Right on the spot?

Yes!!

The article described the amazing benefits of taking a five-minute dance break every day. All by yourself! Just get your best music on and start flying around the kitchen and the living room and the dining room. Even down the hall. Leaping, striding, sashaying, swirling, twirling, swiveling your head, waggling your derrière, and so forth. Arms high in the air, too. Enjoy yourself in front of your biggest mirror!

According to the numerous experts cited in the article, including one Vassilios Panoutsakopoulos, assistant professor at the Biomechanics Laboratory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and a co-author of a study into the benefits of dance breaks, dancing offers a unique mix of physical, cognitive, and social benefits.

Yes indeed. Dancing improves fitness, psychological well-being, and cognitive health. It has been found to lower the risk of dementia. A five-minute dance break was also found to improve children’s focus on (boring) school subjects following the break.

The experts say that improvised dancing (that stuff with just you in the kitchen) stimulates divergent thinking and improves creativity. The dancing will also lead to greater strength, improved body confidence, and better balance.

Also, if you have a partner to dance with, apparently dancing is conducive to enhanced social connection and the bonding that flows from the release of feel-good endorphins and hormones.

All that from goofing around the house with the music cranked up and dancing your heart out, dancing your stiffness and creakiness away, and reliving the best moments of your youth.

As little as five minutes can give you noticeable benefits. Such as just plain feeling good.

So, isn’t this good news?

It is so pleasing to learn that something you very well might like to do just for the fun of it is immensely good for you, as opposed to being told that doing push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups is the only way to go.

In the past, we were told that studies showed we could get good benefits from eating dark chocolate and drinking red wine. Later studies backtracked on those earlier studies. The initial pronouncements were too good to be true.

But somehow, this dancing stuff does not sound too good to be true. It sounds sort of plausible. What is amazing is that just five minutes can give us benefits.

So what is stopping you? Do you feel a little self-conscious? Thinking you will try this tomorrow, not today?

Come on, you great lunk. Go out there right now, turn on your favourite up-tempo music from long ago—preferably a playlist—and shake your booty for five minutes. Ser the timer on your stove.

I dare you.

In the interests of honest reporting, I just went to the kitchen and requested first Lucretia MacEvil (Blood, Sweat & Tears), and then I Heard It Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye), on the speaker. These two numbers lasted longer than five minutes in total, but I stopped dancing when the oven timer went off.

I definitely feel smarter and more well-balanced. Also slightly frisky.

In high school, my dad was the school principal, and possibly as a result of that, I had a virtually dateless adolescence. There was the odd thing, but nothing much to speak of. It came as a pleasant surprise to me that, when I got to university, things changed remarkably.

A fellow—I will call him X—asked me to go to a formal dance with him that was some weeks hence. I didn’t really know him except by sight. He was quite handsome and popular, a notch above my natural dating level. I said yes.

In preparation for the dance, I altered my elder sister’s pink high school graduation dress to update it. I basically stripped down the top portion and put some small shoulder straps on it. I don’t know that my landlady had a sewing machine, so I must have done this on one of my visits home.

On the day of the dance, X phoned me to tell me he would not be able to take me after all. I think he blamed a leg injury, preposterous as that sounds now. That was something I had not contemplated as a possibility, but whatever.

As chance would have it, some other friends invited me to go to a certain coffee shop that evening, so I went along, glad to have a replacement activity rather than just staying home feeling glum and disappointed. Those were the days when there would be folk singers in the coffee shops—not necessarily Ian and Sylvia, but someone. Smoke and haze and a great deal of sophistication.

As we went into the room, there, at another table, sitting with another bunch of people, was X. X! I don’t think we spoke, then or ever again.

I can’t remember X’s name. I remember what he looked like, which was: reasonably handsome.

I never did get to wear that painstakingly altered dress. I hope I didn’t buy new shoes to go with it. Those were the days of satin shoes that could be dyed to match the dress. And corsages! Foundation garments! Oh, the doodads involved. Hair! Hairspray!

Left at the date altar. Awkward. You had to pretend you didn’t really care, that, in fact, you were just as happy to stay home with a good book and a mug of cocoa. But in fact, you were the victim. Rejected with no recourse.

There were such dreams attached to the dances. Even the community hall dances in our neighbouring small town, Laporte, Saskatchewan, were great events.

A live band would play up on the stage. Down on the main floor of the hall, there were chairs placed around the dance floor, and the adults and teenaged girls would sit on those chairs. The young men would not sit on the chairs but would stand at the back of the hall. As the evening progressed and things warmed up, the young men—and not-so-young men—would inch forward until the stag line, as it was called, began to move toward the middle of the dance floor. Some of them would have made one or more trips out to the cars and trucks for a drink.

Oh, would someone other than Dad please ask me to dance? Oh, here he comes, that fabulous guy—but oh no, he seems to be heading for the girl beside me. Quick, look away, pretend you didn’t get your hopes up. Oh, here comes that guy that no one quite wants. Better say yes, because (a) at least I get to dance, and (b) the poor fellow should get a turn.

I seem to recall dancing without talking. Is that how it was? Just all the sensations—the heat, the sweaty hand sliding down onto your bum, the smell of alcohol, the “thank you,” the return to your seat.

Here I am now, all these years later. Yes, I love to dance. But not with strangers. And it is such a liberation—a graduation—not to have to wait to be chosen. After all these years, you know well in advance if he wants to ask you to dance. He knows if she wants him to ask her. You know in a thousand ways. You recognize the tipping point and relish it.

This would be one of the many rewards of having lived out most of your lifespan. It may be hard to be old, but it is way harder to be young. At least, that’s how I found it.

The Wonder Worker™: This is a pill you take at night with half a glass of tepid water. You take the pill, and it puts you to sleep very nicely and quickly. Before long, you descend into a long dream sequence in which you industriously tackle your hardest job—say, doing your taxes or trying to cancel your Shaw TV subscription—and cleverly and calmly take the whole thing on. In the dream, you are happy. Everything works out so smoothly. You wonder how you ever had any hesitation about tackling this job. That’s how well it is going in the dream.

In the morning, you wake up, remember the dream, and, because of the pill, you just get going on the darn thing. It all goes swimmingly until you get stuck on something, which, of course, you will. That’s life.

OK. Here’s another one.

The Sure-Fire Diet Enforcer™: This comes in the form of a big rubber mallet that you can order on Amazon. At night (if you are a night owl), or in the morning (if you are a lark), you strike yourself on the forehead with the mallet three to seven times, and you instantly lose all interest in eating. You might have a small headache, and if you bruise easily, you might develop a purple circle in the middle of your forehead, but otherwise this is a sure-fire solution.

If a small desire to eat anything should crawl into your head, just hit yourself on the forehead a few more times with your mallet until the craving goes away.

As a bonus, the handle of the mallet can be used for other things, such as sweeping under the fridge for something that rolled under there or threatening a door-to-door religion representative.

If the mallet, for some reason, does not work for you, you can just hang it on the pegboard in your workshop, and eventually it will come in handy. Don’t worry: there is another invention coming down the pipeline with the same function. See the next paragraph.

The Mighty Grip Method™ (patent pending): Take a leather belt. Put it around your waist, haul the belt through the buckle, and tighten it until you can hardly breathe and can hardly do it up. Do it up. Now take another leather belt and fasten it around your abdomen in the same fashion, until you can hardly breathe and can hardly do it up.

Now put your clothes on over these belts. You will soon start to feel a bit of nausea, along with the pain of the cinching. The nausea is key because it will take your appetite away. Instead of craving food, all day you will be craving to take those belts off. But don’t do it. Put up with the discomfort. You know the saying: No pain, no gain. Well, no loss.

