Category Archives: Reflections

You Never Know

[NOTE: SUBSCRIBERS WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG RECEIVE EACH COMPLETE NEW POST IN THE BODY OF AN EMAIL. BUT IF YOU CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF EACH POST, YOU CAN READ THE PIECE IN ITS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT ON MY BLOG SITE. READERS NOT SUBSCRIBED AS FOLLOWERS RECEIVE A SHORT MESSAGE FROM ME WITH A LINK TO EACH NEW POST, WHICH TAKES YOU AUTOMATICALLY TO THE SITE.]

The latest weekly prompt from my Florida writers’ group was to write a story featuring the phrase, ‘You never know!’ This is my response—

The ball leaps off the bat with a loud thwack! and soars skyward in a graceful parabola above the seven of us milling below, before curving back to earth, slicing right toward my little brother who prances nervously on the grass.  He’s using the almost-new fielder’s glove I let him have for this occasion, while I use my beat-up old one.

I’m twelve years old, which makes Allan nine, and he’s a fair bit smaller.  It’s the first time he’s been allowed to play ball with my friends—a game called 500, where we earn points for fielding balls hit to the outfield by a lone batter—and I’d coached him beforehand, especially emphasizing the need to call everyone off before making a catch so we don’t all collide under the ball.

“Just yell out to warn the guys you’re makin’ the catch,”I told him.  “Everybody else will back off.”

Now, as the ball plunges toward him, I see him raise the glove over his head, his other hand poised beside it, just the way I taught him.  “Call for it!  Call for it!” I yell.

And he does…sort of.  At the very last moment, he shouts, “Yours!” and ducks away.  The rest of us watch disgustedly, disbelievingly, as the ball thuds into the grass, bounces once, and lies still.

“You don’t call Yours!” I yell at my brother, embarrassed in front of my friends.  “You’re s’posed to call Mine! Mine!  And then catch the ball!”  Allan just offers that shamefaced grin he affects when he knows he’s disappointed me. 

One of the other guys, a kid I don’t really like that much, gets right on my brother, shouting, “What a dork!  What a chicken!  What’re you even doin’ here?”  Allan quails in the face of the attack, drops my glove on the ground, and trudges off to the sidelines, head down.

“Shut up, Gary!” I say to the kid, wondering if this is when we’re going to have that fight we both know is coming sooner or later.  “Leave him alone!” 

Gary glares at me, but chooses to let it drop.  He tosses the ball into the batter, and we all trot back to the game—all but Allan, who sits on the grass to one side, holding the old glove I tossed to him when I reclaimed my newer one.

He’s not there when the game ends an hour or so later, so I head home without him.  As I’m getting a glass of cold water at the kitchen sink, my mother says, “Where’s your brother?  Supper’s in about twenty minutes.”

“I thought he came home,” I say.  “I didn’t see him at the park when I left.”

“He’s probably still there,” she says.  “Go find him, tell him it’s suppertime.”

With an exaggerated sigh, I make my way grumpily back to the park, which is only across the street from our house, but the trip seems like an unfair burden on me.  Nobody else is there now, and I can’t see Allan anywhere.  As I’m about to turn homeward, I hear a strangely-familiar noise coming from behind the maintenance shed on the far side of the ballfield.

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk!  Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

I trot across to the shed, and behind it I find Allan tossing a ball over and over onto the slanted roof of the shed.  Each time he tosses it, the ball lands, rolls erratically down the torn and curled shingles, and bounces off the gutter, where my brother waits, trying earnestly to catch it in that beat-up glove.

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

And now I remember why I recognized the sound!  I used to practice the same drill by myself a few years ago, when I’d been told I wasn’t good enough to play with the big guys.  Allan doesn’t know I’m there, so I watch for a few minutes, and I hear him quietly calling Mine! before each attempted catch.  He drops more than a few because the gutter deflects the ball’s expected trajectory at the last moment, but he keeps trying.

And then he spots me.  “What?” he says defensively.  “You used to do this.”

“Yeah, I did,” I reply, ashamed now of my reaction in front of my friends earlier.  “You wanta know a trick I learned to make it easier to catch ‘em?”

He nods, so I demonstrate how to hold back a bit as the ball rolls down the roof, then step into it at the last moment, tracking the bounce off the gutter.  “It’s easier to catch the ball when you’re movin’ towards it,” I say.  And we spend the next little while with me throwing the ball onto the roof and him catching it, more frequently now. 

Bump-badaba-badaba-badaba-thunk! 

And every time he moves in for the catch, he yells, “Mine!”

We’re interrupted all of a sudden by my father’s gruff voice right behind us.  I don’t know how long he’s been standing there watching us, but he says,  “Boys!  Your mother’s waitin’ supper.  We gotta go!”

