Posted on August 26, 2013 under Monday Morning Musings with 2 comments

Ah, life’s simple pleasures! We went on a very long hike over the weekend with our granddaughter at Beaver Mountain Park. This is another treasure that we have right in our back yard. If you haven’t been there , you should check it out. It is glorious in the summer and if you like cross country skiing, it is a treasure in the winter too. There are a few brooks that run through the park… a great place to play Pooh sticks. You don’t know how to play Pooh sticks ? Each player drops a stick on the upstream side of a bridge and the one whose stick first appears on the downstream side is the winner. There is an International Pooh Sticks championship held annually on the Thames River in England. I am not lying.

Tickets are now on sale for our big fundraiser coming up on September 26th. If you are reading this on my website, just click on the picture of me and Phil and you will find all the information about the event. People not reading this on my website, please go to www.week45.com. If you want to receive my stories regularly, just hit the “follow” button in the blackened area on the right of the home page. And speaking of my stories, I know a lot of people read them and occasionally I get comments. If you like a story and don’t have time to comment, please hit the” like” button.

The Eastern Nova Scotia Exhibition is just days away so I thought it only “fair” that I pen a story about this iconic institution. It is called “Fall Fare”. I don’t know if you have been following the story out of Ontario about the outbreak of food poisoning at their big exhibition, specifically the gourmet food “cronuts”. This is what got me thinking about our own Fall Fair and some of the delectable food served up every year. Can you say “cotton candy”? This story will also be appearing in next  week’s Casket.

And before you know it, school will be back in session. The population of our town will swell as more than 4,000 students from all over the world  start another academic year at St.F.X. I wrote a story a while ago while walking to work when the university was in session last Spring. It is called “Putting the Ant in Antigonish”. I noticed a long line of students walking down both sides of Hawthorne Street en route to campus. It did look like a colony of ants.

By the way, who votes this as “the best summer ever”? We have been blessed with amazing weather and by the looks of it, everyone took advantage of it.

Have a great weekend and I’m sure you know that next weekend is a holiday weekend. Woo hoo!!!

Posted on August 24, 2013 under Storytelling with 9 comments

I have watched, with deep admiration, couples who have stayed married for a long time.  I have not done a conclusive study on the subject but it is apparent that there are themes that surface every time you talk to a couple who has spent the better part of their lives together.

It all starts with respect for each other, and… the toilet seat.  I once asked a couple, well into their nineties, the secret of their longevity.  The husband looked at me with a wry smile and said, “sixty years of me lifting up the toilet seat up and sixty years of my wife putting it back down.”  Very often the first question put to a man in a troubled marriage by a counsellor is, “do you faithfully put the toilet seat down after you use it?”  Sharing the domestic work load is also essential, as is discussing finances and resolving arguments quickly.  A wise person once said, “Never go to bed angry.”  There are hundreds of other things that go into a healthy marriage.

But the absolute keys to surviving marriage, if you are a man, are twofold: (1) learn how to say yes. Immediately after you utter the words “I do” at the altar, repeatedly hum the chorus to the Abba tune; “I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.”  Say yes, even when questions bear no resemblance to reality.  “Aren’t the neighbors’ three small children just sweet?”  You mean the ones that trampled the garden, peed on the side of the shed, screamed, fought and cried while their mother read Cosmopolitan magazine?  Yeah, I’m really glad we moved next door and, yes dear, they are sweet.

“Would you like to go to the hospital ladies auxiliary craft and bake sale?  ”Oh, of course sweetheart, I would much rather go spend two hours in hell than watch the double header on television”.  So guys, take it from me.  It saves time, energy, frustration and oxygen to just get in the habit of saying yes.

(2) The second key to a successful marriage is to realize that a man is never right.  You’ve heard the old expression “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. Have you heard the one “Two rights don’t make a right”?  If you are a man and your wife has an opposing view, it matters not that the empirical evidence is stacked heavily in your favour.  Ted Williams was the greatest hitter in the history of baseball.  I would be interested to know his batting average at home.

