If you live in Ontario you’ve probably heard all the kerfluffle about what the Ontario government proposes doing to pharmacists in this province. My wife is a pharmacist, so we have a vested interest in the battle. There’s a very real possibility of her losing her job.

Despite my obvious bias, I am trying to understand both sides of the argument. Here’s the situation as I understand it:

Pharmacies sell brand name drugs and generic drugs. The generic drugs are cheaper than the brand name drugs, but they’re supposed to work just as well. (There is some debate over this; generic drugs are made from slightly different ingredients, but the medicinal properties are the same.) From what I understand generic drugs are about 50% of the cost of brand name drugs in Ontario. Elsewhere they’re about 25% of the cost of brand name drugs.

The Ontario government reimburses certain patients (the elderly, those on social assistance) the cost of the generic drugs they purchase. They believe that generic drugs should only cost 25% as opposed to 50% the cost of brand name drugs. That way they would be required to fork over a lot less money. So they’re trying to force the drug companies to reduce the price of generic drugs.

The government believes that generic drugs are so expensive in Ontario (yet still less expensive than brand name drugs) because the drug companies spend a lot of money getting pharmacies to stock their particular generic drugs. They give pharmacies money called “professional allowances.” The government believes that if drug companies were not allowed to give pharmacies this money (which they call rebates, or even kickbacks), the money saved (about $750 million) would allow the drug companies to reduce the cost of their generic drugs. And if the cost of these drugs is reduced, it will save the government money that could better be spent elsewhere (about $500 million).

Makes sense, right?

Unfortunately, many pharmacies are small operations that claim they’re only able to squeak by because of these professional allowances. Without them, they feel they’ll be forced to reduce hours and services. Many pharmacies may be forced to close their doors altogether, they simply won’t have sufficient profit margin to continue. The government disputes this, claiming that up to seventy percent of the rebates wind up lining the pockets of pharmacy owners. The money is supposed to go to direct patient care, such as:

* A pharmacist’s time in explaining to patients how and when to take their drugs.
* The cost of delivering drugs to seniors.
* Flu clinic days.
* High-blood-pressure clinics.

(Quoted from here)

According to government audits there has been some abuse of the system by pharmacy owners, including not spending the money on what they’re supposed to, not fully disclosing what the money’s been spent on, and in at least one case, engaging in a resale scheme triggering multiple professional allowance payments. A few bad apples among pharmacy owners may be jeopardizing the system for everyone.

There are those who argue that it’s okay if a few pharmacies close, claiming there are about two thousand too many pharmacies in this country compared to the per capita ratio in the United States (although it could just as easily be argued that there are too few pharmacies in the U.S.). Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, admits that his plan may result in pharmacies closing. He’s okay with the idea of throwing pharmacists, technicians and other related staff out of work, though he won’t say how many it’s okay to throw out of work. The Liberal premier has said it’s not his government’s job to ensure the survival of smaller pharmacies (which actually sounds like something former conservative premier Mike Harris might have said).

Like most things in life, the issue is not completely black and white. Probably drug companies shouldn’t have to pay pharmacies to stock their drugs. And drug prices shouldn’t be artificially inflated. But if pharmacies don’t stock generic drugs, they’ll stock brand name drugs, which are 50% more expensive, and would ultimately cost the Ontario government a lot more.

Without professional allowances, pharmacies probably won’t be able to provide services at their current levels. To compensate, Premier Dalton McGuinty is committed to placing $100 million of government money back into pharmacies. But there are strings attached. There are plans afoot to empower pharmacists to do more than dispense drugs. They’ll be permitted to give injections to patients, for one thing. To get McGuinty’s money they’ll be required to do this sort of thing.

Some pharmacists do not welcome this. Being a pharmacist is already a full time job. They have little interest in adding to ever increasing workloads. It’s hard for them to get excited about having to give injections to patients. They’re pharmacists, not nurses. (What next, sponge baths?)

Pharmacists fear the McGuinty government will be taking far more out of the current system than they’re putting back in. If hours are cut back, pharmacists laid off, and pharmacies closed, patient care has to suffer.

