The Seated View

“You sound really chipper,” The Boy said. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard you like this.” He was right. I hadn’t felt that good about life and myself for a long time. And all it took was a long walk.   Well, to be fair it was a bit more complicated than that.   A brief recap of 2017 It feels as if I`ve been sick for the entire year. First there was croup , then recovering from croup. This was followed by a few months of feeling a bit better, then I got walloped by a crash/sinus infection that turned into three months of chronic sinus infection. Recovery took a long time and just as I was getting better, I was flattened by the mother of all summer colds. To be fair, that was only the past seven months. Ha! “Only”! When I look back on the time that’s passed since about Christmas, it seems like it’s been a fog of feeling too awful to participate in my life. Sure, there were periods where I extremely temporarily rebounded, only to lose g...

One of my favourite things about summer is Canada Day and the Redpath Waterfront Festival . And really, is there anything better than long weekends in the summer? Well, Christmas arguably, but it requires wearing more clothes. And no, I’m not tromping about naked, but there are no socks and no sweaters. Back to the Canada Day long weekend. This year, Canada officially turned 150 years old, so there was a lot going on in this beautiful country as we all celebrated. Toronto celebrated with a duck. Well, there was also multiple fireworks, parties, cake, and much more, but the thing everyone talked about was the duck. The six-story 300,000 pound rubber ducky in the harbour. But I get ahead of myself. The Canada Day weekend is also the weekend of the Redpath Waterfront Festival. It’s relatively new, but has already made its mark — at least with me. They started being with flyboarding , moved on to tall ships (including Vikings), and this year there wer...

“Do you have any change for the homeless?” He asked this over and over again, of almost everyone who passed. To a person, they kept walking, only a few acknowledging him, saying sorry, they didn’t have any change. So did I. And we were all lying. Sure, most of us pay for purchases, even small ones, with debit cards these days, but don’t we all have some change rattling around? The point wasn’t that we didn’t have any change, it was that we weren’t willing to give it to him. This man who didn’t have a home to go to, didn’t have a bed to sleep in, and was depending on our change for his next meal. Or his next fix. Or a bottle of cheap liquor. That seems to be a problem for many. People don’t want to give money to the homeless because they don’t want them to spend it on intoxicating substances or other things they deem worthless. So they don’t help. Or they help by buying a homeless person a meal at the nearest fast food joint. I couldn’t disagree more with this. ...