Musings
About retirement… and random other things!
These blogs first appear as weekly columns in the Red Deer Advocate
Can you hear me now?
I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about hearing tests lately. At least I think that’s what they’ve been saying. I can’t confirm since I’m finding myself struggling to hear people now and I haven’t had a test myself for about seven years. How often are we supposed to have a hearing test, and why don’t we know this as a matter of course?...
Where everybody knows your name
Remember when Cheers was a staple in living rooms across the nation throughout the 1980s? We were all enthralled with the humour, the setting, the handsome main actor. My sister, who was already living away by the time the series began in 1982, came over to the house to have Dad sit down to watch it. He was enthralled from the very start – I...
Stepping outside my comfort zone to sing at Festival of Trees!
What fun to receive an invitation to join a senior’s choir, after a kind person named Jim read my November column ‘Just open up and sing’. I would be welcome to just pop into a group of singers who gather every Tuesday morning, he said. What have I got to lose, I said. So after several Tuesdays went by before I was about to carve out time to join...
Christmas Eve in Bethlehem
Forty-four years ago today, I spent Christmas Eve in Bethlehem. It was a night to behold, for sure, during a memorable winter that I spent working on a kibbutz in Israel. It was what young backpackers did at the time – when it got cold in Europe where everyone was touring around on a Eurail pass, we would head for the volunteer office in Tel Aviv...
The gift of a warm hug
There was a time when everyone was giving me scarves for Christmas. It was a strange phase, but they were all lovely and some were even handmade which made them even more special. I figured maybe I had reached that time in my life when I had become difficult to buy for. A senior living in a small condo doesn’t need knickknacks, after all, so the...
Christmas cheer throughout the year
Do you keep all the Christmas cards you receive - when there's not a postal strike and you're actually receiving them? I keep mine! It’s so that I can bring them out again in the heat of a summer’s day and let a totally different feeling wash over me than the one I felt when I received them in the scurry of the holiday season. In fact, I enjoy...
Where do your Christmas traditions come from?
Nothing shines a light on our family traditions much like Everything Christmas. When you stop to think about it some of them are pretty strange, and yet we hold onto all of them because that’s what everyone who gathers expects year after year. For instance, a bowl of cottage cheese presented with a sprinkle of pepper lines up with the rest of the...
A poignant loss on November 5th
November 5 will go down in history as a very sad day. It’s the day we learned of the passing of Chief Justice Murray Sinclair, this country’s exquisite example of the best in humanity. So many accomplishments in his lifetime, but for me it was his role as Chair of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was most impactful. I had the...
Do you read differently than you once did?
Someone recently mentioned to me that they are feeling less confident about their writing and they figure it’s because of what they have come to read. This thought was shared by an incredibly successful entrepreneur who has a number of degrees and interacts with corporations and governments as part of his work. Now in his 60s, he mentioned his...