Posted on December 3, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with one comment

Time flies… wherever you live

 

“Time, flowing like a river,

Time, beckoning me

Who knows when

We shall meet again, if ever

But time keeps flowing

Like a river to the sea.”

Time – The Alan Parsons Project

With the humblest of apologies to Alan Parsons and his project, time is not flowing gently like a river. It’s rushing, roiling and churning like an angry bull as it hurtles towards the sea.

Wait a minute.

The last time I checked, there were still 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. Let’s stretch this out a bit.

“Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,

How do you measure, measure a year?”

Seasons of Love – Rent (The Musical)

Don’t bother running for your calculator or in the case of many of my senior friends, limping for your abacus. The number is accurate.

At school recently, I was hanging around the office waiting for the day to get started. There were teachers, office staff and administrators bustling about getting ready for the onslaught. We varied widely in age. A common topic was how fast time seems to be moving. I can understand married couples with full-time jobs and young children. The pace of life is breathtaking. Of course, if your children happen to be good at sports, then your life is one long road trip.

I hated to break it to all assembled but if they think time moves at warp speed now, just wait until you’re a senior citizen.

“If I could save time in a bottle,

The first thing that I’d like to do,

Is to save every day

“Til eternity passes away”

Time in a Bottle – Jim Croce

I’ve tried to analyze this phenomenon of the passage of time and have come up mostly empty.  I think electronic devices have something to do with this as they seem to control most aspects of people’s lives from the number of steps we take, our heart rate (while at work or while we’re sleeping) and the gob smacking amount of information (much of it questionable) that we ingest. Make no mistake, “Big Brother” is watching us.

“Time is on my side, yes it is,

Time is on my side, yes it is.”

Time is on My Side – The Rolling Stones

Wrong, Mick. If you’re in your 70s like me, time is not on my side. It’s slipping away. I’ve told this story many times and it is immortalized in my 5^th book, “Eat, Sleep and Walk: Stories from the Camino”. I spent a day walking with a young woman from Australia. She had just completed a stint in the military and was trying to figure out what she was going to do next. I assured her that she had a long runway ahead of her whereas, my runway was much shorter. Without missing a beat she said, “Len. Take a smaller plane.” It is true that many of us are in the late innings of the game but there’s still plenty of runway. Sometimes, the game goes into extra innings

“Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time,

Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines.”

Time – Pink Floyd

The bottom line is that all of us should try our best to use the time that’s given to us. It is precious and better than all the gifts we might find under the Christmas tree.

Which reminds me. It is that time of the year, when I haul my 36-inch porcelain Christmas tree out of the closet and set it on my dining room table. Minimalist doesn’t even come close to describing my meagre acknowledgement of the festive season.

Life hurtles on. It’s relentless and there’s not a lot we can do to stop this speeding train.

In school, I often issue my students the “Five Minute Challenge”. It’s a chance in their busy day to stop, close their eyes and rest for a bit. A chance to reset.

I believe that this is a good practice for all of us to utilize.

As for myself, I prefer the “Thirty-Minute Power Snooze” on the days when I’m not teaching.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute,

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,

And- which is more- you’ll be a man, my son!”

If – Rudyard Kipling

Have a great day and use these 24 hours wisely.

They’re all you have.

Posted on November 26, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

Direct marketing 101

 

I promise that this will be my last post about my autobiography!

(WARNING – shameless self-promotion)

“You can’t finish what you don’t start.”

Author unknown        

There’s a corollary to this statement and it goes something like this:

“You should never start what you’re not committed to finish”.

I am not going to bore you with the process of writing and publishing a book. Simply put, it’s a big undertaking. If you are a writer and have a publisher, kudos to you. You’re a superstar but for self-published authors like me, it’s a “do it yourself” job.

This is not to suggest that I single handedly wrote, edited, designed and laid out the book and printed it. Not so. There are many moving parts and it’s a team effort to bring a book into the light of day.

One of the most challenging parts of the process is to get the books sold. It is a lesson in direct marketing.

It’s rather odd, but I hadn’t thought much about the end game: people actually reading the book, until I started selling the books.

A few months ago, I sent a rough draft of the first two chapters to a friend and former Hillcrest Street neighbour, Bruce Nunn. Some of you will know Bruce best as Mr. Nova Scotia Know it All. Bruce and the Nunn clan lived at the very end of Hillcrest Street. Our families have known each other forever. Our summer homes were “side by each” at Bayfield.

Here is an excerpt from an e-mail that Bruce sent me a few days ago. I am reprinting it with his permission.

“Your words are a good record to have: a colourful tile in the historical mosaic of Antigonish. And maybe, culturally, they’re important as an archive of a piece of the real past – fond, nostalgic recollections of a sweeter time viewed through the distorting lens of time perhaps, but so meaningful when held up against today’s lesser experience: city neighbours who don’t know each other’s names and kids absorbed in their phones who don’t know the wide open freedom of the Salt Ponds or the fun of an impromptu street hockey game or a neighbourhood ball game in an empty field until it gets too dark or your mother’s literal ‘dinner bell’ calls you home.”

It was a much simpler time and I, for one, am so grateful to have been brought up in that era.

And now, I close the book on this chapter of my life. Book number 8 was a great trip down memory lane.

What’s next?

I have been tinkering with poetry, and I might try and cobble together enough of them for book  number 9! Here’s one I wrote shortly after my books were delivered to my apartment:

 

I WROTE A BOOK

 

When I was young, I liked to write,

Short stories and the occasional poem,

I wasn’t tough, didn’t like to fight,

In my imagination, I felt at home.

