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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