Category Archives: Books

About When Things Go Wrong

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Rick and I took a little trip east this last week, to Montreal and our nation’s capital. We flew to La Belle Province and after a couple of days there, rented a car to drive the two hours to Ottawa. On the last night in Ottawa, after supper with a friend, we drove back to the hotel and talked about what a good holiday it had been: the weather was hot but not unbearably so – we enjoyed a Friday night in a park close to Notre Dame listening to a busker and Saturday night walking home from a jazz club along Rue de St. Catherine among the young and hip of Montreal; both cities were very walkable and we (hopefully) worked off all the poutine/smoked meat/seafood calories we over-ingested; and really, all of our loose plans had fallen into place.

But talking about how good something has been before it’s over is like saying “shutout” at the end of the 2nd period of a hockey game. Cue the proverbial fat lady.

As we exited our rental, Rick looked askance at the trunk of the car, which didn’t look exactly closed. And when he popped it open, the latching pin came loose and the realization dawned on us that we could not travel in this car with a trunk that would no longer close. Hmmmm. After the initial pseudopanic – someone (probably me) bemoaned the fact that we didn’t have a bungee cord handy – Rick macguyvered it closed and then we went to our room to call the rental car’s after-hours help line. When I finally got a real person on the line – we’ll call her “Shelby” – which is the fake name she gave me so I couldn’t complain about her later – she said there was no problem, she would send someone to tow the car and amend our rental agreement to switch out to a new car. The only catch was we would have to get ourselves to the rental car place in the morning – the day we had planned to sleep in a bit. Oh well. An hour later the tow truck showed up and we sent our VW Lemon (I mean seriously? Have you ever had a trunk latch pin fall out before?) off to the lemonade stand.

Rising early, we decided that the 30-minute walk to the rental car depot that “Shelby” sent us to (assuring us that they had plenty of cars) was better than taking a taxi. Or for fighting for a reimbursement later. And really, it was so much better. A bit cooler weather but no rain and we got more steps on the Fitbit.

But then we got to the depot where they informed us that: 1) they could not view the agreement online from that particular location; 2) that they, in fact, did not have any cars available; and 3) that we would have had better luck with probably any other location, including the one DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM OUR HOTEL.

And so, we walked back. The service at the new location was excellent but guess what? There were no notes on our rental agreement from “Shelby”. [Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that when I found out that she was from Calgary and I, confessing we were from Edmonton, made some offhand comment about the upcoming Battle of Alberta that was about to commence?] Our new best-car-rental-friend, however, believed our story, tracked down the towed car and gave us a new rental with a full tank of gas.

Years ago, I read – and loved – the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. Part of the book chronicles his Pacific to Atlantic bike trip. Sounds pretty cool, right? Biking with friends for a good cause, seeing the sights, building up your quads, getting a stellar tan. But also: flat tires, torrential rainstorms, bicycle butt, and a lot of asking “What was I thinking?” And much as I thought that that bike trip was cool for him, all that yucky stuff would be too much for me. It was more about avoiding the bad than gambling for the good.

Now, granted, sometimes EVERYTHING goes wrong and then you wonder if traveling is really worth it, but most of the time it doesn’t go all wrong. Sure, we’ve drowned a cell phone, been stuck on Splash Mountain, had trouble at the American border, forgot Simon at the bathroom in Disneyland, had a wheel come flying off our holiday trailer in an epic manner, thought our car was on fire, and I once got instant food poisoning from eating one peanut dusted with ghost pepper. But those things were just sprinkled in with all the other really good and great things we did, like a good spice. (But seriously, don’t mess with that ghost pepper.)

Long story short, it’s all worth it. I mean, you could stay at home and still have all kinds of things go wrong, right? Or you could think about all the fun you had on your last vacation while waiting for Air Canada to deliver your luggage to Vermilion because it didn’t make it on your connecting flight. Which is what we’re doing right now while watching the first game of the Battle of Alberta.

I hope we beat “Shelby”. Just sayin.

About Nostalgia

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Photo by Damla Özkan on Unsplash

I tend to write a lot about memory and things from the past – specifically my memory and my past. It’s not that I don’t like living in the present, but I am a ruminator of days gone by when it comes to putting things down on paper (or computer). Maybe it has to do with my reticence to form an early opinion – you won’t find me Tweet-ing or Status-ing a heck of a lot. I read the backlist of books more often than new releases. I like to cull pictures and memorabilia five or ten years later – when I have some sense of what’s really important to me.

