Posted on December 10, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

 

A perfect hand. A rarity.

 

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

Nobody has ever accused me of being a card shark. OK. I was pretty good at playing Fish and War as a child (!) but once I moved up to 45’s and Hearts, I realized that there were people far more adept at playing cards than me. I loved playing cribbage, but I found my true passion in the basement of the Angus L. MacDonald Library on the campus of St.F.X. University where I learned how to play bridge during my university days.

Depending on the card game, there’s a certain level of luck and a goodly amount of skill involved. Of course, we all love it when we are dealt a winning hand whether it’s a royal flush in poker or a 29 hand in crib. But these are rarities. Most of the hands we’re dealt are average, and occasionally we’re dealt a real shitty hand.

Nobody cares much for whiners. These people always seem to lay the blame on others when things aren’t going right. Cards is an excellent metaphor for life. There are people who are dealt a great hand in life and very often, the outcome is not always what one might think. If everything goes your way all the time, then trouble is just around the corner when adversity rears its ugly head.

The people that I admire most are the ones that take a poor hand and play it well.

I don’t play much bridge any more. When I was first learning the game, I would get annoyed when I was dealt thirteen lousy cards. But as I improved and started playing with people very good at the game, I noticed that they never seemed to get perturbed when the cards were not in their favour. As Paul Newman famously said in the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke, “Sometimes nothing is a cool hand.” A good bridge player keeps track of all the cards played and can eventually put the other team down even with the worst possible cards.

I know some people who are having a very hard time. Some families seem cursed as illnesses and death seem to crop up far too often. They have barely survived one trauma when another appears. Even a card shark would have difficulty playing this hand.

Two people who grew up in my neighbourhood when I was a child developed illnesses early in life that left them with enormous challenges throughout their lives. These women were both very bright and could have made an enormous contribution to society had they been healthy. But wait. They did. With ultimate courage and grace, they faced these hardships head on. They played the cards that they were dealt and in all the years I knew them, they never uttered a complaint. It often seems that those who appear to live a charmed existence seem to have plenty of complaints while others, like my neighbours, take what they are given and live a meaningful life, teaching us  resilience, humility and stoicism.

Rudyard Kipling said it best in his poem If: “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”

Life is no sleight of hand. It’s real and it’s hard and it’s beautiful.

And when you have nothing in your hands, you can bluff like Cool Hand Luke or take a page out of Kenny Roger’s Gambler:

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”

Have a great weekend.

P.S. I have two book launches this weekend: Saturday December 13^th at 2:00 p.m.at the Heritage Museum and for you folks up in Mount Cameron Circle, I’ll be at The Maples on Sunday 14^th at 2:00 p.m.

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.