Kneedy

Posted on September 12, 2022 by dperras56

The nurse was named Rose. An old-school name. However, the new wave of babies being born in Canada.

(well, it’s more like a trickle) seem to be tagged with Old School, Old World monikers. Like Noah, Oliver and Emma. I’m sure Ezekiel, Gertrude and Alma are soon to join the list.

John, Jim, Bob and Dave have been relegated to the periphery and soon to the old-folks’ homes. I’m told I should be filling out my application now.

But I could tell by the tenor of Rose’s voice that she was 60+.

“Do you drink?” she asked. My throat tightened, the same feeling as when my father caught me taking the family car and having a couple of beers, right after I had been expressly told not to do it.

“Ah…..well,….” coming face -to-face with your vices is always difficult. But Rose was relentless.

“Ummm, yes.” Honesty, I’ve been told, is always the best policy.

“Two drinks a day? More than two?”

This may call for a little deception. I felt like the accused on the witness stand who was being asked when he stopped beating his wife.

Rose was too sharp for me. She could flush out the intemperate even over the phone. Moving in for the kill, her impatience with my suspected over-imbibing was apparent. “You can’t drink before your operation. Do you go into withdrawal when you stop?”

This conversation had taken an unseemly turn. I didn’t even have time to make up another lie.

“I don’t know. I’ve never stopped.”

We had to go through the rest of the interview and happily Rose did most of the talking. I was told to visit the Medical Centre behind the Canadian Tire to purchase my crutches, cane and commode. (Don’t ask.)

I had finally decided to go ahead with my operation for a knee replacement. I had put it off because I could still play hockey and go to the gym, my two passions, although walking was difficult. My limping, bowlegged gait was the cause of much imitation and raucous gusts of guffaws from my hockey playing buddies. Great fun.

I played my last hockey game on Monday night before I would go under the knife (really, the saw) on Tuesday morning. I even went out for a beer with the guys after the game, although none of the cheap bastards shelled out for me after. My anaesthiologist, also a hockey player, had assured me that the hops would be good for me. You have to know which of the medical experts’ advice to follow.

The next morning I was wheeled into the operating room only two hours behind schedule. Thank God I wasn’t left on a gurney to die in a remote hallway like that poor devil in Nova Scotia. There was quite a crowd of blue-smocked attendants around me as the epidural was prepared. I questioned the need of this because even though our present view of reality goes the way of recognizing gender fluidity and the myth of only two sexes, I assured her I wasn’t in here in order to give birth. She smiled before she stabbed me, with the assurance that she knew that and this would prevent me from the annoying noise of a saw cutting through the knee bone.

And that’s the last I was aware of until I woke up and the medical team was cleaning up around me. Not even groggy, I was able to count the thirty staples now running down my knee. I was then wheeled down the hall by a good-natured friendly orderly to my room for an overnight stay, a room already occupied by two other bed-ridden senior men. We eyed each other warily, wondering which one of us would receive the bulk of attention from the young nurses.

Old guys sharing a hospital room. I remember watching my grandfather move around in his barn and how he looked to me. I’ll never get there, I remember thinking.

Damn, but it’s got here in a hurry!

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Poseurs

Posted on August 16, 2022 by dperras56

Probably to be human means that we sometimes pretend to be something that we’re not.

Walking my dog beside Dow’s Lake I came across an old guy sitting on a park bench, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. He was by himself and looked to be, oh, a little older than me.

I liked that.

Between him, me and my dog Jasper who had just had his fifteenth birthday last month I figured we had lived through 250 years. (That’s factoring in dog years to people years of course.) And to come clean, I have not been a truly impassioned baseball fan since 2004, when new owner Jeffrey Loria packed the Montreal Expos off to Washington, D.C sometime in the middle of the night. But this guy looked like he was old enough to have followed the Red Sox ‘Impossible Dream’ season in 1967 when they went from last place to first and only narrowly lost the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. So I sat down beside him on the bench. Frankly, I needed the break. My knees, both without cartilage, ensured that I walked like a crippled cowboy.

“You a Red Sox fan?”. Stating the obvious, I’ve found, is always a good conversation starter. It also ensures that people don’t overestimate your intelligence from the get-go.

He looked over at me. Ottawans don’t usually start conversations with strangers, especially since civil servants virtually all work from home now, making real human introductions about as rare as an encounter with an alien.

“Yeah.” He looked over at me, wondering how long it would take me to ask him for some spare change.