Allan runs to him excitedly.  “Didja see me catchin’ the ball, Dad?  I’m catchin’ most of ‘em now!  Jamie says I’m doin’ good!  Didja see me?”

“Yeah, I saw you, son,” my father says, tousling my brother’s hair with one big hand.  Throwing his other arm around my shoulder, he leads us back across the park.

“I’m gettin’ better, Dad,” Allan says.  “You think the big guys will let me play with ‘em tomorrow?”

“You never know,” my father says, giving my shoulder an affectionate squeeze.  “They might, but you never know.”

“Yeah, they will,” I say, “or they’ll be playin’ without me!”  And my father squeezes my shoulder again.

Showing Up

Spring training is underway, the start of another magical baseball season.  The boys of summer are assembling once again to ply their athletic gifts, and to amaze us with their exploits on the diamond.

And every spring, their gathering reminds me of those happy days—more than just a couple of years ago—when the annual softball season opened in our Florida retirement community.  A mob of aging, erstwhile ballplayers would converge on the local park for the opening games of the season.

Most of us had spent a good part of our lives playing ball.  Others, newly retired, had taken it up only recently.  But we all shared the same enthusiasm for the game.

We enjoyed swinging the bat with wistfully-remembered power in the on-deck circle; we relished the anticipation of our turn at bat while waiting in the batter’s box; and we cherished the elusive base hits we sometimes might stroke.  There was always an exhilarating feeling of freedom in running ‘round the bases at top speed, or in chasing full-tilt after a long fly ball in the outfield—the wind rushing in our ears, visions of grace and glory flickering in our mind’s eye.  At such moments, nothing else mattered in the world but the game.

The game was the thing, and we wished it could last forever.

But it couldn’t, of course.  Even back then, we could see the end approaching—still hazy on the far horizon, perhaps, but in sight, nonetheless.

The signs were small at first, but the start of each successive season brought more of them.  The bats seemed heavier, the balls smaller, the bases farther apart.  There appeared to be more holes in the infield for opponents’ ground balls to skip through.  The throws in from the outfield lacked some of the crispness that was seen in other years.

In fact, I discovered to my chagrin that I’d become a centre-fielder with a second-baseman’s arm!

The most significant sign of all was the constant aching in our legs, our arms, our backs—lasting just a little longer than it ever used to.  We feared for the day when it would linger all the way into next week’s game.

I suppose that’s why we eventually switched to a tamer version of the game, limited to those sixty years of age or older.  Gone were the young, aggressive Turks who had overtaken us on the base paths.  Gone, too, were the strong-armed pitchers who could overpower us in the batter’s box.

And gone with them, unlamented, was the notion that winning was the only satisfactory outcome.

Our game morphed into slo-pitch.  The ball would float in from the mound to the waiting batter, crouching, bat-cocked, in gleeful eagerness.  When he hit it, more often than not it was to one of the waiting fielders—of whom there were ten (in deference to our declining ability to cover the whole field).

Many of the old softball rules were changed, or at least modified for our game. For example, a team’s turn at bat still ended when three players were tagged Out!, but no team could go through its batting lineup more than once, even if everyone batted safely.

The best part, though, was that no one seemed to worry too much about winning. At the end of every game, the players would file past each other across the middle of the infield, laughing, slapping high-fives, and complimenting each other on a game well-played.  When asked later (perhaps after a brew or two) about the outcome of the game, we often had trouble remembering the final score.

Most of us always loved playing ball, and were awfully glad there was still a game for us to play. Because playing, far more than winning or losing, was the elusive reward for our efforts.

My playing days, alas, are far behind me now, but I remember them fondly.  And I’m glad that, by the time I was through, it wasn’t who won the game that counted—it was who showed up to play!

I wish I still could.

Ciao For Now

A recent prompt from my Florida writers’ group asked us to make up a story about a person whose time is running out. This is my make-believe offering—

In all the years I knew him, I never heard my father use the word goodbye.  Not to anyone, not ever.  At every point of farewell, he’d offer up a substitute or synonym for the word—Pip-pip!  So long!  Good night! Cheerio!  ‘Til next time!  Toodle-oo!  See you later!  Take care!

Occasionally, he’d venture a foreign language—Adieu!  Auf Wiedersehen!  Adios!  Sayonara!  Towards the end of his life, he came to favour Ciao for now!  But he’d never use the word goodbye, and I used to wonder why.

He tried to explain it once to a mildly-curious, teenaged son.  “The word is too permanent, that’s all.  It implies the end, the finish, that there’ll be nothing to follow.  I prefer to think I’ll be meeting the other person again.”  But I confess, I didn’t really see the difference, callow as I was.

