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Category: Positivity

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Older And … Wiser?

Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn once had a song which went “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.” Sometimes it’s hard not to think Bruce was right. I was reminded of that while looking at a story on Bored Panda recently about “40 People Share Things They Used To Love That Have Become Less Fun With Age.” I was nodding along in agreement faster than you could say “hey you kids, get off my lawn!”

Among the lengthy list, “leaving the house – I used to be a social butterfly, but now I have to convince myself to go get the basic necessities”, which led into another suggestion, “shopping.” Yep, I get that, even if I was never precisely a social “butterfly”, Saturday nights used to be for going out and hanging with friends. I used to live near one of the country’s biggest malls and would go walk around it for recreation if I was bored when I was young. I enjoyed looking at the new clothes rolling in and could spend countless hours in the three record stores.

Now, there are no more record stores, I don’t live anywhere near that mall and my attitude is largely “I have clothes, why would I need more?” If eventually something doesn’t fit or has holes in it, there’s a Walmart close by. I did splurge on a blazer not long ago; found it online. I have a nagging fear that one of my deathbed thoughts will be “I wish I hadn’t willingly spent so much time in stores when I was young!”. And Saturday nights? For quietly watching Netflix or reruns with my sweetie in our room. Her employer used to have Christmas parties, I used to look forward to them. It was the one night to be out with a large number of people, which to me was a good way of filling the annual quota. But they’ve not run those for a couple of years. I think the pandemic showed us there are two types of people. One type went stir-crazy and bounced off the walls counting the days til bars would re-open and they would have to shove their way through the crowds in department stores once more come December. The other had a lightbulb go on in their heads and realize “hey! There’s a lot that I can do right here at home!” Guess which category I fall into.

Several people mentioned loud noises and places. Gotcha. If I go to a bar, which is a real Whooping crane-type rarity these days, I want to be able to talk to whoever I’m with without shouting or pressing my ear upto their face. I used to go to a few concerts a year. The Stranglers, Bob Mould, both in the ’80s left my ears ringing the next morning. Now, there might be about half a dozen artists I’d think of going to see in concert and I’d be happy to be well back from the stage. Probably wearing earplugs. And movies? Turn it down, I’d be thinking…if I went out to them, which led to another suggestion “going to theaters to watch movies.”

I must admit, I thought Covid would actually bring about the death of the field of movie theaters. It hasn’t but neither is it a thriving enterprise these days. Why would it be? The reasons are pretty obvious.

First off, now most of us seem to already have a theater in the house! When I was a kid, when my parents got a 26” color TV in the late-’70s we felt like royalty. Livin’ large! Of course, that was the one TV in the house. Now? We have a 42” TV in our room and I recently saw them marked as “small TVs” in a big box store! Watching a 42” TV with stereo sound in a dark 15-foot room isn’t that much different than looking at a 30-foot screen in a 20 000-square foot auditorium. But, the floor isn’t sticky, I don’t have to eat popcorn and if I do want popcorn, I don’t have to pay $10 for a garbage bag-sized container of it, half of which will surely be thrown away. And for the $14 admittance, we can pay a month of Netflix or HBO and watch movies every night. Not to mention, the kicker – if a new movie comes out that I really want to see, it’s probably on the TV the day it hits the theaters. Gone are the days of waiting six months for a VHS tape of it to get to Blockbuster.

Another person noted “commercial radio is unlistenable.” Sadly that’s close to true too. Too little variety, too much repetition, too few people on it with personalities. I could write pages on that topic alone. In fact, I have on my music blog so I won’t bother here.

“Junk Food” someone opined. Check! I was never a huge chips and candy type guy (maybe that’s why I’m not a huge guy in fact?) but the older I get the less inclined I am to want any food that comes in large bags filled with air or that is colored day-glo orange. I still enjoy a chocolate bar once in a blue moon, but for the most part, I’d rather have a salad, or a sammie (which I grant you isn’t the healthiest of snacks when if features salami and Swiss cheese , but sure is tasty and full of stuff that actually looks like food rather than a Dupont chemical tanker manifest in the ingredient list).

But that leads to my next point. Sure there’s a lot I, and many others it seems, don’t like much now that maybe we did years ago. But the flipside is true. There are things I appreciate much more. Fresh vegetables being one.

