A Mighty River

A Mighty River

I hear the impatient idling of the powerful diesel engine of the large articulated bus at the busstop half a block away. The light of a new day is barely seeping into my room. I roll over and look at the clock. Seven-thirty a.m, as usual. The large apartment block between my small townhouse and the busstop is emptying its occupants: young and middle-aged, singles and married into that bus and the others that have already come and gone.

They are the workers and the employers, the students and the professionals, the movers and the shakers, all joining in a fast-moving, turbulent, dynamic river of life that churns downtown with the energy of ideas and commerce, services and production, aspirations and dreams.

My wife and I used to be part of that mighty Amazon fed by all those commuters crowding quickly into the impatient buses, trains, ferries, planes, cars on this and every other morning.

But these days, in earned retirement, I can pull the covers up to my neck again, and roll over snug in the realization that I won't have to face a whole day of work on not enough sleep, again.

Retirement is a quieter tributary as life meanders through visits from grown sons and daughters, grandkids, photos, phone calls, the odd trip or cruise, e-mails, books, reflections and memories into that contented fulfilment into which my life partner has peacefully tiptoed before me.

Taste and Tongues

Taste and Tongues

Methinks I shall have to make two adjustments to my lifestyle.

My wife, ever concerned about my general knowledge and my health, has recently sent me two e-mails with research that may suggest how to stave off dementia. I wondered for a while which was her motive, but since it seems logical to think that if I were sliding into dementia I would be the least likely person to notice, I guess she was passing on the information for my general information. At least I hope so.

The research suggested two ways to postpone the dementia that sometimes comes with advanced age. Not that I am there yet ( I mean advanced in age) but I would like to get there sometime.

It seems one way is to function in several languages.

I definitely have slid back in that respect. In California I used English and Spanish routinely in my everyday life. Here in Seattle there has been little need for Spanish other than the infrequent occasions when a monolingual English-speaking friend who has monolingual Spanish-speaking contacts in Latin America, copies me e-mails to translate or my wife forwards an item from a Spanish-language source on the internet. Even our household use for Spanish as a means for my wife and me to communicate secretly when the kids were present is no longer necessary or effective since they no longer live at home and, as we later discovered, as kids they had long been able to figure out what we used to think was secret communication anyway.

The other preventive mental health measure I need to take is to increase my intake of wine to one glass a day. My current dosage is far less than that, unless beer can be included as part of such a healthy regimen.

Looks like I shall have to add these routines to the pleasantly limited choreography of my current retiree lifestyle.

If only I could recapture those few days when both chores came packaged together on a cruise on which the sommelier giving a course on wine appreciation spoke Spanish and the wine was served at dinner by a Spanish-speaking señorita.


As they toast in Spanish:
¡ Salúd !

hopscotch: The Introduction

I have hopscotched through many countries and many lifestyles: studying,working, partying, marrying, parenting and now, grandparenting and cruising through retirement.

I don't think any reading of my horoscope or Zodiac sign would have predicted that. Given the pattern of life followed by my grandparents, parents and my nine older siblings, I should have been a very conservative Catholic and lived all my life in Trinidad within a few miles of the ancestral home

But without my being much aware of it, a lot of different hands were drawing the lines of this hopscotch game into which I have thrown my marker.

My parents, brothers and sisters were all very enterprising and had taught themselves to be very competent in their fields. They were also very adept at practical and mechanical things, such as maintaining their cars. I was like them, but I also had a strong inclination towards reading books and other academic activities. My oldest brother, his patience sometimes stretched by my clumsiness when, as a last resort he'd call me to help him with some mechanical task, would address me as "Shakespeare".

As "Shakespeare" I got to do the chores where I couldn't do much damage, like washing non-precision car parts with kerosene. I began to dislike grime and smelly, oily fluids that were impossible to wash from my hands.

I was further nudged towards a more academic kind of life when a childhood scourge laid me low for some months just at adolescence, preventing me from running around with my pals. Physical activities were limited for some months after that.

A line was being drawn more sharply as I went through High School, succeeding very well in my exams and liking every moment of it. University was beginning to become a goal. But there would be no local university in Trinidad for many years. University meant going overseas to the UK or the USA.

                                            University College Dublin

Given that most of my High School teachers were Irish clerics, and that there was a dark legend that most locals who had gone to the UK to study had "lost their Faith", a cause of great gloom among their families, I, and my parents chose Ireland rather than England for my University education.

Up to that time I wouldn't have guessed that that line was part of a hopscotch pattern. It was supposed to be just one straight line that led to Dublin then back to Trinidad.