“I used to play pickup ball with Bill Lee on Sunday mornings back when he played for the Montreal Expos.” Every Red Sox and Expos’ fan has at least one Bill Lee story to share. He had played for both teams during his major league career.

He looked over at me… blankly. “Uh… Bill Lee?”

I was starting to think that this guy didn’t really know what the ‘B’ on his cap stood for. I don’t know… probably he found the Red Sox cap in a bargain bin in some hardware store when he was on vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine. “You know, Bill Lee, the pitcher…. nicknamed the Spaceman . He got traded to the Montreal Expos after the 1978 season.”

“Okay.” He seemed to be more interested in watching a Canada goose clean his feathers a few feet away. I was getting suspicious about this guy’s baseball knowledge. Maybe he didn’t even know what pickup ball was. I could understand that for someone under 40 years of age, maybe those kids only play it on their phones now, but hell, this guy looked like he started school during the Kennedy Administration. If I brought up the name of Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski, he’d probably think I was talking about the Polish ambassador in Ottawa. He was still more interested in the goose, now cleaning his tailfeathers. He stood up and nodded. “Well… gotta go.”

Well, no wonder people don’t talk to each other anymore. ..I got up to go as well. There must be someone else in this park interested in talking about baseball players from the 1970s.

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Chips off the old block

Posted on June 21, 2022 by dperras56

An old Yiddish proverb goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Maybe I took that a little too seriously.

So I’ve always figured, to add my own aside to the wisdom of the sages, sometimes the best recipe for peace of mind is just to wear a good set of blinders and to live your life in ignorant bliss.

There was a windstorm in Ottawa a few weeks ago. It had been widely forecast.

But the weather didn’t look too menacing as I pedaled my ass down Bank Street a little before 4 p.m. that afternoon on my way to the GoodLife gym. The gym is located on the same level as the underground parking lot so there’s really only one large side window in the whole place. I don’t look out the window too much as I workout (and no, it’s not because I’m constantly checking myself out in the mirror.)

When I finished up an hour and a half later things were much the same exiting the building as they were when I entered. Nothing happening here, Sergeant.

That evening, having a couple of beers with neighbours, I made the innocent remark that the predicted raging storm had been highly exaggerated. My neighbours looked at me, somewhat strangely I thought, and commented that actually trees had been blown over just a street away and that there were power outages all over … everywhere.

As the British rock group entitled one of my favourite albums in the 1970s (also the heyday of my life)… “Crisis ? What Crisis?”

And along these lines, it’s funny what stands out in our minds. Back in the 1980s one of my brothers was describing my general persona to someone who didn’t know my every foible the way he did. “If David had a child just like him they could be watching t.v. and the roof could fall in. David would say, “Did you just hear something?” And his child, if he were anything like his old man would say. “No. I didn’t hear a thing.” Then the subject which was closest to their hearts would be brought up. David would say, “Aren’t you supposed to be making supper?’

And his kid would say. “I thought you were!”

But it’s funny how a fictional? good story sometimes foreshadows the future. A few months ago one of my now-grownup kids who, uh, took a few years to get a career on track (but now seems to be well on his way) said to me, “I wrote down some goals. I never realized that you were supposed to have goals.”

Goals ? I knew that there had been something I had overlooked !

Those goals might have been worthwhile if ever organization had been my trump card. I remember my last place of employment, Nepean High School, where the disorganized piles of paper on my desk were a standing joke among my fellow department members, if not the whole staff. I probably retired before the whole mess collapsed on me, taking me out for good.

Another old aphorism goes that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Of course it’s describing how children’s behaviour so often mirrors that of their parents.

I was in a Parent-Teacher meeting a number of years ago when my son Adam was still in high school. His math teacher, which incidentally was a subject in which he excelled, asked him to produce his notebook. Adam reached into a chaotically -stuffed backpack and produced one crumpled piece of paper.

I should have been shocked and aghast, but all I could do was nod in total understanding.

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End of an Era

Posted on April 28, 2022 by dperras56

If you believe in forever then life is just a one-night stand

If there’s a rock’n roll heaven

Then you know they’ve got one helluva band.

-The Righteous Brothers

They say that only the good die young. And one of my fondest wishes, that as well as an out-of- this world rock band playing continuously up there, is that there’s also a never-ending shinny game. Because that game has just been blessed by two of the all-time greats.

