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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There are few admonitions more tranquillizing than to be told you should have known better. Normally it is a reprimand delivered by an older to a younger person such as from a parent to a child. I am discovering however that the warning applies equally to the aged as to the young. The bald truth is that being over 65 years of age doesn’t mean one is a graduate of life’s pitfalls. Old age in spite of its silvery glamour and Epicurean likeness is as fraught with hazard of judgement as is youth.

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After three weeks into 2023 the gush of New Year’s Eve is now safely considered historical. We’re about the middle of January and the middle of the week. A noticeable lull has come over the island. The early morning traffic when I went for my mani/pedi was more contained than usual; the southern drivers with few exceptions seemed more subdued. My manicurist Sun from Vietnam informed me that this coming Sunday is the Asian new year, what appears on my iPhone calendar as the Lunar New Year. The animal for the lunar year is the Rabbit. It’s all a bunch of hocus-pocus in my opinion but Sun became animated to the extent of determining that based upon my year of birth my zodiac animal is the rat which purportedly foretells that I am ingenious but unadventurous. She made other general observations about the lunar year including the use of the zodiac to predict a successful marriage.

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There are two postures I prefer to avoid when I am by or in the pool; namely, tanning my backside and swimming the backstroke. Curiously each reverses the direction of vision of the other. The common issue has however nothing to do with perspective; nor does it involve a more lofty ingredient of comportment. The matter is solely confined to the modest features of comfort and ease.

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