Musings
About retirement… and random other things!
These blogs first appear as weekly columns in the Red Deer Advocate
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?...
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...