The first time I heard the name Mike Bossy was in 1973 when I was playing Junior ‘B’ hockey for the Dorval Jets. Bossy was a year younger than I was, but he was already playing for the Laval National, his hometown team in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, one step up from me. Bossy was a scoring phenomenon, filling the net and getting recognition as a can’t-miss prospect. A teammate of mine played with him the year previously and he told me that like a lot of Junior hockey players at that time Bossy had already quit school, but instead of watching tv he’d spend his time at the rink all day, shooting pucks.

Sounded like a great lifestyle to me. I remember thinking that maybe I could convince my parents to let me quit school so I could shoot pucks all day and become a scoring phenom like Bossy.

Wrong on both counts. Both my parents were former teachers so that was the end of that. And sad to say that my best goal-scoring only happened years later, playing in the beer leagues.

I still blame my parents for that !

Even a casual hockey fan (and it mystifies me how anyone can be casual when it comes to hockey) knows the rest of the story. How Bossy, despite being passed up in the draft by his hometown Montreal Canadiens and twice by the Toronto Maple Leafs (twice!… take that Leaf fans!) Bossy produced nine fifty-plus goal seasons in a row and helped his New York Islanders’ team to four consecutive Stanley Cups in the early 1980s. A bad back brought on by lesser-talented foes who were more adept at crosschecking than skillful play ended his career at the age of thirty. I remember watching him in his last playoff series and he could hardly skate a lick on the ice. I remarked to my brother, “Bossy’s done.”

Of the thousands of confident predictions that I’ve made in my life, this is one of the very few that I got right. And thirty five years later, my prediction really came true; Mike Bossy died of lung cancer.

And just last week, so did Guy Lafleur. I can totally understand the too-early deaths. Both guys grew up in Quebec during my era and at that time it was hard to take a smoke-free breath. Both my parents smoked, my high school had a smoking room and many would light up right in the hockey dressing room as well. None of us would bat an eye. I remember one of my brothers telling an older relative that studies showed that his addiction could shorten his life. The relative took a long drag, exhaled the smoke out his nose and replied that that was okay, he’d rather die young than exist in an old-folks ‘ home with pablum dribbling down his chin.

No one does ceremonies like the Montreal Canadiens. Hockey was a religion when I was growing up in Quebec and I worshipped at the shrine of the Montreal Canadiens. And to watch the memorial ceremony at the Bell Centre, with the voice of the incomparable P.A. announcer Michel Lacroix in both French and English constantly being interrupted by the fans reenacting that old time Forum chant of “Guy, Guy, Guy” brought me back to my younger self.

And a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

That hadn’t happened since my mother died twenty-one years ago.

Both Lafleur and Bossy hearken back to a time when NHL stars arose out of the working class and both remained true to their roots, humble and unpretentious to the end.

My most vivid memory of Guy Lafleur’s hockey magic was the 1979 Stanley Cup Playoff series versus the Boston Bruins. The Habs were trailing by a goal with slightly more than a minute remaining. I was working on road construction in Vegreville, Alberta and I was the only Habs’ fan in the bar watching as time ran down and I braced myself for the inevitable .But when Lafleur had the puck anything was possible. His slapshot from the right wing boards passed a flailing Gilles Gilbert I have watched and re-watched literally hundreds of times I was the only one in that Alberta bar celebrating, pounding the counter and accidentally knocking over my quart bottle of beer. I only escaped with my life by joyfully buying a round for the house.

Rest in Peace and join the game going on up there. Merci beaucoup vous deux gars .

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Don’t Get Me Started

Posted on February 24, 2022 by dperras56

“Do you know your balls get smaller as you get older ?” the old fellow told me.

“I just thought your ears got bigger,” I replied by way of an answer. Or maybe just to change the subject. Jesus, how do I get myself in these situations ?

Maybe it’s because they’re all around me. Old guys, I mean. I just read this morning that twenty percent of the population will be sixty five years old or older within the next five years. Even our sports stars are gettin’ there. I mean, Tom Brady is forty-four and unless he lets his wife boss him around and make his decision for him, he’ll probably be back engineering second half miraculous comebacks again next season. And don’t you think Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the NFL’s Most Valuable Player two years in a row now, looks like the guy you used to hang out in the pool hall with back in the 1970s? The kids I taught when I started teaching back in 1981 are all approaching their mid-fifties now. Probably some of them look more like a Cabbage Patch Kid themselves now than any of the dolls which were such a faddish craze in their day back then. No offense intended, although I know I do that often enough. I try to avoid mirrors myself as much as possible.