At night, you will have to put a special cream on the dents formed by the belts digging into you, and you can get my Ultrasonic Deep Dent Removal Lubricant™ on Amazon. Go for the large tube, as you would generally have to do this for at least a few days before you make the big promise to yourself:

“I will take the belts off, and I will never, ever again give in to the urge to make a sandwich after supper.”

The All-Natural Bust Size Enlargement System™: This is a good one. You don’t have to take any pills or do any fancy exercises. You simply get some very powerful elastic tubing—you could even use those rubber bands that are in your bottom drawer from when you used to try to get fit—and apply them to the task.

The task is redistribution.

You wrap yourself in the rubber or elastic tubing as tightly as possible from your pelvis to just below your bust. This will cause your flesh to rise. Then you wrap yourself in the rest of the tubing from your shoulders down for six inches. All this will create for you a spectacular bustline, having reinforced it with all the spare flesh on and about your body.

One drawback of this tactic is that it will create a great big tubular ridge across your back, but this can be easily disguised with a floating garment. Don’t be alarmed. Maybe a back bust will become a thing. Something extra to hang onto.

And last, the best invention:

The No Regrets Take-It-Back Bong™. It is a word swallower. It is a device you keep in your mouth—a smooth capsule that you hold in place with your tongue against your cheek. It takes a bit of practice to learn how to flip the capsule open and release the contents.

Inside the capsule, rolled up, is the equivalent of a frog’s tongue. After you say something outrageous to someone that you thought was so funny at the time, but was actually a very bad thing to say, you release the word swallower in the direction of that other person, and it gobbles back the thing you said.

As if you had held your tongue the whole time.

This is such a good invention that people will want to buy lots of them and give them as gifts. I am currently looking into getting them made in China and marketing them through Facebook and other scientific platforms.

If you have ever said, “I would give anything not to have said that,” you should be ready to pay a high price for a dozen of these handy capsules.

I can see that the No Regrets line could offer quite a number of products related to food and drink consumption, money spent on useless items, acts of recklessness, stupid bids made at bridge, social commitments made in haste, and so forth.

It is going to be so much fun to get rich quick. I am sure to make piles of money.

That is: why do drugstores have to lock up the men’s razor blades? Almost everything else is just sitting there on the shelves for you to pluck down, assess, and possibly throw into your shopping cart.

Although another thing locked up is the electric toothbrushes.

So why would this be the case?

Here are my t…

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Would that we could all have such a big sign on our foreheads for those days when we are more or less out of service.

This cold—this lingering condition of being badgered to a thread by a million (a billion? a trillion?) viruses—has me staggering along, doing the necessary by rote: make the bed, put on the kettle, bread into the toaster, peanut butter because it’s easier than an egg, brush through the hair, cast a baleful eye at the mirror, move the laundry on to the next machine, ignore the fact that I should have done it last night, spray some bathroom freshener in the laundry room because it smells funny, make sure that the things that should be defrosting are defrosting, and that the things that should be in the fridge or freezer are back in the correct spot and not on the counter turning into food poisoners. You get the idea.

Bare minimum.

It occurs to me: why is that bus out driving around if it is OUT OF SERVICE? Maybe it’s just heading back to the garage. But why would they plan only half a trip for the bus? Surely it could be IN SERVICE until it got back to the garage. Or maybe it was out on some sort of test drive. Then shouldn’t they have a sign for that? SORRY—OUT ON A TEST DRIVE. SORRY—THE LAST DRIVER THOUGHT HE HEARD A FUNNY NOISE.

My ailment turned out to be just a cold. But to say that is as wrong-headed as to say just a housewife. A cold is a near-death experience in the sense that your feelings of health and happiness come close to vanishing. A housewife is balancing countless things in her brain, all while trying to be pleasant. Not just what’s for supper, but what’s for tomorrow’s supper. Will that leftover potato (or rice or noodles) still be good—safe? And if so, is it enough, or will I have to add some slices of bread? And if so, are crusts acceptable? And how about that fancy bread that gave me diarrhea but was too expensive to throw out, so it’s still in the freezer? Maybe some of that, toasted to make it sort of special. And, oh yes, do I hear the buzzer in the kitchen? Oh yes, I am boiling some eggs for tomorrow’s sandwiches. Why do I never remember to put baking soda (or was it baking powder?) in the pot to make them easier to peel? And the cat’s flea collar should probably—possibly—be replaced, if she will hold still for it, because although the package said it would be good for six months, or eighteen months, or something—I forget which—she is now scratching.

Just a housewife. Only a housewife. Only a cold.

Certain ordinary things in life are just plain hard. Having a cold. Moving. Saying no. Having the courage to ask for what you want. Walking away from something you should walk away from.

It hit me as I lay down for my afternoon nap, casually playing a few games of Classic Words, tuned to the Extremely Hard level, hoping to get sleepy. The AI that I am playing against has an unfair advantage.

If you are not familiar with the game, I can tell you that it is just a little Scrabble game you play on your phone with an opponent by the name of Droid. Droid can fling all the letters it gets through every possible combination in less than the blink of an eye and blurt out a word that uses all seven letters for a 50-point bonus way more easily than I can. I am lucky if that happens to me once or twice a week.

The analogy is this matter that has come up in the sporting world. Should a woman who used to be a man be permitted to compete athletically with a woman who has always been a woman? “Always” meaning, with considerably less musculature.

If this were to be handled with the utmost degree of fairness, perhaps your musculature, hand-eye coordination, fitness, and sporting treachery would all be measured. Then, if you came within 10 to 15 kilospasms of similarity, you could compete—man, woman, or beyond. Say, an old man with an equivalently souped-up young person. A fair contest.

Well, I am nowhere within the fair degree of kilospasm differential to ever compete fairly with the AI opponent cheerfully playing Classic Words with me. The only way for me to win is to dial the game difficulty back, and that hurts my pride.

My best just cannot compete with AI because my brain is littered with Why am I not sleeping? Why don’t I just get up and get at those weeds? Should I throw my mascara out because it is more than three months old? Can I take a store-bought thing to that picnic on Saturday?—and millions more fluffy little tendrils of thought—while AI is just whizzing around trying every combination until—bingo!—it finds a word using all the letters and gongs me. Fifty points, plus the benefit of all the points in all the letters.

Not fair.

I don’t want to play in your yard,
I don’t like you anymore...
I don’t want to play in your yard
If you can’t be good to me.

Take that, AI.

She should just do something about her hair. I don’t mean Margaret Atwood in particular. I just mean any woman with Margaret Atwood hair. Einstein, I guess, since he was a man, got to have this type of hair. No one said, “He should do something about his hair.” It was almost part of his charisma, that wild hair.

You never see a shampoo or conditioner promising to give you fluffy, electrically charged, wild unruliness. No. They offer sleekness and silkiness.

Well, that’s all very well if you start out in the sleek-and-silky department. What if you start out with this other hair condition?

Hair products for people with curly or coily textured hair (yes, there is such a distinction) offer one thing: control.

I have a dear friend with whom I used to practise law. At lunch, after a morning of enduring the slings and arrows of family law, we would cheer ourselves up with complaining and joking. We used to imagine a perfect life. It would usually involve our having long, thick, straight hair, which we could swish about when making a point. (She’s got the curly hair, too.)

She also imagined a perfect gentleman who would ask her out to the opera and invite her out to dinner first and it would be his idea.

That last is the real killer. The impossible. That it would be his idea.

Because every woman knows that, in real life, it all takes a little wrangling.

