This Christmas

   If you are a writer in any way, shape or form then it's pretty difficult to view all that goes on during the Christmas and holiday season and not feel compelled to write about it. It's an all-consuming time of year, for a variety of reasons, and one's personal energy is directed towards it and very little else, for the duration.

   The whole season has a marathon quality to it; in order to successfully complete it, you must balance short bursts of energy with stretches of easier running wherein you are able to catch your breath. But you never really rest. If you are not physically involved with all that needs doing, you are at least mentally consumed with Christmas and all its preparation.
   Apart from the actual work involved, it also seems like a time of year for reflection. Christmas always for some reason brings thoughts of Christmases past. Sometimes you remember the gifts you got, sometimes you remember weather and a trip you needed to make, sometimes you recall a relative you were able to see for the first time in many years.
   Your remembrances of Christmas when you were a child are likely vastly different than the ones as an adult. Mine as a child were strictly of the magical variety--the almost unbearable excitement of bedtime on Christmas Eve, the irresistible urge to peel back the wrapped corners of presents, just to catch a glimpse of what was underneath, the appearance in the house of mandarin oranges, waking up Christmas morning to a stocking lying on the floor beside our beds, the laying out of milk and cookies for Santa and the discovery of elf footprints on the windowsills. Pretty heady stuff for a couple of young boys.
   As an adult, of course, Christmas took on a whole different significance. There is a space of time wherein you are an adult without kids and Christmas, more than anything, becomes a time when you travel back home to briefly reconnect with family. This may be only a trip across town or it may be a trip across the country. It is a time in your life when you have begun to view your adult parents as an adult yourself. This can sometimes be an experience.
   Then, at some point, you hopefully will begin to experience Christmas as a parent for the first time in your life. This is a stage when suddenly the magic around Christmas can creep back into your life, as you begin to impart it to your children.
   As you then get older and your kids have figured out the whole "Santa" thing (for you "still-believers" out there I am not going to reveal what the "Santa" thing is...) Christmas may begin to take on new significance.
   Suddenly you are trying to cram Christmas into an already jam-packed life and in an effort to maintain the spirit of the season and provide positive experiences for people, you try to accommodate everyone. When (and if) you make it through this experience, you are likely exhausted and wondering why you do this to yourself every year.
   I am at a point in my life when suddenly I am wondering whether Jesus even actually existed and, if he did, was he all he is said to be. Celebrating his birth to the extent we do has now become problematic for me.
   On Christmas Eve, I found myself in a church with friends and family, taking part in a candlelight service. My forays into churches for the last thirty years or so have been relegated to weddings and funerals so this was a bit of a different experience for me. I know what the idea was. The idea was for a couple of us adults to recapture some of the Xmas magic we remembered from growing up. Also, I think part of the idea was pass on some of it to our kids who were present.

   It was a "nice" service and probably even nicer for true believers. It was also fairly easy to appreciate the sense of community involved. At some point, we recited the Lord's Prayer. This was not a problem for the adults. We realized at the end of the service, though, that our kids had no idea what the words were. In a way, this surprised me but, in a way, it didn't. The Lord's Prayer has long since been removed from  schools and, barring regular church attendance, there is no reason that a young person would be familiar with it. I, myself, felt strange and somewhat hypocritical reciting it, due to the afore-mentioned lack of belief. All in all, it was a strange kind of experience.
   If anything, the value of Christmas for me is that it is a reason to get together. You take the time to think about your family and friends and their situations and arrange to be with them, even if only for an evening. Regardless of the reason, this can never really be a a bad thing. I think one of the best parts of this Christmas was having my two grown boys sharing the same room with us again. This happens way too infrequently and is something to be savoured when it does. Strange to think that it may have been an imaginary child from two thousand years ago that was the reason for it!
  
  
  

The Last Thing I Wanted To Write About

   My modus operandi for writing blog posts is pretty basic--I realize that a thought is consistently running through my head and, if I think I have anything worthwhile to say about it, I sit down and get busy writing.
   I have been avoiding this process for the last few days, however, simply because the most persistent thought in my head has been the massacre of twenty young children.
   This, I think, has been inescapable for most of us. It's the time of year when we should all be involved in some kind of holiday preparation but the pall hanging over Newtown, Connecticut surely has enveloped us all. Random acts of violence are not uncommon anymore but this particular act hits harder and more bitterly than most.
   The fact that we lost children and lost them in such a manner is what rends us. It would have been horrific enough to have lost them in a school bus accident or a building collapse but the notion that an individual planned their deaths and then carried out that plan seems unfathomable.

   Along with all this pain comes politics. In our agony, we feel the desire to take a line of action that will fix things, prevent the pain from afflicting us again. Amidst all this, what you get is reaction mixed with over-reaction and, quite possibly, inaction.
   It's difficult to say whether or not, politically, things will change in the States. At the moment there are calls for greater gun control and there are calls for a greater mental health care presence. Regardless, in a world full of evil ways to commit murder, the unthinkable will occasionally continue to befall us.
   Volumes have been written already about this tragedy and most of my inner conflicting feelings have been voiced. In light of this, I have nothing new to offer, really. My first reaction is that the perpetrator should be as anonymous as possible. I truly don't know that we have anything else to learn about what motivates people to perform such acts and to have this person's face, name and history pasted all over the place seems to serve no purpose. Frankly, if there were a way to expunge him totally from our collective consciousness, then that would be fine with me. At that point, we could concentrate solely on lives of the children and the teachers who were lost.
   The twenty children, in an effort to explain what has happened principally to other children who are still with us, are now being referred to as angels. This seems to be the most hopeful outcome we can have for them. I am blessed with never having lost a child so I don't know how much suffering this angelic declaration alleviates. I suspect it helps, but not much, and maybe not this soon. My own belief is that these children are somewhere now where they will be eternally safe and loved. Perhaps this is not far off from being angels.

