I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all.

‘Both Sides Now’

-Joni Mitchell

“Isn’t it unusual what people can believe?” one scientist said to another in a comic strip that I recall from years ago.

“Oh, I know,” answered his colleague. “My mother-in-law believes in Reagonomics and creationism.”

“That’s nothing,” the first scientist retorted. “I have a neighbour who believes in reincarnation and that aliens live among us.”

“Well, listen to this,” chimed in a third member of the scientific community brigade. “‘One of my cousins is adamant that the earth is flat and the same guys who shot Kennedy framed Pete Rose.”

Cut to the last square of this particular comic where two rats are gossiping in what is obviously an elaborate maze.

“Did you hear the latest?” one bemused rodent says to another. ” Jim over in Quadrant D believes that we’re all being manipulated by pasty-faced guys wearing white lab coats.”

His conversational partner guffaws in disbelief. “No…. really?!?”

And that’s exactly where I find myself after some 65 years of sometimes striding through life, but more often stumbling, often around in circles. If not a state of total bewilderment, then in some sort of confused consciousness.

No… better make that total bewilderment. But there is some comfort in believing that I’m not alone in this particular predicament.

In the summer of 1982 my brother and I decided it was time for him to see the country west of Oakville, Ontario, where our family had moved to from Montreal in 1976. I had been out west twice before, once to work on a road crew north of Edmonton and then later to work at the Hudson’s Bay Company on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton. But as I couldn’t see myself forever digging holes in the highway near Stony Plain nor marking up prices in the Toys and Records Department both sojourns were relatively short-lived. In any event, I had exclaimed the wonders of living on the western plains and hiking and skiing in the Rockies so often that my brother Terry must have been motivated to see it all for himself. Good thing he never asked me why I hadn’t stayed. Just another example of the confused reasoning that has marked, oh, a few decisions throughout my life.

Winnipeg, Manitoba is cited as the halfway point in any east-west journey across Canada, and though I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘Peg, cynics claim that if God decided to give the world an enema, He/She would make the injection in Winnipeg. A steak dinner at the Keg Restaurant seemed as good a reward as anything to mark a journey halfway complete. The hostess seated us at a table next to two young men slightly older than ourselves. They were both gulping Grand Marniers.

After four days on the road Terry and I were both sick of the sound of the other’s voice. One of the drinkers seemed to be doing most of the talking and from what we could hear, he was doing it in a most amusing fashion. When he heard us laughing at his stories he invited us to sit with them and even provided two Grand Marniers. We became fast friends.

As the evening and the G-Ms (as we began calling them, probably because we started slurring the longer version of the word) progressed, we became privy to his life story. He now had his own business selling ultra-light planes in the interior of British Columbia. Such was not always the case.

“I’m originally American. I came to Canada when my draft number came up and I was called to go to Vietnam. I was able to make it across the border and a year later found myself teaching school in the Pas, Manitoba. There I was … an American draft dodger from the state of Maine teaching the British heritage to Canadian Indians in northern Manitoba.

“It was then that I realized… life is absurd !”

He really did use the term ‘Indians.’ Remember, it was 1982, decades from the ‘Indigenous’ term of today.

The next morning Terry and I toured Manitoba’s Provincial Legislative Buildings in a hungover state. Afterwards, Terry found a large bush and threw up. I decided that I would do the driving that morning.

I don’t know if that was a meaningful life decision but at least it wasn’t one of my many that went off the rails.