Lust and Power

In a 1976 interview for Playboy magazine, the 39^th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, said, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” This was in response to a question about his views on the Bible’s admonitions about adultery, and was a paraphrase of Christ’s teachings in Matthew 5: 28—“I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.”

Many were aghast that so prominent a man would admit that, thereby damaging his political standing. Others saw it as an honest answer from a pious man, acknowledging his imperfections. Still others saw it as a cynical ploy—embracing both arrogance and humility—wanting to appear virtuous in the face of temptation, thus enhancing his political position.

Whatever it was, it is extremely unlikely Carter was the only man to have sinned in that fashion, although most of us would not choose to admit it.

There is obviously a difference between the so-called evil of lust and the widely-accepted blessing of love—but perhaps not so great a gap as might be imagined. Lust is relatively easy to define: a strong, sexual desire; a sensuous appetite (regarded by many today as sinful). Its blunt hunger can be satiated, at least temporarily, through participation in a sex act with someone else, or even alone.

Love is a softer sentiment, usually involving sexual attraction, but also embracing such emotions as friendship, protectiveness, tolerance, forgiveness, happiness, fulfilment, and mutual respect. It is something that, although freely given, must also be earned. In a truly loving relationship, the quest for love is never satiated, but yearned for, and given, all the more.

It cannot be disputed that the propagation of our species has relied upon the sexual attraction between men and women, their lust for each other. If two people also found love in their coupling, that was a bonus. Love for one another was not required in order to produce offspring.

Biologically speaking, lust can drive a person to have sexual relations with more than one partner of either gender, and more than once with each. And so it is with love. There is no biological impediment to falling in love with, and entering into a loving relationship with, multiple partners—although obviously, no children will result from a union of partners of the same gender.

Over time, and for a multitude of reasons, monogamous marriages became the norm in our culture. Although men and women could fall in love with more than one person, the law allowed us to marry but one at a time. However, the standing of each person in the conjugal union was unequal. For a long time, women were considered to be, if not the property of their husbands, at least subordinate to them. Power resided with the men. That status has changed ever so slowly, only beginning a hundred years or so ago.

At the time the Dominion of Canada was formed, a decade before the birth of the great Republic to the south, our fathers of confederation and their founding fathers espoused equality for all. But that noble ideal was to be applied only to the propertied classes—almost all of whom were male, white, rich, and protestant. Others of different gender, race, wealth, and religion were scarcely considered, except as property, workers, or servants.

Money and power were all that really mattered, and both resided with men.

Thus, it continued to be possible for men who lusted after women (or other men, or children) to prey upon them with relative impunity. Might makes right, as the adage has it, and fear can make cowards of us all. For the victims, suffering the abuse in silence was often more palatable than facing the public shaming and loss of employment that would crush them if they complained—assuming they would have been believed in the first place.

Jimmy Carter was honest in his admission. But I wonder, is it possible all men harbour such thoughts from time to time, even if only a relatively small number act on them? I cast no stones at him.

I also wonder, does power corrupt only men? Would women who come to power be immune to its seductive persuasions? And would any act on them?

Sexual misbehaviour of any sort is unacceptable, a monstrous issue only now being brought to the broader public arena. But I believe it is power, not lust, that is the driving force behind such behaviour. Any of us might experience lustful feelings, just as any of us might fall in love. But only the most powerful, the most arrogant, the most sociopathic among us would mobilize those feelings into unwanted actions, forced upon unwilling victims, solely for our own gratification.

It is as if the predators, when seized by a biological imperative, say to themselves, Because I can, I will. And who is to deny me?

And so, it is time, as many are saying—time to expose and shame those who are found guilty of transgressions, time to re-assess the accepted perquisites of power, time to educate our young people as to what is deemed acceptable in social intercourse, time to redefine the relationship between men and women.

It is more than time.

The Sneezer

My father was a prodigious sneezer. As children, my siblings and I would delight in watching his frantic scramble for the handkerchief he invariably carried in his back pocket, seeing his face scrunch up in anticipation of the looming explosion, hearing the violent expulsion of air from his lungs.

Getting at the handkerchief was often problematic, especially when he was seated. Without warning, he’d burst from his chair, sometimes spilling to the floor any of us children unlucky enough to have been sitting on his lap. Pawing frantically at his pocket, turning away from anyone present, he’d pull the white cloth out, shake it quickly, and plant it firmly across his mouth. Once in a while he was late getting it in place, which would elicit frustrated mutterings between sneezes.

We thought this routine was especially funny when carried out at church, in the middle of another long sermon. Or while he was on the phone.

