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My father, going out

9/16/2015

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I wish I had a photo of it but I don't. I can see it clearly though.

My father very seldom went out except to do chores. Otherwise, it was only for funerals, maybe weddings, but I don't remember any, or things like going to the bank to sign something, and later, to very occasional CNIB events for the blind.

Dad was the ultimate in practical people. He lived in the real physical world around him. For instance, not being able to see the kitchen floor, he would wash it every time he finished doing the dishes. And he would wash the dishes immediately after supper, no matter how interesting the dinner table conversation.

And if he had to go out for some evening function, he would prepare for it the whole day, shaving and taking his shower early after lunch, feeling through his seldom-used good clothes hours before leaving, and starting to dress at least a couple hours early.

Then, if it was cold out, Dad, who was skinny and never produced enough body heat in the winter, would stand fully clothed in front of the door, blind, facing sideways, waiting, listening silently, without expression, to the usual commotion of us kids who always threw our clothes on at the very last minute in a panic. He would wait there seemingly at peace for more than half an hour, dressed in everything: his long-johns, shirt, tie, sweater, at least two pieces of a three-piece suit (which he was never ever seen in otherwise), a heavy overcoat, pull-over rubbers, gloves, and his 1928 tweed wool cap with earflaps which cost him, new, $1.39, and which I, now older than he was standing there at the door, still am proud to keep in my own cap drawer, and which I occasionally try to pull down over my larger head, or just hold up to my nose; the powerful smell of crankshaft oil and engine grease is still there, life-size.

It's finally time for me to learn from Dad. I still put off to the last minute getting ready to go out, and always put myself into a panic. I wait because I'm already anxious. I always am. Just about always have been. But I don't remember ever seeing that fear in Dad out on the farm. Maybe his practical existence in the world around him kept his fears at bay. While mine were so strong I was driven into my mind. Not a good place to be to confront reality. It will always have the upper hand. Lately I find myself close to panic over otherwise trivial situations.

So I've come up with something that might help. Just as Dad began getting ready early in the day, I am going to ask myself in advance of doing anything (if I can remember to) how to do it without increasing my anxiety. That way, I'll apply my mind to the practical problems of the day, in proper sequence, the one world helping me through the other, instead of acting as a refuge from it.

If I had not been so busy thinking when I was young, I would have already learned this from my father. The way nature expected me to. But it's never too late. Today is still the present.



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Robert Gregory Seaton, Larry Burfield, Yvonne Maggs and 4 others like this.
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Martin Hayter Great story. I always get there for work a half or an hour early. No stress that way.
Like · Reply · 7 hrs

    Stan Burfield Right. I'm finally getting the idea.

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    Linda's passion flower

    9/16/2015

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    Picture
    Linda had this passion flower plant on the balcony till today. It would produce three or four flowers a day. The last one bloomed a couple days ago. Too bad it only lasts one season.
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    Artist at work; her canvas is the apartment.

    9/13/2015

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    Picture
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    Other people

    9/13/2015

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    The older I get, the easier it is to imagine being other people. Any other people.

    A while ago I was having a conversation with one of my young friends in a bar. We had zeroed in on the difference between peoples' outlooks. I suddenly said, “There’s no reason why I’m stuck in this body. It seems really odd to me that I am. The fact is, I could have been born anybody.” He looked at me skeptically. “I could have been born you. And you me. I could have been born a woman instead of a man. Easily. The chances of that were just 50-50.”

    And then a plain-looking, middle-aged woman, as old as his mother, walked in and past. I said, “I can easily imagine being her.”

    He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you kidding?”

    “Why not? There’s very little difference between her and I. Physically, we’re nearly identical. She has more of one hormone and I have more of another, and a few subsequent physical changes, that’s about all. Most of the difference is in outlook.” I looked down, trying to find the essence of the problem. “I think we just don’t want to imagine being each other. So that makes it seem impossible.”

    But he couldn’t latch onto my idea that we could have been born other people. He assumed, even though I denied it, that I had to have been talking about a soul or spirit that might be reborn in a different body. But I’m not religious. And I think it’s highly unlikely such things exist.

    Yet it’s undeniable that each body is somehow a person. Each body that’s born and achieves a certain age becomes a person. There’s somebody in there looking out. There’s a person in there. One very much like me. So my question remains: Why was I born in this particular body. Out of billions. I could just as well be an old Chinese guy in Beijing. Or a young Chinese guy. Or a slave in 1800‘s Georgia.

    I guess each body begins to imagine. And then becomes someone. That must be the explanation, that we’re just bodies that imagine we’re not bodies but something else. Obviously, then, we can’t try out other bodies, as nearly identical as we are. We’re limited to using our imaginations. Which we call empathy.

    But quite often I come back to it. And no matter how many times I mull it over, always arriving at the same obvious answer, it still seems weird that I’m stuck here. Astonishing even.

    Now here’s an even weirder thing: Hardly anyone I mention this to knows what I’m talking about.

    I have a new theory for that. I grew up as an outsider, on a small farm of shy people, me being one of the shyest. I knew about human beings but didn’t feel like I was one of them. I remember later having a revelation, a number of times, that I’m actually a part of a big society, not an alien, that I am a human just like they are. That I’m one of them. With them. But it was a long time before I clearly saw that there was very little difference between us, and especially that there was very little difference between our thoughts, between the selves we think we are.

    And that I could just as well have been born any of them.



    Yvonne Maggs and Katia Grubisic like this.


