Thanks for the memories.
I can’t believe it has been exactly 15 years this month I have been writing my monthly column for the Peace Arch News.
I have covered an array of topics hopefully relevant to seniors of our community and I have enjoyed every minute.
It started with a former editor saying Yes to my first submission entitled Call Us Zoomers Please!
I have written about love, aging, fitness, health, grandkids, travel, grief, loss, hope, gratitude, politics, technology, children, friendship and war. Pretty well everything…except sex. I figured a family-friendly community newspaper wasn’t ready for my take on senior sex. The closest I got was a column on tasting oysters and the similarity with the female anatomy.
Only once did I become a victim of the recent ‘cancel culture’ when my last editor rejected my column on “wokeness.” That word kept appearing in our lexicon so I simply researched its origin and meaning to share with you. Although I am known to be pithy, she thought it was too edgy and controversial.
In it I said, “Woke is the new black.”
Cancelled once in fifteen years…not bad. My daughter was proud of me!
I have had the pleasure of meeting some of you personally in the community and you have told me my columns have been inspirational. They make you laugh. They make you cry. They cause you to disagree, to reflect or to shake your head in disbelief. But at least, they make you feel something.
I love getting letters to the editor from grumpy old fellas who take umbrage at what I write. I love receiving them, as I’m sure my editor does, as it means someone is reading the newspaper.
I have written about 180 columns (dozens of which ended up in my book Lovingly Arrogant: From Chaos to Contentment) and I want to say thank you. Thank you for reading them and thank you for your ongoing support.
Allow me to share a few of my favourite columns from the past.
I think my all-time favourite has to be Meeting Not Exactly an International Bromance where Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau met American president Donald Trump for the first time at the White House:
Trump: “Good morning and welcome to the White House. Will the prime minister be arriving shortly?”
Trudeau: “I AM the prime minister!”
And speaking of America, I wrote about my top 5 things I love about that country in Countdown for the American Dream. Do any of you remember my number 1 choice? I said, “Toilet seat covers… Who needs guns when you have toilet seat covers!”
As I was in England when Queen Elizabeth died, I wrote Queen’s Death a Loss ‘almost too great to process’. It was humbling to chronicle in my own small way, a piece of history.
On a more somber note, my COVID column entitled Grief is a Complicated, but Unavoidable Emotion got the attention of the paper’s publisher. My daughters were denied access to their dying father and grandmother in hospital. “This pandemic is preventing us from…dying a “normal” death. A good death. And that is cruel.”
On a lighter note, I enjoyed my take on There’s an App for That, but I’m Not Interested. Still not interested.
And of course, I love writing about my travels as many of you are snowbirds like myself.
I will be in Buenos Aires when you read this.
I want to thank you so much for putting up with me all these years.
I couldn’t have done it without you.
After all, it takes two to tango.
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