What’s important to me is subjective, but as a memory keeper for my family I do sometimes hold onto things that I think maybe my boys will one day agree is important: their favorite t-shirts from teenager-hood, picture books from toddlerhood and even some baby teeth and the locks of first haircuts. Rick and I also have things saved from our teenage and toddler years and then, beyond that, I have things that I saved of my mother’s – greeting cards from us kids, her wedding invitation collection and a stack of Edmonton Journal comics pages that I cannot recycle. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

A couple weeks ago Rick and I wandered into the Old Strathcona Antique Mall, a place burgeoning with nostalgia, complete with price tags. We have a few things we might want to sell so we were looking for similar things – and we quickly learned we weren’t going to get rich. But it was fascinating to see what was deemed saveable and saleable: a used paper cup with a John Deere emblem, a framed and signed photo of Wayne Gretzky on ice only wearing skates and gym shorts circa 1980-something, hundreds of mugs and badges and signs emblazoned with old logos and all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books ten times over.

As we wandered the aisles, we did a lot of “I remember that!” and “My auntie had one of those!” and also plenty of “I can’t believe that someone would want that/pay for that/saved that!” But then, everyone’s memory is subjective – and important. I recently read Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which chronicles the history of the Los Angeles Central Library told with the through-line of the devastating fire that nearly wiped it out in the 1986. I found it so interesting that the library wasn’t just the storehouse of books, magazines and DVDs. Of course, I’m aware that most libraries have collections or archives of some sort. But a large library like the one in Los Angeles also is the repository of old maps, single subject book collections (like about rubber or oranges) donated posthumously by a passionate collector’s family, and any and all paraphernalia deposited there by defunct social action groups. It’s like they think everything is important.

And it is. Maybe not to you or me, but to someone else it could the connection to a history they thought was lost. Or never knew about at all. It reminds me of an episode of Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up, where a retired couple had never cleaned out the house they inherited from the husband’s parents, just moved in themselves. Once they started sifting and purging their closets, old photos surfaced and antiques they never knew about – and never would have if someone hadn’t saved it in the first place.

I’m not saying we should save everything – gosh, people are paying too much for storage lockers as it is. But curating a collection of things important to you – in a bureau or a box or a book – is actually good way to secure your place in the future, a way to remember and be remembered.

About Plagiarism

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Me: circa 1973.

I am a plagiarist from way back.

When I was in grade one, my teacher (Mrs. W.) gave our class a writing project – an exciting culmination to the whole “learning to read” thing. She showed us how to fold a few regular papers in half and staple them at the folded edge to create a booklet, upon which we could immortalize our words and illustrations.

Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore. So much for immortality.

But it is my first remembered effort at publication. And I do recall – rather clearly – both the text and my drawings, probably because of the traumatic circumstances that surrounded my budding authorship. Namely, when my minimus opus had made the round-trip journey from my desk to the teacher’s and back again, I discovered that it had been marred with the frightening letter “C”. It was my first rejection letter as a writer.

Why, you ask, did my teacher NOT LIKE my story? (Imagine me as a miniature person, with short crooked bangs and spindly arms, feigning a thrust of a dagger to the heart. Actually, see the picture above, taken sometime before Mrs. W. crushed me.)

What had I written, you ask? Let’s see, it went something like this: We all live in a yellow submarine… Yeah, that was the start of it anyways, with accompanying pictures of stick people looking out of the portholes of a yellow spaceship-y thing. It went on like this for a riveting eight to ten pages.

Okaaaaay, so technically I stole the idea from the Beatles. At least I can’t be blamed for my taste, even though I did gravitate at that age to the Ringo songs. Maybe I wasn’t reaching as high as I could have. It doesn’t really matter because I was just borrowing a tried-and-true line so that I could learn how to write a story. Also, I must have missed that day in grade one that we learned about copyright law.

Needless to say, this memory bothered me for a long time – not (necessarily) because of the “C” but because I felt I had done something really wrong. That is, until I discovered Austin Kleon, one of my favorite creative people. No one vindicates the fledgling (and also the mature) artist better than he does. I’ve written about him before. Steal Like An Artist is now ten years old and his blog is way older. Both are an homage to how artists learn by stealing.

This is, after all, where all artists begin – by copying. Picasso didn’t always paint those crazy limp-necked, weird-eyed bird people: he only did that stuff after he drew a whole bunch of (recognizable) bowls of fruit. And even the Beatles – who I first riffed off – started out as a cover band. It’s only after you imitate the giants who came before you enough times are you able to jump off their shoulders and start doing your own thing. And sometimes, just writing down someone else’s lyrics so you can memorize them or filling out a paint-by-number is good enough to satisfy the creative urge within us. That doesn’t make it any less of a creative endeavor and it always delivers that positive, constructive feeling of putting your own hand to something.

