Ann

What’s a Mile?: Old-fashioned

I was talking a mile a minute to a kid the other day and wound up telling her a story about my “old days.” Well, she asked.

I quoted an old saw, “Walk a mile in my shoes before you judge me.” Well, maybe that’s a paraphrase or a re-wording. Anyway, the kid asked me, “What’s a mile?”

And I said, “That’s a very, v-e-r-y WIDE smile.”

Well, I thought it was amusing.

Anyway, it made me wonder how the heck old she was that she didn’t recognize the word mile. She was obviously from the Metric Age. Me? I’m from the Imperial age. You know, feet, not metres, miles not kilometres. Pounds not kilos. Kilos kill me, Bwaah-ha-ha.

Okay, not so funny.

Anyway, it makes you feel old, don’t it? Well, it did me.

So I asked her – well, I’m old enough now to get away with asking a lady her age – “So how the heck old are you?” Yeah, old enough to forget the subtlety if I need to. “Were you born yesterday?”

And she said, 1984.

Nineteen eighty-four? Holy cow. She’s practically still in diapers. Oh, excuse me; that’s in her prime. And really, she was a very charming person.

But of course I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s book 1984 and the dark days it depicted; nor could I shake off the, to me, obvious “similarities” of today’s people trying control others. You know, coups and killings and mass murders and all manner of human rights abuses. It’s hard not to get depressed about that.

And I just wanted to embrace this kid, this young lady, with protective arms.

Thirty-Three

So anyway, 1984. That made her thirty-two. Just about the age I was when I met the lady who became my wife. I was thirty-three. The same age that, stories tell us, Jesus was when he was crucified.

And I had just come from a year of travel across Portugal and Spain, North Africa and the Middle East, including the territory that Jesus trod.

I was a bag of bones, when I arrived in London, so skinny that the Red Cross-like agency in Lebanon had refused to “buy” my blood because I wasn’t “fit enough.” They feared that giving blood would drain me too much and I wouldn’t be able to carry on. Not sure if that was consideration for my welfare (no doubt it was) or whether it was fear of being sued if anything happened to me later and my case was tracked back to them.

Well, anyway, the lady who later became my wife adopted me. I guess the state I was in, and being an “exotic,” a rare Canadian in her oh-so-English life, brought out the motherly instincts in her.

She had a killer smile and oozed warmth and good will.

And the rest? Well, that was beautiful.

So, that’s what started things off and we wound up with me reminiscing.

Anyway, she – the kid — obviously hadn’t heard. She  asked me, “So how’s your wife today? Give her my regards.” She’d obviously heard something. Or perhaps she assumed I was married. Of course, it could  have been the ring.

“Oh,” I said “she passed last February.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the kid said. “What happened?”

“Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh,” she said, “that’s so sad. How are you doing?”

Well, in either Metric or Imperial, I’m doing fine. I’m finding that the day we met, my late wife and I, lives so vividly in my memory these days.

It makes me feel happy.

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Inspired by CK Love ’s fb lament that she could not write just now as she grieves for the world and it’s killings reported on the news. She posted July 23/16.  She asked “Who will cry for the ones who are hated for no reason. They haunt me.”

CREDIT: Photo by H. W. Bryce