Bill Engleson's Blog, page 2

How Brilliant Am I? It needed to be asked but no one was…so…another job for me.

It has been a while since I wrote a blog post. The guilt mounts. The last post was also about short lists. I’m sensing a theme. Today, February 15th is one day away from a new short list. I may or may not make it.

Sitting here in my writing chamber, the snow, even though it has ceased, has, over the past couple of hours, accumulated outside many of our windows in significant quantity…courtesy of three young men contracted to remove a heavy load of it from our roof-top deck.

Peace of mind, as it were.

Back to the wait.

I write a lot. I regularly submit stories and the occasional poem to contests. Many are flash fiction sites where there is no specific prize…just the pleasure, or not, offered by your peers. Over the past few years, I have honed my self-taught writing skills (occasionally supplemented by workshops) by writing every day, often pieces that respond to a variety of stimulating prompts.

Occasionally, I enter contests where there is a monetary prize. Often there is a small entry fee. Many are via a system called Submittable.

Submittable is a process for submitting works to various publications and contests.

Since 2014, I have submitted 28 pieces of my writing art via it. One was longlisted. One was short listed. A few are still in the queue, waiting adjudication.

I live in hope.

I also live in reality.

I should note here that there are other, more individual routes to submit to a range of contests. I have also had a bit of ego-boosting there as well.

As the day approaches for the next short list to be announced (Saturday, the 16th, tomorrow,) though sometimes these days are extended, I get unnecessarily anxious. People have busy lives, and there isn’t always a long list. Did I mention that? I re-review my two entries. A few times. Poems they are. One took months to compose. The other much less time.

Believe it or not, I find a typo in the one that took forever.

It clearly will be trashed.

A poem with a typo,

Unforgivable.

Or is it unforgivible?

Hmm!

Anyways, as to the initial question I posed…how brilliant am I?…I was trying to reference how I view my various writing products. I see their warts (albeit, not always right away) as much as I see their perfection (again, that can take some time.)

Well, that’s it. I will wait. The snow has stopped. I no longer have to brave the elements to brush off the snow from my satellite dish.

And I have other things to write before the night is done.

 

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The Pleasure Derived from Being on a Short List, any Short List…

As someone who has not often been on anyone’s short list, at least to my knowledge, my recent elevation to the FBCW’s short list for its 650-word fiction/non-fiction literary contest, “How I Choose to Hibernate,” was a delightful experience, albeit somewhat short lived.

The mystery is over, and I did not win. I do offer my sincere congratulations to the winner, Ariana Townsend, for her story, Bury Me, as well as the other short listians (sic) who kept me company along the brief autumn trail that wended its way to Winter.

For those who might like to read my entry, Winter Road Song, here is the link.

Almost simultaneously, another of my flash fiction forays elevated me to the position of one of the five finalists in the Carrot Ranch Lets Get TUFF Rodeo.

This on-line excursion was pared down on Monday, October 29th, to three writer-survivors. We had begun, after the initial selection, with a new tale of 297 words…thematically featuring a “mudslide.” The next week, we had to whittle that effort down to 99 words. The following week, we had to carve that sculpted endeavour down to 59 words. The final reduction, pretty much a full deboning, was to take it down to 9 words. Two different 9-word slashes.

With emotion. Two different 9-word emotions.

The surviving three were then tasked with a 24-hour turnaround. Take the original fleshy 297-word story and enhance it to 495 words…

The results were announced on Friday, November 2nd.

I feel fortunate to have finished in 1st place.

While I like to add the occasional win to the column, I truly didn’t expect it or even relish it. I am not sure that has always been my mindset but these days, in all of the writing I do, the two completed books, the two and counting which present creative challenges daily, the flash fiction I so enjoy, the dribs and drabs of poetry I haul out from hidden recesses, all of it means, to me, that writing is pretty much my greatest pleasure. After Pickleball. And Anchovies. And Grape Expectation Red Wine. And Volunteering with the HDCHCS…I guess there may be a few others. I am so fickle.