   I could have gotten away with not writing anything about this tragedy. I am not sure that anyone wishes to read anything more about it, anyway. Given the prevalence with which it has been in my thoughts lately, however, I would have been dishonest not to address it here, in writing.
   I am posting a picture of the victims, along with their names. This certainly needs doing and perhaps is reason enough for this post. Their killer will be nameless, at least in this forum. This also needs doing.

Carving

   Yesterday we celebrated the Buren family Christmas, at my brother-in-law Rick's place. What you end up with is a house full of busy adults making dinner preparations and a house full of busy kids being, well, busy!
   Christmas dinner prep has always been a time-honoured tradition, generally with a host of grown-ups (sort of) shoulder-to-shoulder in some one's kitchen doing the where-are-your-serving-bowls-are-the-potatoes-ready ballet. There is a madhouse kind of feel to things somehow and it always seems slightly miraculous to me that a meal actually emerges from all the chaos.
   And in the midst of the chaos, there is imbibing, laughter, reminiscing and a healthy dose of family solidarity. There are not too many other occasions during the year when families are able to take the time to get together like this and, unfortunately minus one bro-in-law, Jim and his family, we were able to accomplish the feat last night.
   At some point in the dinner preparations, there comes the moment when the turkey needs carving. For whatever reason, this has always seemed the most ceremonial part of the Christmas meal to me. The carving responsibility seems to always fall on the shoulders of the man of the house and I guess this is part of the ceremonial quality it holds for me.
   When I was a kid, I have very clear recollections of my Dad at the dinner table, sharpening the carving knife with a sharpening steel, the metallic swish-swish sound making this magical. I'm sure that I associated this sound with the wonderful meal which always followed and just the general excitement for a young boy at Christmas. The sharpening steel itself was always something that intrigued me as a boy, I liked the way it felt and the fact that, as a utensil, it was so different from anything else in the drawer. I would often take it out at other times of the year and drag butter knives along it just to hear the sound. I can remember my brother Bob and I sitting at the dinner table with our knives and forks, swishing them together, simply for the sound they made.
   It didn't even occur to me until I was an adult, however, what my Dad was actually doing, that there was an actual purpose behind all the swish-swish and arm-waving at the head of the table. I had no idea that the knife was being sharpened so that it could slice through the meat that much more efficiently. I now have new-found respect for the whole process.
   At some point when I was a teenager, Dad discovered electric knives. This changed the carving dynamic quite a bit, as you can imagine. Gone was the swish-swish of steel on steel, this being replaced by the bbbbbrrrrttttt of the electric knife. It wasn't quite as traditional as the old way but Dad loved this knife and I'm sure the idea that he was actually able to bring a power tool right to the dining room table and then use it there in front of an audience held enormous appeal.
   I guess I must have watched my Dad carve the bird enough over the years that I somehow was pretty well able to take on the task myself, when the responsibility at some point fell on my shoulders. Carving a turkey was and is no big deal but, at the same time, I don't do it with the same kind of panache as my Dad. He always did the carving at the head of the dining table, with all present. He would go around the table, asking each person what kind of meat they wanted and how much. He would then carve the bird to order. These days, I carve the whole turkey all at once in the kitchen and present the results on platters which then end up on the table. This seems to work fairly well but, I admit, does lack a little of the old formality and ambiance.
   What I have described has been my family Christmas dinner experience and I had made some sort of assumption that this was true of almost every family. In comparing notes with Doralyn while writing this, however, I discovered that this was not the case in her family. Traditionally, her mother carved the turkey in the kitchen and then the cut meat was brought to the table. Not a bad tradition, kind of mirrors our current one, and eliminates some of the "theatrics" at the same time. My experience is that it gets harder and harder anymore to get everyone sitting down and ready to eat all at the same time anyway, there always seems to be someone who needs to head back into the kitchen for some forgotten item or such. With large families, such as last night, there sometimes needs to be two separate tables, as well. Hard to build a lot of carving tradition around a setup like this!
   Rick, by the way, did a fine job of carving last night. This might even have been one of the first times he's done it but the results were great. It's hard to beat a home-cooked turkey dinner and when you have a bunch of people helping out with side dishes you get to feel the love from all over the place!
  

Scars

   I had brain surgery when I was about five days old. Brain surgery of different kinds is quite a common occurrence these days and London is one of the best places in the world for it.
   I had my brain surgery, however, in 1953. I try not to think about this too much, having delicate surgery like that back in the early fifties. The possible outcome of the surgery was guarded enough that my parents thought it necessary to make sure I was at least baptized beforehand.
   The reason for the surgery, as I understand, was that there was a fear that I was hydrocephalic. This fear was unfounded. As my Dad was so fond of saying, "They went in there and found nothing!" There are pictures of me when I was just a few months old and the healing areas on either side of my head were still visible. They actually kind of looked like devil horns.
   Of course, there were scars.

   I have a dim recollection of being able to see these scars when I was young and had a brush cut. I remember the marks but I really didn't connect them with anything, it wasn't until I was an adult and had been told the whole story that I made the connection between the scars and the surgery. At some point, though, my hair got longer and the scars were more or less forgotten.
  Now, they are back. My hair has receded over the years to the point where the scars are clearly visible. They have grown with me over the years as well. They are much longer now than when I was a little boy.
   Thankfully, I am at that point in my life where their presence on my head does not bother me, they are certainly nothing to be ashamed of. No one has even ever mentioned them to me (although they might look a little more closely now, I imagine) and I myself have to look pretty closely just to see where they begin and end.


Not THE bird bath...but you should run AROUND them!

   My other favourite scar is the one on  my right leg. It's about ten inches long, shaped like an elongated "s" and, this far removed from the initial incident, is almost impossible to see. When I was a teenager, my friends and I were playing football in a friend's backyard. We were using his neighbours' back yards as end zones and when I went running through one of them to catch a pass I ran into a plastic birdbath. The birdbath shattered and one of its jagged edges ran up the inside of my leg. It was a deep enough gash to leave a scar but not deep enough for stitches and was a topic of conversation for a few months, as it healed. After the injury, I went back to the neighbour's house and retrieved the shattered top of it, with permission, and hung it on the wall of my bedroom, kind of a trophy I guess.

