Life As Performance Art 169

I don't seem to have a lot to write about this morning, Gentle Reader. My fruit bowl is full of bananas and apples (galas, lovely golden and red) with dried lavender and bay leaves which do help to repel fruit flies, and I marvel that I, a person on a low income, could enjoy such luxury and privilege of such fruit and beauty as many would take for granted, but I will not take for granted this unmerited loveliness, just as I will not take for granted that I am enjoying a cup of delicious, rich and intense Cuban dark roast coffee (fair trade and organic) and I am drinking it from a beautiful mug with a jungle bird and critter design in flamboyant colours. For breakfast, I am torn between a cheese omelette and boiled eggs with toast with natural peanut butter and rosehip jam. I have three varieties of cheese in my fridge, by the way, extra old white cheddar, Gruyere, and a milder Italian cheese, Montegrappo Stagionata, it is called. I have already mentioned that every week I visit the Bosa, an Italian Market near where I used to live off Commercial Drive, where each week I buy an unfamiliar Italian cheese. I am poor, and I can enjoy such a range and plethora of luxuries as not even my parents had at their fingertips. I have just heard on the CBC a panel of three academics, all persons of colour, weighing in about our sitting prime minister's donning in his salad days brown face and black face. I am not going to further explore this theme, by the way, as I am still in the seat of the unlearned and I am still listening to a whole plethora of experiences, opinions and experiences about race and respect and cultural insensitivity, besides which, there are already so many others commenting about this, that I don't really feel that I should have to, or that I ought to, nor that I have any right to, or at least not on these pages, for now anyway. I am meeting a friend for coffee this morning. It is my first day off, or the first half of my forty-eight hour Saturday, which I can enjoy now thanks to early Canada Pension. We are the same age, we were both born on the same day, the twenty-ninth of February, oh, so very long ago, and this makes us both rather rare and unique for which our celebration of friendship is roundly enhanced. I am grateful that I have other friends, old and new. I am grateful that I have a good friend in Colombia with whom I can practice Spanish while helping him with his English twice a week on Skype. I am blessed with good health, and I am in my sixties. I expect to enjoy a walk or a couple of walks, of some six to nine miles today. Even if all this beauty that we enjoy, that surrounds us could be snatched from us at the blink of an eye, it is here now, and yes of course we must also plan for the future, a future that looks now very dark and uncertain. I think our challenge is how we can plan and prepare for and make a better future, while still valuing what is current and what is in or near our hands, and to appreciate and cherish all the more one another and this beautiful gift called life, but also taking care to live and walk simply, with care, with love and with grace. Happy Friday, Gentle Reader.