BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

Saturday, January 7th, 2012  1:45 a.m.

It is hard to believe that my life has gone by so fast. I will be 68 later this year and odds are not in favour of my living beyond age 80 if I look at the things that are against me and factor in the average life expectancies. Nevertheless, I don't let it bother me too much. I just try to do the best I can and keep a positive attitude. I have been to hell and back again throughout my life right from birth. I have also dealt with all sorts of problems, and gone as low as you can go in life but I still survived. Then I look at friends with mental health problems and say to myself, their problem is at the root of things, not in the extremities. I have seen a number of people over the years who have suffered from mental health problems of different natures so I have a good understanding of most of it. I have tried to help where I could but also had to accept that somethings just had to be the way they went. Thankfully, my only mental health problems happened under conditions of severe toxicity due to mould in an apartment I was renting and raccoons living overhead. It took me a month after I left there to fully recover from that one, thanks to my son who allowed me to stay with him at the time. Now that he lives in London, England, it will be difficult to ask for his help again. But I will, on Monday when he drops in on his way home to England after stops in Victoria for Christmas and Toronto to visit old friends. I think he has decided to make England his home for good now that he is in his mid-30s and I wish him well. The last person in our family to have mental health problems that I know about had to be my father's aunt who we called Annie, the wife of Charles McKinley. She had mental problems caused, I suspect, because she could not have any children. Her husband was my father's mother's brother. He died in 1942. An nie McKInley, his wife, was not a blood relative. Life is funny that way, I have outlived a great many friends myself and even been a pallbearer at a funeral. People I remember from yesterday have now been dead for some 25 years. I have one aunt still alive in her eighties but both my father and his youngest brother lived to be 88, my mother to 85. My dad's older brother died at age 80 in 1994 so their lives have been a far stretch from their parents' lives. My father's parents died at age 65 and 56. My mother's parents died at age 54 and 30. Today, those lives could have been extended. While I do not think I will outlive other members of my family, I do think I will survive long enough for my grandchild due in June to remember me. At least I hope so. I like to say I plan to live to be a hundred, give or take thirty years. We never know what life will bring us and even the fittest of the fittest have died of things that were a total surprise to them. When I was in my mid-20s I weighed something like 165 lbs. My dad at the same age came in at around 130 pounds. Kind of tells you that I am a different build from him so a weight of 200 would be good for me....it will take about two years to get there but I think I can make it. I am on my way now, trying to improve my eating habits today. Now if only I could get my body to coincide with the schedule I have in mind. If I could get my body on a regular one, it would help things a great deal. So, now I will have to worry about what to do with all the food I can no longer eat? Never had that problem before....hmmmmmm.