I offer a borrowed image from a distant European galley. It may or may not have anything to do with me.

 

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A Seriously Critical Accounting of my Journey into the Heart of The Ormsby Review

 

So, there I was in the early fall of 2016, writing flash fiction at a furious pace, working (mostly dawdling, to be honest) on the drafts of two novels, waiting for the release of my second book, Confessions of an Inadvertently Gentrifying Soul, you know, just hanging on my every written and hard to pluck word, being a lonely, albeit thoughtful writer, when my friend, author Howard MacDonald Stewart, himself, at the time, feverishly waiting the release of his book, Views of the Salish Sea, referred me to The Ormsby Review, which at the time, was pretty much in its infancy.

Here is how it describes its mandate: The Ormsby Review is a journal service for serious coverage of B.C. books and authors, hosted by Simon Fraser University.

Initially I was hoping to promote my new book but very quickly, the editor, Richard Mackie, a workhorse of an historian, offered me the opportunity to write a review for the latest book by reporter/journalist, Mike McCardell. Though I was leery, I hesitantly accepted the offer, received a copy of None of This Was Planned from the publisher, Harbour Publishing, read it, enjoyed it, and wrote a review.

Since then, I have contributed one essay on Denman Island’s iconic local library, The Dora Drinkwater, and three additional reviews. Two were for Jack Knox’s first and second books, Hard Knox and Opportunity Knox.

The essay, incidentally, was actually a chapter meant to go into my “Confessions” book, but it slipped out of sight of my eagle-eye.

How careless I am with my chapters!

In any case, my latest Ormsby review is for J.G. Toews’ inaugural mystery, Give Out Creek. You might want to give both the novel and the review a read.

Even if you do, I think the point I really want to convey here is that, as pleased as I have been to be a very small part of the Ormsby Review, its value to me, to others, has been its sweep of content, its exploration of books that shine a fascinating light of the big and the smaller moments of BC History.

The books and the reviews hopefully will keep on coming. And we will all benefit, thanks of course to all of the marvelous authors but also to Richard Mackie, Alan Twigg, BC BookLook publisher, and the enduring support of SFU, my university of choice.

I should mention that the Review was named after Margaret Ormsby, a departed historian of significant note.

In closing, I admit that this is a rambling post. Still, it is crammed with data. Thanks for your time.

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A Playwright’s Announcement– At Home with the Trumps

Earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to smack my thespian chops in Dante Ambriel’s radio play, a musically driven drama, Broken Angel. I say radio play in that we performed it on stage on Denman Island as if we were in a radio studio. Mine was a small role befitting my modest theatrical talents. Dante and her partner, Tashi Draper who is producing the festival are truly creative souls who perform at a high level in a range of artistic arenas.

Out of that experience came the threat (or maybe I meat the treat) of more, bigger, and possibly better, ideas.

One was a festival of plays on Denman.

I had my doubts.

Foolish me.

The festival is on. Stories Under the Stars-The Stardust Festival. Three nights, August 10th, 11th, and 12th, of locally written theatre, performed in the outdoors in a natural amphitheatre on the large homestead of Dante and Tashi.

On the first night, the original cast of Broken Angel will repeat the experience. This of course is by popular demand.

On the second night, Dante will premiere her new play, a romantic comedy, Abracadabra.

The final night will see the unveiling of four short plays:

 The Woman Who Does Laundry by Lorraine Martinuik

2.   The Visitor by Dawn Stofer

3.   Home by Mike White

AND

4.    Yup. You guessed it. At Home with The Trumps by Yours Truly.

My little play is a compilation of three previous flash fiction stories and a fourth story written to tie my crazy scattered Donald threads together into a semblance of a hoot and a holler whole. The result is a short, sharp tapestry of Trumpetry woven into a spirited, satirical overview of the grimacing presidential reaper to the south of us.