Although born and raised in Canada, my father was an Oxonian—a graduate of Oxford University, Balliol College, class of 1932, a member of the rowing club—and among his lecturers were C.S. Lewis and the great J.R.R. Tolkien.  Gainfully employed back in Canada with a PhD in Literature, he was one of the earliest to enlist after Canada went to war in 1939.  He served as a medical orderly until demobbed in 1943, when he returned home in time for my birth.

“Despite our best efforts to save them, we lost a lot of good fellows,” he would reflect from time to time in his later years.  “We knew their time was running out, but I never said goodbye to any of them.  I wanted them to believe there was still more to come.”

Somewhere over there, with his comrades at Oxford or in the obscene battlefields, he learned a nonsensical, British ditty about farewells, not goodbyes, and he used to sing it to me and my siblings from time to time, usually when we balked at having to go to bed.  He was an enthusiastic, if somewhat undisciplined, singer, but we came to love that song.

Eventually, of course, the fateful day arrived, as it does for all of us, that my father’s own time was running out.  Home from hospital for the last time in the deep mid-winter, he was with my mother and their five children and our spouses—the ‘dirty dozen’, as we had long styled ourselves.  We all knew the end was nigh, though none acknowledged it, and small talk prevailed until my father raised a frail hand.  We waited, breath bated, and in a faltering voice between short gasps for breath, he sang that song one final time—his way of letting us know this was not goodbye.

Most of us, I suspect, did not believe that, but no one let on.

A few months later, when the frost had left the ground, we gathered again at the family’s burial plot for my father’s interment, joined this time by his grandchildren, his sister, his nieces and nephews, and a few cousins.  In keeping with his wishes, it was a simple ceremony, and two of us spoke on behalf of the group before his ashes were lowered into the grave by his eldest grandchildren.  And then we all stood around, staring awkwardly at the ground, as if reluctant to leave.

At that point, with an exquisite sense of timing, my younger brother stepped forward and began to sing our father’s farewell nonsense-song, his voice soft but firm.  Before he could finish the first line, all of us who knew it had joined in—a sad farewell, yet a joyous acknowledgment that this was not goodbye.

Pip! Pip! Toot-toot, Godspeed,
Toodle-oo, toodle-oo, toodle-oo,
Ta-ta, old bean, Ting-ting, old thing,
Chuckeroo, Chuckeroo, Chuckeroo!
This parting brings us sorrow,
We hate to say adieu,
So, we’ll say Ting-a-ling, old tin of fruit,
Cheerio, cheerio to you!

Now, within hailing-distance myself of the age at which he died, I think of my father often, and I hear that little ditty echoing in my mind, just as he sang it so many years ago.

“Cheerio, Dad,” I murmur each time.  “Ciao for now!”

Brown Paper Bag

This poem was written in response to a prompt from my Florida writers’ group. It can be best enjoyed by reading it to the tune of the old, Irish ballad, ‘Black Velvet Band’.

His hair hung down to his shoulders,
His shirt was a tattered old rag.
Faded chevrons adorned both his worn, torn sleeves,
And his hands clutched a brown paper bag.

Gunny was the name we all called him,
A veteran, ‘though he never did brag.
He'd wander the streets of the neighborhood,
Snatching sips from his brown paper bag.

His only true friend was old Jarhead,
A mongrel with no leash or tag.
When he died, he left Gunny alone again,
Alone with his brown paper bag.

We never saw Gunny get angry,
He was never a scold or a nag.
When we passed him by, he would nod a sad smile,
And drink from his brown paper bag.

In the summers we often would see him,
With the kit-bag that held all his swag,
On a park bench alone in the warm sunshine,
Holding tight to his brown paper bag.

Then last winter with snowstorms a-swirling,
And temperatures starting to sag,
Gunny died forlorn in the homeless camp,
He’d drunk his last brown paper bag.

When they opened his kit, they discovered
A folded American flag,
And a Congressional Medal of Honor,
Sealed tight in a brown paper bag.

When they tried to find Gunny’s family,
Their best efforts all hit a snag.
But they buried him with full honors,
With his Medal from that brown paper bag.

Gunny rests now with his fallen comrades
‘Neath a cross in a field filled with flags.
UNKNOWN BUT TO GOD and those warriors---
Free at last from those brown paper bags.

Semper Fi, Gunny!

My Whiffenpoof

The weekly prompt from my Florida writers’ group was to write a piece incorporating a song lyric, even a misunderstood one. I chose to use a complete song, but with its meaning and setting skewed from its real attribution for purposes of fiction.