    Yvonne Maggs Have often wondered why I am me and not someone else, just by some fluke, and here I am....
    Unlike · Reply · 1 · 2 hrs

    Stan Burfield exactly
    Like · Reply · 33 mins

    Larry Burfield Interesting thinking!
    Unlike · Reply · 1 · 12 mins

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    A Grand Bend evening, out of season, quiet, restful.

    9/12/2015

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    Picture
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    Moccasin Bells

    9/12/2015

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    Out at the Hobbema Indian Rodeo, a little white farm boy sits expectantly right down on the front bench of the bleachers, legs nearly touching the fence, while up behind him, his broad mother worries beside her blind husband, a man who can only listen, tightly wrapped in his suit and Western string tie.

    The boy leans forward between two slow-talking Indians, huge and heavy in dark plaid and black hats. He is glad he left his holster and silver six shooter at home this year. 

    The air is still, its scent of sun-dried farm dirt as light as feathers. Even the harrowed corral is waiting, its dark clumps flattened for the coming of the horses,  the spray of their hooves. The only movements are behind the gate, dark faces, arms tight on ropes. He listens for the horn, wanting that surprise again of some local native youth, a guy from the poohall, one he would never have noticed in town. The gate moves and now here he comes flying from the chute up on the back of a pounding, kicking, whirlwind. The boy is standing. Wow. This guy holds himself upright, the other hand swirling, legs flying in the leaps, with just as much determination and skill as the best Texas cowboys he's ever seen at the big stampede back in Ponoka. 

    And then the chuckwagon race, the ultimate event for a kid--three brown wooden wagons, the old-fashioned farm kind with seats and wheels and nothing else, no canvas covers or fancy logos, and in the seats, three native farm boys holding back their horses until that horn sounds, and the earth shudders under hooves like hammers, and the drivers' long arms whip down their reins, lanky legs straining against the boards, black hair flying as they career tightly round those two barrels, then thunder off together into the straightaway. 

    Mouth open, adrenaline pumping, that one moment out on that reserve.

    Wandering then, as the evening cools his young spirit, he hears the drums begin, and the chanting -- hi ya ya ya hi ya ya ya -- a circle of men and women drumming and chanting together, enclosing him between tall dark people, between their canvas and skin tents and just as his legs begin to follow the rhythm in the light of the fire a warrior moves from the shadows in beaded buckskin and feathers stepping slowly into a dance, and with each touch and tap of his feet the sudden rhythmic jangle of bells on his moccasins joins the beat of the drums, and the chant as it slides into song, its words from the Indian world but the rhythms make sense to the boy's young ears, and the movements of the dancer, his head down and down, then up, his feet tapping, stomping, tangling through the beat, all this builds a home in the boy's mind, far from his own, yet right there in front of him. 

    And as the decades pass, as he dodges, back-pedals and leaps his way through stressful white culture, its continual attack and defence, its judgements -- always there is this peaceful place, the jangling moccasins, soft tap of feet, the communal drumming, the communal chant.



    You, Linda Eva Williams, Yvonne Maggs, Alan Flowers and 2 others like this.


    Larry Burfield I like your thinking Stan!
    Unlike · Reply · 1 · 23 hours ago


    Stan Burfield Definitely one of my favourite pieces of writing to date.
    Like · Reply · 15 mins
    Comments

    September 13th, 2015

    9/8/2015

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    Picture
    Linda and I have never been religious, but more and more lately we both have felt that something is missing. Personally, I haven’t done much about it, but I’ve noticed a quiet progression in Linda’s life. Maybe a year ago she watched a TV biography of the Buddha, and then a couple months ago she came home from HomeSense with this statue and put it amongst her things in the living room, looking at it occasionally to help calm herself. (It has migrated out to the balcony now, as seen here.) Then a month ago she pulled out an old book of mine called Original Self, by Thomas Moore, and I’ve seen her reading it now and then, which to me means a lot because Linda is NOT a reader. Then, on our 27th wedding anniversary in Stratford, on Sept. 3rd, while she was prowling the Antiques Mall, I found an interesting book in the mall’s main book stall, one of those easy multi-topic books, and at dinner in a Chinese restaurant opened it more or less at random and read to Linda this quote, said to be one of the last pieces of advise the Buddha gave to his disciples before dying: “Be lamps unto yourselves.”

    Linda was in turns disappointed and astonished. She had been hoping to find the answer to that emptiness in her life from Buddhism but now was befuddled. The book said that this quote forms the first principle of Buddhism. We thought of the dilemma it causes followers, that they shouldn’t follow but be their own lamps. We sat there for an hour talking about it and left a little further in the right direction than when we had come in.

    There is an equivalent progression in my life. At 65 I’m finally beginning to see and accept who I really am as a person. I should have seen it, and sort of did, all along. But now I’m happy with the bits and pieces I’ve found. Whether they have anything to do with spirituality is doubtful, however. But at least I’m no longer living a life of self-avoidance.





    9 Likes  4 Comments.......

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    Two buds on a tree

    9/5/2015

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    PictureLinda and I on holiday in Maui, 2005, having just sold our flower shop in Vancouver.







    As of today, Linda and I have been married for 27 years! Yes, married all this time. Linda and I.

    We have very little in common. She's visual, I'm verbal; she's practical, I'm impractical; I love to understand, she loves to do; she's still into flowers and all the other flowery feminine things after a lifetime as a floral designer: but me -- after 18 years as a florist I still don't get it. Yet we do have a few things in common: we are both introverts; we both come from a country background; we both care about the depths of people, especially of each other. And so we know each other inside out. And try to let each other live our own lives, our real lives .



                                                                                                                                   29 Likes   8 Comments

    • Frances Sullivan, Alan Flowers, Maddie Storvold and 26 others like this.


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