Springing a surprise

Worth getting up for

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight

~ Omar Khayyam

ONTARIO SQUIRRELS DON’T hibernate. Like the rest of us in this province, they’re tough and phlegmatic and just get on with it, no matter what the weather hurls our way. And that’s been a lot this past winter.

You don’t see quite as much of them as you do the rest of the year. We all of us hunker down just a little as the snow cascades, if that’s the word, and the wind sculpts it into picturesquely annoying drifts.

You know it’s cold when ice pellets form in your moustache. You know it’s bloody cold when ditto happens in your nasal hairs.

Phlegmatic is as phlegmatic does.

So it was a particular delight, a sign of better days, to catch sight of a white squirrel — unique to our neighbourhood — in the backyard, delving into Lesley’s herb patch in search of who knows what it had buried for future consideration.

I fear a lesser squirrel, common-or-garden black or grey, had gotten there first. The white one left empty-pawed, up and over the fence and purposefully across the neighbours’ garage roof.

But not overly dismayed, I don’t think. It didn’t seem to have had too bleak a winter. If not exactly fat and sassy, nor was it skinny and moth-eaten, either, as they sometimes are at this time of year.

We’d have been hard put to spot it, anyway, given the amount of snow we’ve had. Natural camouflage.

Now that the clocks have gone forward and our little world is waking up and stretching and scratching its backside in preparation for being up and doing, we hope to see more of it. White squirrels are rare and to be cherished. Nowhere else in the city has them, and we regard them as good-luck charms.

We need all the luck we can get as the conflagration builds around us, with no one apparently possessed of the wherewithal or willpower to nip it in the bud. It could be done.

Still, let’s push that to the back of our minds for the moment. Let the greater world (not that it will) take care of itself for once.

The snowdrops are starting to bud

and we have one stubborn crocus (with attendant snail) bucking the odds and determined to make its presence felt.

I wouldn’t bet against it, though it’s probably a kamikaze effort. It’s not easy being green. I think that snail’s a goner, too.

All things being equal, this time next week we’ll be getting set for a trip to Rome.

Lesley has a couple-of-times-removed cousin there, a medical student who we’re planning to take out for Easter Sunday lunch. She’s been complaining about the unseasonably chilly weather, calling it “scandalous.”

I dunno… it looks pretty good from here.

“All things being equal…” Must I add a qualifier to everything? More and more it strikes me that I should. Old age is entitled surely to its foibles. And it’s better than my mother’s “If I’m spared…”

Anyway, we have to go. We have a house-sitter booked. What are we gonna do? Share the place with her? She’s a vegetarian! And when parallel universes collide…

We have tickets for a jazz concert there, Riccardo del Fra, who played bass with Chet Baker. That has to be quite something.

My dad in his youth was cornet major in a colliery brass band. I had him listen to a Chet Baker album once. He was quiet for a few moments and then he said,

“It’s not what he’s playing. It’s what he’s not playing.”

Which was a really astute comment.

But I’m rambling. Oh well. Old age. Foibles. Remember?

It’s getting on for 18 years since I retired from the staff of the Toronto Star, though I kept on freelancing for a good while after that.

I don’t miss working anymore. I think sometimes about writing journalism and it no longer appeals.

I especially don’t miss the snakepit aspect of a newsroom, the “sundry wars and alliances,” as Thomas Hughes put it in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Keeping straight who your friends in higher places are, amid the shifting sands of middle-management paranoia. Who’s on their way out above you, who’s up and coming and may not be on your side. That’s not what newspaper work should be about, but it always has been.

There’s a British guy named Dan Haylett who writes on Substack, a podcaster and “retirement coach,” neither of which were jobs that existed when I entered the workforce. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that his name is an anagram of “deathly tan.”

Mr. Haylett points out that, according to the UK Office for National Statistics, if you quit working at 60 “you’re looking at roughly 12-15 more years before health limitations start to intrude in meaningful ways.”

Which puts me three years adrift, something I really didn’t need to know. But perhaps it’s different for Canadians.

Ah well. When all else fails (as it doubtless will), remember that the Easter Bunny died for our sins.

Try to keep that in mind. Before your mind wanders. As it doubtless will.