During his fumblings for the handkerchief, he’d squeeze his eyes tightly shut, wrinkle his slightly bent nose, and tilt his head backwards, looking for all the world as if he was beseeching the heavens to spare him. His Adam’s apple, never particularly noticeable at other times, would bob up and down with his every stifled gasp.

And the noise! Depending on the severity of the sneezes, or how quickly they came upon him, the noise could be loud trumpeting, loud wheezing, even loud hissing. Always loud. We were never disappointed in the range of noises he could muster.

A-roo-pha-a-! A-roo-pha-a! we might hear. Or A-ree-cha-a-a! A-ree-cha-a-a! Sometimes A-chintz-ish! A-chintz-ish! There seemed no end to the variety of forms his sneezes could take. But always, they were six times repeated before he seemed able to stop. I think we first learned to count by marking my father’s sneezes.

My mother, always proper, would roll her eyes, frown, and sometimes admonish him for his attention-seeking ways. That’s how she regarded them. Genteel people, she maintained, would sneeze into their handkerchiefs so quietly as not to disturb those around them. And they would never draw attention to themselves in so garish or boorish a manner.

At her words, my father would nod agreement and point a finger randomly at her as he completed each cycle of sneezes. But he never changed. Not once as I grew up did I hear a gentle sneeze from him. No discreet Ker-choo! No soft A-choo!

He’s gone now, of course, and I’m older by far than he was when I first began to marvel at his sneezes. Over the years, I’ve become quite aware of the power of genetic coding as I’ve lived with my own daughters—and my wife—bemusedly berating me for my own sneezing habits. I believe, at least in this one small way, I am my father reincarnate.

Allergy season is a disaster for me, and every season seems to boast one or more allergens that trigger my sneeze reflex. Remembering my father’s sneezing, I’ve striven mightily to conform to my mother’s admonitions to him.

But honestly, have you ever tried to suppress a sneeze? Successfully? If you can, you’re among the blessed of the world. I marvel when I see someone turn their face into their sleeve and emit a barely audible Mmm-ffft! They behave as if that simple act is nothing.

When I try, my eyes begin to water, my breath comes in short gasps, and I can’t continue talking, so preoccupied am I with the tickle in my nostrils that just won’t go away. And it’s always to no avail, anyway. I’ve even tried clamping my hand over my mouth, only to have the eruption through my nose. That’s not pleasant, handkerchief or not!

To my chagrin, I’ve discovered that my grandchildren may have inherited the sneezing curse. I watched one of the girls recently, doing as she’s been taught, sneezing into the crook of her elbow rather than into her hand. I thought this a much healthier way of proceeding until I saw her wipe the residue off her sleeve with…you guessed it, her hand!

And my grandson—what a sneezer he was as an infant. I even wrote a poem for him, so taken was I with his prowess. It was entitled Ebenezer Sneezer, and he laughs at it still.

But alas, it’s still I who commands the attention of all around me when I have to sneeze. Although I remember my father fondly for so many reasons—his sense of humour, his kindness, his pride in his ever-growing family— his sneezing proclivities bedevil me to this day.

You may laugh at my concern, thinking it trivial, but it’s the only thing in my life where I can truly say, “It’s nothing to sneeze at!”

From Sapiens to Omnipotentus

Science is pretty clear that Homo sapiens has been populating the planet for more than 200,000 years—a considerably longer time than the Christian story would have us believe. The Garden of Eden was purportedly created some six thousand years ago, and most archaeologists believe it was located near the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, at a spot now submerged in the Persian Gulf.

But in fact, forms of earlier human life have been documented as far back as two-and-a-half-million years. Our human predecessors—part of the animalia family, the vertebrata subphylum, the mammalia class, the primates order, the homininae subfamily, and the Homo genus—include, among others, such species as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis. All are now extinct.

As a child raised in a Christian home, I was taught, and came to believe, that man was created in God’s own image. (As an aside, I was also taught that woman was created from a rib of that man—which, if not an original sin, was at the very least an original prioritizing of importance. As a further aside, I later came to understand that the Christian stories depicting this creation were written by men, which explained that version of events.)

Somewhere along the way, I was also exposed to the tantalizing question: did God create us, or did we create God?

Humans alive today—let me group women and men together as humankind for purposes of this essay—are members of the Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies, which we are told has been in existence for perhaps 70,000 years. Were we, through some magical time-warp, able to confront some of our earliest sapiens predecessors, we would scarcely recognize them as human. I cannot imagine what they would think of us.

Nevertheless, biologically, genetically, we are virtually identical.

Pictures of earlier Homo peoples, reconstructed from archaeological findings, show they looked quite different than we do. They behaved differently, too, living in an environment quite distinct from ours. It seems obvious that, over the millennia, humankind has evolved to accommodate the changing conditions. But beneath the skin, beyond the discrepancies in physical appearance, we are related as a part of the same family in the same fashion that any of us are related to our grandparents. The earliest humans so far identified through fossil evidence—perhaps Homo ardipithecus or Homo australopithecus—were part of humankind.

