My friend Earl told me years ago that his prospective in-laws, who had never met his parents, came to visit them unexpectedly at their home. The old boy was out, said to be turning over his compost pile, so the enthusiastic visiting mother of the bride to be volunteered to get him and rounded the house to catch him unaware, taking a pee on the compost pile. Since he was an Englishman he raised his hat to her.     What else could he do?
       I was relating this story to my family at dinner as I thought it was funny and the pianist said to me,  "You've never done that have you?" She looked at me through querulous eyes.
        " No. " , I said
        My daughter said, " Yes he does.  I've seen him stand and pee on the compost. "
        You can rarely get away with anything in a family!
        I told this whole story to my friend Ez'.  I included my little exposure from my daughter. I excused the behavior based on the fact that both Earl's father and I lived in a secluded area of Lotus City that was quite private. We were less likely to offend anyone and our compost would be healthier.  On the other hand Ez' lived in a wealthy enclave of Lotus City that was much less secluded.
          I said, " You, on the other hand couldn't get away with it because your properties are more open.  Your neighbors would see you."
         " Yes, " he said, "that may be true, but my neighbors have too much  ' je ne sais quoi ' to say so."
         Touche !

Bill Shakespeare has the Duke say, " If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; for, like an ass  whose back with ingots bows, thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey and death unloads thee. " And also,  if you're not young but old----"When thou art old and rich, thou hast neither heat , affection, limb,  nor beauty, to make your riches pleasant."  (Measure for Measure.}
       Wealth has taken a beating these days and maybe it's a good thing.  Maybe we should adopt the "Year of Release" every seven years when all debts are forgiven and we start again. Fat chance !  I really don't believe that anyway. It might have worked in the ancient tight little colony of the Hebrews.  Maybe we should have a a Hebrew  " Year of Jubilee " every fifty years when land is returned to the dispossessed. If the Dukes of Sutherland had thereby left a nobler legacy, most of us would have never found ourselves in Canada. If you believe that Bill Shakespeare had it right it still "cuts no ice." Some will still cling to what they have until the agonal state arrives.
      On the other note  a more modern playwright,  Frederico Fellini, had his wealthy dying Grandee saying, I paraphrase,  "If you eat me you will partake of my bounty. "  The penultimate scene in Fellini Satyricon is the inheritors sitting around a large table munching doggedly on the corpse to fulfill the conditions of the will. They are clearly not enthralled by the means to the end but it shows where Fellini puts the bounty hunters.
        How much, money seems to rule.  How much misery it has caused.  How much sacrifice it has driven.  How little stability it really provides.  How much joy it has erased.  How manipulated those who receive. Of course we all know that money per se is not evil ;  it is the love of money that leads to destruction,  Money can provide ease ; the love of money provides dis-ease.
       Our values have been so skewed by reward,  that it is difficult to carve a path that combines the growth of the soul with the necessities of the flesh.  People give up trying.  They become cynical.  Anger arises at the fetters that have become bonds and chains. Ambivalence confounds even the gentle.
       

 

When one is 86 years old it's prudent to live week by week.  Or in fact day by day.  I have read stuff by much younger people with advice to us old. I  thought to write from my standpoint since I have not read much written material from 86 year olds about life management. Certainly in their 70's one could plan and implement longer term goals and objectives. The emphasis on the day or week on hand can command all of one's attention now, for me, and will forgo much thought about long term ideas. It may be that at 86 the present is the reality and the only relevant reality, since the past and the future are evanescent.
       The gratitude one has to be alive at that age and still be able to plan day by day, is a gift. The gift of a wife and family nearby, even if Covid 19 impairs the connection, can be solved with the internet at all times.  As I say, the gift of life, the capacity to plan day by day, and gratitude for the blessing of wife and family makes it all worth while.
        On our refrigerator a sign says Do Not Resuscitate. This alerts the ambulance paramedics to honor our wish to die a natural death if there are no signs of life, after a collapse at home. I often wondered if I should have the sign tattooed on my chest if I collapsed on the street to avoid the well meaning who might bring me back to a simple vegetative state with broken ribs.
         I spent 40 years in Orthopedic surgery looking after a geriatric hospitalized demographic of patients with life crisis events. It was a learning experience, but it never prepared me for 86. We can't carry over the unique character of others. And I realized somewhere along the line that I was cowardly. My wife, my brothers, my children and all those I love are younger than me and for me to go first, spares me the grief that I seek to avoid. Another character flaw unearthed and about to be earthed in due time.
        How my Christian faith flows  around this unearthly dialogue to myself I do not know. God forgive me because I am only human and a sinner. I tried to be a Saint and failed. I yam what I yam. Popeye the sailor man !