I appreciate open-minded and pragmatic people more than my firebrand 20-something version did. Especially politicians. The way to get things done isn’t to try and find the extreme zenith of any position and try to shout down everyone else until you get your way (usually soon to be reversed entirely by the next election or change of the tides). Trying to reach a compromise that everyone can live with works so much better whether it’s in the kitchen, at the grocery store, the office or Capitol Hill.

I enjoy “my” music more than I once used to. It’s a paradox, because I listen to it less. When I was young and single, I’d have the stereo on most of the time I was home. For a few years I even typically left it on at night while I slept. I would buy new music weekly.

Now, people are often at work in the house, or sleeping, or we’re watching something together. Not music time. Not so many nights do I put on CD after CD or tune the computer to a fine internet station. But… when I do, I often find myself mesmorized, continually marveling at how good some of those records I’d forgotten or once took for granted are. Soaking them in, in awe and appreciation.

I appreciate now that I can improve other people’s days. Or at least I hope to. Often the best way to feel better if you’re a bit down or stressed is to simply pretend you’re not. Which doesn’t come naturally to me, I might add, but as I get older I learn that sometimes a few good words can change the mood altogether. Just the other day I was in a large store and the cashier, a middle-aged lady looking both rushed by the previous customer and surly, rang me through, barely looking at me. Until she came across an item with A Christmas Story markings on it came up. She brightened up. “Ohh, that’s my all-time favorite Christmas movie” she exclaimed. I told her I loved it too and asked if she’d heard they were making a sequel. She had and we marveled at how little Ralphie still looks the same 30-odd years later and how we hoped it could match the charm of the original. If there hadn’t been a lineup we would have likely dissected Elf, which she volunteered was her second-favorite seasonal film. As I walked away she was grinning and made sure to wish me a fantastic day. 45 seconds, a minute, of idle chit-chat turned her day around, temporarily at least. And mine too to some degree. That in itself gave me some satisfaction I wouldn’t have cared about a few decades ago.

Mostly, I think though the older I get the more I appreciate how special, and many, the good things in my life are. I’ve had bad days, losses, as we all have but I’ve come to realize not to take things that are great – big or small – for granted. That was a message largely lost on 1990s me. Perhaps lost on any teen or 20-something. And for that, I’d say getting old isn’t a bad thing at all.

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Will Phones Be Invisible By 2097?

One of the cool gifts I was given this past Christmas was a thick book titled Strange But True Science. A compendium of interesting facts, it covers topics that vary from Area 51 and a bit of UFO lore to about five pages on the history of roads (Romans built a 50 000 mile highway system in their empire, with stone roads running as far afield as Spain. Who knew?) to a look at whether Vitamin C prevents colds (their verdict – no, but it might have a slightly beneficial effect in preventing heart disease.)

One thing that caught my attention was their entry on mobile phones. I always was surprised that in the 1954 movie Sabrina, one of the business mogul brothers played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, has a phone in his limo. Both brothers wanted to impress Sabrina, played by Audrey Hepburn. The car phone seemed far-fetched to me, yet I wondered how they would have incorporated such a thing if it didn’t exist in reality. I think I first encountered one over three decades after the movie so it was mind-boggling to think of them being around in the ’50s. Turns out, it wasn’t fantasy…but it wasn’t common by any stretch of the imagination.

The book says that as far back as 1946, Bell Labs had established a mobile telephone network in St. Louis, and soon AT&T had it available in a hundred cities across the country. But it wasn’t for everyone. For one thing, callers could only call within the same set of antennae, which is to say basically in-town, local calls only. Worse, only three frequencies were available, “limiting calls to only three users per city”! But with the phone and receiver combined weighing 80 pounds at the time and the service charge of $15 a month (close to $200 a month in today’s funds), it might have been tough to find even three buyers in some cities.

By 1967, prototype celphones were built, but they were limited by their bulk and need for the caller to stay fairly close to the “base station” when using it. Fast-forward another 26 years and an early “smart phone” was made by IBM, allowing for e-mail and even faxing from the phone, but its’ brick-like heft and short battery life meant it wasn’t quite finding its way into many back pockets.

Now? Well, we know the story. As of last year, 97% of Americans had celphones, and 85% of those were “smart phones.” Around the world, 78% of all people have a phone in their pockets…even those who probably don’t have clothes to have a pocket in. Countries as far-flung as Uganda and Azerbaijan have 100% of their land covered by cell networks (it’s estimated you can use your cell in a little over 99% of the U.S. landmass.) Facts I quickly checked by…my celphone and Google.