To me it all sounds like another rather dodgy drug business, the heroin trade in Afghanistan. Few would condone the sale of heroin. The whole business should just be shut down, right? But what about the plight of farmers in Afghanistan dependent upon the sale of heroin for their livelihood? Continue to sell heroin, people suffer. Raze the farmers fields, other people suffer. A solution no doubt exists, but it isn’t cut and dried. The system is flawed, but it can’t be fixed overnight without hurting people.

So it is with the situation in Ontario. The current system isn’t perfect. But the proposed fixes hastily carried out will hurt too many people. The two sides, who aren’t even talking to one another anymore, need to get back to the table. They need to take the time to hammer out a proper solution. This may take a bit longer, but a lot less people will get hurt.

For more information and an opportunity to take a stance on this issue, visit Stopcuts.ca.

And this morning the girls got up bright and early at 4am to carry out their quests. Their father got up bright and early at 4:02am to shoo them back to bed, where they lay wide-eyed, wide awake and staring into the night until 5:30am when they got up once more, and knocked on their parent’s bedroom door to ask permission to finally carry out the Easter Bunny’s quests.

Voila, this year’s Easter Bunny Quest. Some of the clues are pretty silly, but you have to keep in mind that all sorts of children all over the world expect this sort of thing from the Easter Bunny. That poor Bunny’s creative well must get pretty dry after a few million households:

E Clue #1
Hello my friend E, it’s another Easter Year
Full of Easter Chocolate, and full of Easter Cheer
The cheer you can find easily, it should be part of life
For the chocolate look inside the shoes of Joseph’s wife

E Clue #2
Thank you for your note, my dear, I’m glad you think I’m cute
Flattery will get you lots of things, including Easter loot
But you still have to work for it, nothing is for free
Your next clue may cost you one hot cup of Pekoe Tea

E Clue #3
You don’t have to go too far to find the next big Easter clue
I promise not make you look inside another smelly shoe
You might get kind of frosty though, if chocolate is your dream
Because you’ll have to check out something kind of like ice cream

E Clue #4
I know a rabbit tall and furry, who once was short and sleek
He has ears that stick up straight with mannerisms meek
This poor old rabbit’s fraught with worry, he likes to whine and grouch
He likes nothing better than to hide beneath the couch

E Clue #5
Easter Bunny’s secret power is to fly quite fast
And when beneath the moonlight, no shadow doth he cast
The Easter Bunny’s breath is sweet because he likes his grapes
And he’s been known to nibble on the plants behind the drapes

E Clue #6
Have you ever had a dream you felt you could not share?
Have you ever danced a jig with Ferdinand the Bear?
Have you ever kissed a cat? Or pet a purple dog?
Have you ever found a clue beneath a smiling frog?

E Clue #7
Some houses can be dangerous because of all the cats
Cat’s do not like rabbits and we sometimes have our spats
Like the time two cats chased me out the door and then they locked it
A story that has nothing to do with the clue inside your pocket

E Clue #8
Are you getting tired of all this running around the house?
I hope you liked this game and that you don’t think I’m a louse
Take care my friend, and if by chance you go for a drive this Sunday
I hope you like what you discover inside your parent’s Hyundai

K Clue #1
Hello my friend K; thanks for your kind note
You should know I will not freeze because I have a coat
My coat is warm and fuzzy; it’s actually my fur
Now go and find a clue downstairs where kitty cats do purr

K Clue #2

The clues are getting harder because you my girl are smart
I cannot make them easy lest you get a big head start
If the next clue you can find beneath something that heats
One step closer you will be to yummy Easter treats

K Clue #3
I’ve heard that you’re a fan of music sung in many keys
Like Lady Gaga, Owl City and the Black Eyed Peas
I think a clue to do with music we can well afford
You might find just such a clue on a black keyboard

K Clue #4
Once I knew a rabbit who was friendly but not wise
This rabbit he ate nothing except hamburgers and fries
He grew so roly-poly I could roll him down the street
And there’s a clue inside a shoe that couldn’t fit upon his feet

K Clue #5
They say that nothing’s free in life; I suppose that this is true
Some things cost so much that it can make you kind of blue
But Easter treats are great because they’re almost free you see
If, that is, you figure out the clue beside the Wii

K Clue #6
Have you ever loved someone that made your heart go all a-flutter?
Have you ever sailed upon a sea of peanut butter?
Have you ever climbed upon an angry whomping willow?
Have you ever found a clue beneath a sofa pillow?