The young lad’s voice was pleasant enough, if a tad off-key here and there, and he held his beer-drinking audience rapt as he began singing the song.

To the tables down at Mory’s, to the place where Louie dwells,
To the dear old Temple Bar we love so well,
Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled with our glasses raised on high,
And the magic of our singing casts a spell…

“What’s a Whiffenpoof?” old Hardy McKinnon yelled out rudely, slamming his empty glass down on the table in front of him, half-cut already, though the evening was young.  “Sounds like a fart!  One o’ them SBD ones!”

The lad stopped singing, joined in the laughter that followed, then said, “SBD?  What’s SBD?”

“Silent but deadly!” McKinnon’s wife cried, pointing at her husband, beckoning to me for another round as the laughter erupted again.

“Quiet, ye lot!” I shouted from behind the bar where I’d been drawing another tray of drafts.  “Let the boy sing his song!”

Indeed, he did look more a boy than a man, sitting there in his khaki uniform, the cuff of one sleeve pinned to his left shoulder where his arm should have been—the only one to return of five village lads who had marched proudly to the train station two long years ago, off to fight the foe for King and country. 

The polished medal at the end of the ribbon round his neck testified to his gallantry and sacrifice—the Victoria Cross, awarded for valour in the face of the enemy, the highest military award the nation could offer.  It had been presented by none other than King George himself, and I’d been there to witness it.

“Let him sing!” I cried once more into the clamour, and it subsided quickly as Jimmy took up his song again.

Yes, the magic of our singing of the songs we love so well---
‘Shall I Wasting’ and ‘Mavourneen’ and the rest---
We will serenade our Louie while life and voice do last,
Then we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest…

The eyes of almost everyone were fixed steadily on the lad as he sang, the words and melody casting a solemn pall over the room.  Those who weren’t looking at him were staring emptily into space with that thousand-yard stare I used to see in my Robert’s eyes after he came home from fighting the Boers.  He never spoke of the horrors, nor of the comrades he’d lost, but I knew they’d been with him ‘til the day he died.

I’d held on to the business after he passed, McSorley’s Old Ale House being the only home I had, and the only pub for miles around—a gathering-place as sacred to its patrons in its own way as the Church of England ever could be.

“Aye, Jimmy, sing some more!” Angus MacPherson said softly into the silence.  “Sing the chorus for us, lad!” 

Jimmy drank deeply from the new pint I’d set in front of him, wiped the foam from his mouth with his one hand, and when he started in again, many of the assembled joined in, the words as familiar to them as the faces in their mirrors—

We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way,
Baa, baa, baa!
We’re little black sheep who have gone astray,
Baa, baa, baa!
Gentlemen songsters out on a spree, doomed from here to eternity,
Lord, have mercy on such as we,
Baa, baa, baa!

My tears glistened on the polished, wooden surface of the bar, and I scrubbed them away furiously with my rag.  Most of the old warriors who’d been singing along were weeping, too—silent tears tracking down their grizzled, ruddy cheeks, only to be swallowed up and lost in their scraggly beards, just as their innocent youth had been torn from them by the long-ago battles they had fought for the fading Empire.

In the silence that blanketed the normally-boisterous room, Jimmy stood up, finished his pint, then walked wearily over to the bar, waving shyly to the crowd.  “I’ll be headin’ up now,” he whispered with a sad smile.  “Shout me up when yer closin’, an’ I’ll be back down to help.”

“Shure, an’ I’ll be doin’ that very thing,” I said, knowing full well I would not.  The boy was bone-tired, I could tell, and needing his sleep—if sleep would come.  I watched as he mounted the narrow staircase, his steps heavy, his one hand on the banister, his chin sunk low on his chest.  I couldn’t see his medal, but I know it weighed heavy on him.  He’d have given it back in an instant if it meant the return of his fallen friends.

“He’s a good lad, young Jimmy!” Liam Dewar shouted, his half-empty pint raised high.  “A noble warrior, an’ a damn fine singer!”

“Three cheers for Jimmy!” Molly Malone cried, a bit unsteady on her feet, trying not to show it.   She was sweet on Jimmy, I knew, but trying not to show that, either.  The crowd joined in, as did I—Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

And then another song broke out, this time led by the lovely tenor voice of the vicar, the Reverend Alastair Holmes, and everyone took up the tune—

It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go,
It’s a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know…

And I thought about the long way home young Jimmy had taken—the journey from carefree boyhood to the blood-soaked trenches of Europe, and back again—mutilated and scarred, perhaps forever.  And for what?  For three cheers and a piece of tin around his neck?

My tears began anew, but tears of gratitude this time—gratitude that, unlike so many other mothers’ sons, he was home again.