Will this spur me on to further playwrightian experiences? Decades ago, in 1980 or thereabouts, I did write (or really, assemble the product of a group workshop.) That work, Care-osel, or Care-ousel) portrayed the life of a Child who comes into the care of the State. A host of social workers, childcare workers, youth in and out of state care and others had come together to grieve over the death of a young man whilst in custody at the Willingdon Youth Detention Centre in Burnaby BC. One of the by-products of that grief was a short, hopefully entertaining twenty-minute play that was performed on a number of occasions.

Now, after all these years, a second effort. Okay, it’s more of a skit. While I think it is funny, it isn’t deep. It’s difficult to dig deep when Trump is your creative gold mine. Anyways, I am comforted that my small effort is encased in, and surrounded by,  the significant skills of others.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

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Some Thoughts on Marjory Stoneman Douglas

On this Wednesday morning, I should have been elsewhere. On Hornby Island attending an all-day meeting. But I was captured by fear of a possible snow storm (it may still happen) and I went ahead and cancelled the meeting. Cowardly of me, I suppose. In any case, I have spent the morning listening to the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School rally in Tallahassee, Florida.

These are impressive young people. Many have commented on their Never Again Movement. I hope their energy, anger, commitment, and fervent activism does not diminish.

Throughout the events of the February 14th, 2018 massacre, I have yet to see any mention of the school’s name sake, Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

I had never heard of her. I became curious.

What an amazing woman!

She was an American journalist, author, women’s suffrage advocate, and conservationist. Even that summary barely covers the life, the very long life, she lived.

I was struck by the irony that so many young people died in the school named after her, yet she lived to the somewhat improbable age of 108, a much longer life than those who fell last Valentine’s Day.

In any case, I trust this short post might serve to share a bit of the life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas as well as acknowledge the awful tragedy that befell one of the two Florida schools that bear her name.

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On the verge of the SHUTDOWN…

I am in a rambling mood this morning. Like some, I am still digesting the horror story that came out of Perris, California earlier this week. Although I occasionally opine on child protection matters, I am going to let this particular situation fester a bit more.

So, how about that US Government shutdown that is in the offing? One should not be entertained by the inability of one of the largest bureaucracies in the world to regularly fail to meet its most basic requirement. Funding.

And then there is the fake missile attack on Hawaii. That spurred me on to write a small flash fiction tale this week. Mostly made up, of course.

Testy

 “I just got tired of all the talk, you know. I mean its been going on, ad nauseum, since the fifties. Before, even. We’ve always known they could do it, that someone was capable of making the decision and that there’d always be those willing to follow orders. And speaking about the fifties, duck and flippin’ cover. A whole generation of kids taught that all they had to do was hide under there desk when the bloody bomb went off and they’d be safe.”

“You finished, Gerry?”

“No. I got a list. Whatatheycallit, a laundry list…”

“Laundry list, my ass. You went way out of bounds on this one.

“I couldn’t help myself.”

“Seriously. What, some mysterious force grabbed your pinkie and you pressed down on the button? You‘re saying you had absolutely no control?”

“Oh, I had control. You shouldn’t be worried about that. But look around. That fruitcake in North Korea and the Orange menace in Washington, both comparing the size of their respective buttons. And here I was…with an actual button.“

“You weren’t concerned about the panic and the fear that would ensue when you sent out this…THIS… BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

“I was thinking exactly about the response. We need to be ready. I figured, what better way to let our people know what might happen and what they might have to do?”

“Not up to you, Gerry. You crossed the line. Consider yourself reassigned.”

 

Perhaps not great literature but it sort of captured my mood this week. And allowed me to not dwell too much on the Perris, California story. That is one of the residual benefits of nuclear holocaust…all else pales.

 

 

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2018, Day 1…An entire year awaits…what to do…what to do.

Like many, I have considered the advisability of resolving to make some changes in the coming year. I have dabbled before in the wickedly complex art of resolution construction. A few have taken. Smoking! Gave that up in ’84. Only took about ten years of fuming failure.