So, back to the hair. I have worn my hair short since time immemorial because—not that it is fabulous short—it is simply better short than otherwise. But now I am trying otherwise. I don’t exactly know where “otherwise” is going. I don’t exactly have “a look” in mind. But I am tired of the tidy short hair. My hair wants to flex its muscle. Well, maybe I want to flex my hair’s muscle. I wonder if I could actually have hair power. The kind of hair that makes people’s heads jerk back in wonder when you enter the room. Wouldn’t that be something? Hair power.

I am afraid to go to the hairdresser. He will know that mine is the kind of hair you want less of, not more. He won’t even have to say anything. He’ll wait for me to say it and then agree. And yet, if I pursue this dream, he will be the one to help me avoid the dreaded “triangle” look.

People with good hair would not know a thing about this longing, this sad little hope, for a better lot in life in the hair department. They probably just take it for granted that their hair can gleam and shine and that they can fling it about for emphasis.

I am not saying that Margaret Atwood has bad hair. I am saying that she has a certain kind of hair. It is not the popular kind of hair. By the way, this is not libel. If it is the truth, it cannot be libel.

Here’s another thing. I understand that some people—say, famous celebrities like Dolly Parton—with wonderful, powerful hair are actually wearing a wig. Well, I don’t mind wearing shoes and socks, but I draw the line at wearing a wig. When you take off your shoes and socks, there is your lovely foot, but when you take off a wig, there is your poor, clamped-down, ruined, thin, wretched hair on full display. No way out of that moment, when the truth comes out. That’s my thinking on wigs.

Meantime, I sit here, thinking and assessing, while my hair is growing at a rate of 1.25 cm per month (or 0.04 cm a day), extruding in a curling direction. I can’t exactly feel it growing, but it definitely feels alive, which I guess it is not. At least the follicle must be alive, so what I feel must be the hair holder.

If I put this much thought into the garden, I would have had it weeded by now.

It is so much more fun to go down the rabbit hole.

On my gravestone: She was nice, she was smart, she was funny. But her hair.

The reunion is some months off, but I am more aware of it than most of my classmates because I am on the organizing committee, and because I have certain things to think about.

Namely, shoes.

When you go to a reunion, you have a whole room full of people upon whom you want to make a good impression. For me to make the best impression, and partly because it would cause me to radiate elevated self-esteem, I must be wearing high heels.

I have a pair of high heels. They are shaped like classic high-heeled pumps, but the heel is a mere 2¾ inches high, measured at the highest point where the heel takes off from the “foot” portion of the shoe. In the good old days, I guess I would have worn 4-inch heels and more or less been able to walk in them. But these current high heels, although they are of modest stature, are my glass slippers.

Glass because, when I walk in them more than eight steps, it is as if all my toes were collected into a vise grip and then compressed with extreme force. It is all I can do not to immediately rip them off and hurl them across the room.

Although I bought them a couple of years ago, these shoes are like new because my feet hate them and fight them. So the wearing of the shoes has been measured in footsteps, not minutes, much less hours. Head says, “Put them on and look lovely, slim, and elegant,” and feet say, “I want nothing to do with them. They are instruments of torture. Give me the slippers.”

It is a long time until the reunion, much too early for me to begin searching the internet for good jokes to have in my pocket. The clothes I will wear are easy to figure out. It is just the shoes.

I am coming up with a plan. Perhaps I can fashion an evening apron with big pockets. Big pockets that can hold both the bedroom slippers and the evil-but-lovely high heels. Thus I can make an entrance in the high heels and, as soon as I have tottered over to a chair at a table—preferably one with a tablecloth—I can secretly swap the high heels for the bedroom slippers.

Except that, once I am sitting down, I can sort of stand the high heels, although my feet are in a state of alert awareness, ready to clench in horror if I should actually stand up again and try to walk. Also, I can stand in them, but in the same state of alert awareness. It is the walking that is inconceivably painful.

I don’t care. I am going to wear them, to the degree possible. I will report back.

My mom always cared about how she looked. Even when she was very old, and it was just the two of us in the house, she would put on powder and blusher and lipstick every morning and be ready to present herself to the world, even when her world consisted of just me, the cat, and the garden.

I care how I look if I am going outdoors. Well, not just to the garden, but, say, shopping. Certainly to bridge. The ladies notice. Going to a reunion, you care how you look.

In the old days, going to the office, I spruced up. At home, no sprucing up—general dishevelment. Look in the mirror and see the truth about yourself.

Back when I was practising law, I noticed that clients coming in for an event where they would see their estranged spouse usually dressed up to look as good as they possibly could. Why? Maybe to say, “This is what you rejected, you big idiot.”

Once, at an examination for discovery, my client, the wife, was meeting her estranged husband for the first time in several years. His first words to her were, “You’ve gained weight.”

Imagine!

I don’t think she had any retort, but one might have been, “Yes. Since I haven’t had to put up with you, I’ve been able to keep food down.”

But anyway, that was a memorable remark.

You’ve gained weight.

There is some thought that you can break high heels in by wearing them around the house with hockey socks. I am not going to do that. Unnecessary pain. I am just going to think about them and steel myself mentally.

That’s my plan.

Except that the very next afternoon, a big scratchy throat rose up in me and threatened that I might be getting a cold. And yes, the scratchy throat led to more big scratchy throat, and the runny nose, and the coughing, and the spacey head, and the generalized misery—yes indeed, it was a cold. Five blasting sneezes in a row. Wracking coughs tearing up my windpipes.

This was an unwelcome development, first because who wants a cold, and second because I was bringing my son home with me the next day to do his initial recovery from hip replacement surgery. He got a new hip that day; I got a new cold.

I made some paltry efforts not to give him the cold, but now he has the cold too.

But this is the worst cold I have ever had. After six days of this miserable situation, last night when I went to bed it became hideously painful to swallow. And once you have it where it is like knives slicing your throat, you can’t stop needing to swallow. Could I not just let saliva dribble out of my mouth so I didn’t need to swallow? What if I sat up in bed? Was that any better? Not really. What if I lay on my side? Was that any better? Not really.

Every time I had one of these swallows, I was thinking this can’t be right, or normal. This knife-slicing thing must be illegal, or certainly a clear sign that this isn’t “just a cold.” And you know those stories about people with cancer—if they had only got treatment earlier. This did not feel like a cold; this felt like some terminal, god-awful disease, coincidentally sliding into me at the same time as the cold, parasited on.

After a horrible spell of being awakened every hour by the knife-throat thing, I decided on a course of action. It being July 1, my doctor’s office would be closed for Canada Day. I would take myself and my world-class, high-end medical emergency to the hospital and get “early treatment.”

By now, at 3:30 a.m., the streets of downtown Chilliwack were virtually deserted, and astonishingly, there was no one but me in the emergency room.

The two initial medical attendants, both of whom I presume chose the caring profession consciously, treated me with unsmiling disinterest. They took my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature from behind their protective glass, not having to get up. They didn’t tell me the numbers. Then I was told to go and sit and wait.

All through this, I felt slightly guilty, as one always does when one goes to emergency with anything less than a leg hacked off.

Another bit of entertainment had taken place earlier in the night. I started in on a wave of cough-and-pee episodes. I was there in bed, in my pyjamas, trying to deal with the knife-throat swallowing, when I had to cough, and the cough was accompanied by a small pee.

So I got up, yanked off the pajama bottoms, and flung them in the corner, then yanked off the top because what good is half a pair of pyjamas? I flung that on top of the bottoms.

While I was delicately standing on one foot, putting on a pair of clean underpants with a little pad to catch any further drips, I coughed and peed onto that—before I even had them on!

So I flung that aside, got out another clean pair of underpants and a new little drip-catching pad, and got these on without incident, I think.

