Musings
About retirement… and random other things!
These blogs first appear as weekly columns in the Red Deer Advocate
Gracefully surrendering the coordination of youth
On the days when I wake up and my eyelids won’t accordion-fold open into their prescribed slots properly, I know I’m in for a day of jamming square pegs into round holes. A day where anything that requires the technology and good fortune of an accurate twist or a fold upon itself in order to function will be completely off. I will coax my eyelids...
Life is a matter of perspective
(Here's me with my youngest nephew on a previous set in Olds - the artist of the mural took the picture!) My nephews are so adorable. All four of them are clever and kind, and either in their 40s or inching much closer to that magic age. It was only a few years ago that I stopped slipping a $10 bill into their birthday cards. I mean, one of them...
A clean sweep
I have always found the action of sweeping my kitchen floors to be soothing, although by the third round of tending animal fluff in a day it can get a bit repetitive. I’m thinking it’s the gentle side to side rocking that’s relaxing, sort of like the motions we made when we were learning the song Kumbaya in the 1960s. Or maybe it’s the TV...
We need a little good news
I’ve been humming the old Anne Murray song to myself a lot lately, because I love her music and because ‘We sure could use a little good news today’. As I write this, we are in a minus 40 deep-freeze, we are mad as hell about world chaos being caused by a single person and we were already tired of dealing with cost of living challenges. The...
What we choose to read
I have spent several years of my life feeling slightly ashamed that I haven’t read Alice Munro. Notable Nobel Prize winning Canadian author – I wondered through the years what the disconnect was. I felt slightly intimidated at times and then quite disinterested at others, thinking that I don’t really read short stories. But then I began to write...
Have you ever met your doppelganger?
I heard about my doppelganger long before I met her. Nicola is my distant cousin from Ireland and her uncanny similarities to me became a repeated theme among cousins in the ‘Canadian line’ who journeyed to the old country. When my mom and dad first set foot in Ireland, they had all four of us kids in tow. I’m not sure how they managed to save...
Owning less than 100 things
I recently heard the former purchaser for Harrods in London describing her epiphany that led to restraining herself to buying only five items this year. I realize that her life of stocking the shelves of one of the world’s exclusive shops is very different from mine – from most of ours, I reckon – but I was mostly struck by that number. Five...
Oddly excited for my high school reunion
With the new year comes a milestone event – this will be my 45th year of graduating from high school. What a thought, what a long time ago, how old we all are now. All of us people who graduated in 1979 from a huge Catholic high school in Calgary. I graduated with nearly 800 people and only knew a few hundred of them by name, and then only had a...
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?...