Now, while I love being able to make a call if I need to when I’m out, or check the latest ball scores – if there were in fact ballgames being played, but that’s a story for another blog – or the weather from a parking lot along the way, I tend to think we love our phones and rely on them a bit too much. But what it does tell me is how much the world can change quickly. In terms of human history, 75 years is a blink of the eye. But telephones were things wired into walls you had to stand still at, and quite possibly shared the line with others with. Devices which cost you an exorbitant amount of money to use to call someone in the next county with, let alone the next country. Now, handheld devices let you get in touch with most people through much of the globe on the go, comparatively cheaply. And let you check your mail or read the news while you’re on hold. It’s an amazing leap forward.

What it gives me hope about is thinking that if we can use technology to make “space age” “sci-fi” phones a reality in 75 years, imagine what other problems we can solve by the 22nd century, if not sooner. Climate change? Our need for fossil fuel energy depleting our resources and despoiling our land and oceans? Toxic chemicals needed to combat pests, many of them invasive? New airborne diseases emerging from Third World markets and threatening humankind ? Hey, we got this! If we can make an 80-pound phone that only called others within about a five miles radius fit in our pocket and instantly call someone on a different continent, these problems too should be solvable. All it takes it enough bright minds and some imagination. And perhaps a latter-day Audrey Hepburn to impress.

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Thankful Thursday XXXIV – Rainy Days (And Mondays?)

Well, it’s a dreary looking day outside here today. Overnight thunderstorms scudded off, dragging along a blanket of low-lying clouds, cooler air and rain showers behind them. This Thankful Thursday, or Friday actually, I’m thankful for Rainy Days. They don’t always get me down!

Now, living in Texas, my mind has changed a little here. Back in Canada, fall often meant rainy day after rainy day, rainy weeks dripping into each other until they turned to snow. As if the days weren’t short enough already there in October, the light was often blocked by thick layers of stratus clouds. I think I came home from work enough times having to peel off my socks because the water had soaked right through my shoes on the way home. It wasn’t uplifting. Here however, sunny days are more the norm. And don’t get me wrong, I love bright, clear days. They energize me. But, there’s something to be said for their grayer counterparts.

Here, the ground gets parched and plants wither all too readily in the warm weather – which is to say about nine months of the year – times. The rain is welcomed. Nature watering the flowers and veggies for once, filling up the bird baths by itself. It gets the grass growing, but the rainy days themselves are a great excuse to put off cutting the lawn without feeling guilty about it.

Rainy days are great in fact, for reminding ourselves to slow down once in awhile. Lie on the sofa and watch a movie. Read those last two chapters of the novel you started two months ago. Pull out the dusty board games and sit around the table with the family. The yard work, the shopping errands… they can wait for tomorrow. Not to mention that cooking homemade soup or chili seems a bit absurd when it’s 95 degrees and there’s a UV rating of about 1000 out. But it seems the right, the comforting, thing to do when the clouds are leaky!

Basically, the rain is a reminder of the “laws” we need to keep in mind. Into each life a little rain must fall, they say. Indeed. We need a little rain, we need a little dark just to remind us to appreciate the sun and the heat. Yin and yang. Chicken soup for the soul. And hey… it might be a chicken soup dinner day! Bright spots abound on the dullest day, if we look for them.

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Thankful Thursday XXX – Netflix Shows Nothing Came Easy To Forrest, Forrest Gump

This Thankful Thursday, which is to say “yesterday”, I thought of a show I saw on TV the night before that : The Movies That Made Us. It’s a semi-regular show made for Netflix that looks at how movies we loved came together… often not as easily as it might seem! This week I’d watched the one concerning Forrest Gump. I’ve seen several other instalments, including recently Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing, all movies I like or love. They have movies chronicled that I don’t care for too, but it’s not as interesting watching what almost went wrong on a movie I wish had gone south, is it?

