Posted on September 6, 2023 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with 2 comments

Crisper… or soggier?

 

“When the winter rains come pourin’ down,

On that new home of mine,

Will you think of me and wonder if I’m fine.

Will your restless heart come back to mine,

On a journey through the past,

Will I still be in your eyes and on your mind.”

Journey Through the Past – Neil Young

I was humming this old Neil Young the other day while staring at my fridge. “Oh my, Len. The years are getting on and your behaviour is quite alarming.” A friend of mine had messaged me to tell me that her number one chore that day was to clean her fridge. I wondered to myself when was the last time I had tackled this most unsavory of tasks. Unlike an oil change, when the mechanic puts a convenient reminder on the inside of your windshield of your next oil change, a person has no way of remembering exactly when they last cleaned their fridge.

Although, there are reminders.

When, exactly, does a person get the impetus to clean their fridge? Very often, a look in the crisper to observe the soggy, smelly, mortal remains of a head of lettuce is one of the triggers. A lonely grape, once hanging beautifully on the vine, is reduced to an almost unrecognizable prune.

It has been raining for three days straight, the start of your vacation. You have already read 350 pages of War and Peace. You have watched 10 episodes of Gray’s Anatomy followed by another dozen of Outlander. You have consumed an 8-pack of Orville Redenbacher’s heavily buttered microwave popcorn and made a serious dent in a 4-litre box of Cabernet Sauvignon. Equal measures of ennui and disgust have set in.

In a lapse of judgment, you decide that cleaning the fridge is just one step up from cleaning the cat’s litter box.

“Shall I start with the fridge proper or the freezer”? It takes a couple of 10-ounce glasses of red to decide which is more soul destroying. It eventually comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils. “The freezer, it will be.”

When was the last time that you took a deep dive into your fridge’s freezer? It is a remarkable and terrifying prospect. You start by removing everything and putting the contents on the counter. A nearby dumpster or compost heap might be a better option. At the very back, in the deepest recesses of this icy cavern, you discover a package. It has so much freezer burn on it that you can’t decide if it’s fish, fowl, or dinosaur bones. It might even be that piece of an iceberg that a fisherman gave you when you went whale watching off the coast of Newfoundland. It strikes you that this may be the opportune time to reveal its contents.

For a moment it looks like someone has mistakenly thrown an abacus in your freezer. There are small, colorful orbs which you immediately recognize as pieces of frozen corn, green peas, and blueberries. You scoop them up wondering if there is a new game you can invent. Cooking them crosses your mind.

Next up is the crisper. According to Dr.Google a crisper “is a bin in your fridge that helps preserve and may prolong the lifespan of your fruits and vegetables.” The key words in this definition are “may prolong”. This assumes that an intelligent form of life routinely visits said bin to check out its contents. You decide that, upon careful inspection, it is best that you tackle the crisper with rubber gloves or surgical gloves. Throw in an N-95 mask for good measure. There is no way to describe stocks of celery which have been neglected for weeks or longer. Ditto for tomatoes and green peppers. It’s amazing that you are even able to determine what these were in their past life. Pouring your “fresh vegetables” into a compost bucket is a sure sign that this crisper has not preserved or prolonged the lives of these unfortunate vegetables.

Your other crisper contains fruit. The apples look like discards from the Garden of Eden. And so on and so forth.

The fridge proper is the last frontier. You are reasonably sure that the contents of the assorted bottles and jars near the front of the fridge won’t kill you, if consumed. The back of the fridge is where the fun starts. After a successful summer of other people growing things, you are eventually gifted jars of mustard pickles or jams and preserves. Thankfully, those generous people that lovingly tilled the soil, had the wisdom to put dates on the lids. 2021; 2019, 2014, 2009. There are many other bottles in your fridge that are well past their due date. That bottle of fish sauce that you bought during your experimental cooking days has the likelihood of causing gastric illness as you gaze at the fungus under the cover which you have removed with an adjustable wrench.

