:: verbal connections ::

I never used to take vacations.  When I was younger; when I worked for an hourly wage, I would in fact work as often and for as many hours as I could, and I never took more time off than I had to.  If I could make arrangements to work on holidays, I would – nothing better than double time and a half on a twelve hour shift!  I took a half week once to be my sister’s maid of honour (yes, I was a male maid of honour!), and a few days at another time for a softball tournament. But I would quite often work years and years between vacations.  Even after I got married, vacations were few and far between.  Once, there was a half week in Jamaica, and there was a weekend in New York City some time afterward.  In four days, my wife and I will be leaving on a two week road trip through the U.S., and I have to say that it’s something to which I have very much been looking forward.

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I am not a lucky person … never have been, in fact.  When it comes to things like random draws, I can remember only one occasion in which I won anything even remotely substantial.  It happened when I was approximately four or five years old, and the prize was a ten-pound bag of flour.  My mom was pretty impressed with the victory, but I was not particularly amused.  Since then, the best that I have been able to manage has been on the order of a free lottery ticket, or a $5 prize.  But yesterday, for the briefest of moments, all that changed.

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I love to listen to music, and so does everyone else in my family.  Everyone has an MP3 player of some kind or other, mostly because they turn out to be lifesavers on long trips.  When we travel with the kids to the States, we spend at least five hours on the road in each direction.  With the kids cocooned in their musical sanctuaries, my wife and I enjoy a much less troublesome ride.  My wife’s car (and the new car that I plan to buy) has an auxiliary input, which means that we’re also able to use our MP3 players to provide ourselves with a decent variety of audio entertainment on long trips without either renewing an expensive satellite radio subscription or burning dozens of cds.  The only sticking point is this: how do I find an easy, consistent way to manage everyone’s music collection?

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My father is thirty years older than I am, and that puts him well into the retirement age bracket.  He lived up here in Canada when he was a younger man, having moved from Guyana to find better opportunities for himself and for his family.  He moved down to Florida a few years ago, as that seems to be the thing to do when you retire these days.  I think that I may actually see more of him now that he lives 2 500 kilometres from me than I did when he was living an hour’s travel down the highway.  I saw him last night, in fact.  We sat and talked for a few hours, which is more than we’ve talked at any one time in many years.  It was good to be able to talk to him like that, but it may be that it was in many ways the saddest conversation we’ve ever had.

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Every Tuesday is cleaning day for me. I spend a couple of hours in the afternoon to work around the house with Windex, Pine-Sol, and the vacuum cleaner to get the place looking reasonably decent.  It’s not a comprehensive sort of thing, but it helps us to keep ahead of the kipple that would otherwise take the place over. As I clean, I usually pop the iPod earbuds in and listen to some music to help the time pass more quickly.  It occurred to me today that there are quite a number of remakes and cover versions of songs in my current playlists.  And then I started thinking about movies and about how frequently remakes and “re-imaginings” show up at the box office these days.

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