Of course now I have peed in the bed. Not a lot, but enough that the sheets, at least, will have to be changed. It is the middle of the night, I am sick, and not at my most housewifely responsible, so I decide I will just put a small mattress pad down on top of the sheet and crawl in anyway.

My poor old bedroom is now festooned with things flung on the floor, peed-up clothing, wads of Kleenex from all the nose-blowing, and the general hideous, unsanitary detritus of being sick, plus stuff I have been too tired, sick, or lazy to tidy up. Every cough and sneeze has been accompanied by a festival of incontinence.

It was a while after that, wrenched awake again by the nasty throat pain, that I decided to go to emergency.

I was triaged in-- because by now more people had come into emergency—not completely at the bottom, but just before a young lad with a nasty sore on his leg. I was just an 81-year-old lady with a cold.

The doctor was extremely nice. Since I don’t have a fever and do have a cough and runny nose, apparently it is unlikely I have strep throat. He did a swab of a suspicious spot in the throat—yowzer, that hurt—and “over-treated” me with a prescription for penicillin and a pill with cortisone to ease the horribly sore throat.

It is probably just a virus, but just in case it’s not, the antibiotic can go right to work.

I came home and slept another two hours.

When I went to my usual grocery store pharmacy to fill the prescription, I found the pharmacy section was closed for Canada Day. While in the grocery store, I found myself uncharacteristically cranky. I had a short grocery list because, although my son and I are sick, we are well able to sit up and take nourishment, and there is always something I need.

There were people insouciantly hogging the aisles, blocking me with their carts, taking their sweet time, pondering labels through their bi-focals. I felt like giving someone’s cart a vicious slam with my cart, but I didn’t, knowing it is just a cold symptom, this misanthropic urge.

My son has been a champion through this. He has been using an old Miracle-Gro Shake ‘N Feed fertilizer container for his “relief container” and has managed to use the regular toilet after certain adventures with the Red Cross commode.

At one point I put a raised toilet seat on the regular toilet, but I put the arm thingies on backward, dinting inward instead of outward, and after he gave the thing a dry run, at my nagging, and got up from the toilet, the raised seat and handles were firmly hugging him and got up too.

Anyway, his recovery is going very well. Either he is having a less horrible version of this cold, or he is a braver, better person than I am.

I eventually found a pharmacy that was open. I am to go and pick up the pills in half an hour.

There are some rules of life: the hot water heater will burst on Christmas Eve, the oven will stop working when the turkey is half done, and you will need to see the doctor when the doctor’s office is closed.

Meantime, I have washed the pyjamas, the sheets, the underpants, and sundry other bits and pieces that have been laid waste by ordinary living. We may not be perfectly clean around here, but we are clean enough. Sufficient unto the day.

Wash your hands after you read this. I feel horribly contagious.

The weather is uncertain, and, since it is June, we could get just about anything: a heat wave, pouring rain, hail, snow, cloudy and windy, or—what I hope for—REALLY NICE.

I thought I was well set, packing-wise, since I can take on the plane an ordinary suitcase, a carry-on suitcase, a backpack, and even a purse. There should be lots of room for anything I could need.

Except that, after I sort of got the bags packed—other than the last-minute, morning-of packing—I began to think of other things I should probably include.

For instance, as to footwear, there is no way that one or even two pairs of shoes could cover all the eventualities. I could ideally use, and indeed, out of prudence should have along, sandals (the plastic ones, plus the grey ones—newish—and the blue ones, much older but still good), hiking boots (plus the thick socks to make them fit), loafers for travelling in and for casual walking if the weather and the terrain call for them (and there I would ideally like my new navy loafers as well as my very old black loafers, which I wouldn’t care if they got wet or muddy), plus, of course, my walking shoes if the hike doesn’t quite call for the hiking boots.

And that’s the bare minimum. No slippers, no fancy shoes—just seven pairs of shoes, or roughly 1.75 cubic feet of shoes.

And that’s just the footwear!

I have four hats, each of which could potentially be The Very One I want for the activity, weather, or time of day. Four. If I nest them together and put the hiking socks inside the crown, that’s about another cubic foot. Plus the delicacy of packing carefully around the dashing brims.

Then, even though there is every chance the weather will be cool and damp for the duration, how can I leave out shorts (two pairs, one casual and one nicer), a bathing suit, and a sundress (just in case)? Because how awful would you feel on the unexpectedly hot summer afternoon when you didn’t have the sundress or the shorts, but had to sit baking in the sun in your jeans while all the other people cavorted around in little or nothing?

And if the bathing suit is being packed, that requires the goggles because, ooh yuck, I can’t stand water in my eyes, and also the bathing suit cover-ups (one for a cold day and one for a hot day), because it is necessary for the trek from wherever to the beach, during which trek you don’t want people to faint at the jiggly sight of you. Jiggly and white.

(Another cubic foot: warm-weather gear.)

That’s just in case the weather is nice.

Now for the not-so-nice weather. This needs the hoodie (for medium-cool weather), the smallest winter parka (for ghastly cold weather), and the rain jacket because, of course, it is thin, has pockets, has a hood, so of course, that.

I haven’t even begun on ordinary clothing. It has to go with the pathetic little 1.75-cubic-foot wardrobe of footwear I am bringing, has to be comfortable, and sufficiently fetching.

That ordinary clothing is what I put in the suitcases to start with, before I started thinking about what else could come in handy.

Oh yes. Toiletries. Such a quantity that I am practically bringing the whole bathroom. Cosmetics, cleansers, lotions, all the rest of it. A man can bring a small container with a razor, shaving cream, a toothbrush, and toothpaste, and he is good to go. What I need to take (and I am really not a fussy woman; I can guarantee that) amounts to about another cubic foot of items that originated at Shoppers Drug Store. That must come along, just in case.

Then books. What if I find I am not liking the book I bring? I must have a backup book in case the first is a disappointment. So, at least two books.

Food, because, just in case, there could be an emergency. The plane could be stuck on the tarmac for hours, but I will be the clever one with food in my backpack. Unfortunately, being from Saskatchewan, I would have to share it. Here, have some of my loaves and fishes.

The fact is that, having packed so generously, most of what I have crammed into the suitcases will not be used and will molder and fester. When it bursts back out of the suitcases once I am home, it will all have to go into the laundry because, although it has not been worn, it is bedraggled and of uncertain provenance.

Every trip to the Dollar Store before my holiday has meant I find some handy little container, some little foldable accessory, that is a good idea and could come in handy.

This is all a bit like Christmas. You keep shopping for it until it is finally upon you, and then, mercifully, the shopping suddenly stops.

I hope they don’t lose my suitcase.

1. Make some stilts with scraps of wood you have around the house and walk around on them. You can swat off the spider webs high around the ceiling with your fly swatter. And just look down on things, as if you were a tall person.

2. Think of something reassuring to say to the cat or dog, because they will probably think you are crazy, or in danger—which you slightly are.

3. Make an all-white meal: a glass of milk, mashed potatoes, sole, cauliflower, and vanilla ice cream, served beside a white napkin. Take a picture of this and send it to your child with no explanation.

4. Make an all-brown meal: hamburger, chocolate milk, a baked russet potato, burnt toast, and chocolate pudding garnished with chocolate chips. Again, take a picture and send it with no explanation.

5. Go to a corner and try to stand on your head. Even if you only get as far as down-on-all-fours-with-your-head-on-the-floor, you will experience an exciting rush of blood to your head and a sense of accomplishment when you stand back up and wait for the ringing to subside.

6. Phone yourself. I have no idea what would happen with this, but you could have a good conversation. Ask yourself what’s for supper, and so forth. How have you been?