My Whiffenpoof.

My boy.

And Off We Go

The weekly prompt from my Florida writers’ group was to write a piece containing the phrase, “shall we go…”.  This fictitious tale is my response.

“Shall we go?”  The sepulchral voice is solemn, portentous, and it reverberates ominously in my ears.

Not yet…not yet!  I’m not ready.

I hear other voices, too, softer voices…my daughters, named for our favourite flowers so many years ago.  They’re talking quietly over me as I lie in a bed I cannot feel in a hospital room I cannot see, unable to speak or move.

“He can’t open his eyes,” Veronica says, “but I can see them moving behind his eyelids.”

“Yeah, I see that,” Jasmine agrees.  “I think he can hear us.”

“Can you, Dad?” Veronica asks softly.  “Can you hear us?”

Yes, yes, yes!  I’m right here!

“He can’t answer you, Vee,” Jasmine says sorrowfully.

She’s right, I can’t.  Everything was fine until…until…whatever day it was, I can’t remember…and that red wave washed over me, collapsing me on the floor for I don’t know how long.  And now here I am, wherever this is.

“Shall we go?” the voice resounds in my ears again, a honeyed basso-profundo, not at all impatient, yet determined nonetheless.

No, not yet!  It’s too soon.

“Keep stroking his hair, Jazz,” Veronica says.  “He always liked that.”

I did always like it, but I can’t feel a thing now.  I can only imagine how it feels, and the thought warms my heart.  I laugh inwardly, knowing my hair must be all askew.

“I love you, Daddy,” Jasmine whispers.  “I hope you know that.”

“He knows we love him, he knows,” Veronica says, and I imagine she is holding my arthritic hands in hers, gently massaging them, terribly weakened now when once they were so strong.  But I can feel nothing.

I lifted you high in these hands, Vee, high up over my head.  And Jazz, too!  And now…and now…

“Shall we go?”  The voice asks again, persistent though not offensive.

Not yet!  No!

“You don’t have to worry about us, Dad,” Veronica whispers.  “We’ll be fine.”

“She’s right, Daddy,” Jasmine adds.  “You and Mummy were the best, and we’ll be just fine.”

I know, I know…but I don’t want to go.

They’re right, of course, they will be fine, both with their own wee families now.  The little ones were here earlier with their daddies…at least I think they were…maybe not…but I’m sure I heard those four tiny voices telling me they love me.  I wanted to say it back to them, to wrap my arms around them, but…

“And don’t forget, Dad,” Veronica continues, “Mum said she’d be waiting for you to find her, remember?  She’ll be watching for you.”

Ah, their mother, my wife, my lifelong love…how I’ve missed her.  Despite a valiant struggle against the disease that wasted her, she left us a few years ago.  And yet, she never truly left us, you know?  I wonder if Vee is right, if she really will be there, wherever there is…my darling Clementine…

“Shall we go?”  The voice is relentless, insistent, though not unkind.

No, please!  Not yet.

“I’m sure Mummy’s been missing you, Daddy,” Jasmine murmurs, and I can hear the sob catching in her throat.  “You were meant to be together for all time.”

“Exactly!” Veronica says, trying to lighten the mood.  “Like apple pie and cheese!  Like mustard and relish!”  She laughs softly as she gropes for more examples.

Jasmine joins in her sister’s laughter, and my heart dances to the sounds of their lilting voices.  “Yeah, or like Abbott and Costello!” she says.  “Like Jack and Jill!”

“Lady and the Tramp!” Veronica offers, and the laughter grows louder.  “Romeo and Juliet!”

“Omigod!” Jasmine gasps, their laughter rolling freely now.  “Tweedledum and Tweedledee!  Lancelot and Guinevere!  Sweet and sour!”

“Yin and yang,” Veronica says, and they stop on that one, as if it’s the perfect one to describe me and Clemmie.

“Shall we go?” the voice asks again…but it’s a different voice this time.  Frozen inside my immobile body, I cannot move, but I feel as if I’m turning around and there is Clemmie…as young and as fair as the first rose of summer.  She’s standing in the midway at the State Fair, pointing at the Tunnel of Love attraction, the one where we had our first, tentative kiss, where the sense we’d found something special first dawned on us.

“Shall we go?” she asks again, and her eyes are sparkling, her smile warm and welcoming.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Veronica whispers, “it’s okay to go.”

“Goodbye, Daddy,” Jasmine breathes.  “We love you.”

Goodbye, goodbye…I love you both…

And I reach for Clemmie’s hand, and off we go.

I Believed ‘Em All!

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back!  Tell a big lie, your father will die!