K Clue #7
Easter Bunny’s secret power is a fuzzy smile
Easter Bunny’s second cousin is a guy named Lyle
Easter Bunnies rarely give out any kind of jewels
But they’ve been known to hide their clues right next to father’s tools

K Clue #8
I hope you’ve liked this game my friend, and that you’ve found it fun
And that you’re not too sad my friend to find it almost done
Here’s a thought to cheer you up; the treats are not too far
You have but to look inside a certain silver car!

If only everything I wrote came so easily.

By Joe Mahoney

I want to tell you about my cat. Actually, I have three cats, but the one I want to tell you about is named Blossom. The story begins with my father-in-law, who decided to move out of his house in the country into an apartment in Moncton, New Brunswick. He needed a new home for his eight year old cat… Blossom. So my wife generously decided to add Blossom to our already (in my opinion) full roster of felines.

They decided to fly Blossom from Moncton to Toronto. They drugged her and packed her up and somehow it became my responsibility to pick her up at the airport, after work.

I’m at work on the day and it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m starting to feel ill. Stomach flu kind of thing. I tough it out to the end of my shift, but I can’t go home. No, I have to go pick up this cat at the airport. But before I do that, I’ve also agreed to pick up a Disney doll as a birthday gift for a friend of my girls. I’m feeling increasingly sick, but I hightail it off to the Eaton Centre or whatever they’re calling it these days to pick up the doll. Then it’s back on the subway to where I’ve parked the car, and off to the airport.

Traffic getting out of Toronto sucks bigtime. It’s bad enough going east to Whitby where I live, but west on the QEW to the 427 up to the airport is worse. Fortunately, there’s a plastic bag in the glove compartment that I can barf into if I begin to feel even worse. It’s stop and go until about half the way up the 427. I make it to the airport without woofing my cookies. Thinking all the while, I don’t even really like cats (more of a dog person, really).

I find the proper gate at the airport with the help of a friendly seventy year old fellow whose job it is to give directions. At the gate I ask an attendant if my cat is likely to be unloaded there. She says yes. I wait. Everybody gets off the plane, including several dogs. But no cat.

I approach the attendant and inquire about the cat. She says, you mean the cat was travelling alone? I say yes, it’s a very sophisticated cat. She says, well in that case you must pick the cat up at the special cat delivery terminal located approximately three kilometres west of the airport proper. I ask her how to get there. She has no idea.

I visit my seventy year old friend. He has never heard of the special cat delivery terminal. I revisit the attendant. She unearths a phone number for the special cat delivery terminal. I revisit my seventy year old friend, who lets me use his phone. I phone the special cat delivery terminal. I get an answering machine. I leave a message asking them to phone my seventy year old friend.

I wait. I refrain from barfing. I imagine being home in bed. I really want nothing more than to be home in bed. I refrain from barfing some more.

The phone rings. It is the guy from the special cat delivery terminal. He gives me directions as my seventy year old friend spreads an enormous map across his desk and marks on it with a red felt pen. I repeat the directions aloud. “Turn right at the second Sunoco,” I say. “No no no!” the guy says. “At the second Su NO co!” I’ve pronounced it wrong. Apparently you can’t get there if you pronounce it wrong.

The directions make little sense. I decide to take a cab. I approach a cabbie and he’s all set to take me until I mention the cat. “No cats!” he cries.

Armed with my seventy year old friend’s map, I hop in my van and pick my way across north Toronto in search of the special cat terminal. Lo and behold there’s the second Su NO co. I turn right and wend my way down an enormously long, desolate road, past large, eerie buildings and arrive after much head scratching at what can only be the special cat terminal, where, one can only suppose, they land the planes and disembark all the cats before taking off again to fly the human passengers three kilometres further on to the special people terminal.

Inside the special cat terminal is a long, L shaped desk at which several unsmiling people are busy clicking away at special computer terminals. I’m feeling even sicker if such a thing is possible and not a little annoyed. “I’m here to get my cat,” I announce to one unsmiling face. He gets me to fill out a form and tells me to go around the corner and wait and somebody will get my cat.