7. Go into the bathroom and, if you’re a man, shave your chin in a funny way, perhaps with stripes. If you’re a woman, put on very garish makeup and maybe even a moustache. Don’t forget a big beauty mark.

8. Make Jell-O in your cupcake pan. Watch a funny movie while waiting for the Jell-O to set. Turn the Jell-O pucks onto a plate. Squirt a goodly amount of whipped cream onto each one, sprinkle with chocolate chips if you have any left, return to watch the end of the movie, and eat these treats with your hands. Have ready a washcloth wrung out in hot water, just in case.

9. Put on fancy music, lie on the floor, and dream about what you are going to be when you grow up. Think of something really good, like an astronaut, concert pianist, dog trainer, explorer, artist, liquor store clerk, paint store employee who helps people pick out colours, or religion starter. Lipstick namer. Paint namer. Stand-up comic. It is your life, your visit to your own childhood, so go ahead and exercise your imagination. This one is more fun when there are two of you on the floor, egging each other on.

10. While you are down on the floor, drag a cushion off the end of the couch and put it under your head. If the throw blanket is within reach, pull that down and cover yourself up. Now close your eyes and let a sweet nap wash over you. When you were little, they were always wanting you to have a nap. Now you feel like it too.

11. Try getting through your whole day with your non-dominant hand in your pocket. You can only take it out for going to the bathroom. This is even more fun if your hand is in someone else’s pocket—preferably someone you find attractive.

12. Put on very loud music that you like, go into the kitchen, close your eyes, and dance until you are banging into the furniture.

13. Think of five things that you are grateful you don’t have to do anymore, such as exams, essays, caring about what other people think of your appearance, studying boring things, or learning the Christmas concert drill with your other useless classmates. Relish the freedom of your life. You are so free that you even forget how glorious your state of life is and succumb to boredom. Wake up! Your life is so good!

Argh. I comforted myself with the following sobering thought, once fatally communicated by a hairdresser to a dear friend of mine: “Nobody is looking at you anyway.”

I have decided on a preventive measure. From now on, I will roll both pant legs up so that it will look like a style, not a lapse.

But this minuscule example of elderly laissez-faire brings to mind other examples of unintentional outfit experiences.

For example, a friend of mine reported that she had gone for an important employment interview only to discover, upon returning home, that she had a sock stuck to the back of her sweater.

And a law school classmate went for an interview for an articling position and was quizzed about when he had had the brain surgery. This was because the bathing cap he had worn during his swim before the interview had left a bright red line across his forehead.

The other day, I emerged from a store behind a group of ladies. The last lady in line, the owner of splendid buttocks, had her long, wafting T-shirt wedged into the crevice. I know this is a look, but I don’t think it was the one she was aiming for. What to do? Helpfully tug it out? Do nothing? I settled on a middle course. I said to her, “You need to tug your T-shirt down at the back,” which she did. If it were me, I would want to be told.

Speaking of bad luck with clothing, my mom told the story of once trying on one of her mother’s good hats. Out on the farm, there was nowhere to parade the thing except on a trip to the outhouse, which she made. Inside the outhouse, having attended to business, she peered down the hole to inspect, and down the hole went the hat.

Clothes live in a hierarchy. First come your fanciest party clothes — clothes that you can own for 20 years and wear five times before you finally give up on them. Next come your good clothes. These are probably fairly new and fit reasonably well. Then come your old clothes. These you can wear for working around the house. The old clothes, due to accidents and carelessness, descend to the rank of “gardening clothes” or “painting clothes.” For instance, I have a lovely pair of blue leather gloves, scuffed up now, which became gardening gloves. Much nicer than the gardening gloves you can buy.

Because of this hierarchy, I seldom have clothes to give away because, over their lifetime, I wear them down to dust. Although one does look a little ridiculous gardening in a pink satin ball gown.

Once, my seven-year-old son and I were visiting one of my classmates. She pointed out to him that he had on one red sock and one green sock. His immediate reply was that he had another pair just like it at home.

Here’s another odd thing about clothes. When you buy two outfits, or two items of clothing, on the same day, both seeming quite nice, one of them will become the favourite and the other will become the non-favourite. But you don’t know, when you buy them, which will take the lead. This, along with all those decisions to keep an item because it might still do a turn, is why closets are crammed to the point of nuclear fusion.

“Clothes maketh the man” is a phrase that first showed up in The Odyssey and was repeated by Shakespeare and a few others. I wonder what those fellows would maketh of modern fashions, including bra straps and slips showing on purpose, gym tights clinging deep into every single curve, and the outrageous and original fashions freshly created by each new batch of adolescents. We all just want to maketh an impression.

That similar job is icing a cake.

These tasks both precede having to see and be seen by other people. I have to work on my face this morning because twice today I will be seen by other people: first, at the gym (make-up optional) and second, at bridge (make-up desirable).

I am pleased to compare and contrast these high-skill activities for you.

When you bake a cake, you may end up with an unseemly crown, or it may have caved in. These things you can fix along with the icing. You get that cake onto a plate, and you place three or four strips of waxed paper under the cake edges so that you don’t get icing everywhere. First, you conduct any necessary plastic surgery on the cake. Then you take a knife or spatula and ice the sides of the cake with the frosting you have just made.

Here is the tricky part: if you are too generous with the side icing, you won’t have enough left for the top. If you are too stingy with the side icing, you will cause cake crumbs to appear all over the sides. So you have to keep at it until you have concealed those unsightly crumbs. The experienced woman will have learned that both face and cake require concealing skills.

Sides done, you now move to the top. That’s the cake I am talking about. Here you get to pile on the icing and then create attractive swirls of some sort. You then add some tasteful decoration if you are so inclined. This involves tubes of colour, fancy lines, and different textures. You might have some sort of a theme. Now, when doing your own face, you employ exactly the same artistry, and your theme is probably “young woman, very pretty.” Lots of tools, brushes, and fiddling.

It is well known that you must not ice a cake until it has cooled. However, you are always working with a warm face (excluding, of course, undertakers), so there is a certain amount of waiting for things to dry, sort of, before you pile on the next layer. That is one difference.

Some cakes are finished with a simple dusting of icing sugar. I think that is a poor excuse for icing, but the Germans seem to think that’s fine. Further, and unexplainedly, they think a very dry cake is perfectly good too.

With the face, it is best to finish with a simple dusting of face powder.

The cake looks very lovely when finished, and then, as it is cut into and eaten, the composition and decoration are all consumed.

Same with a face. When first put on, it is quite lovely (or at least an improvement on what you started with), but as the day goes on, the effects disintegrate, starting with the lipstick being consumed (yes, you literally ate it), and followed by other well-known compromises such as concealer failure, greasiness, lopsided evaporation, and got rubbed off through ordinary living.

Moving on, even from a mere icing sugar dusting, are those cakes with no icing whatsoever. These are usually called quick breads, or “loaves,” as in banana loaf. No icing, but delicious served warm with a lot of butter.

Many older women actually settle on the quick-bread approach when they conclude that they look like marionettes in the make-up they wore in their thirties, and instead go about as is. WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. It is a very sensible and artistically sound choice.

This morning, I don’t know what it was — maybe I have been out in the sun too much — but the places to apply concealer seemed pretty endless. I might be moving to the banana-loaf stage.

I am not even going to get into hair.

I went with a dear friend of mine—Karen (Rustad) Bergman—so that we could attend the celebration of life for a cousin of hers. The cousin, Jim Rustad, was a pillar of the community of Prince George, a city of 100,000 people, he having run a big sawmill and planer mill busines for many years.

