DEPARTURES
Saturday Dec. 14, 2013
Life – in its finest form must be lived from Monday to Friday – because weekends lack sufficient energy for finest, or best. Isn’t that true? Not a departure from values and attitudes, but more of a temporary resting place to re-charge, re-build and re-think the week.
So much zealous boundless energy from my 20s, 30s, 40s, fading in my memory banks – remembering things I read back then, scoffed at actually, that said “our most productive time was in our 50s and 60s”, and I’m sure whoever said that meant the age, the stage of life, not those now so distant nostalgia filled decades. Life, work at least, was at a pretty low-tech pace back then compared with today. Eight hours was eight hours. Ten was ten. But the input/output/thru-put equation has changed so much, that sometime the volume of things the brain must do when the body needs to only work a keyboard and a telephone. And work volume explodes.
Week’s end leaves my end-game weak.
Physical fatigue – not so much.
Emotional, exhausting, several highs, lots of stresses – in many respects a fantastic week. In some, just plain grueling. Not that I would trade it. Just recognizing there is a price to pay for having all that adrenalin coursing through veins – and when the supply is cut off on Friday afternoon, the letting down, let down, flattening out.
Dinner guest, cooking, chopping/slicing/serving – all good, but only a collapse on the couch would help then.
Then sleep. Visions of deep tissue massage danced in my head, until an alarm pierced the air.
. . . and then up at 2:45AM to drive a friend to an early flight – back in bed by 5:00, slept till 8!
So what can reverse fatigue, fix malaise mood?
Coffee.
More coffee.
Morning papers filled the time to drink the coffee.
Or was it coffee filling the time it took to read the papers?
More coffee.
I’m heading shortly to Edmonton. To see Gary. To sleep in Fort Saskatchewan, hold my granddaughter Isla still, if only for a minute (she hates to be held). I’ve got a whistle for her. And to smile. I’ll see friends, one new and several old. Or is that new and used?
We think of cars, household appliances and many other things as new, or used. But people, we tend to think of as new or old. Not their age, but the length of the friendship. Its odd I think. I can have a new friend I’ve spent lots of time with, and I still call them new. Yet someone who is a long-time-barely-know-them type is always called an old friend, without regard to their age.
I remember so poignantly, advice of Ben Farnham – nearly 30 years ago – but it rings fresh today: “as you get older, cultivate lots of younger friends because the older you get, you’ll lose your friends because they die on you”. Two in the last 5 years. Another one coming soon, impossible to avoid its reality, impossible to do anything but standby, to visit, to listen and to try to understand. There seems to be no rule book, no self-help guide with schematic drawings about what to do, what not to do, what not to say, what to say just right . . .
Friendship is peculiar to understand in the case of men and women (as Harry described to Sally), stranger still in men-to-men, how it is that we bond, stay close through years and years – avoiding tears or jeers, but we help each other. Like I imagine brothers would if I had a brother – not about new or used, or new or old – just simple really: meaningful, strongly built, rough, soft, kind, jerks sometimes, hurtful, available when you need them, inaccessible sometime when you need them most, helpful, helpless, fun, funny, flawed, completely genuine and incredible impossible.
We all need this in our best old friends don’t we? We all need it in our brothers – I think, but I don’t understand sibling relationships because I’ve never had one.
I expect, when Isla’s baby brother arrives in the new year she’ll begin needing these things from him, and he’ll need them from her.
I’ll continue to need these things from friends, and they will get them from me.
Some old, some used, and some new. Some 50s, some 60s. Some new ones too – and still, great appreciation for golden oldies, guys with stents and scars, gals who were pals, and some who still are.
So what can reverse my fatigue, fix my malaise mood?
Coffee.
And a road trip.
And seeing friends.
And teaching a grandchild to blow a whistle.
Mark Kolke
200,560
column written/ published from Calgary
morning walk: 5C / 42F, overcast, light breeze, streets are a sloppy mess – air is so humid, every drift is slumping, our path still very slick …
Comments Received:
I like your attitude – enthusiasm and perseverance. I hope your hard work pays off and you win the prize you seek, EC, Chicago, IL