A surgical clip in some one's brain

    Back to the brain surgery for a minute. Only about five or six years ago, I had a CT scan on my head. My family doctor called me at home one evening a day or two after this, much concern in his voice. He asked me if I'd forgotten to tell him anything about my medical history. I told him I didn't think so and he then went on to tell me that the CT scan had clearly showed a metallic surgical clip still embedded in my head! It then clicked on me about the surgery I'd had as a baby, something I hadn't even thought of mentioning to my GP. I couldn't quite understand his big concern but then he said that if I ever had a MRI done on my head for any reason, I'd be in big trouble, given that a strong magnetic force would be interacting with the metal already in my head. I have filed this one away, believe me.
   So this is my little story about scars. These are physical scars and are simply a part of you, the same way your eyes might be blue or your hair could be brown. Generally, there is little we can do about them and however much they might bother you, you can rest assured they bother the important people in your life that much less or not at all. Revel in their uniqueness and then revel in your own.
  

Happy Whatever Days!

   Here and there on Facebook these days, I've come across a variety of posts wherein opinions have been offered as to whether we should be saying "Merry Christmas" to one another during this festive season or perhaps should be using the more politically correct "Happy Holidays". I've also run across people decrying the use of "X" in "Xmas". Then there is "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season" and "Let's Put Christ Back In Christmas".

   I get the point people are trying to make. There is a pretty general feeling that we've gotten away from the "true meaning" of Christmas and have simply given in to the commerce of the season. As North America becomes even more of an ethnic cultural melting pot there will be more and more pressure to homogenize the Christmas season so as not to offend sensibilities along the way. This is difficult for many of us to accept. Not only has Christmas lost much of the significance it had for us as kids, we are now being told it's not acceptable to share our Christmas spirit with people using traditional greetings anymore!
   Honestly, I refuse to get angry about this. If I feel like wishing someone a Merry Christmas, I will simply do that. If I happen to know that the particular person is of a different faith and celebrates the season under a different name I will try and use that greeting, if I know what it is. If I don't know what it is, I might revert to something a little more generic.

   Christmas already has a pretty tenuous grip on my happiness, as it is. As a kid, naturally enough, I was always excited about it. As an adult, though, there are way too many stressors to be dealt with. Family get-togethers are almost impossible to co-ordinate, multiple work parties need to be scheduled around, perfect gifts need buying, and any pre-existing tensions are only heightened at this time of year. The list goes on, I don't think I need to itemize them totally.
   Every year I tell myself that whatever it is about Christmas that bothers me the most I won't fall prey to it again this year. Then, before I know it, I find myself just as engaged in the whole Christmas merry-go-round as I have been all the other years.
   It's not that I object to celebrating Christmas. What I would like to be able to do, however, are all the things I'm not feeling like I'm being forced to do. Whatever they are.
   Okay, I've gotten away a little bit from the whole "Merry Christmas" versus "Happy Holidays" thing I originally wanted to write about.
   When I really think about it, me wishing someone a "Merry Christmas" isn't as much a supposition that they will be celebrating the same kind of Christmas I will be as it is a wish that they will simply enjoy the same kind of feelings I hope to enjoy during this particular time of year, no matter what kind of religion they observe.
   In this way, were a Jewish person to wish me a Happy Hanukkah, I would still get their meaning or intent. And still be as thankful for the sentiment.

"Neanderings" Turns Two!

   Next week marks the second anniversary of "Neanderings". As with most marked passages of time, it has arrived much more quickly than I might have imagined. About a year ago I sat here and mused on "Neanderings" first year so now some thoughts on its second.

My Dad, Kenneth Baker

   First off, I blogged a lot more in Year Two, probably twice as much. Very early on in the second year, my Dad became ill and eventually passed away. For better or worse, this had me blogging almost constantly. As much as anything, I was attempting to keep Dad's friends and family abreast of what was going on with him. At the same time, it was a very cathartic process for me and I'm glad I had that kind of outlet. I think that many of the people who were reading these particular blogs likely and hopefully were discovering the same thing--the string of them ended being pretty well the most well-read blogs the past year.


Cristopher Hitchens

   The blog post, however, which topped them all in terms of readership was the one I wrote last December entitled "Death of an Atheist". This chronicled the passing of Chris Hitchens, a well-known writer and avowed atheist. At that time, I'd recently read a book of his called "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" a book in which he attributes many of the society's ills to organized religions around the world. Currently, this post has been viewed close to 300 times, whereas most of my other posts average around 20. I am not sure why it's been so popular, it might have had something to do with Hitchens' celebrity status and people who were doing random searches on him ending up occasionally at "Neanderings".
   For much of the rest of this past year I simply continued to write about whatever popped into my head--as the blog description says, "random thoughts on random subjects". This took me to such places as coffee shops, storage units, doctor's offices, hospital rooms and football fields. You got snippets of opera, poetry and song. Sex and death popped up every once in awhile and you found out how I feel about some of the Christians in the world. I talked about saying goodbyes--both to kids who have moved and cats who have left this world. You read about me walking and you read about me running. I offered my opinion on some current events and and I blogged about blogging (about blogging!) I even blogged about coffee mugs, for goodness sake.

Strides

   I wrote about running more than once in "Neanderings" and realized after awhile that I had all sorts of thoughts on the subject. I then thought why not start a whole new blog, devoted to my running adventure? This then became "Strides", my other blog, which began back in late October. So far, it's been a fun blog to write and I'm enjoying it!
   So that about caps it off for Year 2 of "Neanderings". I've blogged a lot but the one thing I haven't done is make any inroads on "serious" writing, whatever that means. I guess I'd really like to write something that has a story to it, even something short. This, however, would require a little more discipline and time management than a blog does. I can blog in front of the T.V., with wife and kids hovering about, and answer the phone and e-mails all at the same time. I don't think this would work well for story-telling. Discipline, discipline, discipline--where do I get me some?!
   Anyway, cheers to you all, and many thanks for reading and the occasional comment or words of encouragement. It is nice knowing you're not writing in a total vacuum. If any of you have ideas for blog material then please pass them on. In the meantime, enjoy the holiday season and we'll talk soon!
  