I remember chanting this doggerel over and over as I pranced along the sidewalk as a young boy.  I have no idea where I first heard it, but I wasn’t the only one whose sing-song voice could be heard uttering the same incantation.

To this day, I try to avoid those sidewalk cracks, and most of the fibs I’ve told over the years have been small.  I swear!

That little ditty was just one of many such learnings we picked up as children from playmates, kindly old aunts and uncles, even parents.  And for periods of time, I believed all of them!

Eat your carrots, sonny!  They’ll put hair on your chest.  I’ve always loved carrots, especially raw, and I do have hair on my chest—gray now, of course, but still curly—so that advice bore out, I guess.

Drink your milk!  It will make your bones strong.  I readily believed that, but when I was that age, we were drinking powdered milk my mother mixed up from a box.  Even when ice-cold, it tasted vile, and I always wished we had a cat I could feed it to—but not a black one.

Superstitions played a big part in much of the advice I was given, even though my parents told me superstitions were premature explanations that had overstayed their time.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that meant.

It’s bad luck if you ever let a black cat cross in front of you!  To this day, if a black cat crosses my path, I detour.  It makes no sense, yet I do it, anyway.

Don’t walk under a ladder!  It will bring bad luck, too.  That seemed logical to me, but I would sometimes tempt fate by doing that very thing.  Today, though, a grown man, I always walk around ladders.  I mean, a piano could fall on me, right?

Bad luck will follow if you open an umbrella in the house!  I can attest to the truth of this one because I did open an umbrella indoors one day, just to test the proposition.  As it popped open, it struck a vase on the ledge beside the front door, sending it crashing to the ground.  That led to one of those rare occasions where I told one of those small fibs I mentioned earlier.

Look for four-leaf clovers if you want good luck!  My friends and I spent many an hour doing just that, and found lots of them, as I recall.  And because no great tragedy ever befell us, I suppose the statement was accurate.  One friend insisted on calling them shamrocks, and said we might find a leprechaun.  I never did.

Don’t pull on the wishbone ‘til after you’ve made your wish!  I tried earnestly to comply with that advice, but my brother—more interested in winning the contest than having his wish fulfilled—always pulled first and usually won.  And as a result, my wish that he would magically disappear never came true.

Keep your eyes closed and the boogey-man won’t get you!  I had a lot of faith in this one, especially in the dark of the bedroom I shared with my brother.  I would sometimes hear terrifying moans coming from the vicinity of his bed, so I’d cower under my blankets, eyes screwed shut, praying the advice was well-founded.  I never wished for my brother to be taken, but I did prefer it be he rather than I.   

Don’t cross your eyes for fear they’ll stay that way!  I remember my friends and I daring each other to try it, all of us fearful it might be true, none of us willing to be the one who found out.  I know now there’s nothing to it, and I attribute the fact that I have to wear corrective eyeglasses to some other factor.  But I did look cross-eyed at one of my teachers once, and was surprised when she did the same back at me.  She was one of my favourites ever after!

As I entered adolescence, the nature of advice I was given by well-intentioned relatives changed, although most of it was equally preposterous.

Don’t pick your zits!  You’ll end up with boils all over your body.  The spectre of boils was terrifying, but so, too, was the mortification of acne.  For a while, I tried to convince myself I was developing freckles, but I knew better.  A variety of creams and lotions entered the fray, but I did resort to picking at my zits out of desperation.  Sixty years on, I’m still waiting for the boils.

Beware the devil’s hands, boy.  If you succumb to his entreaties, you’ll go blind!  Well, all I can say to that is, although I do wear glasses now, I never once lost my sight.

Yes, you can borrow the car again.  But see that you bring it back!  This command from my father on every occasion I asked for his keys, was aggravating at the time, but has since become a standard family joke among my siblings.  And it’s a source of wonder to me now that one of my granddaughters owns and drives a car I used to own.  She brings it back every time she visits.

There are other gems of wisdom from my childhood, most of which I no longer follow, some of which I do.  They pop into my mind at the oddest moments, sometimes evoking a laugh, occasionally a tear.  They are milestones along the road I journeyed as I grew up, and they helped bring me safely to the cusp of my ninth decade.

And once upon a time, I believed ‘em all.

Ready For The Fall

The prompt from my Florida writers’ group this week was to write a piece about fall. Here is what I came up with, and I hope it will conjure memories for you, too—

A middle-aged woman I didn’t know smiled as she entered the elevator with me one day last week.  “Are you ready for the fall?”

I cringed, steeling myself for an unwanted mini-sermon from a dogged do-gooder, a holy-roller.  “I…I guess so,” I stammered.  “I mean, I pray, I try to do good…”

A look of bewilderment creased the woman’s face, followed quickly by one of amused pity.  “No, no,” she corrected me patronizingly, “you misunderstand me.  I meant the autumn, not the apocalypse!”

