Following breakfast earlier this morning and afterwards our constitutional exercise in the small downstairs gymnasium we began an uncertain pathway for a drive into neighbouring Renfrew County and round about.  The routine motive of a car wash was superlative in the Scotch mist. Equally evident was the traffic.  For a Sunday morning in particular, the number of cars (in both directions) was noticeable if not downright unusual. Where was everyone going? We speculated that it was the weather. The dank drizzle had apparently dampened the springtime partiality and instead inspired people to go shopping – or to do whatever else indoors – to avoid the wet and chill outside. Malls are ornamental parklands. Though earlier upon leaving town we saw more than one person dutifully and somewhat ruefully walking their dog in the rain. Barring that vested imperative, it is recognizably a choice day to escape the weather or to admire it from one’s drawing room desk.

We punctuated our comfortable drive along the squishing highway, as the wipers fulfilled their compulsion, by investigating the Garmin watch. I am a notorious zealot of time pieces. Lately at the golf club – while noshing with friends – we were introduced to a spectacular Garmin watch. It self-energized by sunshine. The general conclusion is that Garmin is for the athletic specialist whereas the Apple smartwatches are of the more popular persuasion. I am as well an addict of Apple products. They constitute the entirety of my intimate technology (MacBook Pro, iPad and Apple watch). Though I believe uniformity is unnecessary if one wishes variable devices to communicate with one another, no matter the manufacturer, I nonetheless insist upon preserving the lack of variation. It reflects constancy and homogeneity more than anything, part of my many obsessions (whatever the questionable advantage may be).

Having succeeded to dilute or abandon my preoccupation with these instrumental toys, I reunited with an on-going absorption in more proximate and less commercial details. Once again – that is, when having removed oneself from the grip and cleverness of modern manufacturers – I was drawn to a unification of the physical commotion before me. The scope of my failing inquiry into the meaning of life was, first, distracted by the ambivalence of the foggy day and the withered cornstalk stubble in the fields, plus the dark water of the rippling river. As far away as Hilton Head Island may be, the comparison is never diminished. The favour of the sea is for me ineluctable. Conflicting with the attraction is the similarly interminable immobility that governs my being. You see, dear Reader, it is a complication. Yet not insurmountable. There probably is no view which is so singular as to isolate the one from the other. As fondly as I recollect fleeting memories, I am inclined by other sinews to devote myself to the present, not because it is unchangeable, but because it will change with time. It may have been at this speculative juncture that my partner mentioned return to Hilton Head Island in 2029, after the US elections, after the anticipated shift of events and change of character.

Yet who knows what will be our personal state of being then? At this already advanced age – that is, approaching the 8th decade – medical status can alter unforgivably. Meanwhile we’re happily confined to the dull but congenial perspective of country living along the river. My affinity narrows incrementally. Everything suffers the peril of exhaustion, whether by necessity or merely the effluxion of time. The rebound of youth is a thing of the past. The calamity is therefore a blunt and limited contrition. One might well dissuade oneself in this difficult sphere. But whatever the parameters, I prefer adopting a framework for amplification and intensity. This doesn’t entail enlargement, just increase of what is already there. After a lifetime of perpetual modification, settling upon the rudimentary features is the fermentation of age.