Trees

   We had a couple of pine trees which towered high above us down in the "lower forty", as I like to describe the bottom tier of our 3-tiered backyard. My guess was they were about eighty feet tall and I believe they have been around for close to forty years. More than anything, they provided respite from the early morning sun and also a bit of a barrier between us and our backyard neighbours.

Our two pine trees, in all their
(sort of) glory.

   But they were dead. Or dying.
   We had been aware of this for some time now and knew that at least one, or both, would eventually need to come down. We almost arranged for this last summer but didn't. This summer, we finally decided to pull the plug and arranged for a company to come in and finally do the deed.
   They were supposed to come at the end of July but as luck (or misfortune) would have it a large chunk of the deadest tree fell off after a bad windstorm and landed in the neighbours' yard. The arborist they hired to clean that up offered to do our trees at the same time and so we hired him on.
   Troy was the name of the fellow doing the work and for the most part he was a one-man wrecking crew. This unfortunately necessitated the job taking three or four days but as we were in the middle of holidays and always available this was not a major concern.
   

Keenan (at the top) and Troy,
takin' 'er down!

Along the way, Keenan, my stepson, indicated to Troy that he was quite interested in learning all the ins and outs of taking down large trees. Troy basically told him the different things you needed for the job and Keenan immediately went out and picked them up!

All done!

   Once all the main branches had been removed, Troy then gave Keenan the opportunity to climb up one of the trunks and start chainsawing off smaller sections. As this was going on, Troy was quick to give advice about more efficient, safer ways of doing things and Keenan, being the quick study that he is, picked up on all of those things right away.
   So, eventually (and sadly) the trees came down and we now have this wide expanse of blue sky (and the neighbour's house) to look at! We asked Troy and Keenan to leave us the bottom portions of the tree so that hopefully we can incorporate them into the yard design. On a happier note---no giant mess of pine cones and needles to clean up every Spring!

Some of the aftermath

   

After the clean-up.

Poems

   It occurred to me today, as I was on a step-stool, re-organizing all my books on their shelves, that it was thirty years ago this summer that I published my first poem. I had previously attended a couple of creative writing sessions at Fanshawe College, here in London, as I'd been interested in writing short stories but along the way we also briefly discussed poetry and I found that something had been re-kindled in me. I continued on with all the other creative writing exercises but I also continued to write poetry, on my own.

My poetry collection. Almost totally (and un-abashedly) Canadian.

   Our teacher at the time, a published writer named Pam Tikalsky, had been very supportive of all my writing and had encouraged me to start sending things out. I started mailing batches of poems to literary journals here in Canada and the U.S. and soon started receiving back pretty well the same number of rejection slips. I was told to expect this, however, and so I continued to re-organize my batches of poems and sending them out to different magazines and journals. After awhile the steady stream of rejection notices began to take their toll and I was truly on the verge of calling it a day, poetically-speaking, when what seemed like the improbable happened. A Canadian magazine called Canadian Author and Bookman accepted a poem! 
   As you can imagine, I was beyond thrilled. I was so used to all the rejection language I'd been seeing that I actually had to re-read the notice they sent me to affirm that it was, in fact, an acceptance. Now it just so happened that the poetry editor of C.A.& B. was a lady from London named Sheila Martindale and I think she likely was inclined to favour London authors so I may have had an "in" there, who knows?
   At any rate, I had been published and this somewhat sustained me over the next long drought and all the accompanying rejection slips.
   Then, just about the time I was starting to give up hope again, another acceptance showed up at my door, this time from the University of Windsor Review. They had no such inclination to publish Londoners and this acceptance helped validate my writing. After this, more poems appeared in such well-respected places as The Lyric, The Antigonish Review and Dandelion.

If you look inside, you will find
some of my words...

