What the hell is wrong with everyone? We’re surrounded by incivility, incompetence masquerading as caution, and a complete lack of ambition. It’s a pandemic of shittiness which has taken hold of the world and until we figure out what’s causing or contributing to it, we can’t take any steps to turn back the tide of awful offal.

How do you feel about blackouts? About losing time and memory? About general anaesthetic?

You can never “look back” on motherhood because, once you become a mother, you remain one forever so the looking is equal parts remembering, experiencing and anticipating.

You know when you’re flying into Palm Springs, for example, and every other yard has a pool? Think of that as mini Blue Zones all over the world. That’s the dream. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Blue Zones are places in the world where people live inordinately healthy and long lives.

Hello and thank you for being here! If you subscribed to my enewsletter I have taken the liberty of migrating you to this Substack instead. Of course you can always opt out, unsubscribe, leave a flaming bag of dogshit at my front door. I promise to not take it personally, at least I’ll try. So happy to have you here!

YES I want to hear about how you met your partner, best friend, first baby, dog or cat, or any other significant OMG it’s YOU kind of story, please and thank you!

This week’s offering starts off with Sue’s account of how a truly fabulous beginning turns to shit in the longer run. It was, however, a movie-worthy start:

After a long, boring summer job and before heading to graduate school I needed a week off. So I gathered up my aunt and best granny (who was in serious need of some R & R) and headed to a rented cottage at the beach with my bikini and a couple fat novels.

Warm late August sun, fat epic novels, long hours beside the lake, easy suppers. Auntie and I cooked and Gram cleaned up.

One evening after another such lazy day a walk to town was planned. As we three strolled the sandy road a car whizzed by then stopped suddenly and quickly reversed.

“Sue, is that you?” he asked. How long had it been, seven, eight years? What is his name again? He said it, “Michael. Michael Carruthers. Remember me?”

I hardly remembered, but said I did. Best not insult. He looked good, so very tanned, clear blue eyes, in a white shirt with a tie. I knew for certain I’d never seen him even in shoes before.

Bare feet and roller skates. That’s what I was remembering.

After about two minutes in the middle of the road we established that I was vacationing for a week with my Aunt and Grandmother at a cottage corner of 6th and 2nd, just down the road from the place he and friends had rented for the summer. It was Friday evening.

“Lots of us are getting together tonight at my place. You’ll remember some, Gren, Robbie, Bonnie, Denny. Come on down and join us. Robbie will have his guitar. We’ll have a fire.”

“Maybe, I’ll see.”

“Please come.” He tried to be persuasive but I had no intention of wandering off into the summer night to reconnect with a group of quasi friends I hardly knew, even back then.

Did I mentioned I was engaged? Teddy and I had been dating for 7 years. He’d promised to formally propose that summer, then flunked his third year law and put off the whole thing. I was hurting, not sure why. A dream dried up, I supposed.

Gram and Aunt knew. They didn’t much like Teddy anyway and really didn’t take to him calling me, “doll” all the time. Disrespectful, they said.

“You have to go, You need to get out and have some fun. You have to stop moping around.

This young man looks just fine.”

They insisted we turn right round and go back to the cottage so I could get ready. Ready for what, a campfire and log stool. Fine. We retraced our steps even though I certainly wasn’t going anywhere to party with a bunch of strangers.

My heart did the flutter dance an hour later when I looked out the cottage window and saw him again. Tall, beautifully shaped, barefoot, shorts and a tee accompanied by a large black dog, shiny black hair, both.

“C’mon”, he said, “I’ve come to walk you. It’s just down the road.”

And so began a 33 year marriage which came to a strange and twisted end. We’ve all heard the story — affair with the younger secretary while wife struggles through menopause. In this case wife got the last laugh by arranging a full face lift and boob job (refreshing the old chassis, as she puts it) and sent him the bill.

Jacqueline consulted a psychic about her chances of finding Mr. Right and was told she’d meet him at 34, marry him at 35. That he would treat her like a lady first and a woman second, and would build her 5 houses. Her story hasn’t ended yet because she’s still with the love of her life, 41 years and counting.

I thought that after 11 years I was finally over my first marriage which lasted one year, and I was ready for a committed relationship. I made a shopping list of what I wanted in a partner and was so ready to meet THE ONE.

It happened during a telephone sales call. His receptionist gave me his private line since I’d called so many times, and he never returned one of those calls. After I heard the first ring on his end I began doodling and was then caught off guard when he suddenly barked “Hello!” Recovering quickly I asked, “Is this THE so and so…” Long silent pause ensues. I thought I had pissed him off with my cheekiness. Finally he responded: “Yes! Tis I, king of kings, lion of Judah, defender of the faith, protector of virgins, and all other Haile Selassie’s titles.”

