Five Years a Writer

My young-girl career dreams were to be an interpreter at the UN. I have never worked as an interpreter.   At university, I chose literary translation (French to English) as my major. I have never worked as a translator.   I next earned a journalism degree, yet have never worked as a capital J journalist — unless you count my summer job on the copy desk of the Financial Post just after graduating. I don’t.  Over the course of my career, I found my way into various corporate and community communication jobs. And then I earned my master’s in applied communication. The credential came after the work.  I have ended up as a college instructor.  How did I get from a dream of the UN to a job in post-secondary education? It hit me, recently, like a bolt of lightening, that it is, actually, a very straight line from my young-girl dream to my current work.  An instructor is everything that I dreamed about as a young girl, studied in my undergrad degrees, and...

I don’t go to a restaurant for the food. Oh sure, I order food when I’m in one, but it’s the experience I actually go for.  We are good cooks in my house. We don’t need to go out to get a good meal. So when we do go out, we are more frequently than not disappointed by what we end up paying for. But on a good day, that disconnect is ok because the experience of being out, of being with friends, of being served food we didn’t have to shop for and prepare is well worth it.   But on a bad day, even the experience doesn’t make the effort worthwhile. On those days, not only has the food been disappointing but so has the service. And possibly even the conversation at the table. On those days, I wish I had just stayed home. Saved myself the trouble.  Because when trouble is made to have an experience centred on food and then the experience disappoints, it’s a lose-lose situation that diminishes not only the bank account but also my motivation to try it again.  What am I look...

Some days, the world is just too much. So I retreat into a book. Not just any book, but one I know is safe to read. And that means I often end up with a book written for children.   Oh, the joy of a story well told about a character, young of age, interested in exploring themselves and the world, and doing things!   My most comforting childhood read is about Jill and her ponies. Anything I might know about riding comes from the Jill books — including how to fall off one and get right back up. I tried to follow this advice when I fell off my Aunt Vivian’s horse Kitty, but I didn’t quite manage it. I just trailed into the house looking for comfort. Vivian marched me right back out to get back up on Kitty. Harsh, but a good lesson.  I enjoy reading the 3-book series about Emma, who has to go live with her absent-minded aunt Patsy in Edinburgh after her parents are killed in a car crash. Children’s books are not all fun and games. Emma’s story is all about figuring out ho...

I was a late adopter. I didn’t see the need to jump onto the computer bandwagon. My 3-line memory-erase electric typewriter was the cat’s meow, as far as I was concerned. It was several steps up from the old manual on which I had learned to type in Grade 11 (most practical course I took in high school), and it was fully portable. Who needed a new-fangled expensive personal computer?  Well, of course, it turned out that I did. Once persuaded to leave the dark ages, I adapted quickly to the DOS-based machine we bought. Do you remember that amber (or green) blinking cursor? All those floppy discs? I certainly do.  What I don’t remember is a constant hunt down my memory’s lane for passwords. We must have had them, did we? But I don’t recall the angst I feel these days about cyber security and, along with it, all the different passwords and 2-part authentications required today.  Back then, the PC truly was a glorious word processing machine that enabled me to vastly impr...

She knocked on the door, which I was not expecting. Social distancing rules have felled any hope of close contact with anyone outside my immediate bubble. But knock she did. So I opened the door.  And there she was. In full three dimensionality. From head to toe, she was present in front of me. And it was so strange.   Oh, I knew her, as we work together and talk frequently, but only on the screen. Before that day of the knock on the door, I had never laid eyes on her as flesh-and-blood. And it was so strange!  She was masked and she stood a ways back, handed me the item she had brought, and we exchanged a few words. I did not cross the threshold, but the encounter was exciting. And then she turned and left.  It took me a while to make sense of what I was feeling — a mixture of excitement and sadness.  The excitement came from having, for the first time in months and months, actually seen my colleague rather than just viewing her on the screen. Before t...

"A house should be comfortable for those who live there." Beverly Cleary, author of the Ramona and Henry Huggins books Every two weeks, our house gets spruced up by our magnificent Partner in Domestic Matters (PIDM), Linda. Before she arrives, we tidy the place to within an inch of its life so that Linda can perform her hard-work magic unencumbered by the lived-in state of the joint. Between our pre-effort and Linda's main-event effort, the house looks spectacular. Spic and span. Neat and tidy. Like a show home.  it stays like that for not very long, as we really live in our house. Books get piled on the coffee table. The kitchen counter gets cluttered with scraps of grocery lists and chore lists. The bedroom hooks get filled with layers of clothing that could be hung up in the closet, but don't quite make it there. In short, our daily living is evidenced everywhere you look.  Sometimes, I walk into the house and cast a ‘would I buy this house?’ eye onto the lived...

The emails often come in fast and furious to my work in-box. So many words. So little clarity. So much need for this or that. And so many of them signed off with what I am sure is intended as positive but what I take as fantasy.  “Have a wonderful day.” “Have a great day.”  How can an ordinary Wednesday at my work desk in the middle of an ongoing pandemic be either wonderful or great, I wonder? Could we maybe just aim for ‘good’? I can manage good. I can handle the expectation for ‘good’. But expectations for wonderful or great? Move along to the next sucker, please. Count me out of that optimistic fantasy.  This connects into my ongoing contemplations about hope. I have already written that I believe action is an essential factor in making hope meaningful. And, it turns out, I am in good company for thinking this. In fact, it turns out, that the field of positive psychology focuses on “the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multipl...