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18
Oct
2022
Thursday September 21, 2022
Municipal elections are coming up. “Why don’t put your name in?” a friend asked the other day. “You’ve always got a lot to say.”
I hope he was kidding. Because politics already has too many people in love with the sound of their own voice.
Besides, if I got elected, I would have to attend meetings. I’ve missed four meetings in the last two weeks, unfortunately. I suspect that my forgetter is telling me that I don’t like meetings.
Perhaps I never did like them.
In the past, I tended to resent meetings. They took a block of time when I could have been doing something productive. I felt obligated to attend because feared the organization might do something catastrophic without me.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: meetings
28
Sep
Tags: tradition, Meettings, agendas
Thursday September 15, 2022
I’m looking at a relic. No, not the bones of some ancient saint. Or a corpse, mummified in a peat bog or frozen in a glacier.
This relic is a blue-and-white porcelain teapot.
We gave it to my father’s second wife, Christina Fraser, for Christmas one year. Blue and white were Chris’s favourite colours. We found this teapot in Eaton’s, when Eaton’s still existed. She loved it.
Then she wanted to ship it home safely from Toronto to Vancouver. She didn’t trust her suitcase to protect it from Air Canada’s baggage handlers. So she took it back to Eaton’s, figuring they had the expertise.
“Sorry, we can’t do that,” she was told.
Tags: Teapot, Eatons, Baal Shem Tov
4
Thursday August 25, 2022
Something got me thinking about the pop songs I listened to in my youth. Here’s one of them: “Sh-boom sh-boom… yallalala lallalalala, Hey nonny ding dong, a-lang a--lang a-lang, Boom ba-doh, ba-doo ba-doodle-ay…”
The quartet went on to include some real words, but they’ve faded from memory. Only the nonsense syllables remain.
Or Sammy Kaye and his orchestra, otherwise a fairly conservative group: “Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika, Bollika, wollika, can't you see, Chickery chick is me?”
Tags: Silly songs, innocence
Thursday August 18, 2022
I got a cat last week. Correction – last week a cat got me. Because no human owns a cat. Cats may have been the first wild creatures to co-habit with humans, but unlike dogs, they have never let humans dominate them.
My cat is only eight weeks old, but he already runs my household. Wrong again – HIS household! He determines when I shall wake up. By licking the end of my nose..
He has found his own private cave between my pillows, where he spends the night. Unless he decides to wake up long enough to walk across my head.
I expected him to play with my computer mouse – cat and mouse, you know. I didn’t expect him to take naps on my keyboard. Now I know how those computer nerds come up with weird passwords like 8[UEVrn#ds-ibJEtb&iSio&hf. They invite a kitten to pounce on their keyboards.
Tags: Dickie, kitten