When I was first taught that humankind was created in God’s image, I made the completely valid assumption that God, therefore, looked like us. His many depictions in the magnificent paintings of the masters only proved it—a stern, majestic, bearded being, (male, of course), clothed in white raiment, surrounded by angelic hosts, allowing the tip of one finger to be touched by a mere mortal reaching in supplication.

But I have long since wondered, can that be so? If humankind was, indeed, created in his image, perhaps he actually looks like our earliest ancestors, hairy and ape-like—unless, he, too, has evolved across the centuries (which I concede is a real possibility). This would not contradict the creation story, merely situate it in a much earlier timeframe.

Such speculation, however, leads me to an even more intriguing question. It seems indisputable that Homo sapiens sapiens is continuing to evolve. Our marvellous brains have led us to the cusp of some wonderful, perhaps terrifying, advances in medical science—advances which have allowed us to live our full span of years, and more, relatively free of the scourges of premature death, when compared to those who came before us.

Cloning sheep, so astonishing a feat a mere handful of years ago, was just the beginning. Purposeful studies today in such fields as stem-cell research, human genome-mapping, in vitro fertilization, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, to name a few, are moving us beyond the boundaries of what we have always understood to be true of our mortal selves.

Will humankind, in the not-so-distant future, be able to create human life? And maybe code it to follow a certain, predetermined path of development? Will our brains, perhaps conjoined with, or replaced by, digital, adaptive intelligence be able to take us to another evolutionary stage? From Homo sapiens sapiens to, let us say, Homo sapiens omnipotentus?

Will humankind in that case become, not cast in God’s image, but God? Is that the evolutionary future of the being that created us in the first place? To become us?

It has been written that we are one with God. Perhaps, some day in the future, we shall be so.

It’s the Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure

My parents considered themselves members of the ‘upper-middle class’, and took pains to ensure that we children understood that. I’m not sure I ever did, though, although we were neither rich nor poor.

Most of my growing-up years were spent in a modest, suburban home, on a standard-sized lot, in a neighbourhood of similar families, none of whom had everything they might have wished for. I was ten years old before we acquired our first black-and- white television set, for example; I was sixteen before we got our first car, a ten-year-old British import handed down from my grandfather. As a matter of fact, hand-me-downs were integral to our lives.

We knew there were lots of families who had more material wealth than we did, but they didn’t live in our community. Their homes were larger and boasted swimming pools, two-car garages, and paved driveways, with proper kerbs, not ditches, lining their streets. We knew there were people with far less than we had, too, but we would encounter them only infrequently, and were taught it was best to avoid them.

So we did realize, I suppose, that we were in the middle between the rich and the poor, between the so-called upper and lower classes. But the finer distinctions within this middle class were lost on us. It mattered not that one kid’s father drove a bus, while another’s worked in an office. No one cared if somebody’s mother had a job, while another’s was a stay-at-home Mum. Blue-collar and white-collar meant nothing to us. Knowing we were loved and safe was all that mattered.

As an old rock song attested, …Here [we were], stuck in the middle with you.

One of my grandmothers used to sing an old British pub-song, in a fake Cockney accent, to the great amusement of her grandchildren, and it seemed to reinforce the fact that we were solidly and safely middle-class—

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure,

It’s the poor wot gets the blame,

‘Tis the same the ‘ole world over,

I’n’t it a bloomin’ shame!

Mind you, as we grew older, we were encouraged—strenuously—to strive for as much as we could get, to never be satisfied with less. It was important, we were taught, to pursue an education; to find, not a job, but a career; to plan for the future; in short, to rise above our station in life.

Inevitably, some of us took that advice, and some of us did not.

Today, I’m led to believe by pundits and prophets that the middle class is disappearing as the wealth-gap widens between the rich and the poor—or, perhaps more accurately, between the few rich and the multitudinous poor. I admit it’s hard for me to comprehend that, because I’ve never been either fabulously rich or ruinously poor. Being in the middle has always seemed a good place to be.

I recently finished an interesting book—Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari—that delves into why, despite a professed passion for equity and fairness in our modern, liberal society, our species continues to divide ourselves into castes—cultural, religious, and economic. I’m about to begin a sequel, Homo Deus, which looks at where we are likely headed. Harari does not paint a rosy picture.

