4 - Friday, August 13, 1993 - North Shore News

utting happiness into everye

HAVE | got a topic? of
course I have a topic. It
wuld be a thin day that!
didn’t have at Ieast half a
dozen topics in mind when 1
sit down and load my
Remington.

You may jeer that they must be
six lousy topics. Or that I throw
away the five good ones. Cynic.
Who asked you?

But today the topic is one that
probably occurs to most colum-
nists and that they mentally put
away for another day. It can wait.

Ah, but can it?

The topic is happiness.

Of all investments, it’s the only

. one that shouldn't be put away
until it matures, like a fi ive-year
term deposit.

No, it can’t, wait. The living
death is thinking: ‘‘When the kids
grow up and move out... when |
retire... when [ win the Lotto...
when....°" :

When is now. Everyone knows
that. But it’s hard to put it into
practice every day, the only handy
non-metric measure of time that

‘most of us can handle. Anything
Jonger and the evidence gets fuzzy.

I had a happy Sunday.

And, in a way, it was a happy
day that you could only have
ina place like West Vancouver, of
which ther are very few.

Yet little happened. J.B.

“ Prigstley wrote about this phe-
nemenon in a superb essay called

The Moments and | urge you to

read it, since I have no intention

of trying to improve on it.
Around noon I fired up the *64

Pontiac convertible, a fond

" possession, which I bought as

: Phone Beeistration
98'¢:

with ‘VISA: or Mastercard toyou hams is 30 ond 3).

LAautens

GARDEN OF BIASES

recently as 1966.
! dawdled along some twisty
roads and saw a realtor gearing up ©

for an open house. idly ~- and for ’

happy moments ['d argue that an /
hour of idleness between chapters
of routine chaos is, like a cool

spot under a rocky ledge toa fly |
fisherman, the most likely place to
find the big ones — | drifted past
and then turned around and stop-
ped and went into the house.

It was a small house with a lot
of the sort that everyone on earth.
should have. 1

{ brought my wife — she was
struggling against the forces of
darkness in the garden, which is
her notion of happiness — and we
went through it and we talked
about it and we were happy in
such talk.

Oh yes, we'd keep our present
house, but, as my wife said, some
day even I — all but immortal —

_ would be gone, and the childyen .. -

Save. The G.S.J. on

grown, and it is just the sort of
place she'd love for herself.

1 often remark that anticipating

widewhood must be one of the
greatest comforts a woman can

experience, but my wife then says,

You're awful,"’ and | say,

“That's just my Central European
sense of humor,”’ and we move on

to other subjects.

When we got home I realized
that, in our excitement, Ud
forgotten to pick up Grandma's
prescription at the Pharmasave at
Caulfeild Plaza — one of the
friendliest stores in town, by the
way.

Which the pharmacist proved
when | noticed the (free) blood

' pressure-testing machine.

He paused to show me how the
contraption works. i put my arm
into the thingamajig. He pushed
buttons. A rubber bag squeezed
my arm. We read the numbers.
We repeated it, like dose of medi-
cine, three times.

Bingo!

My blood pressure was fan-
tastically ordinary!

Think of it reader.

Here is a man of 58 who is at
least 25 pounds overweight.
Throws back two martinis (two
olives each) or a Windsor Boiler-
maker (Canadian rye washed
down with an ale) before dinner.
Drinks a Guinness with his eggs

-and bacon (just two strips — I

used to have four until [ became
half a vegetarian). Falls asleep
reading The Wizard of Oz to his

44 Anticipating widowhood must be

one of the greatest comforts a

woman can experience

son. Then wakes up, works Lill 4
(or 5, or G, or ever 8) in the’
morning. Shaves, neps half ar
hour — ft can fall asleep any time
— and then spends the day prow-
ling the Great City for fresh
stories. And...

By now you must be saying with
astonishment: ‘But what does
your doctor say about that??’

Doctor! Doctor! [ haven’t been
to my doctor for at least two or -
three years. Hell, she might find
something wrong with me.

But not, at any rate, high blood
pressure.

I drove home, overweight and
out of shape and blissfully happy,
past joggers and hikers and
cyclists sweating their way to
fitness, many of them my age and
skinny as rails.

I raise my glass to them, and
call for a refill.:And light my
-pipe.

When I got home, there was
another epiphany.

I was staring at my wife’s

WY

garden when she caine up the nill
from the bottom of the drive, ex-
cited.

“Did you see the deer?"' she
hissed.

Yes, while she was waging the
endless war against blackberry
bushes along the road, a deer — a
buck with fine antlers — came up
the driveway opposite.

He looked concerned. My wife
must have too. She ran on to
Marine Drive and stopped the
traffic.

An old man stopped his car,
jaw agape. The deer crossed the
road and went up our aforemen-
tioned driveway.

‘Is he yours?"’ the old man
asked. :

Only in West Vancouver, in
mid-afternoon.

My wife and I stood and talked
ia wonderment about it. We
prayed he'd be all rizht.

Happiness.

The real thing.

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