Crazy Times

It’s a beautiful day here on this 2020 Mother’s Day.

The world seems so green and lush and healthy with the deep blue of a clear sky, the yellow rays of sunlight and the colours of the flowers springing up through the ground.

It’s hard to believe the world is sick.

Well, not the planet - but the global population of humans that inhabit our world remain under a stay in place isolation order of varying degrees.

It’s crazy.

You’re living through all of this too, so I won’t bore you with those details you already know.

As for our little family, a lot has changed.

My wife Darlene and I have have separated now for two years, amicably and there is no reason for anyone to shed a tear on our behalf, as it has a been a very positive experience for all.

My two little girls - Alannah and Ashley-Rae are now 19 and almost 18 respectively and have both become quite accomplished young women in their own rights.

And some eight months ago I met one of the most special people I have ever known and fallen madly in love with her in the process.

During the last nine weeks of pandemic self-isolation I have been working from home, my laptop set up with three monitors and a keyboard in the corner of the living room, with the honour and pleasure of working with a fantastic team on one of the most exciting projects of my career - using Microsoft Teams and Zoom to collaborate we meet online several times a day.

Alannah has successfully completed her first year of college, and Ashley-Rae participates in online classes and course material for the remainder of her senior year. If anyone in our house has suffered from the self-isolation mandate during this pandemic it has been Ashley-Rae. Her Senior Year Prom cancelled, her final year of both high school softball and dance team competitions eliminated, she, like most other high school seniors is constantly impacted by a string of disappointments.

The next disappointment is likely to be the cancelation of this summer’s travel fast-pitch softball schedule. The majority of the team’s schedule slated to play in both Michigan and Ohio in a time when the opening of the U.S. - Canada border to non-essential traffic seems highly unlikely until at least the fall, it appears apparent that this season will be another casualty,

Given my age nearing sixty, my daughters have mandated I do stay home - no shopping - no visiting - except to visit Jackie and her daughter Mackenzie - who is the same age as my two daughters - I am now homebound.

I’ll admit I spend a lot of time with Jackie, either at her beautiful home a few miles away, or here at our modest little homestead.

But there is so much unsettled in our world right now.

There are a lot of questions that will be decided by the laws of economics as the world awaits the opportunity to reopen after this shut down.

Will we ever return to a normal office work-life again is will it be the new norm to work from home? Given that there will likely be a six-foot separation rule when businesses try to move back their traditional workplaces - will that reduced optimization of office space make I cheaper to have staff work at home? What will the productivity rates of people working from home be?What will these shifts really mean to our local, provincial, national and global economies?

Will we ever enjoy going to restaurants, movie theatres, shopping malls and such places ever again? What happens to music concerts and professional sports events now?

Or will we simply open up and go back to life exactly as we left it?

To me, it comes down to confidence levels - at several levels. From the global level to open up borders depending on national confidence levels, the more local levels to determine what the safest number of people to gather in one place will be, and our individual confidence that interacting with our world is safe enough yet.

But certainly there is still great opportunities out there for those who have the skills to chase them. We are already seeing some - such as delivery services - from food to purchases - even entertainment. And the realization that we reached our technology level just in time.

And other new opportunities will arise - the most notable in my mind is to offer the skill to help companies and corporations figure out how they will pivot their business practices to survive in this new world.

But will we see the end of professional sports? The end of arena sized music and entertainment concerts? The Theatre? Will we ever again celebrate events with parades and fireworks? And how can the way we take care of our senior citizens change - because nursing homes and long term care facilities definitely need to be overhauled.

What can we afford to do?

Who knows? I don’t. But I suspect we will never again be able to feel comfortable in large crowds - at least not without masks and gloves?

But I think it’s safe to say that if your industry supports health care, delivery of goods, or any kind of internet based transactions or home improvement services, you are likely to boom after this. But manufacturing has no option but to further automate using robotics.

Our world - I believe - will be different.

And I hope that the impact to your world is more positive than negative.

The next question though - when this is all over - will be “did we handle this right?” A lot of retrospective about self isolation and personal distancing will happen - after the crisis - after we are immunized - if we are ever immunized. There will be a lot of finger pointing and blaming. And the current great divide between the left and the right will likely grow larger - as will the divide between the have’s and have not’s. And conspiracy theories - already appearing - will fire dispute in that each will claim that the other is lying or covering something up.

