After my bicycle ride this morning I sat on a bench seat of synthetic cane weave on the patio located in the back yard of the apartment building. I closed my eyes and faced directly into the rising sun.  It was approaching 9:00 am and the sun was positioned just barely above the tops of the row houses in the distance. The heat began rising perceptibly. The forecast today is for a high of 13°C by late afternoon; then progressively higher over the next several days before beginning to descend a week hence. We’re in a noticeable high with sunshine predicted throughout. Already I am imagining what it will be like to wear shorts again!

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Whenever we stay at a hotel and have breakfast at one of those buffet-style troughs I always make a direct line for the bacon tray.  It is fairly reliable – indeed I’d say predictable – that the bacon chafing dish will make an appearance at any of these morning or brunch foraging affairs. The quantities available are positively mountainous. As a result the bacon is an invitation beyond restraint! And unrestrained I am.  There is no question whatsoever in my mind that I suffer a psychological perversion of surplus. It isn’t a matter of greed which has a moral connotation much like the word cupidity implying as it does covetousness. No, my affliction – though reminiscent of the biblical immorality of excess – is diluted by the word gourmandizing which contains the elevated suggestion of gourmet (a certain description of bacon’s appeal to me especially now that I’ve discovered PC Old-fashioned Style bacon). Yet admittedly my distortion is closer to piggishness than to hankering, moral or immoral. I could perhaps temper it by saying simply edacity but that is clearly too arcane.

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Anyone who has been on a working farm knows that, like childbirth (or so I imagine), there’s a lot more to it than is normally shared. In fact the human animal is itself no less prone to the vulgarities of waste and accommodation. I say this not despairingly but rather as a confession of the hard reality we are from time to time obliged to address. From the instant of birth the child is devoted solely to three things: ingesting, expunging and sleep, normally in that order. The miracle that is life translates the first two ingredients into the ineffable. As for the rest – pardon the pun – that is, the sleep and the accommodation in which it takes places, that’s up to us to take care of, on our own, unassisted by anything as mystical as creation or the unfolding mystery of the universe. I speak of housekeeping.

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An alcoholic does by nature welcome the fortuity of an occasion to drink.  This does not however mean that the employment is without restriction. Being one myself – that is, a “recovering alcoholic” – I am able to blather with some credibility upon the subject of drinking. The last time I had a drink (of anything alcoholic) was December, 2013 on the occasion of my 65th birthday. I don’t recall getting hopelessly drunk or anything persuasive like that. I think I was just fed up with alcohol and its mirage – much for the same reason I had abruptly quit cigarette smoking when I was turning 50 in 1998 (actually we were on a plane coming back from the Caribbean and I was having difficulty breathing). In both cases the abandonment was precipitous and the so-called pleasures have never been repeated.

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Each day brings news of the pandemic, some encouraging, some discouraging, little that is conclusive. There seems always to be the threat of a new strain.  Whether it is merely a caution to avoid lapsing from the usual detail of social distancing and wearing a mask, there are also warnings about renewed contamination. Will it ever end?

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No Room for a Bed
by Rocci Fisch, American Political Commentator

The stimulus checks, they’re in the mail
Americans who need the dough can now exhale
Real cash money on the way
Giving it to people who need some pay

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In a world wrought with grievance and setback it hardly seems proper that one should become so buoyant as I now am.  Certainly I have my concerns, my paltry issues, my own complaints about what appears to be a decided evolution.  But uplifted by our early morning constitutional in the clear, frosty air and afterwards breakfast of MaraNatha organic crunchy peanut butter and St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach, I am indisputably aflutter! And silly me, I carelessly overlooked the Canada Grade A maple syrup! The Sacrament of Heaven!

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Living in a small town in rural Ontario it is easy to overlook the talent. The relevance is often closer than you’d imagine.  Granted we of Ramsay Township and Almonte are familiar with our celebrated heroes James Naismith (inventor of basketball), R. Tait McKenzie (sculptor) and James Mackintosh Bell (famed geologist).

James Abbott Mackintosh Bell was born at St Andrews, Quebec, Canada, on 23 September 1877, the son of Andrew Bell, a civil engineer and architect, and his wife, Marianne Rosamond. The family moved to Almonte, Ontario, when James was a child, and he received his early education there. He studied at Queen’s College, Kingston, graduating MA in 1899, then went to Harvard University in 1903 to study for his PhD, which he received in 1904. His field work included pioneer exploration in Arctic Canada for the Geological Survey of Canada with his uncle, Robert Bell. He also worked for several companies as a mining expert.

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A cowboy singer who I believe is no longer whinnying among us – perhaps its was John Denver – wrote a song called “Rocky Mountain High”.

And the Colorado rocky mountain high
I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky
You can talk to God and listen to the casual reply
Rocky mountain high

The ’70s song was briefly controversial for promoting drug abuse. It never affected me that way.  I fully accept the intended meaning of high one gets upon seeing the Rockies and from the concurrent atmospheric pressure on those superb days of clear blue sky and thin dry air.

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Sometimes things just click!  Maybe it’s no more than the fruit of a sound sleep. Or the triumph of figuring how to make your iPhone work properly. Maybe being able to transfer the organic peanut butter out of the jar onto the baguette bagel without making a mess. Or changing the bed and starting the laundry. The overnight skiff of snow having evaporated from the roadway, beaconing a refreshing bicycle ride in the strapping northerly wind. The unparalleled appeasement of a complete evacuation! Whatever it is, it’s the same world but with a new look, a state of the art feeling, a sudden proximity of views and insights. The sedentary glow of long ago memories in Montréal Est.

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