A Funny Little Convergence

   The past week and a half has been a little strange--just odd little things happening at strange times.
   I turned sixty just recently and those milestone birthdays tend to make you think back on things in your life just a touch. My boss of over thirty-one years just announced recently that he was retiring. I am in no position to retire myself but his announcement, as you might imagine, has led me to look back at my working life as well. Listening to him talk about his retirement plans has also made me just a little wistful as to what my plans for the future might be.
   Then, as I'm standing in a Tim Horton's with one of the people I support this past week, the lady ahead of me recognizes my voice, turns around and it is Irene, one of the Alice Saddy staff who worked there back when I first started. I hadn't run into her in probably eight or nine years. She, as well, is just in the middle of preparing for retirement and was amazed that I still worked at Alice. We chatted briefly and then went our separate ways. This, of course, gives me pause for even more reflection on my life.

"The Beatles Are Back" into my little convergence...

   The day after that, I get the chance opportunity to attend a performance at Budweiser Gardens with Doralyn. For the past few years, she and a friend have been purchasing a subscription to "Broadway in London", a series of musical performances put on at the Gardens. That particular night, Doralyn's friend was unable to attend and I became the fortunate recipient of her ticket. The performance we saw was by a group called "Rain",  a Beatles tribute band. I was happy enough to go but was somewhat prepared for this show to possibly be mildly lame--honestly, how do you do justice to the Beatles? Well, I was blown away. They looked like the Beatles (from a distance) and, more importantly, they sounded like the Beatles. Part of the multi-media presentation involved film clips from the early years of rock 'n' roll, leading up to the arrival of the Beatles. Beyond that, there were also film clips from Beatles T.V. and concert appearances. Some of what I saw was stuff I'd seen the first time around, particularly the T.V. footage. I was wowed, even more so than concerts generally make me.
   It struck me as I sat there in Budweiser Gardens, that this, then, was yet another convergence of my past with my present.

12 hours a day, six days a week...

   Earlier on this week, a picture of the merry-go-round at Springbank Park showed up on Facebook. It was a picture taken many years ago when the merry-go-round was in its original location, near the river bank. I spent the summer of '72 running that merry-go-round and its sudden appearance on Facebook struck me as yet another criss-crossing of time and memory. Doralyn was five years old that summer and tells me that she used to ride the merry-go-round all the time, if you want to count that as a convergence.
   Now that I think of it, the week before last, I was with another person I support at the Bay in White Oaks Mall and we were buying something in the menswear department. We were served by a gentleman named Ken, at least that's what his name tag said. Ken doesn't know it, but he and I go back about 40 years. Back in '70 or '71 my sort-of girlfriend at the time called me up, terribly excited. She'd just been to the Simpsons store downtown and had seen a salesclerk who looked just like Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel fame. At the time, she and I were huge fans of Simon and Garfunkel and she just had to take me downtown to show him to me. We made it downtown and had to lurk around the menswear department until this guy made an appearance (I think I pretended I was shopping for something) and when he finally showed up I had to admit that he did look quite a bit like Art Garfunkel. Well, that was Ken and Ken still works in the men's department, more than forty years later and, in fact, served us two weeks ago! I guess that counts as a bit of a convergence, although, frankly, I wasn't even thinking about that chance meeting when I sat down to write this blog post and I suppose the fact that Ken was my Dad's name and Ken is the name of my aforementioned boss who's retiring seems almost irrelevant.
   I suppose all of the above could simply be coincidental. I can't help but think, though, of all those old stories about ancient prophecies which predicted that, on a certain convergence of events, monumental things would happen in the universe.
   I'm not sure if I'm prepared for monumental things to happen in my life and I don't know if any of these intersecting occurrences are the slightest bit significant. I suspect they are all merely incidental chance.
  Unless, of course, they mean that soon someone will arrive in the world who is all-knowing and powerful and who can use their abilities to steer us all toward world peace. And that his name will be Ken...? Who knows?

Apple

Nowhere NEAR finished...