Check out Steal Like An Artist in a special 10th anniversary edition! It’s an eminently readable book – with pictures! – and plenty of encouragement for all.

About The Happiness Equation

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I’ve already said this: I am a fan of Neil Pasricha. My admiration started with his podcast Three Books and then I realized I had heard of him before – I had even slipped a copy of The Book of Awesome in one of my son’s stockings one Christmas. I fangirled so much over Neil’s kind and endearingly nerdy interview style on his podcast that I left a voicemail of appreciation. Then one day in the car, as I was catching up on episodes, to my surprise I heard my voice coming from my radio. If you’d like to hear it, check out Episode 89 after Neil interviews Zafar the Hamburger Man (at time 50:17).

It would make sense that I would then want to read all the books that Neil has written. But while The Book of Awesome and its spawn are New York Times bestsellers, I prefer to stick to his more prescriptive books, starting with The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything.

The book is full of good advice which humorously ends with the caveat: Don’t Take Advice. This is #9 – you need to read the whole book to understand why – but basically, the book is filled with information that resonates and makes sense. Although it seems weird in a book whose very title suggests it will teach you what you need to be happy, the very first section tells you to Be Happy First.

Wait, what? Is it really that simple? Think it, do it?

Actually, the important part of that mini-sentence is the DO. In the first few pages of the book, Pasricha outlines 7 Ways To Be Happier RIGHT NOW as verified by the field of positive psychology. Here they are:

  1. Three Walks – We all know that exercise makes us feel better, if not while we’re doing it, then for the benefits after. Research backs that as little as three 30-minute walks a week will activate pleasant feelings – a.k.a. happy feelings.
  2. The 20-Minute-Replay – If you’re happy and you know it, write it down! Writing about a happy experience lets you relive that experience as you write it down and every time you re-read it.
  3. Random Acts of Kindness – Hold open a door. Shovel someone’s sidewalk. Pay for coffee for the next guy in line. Five kindnesses like these a week help you feel good about yourself and thus, happier.
  4. A Complete Unplug – Periodically – be it after supper, for a weekend or during a vacation – disengage completely from social media, the internet and incessant texting. In fact, Pasricha is a proponent of landlines – if people really want to reach you, they can call you at home. (No one every does.)
  5. Find your Flow. Engage in a personally challenging activity that makes you forget everything else.
  6. Meditate – FOR TWO MINUTES. 2-minute-meditations on a regular basis increase compassion and self-awareness and decrease stress. All for the cost of TWO MINUTES.
  7. Be grateful. Once a week, write out three to five things you’re grateful for. As Pasricha says, “If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.”

Sounds good to me. And easy. But hard. Because in the end it’s up to us to DO these things – no one else can make you happy. It’s all part of the equation.

About Vocabulary

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Bamboozled. Flabbergasted. Discombobulated. Shenanagins. Lollygag. Malarkey. Kerfuffle. Brouhaha. Nincompoop. Skedaddle. Pumpernickel.

About three months ago my eldest son sent me a meme titled “some of the best words literally ever”, with the suggestion that they might come in handy for my blog. He sent my thoughts cattywampus as I took on his challenge and elbowed them in one (and once two) at a time. I had seen all of them before and generally knew what they meant, except for today’s word: I mistook cattywampus for a noun. After all, it sounds like some kind of trouble a Dr. Suess character would get into.

Vocabulary, along with Spelling (or Gnilleps, the more challenging backwards version from the board game Cranium), are some of my favorite things. Is that nerdy? I ask myself (also answering myself by unconsciously nodding my head). Well, yes, in fact it’s SUPERnerdy. But I choose to emphasize the SUPER. I mean, we all want to have a superpower, right? So what’s wrong with wanting to know All The Words? Maybe it’s not as handy as invisibility or shooting spiderwebs out of your wrists, but it’s the one I want to work on. Because no superhero was born in a day.

As much as I have aspired at times to read the dictionary cover to cover, I have never got past “aardvark” because reading the dictionary is actually (spoiler alert) Pretty Boring. I mean, the first page is a whole column of the different meanings and uses for the letter “A”. Who knew? (Well, Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster, for two.) As handy as a dictionary is, or its online counterpart, it doesn’t serve well as a textbook.

