Harper Lee, Exercise and the value of bathing…

Some days are quietly, gently successful without much effort. Yesterday, Thursday, April 23rd, was such a day. After a few morning moments of questionable creativity…a poem and a brief bit of flash fiction that told an Earth Day story (two days late, but what can you do)…I went to the Gym. (Yes, Denman has a fine little gym in the cellar of the Activity Centre which used to be called the Seniors Center but we all got younger and more active.)

There, I did my regular routine; a solid half hour of not-all-that-strenuous fitness. 20 minutes on the recumbent bike and ten minutes with various weight lifting machines.

Whilst peddling furiously on the recumbent bike, I usually read. Yesterday, I was immersed in the exceptional memoir by Journalist Marja Mills, The Mockingbird Next Door-Life with Harper Lee.

This outstandingly evocative and caring book respectfully tells some of the life of Harper Lee, Nelle to her friends, and her sister, the somewhat older Alice Finch Lee (1916-2014.)

For me, books like this one fashioned by Ms Mills come along fairly infrequently. The sisters’ Lee, though they live (lived) in somewhat of a fishbowl, are portrayed as women growing old gracefully, both involved, curious, active, private, snarky and kind. They both have wonderfully special and, at the same time, ordinary attributes. I hope to have a 10th of their grace in my old age, which I have accepted I am currently somewhat beyond the starting line and perhaps closer to the finish line than I care to admit.

So yesterday, a wet west coast day with streams of sun bursting through on occasion, was quietly, gently successful without much effort.

Today, I found out that a letter of mine was published in our national news organ, The Globe and Mail. I thought I would add it here at the end and a link to the depressing column that engendered my trifling response.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/when-does-a-bath-become-a-necessity/article24058562/

Rubber-duck panic

As someone who has frivolously had a shower pretty much every day of my adult life, I don’t think I have read a more disheartening column than André Picard’s When Does A Bath Become A Necessity? (April 22).

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 a boomer, I have been spoiled with sufficient water to drink – and to play in with my assorted rubber ducks. To discover that when the day arrives and 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 Gaétan Barrette, a key defender of the one-bath-a-week standard, that he give it a go for a few years. I suspect friends and family will soon suggest he improve his ablutions.

I’d hate to have to resort to “black-market baths” – a term new to me and sounding not a little grungy.

Bill Engleson, Denman Island, B.C