An overly-simplified conclusion I am drawing from this reading (as one ensconced in our privileged, first-world setting) is that some people appear comfortable with their lot, no matter how mundane it may be, apparently satisfied so long as their basic needs are met. Others, fewer in number, do not accept that status quo, and try to break new trails. Some plod along their life-journey, eyes cast on the path beneath their feet (or, more likely, on the smartphone in their hands), while others, more curious, more ambitious, look for alternate routes to follow, even if that means foregoing some of the more immediate gratification they might otherwise enjoy. Sort of like the proverb of the grasshopper and the ant.

But why do we make the choices we do? Why are some of us seemingly content to muddle along in what I might call a state of arrested development—consumed by our electronic gadgets and devices, immersed in our own narrow worlds, uninterested in the broader issues of our time, and desperate to believe we are going to be looked after?

Looked after by whom? The rich?

A new ruling class of people—those who rouse themselves to effort and endeavour, who pay attention to what is happening around them and in the wider world, and who consciously think about the consequences of their actions—is rapidly moving ahead of its less-diligent cohort. And the space between them—call it intellectual-gap or achievement-gap—will only exacerbate the wealth-gap we publicly decry.

Recent studies are demonstrating that an over-dependence on electronic gadgetry, an inability to pry oneself away from those seductive pixels of delight, is changing the human brain’s learning patterns. And not for the better. In its extreme, this change will render addicted users incapable of thinking for themselves, dooming them to a dreary lifetime of mindless, eight-second sound-bites and 280-character communications. In virtual servitude to those who rise above.

It hearkens back to the maxim of Roman times, the trick to keeping the rabble in their place—Give them their bread and circuses. Already there are disturbing signs that much of the populace cares for not much more. And technology has provided it to them in the palms of their hands.

The day may or may not come when all of us will live out our daily existence like so many drones and worker bees, ruled by entities possessed of artificial intelligence. That remains to be seen. But until that day, it is almost a certainty that the strivers among us will assert dominion over the slackers—a triumph of directed, purposeful intellect over superficial intelligence.

Given all this, I would change the words to my grandmother’s ditty—

It’s the thinkers and strivers wot will get the pleasure,

It’s the complacent plodders wot will get the blame…

Just wait.

While We May

It’s inevitable, I think, that many of us will ponder our lives and our place in the world as the current year draws to a close. And we may well wonder what the impending new year will hold for us. In the words of an old song—

…what lies ahead?/Will we have rainbows day after day?

I believe it’s a quirk of our human nature that we often fail to appreciate what we have until we no longer have it. Many are the things that become dear to us when their very existence is threatened—things that might have received but passing notice before the threat arose.

This tendency, doubtless familiar to most of us, seems to begin early in our lives. I’ve observed young children on numerous occasions while they were playing with their toys. Inevitably, when someone picks up a different toy, the children immediately focus on that one as the only thing that will satisfy their needs. The moment they can’t have it, so it appears, is the same moment they realize what a treasure it is.

This habit stays with us as we grow older. In his classic story, Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain provides a wonderful example of what can happen when people seem to be losing something, even if they never actually possessed it.

tom sawyer

Remember the tale? Young Tom tricks his friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence, in order to avoid the chore himself. By presenting it to them as an opportunity available to only a select few, and one that would not last long, he duped them into a hankering for something they would normally have avoided—afraid of losing the chance to take advantage.

The quirk remains into our adult years, as well. You’ll recognize it when, after walking around all day in a pair of new shoes, you remember how comfortable the old ones were, the ones you didn’t want anymore. And you wish you hadn’t thrown them away.

Or you’ll know it when your grandkids come for a long-overdue visit, one you’ve been looking forward to. And then, only a few hours after your wish is realized, you begin to pine for the peace and quiet of your everyday life. You can’t wait ‘til it’s time for them to leave. You’re exhausted!

You’ll experience the same feeling of loss if a power blackout strikes, and you find yourself walking from room to room, absent-mindedly flicking light switches in vain. All that electricity you took for granted, gone!

no lights 2

There are so many things we have, not just material possessions, that we passively accept as the norm. Not through arrogance or selfishness, necessarily, but because they seem always to be with us. Being with us, they become accepted; having accepted, we become indifferent.

Perhaps the greatest of these unheralded treasures, as we grow older, is good health. Most of us grew up without serious medical problems, the normal childhood ailments notwithstanding. We accept good health as our due—to the extent that, when we do come down with something, we feel resentful and put-upon.

“I never get sick,” we complain to anyone who will listen. “How can this be happening to me?”

Some time ago, I visited our family physician because of a persistent virus that had hold of me. While I was sitting in the waiting room, her receptionist mentioned that she’d had a devil of a time locating my file.

“I finally found it in the dead file,” she said.

“The dead file!” I exclaimed. “Hey, I’m not that old!”

freemedicalcheckupsmall

She laughingly explained that the dead file was for patients who hadn’t had a routine physical exam during the past five years.