So how do we increase our wordpower? The old Reader’s Digest quiz had it partly right: read an unfamilar word in a sentence and take a guess. Because the answer to that question is another of my favorites: Read, Read, Read. While entertaining my 7-year old niece this week (or rather, she was entertaining me), she read aloud for a few chapters from one of the classic Dav Pilkey books about Dog Man – the same Dav Pilkey who purveys Captain Underpants. (Is that the right use of the word purvey? I’m not totally sure. I’m just gonna go with it.) In this seemingly innocuous book for those in the 6+ set, Navy sometimes consulted me, sometimes barreled ahead and correctly pronounced such words as: obnoxious, consequences, humiliation and – my favorite – dopamine responders.

It reminded me of how I used to read everything as a kid, how I have sometimes consulted, sometimes barreled ahead without looking up a weird word because the story was just too darn good. Eventually, if you read and encounter sisyphean or solipsistic, perspicacious or pugillistic enough times, you’ll actually figure out what they mean. Or you’ll look it up. Or you’ll pick up an easier book – like Dog Man – where the known to unknown ratio is a little more palatable. But still challenging – and a darn good story.

About Inheritance & Climbing Trees

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I’m an amateur genealogist. It’s important for me to keep up a family tree and I’ve even dug in a little into my roots (within the limits of the free trial period) on one or two of those sprawling online ancestry sites. It has struck me odd that a person would create a “tree” to show their “roots”. But it’s not really the same kind of tree. And perhaps a better way to look at it is that you are climbing up the tree to get a better look at things. Isolated facts mean nothing, usually, but from a bird’s eye view you can see a lot more.

I realize that when one starts poking around in the past, there’s always the potential of discovering something new – or even – secret. This very thing happened to writer Dani Shapiro after unceremoniously sending away for a DNA test when her husband suggested they take advantage of a BOGO offer. Shapiro thought she knew everything about her family – heck, she even wrote a memoir about her father and had done tons of family research. But then lo and behold, the results returned via email one day and left her completely discombobulated: her story was not what she thought it was and she had the DNA to prove it. She tells that story in her book Inheritance. Since then, she has created a podcast called Family Secrets, where many MANY other people divulge their secrets, also revealed by DNA tests, or by some other fate that led them to question their own status quo.

So, a couple of months ago, I sent away my own DNA sample. It’s as simple as spitting in a tube – and paying a “nominal” fee. I really wasn’t expecting any book deals out of my results and, sure enough, I had paid to find out that I know – as Ken Jeong of The Masked Singer would put it – EXACTLY WHO I AM. No surprises, no secrets. In fact, the results pinpointed the two exact origins of both my father’s and my mother’s families in Poland and Ukraine respectively.

The particular genealogy sites I perused this past year had very little to offer me, first because only a couple other distant family members have surrendered their DNA – at least to those particular sites – so there’s no benefit to be gained from cross referencing. Secondly, since I don’t speak or read the languages very well, I can’t glean any info from the historical records from that part of the world. (That being said, I haven’t tried very hard yet, either.)

What I do have is geography – which actually determines a lot. I mean if my ancestors had not both moved to Canada – Alberta-Derwent (or thereabouts), my parents would never have met and – well, you can follow the bouncing ball. In the “old country” they would have lived about 4 hours apart – in today’s standards of car and highway – and probably would never have traversed either the geographical or cultural boundaries at the time. Plus – they didn’t have any dating apps, so…yeah.

It’s not only geography that determines what kind of trees can grow, but also what kind of family trees.

About Nerds

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Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about it lately – kind of nerding out about it, really – that my obsession with reading and writing and words and this blog and books and ALL THAT can only be summed up as truly nerdy behavior. So, I admit it – I’m a nerd.

It’s not that bad of an association, really. After all, nerds seem to have unlocked a new level in this video game we call Life. All the usual opposites now apply: nerds are cool, nerds are the best people, nerds are what I want my children to grow up to be. (Hello? Remember: we homeschooled them. They now love to read, play D&D and wear flood pants. Mission complete.)

My first memory of the moniker “nerd” goes back to Happy Days, one of my favorite TV shows of the ’70s. Sure, Fonzie was The Coolest with his leather jacket and ability to snap a jukebox into obedience. But it was red-headed Richie I fell for, both onscreen and in real life. (It’s okay, Rick – deep down, you always knew you were a nerd.) Fonzie figured it out pretty quick, too: nerds make the best friends. They invite you into their families and are as loyal friends as golden retrievers.