Doctor Y was an old time physician who was a member of the establishment in Lotus City when I arrived to practice in the 1960's. In a moment of utter madness  he had purchased a large old Tudor mansion with  acreage in the high end district of the city. It was a beautifully landscaped property and he did the gardening work himself rather than hiring help as most of his neighbors were wont to do.  He gardened in baggy cast-off trousers  and an old slouch hat. Pruning, spraying, weeding, applying mountains of fertilizers and mulch---he toiled in the soil with his customary efficiency.
       A newcomer to the district and a neighbor seemed to take particular interest to his work habits and she eventually came to doctor Y's fence and hailed him.
        She said,  " I've noticed how well you work and wondered if you might consider working as well for me. I'm close by. What do you charge? "
         He thought for a moment and said,  " The standard amount, but the lady feeds me lunch. "
         " Oh, " said the newcomer,  " I can feed you lunch. "
         "But " he said ," The lady lets me sleep with her. "  I don't know whether it was the slouch hat or the dirty baggy pants, or the impertinence, but that seemed  to bring cessation to the negotiations.
           It was said that despite the perhaps infelicity at the time, they became good friends and enjoyed a laugh about it all. It is however likely that she would always be hesitant to become his patient.

I idly thought of a potential treasure trove for the enterprising in recycled hair.:  human hair from the barber shop, pet hair from the groomers,  even chemical hair from the beauty shops:  dandruff and fleas notwithstanding. all collected from daily floor sweepings, gone tonight and hair again tomorrow.
    Think of it:  the volume to be collected from all these emporiums, free for the taking by someone with a broom and a bag.
      The rain forest on the coast in which we live is shared by the ubiquitous slug that forages on our vegetables and flowers. There has never been a satisfactory method of control short of getting up early in the morning and cutting them in half and awaiting the cannibal slugs to come so as to divide them in half as well.
            An axiom in Medicine is:  There is an inverse relationship with the greatest number and variety of treatments for any condition and  their effectiveness. Copper wire, beer, liquid and solid ferrous poisons and endless barriers and pathway impediments are to no avail. Give it some thought:  a tiny berm of hair around a tender line of vulnerable tiny shoots which the slug would have to traverse,  slug-slime coated in floor swept hair, prickly impediment dragging the unwelcome creature to its demise.
       Think of it!  A pickup load of hair delivered to your gardens from the multiple emporia of Victoria each day for distribution. I was enthused.
       Then,  I had a dream that a hairy slug entered  the spinach patch and delivered hair and dandruff to the organic gardener's spinach salad.  I had another dream that a realtor was discussing our home and garden as  Hairy Acres.  In my dream the place was impossible to sell. I concluded that there is no end to bad ideas when the mind races with fantasy

When we fished off the Lotus City waters the pianist's extended family, a farm family, visited us from South Dakota for the Christmas season. On a beautiful winter day several of the party including the pianist's uncle went fishing with me at Fiddle Reef. Now Fiddle Reef is aptly named because the reef is shaped like  a violin and is marked by a navigational  buoy at the wide end where through traffic is heavy, and at the stem end where fishing traffic is heavy. The rock is low enough at low tide that it doesn't dry.
     We all planned to have supper at the marina after the fishing excursion. I was intent on having my guests catching a fish and trolled for most of the later  afternoon around the outer margins of the reef, delicately avoiding grounding our lures on the reef.  Despite my best effort, --- nothing! The pianist's uncle was one of those gentle special human beings and waited  at last until it was finally his turn on the lines.
     It was getting late and the balance of the family had gathered at the marina and they could see us at Fiddle Reef, our running lights on, fishing in the gloom. It was cold so we trailed clouds of steam as we went forth in terminal desperation to catch a fish. The winter season was such that the fish there,  were all winter Spring Salmon of 5 to 15 pounds, developing size on winter bait at that time of the year.
        Suddenly, as we were about to give up, a line screeched into action and a fair sized fish started breaking water at tremendous speed, shaking and writhing with each jump. Fortunately the uncle could play the fish more easily because he had the Penn reel in hand rather than the knuckle duster. I said to everyone that surprisingly we had a Coho on because a Spring Salmon rarely leaves the water  in the struggle to free itself. Was I ever wrong? One thing the Spring  Salmon does to a bait ball is enter it with its tail lashing to cripple some small herring or anchovy so it can turn and eat them at leisure. However, sure enough the 10 pound Spring Salmon was hooked in the tail. It behaved like a Coho because of that. I had never seen a tail-hooked salmon before or since, but in retrospect that seems strange because of the manner of salmon tail lashing in bait balls. Moreover salmon lures are designed to simulate crippled bait.
      Salmon. like all of us I guess, prefer getting things the easy way, and returning to have a leisurely lunch.Our uncle had a good time fishing and when he went back to the farm, he said he had quite a 'tail" to tell to his friends.

