Improvements of the Mind

That day again, relaxing in Cole Harbour for the first time with a sleeping child and sushi dinner and hopefully a massage to come.  Arsenal are 7 clear at the top of the league and all is well.  Enjoyed the random JW Doull pop in for religious themed instruction for the new year, and the Guinness en route to Mizo turning up first Nancy Whiskey and then Enjoy Yourself.

As usual, Jan One is the day of celebration.  Rest up and see what it brings, the first of the levees in some time.  

Don't Christmatize it

An outburst to encapsulate a number of age-old points this morning.  The impossible-to-respond-to criticisms of a say-one-thing-do-another "culture" that actually seems universal to the human condition.  But what do I know?  When seeking an excuse to be angry, it is always a one line out of nowhere that triggers the justification for it, something you would have to be a master prognosticator to anticipate, and introduced to the conversation when wholly unprepared because the processing of the throw-away sentence has taken a day or two before it is re-spoken.  Usually can be traced back to an insecurity over finances, or some other concern relating to a loss of independence.

How to react?  Based on prior experience - time is the healer.  As with the flu, so with the emotional roller-coaster.  Will "Christmatize" become a new word to form the punchline of future jokes.  With any luck.  

So get some work done, take a drive with the big man to J.W. Doull in an hour or two after getting a bit of work done seems like the ticket.  But man.  This whole life experience, balancing human unpredictability.  Thought about referencing the funny story last night of Rodney who stumbled over his lack of pick-up lines outside the hospital into a "let us pray" that actually seems a decent approach.  But let's not introduce any further unpredictable entries into the typical arc of recovery.

Basement Orders

You remember that?  I still think it was Griffin, if it proves so, although the way the young man slept silently through the latest shenanigans this aft, perhaps it will never be sorted for certain if we don’t see signs of blood early in ‘23…

I would be happy with him, enthralled, ensorcelled, yet the fates and the winding road and the uncertainty.  If it be not now yet it will come?  Maybe.  What is excellent is inevitable, it seems.  

I must sleep off this wine.  Wanted to record the strange majesty of another torrid few days of memories, relaxing and yet incredibly odd, living through a fever dream rather than experiencing each moment for what it is.  Imagine watching a shell game, flash picture sequence of these nights over the course of the memory.  From Bedford to Alexander.  Was strange to be back at Mount Royal and see the Caseley photo of 1989-2001, realizing he was basically it for you at that place.  And he, like so many, gone.  Memories of spankings and the like, never exactly what they seem.

Yet these traditions carry on in their way.  Check in on Mr. Double Dubonnet tomorrow.  The past is prologue and so much lies there and so much is sad and wonderful.  Up the Arsenal, as well.  It was Boxing Day, babe.  In the North Bank…  

About Fate

What a movie choice for last night, then talk of Venice and before you know it the follow-up to the talk about the body being ready and everything arrives.  Now the wait begins into the New Year to see what fate has in store.  The latest rounds of crying and fussiness marking concerns about another, but I suppose let it work if it is all destined to come out right?  

Ha.  Who can say.  Life happens, and the illusion is the sense of any control.  Roll on with it.  The update to this, as with other developments, shall be - as is said - interesting.

This Moment in Time

The blessing from Soneka - J don’t you want to pray.  The constant focus and the rhythm of the rhetoric rolling off by rote.  The sentiment is genuine, and despite the scepticism (well grounded in AA’s cries during each of the traveling mercy appeals) hard to take too opposite an approach.

11 minutes left before the 30 mins of wifi expires, the first of two World Cup semis playing out as you approach the final destination at last.  How many hours since Chiluba?  Shall send him a message as we walk through the door.  Hope the house held, the mailbox not too overcapacity, and that the snow need not be shoveled for a few days yet.  There is time for festive traditions and Scotch, end of year filings and bills and partnership meetings and proposals to Nunavut.  What a magnificent world.

And our photogenic man at the heart of it, his indefatigable mama in unyielding support always.  How he will take to the Jolly Jumper, how we will enjoy the next few weeks before the return/start of the routine.  Work to be done in capturing the memories, but they were wondrous and bountiful, as much as could have been hoped for through the rigours of the open sky.  

Started out by wanting to capture the “grateful for this moment in time” line even as the whole trip became a lesson in trying to focus on the now despite temptations to look forward and back, how few the occasions were where the mind was ever and only in the present.  

And on sleep to, watching the little man drift in and out, how everyone talks about the lack of it without really understanding the strains and the coping mechanisms and the need for an ability to forgive the sharp word or frustrated look.  Recalling mom’s perceptiveness exacerbating the anger at being correctly diagnosed for reasons outside control.  But there’s something to that as part of the parenthood journey.  That and the multitudes’ efforts to be helpful, the crinkling of glasses and snapping of fingers and are you sure you are not squeezing the child and the infinite pride and joy at his universal smile.  

Messi has scored a penalty, NS is below and there’s one minute to go.  See you on the ground, home.  Well done.