Dad, these days: Part Two

   Awhile back, I dedicated a blog to my Dad. In it I chronicled briefly the Alzheimer's experience he was sharing with us.

Dad and Mum on their wedding day.

   At the time, there seemed to be a timely progression to what was going on with Dad. Change was discernible but was happening at such a pace that it also seemed manageable, to a great extent.
   Well, things have changed.
   A couple of weeks ago, Dad was complaining of chest pains. He spent the night in the emergency ward and they ran a battery of tests. Basically, he is full of fluid and the fear is that this is because his heart is no longer able to power the system that clears this fluid. They pumped him full of diuretics, he felt better the next day and they sent him home.
   I have talked to or seen him pretty well every day since. Some days are better than others. Today, however, was not a good day.
   We made a trip to the bank to shore up some financial stuff and Dad could only take about 20 halting steps before having to rest and catch his breath. He could not even make it from one end of the bank to the other without the bank staff needing to bring him a chair.
   Some of this was done with humour. The overall tone was downright dejection on his part, however.

Mum and Dad and me, when I was cute. These pics are courtesy of my cousin Beth

   Three months ago, my Dad and I were walking up and down golf fairways. There was tiredness at the end of these excursions, on both our parts, but we recovered quickly. There was no sense that we would not continue to do this for at least a few years to come. Watching him yesterday, though, I found it very hard to imagine that we would likely ever be walking down a fairway again. The fact that there seems to all of the sudden be so much to do blessedly leaves me little time to sit and truly reflect on this.
   Somehow, it is not all the medical issues that have me feeling this way these days. Dad has had a variety of medical challenges in the past and has always soldiered on through, buoyantly. I suppose that what he is experiencing now is something that could be temporary and, ultimately, alleviated.
   What is different now, though, is that his spirit seems to have synched with his body. And his body seems to be losing some kind of battle.

Shakespeare and Me

William Shakespeare

   I am old enough to clearly remember the days when e-mails, word processing and instant messaging simply did not exist. Like many of us who are able to remember those days, it is hard to imagine how life carried on, in spite of the fact that we remember it carrying on just fine, thank you.
   Quite often (and particularly since I started blogging) I find myself marvelling at how the great writers, the Shakspeares, the Dickens, the Poes, the Whitmans et al, were able to be so prolific, given the what now seem like meagre tools they had to write with.
   I also remember what the writing process was like back when I was much younger; a piece of foolscap, a pen or pencil and a dictionary (if I had not forgotten one). I think back to the grade school English exams where I had to come up with some form of short story in an hour, the feverishness that went into that, the crossing out and re-writing involved. What surprised me at the time was that, in that kind of pressure-cooker atmosphere, I seemed to be able to come up with stuff that was half decent!

Charles Dickens

   Nowadays, I'm able to sit here with my laptop, get my spelling checked as quickly as I can write, simply delete whole lines or paragraphs, move them around if I want, and have a dictionary or thesaurus readily at my fingertips. If I have a desire for other people to read what I have almost instantaneously produced then I simply post a blog. If I ever get around to writing anything substantial (I just realized how close substantial is to substandard...) all I have to do is get the e-mail addresses of publishers and mail whatever it is I've written right to them!
   So this is the world of writing I am now used to. The physical act of writing has become so simple now that I often wonder what any of the great writers of the ages might have been able to produce with same modern technology I am now afforded.
   As prolific as Shakespeare was, what might his body of work now look like if he'd instantly been able to re-write lines or move soliloquies around. It's a little hard to fathom what he might have been able to accomplish. I have a vision of Dickens sitting at a candle-lit table, quill pen in hand, scrunched up balls of revisions lying about the floor. What if he had not had to endure that?

Stephen King

   These days you have writers like Danielle Steel and Stephen King churning out book after book, endlessly. What would their body of work look like if they had to constantly be dipping their pens into inkwells? I am fairly intimately familiar with the works of Stephen King. One of his techniques is to give the reader a heady dose of background info on characters as they appear, even if they only appear for a page or two. Very often this info is stuff you could easily do without (I'm glad I'm not King's editor...) and I'm sure he does this because, these days, it's easy to do it. I'm not so sure that a hundred and twenty years ago he would waste elbow grease and candlelight on all the extras he includes.
   All of this has me now wondering; would Shakespeare or Dickens even have benefited by having access to today's technology? I wonder if the creative thought process they went through while writing might actually have been harmed by the tools available today. I can only assume that much thought went into whatever words they were laying down, knowing that to have to correct it would be physically laborious and time-consuming. Were they given the ability writers today have to lay down vast stretches of literature and then change it instantly, if need be, would they have done this themselves and perhaps settled on something that wasn't too bad? Hard to say.
   So I need to keep all of this in mind as I lay pen to paper, figuratively-speaking. It is easy what I do here and that's partly why I do it. I do, however, feel some kind of responsibility to whoever reads what they find here to not waste their time, even if it is only five minutes out of their busy lives. Because I am certainly no Shakespeare, as you've noticed.   
    