 

I was a sportswriter, when I attended X,

I went to every sporting game,

Our editor, a member of the fairer sex,

She was a pro, my writing quite lame.

 

As an English teacher, I taught prose,

Poetry, haiku, and even limericks,

Questions about syntax, I would pose,

My students wrote with Bics.

 

And then my children came along,

I journalled early in the morn,

Their lives to me were like a song,

Ever since the day they were born.

 

On a Florida vacation in twenty-twelve,

I wrote my first story on the plane,

An incident at Pearson caused me to delve,

Into a plot that seemed inane.

 

I shared my story with my friends at The Islander,

They found it funny and liked it a lot,

Channeling my inner Scottish Highlander,

Even though my story had a flimsy plot.

 

I began writing humour columns,

For three known weekly papers,

To incite a laugh, they weren’t very solemn,

Mostly about life’s little capers.

 

I was told that I should write a book,

Compiling several stories,

They were quite simple, not needing a hook,

None about the Liberals or the Tories!

 

Over the years, one book became two,

Then three and four and seven,

Number eight is about “you know who”,

No copies will be found in heaven!

 

It’s been a lark, this writing thing,

It’s kept me sharp and witty,

When my stories dry up, I can always sing,

A ballad or a ditty.

Have a great weekend.

Posted on November 19, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

 

Cold, hard cash

 

I’m playing with house money.

Most people I know in this part of the world are not gamblers. We tend to be quite conservative in nature even though we are liberal minded. small c. small l! We generally play it safe and if anything, are risk averse. Not many take “the road less travelled”. We take comfort in routine, and we don’t like surprises.

However, deep down, we’re all a bunch of river boat gamblers. We’re suckers for lotteries, scratch tickets, bingo, raffle tickets, and 50/50 draws. We’ll even “chase the ace” over hell’s half acre if we think we can win one of those monstrous jackpots. We would all like to get rich but sadly, our odds of winning are very slim.

A few weeks ago, I went to a hockey game at the Antigonish Arena, something I hadn’t done in a hundred years. My brother was sitting beside me, and I told him that I was one of the very first hockey players to play in this rink when it opened in 1970. I was a member of the Antigonish Junior Bulldogs.

On our way in, there was a table selling 50/50 tickets. My brother laid down a ten spot and purchased 7 tickets. I wasn’t going to be shown up, so I bought the next 7 tickets on the roll. After the first period, the winning ticket was announced. My brother was studying his ticket and his eyes got bigger as the numbers rolled off the tongue of the public address announcer. He was sure that he was going to be the winner. Unfortunately, he was one number off. I held the winning ticket – the next number in the sequence!

There was a very small crowd at the game. Including the janitor and the Zamboni driver, there might have been 50 people, mostly teeth chattering parents. As I walked down to the scorer’s table, I was figuring that, at best, I might have won $50. I was handed an envelope and inside was $210. At first, I thought that this might have been money to pay the referees. At that point, I realized that almost every person in attendance must have purchased $10 worth of tickets.

I put the wad of cash in my pocket.

I was now playing with house money.

If you’ve ever been to the casino, placed a $20 bet and won $100, you know exactly what house money is. You put the $20 that you “invested” back in your jeans pocket and decide to use the house money ($100) to gamble some more.

We should have taken Steve Miller’s advice:

“Hoo-hoo-hoo,

Go on, take the money and run.”

Take The Money and Run – Steve Miller Band

There’s also a touch of greed in all of us. Of course, we roll the dice with the house money, lose all that, and the $20 we started with… and then some!

I’m playing with house money.

The term “bucket list” became popular after the movie The Bucket List starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

I must admit that I’ve never had a formal bucket list. Life just happened, and like so many other people, I accumulated a basket of experiences, some good and some bad. However, with the relentless march of time, we see the runway shortening and this is when we start to feverishly try and accomplish things we wished we’d done.

My mother was fearless, and she never shied away from trying new things. I must have inherited that streak from her. I took opportunities when they were presented to me, even when they seemed unreasonable (reckless?) like running 5 marathons after having had 3 knee surgeries. I will happily give you my therapist’s contact information!

This is a very long lead up to the main point of this story.

Ten boxes arrived on my doorstep on Monday containing my recently published autobiography. I was in school at the time of the delivery and my kind neighbours (thanks Yvonne and Ann) lugged the books into my apartment.

Getting a shipment of a new publication is sort of like Christmas morning. There is a lot of anticipation to see how a year’s worth of work looks coming out of the box.

So, how did I feel when I opened the box? My gut instinct was that I was very pleased with the look of the book. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if the contents were worthy of your hard earned $25.

I sat on the couch, cradling the book, flipping through the pages. I started humming the One Direction song, The Story of my Life”.

Yes, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction when you’ve tackled and completed a big project. This one has been in the works for 74 years.  After 10 seconds of self-congratulations, I then felt a sense of relief. I have so wanted to write this book before I died. I know that this sounds a bit morbid, but I wanted to leave something for my children, my grandchildren and those who come after.

I want them to know what it was like growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in a large Catholic family. I want them to know where they came from and what life was like for the Baby Boomers.

While this is my story, it is every bit your story too. So many of us share a common heritage, growing up in small town Canada. The book is laced with family stories, stories about our town, province, country and global events.

I’m playing with house money.

Everything from this point on is a bonus.

My bucket list (if I ever had one) is full. However, I have a small pail sitting beside it so there’s still time for more adventures!

Have a great weekend.

P.S. Want a copy of the book? Drop me a note at  lenpdmacdonald@gmail.com