 7th: Sail Past is this coming Saturday. It's a good
annual festival at the yacht club that includes the first fleet
sail of the season, a party at the clubhouse, dinner and a band
in the evening. Then Deborah will be away for another week
visiting her family in Montreal. I'll spend the week doing
yard work, playing music, driving patients to Odette Cancer
Centre, and hanging out with a small group of friends who share
music, sailing and tennis as common interests. The jazz
choir is preparing for our third annual performance at the Liberty Grand Ballroom
on June 21st. It's a gorgeous facility, and our presence
is rewarded with a great dinner.
I went halves with Don Davies on a
couple of old dinghies that the yacht club had to get rid of, so
my latest project is cleaning and varnishing one of them, a
little 7 foot Skimmar sailing dinghy, finding or making a sail
for it, and probably then advertising to find a new home for
it. The other one is bigger, maybe 9 or 10 feet, a
good heavy flat-bottomed fishing boat, so it won't take much
work to recycle, just a good cleaning and advertising.
Then I'll get to work on preparing the Tiger Moth for sale, so
that I can fill its space in the driveway with a small trailer
instead.
One of my sneaky pleasures is to waste
time and a little gas once in a while by just cruising around
nearby neighbourhoods, looking at other peoples' gardens and
homes. I don't covet them, although I would steal ideas if
that was convenient. But I've always enjoyed turning off
the main road to explore residential architecture, and even when
there were no famous sights to see in a small town "down under",
our rental car saved the day by allowing us to cruise little old
towns full of regional character. Sometimes I'd wonder if
the residents were suspicious, and if any had the local
constabulary on speed dial, but we never got challenged, I must
admit. There were a few hard stares, but that's about
it. So I keep doing it every so often, even at home in
Scarborough.
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
June 7th: Waiting
to die: that's what I reflected that I was doing
as I sat blissfully on the outdoor bench under the
cedar tree in the front yard, listening to an
orchestra of bird song and letting my eyes rest on
blossoms, including the first yellow blossom on a
lily we got from Heather.
I hope that I have to wait a
long time, but waiting is mainly what I'm doing
now. I'm no longer working toward trying to
achieve, accomplish or build anything of
significance. The best I can manage is
stasis (musical, financial, fitness, gardening,
friendships) and the occasional completion of a
trip full of novel experiences to a fresh country
on my bucket list.
Now, waiting is usually negative, frustrating, an
anathema, especially to type A's and to young
people hell-bent on achievement and new
adventures. My meditation this morning is
that waiting might as easily be a simple,
positive, zen activity. If done well, it
might be a blissful exercise in openness,
awareness and appreciation. It feels like a
significant shift in mind-set, although I suspect
there may be people who live in this mind-set all
their lives, without really thinking about it.
Of course I'll stretch it out as long as I can.
|
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
May 28th: Today's
best thought isn't original. I heard it
somewhere a few weeks ago, and it has stuck in my
head. We believe that hope, trust and faith
are essential to our well-being and to a
successful outcome to our ailments. The
placebo groups in countless medical trials confirm
this confidence. There's one
element that seems equally important, and
without which one wonders if the other three
can even be authentic: an "attitude of
gratitude". For religious people, that
applies to a creator, and all that s/he has
created. For everyone, it applies to the
days we've already enjoyed, the ones we still
hope to enjoy, the magnificent systems of
science and technology that mankind has built
which sustain our health and pleasures.
An "Attitude of Gratitude" provides a glossy
shine to our daily existence.
|
May 28th: The garden continues to delight
with fresh spring blossoms each day. The peony has its
first vividly pink blossom, and we've been eating strawberries
already. Usually we don't get those until June. We
attended the Retired Teachers AGM and luncheon. I put in a
few more plants, built an Ugly
Stick, and attended lessons at "Youtube Guitar U" a few
times. I played tennis and got the tennis House League
schedule created for the summer, and found time to sit down and
read, which I haven't been very good at making time for.
The only thing that would improve the quality of my days is
more connection with family and friends, who are all too busy -
they should all retire! - and a less solitary musical outlet.
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
May 25th: My garden is like a large green
toy with gems of colour. I take care
of it and play with it a lot or a little
each day, and like a kaleidoscope, it shows
me something new and pleasing every time I
turn around.
|
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
May 21st: I'm shocked to observe how
many people behave as though they
deserve my admiration, a priori...as if
it is one of the "rights" we learned
that we had as children, just by virtue
of being born. Maybe this is one
of the unintended consequences of our
modern parenting and schooling
approach. Do we also have a
northern aloofness that makes us seem
prickly, stuck-up? Or a barely
warranted self-confidence in our
knowledge, values and abilities?