Dirty Dancing was a small budget feature that couldn’t find anyone interested in buying the script until a direct-to-video company that seemingly operated out of a small office bought it for a pittance. It didn’t go direct-to-video and made more money than pretty much everything else the company did combined. Pretty Woman‘s creators wanted Richard Gere to be the leading man all along, and got him, and Julia Roberts to be the heroine, the “hooker with a heart of gold.” Only at the time, Roberts was an almost-unknown quantity, a co-star of the B-movie Mystic Pizza and not much else, and Gere was holding out for a known superstar to drive people to the box office to see him. Once he was convinced Julia had screen appeal, it still took weeks to find the right fabric and right designer to assemble her style metamorphosis. Oh… and in the original script, Vivian, (Roberts) was a druggie prostitute who was left behind after her whirlwind week of the high life with him. Not exactly the romantic fairytale, “Cinderella” people dream about or pay money to see. Re-write!

Then there’s Forrest Gump – the all-American unlikely hero movie that was the third-biggest money maker ever for Hollywood at the time and took home a cart of Academy Awards big enough to carpet Alabama. It starred Tom Hanks, already a solid, A-list actor, and Sally Field, one of America’s sweethearts. Seemed like a can’t miss, right? Of course, it was far from it. The orignal novel which it was based on is vaguely similar in outline … to put it impolitely, “idiot savant stumbles onto great deeds accidently”. But the author’s Gump was rather a rude, unlikeable sod with a pet monkey. Hardly anyone to get the masses cheering on. So, new writers came in to revise his character and it got bought by a biggish studio. But people changed desks there and soon the studio was telling the director, Robert Zemeckis, to cut back, it was costing too much. They wanted no shrimp story in the movie – filming on a boat on water costs more than on land -, wanted no part of the Vietnam saga… costs money to ship people overseas and some of the shots might be expensive, and if he had to run across the country, couldn’t they shoot all the shots in an L.A. city park instead of all across the country? And don’t even get us started on the complications of superimposing Hanks into historical footage of JFK and so on. Thankfully, Zemeckis stood his ground and he and Hanks ended up pitching in some of their own cash to get it completed.

Now, the reason I’m telling you all this isn’t to make you turn on the TV or pitch myself for a Cinema 101 tutoring job. It is instead to point out that things that things that work out great and seem easy are actually quite problematic and often require many hurdles to be jumped. If it took Tom Hanks and Richard Gere so much to get their classics completed, why should we think it’s got to be a lot easier for any of us to see anything we care about through to completion?

Greatness of any sort requires a lot of work and patience… and a little luck. I’m thankful to Netflix and their series for reminding me that.

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Thankful Thursday XXVII – Health

A few days ago, I threw my back out. I think a 12-pack of pop was the culprit. Of course, it’s not the weight, it was some tiny mistake I made in moving to pick it up, twisting in just the right way to make standing back up difficult and ouch-filled. By now, it’s just a dull ache as I sit here typing and sniffling a bit from allergies. If it sounds like I’m complaining, I don’t mean to be. Actually it just leads me to my topic – this Thankful Thursday I’m thankful for good health.

Literally. I mean, I count myself lucky. As someone now over half a century old, if occasional back pains and sneezing bouts are all I really have to be bothered by, I am entirely lucky. By now, I’m at the age where I’ve had friends I went to school with pass away from horrible ailments. I see people who look somewhere around my age hobbling through stores lugging oxygen tanks they need to breathe. Each week now, I’m driving an older brother-in-law to doctor’s appointments to try and remedy some weird illness that caused him to basically lose the ability to stand or walk for a year or more. (Now he can do both, but is needing a walker to go more than a few feet.) Some people in my household have diabetes; others, chronic knee pain. Not to mention my dear dad who passed away this year from a heart attack, months after his wife died from a myriad of problems tied to diabetes but best described as “old age.” And of course, the elephant in the room, this awful new disease inflicted upon the world last year that’s killed more people in this country than the entire population of Memphis or Miami. I’ll take an occasional feeling of a jolt of electricity when I pick up a package wrong or a bit of a runny nose until the allergy pill kicks in any day. With good grace.

I try to make a point to walk; I could still do more. I try to eat fairly healthy foods; I could eat more fruit and a sandwich or two less. But I never take being healthy for granted. Money, toys, respect… all fine things. But they don’t mean much at all if you don’t have your health. If you’re feeling good today, say ‘thank you’ to God, Mother Nature, karma or whomever you choose and keep a bounce in your step.

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Thankful Thursday XIV – The Wizard Of Oz…?