I fill out the form and go around the corner and wait for somebody to get my cat. I wait. I wait and I wait and I wait. I am waiting in a huge hanger type space, filled with mysterious boxes and zero human activity. Finally I hear a shuffling. I spy an elderly security guard approaching. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m looking to get my cat. Can you help me get my cat?”

“Your cat?” he says. “I can’t get you your cat.”

“Look, I just want my cat,” I tell him. “I’m as sick as a dog and I’ve been trying to get my cat for about three hours now and I just want to get it and go home.”

“Come with me,” he says. “I can show you your cat.” And he leads me across this vast space to a special door, which he unlocks, and ushers me inside. And there’s Blossom, whom I recognize from visits with my father-in-law. Filled with relief, I pick up Blossom’s case and prepare to take her home with me.

The elderly security guard, seconds before a paragon of peacefulness, freaks out. “What do you think you are you doing?”

“I’m taking my cat home with me.”

“You can’t take that cat home with you!”

I can’t believe my ears. She’s right there… I’m holding onto her case, perhaps I could make a dash for it… I sigh, a sigh perilously close to a barf. “Why can’t I take my cat home with me?”

He gives me this song and dance about procedure and I’ve had enough. I storm back to the L shaped desk and all the dour faces and I shout, “Look! I just want my cat! Will somebody please give me my cat?” And I storm back to the place I had been told to wait.

I do not recall actually receiving the cat or exiting the building. I can only hope the process was carried out peacefully and with a minumum of vomit. I do recall travelling home on the 401 with Blossom on the passenger seat beside me. I spoke to her soothingly. As tired and as sick as I felt, I suspected she felt even worse. I tried to be friendly, to welcome her to her new home, to make her feel better. I don’t know that I succeeded.

But I did get her to her new home. Where she lives with two new cat enemies, er, friends.

All three of whom I’m allergic to.

So here’s the whole story of the naming of the Schmoops:

We spent months trying to come up with appropriate names.  We never did manage to agree on decent male names.  Well, that’s not entirely true; we both liked Benjamin and Samuel, but one of my cousins had had twin boys the year before and guess what she called them?  So we couldn’t go with that.

Lynda liked Aiden for a boy’s name.  I suggested that if both twins were boys we could call them “Aiden” and “Abettin.”  For some reason Lynda didn’t want to go with that.

Fortunately we had girls instead, and we had managed to agree on girls’ names.  I’ve always liked the name Erin ever since Erin Mulcahey was in my core group back in first year Ryerson.  So I suggested Erin and Lynda agreed.  We were both interested in celtic names and that certainly fit the bill, although I understand the name Erin is far more popular in North America than it is in Ireland.  (For those of you who may not know, Erin means Ireland).

 At our friend Alison George’s wedding reception we sat with a woman named Keira, who was Scottish I believe, and when she introduced herself Lynda and I looked at one another and knew we had the second name.

Middle names were a challenge.  Lynda’s mother’s name was Anne, although she always called herself Nancy.  So for awhile there Erin was going to be Erin Anne Mahoney.  I wasn’t keen on the name Anne but figured I would have to lump it, as I had picked the first name.  Then it occurred to us that Lynda’s mother had insisted on being called Nancy because she hated the name Anne so much.  What a relief.  So Erin became Erin Rose because my grandmother’s name was Rose, and my mother’s name Rosaleen.

Keira was harder.  We didn’t honour anybody with her middle name.  I was driving somewhere one day trying to think of good sounding names and the name Leigh popped into my head.  Keira Leigh has a ring to it.  I’m always singing, “Keira Leigh, Keira Loo, we love you” to Keira.  She doesn’t seem to mind.  (So as not to leave Erin out, I sing “Erin Ree, Erin Roo, we love you” to her.  She doesn’t seem to mind either.) 

As for the order, the girls were born two months premature, so we hadn’t gotten around to deciding the order yet.  Literally as they were coming out, the nurse (whose name was Grace) asked us whose name was going to be what.  Lynda said, we should call the first one out Erin because she’s “errin’ in her ways” wanting to come out two months early. 

I reacted strongly to that, saying, no way can we saddle the child with that as the reason for her name!  Which settled it.  The first one out became Keira, and the second one out became Erin.