  

Forgetting

   I am almost sixty and my mind is changing. It has been for quite awhile now and the process has been a fairly slow and gradual sort of thing. More than anything, I am forgetting.
   Forgetting is nothing new to me but now it is happening in the blink of an eye. It is happening in the space of time it takes for something to travel from my left hand to my right or for me to walk from one end of the room to the other.

It's not THIS bad........yet.

   It takes almost nothing to distract me these days. A fleeting thought will do it. If I could control the fleeting thoughts, I would. I want nothing more than to replace empty toilet paper rolls but the fleeting thoughts prevent this. I want to close the kitchen cupboard doors when I'm done with them but, again, my own thoughts get in the way.
   It seems I have no way of prioritizing what goes on in my head, no way of placing one thought process above the others even long enough to simply to get one thing done.
   I realize that this is not an uncommon occurrence in the aging process. This does not particularly console me. Even though some of the time it is mildly amusing, when you begin to extrapolate it becomes downright terrifying! For that reason I try not to extrapolate too much. I try not to think about just how much worse this could eventually get. I sometimes envision walking into a room, not knowing why I walked into the room, not even recognizing the room and being frozen there, so unsure of my thought processes that I have no idea what to do next.
   At the best of times, my mind has not been organized. I have never been one to make lists, create reminders, use datebooks faithfully or make copious plans for the future. Eventually you learn to cope, though, and if your friends, family and co-workers are aware of your special abilities in this area you can get by not too badly.
   It seems, however, that the best of times may be slipping by. My forgetting from one second to the next has impacted me finally, and not just the people around me. I have had the opportunity to watch my Dad's mind slowly fail in his later years and I can see myself headed there. I think I could live with the speed with which his Alzheimer's crept up on him, if it happened to me the same way. But what if it happens to me so much faster?
   I am at the point now where I have adopted a what you see is what you get kind of attitude. People will occasionally ask me to do something for them at some point in the future. I take care to remind them of how tenuous an arrangement this is. Generally we come up with some kind of plan for reminding me closer to the time. People have come to understand this about me, for the most part.
   For my part, I have made some attempts to re-structure how I think. As an example, if I am driving to the other end of the city and know that one I need to make one or two stops along the way I stop thinking of it as a trip across the city and I start thinking about it as a trip to the first place I need to stop at, on my way. And then I hope that I can maintain this mindset long enough to actually make that stop. If I set my car keys or travel mug down somewhere unusual, I will try to make a special note of the uniqueness of that spot. If I take my car keys out of the ignition but then need to sit in the car for awhile arranging things, I put the keys somewhere on my person so that I don't end up  locking them in the car. I spend a lot of time stopped in mid-action, contemplating the possible results of that action.
   Memory aids are great--if you remember to use them. I have a date book that I use principally for work. It is, however, only helpful if I remember to take it with me, remember to input times and dates, remember to refer to it, remember where I left it and remember that I have one. There are electronic reminding devices--cellphones, i-pods and watches that will all message you a reminder of important events. If you can remember how to program them.
   Most of the really important things, I remember. If they are part of a routine, this makes it easier. Routines sometimes get interrupted, though, and my ability to remember then becomes an issue. If you are a hockey player, there is nothing much more important than your helmet, stick and gloves. At various times, I have forgotten all of these. If you are headed off to work, there is nothing much more important than your wallet, watch and phone. Once again, at various times, I have left all of these at home.
   When I look back at all these instances of forgetfulness, what seems obvious is that I forgot mainly because my routine had been disturbed. Perhaps I forgot my hockey gloves because I set them off in a different area to dry. Maybe I forgot my watch because I had to set it down on a counter to wash some dishes. Somehow or other I got on to the next step of my routine, things seemed normal, and I let the house without something important.
   What is the very worst of all this is that a fading memory takes along with it some self-worth. People, particularly your loved ones, see you differently suddenly. You seem less trustworthy to them. Perhaps an important responsibility is shuffled on to someone else's shoulders. You are checked up on, sometimes needlessly, sometimes necessarily. It is sometimes hard not be viewed as foolish, rather than forgetful. It does not mean that you are any less loved, it just feels uncomfortably different than the way it always has.
   This, then, is my ongoing struggle. I try to do things which occupy, and therefore strengthen, my mind as much as possible. I count blogging as one of those things. I love word games and puzzles. I am quite willing to explore whatever holistic approaches there may be to retaining my memory. My contemporaries are aging as well and I can see subtle little signs in other people of some of the same things I am experiencing. This leaves me feeling a little less alone in all of this.

   We are rather at the mercy of our brains. I know that forgetting can sometimes come across as uncaring, spiteful or malicious but I am trying to learn not to accept the responsibility for this. It is what it is, I truly intended to change the used-up toilet paper roll (in fact, I was almost looking forward to it) but this just didn't happen. I know that many times I have changed the roll and I have started the dishwasher and I have attended the meeting and I have brought my mug safely home and, for the moment, I am happy with this. The quintessential me is still in here, alive and content with who I am and this is something which will not change for a very long time!
   
  
  
  

Bond

Sean Connery-the original Bond

   This week, we have been inundated with Bond--James Bond. This as a result of all the hype over the impending release of the latest Bond film, "Skyfall". It has received nothing but rave reviews and even I am looking forward to seeing it.
   I have yet to see any of the Daniel Craig "Bond" movies. This has been more of an oversight than anything as I have been quite intrigued and will likely be checking them out soon, one way or the other.
   In the meantime, it is quite interesting to surrender to the hype and investigate it, at least a little. The Free Press here in London spent the last week publishing surveys such as who was the best Bond ever, who was the best villain, the best title song, etc.
   I have been watching James Bond movies since they first came out, back in the sixties, and I have seen all (or at least large chunks of all) of them. As importantly, I have read all the Bond books written by Ian Fleming. I read them with the same kind of passion as I'd had for the Hardy Boys books. It's almost as if they were the next step up in the puberty process and they were pretty heady stuff for a young lad such as myself!
   Because of this long association with Bond, it is interesting to watch the recent goings-on, the surveys and opinion polls. It is particularly interesting to listen to people try to rate the all-time best Bond portrayal. This is not the first time this has happened, there have been enough different actors playing James Bond that it kind of lends itself to this sort of thing.