   I also started entering poetry contests back in those days. There was a new magazine in London back in those days called Tabula Rasa and they ran something called the Forest City Poetry Contest. I entered three poems in the first contest and ended up being one of the honourable mentions. I should have been happy with this but, when I compared my poems to the ones which won, I liked mine better. I more or less decided at that point that the vagaries of having poems judged by total strangers was not for me. The following year, however, the same magazine ran the same contest again and when I looked at who the judge was that year I realized that his writing style was quite similar to my own and, for this reason, I entered the contest again. I was sitting there in the audience as they announced the prize winners and, sure as shooting, I got another honourable mention. I remember thinking to myself, as I went onstage to get my certificate and then headed back to my seat, that I had just fallen for it again and was extremely disappointed. I sat there as they went through the rest of the honourable mentions and the third prize winner. When it came time for the second place winner, my name was announced! I was shocked! All of the sudden, I didn't feel quite so bad about the experience. I was actually walking off the stage to return to my seat when the announcer stopped me because I was also the first prize winner! At this point I was almost dizzy!
   This was a high which lasted quite awhile and, truthfully, it still has the ability to lighten up a day. Around about this time, however, I stopped writing poetry. I have never totally been sure why I did this. I think at some point it felt as though I had run out of things to write about. I had just gone through a two or three year phase when it seemed as though everything I saw was a potential poem---so I wrote about it. I think I then stopped seeing things that seemed to require writing about them. 
   On top of all this, I became interested in composing music. All the time I used to spend writing poems was now being spent down in the "dungeon"---my basement---on my portable keyboard. Then as commonly happens, life got in the way and even this stopped, for the most part.
   Which brings me to the present.
   I feel like writing poetry again. It feels as though I am back in that space where things seem to need writing about and would be worthy subjects. 
   I have even entered contests again. For the last three years, I have entered the CV2 (Contemporary Verse 2) Two-Day Poetry Contest. They give you two days to write a poem but you must incorporate ten words that they give you. Some of the words are pretty innocuous, like "bunk" or "ham". Others are words I actually had to go and look up, such as last year's year's "furuncle" and this year's "absquatulated" (both of which I just now had to add to my laptop's dictionary...). The process is both daunting and fun at the same time and people are actually able to come up with awesome poems. I have liked the three poems I came up with but they were not winners--it is, after all, a very subjective kind of thing and the fact that I don't win is very secondary to the fun I had. And you get a subscription to CV2 for entering so it's kind of win-win!

...and so I did!

   So I will write more poems, just for myself and with my own words. Maybe I'll submit them places, maybe I won't but it will still be the same exercise in self-discovery it always has been and that's why I think most poets do it!

Tattoo

   For the past few years, I have toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo. I'm not sure why, this late in life, I'd started deliberating on changing my body this way. Some of it, I think, is due to both my wife and sons and brother-in-law having had their own tattoos done and me having enjoyed the results of all these. It seemed creative, almost like writing a poem or something. At any rate, it was something I'd thought about a great deal and last week, finally, I took the plunge.

Sawchuk (and his mask), hard at work.

   In trying to think of what to get as a first tattoo, I found myself torn between something with a literary allusion and something sports-related. These have been my two passions over the years and it only seemed to make sense to choose between them. I finally settled on getting a rendition done of the goalie mask Terry Sawchuk wore back in the fifties and sixties. 
   When I was a boy, Terry Sawchuk was one of my sports heroes. He had a brush-cut the same way that I did and he had a real cool mask. This was back in the days when there were still not a lot of goalies with masks and Terry's made him stand out.
   Sawchuk was also kinda dark and a bit of a loner. To top it all off, he died early and somewhat mysteriously and this only served to cement my fascination with him.
   I went online and found a couple of images of his mask and then made my way to True Love Tattoo, here in London. I had been given a gift certificate for there from my son, Bryant, and Doralyn had chipped in for the rest I would need. I took Bry with me and we set up a consultation date with Will Smink, one of True Love's artists. I showed him a couple of the pics of the mask I'd printed off and we talked briefly about size and placement. He told us that we wouldn't likely be able to get in before September or October. Well, as it turned out, there was a cancellation while we were standing there booking an appointment and we were able to get in the following week! This was very fortuitous as Bry already had an appointment booked for that day and so we would both be there together. This also minimized the time I would have to fret about it come to my senses try and contain my

Will, hard at work!

excitement!
   The day finally came and Will had managed to find a more detailed image of the mask than I'd been able to and I liked it so we sat down, I laid my forearm out for him, and we got started. He applied the stencil, got the photo arranged for his own reference and then got his inks all ready. He took one short swipe on my arm, looked up at me, smiled, and said "You've got a tattoo". At this point, no turning back!