But let’s get back to my opening line. I guess that if the fate of women is to have to go through menopause then I suppose the male alternative is acceptable. I mean, it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night with hot flashes. And even though my aging carcass can’t do as much as I used to , my days are full enough. I mean, just counting the number of vitamins I pop every day is really time consuming.

To circle back to the beginning, maybe my testicles won’t turn tiny. After all, one has to consider the source of that information. I saw the same old guy outside Tim Horton’s a couple of weeks ago. We were both drinking our coffee outside even if the temperature was tipping the thermometer at -26 Celsius. Tim’s couldn’t let us stay inside. Even though we both might be double-vaxxed, double-masked and wearing a hazmat suit our very presence was considered contaminating.

“How are you doing these days,” I asked him between slurps. I avoided the moniker, ‘old fellow.’ Pot calling the kettle black and all that.

“Did you know I fought in Vietnam?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. He had a Quebecois accent, so I followed up with what I thought was a logical question. “Did you go as a volunteer or did you get American citizenship?”

“I was born in the mountains of Sweden,” he answered. I didn’t know there were mountains in Sweden, but I didn’t want to be a buzzkill. But I’ve listened to a lot of Swedish hockey players being interviewed on tv, and none of them spoke with a Quebecois accent.

“Where were you stationed over there? Ping Pong, Sing Song? Sorry, other than Hanoi and what they used to call Saigon my knowledge of Vietnamese geography is severely limited.” I felt a little levity was required. I’d also had a lot of time on my hands throughout the past two years and I couldn’t even remember the number of lockdowns we had endured. I think I have to take off my shoes to count them all. It was only noon and I make it a practice not to have my first beer before 5 p.m. Turns out we had a good talk and I hardly believed a word he said.

No different than all the media stories I listen to all day.

But as anyone who knows me well can attest, don’t get me started.

I might never know when I might stop.

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Gym Dandy

Posted on January 16, 2022 by dperras56

I almost got into a fight at the gym the other day.

Well, I mean the other week. The gym has been closed for sometime now. Again. You know the drill. The thing is, since the pandemic started, I’ve never missed any gym time. That’s not true of my contemporaries. Usually I’m the oldest guy in there by, oh, at least three decades. I get snide looks like some are thinking Father Time lost his way to the geriatric floor and stumbled into the maternity ward by mistake.

I had just finished my two minutes on the rope pull. And of course now you have to sanitize everything your contaminated hands have touched just as much as a brain surgeon before he cuts into someone’s cranium.

There was a young guy on a bench about five feet over. Doing bicep curls or something, and giving himself loving glances in the mirror.

Anyway, I didn’t like the looks of him. I can’t always explain what goes on in my sixty-five year old, probably mildewed mind. I’m sure there’s a lot of tissue up there that doesn’t get enough blood flow. And , to be candid about my few weaknesses, I’m sometimes a little careless about what I say and do. So I took the water bottle and squirted it in the general direction of the rope. What I always do before wiping it down with a paper towel. I must have squirted it at the guy’s handsome visage.

“Hey, fuck you.” I guess I had upset him a little.

“No, fuck you.” In times like this my reptilian brain takes over. Also, after a lifetime of hockey fights, I’ve learned that one never apologizes, even if one has just delivered a slash to the back of an opponent’s legs. The spiritual homilies I use to advise others didn’t seem to be on the tip of my tongue.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Neither of us probably never made it to the school’s debating team.

I decided to see if a little levity would soothe the wild beast. “You seemed to need a little cooling off,” I told him. I didn’t think a full-on fistfight between two guys forty-five years apart in age would do much to enhance our prospects of still being allowed in the gym. Besides, we were beginning to attract the attention of some of the bemused inmates.

We both rose to our full height. He had me beat there.

To tell you the truth I was beginning to enjoy this. “You gonna fight me?” I said, probably in a manner a little too snarly for my sixty-five years.

“No…old man.”

Okay. That’s it. But cooler heads prevailed, and I’m not referring to the two unlikely combatants.. A psychotherapist would have a field day with me. And if this had been the American Wild West of the mid -18th century and I had been packing a Smith and Wesson revolver instead of a water bottle my only defence would have been, “I just didn’t like the looks of the filthy varmint.”

A couple of weeks later I told the story to my wife. I don’t know why, I must have had one glass of red wine too many and I was trying to fill a lull in the conversation. As usual, she had no sympathy. No surprise there. If she and I had been in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, the Fall of Man would have been my fault. Adam, Eve and the snake would have been blameless.