And then in 1984, the gauntlet was REALLY thrown down with the movie Revenge of the Nerds. We all went to see it, like it was field research: where did we fit? Were we nerds or were we – what’s the opposite of nerd? – A cool kid? Popular? A jock? Good-looking?

The truth is that most of us fall somewhere in between. While it’s hard to “cross over” in that brouhaha we call high school – like Drew Barrymore’s character in another of my favorite Nerd-Wins-Big movies, Never Been Kissed – graduation lets you leave the crowd behind and find your real tribe: other people who are passionate about things like dressing up their dogs, making sourdough bread from scratch, playing video games (or watching other people play video games), collecting atlases or antiques or just cramming your head with knowledge about (fill in the blank).

As an adult, I myself have been obsessive (or still am) about reading (surprise!), geography (I’ve colored maps to help me memorize where countries are), scrapbooking (I will never be finished), ancient history, Biblical history, future history (Ha! I made that one up!), the cartoon Peanuts, the TV shows House Hunters International and Clean Sweep, art journaling, the Newbery list, the Caldecott list, my TBR list on my computer and many, many authors and podcasts of which I strive to be a completionist. I could probably go on. But then, so could you. AmIright?

All of this qualifies as Nerdy Behavior. One of the cool/nerdy things about the internet is that we no longer have to do our research on TV or at the movies anymore. The World Wide Web can help us make contact with actual people who are obsessive about the same things that we are. Or who are – at the very least -interested/fascinated/approving/admiring of the things that we shielded from the eyes of the cool kids and our older siblings.

One of the best side effects of suffering from Nerdism is that you learn not to care about what is “supposed” to be cool and just to follow your heart. Nerdity gives you the obstinacy to be the human God meant you to be in all your nerd glory. You can even nerd out about sports or fashion or cars – traditionally non-nerd subjects.

To nerd is human. So embrace it – your nerdiness is your gift to the world.

About the Bookshelf in the Basement

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Recently I’ve been thinking about the first library I frequented when I was a kid: namely the bookshelf in the basement of my childhood home. There were books elsewhere in the house but the basement bookshelf held an especially eclectic mix of picture books, assorted novels, discarded textbooks, first free books of several encyclopedia sets and Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. Oh, and some MAD Magazines and maybe some old Chatelaines.

For some strange obsessive reason I’ve tried to recreate the contents of that bookshelf in my head. I certainly read enough of its books over and over again, because “back then” when school closed for the summer, so did the library. If you were lucky (and apparently, healthy), you might be gifted a brand-new book at the end of the school year for perfect attendance, or, maybe for some more scholarly achievement. That’s how Little Women came into my possession. But that book went to live in my room with the others that I could legitimately call MINE.

The first denizen of the shelf I remember was a worn-out copy of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. With an innate desire to be a completionist, it bothered me to no end that there was a Part One to that story “out there” that I would ultimately read out of order. I remember that the cover was ripped off that one and only Suess that we owned, so there was no flyleaf listing the other myriad books that the good Dr. had penned under Suess or Geisel or LeSeig. Those listings in the front of books or the mail-order forms at the end of paperbacks were the only Google I had to inform me back then of what I was missing.

When it came to the Nancy Drews or the Trixie Beldens, (I eschewed The Hardy Boys because: Hello? They were for boys!) the covers were intact along with numbered lists of all the books we didn’t own. Of the Nancies, I remember we had 1, 2, 8, 21, 22, 23, 32 and 43 and of the Trixies, only 1, 5, 9 & 13. Clearly, there were gaps in my chronology of both of these heroines that I fantasized about emulating. Unfortunately, for ten-to-twelve-year-old me, there were no murders or robberies or plots to kill me (that I knew of, even though, I was kind of nosey like Nancy-Trixie) that were readily available for me to solve. Instead I contented myself with reading about their smarts and their tenacity to get in and out of trouble AND save the cat/the day/the whole dang town. There were other incomplete collections on the shelves: those shunned Hardies, The Bobbsey Twins – who were actually two sets of sibling twins – Donna Parker and – for some anthropomorphic fun – a few Thornton W. Burgess books. For some reason, those last ones are the only ones I managed to keep. They live on a shelf in my basement.

I did try to revisit Nancy a year or two ago when the audiobook for The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew #1) read by Laura Linney appeared in the “now available” feed of my library app. Although Linney made it bearable, it was clear that the bloom was off the rose for me. The formulaic fiction reads like a soap-opera for kids, with the beginning of every chapter recapping what just happened one page ago. I was content to return to my adult crime solvers like Cormoran Strike, Robin Ellacott and, my new favorite, Armand Gamache.

