The first of the month, the second of the year, 2026. I purposively iterate the year lest I mistake it for another. Reanimation after exhaustion of the new year’s rigours. Our drive home south of the city was along the old highway through tiny farming communities. Muffled in our cabin, listening to Beegie Adair, The Mantovani Orchestra and Baroque music, streaming along dry roads, passing endlessly white fields glistening in the slanted blue mid-afternoon sunshine.
For the past decade and a half I have avoided reflective surfaces. We previously had a full-length mirror in which I routinely glanced at my overall appearance from top to bottom, particularly when wearing a suit in preparation for an outing to the office. But when we sold the office building and the law practice, then precipitously sold the house and suddenly had no place to live – forcing us immediately to downsize to an apartment and get rid of tons of stuff, my regard of the corpus withered to a square look at whatever confronted me in the bureau mirror from just below the chin to the top of my thinning silver hair. In retrospect it was Nature’s evolutionary way of affording a digestible and less superfluous image of self without the added gall of the declining – and expanding – fuselage.
Finding what you’re looking for has never been easy. The technical revolution of on-line shopping has not in my opinion made it easier. Oh, yes, easier to spend your money; but, not easier to get what you want. And what makes it an even greater contest is that shopping in the ordinary way of going from one store to another hasn’t really got any easier either. The point is: shopping is a task, a real chore, a piece of business. You may think you can circumnavigate the exercise, but you cannot. Shopping will forever remain a burden. Though having said that, if one were lucky enough to have a successful shopping outing, then, Okay, you may convince yourself it hasn’t been an effort. But it was work, you’ll have to admit, balancing calculation and enquiry. When it is over, there will be relief at the end of the day – whatever the outcome.
Today we received welcome news from our dear friend Bunny on the east coast of South Africa in Simon’s Town. I marvel at the brilliance of such exotic travel! The venture to the area illustrates one-quarter of her life. The memories – both good and bad – stimulated by this compelling recall are no doubt unsurpassable. I suspect much has changed no matter where one goes, but the antiquity of Simon’s Town likely preserves much of what has always been there.
There are good and bad knots. The good knots secure your shoes upon your feet; or, straighten a silk about your neck. The bad knots are the events which obstruct a purpose. Very often the bad knots are merely the uncomfortable consequence of living. No matter how the knots are portrayed, tying them up is an alleviation.
For some reason whenever things go particularly well in my life, I find myself thanking a mysterious creation of my mind, sometimes called Lord, sometimes God. If it were imperative to have a specific religion associated with the nouns of address, it is Christian because of my adolescent indoctrination. Otherwise my reference is oblique at best; it could as easily have been a Star Wars reference to a Hollywood fiction, just something distant and beneficent to which attribute thanks. I simply felt the need to render thanks – beyond an implausible gratitude to fortuity or myself though I often conjoined my parents in the same breath (but always subordinately to the principal or primary recipient – the Unknown).
Hughie Whitten – sadly no longer whinnying among us (having fallen victim at a young age to a car accident on the edge of town) – famously said, “The first thing you do with a new car is beat it with a baseball bat then drive it through a barbed wire fence. Get it over with!”
When he was 11 or 12 years old, while living in Western Canada among the farmers who harvested vast sections of land that stretched flat and endless from the outbuildings to the horizon, when the setting sun was an eternal majesty, when Dr. MacGregor Parsons lived in a mansion on the hill overlooking the village below, he met Kenneth, a dairy farmer’s son, who was in his class at school and who inspired him to perfection.
…but you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life, while it’s happening to you, never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.
Andy Wharhol (1928 – 1987)
This famous quote is by artist Andy Warhol often cited from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. It reflects on the limitation of experiencing life in the present moment versus the retrospective, emotional “atmosphere” that memories create.
My car ride today wasn’t entirely vicarious. I did leave the garage. And I did get a car wash at nearby Circle K (thankfully it was operating). But a hurried glance up the Appleton Side Road was bleak. I rely solely on All Season tires (it is doubtful that I shall ever get winter tires). And I don’t trust the drivers coming in the opposite direction. Many of them in my opinion are recklessly bent upon undue speed in the circumstances. There were only narrow tracks to follow to avoid jumping the parallel lines of packed snow. The conditions invited disaster. My final resolve was to heed the peril.