And the scientists will be monitoring closely how this incredible reduction in human activity has allowed this planet we live on to heal. That should be interesting. Or even more concerning - depending on what we find out.

It’s bound to happen.

It’s who we are.

And these are crazy times.

Rolling Around the Sun

This big blue waterlogged rock of ours keeps spinning around the sun.

I guess this means that time just keeps moving forward, one second after the previous one. Baby steps along.

It did so before we got here. It will continue to do so after we leave.

I find time so fascinating. It is the only man made invention that was here before we got here and will continue long after we are gone to no longer measure it. Even long after our water logged rock and our blazing sun. Even after the Milky Way galaxy that our sun orbits is gone.

It hurts my brain to think about this.

Time that I am speaking of is the measurement of consecutive moments and knowing where we are in that measurement.

Others – much smarter than I – talk about it as an entity – relationship with and a dependency on gravity. The stronger the density of gravity – the quicker time passes – supposedly proven by using atomic clocks to compare time between the earth’s highest peaks and at sea level, several nanoseconds of difference between the two.

Is that really proof, or a flaw in the mechanics of an atomic clock?

I think of this as people I know and love pass away. It’s part of that conceptual question of “what happens when we die?”

Do we continue to exist? Or is it the same thing as turning off and unplugging the living room lamp?

Well, I certainly am no Einstein.

But all things of nature are so perfectly designed. Perfectly balanced. Perfectly fit to fulfill a role. Leaves on trees stretch out to receive the sun, or collect the rain. Seeds from those trees dispersed by wind or animal or both to extend be reborn after the parent tree dies, and rots away, becoming the nutrients needed for the next generation of all things around it.

So why would our being – our soul – be any different?

We have no math to prove it. No scientific experiment to shed even a hope. We do have legends, and antidotal accounts that demand it is true. Our religions tell us it is true. But we have nothing scientific to back it up.

Our existence on this planet, our cognitive awareness that we are here and our interaction with the world and the thoughts – thoughts is the key word – our perception of what we see and smell and taste and feel, combined with our emotional responses – that’s what makes us … us.

It’s brilliant. So if everything else produced by nature is regenerated again – lakes to gas to clouds to rain to water as food to lakes again as an example why would we just assume that the lights go off when we die?

That seems too easy an answer. But scientifically it is the only conclusion we can make so far.

We have no data to support anything else.

I used to have a boss named Bob. Bob would never say that we didn’t know anything or couldn’t do anything without adding the word “yet” to the end of the sentence. It was always a challenge to learn. The subtle instruction was “go figure it out”.

I loved working for Bob.

And I don’t believe the lights go off at the end. Maybe our consciousness doesn’t continue in a manner that remembers the existences before – maybe it all gets rewired – re-used somehow. Maybe we do get planted elsewhere. Around and around again and again – waiting for the right opportunity to develop to exist.

Just like our big rock spinning around the sun, once molten lava, then drenched with water, then frozen, then thawed, then green with life and then the next thing – whatever it may be. And whatever it may be again after that. And after that again.

We just really don’t know … yet.

And before I close this – please do not pummel me with comments about heaven or hell or reincarnation. Those are ideas, perhaps even theories. And their truth to you is directly related to the amount of faith you have in those beliefs.

I am not here to debate or even question your faith. Honest.

I’m just reiterating that as a collective, we don’t know …

Yet.

But when we pass away, then will we know?

I sure hope so.

Conceding the Gap

It’s interesting how the generation gap makes itself evident every once in a while.

Sometimes it’s even kind of awkward.

One evening after work last week, I was unwinding with a drink, my iPad, and a Bluetooth speaker on the back deck by the pool. I have tons of old music loaded on a media server that sits in the living room, but no matter how much music I add, I never seem to find the music I am in the mood for at a given moment. I never really know what I'm in the mood to hear until I hear it.

Such was the case this evening.

So I switched the setting of my app to simply play random selections in “shuffle mode”.

One song comes up from a live Bruce Springsteen concert album. You can hear the cheers and crowd noise in the background and then the base guitar kicks in hard with a familiar repeating riff interrupted by the smash of drum and cymbals  between each. And then the Boss starts in …

I’m driving in my car …

I turn on the radio …

I start pulling you closer …

At that point my youngest daughter Ashley-Rae comes out, bored from a summer day with nothing to do, and sits down beside me.