Five years! I was stunned to realize I hadn’t had a checkup in all that time. I suppose, because I was feeling just fine, I’d assumed it would always be so. After all, good health is only what I deserve, right? That’s how it is.

Until it isn’t.

Nowadays, as I approach the three-quarter-century mark more quickly than I would like, the advent of a brand-new year doesn’t hold the same promise for me that once it did. I no longer wish for, or expect, endless rainbows.

I would be happy, I have discovered, to hang on to what I have.

My focus has turned to acknowledging my blessings, appreciating them more fully, and not taking them for granted. And chief among those, I am finding, is continued good health.

good health

It behooves me, I believe, to accept the responsibility to make that happen. While looking to whatever future awaits me, for however long, I must strive not to abuse the good health I currently enjoy. There are elements of our North American lifestyle that are proven killers—killers even of people, such as I, who have always taken their well-being for granted.

Of course, it’s difficult to imagine that I might fall victim, for, as Edward Young wrote almost three hundred years ago—

All men think all men mortal but themselves.

But nearly four hundred years ago, Robert Herrick, wrote—

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old time is still a-flying,/

And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying.

rosebuds

That tomorrow is but a day away. So, today is all the time we have to protect what is, indeed, a most prized possession. We owe it to ourselves to guard and nurture our good health.

While we may.

A Writer’s View

I’m occasionally asked about the art of writing by those who read my blog-posts and books, but I’m usually caught off-guard, quite unprepared to give a cogent answer. I was better primed for an industry online interview, however—an edited transcript of which is shared in this post.

Q. What is it you enjoy most about writing?

I enjoy the freedom to do whatever I want in the first-draft stages—creating credible characters, inventing dialogue, describing events, contriving plausible story-lines.

But even more, I enjoy the rewriting, where I can change things, reconstruct situations, alter outcomes. I love having the opportunity to shape and re-shape the fictional world I’ve created in each story—almost like a wizard, going back in time with the power to change what originally happened.

Q. What is your writing process?

I write everything down as soon as possible after it occurs to me —essays, short stories, blog-posts, episodes for my novels—sometimes in the wee, small hours of the morning when the thoughts tumbling in my brain won’t let me sleep. Later, when the frenzy of first-draft has abated, I rewrite them to see where, or if, they fit in the overall picture.

I often spend hours on end in the process, even to the point of missing lunch or dinner. I’m amazed when I discover that four or five hours might have passed before I paused for breath, so to speak. For me, writing is an alternate universe, one in which I easily lose myself.

Q. Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

I remember the first story I wrote as an adult. It was titled The Leaving, and was included in two of my published collections of tales. It told of the conflicting joy and sadness associated with the realization that my two daughters were growing up, leaving their childhood behind. It was predicated on a credo my wife and I adopted in their upbringing—hug them close, then let them go. The hugging was easy, of course; the letting-go not so much.

Q. What prompted you to try writing a novel?

In the beginning, it was an attempt to answer the question as to whether or not I could do it. And it took a long time to figure out—five years from inception to publication. I was hoping to accomplish a number of things, the first being just to finish it; while I had been writing stories and poetry for a long time, I had never attempted a novel.

Additionally, I wanted to tell a story that would prove difficult for readers to resist. I wanted to relate that story mainly through dialogue among the characters—in their respective voices. I discovered, however, that the telling of some events had to be in my own narrator’s voice. I also wanted to create convincing characters in whom readers might invest—little knowing at the time that I would become so attached to two of them that a series would follow. They feel like friends now—to the point where, rather than creating their story in each successive book, I’ve come to feel like I’m simply recording it as it unfolds.

Q. How many books have you published?

To my astonishment, there are five novels now: By Precept and Example, 2007; Until He Killed Her, 2010; Lockdown, 2012; First Do No Harm, 2015; and the most recent, Missing and Murdered, 2017. Each of the stories is told against a backdrop of contemporary events taking place at the time of publication.

There are also three books of collected stories: On Top of the Grass: Tales of a Snowbird in Florida, 2008; It Matters to Me: Tales of a Young Father, 2010, and The Passing Parade: Tales of a Bemused Bystander, 2017.

All the books can be found, in print or e-book formats, at a number of locations, including http://www.amazon.ca and http://www.barnesandnoble.ca. They are also available online at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/precept.

Q. What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a sixth novel in the Maggie Keiller/Derek Sloan crime series, and I hope to have a fourth collection of tales, Tall and True: Tales of a Peripatetic Blogger, published in 2018.