I never did read all the books of any of those series. Once I discovered that the library had complete sets, I quickly tired of the repetitive antics of teenaged detectives. There were other great books on our shelf to read and re-read: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Also a series! Did you know?), Clarence the TV Dog (We did own the sequel to that!) and The House at Pooh Corner (also a number two book – I didn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh until I had kids of my own).

It’s nice to know that for some of these books, I CAN go back and read them and they hold up. And for others, like Miss Drew, I can be happy to just revisit her – and our old bookshelf – in my mind.

About Some Picture Books & Their Authors

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P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by [Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, Maria Beddia]

I’m a huge fan of picture books, but I especially love picture books that aren’t necessarily aimed at their usual audience. Or, at the very least, clever books that have plenty of Easter eggs for the older person reading to their teeny tiny audience.

P is for Pterodactyl is the kind of book that a burgeoning reader might throw across the room. But it also might be just the thing for an ESL teacher to read to a graduating class – just to show them that the English language is weird and mean, even to us native speakers. It’s full of all the nonsensical words whose first letter doesn’t make a sound. (Whose idea was that, anyway? And how did it get such traction?)

One of the co-authors of P is for Pterodactyl is Raj Haldar, whose other occupation is: Rapper. a.k.a. Lushlife. Which makes sense, since songwriters are such purveyors of words.

A lot of picture books get written by famous people who aren’t known to be authors, per se. Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada (Jimmy Fallon), Outlaw Pete (Bruce Springsteen) and my favorite, which is sort of an anti-picture book, The Book With No Pictures (B. J. Novak) are all celebrity offerings. But it’s not like these people don’t regularly traffic in the currency of words in their primary professions: songwriters and actors and talk show hosts write stuff all the time.

The latest celebrity/picture book writer to hit my radar? The Edmonton Oiler’s new forward, Zach Hyman, who has penned three picture books now. (And only one of them about hockey.)

Zach Hyman’s latest book.

My favorite part? When I Google him, he shows up as a Canadian author, not a Canadian hockey player. I guess it depends on who’s writing the Wikipedia tags – there is after all, a lot of power in the written (another silent letter!) word.

About Tuesdays with Morrie

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I’m re-reading Tuesdays with Morrie right now. I have a few more pages to go but I feel I can write about it because a) I’ve read it before; and b) anybody can figure out how it ends. So no spoilers here: Morrie dies in the end.

Tuesdays with Morrie is part of my (Death or) Near Death Collection. This book is shelved, if not physically on my bookshelf (because remember I did that color thing with my bookshelves), in my head along with When Breath Becomes Air and The Last Lecture. All three of these books deal with the imminence of death and what we can learn from it.

Death is not really a subject I shy away from. Just yesterday, I went for coffee with an older friend and we talked about how we both aren’t drinking as much coffee anymore but choosing to really enjoy the ones we have left in our lifetime caffeine budget. I fully embrace the concept that Neil Pasricha explores on his 3 Books podcast: we only live for about 1000 months, so let’s read the best 1000 books out there. And my husband and I religiously watch and read murder mysteries together: right now it’s Criminal Minds at supper and Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Series before bed.

It was on this very day that I’m publishing this blog post 37 years ago that I was first confronted with the complete unreasonableness of death when an 18-year old friend – the most popular girl in school with all of her unlived life ahead of her – was killed in a car accident. Everything stopped. Every moment I had had with her, I tried desperately to remember. Every waking moment was pain and fear at the thought of death cutting short such a vibrant living person. I was acutely aware that It Could Have Been Me.

It’s that imminence that Morrie wanted his audience to whom Mitch Albom was writing to keep in mind. Morrie had learned the lesson early – by nature of just being a very thoughtful person – that money and ambition aren’t the things that matter in the end. Although I chuckle at the Joan Rivers’ line, “People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made,” – I suspect that Morrie is the one who is right and that even Joan knew it, too. Everyone knows that money can buy you a nice car, a big house and a lot of pizza, but in the end, Morrie could no longer drive, he lived in his wheelchair and he could no longer eat solid food. It’s not a great advertisement for a book, but the gold is there, demonstrated firsthand between the author Mitch and his old professor, Morrie, who meet on Tuesdays so Morrie could teach his last class. His thesis? That the real riches in life is relationship, for however long that might be. And Morrie lived that way, long before Life had sent him an eviction notice.

Don’t wait till you’re old to stop caring about the things that don’t matter and to start caring about the things that do.