They are young and they are middle-aged and they are old.
They walk unaided and with canes; they ride in baby strollers and in wheelchairs.
They are famous and they are not.
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises”
The death this week of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor happened the same way: gradually, then suddenly.
I’m not a great royals watcher but it would have been hard to miss the ever-so-gradual diminution of her vitality over the last several years: the reduced public schedule and transfer of some duties to then-Prince Charles and other family members, the events missed altogether due to “mobility problems”, and the change in her own standards of participation at the events she did attend (taking the Trooping the Colours salute from the palace balcony instead of joining the parade in a carriage – or on horseback!). But then she would pop up on a surprise visit to open a hospice, seemingly the same as ever.
And yet, not quite the same. When I saw the photo of her with Liz Truss, Britain’s new Prime Minister, I noticed the big bruise on her hand — a bruise much like the one my father sported for the last several years of his life — but what really caught my attention was her weight, or lack of it. “She’s keenin’ in,” I thought — an expression learned from said father’s Scottish cousins and that refers to the involuntary weight loss that so often accompanies one’s last few months of life, even when all else seems well.
Two days later, she was dead. Gradually, and then suddenly.
So, it’s been what, a year? Since I last posted a photo of a yellow-jacket wasp on my Pinky Winky Hydrangea, I mean.
Oh. Two years. Clearly, it’s time for more, because they’re amazing.
Without any apparent difficulty they crawl over the irregular surface of the hydrangea florets more adeptly than I crawl around my completely flat exercise surface.
Without benefit of pitons or ropes or climbing shoes — or hands, even — they scale vertical surfaces.
I feel my shoulders drop when I type that hashtag to accompany my retweet of any calm, peaceful, downright tranquil photo on Twitter, a medium known more for inducing rage than tranquility.
Puffins, sunsets, sunrises, paths through valleys, paths through hills, flat-calm ponds, deserted-beach overlooks, striking skies. You get the idea. In an undeniably crazy world, there are still oodles of ways to retrieve peace, at least at the personal level.
In that spirit, today I offer my neighbour’s coneflowers. I think that’s what they are. Hey, I didn’t plant them, I just enjoy them. And so can you.
Just. Breathe.
“There’s not one thing that doesn’t point to it not being him,’
Stanko told The Associated Press.
Fate: That’s the only way to explain what led me to click on the headline for this story, but it became clear soon enough. Or, more accurately, completely unclear.
There’s not one thing
that doesn’t point to
it not being him.
Maybe breaking it down will help. Divide and conquer, that’s what we say, yes? All right, then. This is me, going in.
Whaddya mean, it’s almost too dark to play?
The golf course looks fine to me: not in high-noon sunlight to be sure, but perfectly clear. Yet the TV announcers are talking about the possibility of having to end the day’s play before the last players have completed their round. Something about them not being able to see where their golf balls land, or to see that perfectly obvious flag marking the hole on the green. What the heck?
Why does that flower look so washed out?
The flower in question looks fine when I pull the camera away from my face, but the view through the aptly named viewfinder is overwhelmed by light. Colours are faded; shadows are muted; contrast is lost. What the heck?
I have commented before on the embarrassing name of the hydrangea plunked beside our front step. I tolerate that defect because the shrub is so pretty when it flowers, because it flowers when most everything else in the garden has stopped doing so, and because it attracts wasps and butterflies. Oh, and an occasional bee in full sunlight.
Anyway, back to the Pinky Winky. This shot shows the ever-so-gradual progression from teeny white balls with just a hint of blush to pure-white blossoms to pink ones.
Keep sewage away from drinking water.
It doesn’t seem like an amazing idea, does it? I expect that you could get agreement on this point from all Canadians. It’s just something we know, you know? Hasn’t it always been this way?
No. It first started being a significant problem about 10,000 years ago when we stopped being primarily hunters/gatherers and began being farmers and dwellers in one fixed spot. Still, it was a long slog until someone had a better idea than getting excreta out of your dwelling by throwing it into the street – or, maybe, until they had the technology to implement that idea. It was 3000 B.C. before latrines were first linked to a city’s sewage system in what is now Pakistan, and it wasn’t until 100 B.C. that a Roman decree *required* city residents to use latrines connected to the sewage system that ran under the streets. Of course, in those pre-modern-medicine days, the incentive to use plumbing wasn’t better health: It was less smell.
However, progress is worse than slow: it’s fickle. After the fall of the Roman Empire, things went backward for quite a while. In mid-18th-century England, all the Brontë sisters died young from, at least in part, lifelong consumption of water contaminated by sewage. Oh, and by a local graveyard. Oh, yuck.
Ah, sweet misery/mystery of life, at last I found you: the misery index.
The misery index was initiated by economist Arthur Okun, an adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960’s. It is simply the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate.
You can chart the US misery index by year since 1948 if’n you want to, with helpful dividers that show who was President when. Not that we’re into blame.
Some people say that unemployment causes more misery than inflation (1.7 times as much), but this fact — if fact it is — is not reflected in the index. It does, however, suggest where an individual ought to focus their own efforts to lower their personal misery index, especially since inflation seems to be out of anyone’s control.
Posted: 2025 may 03
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
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