Residing – or rather should I say, to avoid the appearance of contravening USA immigration laws – vacationing as we do for about half the year in Florida, we do not normally confine our conversation to either the Arctic or Antarctic regions of the globe. However the improbable alliance of both Florida and the polar regions recently arose during casual communication with my erstwhile physician.
As I floated on my back, face upwards on the turquoise sea this afternoon, squinting into the blazing yellow sunshine, breathing discriminately through my nose to avoid salt water being pushed into the corners of my mouth by the small waves thrust upon me by the sea breeze, I thought to myself, “I am on Key Largo!” This after six months was my thankful and unassailable abstraction. We made it! It is affirmed. And now I can return home with a crown upon my head.
It is inescapable especially to the Christian observer that the arrival of Spring is about more than the awakening of the seeds in the ground. It is also about rekindling the fires of religion within one’s mind, or should I say within one’s heart. The debate about the intuition or rationality of religion is never ending, all the more so at a time when it is fashionable to blame religion for all the world’s problems. To an increasingly educated society it is considered lower class (perhaps enshrined by Karl Marx’ conjunction of religion and the masses) to adopt traditional religious models. Moreover as the world’s religions are thrown progressively into the face of one another, it seems just plain unfair to suggest that one man’s god is better than another and thus to reject them all. However as someone who has had a blocked heart and lived to tell the tale, I am not as clear about the rejection of some of the possibilities of religion. I don’t for a minute suggest that my survival was a religious experience (it was purely medical), but it reminds me of the importance of matters of the heart and the free flow of the cardiovascular system. Sometimes one’s heart can be blocked by more than material matter.
The adage “Money doesn’t disappear, it just changes hands” hardly passes for scholarly economic theory. It nonetheless captures the universal truths of perpetuity and transformation. All my life has been misspent attempting to secure the sometimes harried edges of existence to impart the appearance of stability and control. Yet in spite of my best efforts I keep hurtling towards new realities, apparently in the throes of swapping today’s provincialism for tomorrow’s unknown. Granted there is some design in the process though I cannot for a moment pretend to see the future. Whatever the ambition or prediction, things change.
You can’t make this stuff up!
What could be more unimaginable than being born at St. James Palace, London and popularized as a little bastard then ending up living at Louis XIV’s Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye where Louis XIV was born in 1638 and lived until 1682 when he removed to Versailles. And putatively the singularity all turned on whether one were Catholic or Protestant (though I have no doubt the underlying financial scheme was far less unimaginable).
The word “legal” conveys a sense of precision and imperative in addition to the domestic purport of “official” as is a “legal document” or “make it legal”. Whatever the usage legality implies a system of rules governing human conduct. Some of our laws are expressions of common sense like those pertaining to driving. But in the event of mistake or misunderstanding, there developed a batch of laws called “equity” or what former kings of England ascribed to the pronouncements dispensed in the court of chancery. Equity had a distinctly ecclesiastical flavour and effectively overrode those laws which for some reason or by some previously unanticipated quirk of circumstance made it seem “unfair” to apply the so-called “strict letter of the law”. Hence the characteristic mystical or churchly theme. The common law was a set of precedents which established the expected habit of enforcement after repeated consideration of similar facts. Statutory law was a “codification” of laws which overcame precedent and was intended to reduce variation to a minimum. And if all that were not enough, many countries (but not England surprisingly) created Constitutions which were so broadly worded as to cover almost any eventuality yet insinuate the whole with what were perceived by the legislators to be ideal motives of governance.
It isn’t often I encounter someone whom I instantly recognize as a gentleman. But when the occasion occurs it is distinctive and potently manifest. It is a compliment which borders on faultlessness (though I fully suspect that beneath the veneer there may exist tolerable imperfection). These polished beings are nonetheless members of the human race and are thus adorned with the inevitable imperatives of its rudimentary animal nature. Yet the consummate gentleman preserves an identifiable superlative which pleasingly sets him apart from others.
We leave Key Largo on Sunday morning, April 23rd. Today is the middle of the month and our townhouse rental contract ends April 30th. The moment feels providential. This morning we plan to do critical grocery shopping, collecting mostly prepared foods so that we can gauge our consumption more accurately for the remaining 7 days. Perhaps there is on the agenda one last pasta dish with sautéed mushrooms, thin slices of filet mignon, green peas and whipping cream. I’ll also fill the car’s gas tank. We’ll use only a drop of fuel in the coming week so we’ll be prepared to go. Our first stop after leaving here is the beloved St. Augustine, Florida where we’ve visited before. It will be our final gander at the North Atlantic Ocean before heading inland. And of course the singular hamburger and fish joint (Obi’s Fillin’ Station) across the road from the hotel!
Surely refinement is the product and objective of aging. The recasting transpires both unwittingly and by design (though the latter is at times disguised by the insinuation of curmudgeonly fussiness). There is as well an accompanying simplicity. And as nose-in-the-air as it may sound, the goal is clarity and classicism.
An Ontario summer is magical! Sitting on the patio at the golf club overlooking the Mississippi River renders an ineffable picture to the mind’s eye! Already we are contemplating our return to Canada from our treasured Key Largo where almost every day for the past six months has been blue sky, dazzling sunshine and turquoise sea. Yet as mellowing as it has been we haven’t lost our shameless appetite for cooler air and the riparian atmosphere of the meandering waterway which dignifies and characterizes so many elements of our historic rural town and surrounding hamlets.