“Ash, this is a great great tune … listen …” I said to my fifteen year old who thinks music before 2012 is too old to be bothered with.

I hit the double arrow icon on the tablet to start the song over. The crowd noise rises again as it did before, and Ashley-Rae sits patiently to humor me.

I’m driving in my car …

I turn on the radio …

I start pulling you closer …

But you just say No ….

You say you don’t like it …

But I know you’re a liar …

Because when we kiss … ohhhh …

Fire …

“Dad, is this song about rape?” asks Ashley-Rae.

“Huh? What? No …. No no no”, I stammer … shocked at this twist, not sure if she’s teasing me or seriously asking. “No this about when a man … you know … and he thinks the girl is playing hard to .. you know …”

And I stopped.

“Dad, no means no”.

“Uh yeah – yes it absolutely does … “ remembering my audience is my very pretty fifteen year old daughter that I am very proud to hear say this back to me.

“So is this song about rape?”

At that moment the neighbor lady across the corner came to the back gate announcing her arrival with “Hellloooo?”

Perfect timing. I jumped up and hurried my way to the arbor gate and let her in. She was asking to borrow a garden tool. I found it surprisingly quickly in the shed and as I was handing it to her I asked “Hey do you remember an old Springsteen song … “I’m driving in my car …”

“I turn on the radio …” she continued and she sang the next two lines as she did a little dance.

“Ashley-Rae just asked me if that song is about rape …”

The nice neighbor lady looked up at me surprised. “huh?” and she started to sing the next lines … “ohhh … gee … I don’t know … it’s such a great song … how do you handle that?”

At that moment that I realized that whether or not we thought it was a great song or not didn’t matter.

“ASH” I yelled, hoping she was still outside.

“Oh hi miss Melinda”, she said as she appeared around the corner.

“I asked miss Melinda, and she agreed that the song is about rape”, I said and the nice neighbor lady played along by nodding, accepting her new stance, understanding why.

“Okay” said Ash as she spun back around to go back in the house. “Too bad though, it’s a pretty good song”.

Oh and Four and a Wedding

My daughters’ fastpitch softball has been over for about a month now. The season ends way too soon for me.

This was the year they would have more talent than any other year before. A team of strong bats, and team of strong defensive players. But for some reason the team never got on that roll we were all waiting for.

Both my daughters played for this team.

A team of 16 year old's with the exception of my daughter Ashley-Rae who didn’t turn 15 until the final week of the provincial championships.

Ash had a break out year, earning outright the second base position. And moving up to the top half of the batting order. She made clutch hits, she made clutch plays.

Alannah – my eldest – did not pitch her best this year. She blamed a tough school year, her new part-time job, and my inability to catch her pitching practice due to a leg infection I fought off the first half of summer.

Excuses. Teenage girls.

There were some highlights – at least for me as a sideline dad.

There was the beautiful double plays from Alannah at third to Ashley-Rae at second to McKay at first. I got one of them on video – well – I have the ground underneath the plays on video – I was too busy watching.

There was Alannah’s home run – which I also have on video – a hard swing at a fastball up around the letters she caught square on the barrel. In the video it looks effortless – all she was looking for was a line drive for a base hit, but it flew over the right center field fence with barely an arc.

There was another game in Toledo – the girls playing an elite Michigan team – down by three – with Ashley-Rae hitting a line shot off the fence in left field to bring in two runs – followed by Alannah hitting a line drive the opposite way to right off the fence to bring in two more – one of them being Ash.

Great moments for this Dad.

In my years of being a Dad on the sidelines I have mastered the ability to cheer humbly for such things – cheering for the team, not for my girls – I do that privately with them when it’s over. And never to be the loudest parent cheering. The humbler the better.

This year we also had some coaching challenges. One of the coaches was the boyfriend of the manager. Our manager was and still is a great player in her own right in her own day, and just now coming into her own with this squad of four years together. I hold her in the highest regard. One day she was running the bases as the team was working on those “where to throw the ball under what circumstances” situation defensive skills sessions. In a run down, one of the girls tried to make her throw too quick and caught the manager right in the mouth. A hard thrown ball, the manager couldn’t hide her pain. As she went to the side to recover, the boyfriend coach gathered the group into the middle and used every swear word in the book to chew the group out for this accident.