People in southern cultures, as I
travel, don't seem to display this
attitude about themselves and others.
If this bothers me in others, do
they suspect the same of me? I
must try to watch for that, and
guard against it.
|
May 21st:
This has been a week of further reconnecting with old
friends who seem to come out of the woodwork on the
May long weekend and the sunny days leading up to it,
which has been fun. We've seen Rod Smith,
Laurence and Joan Wright, Greg Martin, Christine and
Liam, and Andrew Chung. Andrew who was just
accepted into the music teaching program at York
U. He owes me a Dim Sum lunch in return for my
part in helping him get in, which we're looking
forward to next week. I spent more time with Don
Davies, who is a friend of the admirably "constant"
sort. We've also reconnected, of course,
with the many tennis acquaintances who are part of the
house league program that I run, and some yacht club
"friendlies", as another old acquaintance used to
refer to them, to distinguish them from people you
know well enough and spend enough time with to call
"friends".
Deborah drove
her brother Geoff and her niece Kymberly and nephew
Joseph to Montreal and back in our
truck. They spent three days there visiting her
mother Sylvia and Fred, and Deb's sisters Judy and
Cynthia.
I had my
first orientation session at the Canadian Cancer Society,
where I have volunteered to drive cancer patients back
and forth to treatment. They expanded my
awareness of the nature and multiple causes of this
cluster of abnormal cell growth diseases.
Our
gardening effort has tapered off now that the plants
are in. We now do a little daily weeding,
watering and pest control. A few of Heather's Asiatic
lilies are under constant attack by an infestation of
the scarlet
lily
bug. Most of my garden time is spent
simply enjoying the daily development, keeping the
lawn mowed, and inviting friends over to view the
results. We used to look for opportunities for
children to have their writing efforts read by others,
especially appreciative adults; this was sometimes
called "authentic writing", and the theory was that
having an audience motivated children and improved
their skills of expression. I think of my
gardening the same way. I don't just want to
enjoy my own garden, I want to show off my efforts to
others! Maybe we could call that desire to share
some sort of "authentic living", a.k.a. a modern term,
"validation".
The boom
and sails are on the boat, and it's getting a good
cleaning this weekend. We are doing two six-hour
OD duties at the club, one for ourselves and one we
volunteered to do for a neighbour who couldn't be
reached to do his right after ours. It gave us
an excuse to be at the boat and make some headway on
the clean-and-shine. That's how we'll spend the
rest of today until this evening's tennis round
robin. I think of the sailboat the same way as
my garden, by the way, so if you want to go out for a
sail, let me know.
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
May
17th: If we are honest, most of us know
very little about most things.
When ego doesn't get in the way, we turn
to experts, or sometimes to people we
trust might be better qualified to
identify true experts. The
fundamental question for most of our
decisions, therefore, should never be
"What's the right answer?" It
should be "Who do I trust, and why?"
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Mother's Day, May 13th,
2012:
The sailboat is in the
water, the mast is up but we still have to put
on the boom and sails and tune the
rigging. The taxes are done and
paid. I completed and sent out the
spring newsletter for the yacht club, the
Halyard, and my tennis house league program is
up and running. I'm running round robins
until after the long weekend, and by then I'll
have schedules made up for matches for the
balance of the summer. We've reconnected
with some friends, and let the rest know that
we're back in town so that they can call us
when they're able to. The Angola
Memorial Scholarship Fund will have it's AGM
in six weeks.
Yesterday Rob and Cyn made
it into "the big smoke" to see The Hockey Sweater with
Elisabeth. Afterward they came over to my house to
see the garden Deb and I put in the day before, plus the
front flowerbeds I began last fall which are now turning
out well. We ate burgers and drank beer.
Earlier in the day we saw Jenn briefly, and met Aiden for
the first time. She's a lovely young lady just
graduating from grade 8 and already being called upon to
participate in high school musicals.
Deborah has driven the truck to
Montreal this afternoon with her brother, niece and nephew
in it, to visit her Mom and two sisters. I'm a bachelor
until Thursday, but I have lots to keep me busy, as
always: tennis, the stock market, jazz choir, darts, the
garden and the boats. I'm going on Thursday morning
to get "trained" as a cancer driver volunteer, and on
Thursday evening when Deb is back we'll go to the annual
dinner of the Canadian Power and Sail Squadron. That
is always a lovely dinner overlooking the marina just down
the hill from us, and is free with the annual membership
we pay, which isn't any more than the cost that the dinner
would be on its own.
Best
Thought I've Had Today:
May
12th: If I've had the last word, the
discussion wasn't really over yet.
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