From the instant of birth we begin an unfathomable enterprise of bouncing around and as often bouncing back. I have never discarded the adage that we discover whence we come only by leaving it. Bouncing around is just the unpremeditated journeys we undertake or encounter as the product of environment, family, education, employment and sometimes misadventure. From tribulation and debacle, and the evocation of necessity, want and need, we travel along a timeline of incalculable change and circumstance from which we end at times in the most unlikely situation. In short, barring the life of a monastic, we seldom know how, when or where we shall end up.

My entire life has been sustained by the ability – or at least the belief – that I could always bounce back.  Which is to say life hasn’t always been predictable or perhaps exactly as intended. There is no question for example that a good deal of my experience has been guided not completely by design rather by emotion and instinct (some of which was candidly speaking more visceral than cerebral). But I have always preserved the desire to stand upright on the square.

My degeneration to the intervening (and frankly rather short-lived) exposition of passion was predominantly retarded until I began undergraduate studies in Philosophy at Glendon Hall in Toronto. I was 18 years old. Until then I had circulated within the embrace and control of my parents and my masters at boarding school.  They navigated and steered the ship. The most remarkable evaporation of constraint was permission in prep school to smoke a pipe in the Prefects’ common room. It was until that completion of time and purpose that I was directed in a calculated manner of childhood  and study by what can overall be characterized as beneficent models. It made me a scholar, a football player, a house captain, a prefect, a Regimental Sgt-Major and an Anglican. Those were the planks upon which I commenced my journey into the unknown.

The downhill amendment overwhelmed me when I was at last set entirely free of familial and social constraints. I began smoking cigarettes (Winston, should you care to know). Often I have reflected how different my life might have been after prep school had I chosen to attend Trinity College at U of T rather than Glendon Hall; but similarly I always confessed that to have done so would only have been submission to previous bulwarks which at the same time would only have extended the palpable limits of life to that point. Ironically when I attended the Bar Admission Course at Osgoode Hall, I earned my keep by acting as a Don at Devonshire House (located immediately adjacent Trinity College – and my boys ended engaged in a formal debate with the Trinity boys in their ancient chapel followed by a good deal of brouhaha and beer at the Embassy Tavern on Bloor St W just above Devonshire Place).

Nonetheless and in the result the fact remains that this process of discovery and expansion beyond the former boundaries did a great deal to challenge my priorities and intentions. I was forced to consider and weigh my past and to think for myself. While there are many events of notability which arose from that period of my life, I endured for the first time the obligation to make decisions.  The main decision – and perhaps the first occasion on which I really bounced back – was to go to law school. With only a BA in Philosophy I needed a trade. The fluff of my past had worn off.

The next significant step was the choice to go to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia rather than Osgoode Hall in Toronto. While the choice may have been aligned with my father’s ancestry in New Brunswick, it primarily was an effort to withdraw from my moorings in Toronto and Upper Canada, ties which I felt had forced my hand in some respects. On my arrival in Halifax I had but one disheartening mail communication with a former friend, Bill Rutledge, who, when he read of my loneliness, responded only, “There ain’t no ship to take you away from yourself. You travel the suburbs of your own mind.”  I never did thank him for the persuasion.

As much as I grew to love Nova Scotia, however, and as heartwarming and endearing as were my associations there, I felt my stronger roots were in Ontario. So once again I bounced back though little imagining my lifeline would be pulled into a small rural town from which I have never since departed. My entire law career effectively started, evolved and fizzled in Almonte. During that period of almost 40 years I did what a country lawyer does and little more. But I was drawn unwittingly into a barrage of cooperations which fulfilled my burgeoning need to produce and contribute, things like being a Warden of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, President of the Almonte Business and Professional Association, Chairman of the Almonte Board of Trade, a Trustee of the Elizabeth Kelly Library Foundation, Master, Secretary and Historian of Mississippi Lodge No. 147, President of the Mississippi Masonic Hall Inc., a Member of the Committee of Adjustment of the Town of Mississippi Mills, a Member of the Local Architectural Advisory Committee, a Lecturer at Algonquin College, a Member of Lions Club International, a Member of the Lanark County Bar Association, a Social Member of the Mississippi Golf Club and a Director of Mississippi River Power Corporation. It was my unqualified privilege to perform my duties in those capacities.  Naturally none of it happened without the benefit of impetus, stimulus and support from others. It enabled me to expiate any guilt I may otherwise have harboured for not having done my part in the community. And I contributed to charities to put my money where my mouth was, specifically the St. Andrew’s College Foundation, the Almonte General Hospital and the Mississippi River Walk, each of which is very dear to me.

Yesterday I read in Country Life magazine a guip; viz., “I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.” (Chalcot Crescent, Fay Weldon). Frankly I haven’t any discernible fear or presage of dying. Indeed I have already bounced back from two near-death situations, from one of which my erstwhile physician candidly observed upon my return home from hospital, “We didn’t think you’d make it off the operating table!” Since then I have been found unconscious on the beach (my heart stopped) and been diagnosed with melanoma cancer. But seemingly I have bounced back.

In the meantime i confine myself to my desk and my lounge chair in the radiant sunshine on the balcony overlooking the river. I have learned to tolerate the insignificance of others, their pusillanimity and ignorance. My curmudgeonly behaviour is evidence only of my unhindered devotion to the moment  I haven’t time for anything further. Except that is for a hat tip for my 30-year life partnership. It is an affection, association and fraternity which has afforded me an uninterrupted and unparalleled adventure and artistry (whether nature, things or accessories, both ethereal and substantial).  From the first moment of our formal encounter over martinis at a bar in the By Ward Market with my dear departed friend, John Francis Fitchett, and later on a cold windswept Saturday morning preceding the subsequent acquisition of a 24K superbly yellow gold chain from a vendor in Chinatown on Somerset St W, ours has been an alliance of incomparable gratification and fortuity. Now that’s what I call bouncing back!