“Ah…of course,” I sighed, embarrassed by my mistake.  “Sorry…”

As the elevator doors opened on the eighteenth floor, the woman stepped out, still amused by my obtuseness.  “No need to apologize,” she said.  “At your age, I imagine it’s best to be ready for both!” The doors slid closed behind her before I could think of a suitably nasty retort.

Back in my apartment on the twentieth floor, I reflected on our conversation as I unpacked the groceries I’d been carrying.  It seemed to me an honest mistake to make, an understandable one, and the woman’s parting shot was likely good advice.  But why did she have to be so rude?

Later, relaxing with my wife over a cup of tea, I talked about what had happened, and about getting ready for the fall.  “Remember when we were kids, it seemed summers would never end?” I said.  “From the day school let out until the first fall-fair arrived, our days were blissful, carefree, limitless.  Eat breakfast and head outside to play; dash inside for lunch, then back outside; trudge home for supper, then out again ‘til the streetlights came on.”

“I remember,” my wife said.  “But things sure changed when we grew up, in spite of our best intentions.  We got married, started working, became parents.  Those summers suddenly became  a lot more finite.”

I nodded agreement.  The calendar tells us summer ends with the autumnal equinox in late September, but the end always came much sooner for us.  It was marked, not by an arbitrary calendar, but by the requirement to go back to school.  Both of us were teachers in those long-ago days, and felt we had to get back ahead of our students if we had any hope of being ready for their return after Labour Day.

For many folks, I guess—like the woman on the elevator—the coming of fall is a time of new beginnings, of anticipation.  They think in terms of flaming fall-colours, brisk autumn days, evenings spent curled up with a book in front of a cozy hearth.  They look forward to the change of seasons.

Not I, though!  I’ve always thought of it as a gloomy time—the conclusion of summer, and the close of so many pleasurable things that vanish with the coming of September.

For example, with the end of warm, sunny weather, there came an end to my carefree habits of dress.  No more swimsuits or running shorts; no more open sandals or ancient running shoes; no more tank-tops or faded team sweaters.  Instead, it meant a return to the straitjacketing drill of collars and ties, pressed slacks, knee-high socks, and polished dress shoes.

The end of summer put a stop to the treasured luxury of shaving every two or three days, depending upon what activities were planned.  And it called a halt to the wearing of old ball caps as an alternative to brushing my hair.

The inevitable onset of fall wrote fini to three or four leisurely cups of coffee with the morning paper, and an end to mid-morning breakfasts on the back porch.  It heralded, in their stead, the beginning of hurried showers and breakfasts-on-the-run.  It marked the re-entry into the exciting world of daily traffic reports, as I attempted to find the shortest, quickest route into and out of the city.

In short, summer’s end brought to a close the lazy, drifting vagaries of summer living I tried so vainly to hang on to.  Coming back to the real world always provided a jolt to my entire system.  It was like going from childhood to adulthood all over again!  Once was enough!

“You know, I never wanted to be the type of person who wishes his life away,” I commented to my wife, “always wishing for something to be different than it is.  But, in a sense, I guess I used to do just that.”

“Me, too,” my wife said wistfully.  “For me, the year was divided into two seasons, summer and not-summer. And not-summer was not good!”

“Remember we’d take the girls on one last camping trip up north?” I said.  “My cutoffs and hat would be in my bag, my shaving-kit left behind.  It was always one final fling in the glorious realm of summer.”

“I loved it,” my wife said, staring into the past.  “Hiking, swimming, paddling, exploring, picking berries, roasting marshmallows, singing our hearts out by the campfire, sleeping the sleep of the innocent in those old sleeping-bags—it was like being children all over again.”

“Even now,” I said, “when every day is like a Saturday, I still pretend summer will never end, that I’ll never have to grow up and give it up.  It still seems there’s always so much left to do.”

“At least we have Florida now,” my wife smiled.  “Year-round summer! Before the fall ever arrives, I’m already planning what I’ll pack.”

During the course of our happy reminiscing, I managed to forget my annoyance with the supercilious woman in the elevator.  But by chance, we happened to ride the elevator again yesterday, going down this time.  As she stepped aboard, I could tell she recognized me as the confused old fart from a week ago—but this time, it was I who spoke first.

“Before you ask, I’m ready for Ar’geddon!” I smiled.

“Our what?” she said, head cocked.

“Ar’geddon!” I repeated.  “I’m ready to go!”

The same pitying look as last time spread across her face, the same condescending smile.  “Sir, you mean Arma-geddon.  You’re mispronouncing the word.” She shook her head disdainfully, appalled by my lack of acuity. 