“You know, those bottles are full of disinfectant. You probably stung the guy’s eyes.”

Uh… I never thought of that.

The gym’s still closed. But like the Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

But water bottles, and the disinfectant, will be more carefully deployed.

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A Lifetime of Confusion

Posted on November 22, 2021 by dperras56

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.

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Mumbo-Jumbo

Posted on June 11, 2021 by dperras56

Hector “Toe’ Blake coached those famous Stanley Cup winning Montreal Canadiens’ teams to eight championships during the last half of the 1950s and throughout the ’60s. When asked by a sportswriter to foretell the outcome of that night’s game, he replied, “Predictions are for gypsies.”

In today’s world, he would have to rephrase that simple reply into something like this: “Astrological foretelling, unless culturally-appropriated, is the domain of individuals self-identifying as the gender female in the cultural/racial/national group Roma, who have been persecuted for centuries by means of cultural and actual genocide. “

If not couched in gobbledy-gook jargon such as this, using specially made-up words that sound as pretentious as they are meaningless, the speaker risks being besieged on social media by an army of self-proclaimed ‘social-justice warriors’. Of course these ‘warriors’ have never been in a dangerous situation in their lives, or even ever done an honest day’s work . In fact I would say they’ve probably never spent any time with anyone who has a perspective outside of an academic class pontificating about ‘equitability emancipation.’ (The term exists; I looked it up.)

What does all this mean ? I guess I really am living up to my blog’s nomenclature. If that is true, then I will have to let a mind far greater than mine phrase my apology. As Maxwell Smart used to say in a t.v. show I loved to watch in the 1960s, “Sorry about that, Chief.”

But all of this reminds me of what Oskar Schindler asked of his accountant Itzhak Stern during the darkest days of the Holocaust, “Do I have to make up a whole new language?”

To which Stern replied, “I’m afraid so… yes.”

In the bad old days it was the extreme right wing Nazis who made up language and shouted down anyone with the nerve to stand up to them. (And then of course, went far beyond just shouting their opponents down.) Today it’s the extreme left who brook no discussion, denigrating and labeling anyone whose views may differ from their own.

I can only say this with a certain amount of sadness. I was once a staunch NDP voter who did his thesis in 1978 on ‘The (left wing) Waffle Group’s role in the New Democratic Party of the 1960s.’ But then being left-of-centre meant a fairer deal for the working man and equal rights for all races and genders (Even if in that time there were considerably fewer genders than there are now.) Society wasn’t divided into umpteen categories, represented by boxes on an application sheet.

And when I say divided, I mean divided in an acrimonious way. I realize of course that those people I am bemoaning of course mean well. Who doesn’t ? But let me illustrate my point (before I forget it) with a personal anecdote.

In 1970 at Beaconsfield High School I took a course called’ North American Literature .’ It was taught by a Jewish teacher named Mr. Neiss. He had a wife who was very sick at the time and Mr. Neiss said that during his most distressed periods during her illness he would read Henry David Thoreau’s American masterpiece ‘Walden.” The book was about the author’s thoughts and experiences of his year or two living alone in a log cabin he built by himself along the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Most of my classmates thought of him as mildly muddled (both Thoreau and Mr. Neiss) but I remember one line from that classic which I still quote today. “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our lives today Too many professional do-gooders, all out to publicize how virtuous they are.

As for me, I’m heading back to the basement to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs. I’ll also catch some baseball, even if the Montreal Expos ceased to exist in 2004. That’s real life, real entertainment.

And that’s no bullshit. Oops, I mean intestinal excretions from the male bovine gender.

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The Circle of Life

Posted on May 4, 2021 by dperras56

So many people are crazy now, it’s almost the thing to be. There are more crazies than sanes. You run into a sane now and you say, “What’s the matter with you, man? You sane ?”

Of course in the world we live in now, sanity is in the mind of the beholder. There are some out there, unbelievable as it may be, who consider me to be on the fringes of the real world, just inches away from stepping into the enchanted kingdom.

Can you believe that ?

The thing is, I don’t get out much anymore. My two outlets throughout my retired life, the gym and the hockey rink, have had their doors slammed in my face. And so here I am, feeling as isolated as a leper who’s just been pushed outside the gates of a walled medieval town, left only with a pouch of stale bread crusts.

But to tell you the truth I can see myself living out my days all alone in a ramshackle farmhouse with nothing to do except for whacking golf balls out into the wild blue yonder of an empty hayfield. In the winter I could strap on snowshoes and tramp as far out into the woods as my arthritic knees would take me.

