Being Here

I have not written as much on this blog as I had originally intended. A great deal of what happens here is simply repetitive – our daily routines with some slight deviations. Not too much of interest. Besides I’m rather a lazy person about tasks that don’t grasp at my attention for some particular reason. Being here is something like being at our place in Orillia, in that it is a world separate from that of Toronto where the ordinary daily business life is on-going, especially for Mark. Here (and in Orillia) we dwell more within the same space; our daily activities are more co-ordinated with one another’s. At the same time there is greater possibility for quiet reflection.

For me that comes especially, though not exclusively, in the early morning, from about 6 AM to 7:30, while I breakfast on the balcony, watching the sky and the water shade from very dark to progressively lighter tones of blue and gray. My mind travels over decades back to periods of my life that I rarely visit. People, events, and impressions come back with great clarity and I wish that I was able to record them all before they slip back again into the regular stream of consciousness. The morning after talking with Maurice a few days ago while he was at Catherine’s Christmas party, I found myself back again in the early days of our relationship at 55 Admiral, remembering so much more than I could easily communicate to him or to our daughters. This morning I thought for some time about Tom O’Sullivan and the two year period when I saw him as a therapist, a period that saw many changes for both of us. I had only two other “close encounters” with Tom after that time: once when I had lunch with him when I was in graduate school; and, at lunch again years later when I interviewed him about his experiences in Therafields. Our relationship was so vastly different in those two encounters that it had been in the earlier days.

I told my writing group buddies some months ago that I think that I and most of them are now in what I view as the middle years of old age. The early “senior” years seem now like an extension of middle age – still lots of restless energy, ambition, and great mobility. Now, less so. Still we are some distance from what I think of as true old age, as experienced, for example, by my mother in the last five years of her long life. I like the period that I am in right now. There are real life issues to be dealt with: professional, logistical, financial, as well as health and family issues. But other than the odd twinge from the past I rarely struggle with feelings that I must accomplish more or be more. I am mostly able to take each day as it presents itself and to deal with and enjoy what it has to offer. I don’t think that the days of adventure are over though. My mother continued to do some travelling into her late 80s, her last voyage being a cruise in the eastern Mediterranean and a visit to Crete when she was about 87. I fully intend to take the opportunities that Mark and I have to travel and to learn about other places in the world and other histories that in various ways intersect with our own.

I think of all of you people while I’m here, glad that you are there, sometimes wishing you were here, even as I know that if you were, I might rather soon wish you were there again! Such is the inconstancy of human emotions!