Daniel Craig, the "new" guy

   In the past, whenever the question has been asked, the general consensus was that Sean Connery was the quintessential Bond. What I find fascinating now is that this seems to have changed. According to the surveys, now Daniel Craig has taken on the mantle of being the best Bond ever and "Skyfall" has been described as the best of the Bond movies. Now, I haven't seen "Skyfall", nor have I seen any of the Craig performances so I'm not really in a position to offer an opinion. My feeling is that Craig is more than acceptable as James Bond and I am interested in seeing him in the role.
   Acceptable as Craig might be, for me, there will always be a soft spot for Connery. They say that your favourite Bond is your first Bond. Sean Connery was the actor who laid out the Bond template and he is who I visualized as I was reading Fleming's books. In the interim, I have appreciated Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton and, to a lesser extent, Roger Moore--all of whom have played Bond more than once. I hesitate to even mention George Lazenby.
   What they are currently saying about "Skyfall" is that it has not only the wild action you've come to expect from a Bond film but also extremely strong, three-dimensional performances by the principal actors. This has not always been true of Bond films. It also takes the theatrical Bond back closer to the Bond depicted by Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming, James Bond's originator

   If you have read the books, you know James Bond as a very conflicted individual. He is not superhuman, he falls in love sometimes when he shouldn't, and he can be brainwashed. He is an assassin who occasionally develops soft spots for his targets. He makes copious mistakes. The James Bond of the movies has not always been the James Bond of the books. It appears as though Sam Mendes, "Skyfall's" director, has gone above and beyond in humanizing the main characters and this is why the film works.
   It's hard to imagine the Bond series of films ending. It may not end any time soon. If this is true, then, at some point, they will be looking for a replacement for Daniel Craig. Already this week, there was an article in the paper as to who Craig's successor might be. Sometime in the future, there may be a major controversy as to who was the best Bond--Craig or the new guy? Until I learn otherwise, though, I'm sticking with Connery... 
     

Carsongs

   There are songs I sing that I only sing in the car. I spend a lot of time in my car and, for much of that time, am alone. This gives me the perfect opportunity to break into song.
   I have been singing essentially the same songs for years now. They are songs that, for a lack of a better term, have always struck a chord with me. Many are songs from old albums my parents used to play. A couple of them are folk songs from a live Harry Belafonte album, "Hene ma tov" and "La Bamba". Ironically, one is an Israeli song and the other has whole sections in Spanish, the translations of which I have never actually known but they are both melodic and beautiful and I am happy to sing them anyway.

   Harry Chapin plays a prominent part in my car songbook. "Cats in the Cradle" and "Taxi" (yes, the whole thing--minus the high part) get a lot of play. I also do a specialty version of "Taxi" in high speed, it takes only about a minute and 45 seconds and is good for a giggle, although only one other human has ever heard it and he is with the angels as we speak.
   Various songs from the original album version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" get frequent airplay, my favourite is "Hosanna" (I sound like Jesus and I sound like Caiphas...)
   There are several songs I like to think of as perfect songs. Their perfection has something to do with their message, their poetry and their symmetry. Included in this particular list of car songs is Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy", Traffic's "John Barleycorn", Paul Simon's "Duncan" and Paul Stookey's "The Wedding Song (There is Love)".
   Lastly, there are my songs, songs I've made up, some serious, some pretty light-hearted and some downright silly. Some I wrote when I was a teenager and then on into my early twenties, mostly about girls and work and many of them, to coin a phrase, angst-driven. After I discovered that my Mum's remains were interred in common ground at Mt. Pleasant cemetery, I ended up writing a song called "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". I wrote this simply while driving around, without having to put a lot of deep thought into it. Generally, this is when the best songs happen. At the other end of the spectrum, I wrote a song about a guy whose girlfriend won't have sex with him because, as it turns out, she's in love with a tennis player. To make matters even worse for the young man, the tennis player turns out to be Martina Navratilova. Probably the crowning achievement of my car songwriting career has been a take-off on Puccini's great aria from "Turandot"--Nessun Dorma. In my version, the title becomes "I Knew Norma".

   Unfortunately, no one has heard or will likely ever hear any of these self-written car songs. The glory of singing in the car is the anonymity and relative privacy. I do tend to turn down the volume a touch at stoplights and in slow-moving traffic. Once I'm back up to speed, though, all bets are off.
   So if you see me in traffic someday and it looks like I'm talking to a passenger in a very exaggerated and demonstrative sort of way and you look and you notice that there is no passenger...well, that's just me and my car songs!
  
  

Fear of heights

   I believe my first misadventure with heights occurred back when I was about four years old, or thereabouts. There was a swing in a tree out behind the duplex we lived in, in Youngstown, Ohio. My dad was pushing me in it and I was going higher and higher and suddenly was terrified.
   I don't know what terrified me. I know that at the apex of the swing there was really nothing between me and the ground. I'm just not sure how I knew that was a bad thing.

don't look down

   Perhaps I fell one day, from someplace high. Perhaps I fell that day, it was long enough ago that my memory is perhaps cloudy enough to not remember the possibly almost tragic result of my ride on that swing. For whatever reason, the fear of being in a high place has been with me for a long time.
   Fortunately, I have been able to avoid situations where I might actually have to deal with this fear. Any time I have had to deal with it, it has been something which crept up on me that I was unable to plan ahead for.


