Friday, February 09, 2024

Into the new year we go

 Someone on a Facebook page for vintage paperbacks said to me "you seem to have read just about everything! I feel both admiration and envy!"

My response was it just seems that way. I did some research once and found the older a book was, the more likely I was to have read it. As we approached the present day, my strike rate sank to zero.

I was fortunate that my teenage years where I was reading almost constantly coincided with a wave of paperbacks in the 1960s that offered SF titles old and new at affordable prices. My notebooks of the time reveal I was consistently reading six paperbacks a week,month in and month out. (The average paperback in those days was seldom bigger than 192 pages, remember.) Under that set of circumstances, it was easy to cover the field fairly well !
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Got through Christmas without any drama.  I drove in for the morning service at church where we sang all the old favorite Christmas songs.  Home and had time to sit down down for a while before joining my niece Anita and her son for lunch in the city.

I had never been to the Crowne Plaza before - it was built after  I moved out of the city - and it has a deceptively small frontage (a bit like Doctor Who's Tardis).  We enjoyed a very pleasant meal, and I managed to stop eating just at the stage where I felt I could have eaten one more mouthful.  That's the time to stop!
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Tuesday I skipped the usual croquet morning and the evening quiz night,  so I had plenty of time to meet up with Dr Ali, my new medical adviser.  He had received the results from the scan I had early in the year.  Good news and bad news.  There was no sign of Problem A, which they had been looking for.  But they had noticed some signs of Problem B, so I have to go and see a specialist.  Sigh.   Oh well, better to get it done than not know about it at all.
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The television set hasn't been switched on since before Christmas.  Oh, I have watched a couple of movies on You Tube (seeing THE MONOLITH MONSTERS again was a real treat, haven't seen it in fifty years).   In the milder weather, I have been eating my meals out on the patio, and I have a new radio by the back door -- i was initially attracted to it because it has both a cassette deck and bluetooth, a hybrid of two different centuries.   This means I can listen to old radio shows while I eat.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've listened to HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, FRONTIER GENTLEMAN, THE HERMIT'S CAVE, THE HAUNTING HOUR, GANGBUSTERS, THE WHISTLER, ESCAPE, WILD BILL HICKOK, THE SEALED BOOK, DRAGNET, CHALLENGE OF THE YUKON, THE CISCO KID, and HOPALONG CASSIDY.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Memories


While I was sitting out the back having my morning serve of tea & toast, I was flipping through a magazine and looked at one of their short stories; it turned out to be about a brother and sister who didn't get on in younger years but came to love and respect each other as they grew up.  The story ends with the brother proudly being part of the wedding of his younger sister.

After I finished reading, I closed the magazine and sat there lost in my thoughts for a while.  What were the odds, I pondered.   Just this morning, Facebook had reminded me that it was seven years to the day I had been best man at the wedding of my younger sister.  I'll never forget how happy she looked that day.

We miss you, Julie.   God bless.

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Even last Sunday was busy this week.  I read from the Old Testament at the communion service this morning (and got the usual two or three comments from the parishioners - maybe I should start selling my autograph for the missionary fund).

Then picked up three bags of feed from the Animal Tucker Box store.  Home for a light lunch and closed my eyes for an hour.  Went next door to a birthday party for my neighbor's big-seven-oh celebration.  The family dogs didn't seem upset by all the visitors, though one of them brought her ball in and kept dropping it at stranger's feet and looking hopefully at them. 

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Here's a poem I wrote back in 2014:


A MONDAY POEM

Somehow 

at this time of life 

the day seems to go out of focus

so easily. 

Too much coffee

or maybe too little. 

You feel as though 

in some way

you haven't quite connected

with reality. 

It's all -- somewhere a little removed. 

You run on tramlines of routine,

vaguely baffled by your own steadfastness.

The things you used to love

no longer give you the same pleasure. 

The things which were a chore 

are so familiar 

they no longer

even bore you.

Voices on the radio 

talk of interesting things

and play new pieces of music 

but it seems to come 

from a space station 

in orbit 

around some other planet. 

The calendars and diaries

tell of an old year ending

and a new year beginning, 

but there are none 

of the markers you were used to. 

Where are the cards 

from those uncles and aunts, 

so punctual every year?

All gone, every one of them.

And you realize that now

you are the older generation.