Hopefully I’d be able to make it all the way back.

My wife, the socialite, still sometimes arranges the odd social engagement with neighbours. You know, the thing where you sit around a rickety garden table drinking beer in the still-chilly weather, trying to figure out something to say that doesn’t involve either the lockdown or our incompetent politicians. The trouble is that after almost thirty-five years of marriage my wife and I agree on even fewer matters than we did when we first took our vows. And she dislikes my opinions even more should I have the gall to voice them in public. So unless I want polite society to witness a full-on domestic dispute, I’m really left with only one option.

Smile and nod.

According to the Lion King there’s a circle of life. The first house I lived in was a bungalow with three bedrooms on the ground floor. There were four kids in my family, so my parents had one room, my oldest brother had another and my sister, the baby, had the third. My other brother and I slept in the basement That was okay; the ping pong table, my weights and the t.v. were down there with me. I could leave the basement when I wanted. My parents, unlike my wife, weren’t even afraid to present me to polite company.

I’ll probably end up on my own in a basement again. I still have my weights, the ping pong table and a t.v. down there. And the t.v. is now bigger, has high definition and gets more channels. But I don’t get out with polite company very often.

So rattle my cage when all this over. I just hope I’m presentable.

But I might not want to come out.

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Country Roads

Posted on April 14, 2021 by dperras56

Don’t worry – I’m not here to tell you my frickin’ life story.

God spare us.

The main reason is that I can’t remember most of it. But like an aging nonagenarian suffering from dementia and wasting away in a nursing home, certain ‘highlights’ still register, like an out-of-control kaleidoscope.

Such as when my grandfather, father and I were out walking one night on the country road in Quebec’s Eastern Townships not far from my grandfather’s farmhouse. This was in the early 1960s, before some government bureaucrat decided to flatten the natural topography, pave it, cut down the mature maple trees lining the road and turn it into a highway. This seemed to serve no purpose other than to speed up traffic and kill a succession of my grandfather’s dogs who never seemed to adapt to the idea that they now lived along a busy highway. In that way they were no different than most of the people who lived in the area.

This story has a point, although I have heard it said that most of what I say and write is lacking in that department. The three of us came across a chubby, more- than- slightly dishevelled woman sitting underneath one of the aforementioned maple trees and smoking a cigarette. She was not unfamiliar to us, even if she did not usually sit by the side of the road by herself in the dark, smoking cigarettes.

If this was the city today, we would have lowered our heads, avoided eye contact and hurried on by, surmising that she was drunk, high, begging, mentally-ill or quite possibly infected by some new variant of the novel coronavirus. But this was the country, where everyone knew one another and even greeted people they didn’t even know.

Imagine that.

“Hello Marjorie,” said my grandfather. He didn’t smoke, but he did chew tobacco. I always marvelled at how he never seemed to swallow any of it. You don’t see it much anymore, especially in the coffeshops of Ottawa’s Glebe where I now reside. It would rank considerably below heroin addiction and panhandling in acceptable social habits. Just above smoking cigarettes. But for those of you who consider it a filthy habit, my grandfather spent most of his time in a barn, hayfield or the woods. Spitting there didn’t seem to do so much damage. When he was old he kept an empty milk carton beside his rocking chair. I never saw him miss it. However, once in awhile his dog would come by and knock it over. Eventually, he or I would clean up the mess.

“Can I bum a cigarette?” Marjorie asked. I guess she didn’t plan on getting up for awhile. My father never ventured out without them. He handed one over and as she reached out to take it my father asked, “How old are you now, Marjorie?”

Marjorie didn’t miss a beat, as she lit up and exhaled slowly. “I’m thirty six” she answered. “Next year I’ll be twenty seven.”

As you can well imagine, Marjorie had never finished high school. Today with our advanced systems she probably would receive a diploma, probably even with ‘honours.’ But she was looked after by her parents, even if my memory draws blanks when I try to recall her eventual fate.

Marjorie left us with one unforgettable gem. As we turned to go I thought I should add my own two cents worth. Despite what has happened to me since, my parents brought me up to be polite and well-mannered.

“It was a pleasure running into you again, Marjorie,” I called back over my shoulder as we turned to leave.

She must have been unimpressed with my chivalry. “The pleasure was all yours’,” she answered, blowing smoke in our general direction.

It’s probably not the last time someone walking away from a conversation with me would have the same thought.

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