Have you ever been in a competition against your wife?  Don’t do it. The only thing worse than competing against your wife, whether it is a foot race or playing a “death to the finish” Scrabble game, is being on the same team.  We try to avoid competitions because there’s always a winner and a loser.  And remember, even if the man wins, he loses.  The fallout from a loss makes New York City after Hurricane Sandy look like the botanical gardens.

Just the other day, I was minding my business while on vacation, when someone suggested that a group of us go to a neighborhood pub for trivia night.  It wasn’t my wife who asked me to go so I knew I had at least two options going for me.  I had no intention of going to trivia. I actually like trivia but it doesn’t get started until 9:30 P.M. I am an early morning guy.  On this particular day, I was feeling somewhat bagged after a late night and a round of golf with my son in the hot sun earlier in the day.

My first response of no was not taken lightly or seriously by a small cabal of women sitting around the pool deck.  Men are used to being brow beaten. In retrospect, I should have just said yes and then snuck off to bed.  I made several mistakes in strategy.  I remained outdoors to watch the sun set along with the others.  The intensity and frequency of the attacks on my manhood (I believe that the word” wimp” was uttered more than once) increased exponentially.  Initially they tried to appeal to my intellect by actually suggesting that I had an intellect.  Women don’t do this readily and I immediately suspected that these pleas of participation were alcohol induced.  I think one of them even suggested that I was cute.  I now knew that I was dealing with a very dangerous enemy.

It was my turn to cook supper and I was asked to barbeque.  In order to get to the barbeque pit I had to pass by the pool.  It was dark by now and I tried to make my way inconspicuously but women on a mission have magical night vision.  I tried to avoid them as I would an army of red ants but soon after lovingly placing two New York strip loins on the grill, the second wave of assault was unleashed.  I was no longer cute or smart.  I was a lout and a deadbeat.

I soldiered on but eventually I caved in.  To their credit they wore me down and by 9:00 I was sitting at the pub with a stack of small pieces of paper.  You see, because I don’t drink, I was appointed the “runner”.  Years of marathon training had qualified me for this position of esteem.  Once our team had agreed on an answer, I was to write it down on paper and deliver it to the trivia master of ceremonies.

By the luck (?) of the draw, I ended up on the same team as my wife and the game began.  The first question of the night was about Greek Mythology: “Name the creature that was half man and half horse”.  Three people, including me, blurted out “Minotaur”.  Astonishing!  Consensus reached in seconds.  I looked to the end of the table and saw the troubled look on my wife’s face.  At first I thought she was having a reaction to the tequila in her Margarita. But, no, it wasn’t that look.  I know this look – the one that says, she’s right and I’m wrong.  “I think that it’s Centaur,” she said.  Certain that she was wrong, I lead the charge to overrule her and minutes later I deposited the answer to the quiz master.

A short time later, the quiz master bellowed through the microphone that all but one team got the correct answer.  A smug smile appeared on my face until I realized that Minotaur doesn’t start with the letter “c”.  My wife was right and for the remainder of the night, I simply counted the stars above and agreed with everything she said.

Posted on August 22, 2013 under Storytelling with 3 comments

I was recently speaking to a friend whose daughter was just learning how to drive.  Is there anything more nerve wracking than envisaging a teenager getting behind the wheel of a vehicle weighing a few tons?  And that’s only half of the worry.  Coming up with the equivalent of a mortgage payment to insure a new driver is yet another reminder of the costs of raising children… or the benefits of staying single.

Most of us learn how to drive at an early age, starting with a tricycle and then moving up to a bike with training wheels.  There have been many times over the years that I wish we had never let our children out of the jolly jumper.  Most people of a certain age learned to drive the old fashioned way.  When our economy was more agricultural based, kids on the farm learned by doing.  They were driving farm equipment from the time they could walk.  They might occasionally run over a chicken but the general public was not at risk.

Townies learned differently – usually at their father’s knee or more likely on father’s lap.  It was not uncommon on our street to see a youngster perched in front of Dad manhandling a gigantic steering wheel.  Graduated driver licensing was not even a twinkle in government’s eye back then.   And, of course, seatbelts weren’t even invented so there was little worry about mundane things like safety.

