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Cancel or Decouple, that is the question

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  Cancel or Decouple? Have you been cancelled? I believe we all have in one way or another. We were cancelled by our neighbours. I don’t know why although my wife blames the dogs, particularly Pippa, our female cairn terrier who likes to pee on Gordon’s pristine lawn. They used to like Finian, our male dog, because he would visit them and watch the goldfish in their pond. Then, Finny pooped on the lawn and that was the end of his visits. But they’d still say hello when we’d catch the other’s eye while out gardening, hanging laundry, weeding the stones or whatever. I do that on the street. If someone catches my eye, I say hello whether I know them or not. It must be an old man thing. One day, they just stopped saying hello or acknowledging our existence whatsoever which isn’t easy because there isn’t a fence. (Weird as it may seem, the only line differentiating our property from theirs is a slightly different arrangement of rocks on the ground.) Betty especially has ignored us. Nicola’s
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Memories, where do they go?

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  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
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Rediscovering the Beautiful Art of Hanging Out

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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
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Anthropomorphism and Our Dogs, Pippa and Finian

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  Anthropomorphism, that’s when people attribute human characteristics to animals. Humans and animals share the same genetic origin and so, share common characteristics. This was an idea postulated by Charles Darwin, later disregarded by scientists who believed “animal behaviour revealed simple mechanical laws that made mentalistic explanations unnecessary.” 1 But, lately, scientists believe that animals do have human characteristics. For example, personality has been observed in birds, horses, cats, and, of course, dogs.    May I introduce our own, Pippa and Finian, Finny for short. They are both terriers of the Scottish variety and share a genetic desire to kill small creatures. When one of these creatures climbs a tree or retreats in a hole, Pippa will cry in frustration. Kill. That’s all that seems to be going through her head and Finny isn’t much different. The dogs and us on the trail Recently, I had Finian on the leash in the treeless, alpine region of the high mountainside. Su
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Flag Wavers

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  We were again treated to images of flag wavers calling for their rights and freedoms on the streets and lawn in front of the Parliaments buildings in Ottawa. Driving through the Okanagan recently, we passed a few pickups covered in stickers calling for freedom and unity with a minimum of two Canadian giant flags secured by poles to the back of their truck beds. Anywhere they can fit them. Canadian flags and calls for freedom, freedom, freedom. My wife referred to them as clown trucks.     I have to agree with her to an extent. Anyone with any connection to world has seen what’s going on in Ukraine. Someone invades your country with the goal of putting in a puppet government and robbing you of all your rights to sovereignty and suddenly you’re no longer a citizen of that country. You’re a province of another. All your democratic rights are gone along with your right to self-determination and all the loss of freedom that entails.    People around the world connected the Ukrainian flag
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Retirement, a time for recalibrating

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I believe one of the secrets to retirement is self-discipline. We suddenly return to a life more in common with children than other adults especially if we are no longer required to work to live. Suddenly our time is our own.  After my dad retired, he and my mom built an addition to their cabin. The project took them over a year of constant labour using blueprints designed by my brother who’d just completed a degree in architecture. That design required that the roof be supported by single, one and a half story beam. Can you imagine?  First, they had to find suitable tree in the forest. Then, they would have had to cut it down, delimbed it, peeled the bark off and varnished it. But, the hard part would have been erecting this huge log, held it in place, and then secured it in place.  He and my mom couldn’t have done that on their own but who else could have helped? Maybe my sister, brother, and his wife. I’m embarrassed not to know. There was no timeline or expectation of performance e
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The meaning of life. Are you kidding?

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  I had a conversation with a friend about jobs and meaning and, without one, you can’t have the other. And so, I wondered, is this true? And, of course, I generalized that even further to wonder if, without purpose, can life have meaning? I posed a version of this question to my wife and she replied, I’m not talking about it.    But my friend was so passionate, it was difficult to ignore. He’s in the oil industry and he’s seen many of his friends lose their jobs. My daughter was in the oil industry. She made a lot of money for a young woman her age, less that her male counterparts, but still a lot.    My friend has three houses, each worth more than one of mine, so I figured, unless the friends he was talking about were young like my daughter, they would have accumulated a considerable sum of money and capital. Certainly, more than I, as a teacher, had done.   He and I are the same age. I’m retired. I haven’t lost my meaning. Does he fear doing the same should he retire as well?    I
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