Q. When you’re not writing, how do you spend your time?

I spend a lot of time reading—more, perhaps, than writing. And I sing bass with an a capella men’s chorus, Harbourtown Sound, which is both enjoyable and time-consuming. The chorus website is http://www.harbourtownsound.ca/.

I also try to stay active in golf, tennis, cycling, swimming, and other physical pursuits.

Q. Who are your favorite authors?

There are several, including John D. MacDonald, James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard, John Sandford, and Randy Wayne White—all of whom write in my preferred genre. I also enjoy authors from different genres—Bill Bryson, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Winston Churchill, to name a few.

It Matters to Me

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

From as far back as I can remember, the Christmas season has always been my favourite. And it’s true even more now, in my mid-seventies, than it was as a child.

When I stop to think about the reasons for that, I suppose it has to do with the different meanings that Christmas has for me. Although I can think of many, there are three significant beliefs that stick out.

…with the kids jingle-belling, and everyone telling you, “Be of good cheer…”

None of the three has anything to do with the endless sparring between the commercial and religious aspects of the season—where we find Santa Claus in every shopping mall, serenaded by traditional carols blasted over a tinny sound system. Or coming to town on a huge sleigh pulled by plastic reindeer. Were I to dwell on that, the whole season would be spoiled.

Neither are my feelings affected by the view of Christmas as a pagan festival, the embodiment of which is old St. Nick, rather than as a true celebration of the birth of Christ. For me, the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

It’s the hap-happiest season of all…

As a matter of fact, Santa Claus is one of the things I like best about Christmas. For the record, I still believe in him. Every Christmas—under the somewhat curious stare of my grandchildren, who are all sophisticated now to the point of pretending to pretend—I hang up my stocking, just as I have for more than seventy years.

“Gramps, you don’t still believe in Santa, do you?” my youngest granddaughter asks. She watches me closely as I frame a reply.

“Sure do,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know if there really is a Santa Claus, but it’s more fun to act as if there is. Believing in Santa is one of the things that make Christmas so much fun.”

I don’t know if she agrees with me, but it’s reassuring to note that she still hangs up her own stocking.

The second thing of significance for me about the Christmas season is the good feeling prompted by memories of Christmases past. It’s always been a time for family members to come together.

With those holiday greetings and gay, happy meetings when friends come to call…

For years, my parents’ house was the destination on Christmas Day, eventually giving way to my home, where my wife and I raised our two daughters. Grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, and friends would all drop in, often staying for the opening of the gifts, and dinner afterwards. And, without fail, they would reminisce about their own childhood Christmas seasons, sharing their happy, nostalgic memories with us.

…tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago…

It’s different today, of course, because our daughters have children of their own. Theirs are the homes we gather at now, with in-laws and friends of their generation. And, to my everlasting surprise, we have become the old folks—observers rather than directors of the goings-on around the tree.

Worst of all—as the oldest one gathered there, I have to wait ‘til the very end to open my stocking.

…parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting, and caroling out in the snow…

But, regardless of where we are, the things that haven’t changed are the feelings of love and joy we all share at this time of year.

The third thing of importance to me is the fact that Christmas does mark the birth of Christ. I believe the question of historical accuracy is irrelevant. The very fact of his birth, whatever the actual date, is a symbol of our hope for peace on earth. It stands as a beacon of the promise for salvation in a world fraught with danger and despair for many.

I have absolutely no difficulty in integrating these three different notions of Christmas. For me, they come together nicely—the fun and excitement of Santa Claus, the love and laughter of times with family, and our renewing joy at the birth of Christ.

There’ll be much mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing when loved ones appear…

Perhaps the thread that ties the three together is the idea of faith, the idea of choosing to believe. Christmas is my favourite time of the year, but for reasons that are neither irrefutable nor provable. Faith doesn’t abide proof.

My beliefs are valid only because I deem them so. I want to believe in them, so I do. And, therefore, Christmas represents a magical time for me—especially now, knowing I have more of them behind me than ahead.

Softly-falling snow, gaily-twinkling lights, the wonderful music, the excited laughter of grandchildren, and a peace that surpasses all understanding—all join to herald the coming of another Christmastime, a time to celebrate, to remember, to rejoice and give thanks.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

And it matters to me!

The Forest

A close friend posted a picture online recently, accompanied by a passage from John Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist and author. It read …and into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

On this past weekend, our Canadian Thanksgiving holiday, two of my sisters went camping with their families, braving the October temperatures in the boreal forest of Algonquin Park. They also posted online, pictures and messages, waxing eloquently on the beauty and serenity of the wilderness world around them.

I have long believed there is no more beautiful place to be in the world than Ontario in the splendor of October—when the green forest recasts itself in glorious hues of scarlet red, bright yellow, incandescent orange, and intense burgundy. The sun, lower in the sky, shines through them, and they glow as if afire.