Every word you could imagine was used.

Every parent attending behind the fences heard every word of the obscenity lased diatribe strung together as only swearwords can be that makes no sense but gets the anger across.

That was never forgotten.

In the following weeks – one night sitting outside the hotel in Toledo, I asked the boyfriend coach about this over a beer.

“I have been to many clinics and workshops and listened to many great coaches talk about being a great coach”, he said justifying, “and they all say that you should be very supportive during games – but a real prick in practice”.

“And you think this works then?” I inquired – suggesting he should re-think his pontification.

“I have coached elite boys in hockey and baseball …” he started.

“I have coached and raised girls”, I replied, “and that shit don’t work with girls”.

“Well it’s getting late”, he said, and went back inside.

I tried.

We had yet another challenge this year as well. My wonderful cousin whom I consider a niece although she considers me a cousin was getting married. We received the invitation the summer before, and my girls – never having been to a wedding yet – were very excited. The date was a Sunday in late July.

It was in Kitchener, Ontario.

Shortly after we received the wedding invitation, the date was announced for the next provincial grand championships. It was that same weekend – the final games to be played on that Sunday. But which town in Ontario was going to host them was still unknown.

“It’ll work out – it always does” I told the girls, because it’s true.

In late April the decision was made that the Grands would be held in Stratford – a tiny town known to the world for its Shakespearean plays … and yeah … it’s the home of Justin Bieber.

Stratford is only 45 minutes away from Kitchener. And since hotels in Stratford in the summer are so hard to get – we would stay in Kitchener.

“There ya go”, I said to the girls.

“Great Dad, but we will be playing Sunday, we are better team this year, and we always make it to the Sunday final bracket”.

“It’ll work out”, I promised. “It always does”.

The week before Grands, the girls played in a warm-up tournament in Brantford, Ontario, the home of The Great One … Wayne Gretzky.

At sometime early in that tournament the coaches were warned for “chirping the umps” from the bench. It was the boyfriend coach – the one who was being supportive of the girls during games. Balls and strike and safe and out calls were all being questioned.

After that first game, the team received a “bench warning” sometime during that first inning of each game following. The word was out, the umpires were not putting up with this guy.

Games were played – more lost than won, and we exited Branford early Sunday morning.

The next weekend – we headed to Stratford.

The truck was loaded down with ball equipment and canopies and lawn chairs and coolers and medical bags and suitcases – and dress bags and make-up kits and suit bags. Twice our normal cargo – because we had a big wedding to go to.

The first inning of the first game, our pitcher was throwing fine, but no strikes were getting called on close pitches. The boyfriend coach chirped. The bench warning was administered. These were the same umpires from last weekend.

The Saturday afternoon game came due. The girls had to win this game to earn a spot into the Sunday bracket. A record of three losses and no wins of course put them below the cut-line. A win here might still get them in to the bottom seed.

In the first inning – they hit our starting pitcher hard, and after she took a hard line drive off the knee cap, she was done and injured on the bench. Alannah came into pitch – knowing that she would not get a strike called unless she threw it right down the middle of the plate. Balls on the corners, drop balls and risers were all called balls. So as hard as she could she threw fastballs down the middle. And they hit her all over park too.

Finally the boyfriend coach said something about a pitch that caught the inside corner. The ump stepped from behind the plate and took two steps towards the dugout and said “It was this far inside“, holding his fingers an exaggerated distance apart.

“Sure it was” mumbled the boyfriend coach.

“You’re outta here!” screamed the ump who whirled around with his arm in the air.

The manager stepped out to try to talk to the ump – but before she got both feet on the field he whirled back around and yelled “You too!”

With both the manager and the boyfriend coach gone, our remaining two coaches – both with more experience alone had than most of the opposing managers and coaches in the tournament, led our girls to a comeback – rallies were countered by the other team’s rallies. Great defensive plays on both sides. And the gap was being closed by our girls. But no close calls went our way, and the strike zone for our pitchers remained the size of a keyhole. And in the end – our girls fell short. But not for lack of trying, and not for lack heart.

And it was over. They were done on the Saturday afternoon.

And in the car, Alannah muttered “well, at least we know we can go to the wedding”.

“I told you it would work out darlin’, it always works out.”

The wedding was awesome, but that deserves a story of its own.