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