Bad news - March came in like a lamb

Getting old is not for wimps 

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Canadian comedian Glen Foster, commenting on aging and some of the things that bother us as we get older, says in a comedy routine: “Every once in a while I look around ask myself the question: ‘Why am I here?”

            It wasn’t a religious or a metaphysical question. He went down into the basement and looked around and said: “Why am I here? What did I come down for?”

            Don’t deny it. You have done ‘the exact same thing’. Anyone over the age of fifty can empathize. You were standing in your kitchen and thought of something you wanted to get from the living room. You strode confidently in there only to find, not what you wanted, but that you have completely forgotten what you came in for. The first stage of a disease called BOF (Being over Fifty). I’m 63.8 years old, so you can imagine the problems I have. Now, if I’m going into another room for something, I say aloud what it is I am seeking, in the hope that the echo of the words will hang in the air at least long enough for me to retrieve the object. As my late friend Bob Nielsen used to say, when he was 80+ and still had a better memory than I, who was 55 or something: “Aging is not for the faint of heart.”

            Like me, and the rest of us, this winter is aging. There was bad news on the first day of this month, if my late grandfather was to believed – and he was. “If March comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb—well, even you, with your limited intelligence,  can figure out the rest.”

            March the first was quite a nice day here, which means that March 31, if Israel and Iran let it arrive at all, will be an ogre, a fiend, and a rat-tailed cobra. We can scoff all we like about the old sayings of our ancestors, but some of them are true. “A red sky at night is a sailor’s delight, etc.” has a firm grounding in meteorological fact. Okay, March’s going in like a lamb and all that doesn’t quite, but who’s going to argue with Grampy?

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            Other observations while I wait for March 31 and its tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons, and like that:

            If you are in the mood for seeing a person who is totally unrealistic, naïve, divorced from the world, and one who has hope for humans to respect other humans, go on the Internet to the Toronto Etiquette Project. On that web page a chap gives suggestions to Toronto bus, subway, and transit riders and others so that everyone’s city experience will be better. We’re talking about Toronto here. Hogtown, etc. You shouldn’t preach or floss your teeth on the subway; you shouldn’t smoke near doors or swear around kids; don’t talk on your cellphone in a restaurant; if you’re a pedestrian, please ‘merge properly’; don’t be tweeting on your Blackberry, and treat cab drivers with respect. Yeah, THAT cab driver, the one who picked you up downtown and took you back downtown via Oshawa. Good luck, my friend.

            I was walking in my cousin’s icy yard and of course fell right on my ruggedly handsome face (it’s even more rugged now). She looked at the upward-facing tread on my boots and said: “Hey, you need winter tires!” Then she laughed, but only once, if you know what I mean. It seems that the tread on her boots weren’t anything to email home to mother about, especially when someone attempting to get up off the ice “accidentally” kicked out and tripped her. She’ll be home from the horse-stable soon.

            Larry Wandling and Bill Granite from the Club went on a mighty bender last week. Both were on serious medications, so that wasn’t a great idea in the first place, but late one night they were sipping away and decided they were going to try each other’s medicines. They will be missed.

            I wonder about a lot of things, not many of them in the Middle East where the fine science of Logic is non-existent, but, before Muammar  Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was filled full of holes, he was boss of Libya for many about four decades. During all that time, his only title was ‘Colonel’ Gaddafi. My question is, since he was the boss (in spite of saying he shared power with others), why didn’t he give himself a promotion? Maybe not Field Marshall, but surely Brigadier General, I would have thought.

I’m not sure what the Toronto Etiquette Project would say about that. I wonder if, when he was about to be shot, he wasn’t thinking: “Why am I here? I know I came here for something.”

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