Last night I thought of the familiar Christmas short story of the young couple who didn't have  enough money for presents to one another. O Henry's story recounts the boy had a watch that he prized and she had beautiful hair. He sold his watch unbeknownst to her to buy her a beautiful set of combs for her beautiful hair and unknown to him she sold her hair for the money to buy a  special band for his prized watch.
             Christmas evening was met with dismay initially,   then later a realization set in. This story is simple but profound. Love and sacrifice are inextricably entwined with one another. Love is willing to sacrifice again and again and sacrifice is a part of love in action. That's where Christmas came from. There is glory in this mistake, and something to remind us that the law of unintended consequences teaches again and again that we are not as smart as we think we are. The Magi saw something more in the stable.

She had been sitting for a fairly long period and had to go to the bathroom and her leg kept going to sleep. "Can we take a break?" she asked.
"Just a couple of minutes , ' he said, " I'm tidying up something."
A trace of amusement passed her face and she shifted slightly to wait. He looked up just as the wisp of amusement was there and it was imprinted on his unconscious memory. Unknowingly he painted it in.
       He much later showed the portrait to the Eminence. "Very average painting" ,the Eminence observed. "but there is something intriguing about the face."
       Then he made a much fuller comment about the portrait  and observed that the enigmatic smile was significant, as it reflected a depth of both sorrow and joy;  that life and death, goodness and sin were omnipresent as a part of the human condition. Centuries later,  the enigma of the smile continued to confound as gallery travelers marveled at what they were told to see.
                        So dear Brutus, let us not be airy-fairy
                        If you hear a chirping in the bush
                        It's probably a sparrow and not a canary.
        The law of unintended consequence!
    

Some time earlier we had a workshop on story telling. It appeared to me at the time that I   was perhaps the most curmudgeonly attendant there or maybe the oldest and needed something. I got it! The workshop was conducted by a visiting EpiscopaL priest who is a professional story teller. Her stories were allegorical but not scripturally based that day. However, the sort of story telling that scripture utilizes is often allegorical stories that tell us something about ourselves, if we identify with the stories and the characters within them. They can be creative and constructive.
        Half of the people at the workshop were Anglicans and half were not church people but were interested in this kind of story telling. The priest may have avoided scriptural tales in view of the nature of the participants. The act of relating to one another through listening to allegorical tales, reacting to the characters in the stories in the way one does, and vicariously to one another as a result, provides an interesting and valuable  insight about how one thinks about oneself and the tangible and intangible  reality you think you know, or thought you knew.
      Whether fable or parable, allegory or metaphor, we can delve into a head space for ourselves or learn from others. Of course, whether we were church goers or not, there was no discernible difference in the responses at all, in our workshop.
       And yet when I look at our liturgy in church on any Sunday, the readings of scripture, the hymns, the psalms sung, even the prayers, have significant elements of allegory. What does that allow in respect to interpretation? A respect of the diversity among us. It allows our God-given right to be ourselves in all things of the spirit and to follow where it will in charity and harmony even for the most curmudgeonly.
      

Alas it didn't work out and shouldn't have either. In 1969 and earlier I was on call for orthopedic injuries at a downtown hospital in Lotus City. It was hard work and I was often tied up for hours day or night, every other day.The Emergency department had a number of doctor parking spaces allocated to us adjacent to it, but they were not only filled by doctors called to Emergency but by police who were often part of the scene. I was a bit cocky and felt if the police were in one of the doctor designated spaces and it was fully occupied I could park with impunity on the adjacent street. I got a lot of parking tickets which I ignored, convinced of course of my own rectitude.
       One day when the pianist was strapped  and busy  with children she received a visit from the city police department who told her I was under arrest for failure to pay multiple parking tickets ad should appear at the police station. On hearing this I clearly thought my contribution to mankind at that time would be apparent  and absolve me if they understood using our spot for police cars was not on. I hastened down to the police station to deliver my opinion, was informed of the charges, booked,  finger printed, and jailed. Shortly after, the desk sergeant said I could make bail and my  jail door was unlocked.
         He asked me if I was guilty of the charges and I said no, since given the situation and the self importance of my work  I considered they were dealing with me unfairly. Still, I was my own worst enemy and deep down I knew it. Despite that I believed I could argue my own case before the judge. We had a date and I argued my case as I thought it would be convincing. The judge smiled at me and said, "50 dollars or ten days and all your tickets in arrears to be paid." I smiled at him and bit the bullet. Never walk loudly and carry a small stick. I learned my lesson. It may be cliche but it is so applicable I must use it.  " Too soon old too late smart."