   Back in 1973, my Dad and my brother Bob and I made a trip back to Gibsons, B.C. for a visit. My mum had passed away in the spring and we just wanted to connect with the family we had there. One day, my Dad, my Uncle Keith and my brother and I decided to climb Soames Hill. Soames Hill towers over the main harbour at Gibsons and provides a wonderful view of the town and surrounding islands. We set out for its base one afternoon and began climbing. At the beginning, it was a fairly gradual ascent. Little by little, though, things got steeper and the landscape more difficult to traverse. At some point, I found myself inching my way up a sheer rock face. It had been a path which simply narrowed, got steeper and then petered out into merely footholds. I had been looking up for the most part, trying to find the easiest way. There stopped being easy ways and I made the mistake of looking down. I was about a hundred feet up in the air and knew, from where I was and what was below me, that I would not survive a fall from there. I was paralyzed, almost sick to my stomach, and seemingly unable to go up or back down. Eventually, my Dad and Uncle talked me through taking very small steps forward and I finally found myself at the top of the rock face. From there, things were easy and we ended up at the peak of Soames Hill, looking out over Gibsons. We took pictures up there but none of them contain any of the real terror I'd undergone getting there.

The view I survived to see.

   I think little bits of that day have followed me around--a watermark of fear had been created which has been etched indelibly on my psyche. Part of the dynamic going on was the feeling I had that falling off that rock face would have ended the almost unbearable fear I had been experiencing. I now wonder how many other people who might have been in similar but perhaps even more dire and inescapable situations simply decided to jump and end the fear.
   I now approach high rise balcony railings very gingerly and test them before I actually lean up against them. I then am able to lean out and look over or simply take in the view. Often, however, I almost forget what I am doing and suddenly what feels like tiny electrical shocks pass up the backs of my legs as I realize once again just how high up I am. I almost imagine there is no railing and I am suspended in space, then falling.
   In what seems to me an unthinkable and almost evil  incongruity, it is much easier to climb to a high place than it is to get back down. I found myself needing to get on to our roof last weekend to check things out before the remnants of Hurricane Sandy blew through. Getting up on the roof was not an issue. My unreasonable fear kicked in, however, when it was time to get back down. I had had a dream earlier that week that I found myself suddenly on a rickety and narrow footbridge suspended over a several hundred foot drop into a river.  I was terrified and wanted to jump, to end the fear. Little bits of this dream came back to me while looking down from the edge of the roof. Jumping off the roof, in a twisted way, seemed almost preferable to the fear involved in being suspended up high for the three or four seconds it would take to orient myself on the top of the ladder. I approached the ladder more than once and had to back off. I have been on the roof several times before and had to keep reminding myself of this as I finally negotiated my way back down.

   I even found it difficult to to Google fear of heights, in order to get a pic or two for this post. It is way too easy to superimpose myself into many of the pictures you find when you do this particular search. Each and every time I got that same electrical pulse up the backs of my legs and an almost metallic taste in my mouth, in my fear.
   This loathing of heights generally does not impede my ability to function normally on a daily basis (apart from making it a bit of an adventure to clean my eaves troughs) and I have never had any particular need to address it in any corrective way. The technical term for a fear of heights is acrophobia. There is apparently some debate as to its cause and treatment. Some believe it occurs as the result of an early childhood trauma, others believe it is an innate part of a person that they are born with. Some believe it has something to do with how we process the visual cues we need in order to perform motor activities. As a brief example, the visual cues available to me at the top of the ladder (grey sky, other rooftops) are vastly different than the ones at the bottom of the ladder (solid earth being one of them).

   Fear of heights is not something I am particularly ashamed of. It is certainly common enough. And it almost makes sense, to have some level of fear of potentially dangerous situations. At least up to the point where it paralyzes you.
   So you will never see me working on a skyscraper and you will never see me piloting a hot air balloon and you will never see me rock climbing in the Grand Canyon. My friends will all be in low places and, hopefully, the only lofty things I will need to deal with will be my aspirations!
  

Hurricane!

    I've been spending a lot of time lately blogging away on "Strides" and enjoying the fresh taste of it quite a bit. It feels as though I've been a little neglectful of "Neanderings", however,  so I've sort been on the lookout for a good blog topic for here.
   I've been wandering around, going what to write about, what to write about, what is there that's kind of new and different? And then a hurricane hits, Hurricane Sandy actually, like from God, or something!


 

   Well, at least it's supposed to hit here pretty soon. It's just before six o'clock in the evening and the wind's getting pretty strong. The main part of whatever is left of the hurricane is supposed to rear its head here late this evening. It's also supposed to stick around for awhile, which I guess is a little unusual and a little more concerning as well.


...carry the groceries in a hurricane!

You should really help your wife...

   We feel we're at least a little prepared which means, to us, that we ran the dishwasher, so that we would have something clean to eat our uncooked food off of, in the event of a lengthy power failure. Hopefully, this will get us through...
   Right now it's just a little after eight o'clock in the evening, it's dark and the wind has picked up tremendously. On Facebook, friends of friends on the eastern seaboard are already without power. A friend of mine earlier on had his patio umbrella fly out of its base, smashing the glass table top. I can only imagine that, in this area, there will be many, many more stories like this. Of course, I'm hoping this is as serious as it gets, lots of destruction is nothing to make light of.
   At this point, Hurricane Sandy is no longer a hurricane and has been downgraded to a bad storm. A real bad storm, from looking at the video. I went out a little while ago to try and get some pics or video but nothing doing, just too dark. Maybe in the morning, if I'm not looking for my car...
  
     

Jocks: Part Two

   In the previous post, I began to describe to you how I was initiated into the world of jocks. I purposely attempted to keep the tone light and hopefully somewhat amusing. The longer I wrote, however, the more there seemed to be to write about and I realized that not much about it was light and amusing. So I saved it for today.
   If you have spent any appreciable amount of time being around jocks for whatever reason then you've probably seen something ugly. This has probably happened on a team you've played for, on another team you played against, as a spectator or perhaps as a friend or relative of someone on a team somewhere.
   The ugly thing you saw was an athlete or possibly even a fan who simply forgot who, what or where they were and acted reprehensibly. They shouted an insult, they made an obscene gesture, they physically assaulted someone. Subconsciously, they reasoned that their mere presence at a sporting event gave them licence to act in a manner that, if it had occurred almost anywhere else in public, would have gotten them totally ostracized, fired or thrown in jail. If you have been lucky enough to have avoided any of this personally then it is still more than likely that you've seen an example of it on t.v., in the newspapers, or on the internet.