We couldn’t get in at the Provincial campground, so I booked us a spot at a nearby campground called Bon Echo Family campground.  It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from the Provincial park, so that’s worked out well… every second day we get a day pass and spend it at the provincial park canoing, swimming, hiking, exploring.  And there’s canoing available where we’re staying, along with a beach that’s even better than at the provincial park, so we have the best of both worlds in many respects.

And the weather has been fantastic, especially considering it looked quite dodgy the day we got here, cold and rainy.  But every day since then has been better and better.

And that’s all the time I will spend blogging today, as this is not supposed to be an electronic vacation.  In fact, I just hooked up to the campground wireless to see if Mr. Schmidt had read my submission to Analog yet… but no such luck.

No news is good news, I guess.

And tomorrow it’s back to Whitby, and the following Monday back to real life.

Not thinking about that, though.  This afternoon is all about swimming, canoing, and ice cream.

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…

Sometimes I wonder what the girls will say when they’re grown, and they look back at my performance as a Dad.

“Left a little bit to be desired there, Dad,” they might say.

“Hey, I did the best I could given my limitations as a human being,” I might insist.

“Sure Dad,” E will say. “But what about the broom?”

Ah yes.

The broom.

Came home one night after they’d been with a babysitter. They’re always a little worked up after babysitters. Probably because they get a sense of how great the world would be without any rules. And then I come along and re-impose rules on their universe.

So this one night I’m keeping my cool, and they will. Not. Do. A. Single thing I say.

Parents sometimes wonder why they’re perfectly calm one minute and a raving lunatic the next. One explanation offered is that it’s because the kids are getting under your skin, but you’ve got your foot on the brake keeping yourself calm, right up until the point that they’re painting the dog and putting the cat in the oven, and then, attempting to save your prize rhododendron from the microwave you take your foot off the brake, but the other foot has been on the gas all along and suddenly you’re zero to a hundred and twenty in a split second.

That was me that night. Doing my best to remain calm in the face of two completely adorable but utterly out of control orangutangs, and failing miserably.

I’d had enough. I took my foot off the brake. Picked up one of the girl’s toy brooms. Threw the broom on the floor. As God is my witness I thought it would bounce. Instead it shattered into a thousand pieces.

I had the girls’ attention now. But I certainly hadn’t improved the situation any. Man were they mad, especially E, because it was her broom I’d broken. She was inconsolable, and I was ashamed, because this was not me. I was not someone who broke kids’ brooms, or lost control.

And I heard about that broom for months. I’m sure when I’m an adult I’ll hear about it again. I won’t be completely forgiven until the girls have children of their own, and discover that they too are only human. Just as I’ve forgiven my own parents for the odd bonehead move they made when I was a kid.

Now if I can just limit my own bonehead moves to the broom for the next nine years…

So I drove down, parked near the station, and went in to meet him.

He wasn’t there yet, which was a good thing, because it turned out I was waiting in the wrong place. I was upstairs in Union Station when I should have been downstairs. A friendly employee set me straight, and I headed downstairs to meet the man.

When I got there, I realized that the place I was required to meet my father-in-law was a fair distance from where he would get off the train. My father-in-law is seventy-nine years old, and while not decrepit by any stretch of the imagination, I thought it wouldn’t be particularly nice to require him to carry his baggage all that distance. Plus I had no idea how many bags he had or how big they were.

So I wandered into the inner sanctum of Union Station and inquired of another employee how close I could get to where my father-in-law would be getting off the train.

“Down by that escalator,” the fellow said. He didn’t seem to have any problem with me waiting there, so I high-tailed it off to the escalator.

When I got to the escalator, it occurred to me that there were two escalators, separated by walls, and if my father-in-law were to come down the wrong one, I would never see him. So even though the escalator stairs were going down, I ran up them to see where the passengers were getting off the train.

Sure enough they were getting off near the other escalator.

Instead of running back down the escalator, I thought I would just run over to where the passengers were getting off and meet them, thinking to reduce the distance my father-in-law would have to carry his bags to zero.

Well.

The employee who had directed me to wait by the escalator (the wrong escalator, mind you) greeted me with a decidedly snippy, “I thought I told you to wait downstairs!”

“I just want to help my father-in-law with his bags,” I told him. “He’s seventy-nine years old.”

The employee stepped away and muttered something to another employee who happened to have a walkie-talkie. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say something about “a trespasser.”

