BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, 10:55 p.m.

Friendships are an interesting thing. My parents had a close friendship with their neighbours at the lake before 2005. The neighbours were more like my age than that of my parents. In fact, there is a closer relationship between my younger sister by three years than my parents had with them as neighbours. I think they looked at my parents as replacements for their own parents as it was the feeling I got at times when I was down there. When my parents first moved to the lake back in 1974, it was my older brother and I who poured the concrete bases for the deck that surrounded the west end of the house. Along the way, I did repairs to the old decks between efforts by my father but in time the whole deck needed replacement. Thirty years later it was the neighbour who replaced the deck for my father. It was something he was particularly good at and there was nothing further he could do to his own property to make it better. Because my parents lived to be 88 and 85 they had a number of different groups of friends. There were the business associates from the general office where my father spent a lot of years before his promotion to one of the top three in the company, the other two being family members who owned the company. Then there were the son and his wife who had trained together in medical school and live in Saudi Arabia for a dozen years or more. They in turn were the son and daughter-in-law of a couple who my parents had known since the 1950s. He had worked for my father's firm for his entire life in the high end retail jewellery business having gone from Halifax to Calgary in his employment journey across Canada. Times were different back then and the way people celebrated friendships was also very different. Those who had gone to war in the 1940s had learned how to party with friends in a military situation. They quickly learned how short life could be for some and how important it was to get out and have a good time. My parents had regular parties at the house after the war right into the early 70s when they started to see their own friend begin to pass on like I have done in the past thirty years. Their parties were either for business associates or for just friends that gathered each week to celebrate in their own way....a few bottles of booze, beer and food. Most of it was talk or a bit of dancing but always fun. For one reason or another, my parents latched on to a group known as the Somerset bowling league. It met once a week throughout the winter for an evening of exercise and fun. I also filled in at time when spares were needed. That same group living on Somerset Road, home to my dad's older brother and family who introduced the family to it, consisted of a number of my uncle's neighbours who had been gathering for as long as I could remember while they lived on that street. Time would take care of that group as it slowly moved away, died off or finally left because of the deteriorating political situation in the Province of Quebec. Montreal had been the financial center of Canada for something like a hundred and fifty years until the French element drove it away with idealist thoughts of sovereignty for the large Quebec French element within the borders Canada. While I never thought of it that way, I was always aware that the family friends were always the same groups of friends that my parents had known all their lives. From time to time, a gathering of the clan brought out old friends and family but as time passed they were fewer and farther between. In time, it was the offspirngs of those families that came to those gatherings and the locals whose lives had been influenced or totally changed for knowing my parents. It did not dawn on my how the changes had come about until my father said one day that they had outlived all of their wartime friends, all of their early friends and had not expected to live beyond their mid-sixties because their own natural parents had all died by the age of 65. My mother lost her natural  parents at ages 54 and 30 and my father lost his natural parents at ages 65 and 56. Both their fathers had remarried and my mother was close to her stepmother who had raised her as a teen but my father resented his stepmother and never spoke to her since she ended up with the family wealth after my grandfather died. She was seen by him as an opportunist and nothing more than his father's secretary from work until he married her a year after his wife died. My father had been away at war for 4-1/2 years and came home to find a dying mother and a father who was seldom there.

Even I, my older brother and younger sister have already outlived all of our grandparents. This was a surprise to my parents who found their own longevity a unexpected happening. They took to the road and travelled for months after my father's early retirement at age 54 and travelled a great deal in North America and Europe. Dad live another 34 years after retirement, something he was not really prepared for with the effects of inflation and the added costs of living in the country but he had prepared his financial situation as best as he could to ensure they would survive in reasonable comfort. Fortunately, his skills as a businessman took care of a number of services for which neighbours would regularly have to pay like snowremoval, dock launching, mechanical repairs and so on. His skill as an accountant, negotiator, manager, corporate executive and willingness to take on any task placed him in high local esteem.

Among the people I have known in my life, I can count only two at the moment who are presently in my life. The rest were just acquaintences who at the time were close but who because of my own inability to keep up relationships, disappeared over time. One of my present friends and I see each other anywhere from one to three months apart because of our different states of health. He still skis while I had to give it up thirteen years ago. He still plays tennis while I have had to deal with two hip replacements and other medical problems. Still, we have been good friends since first meeting some 29 years ago and now live some three streets from each other. My other friend is younger by some 15 years our having met during rehab at the hosptal in 2010 shortly after having my first hip replacement. He has gone through a variety of physical problems, emotional problems and is headed for great financial trouble unless he is able to pick things up shortly and do something to earn a living. Unfortunately, he has a knee replacement to go through next so it is not over for him and a back operation is in the works for the future. LIfe is never easy for some. Nevertheless, he and I get together every month or so for an afternoon that consists of coffee and often lunch or an early evening meal, usually at a fancy coffee shop somewhere followed by a trip to a mall, Chinese restaurant, or perhaps a  Thai or simple Vietnamese restaurant somewhere. It is usually a good outing. Well, time to go now that I am thinking about food again....tough thing when you are on a diet, and yes, I have been losing weight, how much and for how long I cannot tell you but something is working in my favour.

Bye until next time.