Forestry is Prince George’s main industry.

The celebration, however, seemed to have little to do with his having been a notably successful businessman and donor to many good causes, and much more to do with the way he cared about people—employees, friends and relatives—and the rascally high jinks he and his buddies had engaged in over the years.

The story I liked best was about the time he and two friends went on a hunting trip one October. (Here I must say that I heard two versions of this story, each slightly different from the other, sort of like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so I will retell it as I now remember and envision it.)

These fellows went on the trip, and on the way home to Prince George from somewhere near 100 Mile House, late at night, they grew tired. They decided to park their camper on the side of the road and catch some shut eye. In the middle of the night, one fellow got up and climbed out of the camper, probably to attend to the call of nature, and decided that, since he was awake, he might as well climb into the truck and start the drive home while the others slept.

Since the truck was parked on some sort of rise, he decided just to release the brake, engage the clutch, touch the accelerator (I imagine—country guys know how to do all this stuff), and let the truck roll until the engine caught, so he wouldn’t awaken the others with the normal truck-starting noises.

In the meantime, the hero of the story—Jim, the good man being celebrated at this celebration of life—also climbed out of the camper to attend to his own call of nature. Dressed only in his undershorts, he noticed in the dark that the truck was beginning to roll. As fast as he could, he searched for a big rock to put in front of a tire to prevent the truck from rolling down the hill.

But the truck just rolled faster and faster, and in a moment was driving away.

There was Jim, out on the highway in the middle of an October night, dressed only in his undershorts. At this point, the highway had virtually no traffic. While he waited in the dark, Jim found some pieces of plastic by the roadside and fastened them around his feet because they were getting very cold.

Eventually, a car came along, and Jim, a tall man, stood in the middle of the highway with his arms outstretched to stop it in its tracks.

The car was being driven by a doctor on his way, as fast as he could make it, to an emergency waiting for him at the hospital in Kamloops. The good doctor picked Jim up, and together they raced to Kamloops. Outside the hospital, the doctor dropped Jim off, and he stood there naked except for his undershorts and plastic footwear, trying to figure out how to get to the police station.

Meantime, the fellow driving the truck thought he should stop and see how the others were doing. (For all I know, maybe he himself was answering a call of nature, because one thing about road trips is that they involve regular stops for coffee, gas, stretching your legs, and attending to such matters.) He opened the camper door and looked in. The third fellow was still inside, both he and the driver having thought Jim was with the other one. Now they knew they had lost Jim, so they started back the way they had come, looking for him by the side of the road—or anywhere.

Back at the hospital in Kamloops, a group of nuns came walking by, and a man driving past, seeing this nearly naked desperado near the nuns, stopped his car to see whether help was needed. Jim convinced the man that he was not as crazy as he looked, and the man drove him to the police station. Walking into the police station, Jim was able to convince the police that he was not crazy, and there he settled in to wait.

Back to the hunters: they drove all the way back to where they had originally parked for the night, looking and looking, but not finding Jim anywhere. At this point, they stopped at a roadside establishment and called the police, through whom they re-connected with Jim.

And so the story ended, with no one the worse for wear, but what a tale to tell.

There was a big feast at the celebration of life, and during that portion of the event I was able to have a most interesting conversation with a young man, husband of one of the granddaughters of the man of the hour, interesting not just because he is a very smart and nice young man, but because of what he is doing for work. He has just started a consultancy to educate institutions on how to teach young people, and eventually all of us, to use AI as a useful tool, rather than letting AI colonize our human brains and compromise our thinking ability in a harmful way.

This was my second celebration of life in a matter of a few months. The thing about funerals, or such celebrations, is that they make you think about your own life, and how you should make sure to love your loved ones as fervently as you can, and to live the precious, unique life that is yours as ambitiously as you can. The second thing you begin to understand is just how short an individual human life really is.

On the drive, we saw abandoned sheds and barns along the way, as you do in farming country. We saw one barn with a big tree growing up through the roof. These old sheds and barns outlast us. When you are a child, life seems long, and old people seem very, very old. When you become an old person yourself, however, you realize that time is whizzing by faster all the time, and it won’t be long until you yourself evaporate.

Oh yes—the five-pound weekend. I brought about five new pounds home, mostly nestled in a friendly way around my waist. That’s because I have a policy of throwing caution to the wind at restaurants when I travel. I had eggs Benedict numerous times and ate every last delicious morsel. And other tasty goodies. Chocolate bars.

This week’s menu, back at home, will feature broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, carrots, celery, and possibly a whisper of fish.

We stopped in twice—on the way there and on the way home—at an amazing restaurant in 100 Mile House. It is a one-man operation called Eva Ore, where a man named Nathan cooks gourmet meals for a small clientele attracted entirely by word-of-mouth marketing. Nathan has at the very least the moral support of his wife Eva, a poet and translator. Besides Nathan’s mouth-watering Hollandaise sauce, tender poached eggs and perfectly cooked asparagus spears, the restaurant features a playful and evocative décor complete with foreign black-and-white movies from the 1940s playing silently on a big screen. All the meals are served on charming vintage china. Cloth napkins, of course.

On the road we listened to wonderful music and discussed the men, women, and children we have known and certain unexplainably bad decisions we have made.

Oh yes. We stayed at a fancy hotel, thanks to Karen’s largesse, and burst into whoops of laughter when we saw the toilet in our room. It was all kitted out with electric gizmos and elaborate functions so that you could practically give your bum a manicure by pushing the right buttons. We were too afraid to try anything of the sort, but we did enjoy the wonderfully warm toilet seat.

What next.

While I wait, I am thinking of that old black-and-white cow that was tethered to a peg in what was the equivalent of the village green in Langham, Saskatchewan. All that cow could do was circle round and round, grazing on the grass within the circle she could reach. Poor thing, but that was just the way of life for that cow.

The village green was a low spot, green in the summer, but in the spring it became the slough — a veritable lake, where boys could float a raft and prod it around with a stick and enjoy being sailors. A novel experience on the prairies.

Back to the cow, tethered. When you are waiting for something, you are snagged up. You are not going anywhere until the thing you are waiting for finally happens. Then life can go on, but in the meantime, you are tethered to the thing you are waiting for. It is as if the flow of life is dammed up, and the longer you have to wait, the more dammed up it feels. Please let this thing happen so that life can go on. The mind keeps going to it, like the tongue going to a new chip in a tooth.

While I am tethered to this thing that I am waiting for, I think of maya — the Buddhist concept of earthly desires being mere illusion, a distraction from the deep flow of spiritual existence. Maya being something we must learn to detach from.

And yet. And yet. Breakfast must be made. Dishes must be done. The garden must be watered. A thank-you letter must be written. The cat must get another flea treatment because those darn fleas are biting my ankles instead of sticking to biting the cat, as they should. Darn fleas. I am waiting to call on the neighbour to hold the cat while I put the flea treatment on her neck, because the cat tries to shoot into the air to avoid the deathly feeling of a few cool drops on her skin. But that is not my big waiting. That is just a little mundane waiting.

While you are waiting for the major thing, you have to pacify your mind. Be patient. Things will work out. It will all be good in the end. Meantime, make the best of it. As my bridge friend says, after playing out a hand of poor cards, you have to make the best of what you have to work with.

After the thing comes that you have been waiting for, you will have a brief respite from waiting — from the tether — but I promise you this: almost immediately, a new thing to wait for will arise.

Here is the big thing I am waiting for: I am waiting for my son to get his hip replacement surgery date, for which he has now been waiting fifteen months. All the while, he becomes more disabled and has more pain. I am sorry for his trouble. I would take it away from him if I could, but I can’t do a thing about it. He is the one with the pain, waiting for the surgery. But I am his mom.