This Thankful Thursday, I’m thankful for The Wizard of Oz. Well, not exactly the movie with Judy Garland nor the Frank Baum book, although both have their merits. And they also inspired some great music that I love, like Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Scissor Sisters’ “Return to Oz”. Rather I’m thankful for it, and many others like it because it’s an example of a well-told story. And where would we be without those, be they in film, in print, or handed down orally generation to generation?

What’s more, it’s a prime example of one of the Seven Basic Plots…and where would aspiring writers like myself be without those role models to guide us?

As an aside, my early memories of the Wizard of Oz weren’t all that great. I was very little – maybe three years old – and in hospital, and they somehow got the local theatre company to perform the play (likely in quite scaled down form) in some sort of auditorium at the hospital. Those who were well enough to be transported out of their room to see it were. I vaguely remember it being a bit disturbing. I clearly remember being very disturbed and frightened when they sent the actors around the hospital. The witch came to my room…not a comfort for an ill three year old!

Some years later I overcame my Witch trauma and watched the movie, and quite liked it although agreeing with my mother that Judy Garland was probably too big and old to be a believable Dorothy. Regardless of that, it was an interesting film and doubtless ahead of its time in production values.

I likely didn’t give it any more thought until I hit my twenties. I picked up the then-trendy novel Bright Lights, Big City and loved its style, I was fast in line to see the movie adapatation. I read through reviews of it and was surprised that several made reference to it being a retelling of the Wizard, give or take. Seemed a bit of a stretch, but when one boiled it down, both were stories of someone being transported from somewhere simple (in fact, Kansas in both) to somewhere shinier and glossier (Oz for Dorothy, the Big Apple and its nightclubs for Bright Lights…), looking for excitement and new meaning, only to be put in harm’s way, ultimately disappointed and going home, more appreciative and wiser. Okay…maybe they had something there.

Years later, I would come across a fiction writing principal known as The Seven Basic Plots. The appropriately-named Christopher Booker had the idea that there were really only seven plots in all of the world’s great stories. There’s Overcoming the Monster (from Dracula to Star Wars), Tragedy , where the “protagonist is a hero with a character flaw or great mistake” (MacBeth, Bonnie and Clyde) , Comedy, which he suggests also needs conflict resolved in the end (Midsummer’s Night Dream, Four Weddings and a Funeral), Quests, something bigger than the person (think of the similarities in the wildly disparate Raiders of the Lost Ark and Monty Python and the Holy Grail) , Rags to Riches, which if successful should also include growth of the character (Cinderella, Great Expectations), Rebirths, where the flawed character grows and becomes anew (Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Elizabeth & Darcy in Pride and Prejudice) and Voyages. Oz. Bright Lights, Big City. Alice In Wonderland. A fantastic journey leading the subject back home, a better person.

Now, it’s entirely possible that if you really think about it at length, you might be able to come up with a popular story, either book or film, that doesn’t fit any of those categories. Hats off to their creator if so… especially if it ended up being a story that resonated. But it’s remarkable how many great stories do fall into one of the seven categories. That’s handy for me, as a writer, to remember. And it’s handy for us all to remember by extrapolation – no matter how different our own stories seem from other people’s, chances are they’re not all that terribly different. There aren’t too many different life stories… the way that we choose to react to them, the tiny details are what make them memorable and separate the good from the bad… the Scrooges from the Darth Vaders.

The witch in the room or the likable Toto. Ultimately, we all decide how our story will be told.

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Thankful Thursday XII- Libraries

One of my regular readers commented on my music blog about discovering a rather great but obscure Chet Atkins record at her local library. It was a good reminder of their value, so this Thankful Thursday, I’m thankful for public libraries. Former First Lady Laura Bush once offered that “I have found that the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.” Indeed, if I wanted to be corny about it, I’d say it offers more of the world than your passort and more riches than a Visa card. But I won’t be corny…I’ll just think it instead!