You’re getting near the end. All that is left are the glass shelves. Under normal (?) circumstances, a homeowner wipes the glass shelves when something spills, like blood from a package of meat or the time the maple syrup jug tipped over. But you have procrastinated and over time, there is a buildup of unspecified gunk welded to its surface.  Normally a good dunking in hot, soapy water will do the trick but upon examination, you might need an industrial sandblaster.

At last, you are finished and are filled with equal amounts of disgust and feelings of accomplishment. You vow that you will never let this happen again.

What hasn’t been discarded is put back into an immaculate fridge.

You reward yourself with a nice cup of tea and a slice of homemade bread with blueberry preserves. Returning the milk to the fridge, a bit of it spills on the glass shelf along with a tiny dollop of the preserves. You close the fridge.

Later that night, in the middle of a blissful sleep, you awake in horror. You sit bolt upright and then run to the fridge. A warm, wet cloth tidies up the mess you left hours earlier.

Getting back to sleep is not easy. Instead of counting sheep, your new mantra emerges.

“I will keep my fridge clean. I will keep my fridge clean.”

Have a great weekend.

 

 

 

 

Posted on August 30, 2023 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

 

Pondering my next story

 

“I will remember you,

Will you remember me,

Don’t let your life pass you by,

Weep not for the memories.”

I Will Remember You – Sarah McLachlan

 

Why do I write?

Looking back on my life, I guess I’ve always been a writer, even though I never thought much about it. Most of us took our first rudimentary steps towards literacy when we learned our ABC’s and penned simple three-word sentences.“See Dick run.” We learned cursive writing. I curse often when I write. My recent experiences back in the classroom have told me that cursive writing is nearly extinct.

In high school and university, we had to write a lot of essays. One of the most memorable that I can remember was when I was taking my education degree. As a future English teacher, we were asked by our English methods professor to pen a piece so that he could assess the talent in the room. He was a severe task master and obviously didn’t think there was much star material in his presence. He eviscerated my masterpiece giving me a failing grade. I wasn’t alone. He humiliated several fellow classmates, bringing a few of them to tears. It was an important lesson for me, and it had nothing to do with writing. I promised myself that I would never humiliate a student.

When I attended university, I took part in many extracurricular activities like intramural sports, learning how to play bridge in the basement of the library (when I was supposed to be in class), and going to pubs. I was also the sports editor for the student newspaper, The Xaverian Weekly. I had almost forgotten about this until a few weeks ago when I was asked by the Alumni office to look through the 1973 yearbook to identify some photos for our upcoming Golden Grad. I was amused to see that I received a “Literary X”. Reporting sports scores wasn’t likely to get me a Pulitzer Prize.

I can’t remember when I started journalling, but I believe it coincided with the birth of my children. My filing cabinet is filled with all kinds of memorabilia, which in due course will likely find its way to the local landfill, but I’m hoping that my children will save the copious, hand written journals. Two in particular stand out. Five years apart in the late 80s and early 90s, I wrote a daily journal, chronicling the lives of my family and my community. It’s pretty mundane stuff but life is ostensibly mundane, don’t you think? I think that this is where I learned the discipline of writing because every morning, between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., I was at the kitchen table, recounting the events of the previous day. These days, remembering what I did a couple of hours ago can be challenging.

In 2012, on a trip to Florida, I wrote a funny (and a tad sarcastic) piece on the back of my 8.5×11 boarding pass. When I ran out of space, I wrote the ending on a bar napkin. During happy hour at our time share later that day, I read the story out loud. My friends loved it, but I think that alcohol and appetizers may have clouded their judgment. That is when I began writing regularly and discovered that I had a passion for it. Subsequently, I ended up writing a humour column for three newspapers. If I thought that I might scratch out a living as a freelance writer in retirement, that was quickly quashed when I cashed my first few cheques.

And then I wrote and published 7 books.