Bryant and I, post tats.

   Shortly after Will started tattooing me, Doralyn showed up. She sat and waited while he worked and it was kind of nice having some conversation (and levity) to pass the time. She asked me if it was hurting and I told her it was somewhat like walking through a bramble bush. Then getting caught in the bramble bush. And then not being able to get out of the bramble bush... Actually, fairly minimal amounts of pain were had but I was quite glad Will was just working on my forearm.

   Bry's tattoo was done before mine and he showed up to watch the final moments. Will declared me "done" and I was mightily pleased with the result! I was a tatted man and

And the finished product! Thanks, Will!

having a hard time believing it!
   

Old Friends

    Simon and Garfunkel had a song called "Old Friends" many years ago, on their "Bookends" album. It was a bit of a sad, yet beautiful, homage to the aging process. I was a young man in my early twenties when I heard it for the first time. 
   I had it running through my mind the other day after I left the restaurant I had just had breakfast in. I had been sitting near a table which had six elderly men, eating breakfast and generally being convivial. I'm not sure whether they were just a group of friends getting together or whether it was perhaps a "meeting" of some kind (a couple of the gentlemen seemed new to each other) but I found myself somehow or other enjoying being in their proximity. 
   Now, I did say elderly, didn't I? 

   Well, the fact of the matter was that they all were either balding or had white and/or graying hair, they were wrinkled in the usual spots, jowls were present, and they all wore eye glasses and short-sleeved dress shirts. And, wouldn't you know it, I just described....me!
   So, yes, I am an old man, by pretty well any definition you use. I am eligible for all the Tuesday Night Senior Specials and I get called "Sir" on a fairly regular basis. Dinner at 4:30 or 5 o'clock doesn't seem like that foreign of a concept. The eyesight's occasionally blurry and the hearing requires electronic assistance (although I am holding out on that one) and middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom occur pretty well every middle-of-the-night.
   The accouterments of old age are all there and yet, somehow, I still feel removed from it.
   The adage goes You are only as old as you feel and I pretty well put full faith in it. For the most part, I have not stopped doing the things I have always enjoyed doing and this has always involved keeping the body and mind active. The body is active with running, hiking, golf and, occasionally, ball hockey. The mind is active with poetry, writing, crosswords and blogging.
   Because of all this, as I sat there in the restaurant the other day, it was hard to feel true kinship with all the gents at the next table. It kind of felt like watching my dad, perhaps sitting there with a bunch of my friends' dads---it wasn't like spying on a group of my peers.
   Sometimes I wonder if this is problematic, if maybe I should spend a little more time "acting my age". Of course "acting" would be just that---acting. There is no sense in attempting to be other than what you actually are, whatever that is. I suppose I'll just continue to do what I have always done until my passion for that thing has dissipated.
   Of course, it could very well be that every gentleman sitting at that restaurant table is as active and young-feeling as I am! Because I don't really know any of them, I am going to try and avoid the trap of making assumptions, based on their appearance. I think this has occasionally been done to me---because the trappings of old age apparently hang from my shoulders I have been conveniently placed in a niche, deposited on a mantle and only occasionally dusted off. This, of course, by people who don't know what I know.
   At one point in "Old Friends", Paul Simon says
                         Can you imagine us
                         Years from today,
                         Sharing a park bench
                         Quietly?
                         How terribly strange
                         To be seventy.
   Well, I may accidentally be sitting on a park bench someday with a friend when I'm seventy but it won't be terribly strange and the people around us are going to be wondering why those two old geezers are raising such a commotion with all laughing and giggling! And if it's not a park bench it just as likely may be a players' bench in a hockey arena or a participants' bench at a track meet!
   

Although it is quite easy to, I try not to judge people by what other people tell me. Generally, I prefer to react to people based on mutual shared experiences. What this means is that if you are a person in their sixties who acts like a person in their thirties then I am going to treat you like a person in their thirties, until given reason to do otherwise.
   I would only hope that people do the same for me---treat me as you know me to be. We will get along fine if you do!