Huh, I thought. How ’bout that, a trespasser. And I looked around for some seedy looking character before realizing that he was talking about me, of all people.

‘Cause of course that’s exactly what I was doing, albeit with the best of intentions.

My father-in-law was getting off the train. He saw me. I saw him. I couldn’t leave. Somewhere nearby a security detachment had been deployed to rid the station of its trespasser. Me.

My father-in-law stepped off the train. We shook hands. I took his suitcase from him. It was enormous. It would have been a long walk to meet me.*

“Never mind,” I heard the man with the walkie-talkie say. “He’s leaving now.”

And leave we did.

I readily admit this story would have been a lot more interesting (and painful) if it had ended with me being tasered. I apologize for the lack of tasering. And I mean no disrespect for the poor fellow in the news these days whose name I’m not even going to attempt to spell at this late hour who was in fact tasered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the incident has made me think about the difference between right and wrong, and the grey area in between. Clearly I violated at least Union Station laws by being where I wasn’t supposed to be. But would it have been right to leave my seventy-nine year old father-in-law with an enormous bag to carry a great distance? Should I have assumed that train staff would help him? Was I in the wrong attempting to do the right thing? Is the road to hell paved with good intentions?

I dunno.

Glad I wasn’t tasered though.

*(Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted the suitcase in question turned out to have wheels.)

(Joe: Shh!)

We got to talking about weight. I told her I thought chubby people seemed happier than skinny people. I have no scientific evidence to back this up, it was really a foolish assertion to make. And yet my life’s experience seems to bear this out. Which is just as foolish an assertion to make. And yet, dear reader, it is far from the last foolish assertion I will make in this post.

I told my mother, “Mom,” I said, “It seems to me that to be happy you have to be large. Which is why I’m feeding my family large slabs of homemade cornmeal pizza, and then later copious amounts of homemade chocolate balls.”

“Son,” she said, “You’re an idiot.”

I beg your pardon, actually she was just thinking that. What she actually said was, “So what you’re telling me” — idiot — “Is that in order to be happy you have to be unhealthy.”

I hadn’t actually thought of it like that until she said it. But the truth of it hit me like a bag of potato chips in the face. Which is to say it didn’t hurt much or leave much of an impression. “That’s it exactly Mom,” I told her. “I’ve known lots of skinny people and they’re all miserable sods” (another ridiculous assertion). “Whereas all the large people I know are full of joy, among other things.” The conversation soon drifted into other areas as my mother gently and without too much difficulty steered her idiot son toward more benign conversational material.

But the idea has taken seed, which is why my immediate family and I are going to eat our faces off this Christmas season. And I’m not talking pan fried fish here (although there will almost certainly be some of that… Arctic Char… hmm). No, it’s Chocolate Balls and Cherry Surprises for us. Turkey with lots of gravy and stuffing. Cherry Cheese Cake, Jell-O Pudding Pie, and Harold Squares. Red wine and beer. Potato Chips and Strawberry Wine.

We will be large. We will be happy. Life will be short, but grand.

Burp.

I found it interesting because I had to make a decision in the course of writing it. I came up with a line that made me laugh, and then had to decide whether to use the line. As I was making the decision I was acutely aware of the presence of my mother looking over my shoulder, and of the good opinions of all my clean living, clean thinking friends, all three of them.

No I don’t live with my mother, although I’m sure such an arrangement would be most pleasant and result in a good deal less cooking on my part. But she does on occasion read my blog and I value her good opinion of me.

If you read over the previous post I’m sure you’ll quickly note which line I’m thinking about. Maybe you don’t find it particularly funny, but when I thought of it I chuckled. Wrote it down. And promptly deleted it and replaced it with something infinitely more boring.

And then I erased that and put the line back.

Robertson Davies has said (or it has been said of him) that he couldn’t write worth a damn until his parents passed on. I don’t want my parents to pass on, I’m all for immortality for the both of them, but I’d love to be able to write like Robertson Davies. His writing was tame before the death of his parents (I believe, not having read his entire oevre), and it was only with their passing that he no longer felt their benign yet nevertheless judgmental presence.

So it was that I felt the need to grow up and allow myself to indulge in one fairly inocuous if crude expression for the sake of a minor chuckle.

Robertson Davies, look out!

Not.