I grew up just before the Golden Age of Google. As a kid in the ’70s and university student in the ’80s, there was no internet. There were books, periodicals, records (and later CDs). My family was literate, and I spent many an hour and allowance in book stores when young, but still, there were limits to what was in reach at home, whether for learning or recreational reading. By comparison, our local public library seemed limitless. The city where I grew up had three library branches, the main one being a sprawling, two-level place with virtual acres of novels and reference books, a kids section, a couple of full aisles of music CDs, foreign movies, perhaps 160-feet of shelves of magazines and newspapers. Forget candy shops…this kid was happiest in the library. My appreciation for Kurt Vonnegut, Oscar Wilde and many other authors came exclusively from happening upon a work of theirs and borrowing it, which sparked my curiosity enough to borrow more of their work. Likewise, I might never have really found bands I love like the Mescaleros or Wilco without having access to borrow CDs of theirs. If you’re a poor student, there’s a lot less at risk borrowing a CD for a week than going to the store and putting down $15 to buy it, sound unheard. And yes, in turn, I ended up buying quite a few of them for my own library in time. the library sponsored movie nights where they’d show small-budget or foreign films in the basement, movies one wouldn’t have seen on NBC or noticed as they gathered dust at the Blockbuster. Many a school assignment was roughed out while sitting in the stalls there, and when they began experimenting with introducing computers, much of my e-mail writing and reading was done at the public library… their service let me do more with the half hour allotted than I often could do at home in twice that with my spotty dial up service.

When I read through the book Our Towns by the Fallows, where they visited various towns and cities throughout the country which seem to be thriving, one thing they pointed out was that all of them seemed to have a vibrant library system. Besides the storehouse of knowledge in the books within, many are important community centers, offering adult education courses, life help for the homeless or destitute, community events like the movie nights in my old town, after-school programs to keep at-risk kids off the streets til their parents get home, you name it.

Albert Einstein once said “the only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the library.” I know that Einstein was a pretty smart dude… so I sure won’t disagree.

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Thankful Thursday VIII – Toilet Brushes

This Thursday I’m thankful for toilet brushes. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.

Well, not exactly for the brushes, although they are useful implements to have hanging around in the bathroom. But one made me feel good yesterday. Perhaps a little explanation is in line.

My mother-in-law is quite elderly. For her age, she’s in great shape and quite feisty but still…she’s a little old lady. My sweetie and I have been actively discouraging her from going out into crowds in the past year with the pandemic raging. So most of her grocery shopping and trips to pick up prescriptions, we’ve been doing. Often she just needs basics – bread, tortillas, eggs, maybe some pork or ground beef. And candles. She loves burning her prayer candles, plain white please. We usually pick her up a few when we see them.

So this week, she needed one or two usual things…and a toilet brush. She still cleans her own bathroom and had thrown away the old one. I got one while doing our family’s shopping and took it over to her. She was happy to get candles, but really excited to get a simple toilet brush and its holder. A five buck plastic item. Useful no doubt, but not the thing of which many dreams are made. But she loved it. She was happy. That of course made me feel quite good in turn. Who knew a plastic brush and holder would bring such joy?

Simple story, simple moral. Sometimes it’s the smallest gestures that make the biggest differences and gifts can mean as much to the giver as the recipient. We all love making a huge difference in the lives of those around us and accomplishing great things. But this Thankful Thursday, I’m reminded of how special run-of-the-mill little favors and gifts can be.

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Thankful Thursday III – A Waxwing Moment

It’s Thankful Thursday again, and today like others is a good day to be thankful. I actually had a draft of today’s ready to go yesterday – and it may see the light of day later – but I had a nice little moment earlier today that I to replace it with.

While out running many errands – many boring errands – grocery shopping, filling up the car, driving a relative to work – I needed to drop off a package at a courier drop-off center in a big box store. I pulled into the parking lot, got a spot at the edge of the lot and found a whole flock of Cedar Waxwings flitting about in the trees right in front of my car. Waxwings are a bird that perhaps could earn the designation “charming”. Small, elegant looking little sparrow-sized birds with a crest like a cardinal and a mask like a Raccoon, and when you see them in the right light and angle, little bright patches of yellow and red. Little birds that have human-like traits of being highly gregarious (you seldom see one waxwing) and a slight tendency towards drunkenness. You see, waxwings like berries more than anything else, and if they’ve fermented on the tree… well, you get tipsy birds. Unlike humans though, the tipsy birds don’t seem to fly at each other or shoot one another.

Anyway, I opened the door of the car and expected them to take off, but instead, a few flew and others kept on looking for berries in the tree and hopping around not far from my feet. I snapped a few photos with my phone which is most definitely not high-def but captures the moment at least. As I did, with the birds flying around me, a car pulled over to the side of the road, window rolled down and a lady yelled out at me “what kind of birds are they?” I called back that they were called waxwings. “They’re adorable” she answered before driving on her way.