My own driving career started when I was around fourteen.  I was the stick boy for a local senior hockey team and travelled the province with the team.  One stormy winter’s night, on the way back from a game in a town two hours away, I found myself in an unenviable situation.  All of the players were intoxicated, especially the driver.  About a half an hour from home, he announced that he was too drunk to drive and pulled over to the shoulder.  He handed me the keys. “You’re driving or we’re spending the night right here.”  There were no other voices of reason as beer bottles clinked in the back seat.  I pondered my dilemma and the words to the poem “Horatius at the Bridge” leapt into my head. “… and how can men die better than facing fearful odds…”   The odds were quite good that I would freeze my ass off if I didn’t take up the challenge.

I got into the driver’s seat and propped myself up by putting two sweaty hockey gloves under my rear. The former driver issued a caution. “She’s pretty peppy.  Go easy on the gas.”  Pretty peppy, eh?   The car was a recently retired Mountie car with about an 8,000 horsepower motor.  Carefully putting the car in drive, I gently depressed the gas pedal and the throaty roar almost bounced me from my perch.  I managed to make it home safely and refused to get behind the wheel of any vehicle for several years afterward.

Eventually I got my license in my early twenties.  I had two driving instructors who used decidedly different techniques to prepare me for the test.  The first one was a relative and the day of my very first lesson we stopped at the liquor store before heading out to the back roads.  In those days you could buy a case of quarts of beer (the good old days!), six to a box, for about the same price as a handful of Joe Louis’s and cokes.  At first I thought, “How odd to have beer in the car for a driving lesson” until I realized that the beer was an essential prop.  He drove well out into the back woods, out of harm’s way, save for the forest animals.  He popped the tops off of two quarts of beer.  I protested on two grounds: that the beer was too warm to drink (this was long before you could get cold beer in the liquor store) and that learning how to drive while drinking seemed somewhat incongruous and unconventional.  Well that discussion lasted all of ten seconds and moments later, I was behind the wheel with a quart of warm Alpine beer between my knees.  Sometime into the third quart we hit a rough patch.  Somehow I had managed to get too close to the well gravelled shoulder and, just like that, the car was in a full blown tail spin.  My instructor barely noticed and showed no alarm. “Take your foot off the gas,” and that’s all it took to solve the problem.  I learned a few lessons that day.  One is to take your foot off the gas pedal during a spin and the other is, don’t drink warm beer.  It is not good for your digestion.

The second lesson was in a large city on Canada’s West Coast.  I had recently purchased a used VW Beetle, standard shift, in anticipation of getting my license.  Quite simply put, my instructor, a close personal friend was (how do I put this delicately) , certifiably insane.  Getting the hang of a standard shift is problematic enough without other distractions.  To wit.  We started our very first lesson at rush hour, in rush hour traffic.  None of this wimpy driving around a mall parking lot on a Sunday morning.  No, it was baptism by fire!  My first feeble attempts, just trying to get out of my driveway, were comedic with the car shunting and lurching a few yards at a time and the gears grinding.  Gradually I got the hang of it and I felt a degree of satisfaction as we wheeled into lanes of heavy traffic.

I was doing just fine until I felt something akin to a vise grab my crotch.  It was my friend and he had this demonic look in his eyes.  “You never know when the driving examiner might grab you by the nuts’”, he said.  Two other strategies, covering my eyes with his hands while I was driving at 60 mph on the highway and jerking the steering wheel from me shortly afterward certainly got my attention.  Defensive driving took on a whole new meaning.  How could I fail the driving test after this experience?

My own children all learned to drive and all but one took drivers education – a gentler and more sensible way to learn… and infinitely easier on the parents.  We were living in a rural neighborhood when our three daughters started dating, before they had their licenses.  It was ironic that all of the boyfriends lived at the far reaches of the county.  It was nothing to get a call at 11 PM to pick up one of the girls and have to drive the better part of an hour in each direction to get them home.  Or, to drive a boyfriend back to his house.  By the time they all had their licenses, we had moved back to town.

And now we find ourselves at the other end of the spectrum.  Always a two car family, we recently sold one of them in an effort to downsize and reduce our carbon footprint (and our car insurance bill).  We now share one small, modest vehicle.  Our next purchase will be a tandem bike.  Hopefully we won’t need to take a driver’s test.