Monthly Archives: November 2020

About the Mail

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So, do you have your Christmas cards ready to get mailed out? Are you looking forward to an avalanche of cards and packages (that you didn’t order from Amazon) to pour forth from your Superbox when you insert that magical key to reveal the wondrous contents inside?

Yeah, no. Mail really has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s rare to open up my mailbox and see handwritten addresses in the to and from spaces. Occasionally there’s a birthday card or a thank you. But mostly the mail is a never-ending invitation to recycle a bunch of paper that I never asked for. Even bills don’t come in the mail anymore unless they’re from my offline plumber or some magazine that I never subscribed to telling me to “Pay Now!”

When I was a kid I so loved the idea of getting mail that I was okay even with getting junk mail sent to me, thrilled because it was addressed to me. In a magazine I discovered the answer to my quest to be noticed by Canada Post: a sign-up form with circles to fill in if you wanted to be “contacted” by multiple retailers. Little did they know that I was twelve years old and had no money or no idea what an onslaught of mail I was setting my parents’ mailbox up for. Not unlike my inbox when someone sells my email address without my permission.

It was mostly junk, yes, but I think I must have received occasional free samples of brand new products like cereal that I didn’t like or dishwasher soap for an appliance we didn’t own. I even became a Regal Catalog representative and pored over their magazines like they were Christmas catalogs, blissfully unaware that most of their stuff fell apart moments after you purchased it or was “not exactly as advertised”.

I did, however, also receive actual letters back then, because I also collected pen pals along with those free samples and catalogs. The Edmonton Journal had a kids page where you could get your name and address published if you were interested in writing to someone across the province or across the world. I had several “first-date” letters that never went anywhere – kind of like the swipe left of my time. But I also had a lasting correspondence with two girls, one from Winterburn, Alberta and the other from Belfast, Ireland. One taught everything about the horses she was so in love with, the other about punk rock and what it was like to have bombs blow out the windows in your living room.

Although I bemoan the fact that I don’t get any letters anymore, I’m not exactly writing them either – it’s just too easy to slough off the job of hand-writing anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days of having to decipher someone’s handwriting, of pressed flowers or photographs falling out from between the leaves of paper, of saving such things in shoeboxes for all eternity. Because they are saveable: they’re usually thin, unique and can contain valuable information.

And so sometimes I will even print up a memorable email and paste it into a journal or fold it up like a letter and second it in a shoebox. And you can bet that I save any Christmas letter or card that I receive, for at least a little while, and if it has a handwritten note all the better. These things might take time, but then those messages can last for a lifetime.

Here’s wishing that your mailboxes will all be full of only good stuff this COVID Christmas.

About Career Choices

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[It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Throwback Thursday. It’s fun to read about what my under-10-years-old children were wanting to be when they grew up. It’s safe to say that they were not expecting a worldwide pandemic and a shaky job market for the year 2020.)

            One of the great advantages about being five years old is that you can make a career choice without considering the logistics of the situation whatsoever. Never mind that we live no where near Cape Canaveral, my youngest son Simon, for the longest time has wanted to be an astronaut, or in five-year-old language, a spaceman.

            Tim, the middle child, made a point of getting clearance from us that he DOES NOT have to do the same thing as his Dad. When we said that he could be anything he wanted, he decided that he was going to be a millionaire. (Get the connection? Dad: not a millionaire.) Rick and I capitalized on the moment and began considering early retirement since we figured Tim the Millionaire could take us in. But when we asked him if he would take care of us when we were old, he flatly refused.

            We then turned the question on Gil, the oldest, a.k.a. most guilt-ridden, son. Gil’s preferred occupation, like most kids, usually reflects what he’s interested in at the time. So at the moment, he’s torn between becoming a professional soccer player or a professional Lego builder. Bolstered by his younger brother’s answer to our plea, Gil smiled at us and said, “No way!” And so the ball was in Simon’s court. Four pairs of eyes were on him as the youngest child had the question posed at him. And with the carefree attitude of the baby of the family, he absolved himself of all responsibility by announcing, “I’ll be in space!”

            Simon has been so resolved upon the astronaut route that it came as a huge surprise the other day when all that suddenly changed. At a car dealership, he saw a car that he particularly liked and said, “I want that one!” To which I replied (with all the coldness of a parent who has been shut out of their child’s home when social security becomes obsolete), “I guess you’ll have to go out and get a job.” This presented no problem for him. “ Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna be a wrestler!”

            A wrestler? The change of course was easily detected. The night before we sat in a pizza joint, subjected to big screen WWF, which the two younger boys were especially enthralled with. “What about space?” I demanded. “Don’t you want to be an astronaut anymore?” Sure the moon made for expensive round trip visitation, but a WWF wrestler? Astronauts rarely go slamming other guys around in zero gravity.

            But Simon had it figured that since there were no towns in space, and he liked to go to town, his life’s occupation would have to change. If television has such an effect on such important decisions, however, I think we’re going to have to buy a copy of Apollo 13 and start playing it over and over again. And even though the pizza was good, we’ll have to stay away from that pizza joint.

[Apparently, I wasn’t too thrilled about Simon’s WWF aspirations eighteen years ago. I’m happy to report that while he’s neither an astronaut or a wrestler, he’s pursuing a career that he loves and he spends most of his time on Earth.]

About Alex Trebek

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

What is 2020, Alex?

Although living through a global pandemic that appears to be ramping up right now is decidedly NOT FUN, there are always silver linings to be found as we huddle, zoom and binge. Losing Alex Trebek, however, is not one of them. The beloved host of the popular game show Jeopardy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer last Sunday, November 8. It was the year 2020. In case you weren’t listening.