What else? Hmmm. Puns! I have often resolved to limit my unpleasant pun penchant. Others close to me have offered considerable encouragement but like a pun-drunk pugilist, I keep flailing away, looking for the elusive knock-out pun.

These modest concerns aside, this year I will turn seventy-one. Like the POTUS, number 45, (and why I would compare myself to Trump is hard to say. I suppose I see him as the worst of my generation, a post-war baby a year older than I am but still more of a representative boomer by dint of his mouth-scorning silver spoon sticking out and his egregious behaviour) my patterns are pretty much set. I have always been a creature of habit, comfortable habits for the most part. I have a creative urge which I have favoured these past few years, but this inclination has been tempered by an equally compulsive itch to be slothful.

I have two major writing projects which I abandon regularly for more immediate gratifications. This year, if the stars align, if my creative fluids are not unexpectedly sapped, I hope to finish at least one of them. As one of the two is milliseconds away from completion, I suppose it has the edge.

That’s it. A rather sad, hardly reflective post. Not a good sign as the new year begins. And while not reflective and yet, in turn, highly selective, I am satisfied that I have once again set a standard of expectation without actually resolving anything. Life, resolutions, all a leap of faith, eh…

Girls jump to the New Year 2018 at sunset.

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Some Incredibly Interesting End of the Year 2017 Thoughts…

It is approaching mid-December. I am running out of time to capture a few elusive thoughts for 2017. I recently drafted my first Christmas (Yes, I still call it Christmas) missive. Actually, I totally, unimaginatively, called it my Festivus Letter. But, truthfully, I am still held captive by the concept of Christmas. God knows why!

In another feat of failed imagination, here is the letter…

Dear Friends and Family,

I am starting a new tradition for me. A Festivus letter summarizing my most magnificent past year. Fear not. It will be brief.

As I compose this missive (December 9th, 2017) I can honestly say that it has been an interesting year. Sharon and I have spent more than a healthy amount of time following the disastrous exploits of Donald J. Trump. On a creative note, Trump has proven to be quite a muse for me. I write a lot of flash fiction stories these days and Trump is often featured. I also write poetry as well…generally minus Trump references.

Sharon, who bears no responsibility for this effort, ended the year with her participation in the Denman Island Christmas Craft Fair by selling her beautiful silk inspired crafts.

There were a couple of personal highlights for me this past year. In late April I attended my first Federation of BC Writers AGM. As it was in Nanaimo, the town of my childhood, and only eighty kilometers down Island from Denman, I went, challenging my usual practice of not going anywhere.

In August, Sharon and I went to New Westminster to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of our old commune, the CRCA. I have such fond memories of those distant days when I lived cooperatively. Many old friends attended, and I was heartened that the current residents have maintained the spirit and the practice of shared living.

As for life on Denman, I continue to chair the Hornby and Denman Community Health Care Society (for one more year before I pass on the mantle), play Pickle ball 3-4 times a week, promote the very modest sales of my two books, continue to work on other writing projects and the like.

There it is. Not everything that unfolded in 2017 by any means but a modest glance backwards.

Pretty darn exciting, eh!

Have a fine holiday, everyone.

Love from Denman,

Maybe the letter sufficiently sums up my year. Of course, I didn’t mention a spill I took that necessitated my first ever ambulance visit to the house. I declined a trip to the hospital. I’ll save that experience for another time. At my age, I try and do whatever I can to lessen my contribution to the increasing cost of health care.

I do try to be a reasonably good citizen. Just don’t mention the Senate…please.

I have also attended my first of two sessions on Advance Care Planning. The second occurs on Wednesday. We had homework from the first session. I may have to invent a dog when asked where that homework is. Old joke! Sorry.

In the coming year, I hope to continue blogging every so often on child welfare and writing matters. That, and my obscure creative efforts, and a bit of volunteering, not to mention Pickle Ball, will allow 2018 to be a mirror image of 2017. Hopefully, minus the ambulance visit.