The rest of our conversation continued in this fun, and flirty, manner and we met, and married 18 months later. And he built me 5 houses.

And just to prove that it’s not just life partnerships that deserve mention, this workplace encounter:

The room was, as usual, messy and cluttered. The windows, which were never open, were dirty, also as usual. The morning light outside didn’t help much. The reporters wandered in and found seats, waiting to see what the cops wanted to offer and whether they would have any straight answers to any serious questions. It was an old dance —everyone knew the steps. Nothing to see here.

But there was something to see today; a new reporter and, better yet, a woman — early twenties, decently dressed, unconventionally pretty. A smart college kid, by the look of it, but she settled in easily, and swapped a few lines with the cops, old guys in suits who were happy to have something brighten up the daily news conference. Then the senior one decided to have some fun, pulling out an overnight report involving a sexual assault, which he recounted in clinical detail, waiting for a response.

He got it; she looked straight at him, smiled, and said “Ew — my notepad feels … sticky.”

They laughed, but it wasn’t an easy laugh; they knew they’d lost the round, and they couldn’t get a rise out of her. Yes, I thought.

Today’s musical offering takes us back to the days when hair was big and pants were skin tight. I suppose that also covers the Elizabethans….

Until next time, stay open to possibilities!

There’s a moment of weightless limbo when you move from one state to another, liquid to gaseous, for example.

Or from independent adult to fatherless child. That moment came for me last Wednesday at 11:35 a.m. when my father died. You might be taking exception to my framing his death as my loss, my experience, but how else to understand the event except through my eyes, brain and heart? Even a recounting of the facts of his life are framed through the lens of how we understood them, how we heard about them in the first place, and in subsequent tellings, so I’ll do my best to be accurate. My brother Jan is the family historian, and I am relying on his compilation for details.

My dad, George Piros, was both a fighter and a lover and he would be mightily embarrassed at both descriptors. If you’d asked him, he might have said, “father, husband, engineer, patriot”. And he was also all those things.

Let’s talk about the lover first.

* Dad loved his country.

When he was 10 years old, Nazi Germany had invaded and occupied Poland. He and his fellow boy scouts smuggled packages of medical supplies from the German hospital where his father, a doctor, worked and delivered them to secret underground Polish clinics. Under the guise of playing stick ball and tag he and his friends kept track of the movements of German soldiers and officers for the Polish underground. At a visit to the Uprising Museum in Warsaw, dad took me into a unrealistically clean replica of the sewer tunnels the underground used to move throughout the city and noted how they would chalk the words, niemcy tu on locations where Nazis were stationed on the street above.

When the Warsaw Uprising erupted on August 1st, 1944, Dad joined the Konrad Group, Platoon 105, made up of kids 13 to 16 years old. Over the years Dad told us many stories: being used as part of a human shield in front of Panzer tanks, delivering messages between streets behind barricades and through sewer tunnels. He remembered how in the early days of the Uprising, he and his friends thrilled to the role of boy soldiers and how, by the last days, those that were left were numbed to the violence and simply trying to stay alive.

As the uprising came to end, he reunited with his father, uncle, mother and sister in an insurgent hospital in one of the last pockets of Polish resistance. Within days his father, uncle, and best friend were killed and he was shipped off to a forced labour camp in Hamburg.

In Hamburg Dad was part of a group whose responsibility was to dig up and cut power lines into buildings which were on fire and damaged after Allied bombing raids. During one of these times the power was still live, and his saw exploded and blinded him for two weeks. He was 16.

During his imprisonment he contracted TB and nearly died. On May 5th a reconnaissance unit of a US armored division liberated his camp, and although Dad was not allowed to go east into the Soviet controlled area, he kept trying and eventually made his way to Warsaw where he found the city had been reduced to rubble with notes attached to posts all over, letting family members know who was where.

* Dad loved his family.

He made every effort to support his surviving family, notably his mother and older sister and all his life was grateful for what he saw as their sacrifice which allowed him to study engineering at the Warsaw Polytechnic.

Dad married mom, Ewa, in 1954, in a bombed out church with no roof and, by the time they received permission to leave Poland and come to Canada, they had two children with two more born in Regina.

All our lives Dad was a firm proponent of education and he pushed us hard to study and pursue a career. At first he thought my interest in journalism was a little flaky (having grown up with Soviet controlled propaganda) and encouraged me to become a translator at the UN.

He is survived by mom and by 50 kids, grandkids and great-grandkids.

* Dad loved his work.