In the face of this great trial, Trebek was still such an optimist. When he announced on the show in March of last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, he allied himself with the common man, saying he was just one of the 50,000 other people in the United States who were told the same news that year. And he said he would fight it.

So when Alex kept showing up for his hosting duties as if nothing was out of the ordinary, it really seemed like he was not only fighting, but beating it. He looked a little older when I tuned in to the new season of Jeopardy this fall, with contestants spaced out and separated by plexiglass shields. That didn’t stop him from chatting them up as usual, encouraging them to win big and teasing them mercilessly.

It was all in good fun, of course. Calling a contestant a “loser” when they described a dorky hobby or roasting them because they missed a clue that was right in their wheelhouse was part of the charm of Alex Trebek. If Alex corrected your pronunciation, you believed him. If he called someone a nerd, it was just him saluting one of his own.

If watching Jeopardy made you a nerd, well, so be it. My kids learned early that when Jeopardy was on, I might ignore them: I couldn’t risk missing the satisfaction of calling out the questions to the clues that I knew, which some days were not very many. Jeopardy was a trivia show, after all, and most trivia is, well, trivial. Nevertheless, if I could show off a little of my knowledge of biology or books that I had never read, of obscure definitions or even some math, it made me a little happy inside.

My son, Tim, is the one who asks me when I’m going to try out for Jeopardy and one of my first reactions when I heard the news was that now I never would get to meet Alex Trebek, at least not in this lifetime. But as much as I liked playing at home, I don’t think I would like the pressure of playing for real, of getting frustrated with my clicker not working when I KNOW the answer, and of ringing in too many “educated” guesses. One of my favorite stunt authors, A. J. Jacobs went on as a contestant after he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. And he bombed. Just sayin’ – I don’t think it’s that easy to not-bomb.

If Alex had been a contestant on his own show, I think he might have given Ken Jennings a run for most-winningest player. I remember an interview he did years ago where he was asked what he was going to do when he retired and he replied that he hoped to re-read all his favorite books. I resonated with that. I hope he had time to do some of that, but it was so obvious that he was a people person, that I suspect he spent a lot more time with the living than the dead while he could. When he got to where he was going, he could look forward to a Babette’s feast with his favorite famous people.

And maybe with some people that were not so famous. My sister texted me on Sunday that our mom would be happy to see him. What made losing Alex that much more poignant for us was that our mom fought the same kind of cancer – and we knew what a rough go that was. And also: she loved Jeopardy and she loved Alex. She maybe didn’t know that much about Greek mythology or African geography, but she knew a nice man when she saw one. I’m sure that she recognized him when he got there.

About Falling After Fifty

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I fell down in the shower last week. I didn’t break any bones and I sustained no head injuries. But I did get a nasty welt down my back where I landed hard against the rail that the shower door slides into. And my pride was definitely bruised.

All in all, I was lucky. When I Googled “falls in the bathroom”, the search engine responded with this ominous headline: Bathrooms Can Be the Most Dangerous Place in the House. Then I asked: Okay, So Who Died in the Bathroom?

Well, for starters, we all know that’s where The King, Elvis, met his maker. So did actress Judy Garland and author Evelyn Waugh. And several royal personages over the centuries also had their demise on the toilet, including an ancient Chinese ruler Duke Jing of Jin who fell into the toilet pit and drowned.

What a way to go.

But I digress. None of those people died from falling – well except for Duke Jin – but that wasn’t in the shower. Slipping in the shower is the second most dangerous activity that causes injury in the bathroom. The first: BATHING. Bathing, I guess, is dangerous. (Especially for Duke Jing who took a bath in…well, never mind.)

But yeah. I guess it all comes of having to be Too Clean. Bathing can be dangerous and so can cleaning the shower because all that soapy stuff also makes things dang slippery. That’s what I was doing. I was cleaning the shower and shortly after I polished off all the goo that built up on the floor of our shower, I stepped inside to finish rinsing the doors and Whoops!

I just need to be more careful. I’m not getting any senior’s discounts just yet, but it’s never too early to start practicing Safe Stepping. With this resolution comes the evaluation of all my activities. What about walking – is that safe? That all depends on the terrain. If you move off the beaten path around here, you could very well break an ankle tripping into a gopher hole. And it depends on the season: winter lends its own hazards of snow and ice and frozen dog poop. That stuff could kill you.

So, does being safe also mean I shouldn’t go hiking or skating or skiing in the winter anymore? I’m not sure I care anymore about skiing anyways – the last time I tried, I cried all the way down the mountain, moving at the at the speed of a glacier as I tried to relive my old daredevil self of ten years prior. But at least I didn’t get hurt.

Which one is it going to be: Safe or Sorry? To some degree, always being safe and calculated is a little boring. And to be daring and spontaneous, the opposite of boring, could lead to deadly falls into toilet pits, so to speak.

There is a measure of sorry to being safe, isn’t there? I still want to be my old self and do all the things I used to. But my body can’t keep up in quite the same way. On days that I work-out hard or go for a big walk, I need to convince my knees that it’s okay to do the standing-up thing. Fifty-three is not old, but it’s not twenty-three, either. After I fell last week, it took me a good minute or two before I could figure out how to stand up again. For one, I didn’t want to fall again. And two, my body just didn’t want to move that fast. I lay there doing inventory on where I hurt and how serious it felt and then made a plan for how to get up.

So, The Plan is now to quit cleaning the shower. Or maybe just to quit showering. Neither of those options can be as bad as falling into a toilet pit, right?