 

 

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Split Second is the BOMB…

It’s Sunday morning, November 5th,2017. I’m moving slowly. There is a carpet of snow on the ground. Trump has begun his tour of Asia. Yesterday, he said this at the America air base at Yokota in Japan.

“No nation should ever underestimate American resolve. Every once a while in the past they underestimated us. It was not pleasant for them, was it? We will never yield, never waver and never falter in defense of our people, our freedom and our great American flag.”

My first thought upon hearing him: Sure, he didn’t mention North Korea. He might very well be sending a restrained Trump missive to North Korea to cool its jets, but holy Hannah, what a thing to say in Japan. I have to imagine that even though Japanese-USA relations have improved considerably since WW11, the memory of that war, of the way that war ended with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still rankles.

We all know with certainty that “no nation should ever underestimate American resolve.”

As my own little bubble-nation of one, I certainly don’t.

As for Trump’s resolve, well, he is an enigma of resolves. He tweets his favorite resolves. The man is an open book of resolves.

But enough of Trump.

On a lighter note, this morning TCM is replaying one of my all-time favourite nuclear devastation films, Dick Powell’s 1953 pot boiler, Split Second. I confess, I’ve never been able to get enough of Split Second. It’s got noir, an unfaithful wife, a tough talking dame (I hope I can say that…it is a noir term, after all), gangsters, heroes, a ghost town, an old coot…nay, two old coots, and the BOMB.

I was very young when I first saw this film. I think I watched it from under our dining room table. We only used that table for “duck and cover” practice.

As frightening as that film was, still is, I am drawn to it and its bleak message. It does challenge good science, however, in that the subject of post-bomb radiation is somewhat ignored at the end. Still, the movie does caption THE END against a backdrop of a mushroom cloud.

I also love mushrooms, but that’s a totally different story.

Anyways, I realize that this blog post is somewhat aimless. There must have been a point.

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Bathing for Old People or Soaking the Rich at Air Canada or Bath Faults and Ethical Wounds

T his essay was written a couple of years ago. Part Humor; Part deadly concern. Recently, the Seniors Advocate of BC Isobel MacKenzie, expressed concern about the frequency of baths available to seniors in care homes. It may be an issue, a dirty little secret, whose time has come. Here is my take:

BATHING FOR OLD PEOPLE or SOAKING the RICH at AIR CANADA

or BATH FAULTS and ETHICAL WOUNDS

In late April, on a Wednesday, as is my somewhat mind-numbingly mundane habit, I bought a paper copy of the Globe and Mail. I say mundane to acknowledge that it was purely that repetition of humdrum behaviour, the buying of the Globe most Wednesdays, that provided, for me, a late in life transformational experience.

There were two stories that day that attracted my meandering, somewhat easily divided attention. One, in the business section, a section in which I am rarely comfortable, told the story of AIR Canada CEO, Calin Rovinescu and how the Corporation had enhanced his retirement pay by almost double. It would kick in at age 65 in the amount, with the increase, of $791,300.00. annually.

My first thought was, “what a lucky son of a gun.”

My second thought was a tad less flattering. The article elegantly left no doubt that the greedy buggers at AIR CANADA had breached federal guidelines established a few years earlier to salvage a significantly underfunded Air Canada pension plan.

Hunkered down with corporate greed on my Wednesday plate, I huffed and puffed a little bit and then checked out more of the newspaper.

In moments, my world view crash-landed on the highway of way too much information. This shattering crack-up was instigated by an article by Andre Picard, the Globe and Mail’s Health and Stupidity reporter entitled, WHEN DOES A BATH BECOME A NECESSITY?

I thought the question, when does a bath become a necessity, preposterous. A bath is always necessary. That’s a given. Who would think otherwise?

Certainly not my mother! My father, however, was a little more ambivalent about his daily dunking though I confess I didn’t pay all that much attention to his ablutions timetable.