We lived on a lake in the north for a long time—a long time ago. One of our favourite October pastimes was walking the solitary cottage roads after all the seasonal vacationers had headed home. Smelling the wood smoke from chimneys of the few year-round homes, kicking the wind-strewn piles of fallen leaves, breathing in the nippy harbingers of winter borne on the autumn breezes.

Occasionally, late in the month, we’d even get the first falls of snow, blown hither and yon before melting away in the late October sunshine.

The forest was a refuge, a release, a reminder that life, once upon a time, was simpler and elemental.

Sixty years ago, I spent a summer planting trees on the slopes of a valley, formerly the rocky, infertile fields of a pioneer farming family. A lovely, clean river meandered its way along the valley floor. We worked in pairs, one with the spade, the other with the bag of saplings, and we traded places every half-hour, or so. I remember it as hard work, dirty work, thirsty work, to be sure. But I know now it was glorious work, where we were (to steal from the 1965 novel by Peter Matthiessen), at play in the fields of the Lord.

One of us would cut a T-shaped slice in the ground with the spade, then pry it up, splitting apart the base of the T. The other would gently place a sapling, each about six inches high, in the crevice, and press the ground back together around the fragile stem. When we finished a row, we’d retrace our path, pouring water from a bucket on each new plant.

I’ve lost track of how many trees we planted in a morning, or a day, or over the entire summer. But it had to be a lot. Hundreds. We’d never heard the phrase paying it forward…it hadn’t even been coined back then, I imagine. But that’s what we—such callow, carefree boys—were doing.

I had occasion some time back to drive through that same valley, not too far north of Toronto, and I stopped to look at the fields where we had laboured—private property now, far across the river on the opposite slopes. To my chagrin, I couldn’t see them at first. And then the astounding reality struck home. The fields were still there, but the green canopy of a forest covered them—a forest—shielding them from my view.

Our forest! Our trees!

I couldn’t walk through that forest, of course—touching the trees, remembering them in their infancy, as they passed from my hands to the soil that embraced them. Nor, truth be told, did I really need to. It was enough to recall those barren fields as they were, and compare them to what they became after we were there.

As I think back on that long-ago summer, I know I left things behind—sweat, friends, youth. Lost now in the mists of time.

But, as Muir so eloquently wrote, I found my soul.

Bearing Arms

When I was about ten years old, a long time ago now, my father gave me some needed advice to deal with bullies at school. The ones who could outrun me.

“Don’t run away,” he said. “That’s what they want, and they’ll keep coming after you. It’ll never stop.”

I asked what I should do, instead. “Hit them,” he said without hesitation.

When I pointed out that such a response might result in a worse beating than usual, he said, “Maybe. But if you land one good punch, right in the schnozz, for example, they’ll think twice the next time. Bullies don’t like to get hurt.”

I honestly don’t know if that was wise counsel or not. But I remember ending up in a few fights for awhile afterwards, often enough that my mother spoke to my father about his advice. For her, fighting was never the answer. Talking through a problem was always the preferable option.

I’ve been an adult for quite a long time since then. And there have been occasions through the years when I felt put upon unfairly by someone—not physically, perhaps, but in a bullying manner. And I’ve wondered what would have happened at those times if I had continued to follow my father’s advice.

Don’t like somebody’s behaviour? Hit him!

I suspect I might have been charged with assault, my only defense being that I was following a strategy that was, perhaps, legitimate once upon a time—but no longer.

It reminds me of the tragic situations I read about too often, it seems, in the great republic to the south of us, the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave.

In 1791, more than 225 years ago, the American government adopted an amendment to their constitution, which had been ratified two years earlier. That amendment bestowed upon every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. The arms in question in the eighteenth century, of course, bore little resemblance to the guns available today—some of which constitute weapons of mass destruction, by any reasonable definition.

As recently as last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled: …the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding; and further, that its protection is not limited to …only those weapons useful in warfare.

According to the New York Times, more Americans “…have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.”

Data from the National Vital Statistics System of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control, through 2015, show that—

on average, there are 12,000 gun homicides every year in the U.S.;
seven children are killed with guns in the U.S. on an average day;
America’s gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other nations.

A list of firearm fatalities in the U.S. since 1999 yields more than 440,000 killed, including the awful massacres of school children in Columbine, Colorado in 1999, and in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

And this past week, of course, the lives of fifty-eight innocent souls were snuffed out in Las Vegas, Nevada by a deranged killer with an arsenal of military-grade, automatic weapons at his disposal. All legally purchased.