  

Running

   Every once in awhile, I feel like running. Generally I'm outside walking somewhere and I get the almost overpowering urge to run. And I'm not talking about jogging around the block or something like that, I'm talking about flat-out, pick a target about 100 yards away, hell-bent-for-leather running.
   I suspect that if I were anywhere where there were no witnesses I would probably do this. Also, the fact that warming up is something that probably should happen first inhibits me  somewhat from spontaneously bursting into breakneck speed. Well, okay, the term "breakneck" is somewhat inhibiting itself....
   I used to be fast. When puberty hit I transformed from the "fat kid" everyone made fun of to the fast guy people wanted on their team. I played sports incessantly--basketball, touch and tackle football, road hockey, tennis and soccer. Often I came home with blisters on my feet, compliments of unforgiving tarmac. My untested theory was that my years of carrying around a few extra pounds had strengthened the old leg muscles and then when I burned off all the weight I already had a head start, speedy-wise.
   It took me awhile to figure out that I was fast. This concept didn't occur to me until I started playing touch football on a regular basis, at first just with my buddies and, later on, when I played in a touch football league. I very clearly remember running with the ball, being chased by guys on the other team, toward the sidelines. I remember thinking I was running out of room and no way was I going to get around them and then I simply just turned it up a notch and managed to just barely turn the corner on them. These were always "holy crap" moments, surprising even myself. One time, one of my friends showed up with a camera and was taking random shots of guys during a game. I didn't pay much attention to him but days later, after the film had been developed (this was long before digital) he showed me a picture he'd taken of me running down the sidelines with the ball. I was in full stride, my feet not even touching the ground, my long hair (those were the days) flowing straight out behind me. I have no idea what happened to the pic but it was always one of my favourites and seemed to capture the essence of the joy I used to have in being "fast".
   In the touch football league, the guys on my team very quickly started calling me "Roadrunner", they knew they could pretty well send me out there to catch a pass and I was gonna get past the guy covering me. Now, this didn't always mean I was gonna catch the ball...
   I remember lining up for the start of a play once. The opponent across from me took one look and yelled at his teammates for "help" because he had "speed" out there! These days I look down at my gut and have to giggle a little at the memory.
   Speedy guys have a very limited window of opportunity within which they can enjoy this gift. It wasn't long before I found myself getting caught from behind occasionally and this kind of took me aback. I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, I thought that might happen eventually", and didn't let it bother me.
   Then I started helping to raise a family. Just not the same amount of time to devote to sports and the pounds came back, slowly. Eventually, I found some time to get back into being a little more active and joined the local ball hockey league.
   By this time, however, I was in my late forties and slowly moving into the early fifties. All the guys I was playing against were in their twenties and thirties, for the most part. Many, many times I lined up against them and wondered what the hell I was thinking. What I found, for the most part however, was that the young guys neither were able to run around me nor catch up to me. Now, before I go any further, I really had to make sure they didn't catch me standing still or going in opposite directions! Although my straight ahead speed served me well enough, my turn-right-around-and-catch-a-guy speed was the pits. That's where a little experience helped out. A lot of times players would come down on me with the ball and they'd get kind of this look in their eye (I imagined) that said "I'm just going to flip the ball past this guy and run right around him". Well, that almost never happened!
   So, as I mentioned right at the beginning, I still have this urge to run fast every so often. The one thing I don't ever find myself doing is running around with a bunch of other old guys (I'm almost 60 now). So I often wonder what that would be like. Not that long ago I came across some kind of ad for Masters track and field. I did a little investigating and found video of men in their seventies running sprint events somewhere. So this is sort of my new dream, to get involved with a little track and field. But not running distances, I hate that, it takes too long. Ever wonder why you see so many joggers out there with headphones on, listening to music? They're bored. Me, I just wanna run fast, for about 12.5 seconds at a time!

I'm thinking I could take 'em...

   Step one in this little quest is to lose about 30 pounds, can't really have that slowing me down.
   After that, who knows?!