Word Prisms

  After selling our Slave Lake house, we packed our trailer and headed for Invermere hoping to find a new home for our retirement. Not far from Carstairs, a warning light came on our car telling us we need to stop immediately We didn’t stop but we did pull into a campsite in the above town, parked the trailer and drove to the nearest Toyota dealership. There, we were told that the oil pump wasn’t working and they’d have to wait over a week for the part to arrive. Shit. But that’s not the point of my story. The point is that while taking the dogs for a walk at the Carstairs campsite, I was listening to a book called “At the Existentialist Café, Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.”  Still with me? The point of the café is that it involves hypothetical conversations with people who think about stuff like existentialism. Among the participants, sat Simone de Beauvoir, feminist, author, and sometime lover to Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps the most famous existentialist philosopher. But, though

Hanging out, it’s something I’ve relearned in my retirement. As kids, we used to do it all the time because, that’s all we seemed to have, was time. Then, if we went to post-secondary, we’d can still hang out but not for such lengthy periods of time. We’d have scheduled our hanging out time to sit on the benches in the hallway near the entrance to the library, coffee in hand, and watch the other students pass by. Usually, we scheduled hanging out with a friend or friends but sometimes alone. Occasionally, someone else might come along and hang out with you and you might learn some amazing things about that person like they’d been a chamber maid in London and how gross that had been but also, how interesting. Or, you might discuss a book you’ve been reading or a problem you’ve been attempting to solve. Or, some philosophy you’ve discovered that has opened your eyes to a brand new world. Or, some cockamamie theory you’ve come up with that you think will open the eyes of others. I was alw