   I have spent about fifty years being involved in sports one way or another, as a parent, as a viewer or as an active participant. It is clearly the jock mentality occasionally rearing its ugly head that is my least favourite aspect of having been involved for so long.
   It is probably unnecessary to spend a lot of time here analyzing why the jock/violence mentality exists. It is a very multi-faceted issue involving, I believe, psychology, sociology, economics, and even sexuality. Regardless of the reasons for their existence, it still bugs me that I run into these knobs or am assailed in other ways by their mindless antics.
   In the blog previous to this, I talked about my trials and tribulations with the jocks at Oakridge, my high school. In a blog I posted back in early May, entitled "Bullies", I described an experience I had as a hockey parent many years ago. I had been with my sons in a dressing room after a game and one of the mothers was frantically trying not to be the last parent left in the dressing room. The reason for her fear was that her estranged and physically abusive husband was in the arena and she was terrified at the prospect of possibly ending up being alone with him at some point. What I didn't mention was that the abusive husband had also been on the Oakridge high school hockey team during my tenure there. He wasn't someone I knew personally but, at the same time, it was disturbing to think that a high school contemporary of mine had gone on to this kind of a relationship with the mother of his children. It was also hard to disassociate this man from the sports environment, the only environment in which I was familiar with him.
   Obviously, sports is not the reason why people abuse. Just as often, I suspect, sports plays a role in stopping abuse. It`s just that I have personally seen some of the nicest, most mild-mannered people go all gonzo once you get them into a sports setting.
   I play a lot of ball hockey. We pay to play, there are no salaries involved, and there is no fame resting on the results of games. And yet there is still belligerence and ugliness. There are players out there who will berate you for every little mistake. There are also players who have invested way too much of their manhood into the outcomes of even small little battles, let alone the outcomes of games or seasons. I was involved in a game once and one of our players and one of their players got into a minor altercation in the corner. The rest of the play headed towards the other end but these two guys walked back, jawing at each other. In a classic prelude to a hockey fight, one guy`s glove "facewashes" the other guy and this is reciprocated. Before you know it, fists are flying. Their guy is about three inches taller and forty pounds (all muscle) heavier and the fight is over very quickly, with their guy on the floor on top of our guy. At this point, the ref jumps in and basically grabs their guy. While being grabbed by the ref, their guy still manages to haul our guy up of the floor and then starts kneeing him in the head! To our league's credit, their guy was suspended for about a year and a half for this. This is better than time in jail, which is really what should have happened.
   I tell my wife, Doralyn, about stuff like this and she then needs me to explain it to her. She wants to know why it happens. It is hard to come up with a plausible explanation. As close as I can come is that I think sports is sometimes an arena wherein you can revisit your lost hopes and dreams. In an effort to live up to those lost hopes and dreams some over-compensation occurs. If, as growing up, you never won a game,  you never were able to play your best or make it to the big leagues, then making a mark for yourself in a municipal hockey league or recreational baseball or some other amateur sporting endeavour is really all you have left. Unfortunately, sometimes the easiest way to do this is by picking a fight, shouting out a slur or putting your fist through a window.

   I occasionally wonder what happened to the other jocks at high school. I do know that they are not all still alive. I also know that the vast majority of them probably ended up with decent jobs, raised great families, and suffered their own triumphs and the usual amount of tragedies. If somehow or other they provided roadblocks to me or anyone else over forty years ago I'm pretty sure they were unaware of it. I'm also pretty sure they had their own insecurities, high school is like that. It is sometimes difficult, however, not to lump all of them in together. I myself played on a handful of sports teams, perhaps someone out there thinks I'm a jock, perhaps I impacted some one's life in a way I'll never know about or understand. In the previous blog I talked about having a crush on the same cheerleader who was the girlfriend of the captain of the football team. Well, maybe that cheerleader liked me...
      
  
  

Jocks

My least favourite kind of jock...

   I encountered jocks for the first time back in high school. I'm guessing that this is where most of us begin our relationships with jocks. Actually, before I continue, I should clarify that when I say "jock" I am not referring to the article of athletic apparel but more directly to the athlete himself. I have never had a problem with the jock you wear, in fact it is one of my favourite pieces of athletic clothing. Unfortunately, it was a different story with the human variety.

My favourite kind of jock...

   Generally, you run into your first jocks in gym class. They're the kids who, although only in Grade 9, already seem to have known the phys ed teacher their whole lives. They joke with him, talk sports with him and are physically able to do almost whatever he asks them to do.
   That was never me. In the first place, I've pretty well always been more comfortable around women and, secondly, for a variety of reasons there were many aspects of phys ed I either didn't get or simply couldn't perform. For the life of me. Rope climbing was one, but that's probably a blog unto itself.
   I began to inhabit that middle ground between the land of the jocks and the land of the nerds. With my friends in the neighbourhood, I was always playing one sport or another and was actually quite adept. This never translated too well in school, however. The little bit of athletic ability I did have managed to elevate me a touch above nerdism but never even came close to making me a jock. Which was fine. I flirted enough around the edges of jockism to find myself on the junior football team, the senior basketball team and the senior volleyball team at Oakridge. These associations had me rubbing shoulders with jocks on a regular basis (what was I thinking?) and they and I very quickly realized just how out-of-place I actually was. More than anything, I guess, I got in their way. They'd go in for a lay-up and, when they came down, I, for some reason, would be right underneath them. This apparently made made me a dip-stick once when it happened to the star of the team, right from the star's mouth. It was hard to run plays in practice because I, knowing where the ball was going, always got in the way of it. This did not elicit a positive response from a couple of the jocks on the team. They'd pass around orange slices at half time of a football game and give me a hard time if I took one because I hadn't played much, if at all.

