This morning while munching a sliced green Granny apple and sipping a strong black java, the clever people at Apple Music lured me into a selection under their Listen Now category called New Music Mix. I am listening to it now, piped into my Bose Micro SoundLink to which my MacBook Pro is connected by Bluetooth. What a marvellous abbreviation of domestic technology!  Often I proclaim to anyone in sight that Apple Music is one of the best things to happen! Before Apple Music I confined my musical research to retail music stores which displayed their CDs in the manner of files in a cabinet through which one sorted by flipping plastic covers.

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For reasons immaterial I’ve lately had occasion to read “bios”, those short biographical profiles normally written by oneself or one’s agent or publicist for predominantly commercial purposes. The bumf contained in the bios is invariably complimentary; and, as a result, the substance is somewhat suspicious or sufficiently attenuated as to be both uninventive and in some measure questionable. Especially when one knows the person about whom the bio is written, there is often a frigid disparity between that personal acquaintance and what one reads. It isn’t so much that there are incongruities but rather critical gaps.  What it is that expresses a person’s particular characteristics is seldom reflected in these so-called life stories of limitless triumph. It causes me to doubt or to diminish the profitability of the production.

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We regularly quip, as I did by email this Friday morning with my longstanding friend Fiona St Clair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that we’re having to endure another day of unbridled climatic flawlessness on Key Largo.  The magnificence of the azure sky has blended with an uncommonly arid and cool northerly wind of 31Km/hr. It has made for an exceptionally reinvigorating atmosphere throughout the island.

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Joe Walsh, Commissioner of the Greater Northeast Athletic Conference, is from Boston. He and his wife Deb are longtime winter residents of Buttonwood Bay Club. They reside for the season in a townhouse here in Key Largo immediately next to our own. We both happened to be at the central pool this morning. Joe approached me, in his inimitable way with clipboard in hand and the indisputable air of an estate agent, to enquire whether I approved of Buttonwood Bay Club (by which I interpreted he meant Key Largo as well).  I replied succinctly that we had already contracted with the owner’s agent to return next year.  Joe’s casual enquiry revived a number of personal recollections about the Florida Keys in particular and the State of Florida in general.

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It must be another sign of my unobstructed curmudgeonly decomposition that almost everyone whom I meet these days comes across to me as moderately odd. I say this with sizeable reservation for several reasons. I realize the assessment appears to sanction my own behaviour as less peculiar (which I am quite certain without investigation is not true). I acknowledge too that my upbringing from boarding school at St. Andrew’s College to law school at Dalhousie University was not without its perplexing flavours. And being a country lawyer in a small town of rural Ontario is not traditionally adjudged to be without character or distinctiveness.

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The events of life can be precipitous. In 2007 at 59 years of age I had sudden open heart surgery which sidelined me from my law practice for three months. Ten years later at Daytona Beach Shores I suffered a serious fall from my bicycle (my heart stopped) which kept me at Halifax hospital for almost a month.  My next casualty may not be so lucky.

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The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider’s or “etic” category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or “emic” performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.

Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, respectively, where phonemics effectively regard elements of meaning and phonetics regard elements of sound. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic-etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity.

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The reminiscence of our home territory in the Town of Mississippi Mills in the County of Lanark and Province of Ontario is neither doleful nor saccharin. But until today it most certainly hasn’t been either regular or frequent. We moved our principal residence in Almonte on the morning of Wednesday, November 2nd last to a new apartment across town then immediately left for Key Largo, Florida where we are now secluded until the remainder of the winter. As you might imagine our personal possessions were jettisoned into the new apartment and effectively abandoned in their crates unopened. There is a good deal to do upon our return home at the end of April.

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With the remedial light of day it is strangely unmanageable to recall the focus of last evening’s disagreement – as heated and intuitive as it was at the time. Indeed so sparse are the intricacies of the erstwhile disharmony that I am equally embarrassed by the scope of the row as by my failure to recollect either its particulars or its condition precedent.

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As I lounged by the pool today, feeling the potency of the blazing white sun, I was overcome by the compulsion to report to the sea for duty. It had been since late last November or perhaps early December since I had swum in the sea. I was noticeably feeling the want of salt sea water and the memory of its singular buoyancy. The declining ambient temperature has temporarily estranged me from the sea though in the interim I have regularly contrived the scope of my return. Already the daily temperature has begun to climb. The high today was 74°F; and without any wind it felt warmer.  I am counting upon the sun to warm the sea to its historic tepidness.

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