Out of the closets!

Though our scheduled audience today with a learned medical professional did not elicit the most favourable prognosis we could have hoped for, the report is nonetheless palatable (considering our advanced age and incremental tailspin) and more importantly marks a transition.  In the most fundamental terms we have exhausted the obtruding necessities of life and are now free to embrace what we prefer to do.  This includes removing the luggage and cotton clothing from our closets to prepare our sojourn to southern climes.  Our obstacles are now unilaterally those of our respective physicians!

Life in the Big City is seldom free of constraint.  At the moment ours happens to be the constraint of time and its collateral imposition.  With Time so undeniably running out it assuages my temperament to have at least a preoccupation more persuasive than congenital arthritis. Though the liberty from hampering restriction is by no means the Fountain of Youth it enables me to indulge what is clearly becoming an unabashed alliance with indulgence and manifest pleasure. Make no mistake, I fully intend to prosecute what hour remains with gusto!  I confess as well that a portion of my ambition is devoted to the accomplishment of this year's "bucket wish" - a tiny barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico.  When we were first introduced to the place about a year ago I was instantly bewitched.  To my everlasting embarrassment I shamefully resisted the initial acquaintance by having mistakenly contaminated it with the less romantic anamnesis of other coastal venues.  Just shows how wrong one can be!

So now in the days that remain before setting off we begin the evacuation of our meagre possessions. To be perfectly honest the undertaking is effortless, partly because we've done this before, partly because we've learned to diminish rather than to enlarge. The repeated enactment of this performance further facilitates the process. We know to store the relevant articles in identifiable places, both here (for easy reference) and en route in the automobile (for comfortable transport). Mainly what we want to take with us is readily accessible (and discoverable); and we have acquainted ourselves with the most convenient agenda for loading it into the car. Granted we haven't any particular government to our wagon of goods, but keeping in mind that we require limited resources for the four days it takes us to get there, the balance can be usefully stored within a mathematical scheme.

Intermittent with this knapsack assignment is the prosecution of several prosaic matters, a mixture of functional, family and social affairs. This includes securing our PIN for on-line voting in the upcoming municipal election.  For some reason a number of residents of our condominium building were not properly recorded on the voting list. We have willingly borne the indignity of this corruption because we are forever anxious to exercise our voting right, a privilege and obligation in my opinion. To omit its dispatch would be inexcusable. Another less onerous homage is an assembly of oysters on the half shell at a popular fishmongers with my sister and her husband.  My sister is always eager to satiate her hereditary addiction to fresh oysters (something for which my late father and his New Brunswick coastal clan were in particular renowned).

On an abstract level the awakening freedom is beyond licence; it is a veritable temptation, one to which we are complacently submissive. I savagely consume the liberated existentialism - giving meaning to life and living it passionately with authenticity. At least for the moment we have escaped the gnawing tedium of obligation. We have sanctioned our reward both philosophically and rationally. The object is not to be free of despair (which after all is the universal human condition); but rather to feel the refreshing breeze that dispels the poisonous vapours of worldliness. The toxicity of this especial inebriation is the unvarnished pleasure of anticipation. Certainly the experience is no more singular than Christmas morning to a child - but just as fetching.