Of course, having lived a relatively spotless, frequently damp, West Coast lifestyle, I immersed myself in the finer points of the column. Immediately, two factors hit me in the face like a wet dish cloth: A. The question apparently applied only to malodorous nursing home patients and B. The question apparently applied only to pongy elderly nursing home patients in La belle province. OR SO I ASSUMED!

In any case, I hastily fired off a letter to the Globe and Mail lampooning the notion of once a week bathing. I pummelled the Quebec Minister, possibly a once a day bathing-dandy, and most certainly a Physician, a Radiologist, for consigning the elders of Quebec, the ones who built his Province and drove the filthy English out, with a venomous quill of my best porcupine-sharp barbs.

Here is the original letter.

Dear Editor,

As a sixty-eight-year male who has frivolously had a shower pretty much every day of my adult life (and I admit to an occasional unintentional break in this fastidious routine from time to time,) I don’t think I have read a more disheartening column than Andrew Picard’s “When does a bath become a necessity?”.

I say disheartening because, while I confess that I have found aging not to be all that it was cracked up to be, I fully expected to stay clean and perky until the day I left this mortal shower stall.

As an early baby boomer, I have been spoiled. I have fought in no wars; I have had 3 squares a day minimum; I have had sufficient water both to drink and to play in with my assorted rubber ducks.

To discover that, when the day arrives that I am compelled to enter a nursing home, my bathing routine will be, at best, a Saturday night dunking, much like it was in the old and possibly fictional wild west,

well, you can appreciate my shock.

I would suggest to Quebec Health Minister Gaetan Barrette, apparently a key defender of “the one-bath-a-week standard,” that he give it a go for a few years.

I suspect that his friends and family will soon suggest he improve his ablutions in much the same way I hope I will be permitted. I would hate to resort

to such criminal activities as “black-market baths,” a term new to me and sounding not a little grungy.

I’ll end on a ditty that just came to me.

Aging is such a woe

if you can’t be bathed

daily

from your head to your toe.

 

I was feeling pretty puffy-chested, let me tell you. Quebec! Let them eat a cake of soap once a week. Here, in the squeaky-clean west, l knew beyond any doubt that OUR seniors, OUR vulnerable elders, whether resident in state or private care, would, no matter their financial circumstances, be treated like royalty, or even better than royalty, and would be drenched daily as promoted by thinking people of every century including, for example, Thomas Aquinas, who said, that the pain and the sorrow of life can be alleviated by a good sleep, a daily bath, and a refreshing glass of wine. In which ever order you prefer, though Tom Aquinas didn’t specify as clearly as he might. In any case, for some, myself included, a good sleep is frequently the by-product of both a glass of wine (or three) a day and a daily bath, preferably hot but at least tepid.

Alas, my faith in the politicians and health authorities of BC may have been misplaced. An acquaintance who follows the rituals and regulations of British Columbia Care Homes sets me straight: we, too, are a once-a-week bathing Babylon. I was shattered. I have always been encouraged by my thrifty parents to plan for the future. This sound advice went sideways in my teens and early twenties, no doubt when I encountered the Counter Culture and fell hard. Once those heady times had dissolved, my middle-class values muddled again to the fore, their proper place reclaimed, and I began to plan for aging and other of life’s inevitables. While you can save money for the future; you probably shouldn’t save shower and bath water. Each stand alone.

Bathing is living in the moment. It is a pleasurable moment for many. To gently lower your aching flesh into a pool of warm or hot water, perhaps with bubbles (though I am not drawn to them…as much as I once was…) or to stand under a pulsating stream, a caressing cascade of invigorating, restorative water: Is that not something to die for?

Not just to die for; To live for as well. It is not just the hygienic properties. As Anthony Burgess said, “Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.” The implication is clear. The most minimal standard, the one that will keep you just short of odour terrorism, is the once-a-week cleansing. A very low bar, indeed.

 

Once I began this bathing odyssey, this trek into the wet nether world, the sprinkling shower of diminishing possibilities that may befall those of us who become infirm and require the intimate intervention of the State, I found myself dwelling on my current condition.