So I am just waiting.

Then the company leaves, out the door, promises to come again soon, don’t leave it so long, have you got your keys? Your wallet? Your book? If you forgot anything, we can mail it to you. Don’t worry. Are you sure you don’t need us to pack you a sandwich? No? You’re good?

Then the door closes, and it is so quiet in here. So very quiet. The house breathes a silent sigh. Just us again. How is that done? Just us. We are down to zero.

Well, there is surely laundry to do now. So much laundry that you can just add things to the washer willy-nilly, to get things back to normal.

And there are surely dishes in the kitchen to wash. And some contemplation of the fridge, still stuffed with good things to eat.

Maybe put together a meal. The leftover of the too-large steak, cooked to medium-rare perfection—still good if sliced thinly, at a slant. Grind some more pepper onto it. And a salad. A salad of romaine lettuce, chopped apple, sliced grapes, sliced raw mushrooms, blue cheese dressing—oh my, surprisingly good.

It is a little like getting lost while out on an errand—the mistake causing you to see parts of town that you didn’t know about, and that you should purposely investigate sometime. So it is with assembling a meal out of the bits and pieces in the fridge clamouring to be eaten before it is too late. The remains of the goodies you prepared in advance of the company arriving. You made lots so that there would be choices, and now, of course, there is lots left. Bread and cookies and pie and endless fruits and vegetables.

That first load of laundry is now ready to put in the dryer. Find the next load of laundry to go into the washer.

What next? Must get the exercise. Maybe a walk. Can put on the knapsack and pick up a dozen eggs on the walk. Seem to be out of those.

Dazed, a bit, after the company has left. Tired. This old dog has been taken on a trek, a mountainside hike, but this old dog loved it. Now ready to lie down for a bit.

All the things unattended to while the company was here. The ICBC notice—yes, of course I will renew the insurance. The notice to get the next Covid vaccination—yes, will do. The reminder to get the oil changed—yes, and I can make the appointment online for next week. The catching up with the usual social calendar—events confirmed, cancellations confirmed, proposed outings under consideration.

Regular life goes on. What felt like a flat, empty landscape—with the company gone—now begins to shrug itself into wakefulness. A few things will happen. Other things will rise to fill the emptiness of the company-gone house.

The state of company-gone.

Now creeping into my mind are the images, which will be permanent, especially if revisited, of the time of the company in my house. Music, laughter, hilarious jokes told. And all the rest of it.

My outrage started with my reaction to the Alberta separatist proponents. How dare they even THINK of stealing away a piece of my Canada?! (Yes, interrobang.) This is my country. Our country. You cannot raid it and plunder it, you selfish idiots.

And some of these people flagrantly misusing personal voter information.

You don’t own Alberta any more than I do. A whole lot of the descendants of the original occupants—the Indigenous people—are permanently settled in Alberta. Five of our country’s most beautiful national parks are right there on federal land in Alberta, including Banff National Park, the oldest national park in Canada.

Then there is the practical side of things. Do you really want a land-locked country, with border crossings and an army and setting up your embassies across the rest of North America. Would you have an Alberta dollar, and would you still honour Canadian Tire money? And what would you do about King Charles? Really, this has not been thought through. It is sabre-rattling. You might get the Republic of Alberta, but it would be riddled with pieces still clearly belonging to Canada and the Indigenous people. Don’t even let us get started on whether you would rather be US citizens than Canadian.

I got all worked up in my mind and planned to write to ORGASM, that is, the Organization for the Right Ghastly Alberta Separation Movement. Here was my idea: yes you can take Alberta out of Canada, and here’s how: Take your big map of Canada, lay it out on the dining room table, take your black marker from the kitchen drawer, and draw a straight line from Coutts (yes, thank you, we all know where that is now) up to the very northwest corner of what is now Alberta. Now, give everything to the left of that to BC, and everything to the right to Saskatchewan. Poof, Alberta, you are gone. BC gets Calgary and Saskatchewan gets Edmonton. Yes, provincial boundaries can be redrawn. A bit of a fuss, but doable. I don’t think it would even need the participation—much less approval—of Canadians living in Alberta. I could be wrong on that.

We would have to rename Alsask—to, maybe, The Town Formerly Known as Alsask. Lloydminster would lose its border-town cachet. The Saskatchewan Roughriders would still be the supreme football team in the province, if not the country. There would be some adjustments.

But all that was just my outrage having a tantrum.

I want to come to the defence of, if not the separatists, the alienated. In corporate law, there is a concept that minority shareholders should not be exploited or have their rights steamrollered by the majority shareholders. I think the alienated in Alberta must feel like minority shareholders. They live in a country where the federal election is already won or lost before the polls even close in Alberta and BC. They feel ignored and abused by those who run the country from Ottawa. Remember that slogan (thank you Ralph Klein) that was slung around in the 1970s? Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark? That’s how hurt and mad they felt. They are always picking up the tab and no one picks up the tab for them.

Politically, Alberta has been home to a strong base of conservative voters. I prefer the word “conservative” to “right-wing” in my new consideration of the Alberta situation. If you use a term including “wing”, you move very quickly to wingnuts, to name-calling, to derision. So, let’s stick with “conservative”. The best of conservatism must spring from caution, care not to destroy, desire for safety. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And fear. Fear of loss coming with change.

Alberta’s economic future may lie with tourism, because the big oil and gas industry, and the big underground wealth located in that province, may be going the way of the bustle. Fashions change. Knowledge and understanding evolve. Things that used to be just fine are no longer just fine. And change is threatening and traumatic for people who are by nature conservative. Did Alberta make the conservatives conservative? How is it that the Alberta political culture is so different from the Quebec political culture? Who knows.

At the other end of things are the progressives. Those who welcome change that they hope will be change for the better. While the conservatives want to keep a tight fist around their tax dollars, the progressives are ready to keep our community money in a dish in the hall, for worthy projects and for sharing.

In passing, I want to say that Alberta is full of wonderful people, including dear friends of mine, and cousins and cousins-once-removed. It produces wonderful musicians. There is the Fringe Festival. Banff! Jasper! Lake Louise! Cowboy hats and cowboy dreams. And in my childhood, Alberta always seemed to have lovely, paved highways, compared to my old stubble-jumping, gravel-roaded, poor cousin of a province, dear Saskatchewan. Alberta money, nouveau riche. Even, allegedly, no rats. (See my jealousy.)

But back to the minority shareholder. To feel powerless, unappreciated, unheard, trampled upon, is to feel resentment. And resentment breeds political huffery and puffery.

I think we need to do something, or maybe many things, to promote a feeling of love for our whole country in all of us, and a sense of belonging to it, sea to sea to sea, that is bigger than the politics of the day. We all need to have an Alberta family come to stay with us, in our house, for 10 days every year, and we can eat pie and talk and listen. Also, a Quebec family, in our house, for 10 days every year. Oh, and yes please, a Nova Scotia family and a Newfoundland and Labrador family for at least 10 days a year, because just think of the music! The music! And a family from Nunavut. Yes, the darlings. And people should be able to bring their dog. Everybody should be sent home with an extra new suitcase, for all the presents we want to send them home with. Because we love them.

This would be a very good initial investment, or outlay, from the spanking new Canada Sovereign Wealth Fund. A big grant, every year, for every Canadian, to have an ambassador family from another province to visit at your house, and for you to fly to visit them, and take a nice hostess gift. Preferably something edible. Honestly, wouldn’t this be wonderful? (You can tell I have deep-seated progressive leanings: I am quite ready to raid the piggy-bank…)

Maybe it would help, in this giant country, to have an electoral system more reflective of all of us than this first-past-the-post business. Maybe we need more committees.

