There are only a few significant ways my wife and I can change our lives. I am in my late seventies and she is surviving her sixties. But we believe there is nothing to stop us from trying. So late last year we sold everything in Ottawa and moved west to a place where we knew nobody.
Our most ambitious goal was to get out of the house. I mean to live in a way that would take us out every day. We used to have a picturesque three-bedroom apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of a building, with a clear westward view miles up the Ottawa River. It was impressive to everybody who visited, but we spent lots of time there and I often heard the complaint that we should be out meeting people and doing new things. We came to the Okanagan to break our sedentary habits and become more active.
We brought work west with us, a promise to finish a commissioned play for which we have already received part payment. I sank hours of time researching the material in Ottawa, and she, the playwright, has been making slow headway on the script.
The years since I last posted anything on this site have been years of soul-searching for me, years of wondering what to do with the verbal talents I have been sending out into the void for most of my life. I have always wanted to be a writer, and I have used that ambition to learn a lot about the world (notably about myself) but relatively few people ever benefited from the things I have learned. While that was maddeningly frustrating at first, it eventually gave way to resignation when I decided that I myself was a good enough audience. I even stopped writing letters.
That's certainly a change -- not one I would have preferred, but one that has taken me down different paths than I ever would have devised on my own.
Further details, as I am fond of saying, at eleven.
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