As has been noted many times elsewhere, shocked politicians offer their thoughts and prayers every time to the grieving families. Far fewer of them, however, think to call for an end to the madness. Apparently, the slaughter of American children has become something that can be tolerated in the name of preserving the sanctity of the Second Amendment.

That provision may have been acceptable, even advisable, when it was ratified those many years ago. Today, however, a nation’s fawning adherence to it strikes me as being even less wise than a decision on my part to follow my father’s long-ago advice into adulthood.

When—if ever, I wonder—will that gloriously-blessed, yet grievously-afflicted nation grow up?

Just a Cliché?

Many people think of clichés as timeworn, too-oft-repeated banalities, devoid of meaning because of their ubiquitous presence. Too self-evident to be of any use; to wit—

It is what it is. Well, yeah…almost assuredly…duh!

What will be, will be. You think?

As I approach the three-quarter century mark, however (in fluctuating moods of disbelief and resignation), I find I have begun to pay closer attention to many of them, discerning nuggets of truth that, heretofore, I paid scant attention to. Whether this is on account of acquired wisdom or wishful thinking, I cannot tell.

Either way, I am becoming increasingly aware of the boundaries of life—that there is, not just a beginning that was, but an ending to come—a fact I tried to ignore in those halcyon days of my youth. And many of the so-called clichés are resonating clearly now for me, rather than ringing hollow.

The times, they are a-changin’, right in front of my eyes, falling by the wayside as we continue to poison our planet, wage war on our fellow humans, and trample on the rights of others in a mad scramble to make our selfish way. I’m beginning to understand more fully now that time and tide wait for no one, and it will soon be too late to reverse the flow.

Actions speak louder than words, undoubtedly; yet increasingly, we scoff at the science of climate change, and the inevitable—and irreversible—consequences of global warming. The planet is home to all of us, the only home we have, and I fear we will not defend it, so focused are we on wealth-acquisition and a penchant to wield power. We need to remember that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

We shall reap what we sow. Or, if not us, those who come after us—those for whom we have tainted the future they will inherit.

It has been said it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. Nevertheless, if we do not speak out while yet we have the chance, our children and grandchildren may experience a fate worse than death—living on a planet that will be hell.

Too many of those to whom we look for leadership and vision, alas, fail us with their short-term thinking. And as I enter this last quarter of my life, it occurs to me that neither they nor I will be around to reap the whirlwind that is being seeded by our collective short-sightedness. Too many of them are yesterday’s men, when what we need are tomorrow’s dreamers—men and women who think beyond the constraints of the present.

Hindsight is better than foresight, by a damn sight, it is true. But foresight is what will save us from ourselves. If we don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for anything, and we’ll fall very hard.

So, these clichés—are they just empty aphorisms, bereft of significance? Or do they, perhaps, constitute a wake-up call, wisdom from those who have gone before us, that might help preserve our bounty for those who will follow?

And, if they are true, will we pay heed? Will we listen to the ones that caution us, each a voice of one crying in the wilderness?

Or will we ignore their message as nothing more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

When I hear false promises from so many of our leaders, I am reminded that every man has stupid thoughts, but wise men keep them quiet. I am reminded that when you talk sense to a fool…he calls you foolish. I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Worst of all, I am in fear of those who believe everything they think.

If we are to change the current course of human folly, we must refute the notion that everyone is entitled to an opinion, and substitute instead: everyone is entitled to [an] informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

Napoleon famously said (in French, I imagine), In politics, stupidity is not a handicap. Woe that he was right! So many of our leaders persist in pissing on our legs, while telling us it’s raining, and have the gall to pretend not to notice that we notice!

And that is our fault. Far too many of us demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which [we] seldom use.

My mortal coil is unwinding, more quickly now, it seems, than ever before; and too soon for my liking, I will shuffle off to who knows where. In the meantime, I try to heed the old advice—Don’t look back; something may be gaining.

But looking forward is difficult, too, given the problems we seem not to be facing up to. I yearn for a generation of leaders who will step to the tiller, place firm hands on the wheel, and chart a steady course, one we all might confidently follow. We need captains who are principled, intelligent, unwavering, and above reproach—like the north star, [so we can] set our compass by them.

Will we find them? Will they find us? Or is such conjecture nothing more than a fanciful wish on my part? The world ends when you die, or so some believe. But for those left behind, it goes on, whether for better or worse. Will that world flourish—a renewal, a blossoming? Or will entropy prevail—a gradual decline into chaos and disorder?

Will the future confirm what Robert Browning once wrote—the best is yet to be…? Or will it be what Porky Pig proclaimed—Th-th-that’s all, folks!?

Just a cliché? Maybe. But it matters to me.

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tallandtruetales

Hot air, flights of fancy, and roads not taken…

Category Archives: Musings