Right now, I want to say to the Albertans flirting with separation, I am ready to listen to you. Really listen. I want to comfort you and talk with you and brainstorm. We need to talk about how to make things better, for you, for us, and for the grandchildren, and for their grandchildren.

I am speaking as an elder.

Let’s not sugar-coat it with “unevolved”. Evil.

This morning, enjoying my drive to the gym on a fine sunny day, I was scanning the horizons for anything of interest. I saw a man wearing a black T-shirt, on the front of which was printed: “The next round is mine”. I liked that. Maybe it meant this round is mine, or it meant after you pay for this round, the next round is mine. Either way, good-hearted and funny.

Then there was the helicopter flying low, obviously headed for the Chilliwack airport. We have to be the only town in Canada with an airport right in our downtown--unless you include Toronto, where the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, also known as Toronto Island Airport, is sort of downtown. But the main thing about the Chilliwack airport is not its airport-iness: rather that it is the location of the Chilliwack Airport Restaurant which is basically a pie restaurant. And just so very wonderful. I must go there again soon. Some patrons apparently go there twice a day. Oh, the choices.

Then, a glimpse of what looked like a shred of the Confederate flag on a truck. Remember those? Remember those people who thought their rights were being trampled on by being forced to get a Covid vaccine shot? That took their trucks to Ottawa and to Coutts, Alberta--there, some with guns--to show the government that they were there to enjoy an insurrection, if it came to that? And some flew Confederate flags on their trucks. Or decals.

In the gym, one of the regulars is wearing a black T-shirt celebrating Johnny Cash. Curious, that a man with such a low droning voice is immortal--still beloved. Amazing. I have talked politics with that particular guy at the gym, and he holds views about race that are disturbing. We share a smile and a wave. Does that make me a hypocrite?

So, back to those Confederate flags. Surely the very worst crime a human being can commit is not murder, it is enslavement. To steal a person and use him or her up. It is such a cynical crime, slavery. And that is what those Confederate flags are about. It is code for “us white men are the best, the onliest, and let us just obliterate and trample upon and use up anyone who is not a white man.” And it shall be our own private joke--which, of course, we really mean, too. Up to and including lynching. Paste that decal on your truck and flaunt it. Let us also have contempt for scientists and people who went to university, while we are at it.

Yes, slavery is surely worse than genocide. There is slavery, and there is its cousin, the oppression and exploitation of other people. People with an inferior skin colour, people of an inferior sex. There is good old patriarchy.

So I got quite angry, thinking about this. How can such wickedness, such evil, such arrogance, go along, out there in the open, parading as just one political view?

By now, home, eating my delicious lunch, I turn on the CBC News channel, to see if the world has perhaps ended since breakfast. No, the world has not ended.

But here is what I learn. This comes out of the grilling Pete Hegseth is getting in Washington, DC: the top military brass that he and Trump and their henchmen have axed include notably women and African Americans. God help you if you happened to be female and black. Or Jewish. This is going on right now. Right now. The Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, all decades long past. Since then, I checked all this out on the internet, and the axed military leaders include a lot of white guys too. You always have to double-check this stuff.

Then, in the news, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announcing that a search of the City of Winnipeg’s Brady Road landfill will continue, in the hope of finding the remains of an Indigenous woman, Ashlee Shingoose, one of four women murdered by the same individual in 2022. Remains of the other three women have been recovered, and their families have been able to hold funerals and ceremonies for them.

Also, in the news, Canada will be the home for the headquarters of a new international bank, for defence-building, for a group of nations, NATO members and “allied nations” that need to stick together for strength. So far, this is being called the DSRB (Defence, Security and Resilience Bank), and the headquarters will probably be in one of Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal.

Not Chilliwack, I notice, I imagine because our airport is just not big enough.

Meantime, back to the DSRB. It does sound a bit like the cooperative movement, doesn’t it. Working together being so effective for bees, ants and humans.

Tomorrow, something funny might crop up. If so, I will let you know. Meantime, I guess I should just do up the lunch dishes.

I have dear loved ones who are just so much fun to hang around with. Such good talks.

Meantime, since they are all far away from me, I can cook up some great dinner parties in my head.

This one is at the Keg in Abbotsford (a short drive away for me). I have remembered to wear my hearing aids, and turned them up, because restaurants tend to be noisy--on purpose, darn it. No wait! I can hear perfectly on this occasion! No horrid little hearing aids! I have ordered the filet mignon, and we are just waiting for our plates to arrive. I am on my second drink, because it is a fantasy and I am still enjoying a drink. Here is who I am with: Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, my darling imaginary romantic partner, and Barbara Frum.

Now here is another one. This one is at Ed’s Warehouse in Toronto, and yes, in my fantasy it is still open. Of course, we are all ordering the roast beef with all the trimmings. It is during some type of comedy festival in town, and with me at the table are Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Norm Macdonald, and Rex Murphy.

Now I am at Granville Island, in Vancouver, at some darling restaurant that does wonderful things with exotic mushrooms: With me are Eckhart Tolle, Mother Teresa, Tommy Douglas, and Peter Gzowski. Oh, think of the conversation. Mother Teresa speaks perfect English and is able to report that heaven was just an idea, after all. Tommy Douglas says that’s funny--heaven was the day Canada’s Medicare system came to be, July 1^st, 1968. Eckhart just beams seraphically, and Gzowski is fascinated and full of wonderful questions.

This one would be fabulous: We are in a sushi restaurant on Robson Street in Vancouver, the one where the little wooden boats go around, and you can just help yourself to any little plate with some dainty Japanese thing, when you see one that appeals to you. I am side by side with Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Donald Sutherland, and Barbara Walters, who is doing all the talking while the rest of us are still busy eating. But we will end up talking, for sure. No, that restaurant is no good, because it is no good being side by side, we need to be at a round table. So, ok—a Vancouver dim sum restaurant. Same idea: little plates of deliciousness, which they bring by and offer you a choice of until you are too full to eat another thing. And you can smile at everyone else, while they say just amazing things.

Then for the first of July: Mark Carney, Diane Fox Carney, Stephen Harper, Laureen (Teskey) Harper, Ian Hanomansing and Nancy Hanomansing (whom I actually know since she was a beloved colleague in the Vancouver family law bar—Nancy Trott, actually: Hi Nancy!). I will just sit and listen, for once. Oh, the high-flown ideas! I think we should be eating salmon and magically ending the meal with Saskatoon Berry pie with ice cream. The pie warmed up. No one wants to leave the table--it is so much fun. Each one besting the other. It will have to be in the evening, because Mark will have had to work in the morning. Probably the day off, for Ian and Nancy.

How about this. This one is at my house, because I live in a very big house in the English countryside, with servants, and my guests are all staying over for the weekend, and the weather is perfect—warm and sunny. We are all here at my big table, with the thick white linen cloth. Mussels in white wine sauce, to start. Joining me and my handsome, dreamed-up, highly intellectual partner are George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, John Stewart Mills, and Rosemary Barton. Rosemary knows how to ask the penetrating question and manage the conversation if anyone is hogging it. And they will all be here overnight. In the morning we will all be here for breakfast. Every last one of us.

And finally, taking their turns to join us at the many round tables, at my law school class reunion--where everybody actually made it, even those darling ones who left for heaven prematurely--are Lord Denning and John Candy. It is a fabulous multi-course feast, paid for in full by the Law Society of Upper Canada, honouring us because we are the best law school class ever, in the entire history of the province, ever was and ever will be. It will be in Ottawa, and the weather will be lovely.