Word Prisms

  I was watching an episode of the series “Industry” where the owner of a massive chateau thanks his dinner guests for the memories that he will always attach “to this house.” And I thought of Los Angeles and all the houses destroyed by the fire and the memories lost and the Slave Lake fire I lived through in 2011 and all the memories lost in it and, the fact that, no matter how rich or poor or in between the individual may be, those are memories lost.   We didn’t lose house the house we were living a the time but our previous house burnt to the ground; the house in which we had spent 14 years raising our eldest child from age 2 to 16 year-of-age, our middle child from 6 months to 14 and our youngest, for whom the house had been his only home until age 11. There was nothing left, not even the basement that had been constructed of wood.   Our first house  ! And the apple tree that we’d planted and buried our first dog beneath, that was gone. And the firepit ...

  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. Nico...

  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. Bu...

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...

  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 mo...

  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 conne...