It was not a dazzling event, and I was walking into the building three or four minutes later to do the task I had come for. But it was a nice little moment. For a couple of minutes I was not thinking about the best route to avoid traffic to the next stop, money, or anything else other than enjoying the outdoors and the active little birds which were going on about their business of the day. The passerby who noticed and appreciated it encouraged me more.

And that is often the key to being in a good mindset. You don’t win the lottery, get promoted from sweeper to CEO or get to be on the cover of ‘Great People Of The World” magazine everyday. But if you look around you, you probably do get the special little fleeting moments no matter where you are. Learn to enjoy them and you’ll find the mundane becomes a lot more magical.

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Thankful Thursday II : Take Me Out To The Ballgame

This Thursday I’m thankful for baseball being back.

Yes, the boys of summer are back, with all 30 Major League clubs opening up their spring training camps by today. Mind you, not all players have to report to the camps in Florida and Phoenix until month’s end, when the first exhibition games will begin taking place and the first few days usually consist of little more than a handful of players – largely unproven ones eager to compete for a spot on the roster – doing a few stretches and jogging around the field. But still… baseball is back. With it, hints of a long, lovely summer ahead and flashbacks to generations of summers gone by. …

When I lived in Canada, Spring Training held a special place in my heart because it was something hopeful. Winter’s there were long and dark, but when baseball began revving up its engines, there was hope in the air that spring might find a way to arrive after all. It usually beat the first northward bound Robins back by about two weeks. I often aspired to, but never quite made it to, visiting Dunedin (a St. Petersburg suburb that’s training site to my beloved Blue Jays) in March to get a look at the year’s edition of the team up close with a big helping of warm sunshine on the side. This year, for the first time since I moved south, it has that very same appeal, beginning in a week where we’ve been housebound for days after 0-degree weather and two major snow and ice storms. The thought of a sunny afternoon watching a double play unfold is doubly appealing.

I’m unusual as a Canadian. As a small kid, I didn’t mind watching hockey and collected hockey cards like the rest of the boys in my neighborhood, but my heart was with the Boys of Summer. I loved playing ball when I had the chance (my friends who watched me drop ball after ball or run away from incoming flyballs probably didn’t love it as much when I did!), loved watching the few games that were televised back then and poured over the stats on the back of the cards I collected. It seemed the perfect game to me. It was best enjoyed in fine weather, in the sunlight on a grassy field. Lots of math, lots of strategy, lots of big personalities, the game playing itself out as it might without regards to a clock. It was like chess in that…and yes, little nerdy me played chess too! Of course, maybe that wasn’t so unlike other Canadian kids. Baseball trivia buffs are often surprised to find out how many times Toronto, Canada has had the highest attendance of any big league team for the year outdrawing baseball “meccas” like Boston, New York and St. Louis. Back then, for reasons hard to remember, I was a Cincinnati fan and when our family drove back from Florida and crossed the Ohio River, I looked out at the stadium like a Muslim approaching Mecca. That was the house of Pete Rose. Johnny Bench. Joe Morgan.

Of course, as I got a bit older, my hometown (approximately) got its own team and I was soon converted to a Blue Jays loyal. The first few years they were bad, but they played with heart and had cool caps. Then they got good and it got really exciting. When they finally got to the World Series in 1992, life in the city changed. Temporarily and for the better. Everyone was a fan. Everyone wanted to talk about the Jays. Wear a tie with the Blue Jays logo in to work and everyone was your friend. Customers who’d usually complain their order wasn’t ready on time or about a price increase were all smiles discussing that incredible glove of ‘Devo’ or ‘who knew Sprague was that good, eh!’. There were no Liberals or Conservatives, Whites or Blacks, there was just a city of baseball fans.

Of course, since 1993, there’ve been ups and downs for the Toronto fans…more down than up frankly… but a winning streak still has the magical power to unite the city. A lot has changed in the game too. Strategies have changed, computers have largely replaced old-fashioned scouts watching players and there’s less subtlety to the games… fewer bunts, fewer pitchers trying to pick off a runner, more big hitters swinging for the fences with no regard to just getting on base. But still, it’s baseball. America’s pastime.

Hope springs eternal they say, and in spring hope’s eternal for ball fans. Everyone’s in a first-place tie. There’s a long summer of games for that to change during; a long season of “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” being played, just as it was 50, 80 years ago. And after a year of Covid lockdowns, a winter of ice and snow, the idea of the familiar seems rather great.