   I actually got cut from both the football team and the basketball team but ended back on both of them, for different reasons and miraculously. Apparently I didn't get the hint. For whatever reason, this enabled me to continue my square-peg-in-a-round-hole experience with high school sports and the world of jocks.
   Fortunately, this experience never actually included any form of physical confrontation with any of the jocks I ran across, I always tried pretty hard to stay under the radar. At the same time, they had other ways of making my life miserable.
   Round about Grade 10, I fell in love with a cheerleader. I didn't fall in love with her because she was a cheerleader, I just fell in love with her. She, however, was relegated to the category of all-time-stereotypical-jock-gets-what-he-doesn't-deserve-just-like-in-a-teen-movie as she, of course, was the girlfriend of the captain of the senior football team. So, due to this jock I didn't even know, my life was ruined, at least for a month or so.

   About the same time I was in love with the cheerleader, I was also in love with my Spanish teacher (yes, I really had enough love to spread around back in those days) and I truly felt there was something special between us. I felt this way right up to the Xmas break. Upon returning from the break, we were all informed that she had, in the meantime, gotten married. Not only had she been stolen from me, she had been stolen from me by.....my gym teacher! This made a low moment even that much lower.
   Eventually, I continued to fall in love with a different girl every couple of months or so and the pain of these two losses slowly diminished. In Grades 12 and 13, I ended up on the volleyball team. The Oakridge volleyball team is much storied and has a history of being one of the top volleyball powers in the province. And all this started just after I played for them. In my day with the team, we were pretty well a bunch of nerds dressed up as athletes. We did not win a game in the year previous to my starting to play and we did not win a game in the two years I was on the team. There was absolutely no jockism on the team, we stole no one's girlfriend, we intimidated no one and I'm pretty sure no one looked up to us. We did have some fun and actually came close to winning once or twice in my final year. I spent my last year on the team as captain and MVP and at the year-end awards banquet found myself up there with all the other jocks, accepting my award. The irony was not lost on me!

     
  
  
  

I Am Invisible

There I am....

   Yes, I surely am. Invisible, that is. I am that person whose name you can't remember five minutes after you meet me. I am "the old guy" on the team. I am the guy you spent five hours with at the same table at last year's Xmas party that you don't remember this year. I am the person you don't say goodbye to when you say goodbye to the only other person in the room you're leaving. I am the person who didn't get invited to any of the New Year's Eve parties, not because I wasn't popular but because no-one remembered about me. I am also the person who occasionally doesn't get invited on the family vacation.
   My car has been hit from behind three times in a row, while it was stopped, simply because I am apparently invisible.
   I don't stand out in a crowd, my personality is so low-key that I can't initiate conversations and I never have enough self-confidence to simply introduce myself to strangers and then carry on talking with them. If something truly remarkable happens right in front of us then sometimes I will have something to say. If I am in a meeting I will let everyone voice an opinion and will only venture mine if it doesn't get voiced by someone else first.
   I don't scream and yell (even when I likely should sometimes) and I don't take charge unless there is some dire emergency. I have a sense of humour but I certainly don't tell jokes. I will never ever be the life of the party.

Perhaps I just need to do THIS...

   Just today I was in a staff meeting and the person sitting beside me started talking about me like I wasn't even there and then realized I was sitting right there beside her, being invisible, I guess.
   I will never be bombastic enough that I become instantly engraved on anyone's memory and, really, that's fine with me. For the most part, I don't have a problem wearing my cloak of invisibility. My anonymity is almost like a shield and it is sometimes preferable to not have a bright light shining in my direction.
   So be careful wherever you are, you may think you are alone but there's every possibility that I am only five feet away, quietly passing through your space. If you notice your coffee somewhere different then where you left it a couple of minutes ago, that might have been me.
  

Perceptions

   Quite a few years ago, I received a very excellent lesson in perception. At the time, I was working in a supervisory capacity with the agency which currently employs me. I was sharing an office with another person who held essentially the same position as myself.
   One afternoon, one of the employees appeared at our door with a concern which he stated to both of us. We gave him as much feedback as we could at the time. After he left, we compared notes and realized that we had diametrically opposed views on what had, only seconds before, gone on in our office.
   She thought the employee had stated his views in an angry and frustrated kind of way whereas I thought he had been calm and collected. I remember looking at her and not being quite sure what to say. I had the distinct impression she was looking at me the same way.
   This was a seminal moment in my somewhat limited understanding of human nature. What it meant was that I couldn't believe what I saw and heard. It was as simple as that. And it wasn't just that I couldn't believe my fellow co-worker. I had been given some reason to not believe myself.
   I am not so self-centered that I believe my perception of things is flawless. My perception of anything is simply that--my perception and not too likely the same as anyone else's.

   I think of that day in our office on a pretty regular basis. As I listen to people give me their observations on things going on around them I remind myself that these are only their perceptions and that mine could very well be totally different. I have also become very suspicious of gossip, particularly as it applies to myself. In the past, I have occasionally been told negative things that other people have said about me. As tempted as I might be to take things like that to heart, I always stop and remember that day in the office. I have vowed since then that I will form no second-hand negative opinion about other people within my sphere of influence. Until they actually do me me wrong right to my face, I will continue to relate to them as I would any other.
   The problem of different people's perception of things is mind-boggling when you think about it. I imagine a boardroom with maybe twelve people sitting around a large desk, working on a venture. What hope would there be in this with twelve different perceptions of the same issue? For that matter, how the hell does someone get an education?!
   Best to double-check, I guess. Or triple- or quadruple-check. Don't take anything on face value if it is at all important to you. Feel free to ask other people for input and then weigh it carefully. Find someone who generally sees things the same way you do and run stuff past them. Then find someone who never sees things the same way you do and run it past them as well. It might be an eye-opener.