Reminiscences about the dead are – at least demonstrably – more often than not rather like the funerals that preceded them; namely, fraught with anguish, despair and sadness. This, as I am certain you’ll agree, is not the preferred way to confront the “inevitable” notwithstanding the circumstances or consequences of the loss. What, I ask, is there to be gained by submerging oneself within a stew of sorrow?  I can’t but imagine how more inspiring a recollection would be if it were heightened instead by spirited bravado.

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Autumn – so I am beginning to think – is like life itself; namely, an initial canvass of every colour on the palette suddenly followed by evaporation and a dormant chill. As I have so often remarked, “Nature teaches us how to die” which in this context will suffice as a period of transition from one expression to another. That is to say, there was today as we cycled along the erstwhile railway right-of-way no suggestion of either demise or disappearance; rather the willing admission of change conjoined by the uncommon beauty and effervescence of the season. The irrepressibility of the morning constitutional lingered undiminished into the afternoon.

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There are I am sure few extravagances about which one is instinctively reluctant to clamour on the public stage. Yet proclamations involving cravings can so often descend into frightfully common exhibitions! Fortunately for me I needn’t lapse into the threat of the visceral on that particular subject. My personal indulgence is the passenger automobile. The snag is not that there is anything wrong with an affection for a mechanical device; but that automobiles so often reflect a hidden perversion or psychological impediment of the owner. It is common knowledge that the adrenalin is aroused differently in prospective customers; and the manufacturers have long ago learned just how to market their brand.

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Four years of listening to Donald J. Trump as putative and elected president of the United States of America – a personal intelligence project which I initially began with interest in the candidate but which soon descended into an inexorable education in politics – I have shamefully only now  acknowledged that there is some muster to Trump’s bluster. Or as is so often regurgitated, “It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it!”

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While I don’t believe there is any magical date by which one imagines having reached the pinnacle of human knowledge, there is nonetheless a moment at which one achieves licence to detailed reflection upon the subject. Curiously I have always been attracted to summaries – whether of impending deals (when I was practicing law), of completed tasks or of something as mundane as money in the bank. It was as much a process of organization as mere repetition (part of my obsessive nature no doubt).  I accept the philosophic conclusion that there is no past or future, only the present, but I persist to itemize both the past and the future as though they materially affected the present.

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Herd mentality is noticeably an inescapable subject throughout both the Trump succession and the COVID-19 pandemic. How else explain the percolating chaos that has overtaken the United States of America and the globe?

Herd mentality, mob mentality and pack mentality, also lesser known as gang mentality, describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make different decisions than they would have individually.

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Listening to the Senate confirmation hearing of Madam Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not for the pusillanimous. The use of the most fundamental debating tactics is either absent or curiously prevalent. Something else governs the performance. And Justice Barrett is noticeably making a calculated decision to preserve her advertised veneer of legitimacy and capacity by refusing to acknowledge what is the patent purpose of her nomination; namely, to defeat so-called “leftist” thinking in American society. To imagine (as Justice Barrett has mockingly done) that the appointees to the highest court in the United States of America are inexplicably sheltered from their religious or other cultural beliefs is utterly monstrous and illegitimate or at the very least glowingly inauthentic. It also defies both logic and instinct. To expect that a Trump appointee will do anything other than what they’ve been hired to do is preposterous.

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This is a tiny retrospective. Significantly it echoes memories of my parents whom I indisputably miss.  My father died in his 96th year in 2014.  My mother died in her 92nd year in 2018.  Both as fas as I know died a quiet death triggered by natural deteriorations. There was accordingly no excessive despair surrounding their deaths. Perhaps because of the general immediacy of my behaviour and an overall concern about their health, I had regularly visited my parents with a view to ensuring they were being well attended at their respective retirement residences. I never had what I would characterize as a “close relationship” with my parents. Visits with them were decidedly familial without the drama of an afternoon TV show. Granted I tended a bit more to the succinct with my father than my mother.  But it could never have been said that any one of us trespassed upon the borders of privacy or social delicacy. No doubt this contributed to my business-like association with my parents for whom I had drawn their joint deeds, wills, powers of attorney and trust agreements.

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The serendipity of life has never escaped me. An event today for example has coincidentally marked a revival of the religious theme which is astonishingly appropriate for what customarily surrounds the Thanksgiving weekend – family, food and togetherness – a foregathering significantly associated with the first Americans (the Pilgrims) and their brethren (the native Indians). Typically paintings of the first Thanksgiving somehow align with traditional Christian values though as regularly with about as much real diversity or legitimacy.

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There were two pillars upon which I was elevated to my current astronomic view of the world: the Anglican Communion in Canada and Freemasonry.  Both suffer the reputed contamination of White Anglo Saxon Protestants and North York Toronto generally. Over the years I’ve had the privilege to travel from the local parish and lodge to the General Synod and Grand Lodge of my respective guides. In every instance I was more overwhelmed by the ceremony than the substance. Interestingly these two prongs of propriety are putatively at least based upon a similar prerequisite; namely, a belief in God (in the case of the Christian theory) or the belief in a supreme being (in the case of Freemasonry). Both are equally uncompromising in that particular.

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