   There are really only two ways to eat an apple. Now, I'm talking about apples as a snack only because, of course, there are many ways to cook and eat apples and they are all delicious. For my purposes today, I am talking about heading out to the kitchen because you've got a food hankering, taking a look around, and then deciding that an apple would be a healthy choice.
   At this point you have two basic options---you can cut up the apple into slices or you can simply grab the apple, wedge it into your mouth, and start tearing off chunks. 
   If you cut up the apple into slices and eat it, it's gone.
   If you decide to eat it as is, right out of your hand, it will last forever.
   And ever. And ever.
   You can never actually finish eating an apple when you eat it that way. You may think you've finished and you may set it aside and go back to what you're doing but then, maybe twenty minutes later, you're looking at that apple core again and you can see one tiny little bit of it still left. And if you can get at least one corner of a tooth anchored on to it, then you  still have an apple you can eat.
   You may look like a beaver or a raccoon while you're doing this, rolling around a little stump of a morsel with your tiny little paws, but you're still eating that apple.
   At some point you may feel like you're truly done with it and you'll set aside. You might even throw it out. If you don't throw it out, however, and just leave it where you were sitting, it's possible that it will still be there the next day. It will be all brown, for sure, and you'll think to yourself oops, I forgot to throw that out but then, looking at it, you'll think to yourself whaddya know, there's still a little left and you'll munch on it again. It's a renewable food source.

STILL some good, little bits!

   Have you ever been rooting around under the furniture or maybe behind an appliance, looking for something that rolled under there and you find an old apple core, fermenting? And have you thought to yourself hmmm, if I just wiped off the dust bunny I could pry off one more bite? Sure you have. And, if you're like me, you went ahead and did it. Because apples last forever.
   If you take an apple, peel the skin off, carve a little face onto it and then just set it aside somewhere where critters won't get at it, you will eventually have a little person. It will look like a wizened, tiny old man or woman but you will be able to dress it up, put miniature spectacles on it, maybe a little cap or bonnet, and you will have a small version of a human being. And this human being will last longer than you're going to because apples last forever.
   There are places in the world where famine is a perpetual problem. It has occurred to me that apples would be the solution. Why not airlift apples into these places? I'm not thinking tons and tons of apples. I'm thinking likely one bag would do.
   In retrospect, I wonder why there are other fruits and vegetables at the grocery store. You eat a carrot, it's gone. You eat an orange, it's gone. Same with celery, grapes, potatoes, squash, you name it, once you're done eating those other foods, they're gone. Not so with apples.

The Future

   I've heard that, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the only livng thing able to survive will be cockroaches. I can envision a tiny cockroach supper table, with little cockroach kids and a cockroach dad sitting around it. The cockroach mom walks in and places a huge tray of food on the table and all the cockroach kids moan "Aww, mom, apples again...?!"

Kika In The Bar

   Last weekend, Doralyn and the boys and I headed to Uxbridge, Ontario to stay for a couple of days and help Doralyn's brother, James, celebrate his fiftieth birthday.
   Part of this celebration involved attending the King Henry's Arms pub in Uxbridge and watch James perform along with his band, Fourplay. Fourplay specializes in vintage rock and comprises some very talented performers. The evening itself was billed as James' birthday party.
   As part of the birthday celebration, James' daughter Shakira, aka Kika, and his son, Zoey, got up in front of the audience to play and sing a number. Zoey played the guitar and Kika sang. The song they performed was "The A Team" by Ed Sheeran. If you're not familiar with it (I wasn't) then check it out on You Tube. Their opportunity to showcase their talents came between Fourplay sets. The bar was packed and the crowd had really been rocking, dancing and singing along with the band. When the band stopped, the crowd essentially maintained its boisterousness, completely unaware for the most part that two young performers still had a song to do.


Kika and Zoey in the King Henry's Arms

   In spite of all the noise and lack of attention, Zoey began to play and Kika began to sing. They could barely be heard. I was not surprised, given the nature of small-town bars, that people would just continue on in party mode, in between sets of a rock band. I was however very annoyed at the total lack of respect for the two performers who were trying to do a special song for their Dad on his birthday. I was about thirty seconds away from raising my own voice above the din and telling people to shut up when the reason for this blog post happened.
   Kika's voice took over.
   Her singing got a little louder and, all of the sudden, its pitch and timbre rose above the general cacophony and stopped people. Without any outward admonition that I could hear being directed at it, the crowd ceased its rowdiness and listened to the song being sung. The quieter they got, the more forcefully the song took over.  I found this very gratifying and, honestly, quite magical.
   You need to understand that Kika is a 13 year-old girl. She is tall and willowy and you can imagine that at some point in the not-too-distant future she will be causing havoc in the hearts of young boys. But on a Saturday night in a downstairs bar in Uxbridge, Ontario she was just a mere slip of a girl standing up to a crowd of celebratory, partying drinkers and, in an ephemeral moment, stopping them in their tracks.