Adrift With Intervals of Doldrums
Saturday, September 07, 2013
 |
| September 7, 2013 |
Work and having a profession bring order
and routine to one’s life. When one is retired either by choice or by the
contemporary term, so British, but so universa,l called redundancy one feels
adrift with the addition of intervals of doldrums.
The phone does not ring because most of a
certain age eschew personal communications, be they in person or by voice.
Two-thumb two-way exchanges are safer and easier. When the phone does ring it
is one of our daughters or my friend Ian who lives in North Vancouver. My other friends,
acquaintances and contacts have become invisible.
I remember arriving at a Pemex gas station
during my years in Mexico City
and being accosted by people selling Chiclets and lottery tickets. They would
also suddenly appear at red lights. It may have been in the Mexico of the
late 60s that I met up with my first windshield washers who would start their
job before I could even say, “No.” The best way of preventing any communication
was not to look at these people in the eye. As a young man with no sense of
ethics towards my fellow men I thought that this technique the same that I used
with dogs (if you do not make eye contact with a dog, more often the dog will
not climb on you or lick you). By the time Rosemary and our two daughters left Mexico in 1975 and moved to Vancouver I regretted these actions in which
I depersonalized these people who at the very least deserved my consideration
of their humanity. It was also at about the time when traffic in the Mexico
City beltway, the Periférico
became so bad that with cars virtually stopped at rush hour you could now not only
ignore the lottery ticket and Chiclet's vendors, the fire eaters but also the
women offering blow jobs.
It was momentarily
refreshing to arrive in Vancouver
and experience the pleasure of not having to deal with anybody at the
self-serve gas bar.
I am now committed after
all these years to using the self-serve gas bars but I feel some regret. I have
noticed how my prosperous new-immigrant neighbours arrive at their garages in
their hermetic big SUVs and how the doors of the garages are whisked open and
shut with me not being able to even say a good afternoon. These new immigrants
just like yours truly who at one time hailed from Mexico, are not used to immediate
communication with those who are not friends or relatives. We de-personalize
them and that way they do not exist.
The above may be a
long-winded attempt on my part to rationalize why my telephone does not ring.
At least twice a day it does ring and that great invention, call display, that
filters those who call, informs me it is an unknown number or a toll-free one.
I know what to expect. I say, “Hello,” once or twice and by the time the robot
caller can answer me I am gone. I regret even these actions as those who want
to make that survey must feel very much like those who sold lottery tickets at the
Mexican gas stations.
So it is with much
enjoyment that Rosemary and I prepare on Fridays what we are going to cook for
Hilary, Lauren and Rebecca on Saturday. We fuss and shop. We vacuum and clean
windows. Rosemary mops the white kitchen floor. I select what film we will see
after dinner. We savour these Saturday afternoons knowing that soon they might
be no more. Rebecca will have dates on Saturdays and not much after so will
Lauren.
Rosemary’s cat
Casi-Casi also likes the breaking of our daily lack of routine. He seems to
have a special relationship with Lauren. On Sunny Saturdays they sit on the
metal bench in the back garden or he follows Lauren who lures him with long
multi-coloured ribbons.
Today is a sunny
Saturday. Fall does not seem far away. The roses are waning and some of them do
not open. I cut some of these roses and scanned them for today’s blog hoping
that I will be able to write, here, next year, at this time, on the very same
subject.
Sometime soon, I hope,
too, that Rebecca might be persuaded to pick up the phone and call and say, “¿Qué
tal Papi, cómo estás?