I am not the man I once was. Though not one to make predictions, other than the odd Stanley Cup forecast, and my frequently futile political prognostications, I will venture that I will never be, or see, the man I once was ever again. These days, there is a laundry list of minor complaints, parts failing, organs losing their sparkle, wretched wobbling, baubles of small pleasures floating away with all the errant rubber duckies of my youth.

For a time, I pondered the eternal question: “Am I the only one who is concerned about government bathing policies?”

No, I determined, it is not just an issue that strikes a chord only with me.

A recent report produced by the BC Health Coalition and penned by Marcy Cohen and Joanne Franko identified bathing as one of several significant home care services which have been cut back in recent times by Health Authorities. Whether inadvertent or intentional (and really, it would have to be intentional as the accountants track this sort of thing) it is very provocative. I should observe here that I generally embrace but one conspiracy theory a year, although in my youth, I thought the Warren Commission suspect and, much like over 2/3rds of Americans, I believe that there was a second gunman. There may be other worthy conspiracy theories afoot but in my time, this one and (perhaps) who really killed Marilyn, are the ones I most hold dear.

This has nothing to do with bathing, I grant you, but it does have a lot to do with the way my mind works. This year I have come to believe, and share here for the first time, my belief that there are forces afoot, federal, provincial, municipal, and corporate which are conspiring to prepare us for massive water shortages.

Is it any coincidence that Lyndon Baines Johnson, decades ago, while seeming to champion cleanliness and some of the other holy nesses, Godliness, Eliot Ness, and the like, is reported to have said that “Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath?” The political acumen that this exemplifies, setting a barely tolerable standard that had even then likely outlived its time and yet might be politically necessary as we run short of the life-giving liquid, was prescient.

Another thought rankles as well. LBJ was a tall drink of water. You only have to look at me to see that I am not only tall but weighty. Men of my dimensions simply need more water to keep alive the fallacy that we are clean living and squeakily scrubbed.

Recently, on a Sunday, June 14th, to be exact, with deep thoughts of personal sanitation scooting across my furrowed, relatively scoured brow, I tuned in to Cross Country Checkup.

They were celebrating fifty years of that iconic show. Because that first show examined a quaint new concept just emerging on the federal stage called Medicare, the CBC, and old Rex thought it wise to see what the state of Canadian Health is today…good stuff…but…get this… not a single word about bathing. Oh, the eat your vegetables, exercise until you pass out and the don’t smoke and if you do, you should pay for all your health-related costs folks were prevalent on the call-in lines that day. I, of course, dialled over and over trying to get my powerful point across but I got nowhere beyond an unending busy signal.

It got so frustrating that I took a second shower.

Conclusions

My quest for crystal clear bathing policy continues. Entreaties to politicians, Ministries, Health Authorities, my MLA had produced zilch until days ago when the Ministry of Health sent me a copy of the 2009 invoked BC Residents Bill of Rights. Though it offers a tubful of wonderful rights, it sheds no light on what citizens can expect from state funded bath houses.

Rest assured, I will not relax until I know everything. I will in all likelihood, and assuming the well doesn’t run dry, bathe regularly until I reach that time when I lose my grip…on the soap, slip and crumble in an unhygienic heap in my shower.

And what of AIR Canada CEO, Calin Rovinescu, you ask? Why have I mentioned him at all? I don’t really know. Except perhaps as a device, a juxtaposition. Time permitting, I may have explored what Air Canada expects in the way of bathing for staff and passengers. Presumably they like them all clean. Be assured Mr. Rovinescu, with his almost annual compensation bordering between 5-10,000,000 dollars and his well-deserved, recently inflated $800,000.00 a year pension will never want for a daily bath, unless his own values dictate a less frequent regime.

This will be strictly his choice of course, unlike a percentage of our older citizens, many who will wander, poor, confused and adrift, into the water-restricting, underfunded, under-staffed, over- whelmed, bottom line, long-term care of the State.

Thank you

 

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