Before I get into anything else, I’d like to thank you people who have been following my blog for lo, these many years.

Both of you.

If there is one defining characteristic of my life, it is that no one has ever paid any attention to a single thing I’ve said. But instead of blaming myself and maybe changing my approach to life I tend to adopt my wife’s attitude that attributes everyone else’s inexplicable behaviour and failure to heed my advice to the fact that they are concussed, autistic or depressed.

She puts me in all three of those categories.

I tell her that the Psychology 101 course I took back in 1973 at John Abbott Cegep would ascertain that she is projecting her own ailments onto others. Any psychologist (not that I need one of those) would say that this ‘projecting’ is very common.

Probably the reason for this present-day angst that I have been feeling for awhile is that so much of life today makes so little sense to me. Any product that I’ve liked, be it a yogurt brand or a type of cookie, stops appearing on the shelves, any t.v. show that I appreciate goes off the air. I always thought that one was supposed to get wiser with age, become a guru whom everyone respects and comes to on bended knee in search of sage advice. Instead I find myself running to my children whenever I need help with the computer or my phone, whether it’s doing my taxes or figuring out a new app. I used to respect our country’s politicians, whether it was listening to Pierre Trudeau tearing strips off the separatists in Quebec or reading about how Sir John A. MacDonald established our country by constructing a railroad from coast-to-coast.

Now I listen to Justin Trudeau’s empty and breathy proclamations about the vaccines arriving “soon” and watch rioters knock the heads off of Sir John A.’s statues.

For decades I prided myself about keeping abreast of the news. Now I watch the aquarium channel instead.

Maybe I’ve already bypassed this elder-as-sage period and moved on to elder-with-Alzheimer’s. Just the other day I walked into a Tim Horton’s in Quebec without a mask.

After all, it’s only been a little more than a year.

But when chastised by the twenty-something cashier at least I didn’t further embarrass myself by saying, “Pandemic ? What’s a pandemic?”

It may be a mid-sixties thing. I remember talking to my father at the kitchen table back in 1993 I believe it was- (don’t ask me who I talked to yesterday.) The non-smoking ban in public places was beginning to gain traction and have teeth and I watched my father light up another in a two-pack-a-day habit that he had faithfully practiced “since I was thirteen or fourteen years old.”

“What happens ,Dad, if they really carry through with this non-smoking thing?”

He took a deep, satisfying drag, blew smoke out through his nose and smiled with what was either deep confidence or false bravado. “This, too, shall pass.”

Well, we know how that turned out.

I can relate to the old man.

It happens to the best of us,