Seven Sundays ... Again

It's the first birthday of this photo of Ken's 90th birthday last year

The lazy metaphor for what we're going through is "Groundhog Day" - an allusion to the unaccountably perennially popular movie that makes a lark out of Bill Murray stalking Andie MacDowell. I assume I don't need to explain in detail how the protagonist relives the same day, thousands of times, before he stops being such an asshole. 

Instead of using clichés to mark our pandemic Moebius strip timeline, I will rerun photos from last year's blogs until we vaccinate our way out of this.

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended the funeral of a person who had lived all of his 90 years in the same place. During the visitation and at the graveside service, I heard many folks say how they had gone to school with him, worked with him, volunteered as firemen with him, had known his two wives and his children and his extended family ... people who had spent their lives in the very same place.

I don't know what that is like. I have not lived in one place. My father's armed forces career took us from Vancouver Island where I was born, to Winnipeg (for four years), to Edmonton (for seven years) and finally to Trenton, Ontario (until I left home). 

I spent my childhood among other armed forces kids I'd just met and would soon say farewell to. I became skilled at making new friends and resigned to eventually losing them. 

That was life.

As an adult, I no longer had to live with my parents, so, of course, that was when they took to staying in one place. They never moved from their house on McQuade Drive in Trenton.

I, on the other hand, moved to Waterloo for my undergrad degree, to Victoria BC for my masters degree and then to Toronto so I could find a job. 

Old habits die hard.

During my transient years from high school to grad school, there was one friend I have managed to keep to this day. Mrs. Katherine Storey (she spells her name Kathe and I call her Kate) became my friend in Grade 11. We have never been far from one another's heart's ambit since, even though sometimes years go by between the times we clap eyes on one another.

There was a period, when Kate and her husband Ed were both working at the Oak Ridges facility in Penetanguishene, before they had their daughter and before I went to law school, when we visited regularly. 

On one eventful weekend, they came to Toronto to stay with us and connect with a band of fun-loving, hard-drinking friends from the 'Tang who were also in TO for the weekend.

I wrote to the Jewinskis all about it.

More about that next week.

Thanks for reading!

Look out for that 3rd wave!

Karen

Ken's birthday this year. We're indoors with him
and Ken's talking to his other son and his wife on Zoom.