I am reading a book. It’s called The Library Book by Susan Orlean. The book is about libraries, hardly a page turner, but I must admit that I am learning a lot about the underbelly of libraries. They are much more than a place to warehouse books. When I arrived at page 93, I came upon a paragraph that summed up nicely why the written word is still important. Rather than write a precis (I remember writing these for KM in grade 11), I am publishing it here in its entirety.

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear that not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten – that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are part of a larger story that has shape and purpose – a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

I am not suggesting that everyone writes a book. However, you could go and grab a Hilroy and start jotting down memories – while you are still able. And do it with cursive writing! A Hilroy is virtually indestructible. A Word document on your computer is no substitute. Your children, grandchildren and those who follow, will be very happy and grateful that you did. I can see you muttering, telling me that you wouldn’t have anything interesting to say. Agreed, the whole world won’t be remotely interested in the minutia of your life, but your loved ones will. I guarantee it.

My brother is the family’s genealogist. For well over a quarter of a century, he has painstakingly documented the lives of our forefathers (mothers!). Finding old family records is not for the faint of heart. I would have loved to have read stories and anecdotes written by my ancestors. Don’t you often wonder what your great, great grandparents were like?

Why do I write? Am I afraid of being forgotten, just a handful of dust in the wind? Not in the least. Someday, I hope one of my great grandchildren will be poring over my journals or books to understand why they love the outdoors, music and are obsessed with sports.

I write because I can.

And I love it.

Have a great weekend.

 

Posted on August 23, 2023 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with one comment

Procratinating. Will I or won’t I?

 

Procrastination: the action of delaying or postponing something.

“He who hesitates is lost.” Joseph Addison

I was thinking about writing a piece about procrastination, but I think I’ll wait until next week.

Therin lies the problem with procrastination. It is so much easier to put things off instead of just taking action and “getting ‘er done.”

The list is very long:

I’m going to clean out the freezer.

I’m going to organize the garage.

I’m going to travel to (name your country) before I’m too old.

I’m going to get my act together and lose some weight.

I’m going to quit smoking.

When a person is young, they can afford to put things off. I was a financial planner and very often I heard clients say that they would start saving for retirement after the kids left home or after taking a big trip. And very often, that didn’t happen.

“Time is on myside, yes it is,

Time is on my side, yes it is.”

Time is on my side – The Rolling Stones

Except when it isn’t.

There’s no procrastinating when you have a vicious toothache. It needs attention and you will stand outside a dentist’s home at 1:00 in the morning, banging on his door, to get some relief.

There’s no procrastination when you’re on a road trip and your gas gauge is on empty.

Urgency requires action.

The flip side of procrastination is impulsiveness- acting without forethought.

I often look back on my life and wonder if I have been impulsive. Certainly, there are things that, in retrospect, could have been done more judiciously. We can all say that. Every one of us has made a purchase that we regretted 30 minutes later. Or said something in the heat of battle that left scars. We’re human after all.

Being impulsive can get you into a heap of trouble. On the other hand, being decisive can reap big rewards.

Decisive: having or showing the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively.

It’s much more difficult to be decisive when you are younger and haven’t accumulated enough mileage, knowledge, or scar tissue. Experience gives a person confidence and as we get older, we are much better positioned to size things up quickly and to take action. Sadly, some people never reach this level of self-actualization and spend their entire lives second guessing and putting things off until conditions are ideal. This just in. Conditions are never ideal.

I often say that I am lucky. I refer to it as the “accident of birth”. My mother was fearless and decisive. She never waited until all the stars were aligned properly. She dove in headfirst, never being afraid to try new things. I think I inherited some of that Irish DNA! Agreed, when you dive in headfirst, without checking the depth of the water, you can get a nasty bump on your head but that’s all part of the learning curve of which I spoke about earlier.

I’m now 72. I don’t have time to procrastinate any more. At this age, what in the hell are we waiting for?

Saw this the other day on Facebook.

“Choice. Chance. Change.

You must make the choice,

to take the chance

if you want anything,

In life to change.”

Author unknown

If not now, when?

Have a great weekend.