Waiting a beat to spring the trap I’d plotted, I said very quietly, “Whatever!  It’s not the end of the world!”

We rode the rest of the way in icy stillness, a long, silent fall from the eighteenth floor to the parking garage.

A Crowd of Stars

The youngest of my brothers-in-law died recently, following a long period of worsening, physical incapacity and illness.  He was the second of my generation to go, my younger brother having passed three years ago, and I suspect his death brought the spectre of the end-times somewhat closer to us all.

In addition to my sister, he left behind four children, three of whom are married, giving him three grandsons and two wee granddaughters.  At his private interment, his daughter and three sons spoke of him as a loving and beloved father, and there is no greater tribute I can imagine.  Eighteen of us exchanged reflections and prayers that day, spoken to each other and to him, designed to bring a sense of closure and peace to us all.  We were saddened, of course, by his passing, but relieved that his suffering was ended.

He was married to my sister for forty-five years, a loving union that brought credit upon them both.  I still remember dancing at their wedding, when none of us—so young and brash and full of piss-and-vinegar—could have imagined this day coming.  But it has now for him, as it must someday for all of us.

Deliberate and intentional in word and deed, especially as he grew older, my brother-in-law was rarely intemperate or harsh in his dealings with others.  A man of deep faith, he was loving and giving, and forgiving of others’ shortcomings.  Throughout his tribulations, he was confident that, as he approached the final crossing, he would meet his saviour on the other side.  I hope he has.

In her remarks, my sister said something I thought perfectly summed up his life and faith—from Matthew 25:23, “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things…enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

My wife shared many of those same understandings about what is to come with him, and I remember them engaged in deep conversation over the years, communicating their ideas and beliefs, their hopes for the hereafter.  By contrast, given my differing views, the exchanges I had with him tended to be temporal more than spiritual, though always sincere and affectionate.  He had a way of thinking before he spoke, and I constantly found myself leaning in to be sure not to miss what he might have to say.

The day after he passed, I wrote the following note to my sister—

When we get old, as some of us have, we think differently about death than when we were younger.  I won’t say we ever look forward to it, but we perhaps stop fearing it.

We think of death as a companion on our journey through life—way back in the throng at the beginning, but gaining on us as we begin slowing down.

We think of death, not as a spectre that will end things, but as an usher who will open the next door and allow us in.

Just as life ushered us in at the beginning of our journey through the here and now, death ushers us into the beginning of our next journey.  None of us knows what that journey will look like, but faith sustains us.

When I think of him now, and where he is, I think of these lines, adapted from the poem High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.—

Oh!  he has slipped the surly bonds of earth
And dances the skies on laughter-silvered wings…
He has topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace…
Put out his hand and touched the face of God.

With that note, I also included one of my favourite poems, When You Are Old, by William Butler Yeats, the greatest of the Irish poets.  I imagine it as the song my brother-in-law might be singing now to my sister from wherever in this vast universe he finds himself, and I hope it comforts them both—

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

I Dreamed…

A recent prompt from my Florida writers’ group was to use the phrase, “I dreamed last night…”. This was my submission—

A reminder to those who receive my complete posts in your email, rather than just a link—if you click on the title, you’ll be able to read the post in its proper format on my actual website, rather than in the body of your email.

I dreamed last night of a universe vast,
Extending the future from some unknown past,
Throbbing, emitting, exploding in heat,
Its energy vibrant, its fate incomplete
As onward it rushed, this dream in my head
Rendering me rapturous, there in my bed.

I dreamed last night.  And I wondered if I
Might perhaps be a part of that darkened sky,
From genesis unto eternity,
Unceasing, undying, the infinite me---
My spirit indwelled with life, and a mind
Pushing e’er forward from a past left behind,
Seeking out answers as questions unfold,
Traversing the nothingness, fearless and bold.
I dreamed last night I was mounted astride
A life-force impelling its own suicide.
For how could I, a mere mortal, defend
A beginning without eventual end?
How could we persons, predestined to die
Believe in a universe beyond the sky?

I dreamed last night.  When I wakened again
To face the day’s dawning, the truth appeared plain.
There’s no need for proof of life after death,
For we do not die after our final breath.
We’re integral to that miasmic cloud,
That cosmos of energy, bursting and loud.
We’ll live evermore, just not in this state--- 
We need but to trust, let our faith not abate.

Yes, I dreamed last night of a universe vast,
Informing our future through present and past,
Accepting us gladly, just as we are,
Propelling us forward from near and afar.
Mortality ends, but life still goes on,
And we shall be part of it, unto anon.