Although it wasn’t easy to be an immigrant, ESL engineer at Cominco where UK born engineers were the dominant force, he persevered and when his work overlapped with travel (which he also loved), he was in heaven. The job took him to Alaska, all over Canada’s north, to Greenland and a five year stint in Madrid. He used that posting to drive a jam packed Renault all over Spain, and up into France, Germany and Poland. When asked by a colleague at an event in Germany, why his German was so fluent, dad replied, “I was a guest of your government”.

* Dad loved hockey, especially, and inexplicably, the Habs as well as the Rossland Warriors. He loved to ski, hike and travel the world.

* Dad was a fighter too.

As already described, he fought for his country as a kid during the Warsaw occupation and uprising. He fought to survive the German prison camp. He fought to make a life in Canada despite having no money and knowing no English. He fought debt from an ill-advised mortgage on his first house in Saskatchewan and he fought to make a name for himself in his chosen career at Cominco (now Teck).

He fought the onset of aging and insisted on remaining independent, for better and worse. After his accident in August, he fought to recover his physical strength but this was a fight he couldn’t win. At 95 it was simply too much for even this fighter.

While we know his life was long, even by today’s standards, and that he lived that long despite the early assaults and privations of his wartime life, that moment when he passed still came as a gut punch.

I know we, the immediate family, are not the only ones who will miss him. As they say in Polish, szerokie drogi. It’s a blessing, of sorts, which means “wide roads”, particularly apt for this travelling man.

The musical selection threatens to do me in so here it is with no introduction.

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I received the phone call the other day, the same one you probably get every couple of months/years/weeks. The one that asks, did you spend $4500 on a Turkish carpet at Carpetmania, many miles from where you live?

Speaking with Cherise, the helpful credit-card rep, I realized it had been a few years since one of my cards was scammed (only paying subscribers receive my PIN number), and that time it was by someone who had purchased a MacBook Pro online and arranged to pick it up at a mall not too far from me. The Apple store even had video of the person who came to pick it up, and yet the charge went on my card and the MacBook vanished. Eventually, my card was refunded, although I had to return the points (waaah).

Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

BUT WAIT! The scammer walked away with the machine even though she wouldn’t have had any identification to show she was the cardholder, i.e., me? They had video of her?? The good — albeit unconfirmed — news I heard from Apple was that they have ways (rubbing hands in Scrooge-like glee) of disabling the machine remotely, so she would get no satisfaction from it unless, of course, she had an ex-Apple tech buddy who could reverse those moves. Or she could sell the connectivity-free machine for half-price online to some unsuspecting rube who sees a brand-new machine, with the original packaging and thinks, SCORE!!!!

And so it goes. As my clients at the BC Securities Commission always say, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, and that goes for investments, purchases and special offers.

My most recent brush with the world of scammery was all online purchases, only one of which went through before the bank’s algorithm kicked in and stopped the next raft.

Ms. Piros, did you purchase $658 of perfume online?

No.

Did you purchase a $1,000 Air Canada gift card?

Hell, no. (What kind of a cruel gift would that be?)

Did you purchase $672 sunglasses?

I wish.

Did you make a $9.35 purchase at HardWare City online?

No. Wait, what?

The hardware charge went through, but will be investigated and likely refunded to me within 10 to 20 days.

All this made me curious as to what happens behind the scenes. How do they know I didn’t buy a cheap wire-crimper, even if I say I didn’t? When someone scams my card for an online purchase, they must pick it up somewhere, right? I don’t see anyone lurking around my front door, waiting to intercept an Air Canada gift-card. So where do they ask for the loot to be sent? Even postal boxes have owners who pay to own them.

I reached out to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, where I learned my scammers are likely not interested in obtaining the online purchases at all, but more likely in leveraging them to get cash back from a fraudulent claim that their order didn’t arrive. Oh, and they’d like to be refunded to a different credit card.

Lisanne Roy Beauchamp from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre says they may have used a PO box purchased with sophisticated fake ID and another stolen credit card, or they may have used the address of an empty or abandoned house. Perhaps they scammed someone into accepting a parcel delivery. And sometimes they do actually hide in the bushes and wait until they can let their porch-pirate flag fly, snatching the delivery from your front door. The possibilities are staggering.

And you have to also be wary of those monthly automatic charges from your gym, your phone provider, your streaming service. Lisanne says, “Anywhere you leave breadcrumbs, they can get picked up. For subscriptions, your information is only as safe as their gathering & storage systems are. Beyond their actual systems, policies and procedures to protect their client's information, it only takes one employee to click a link in a fraudulent email setup with malware to then gain access to any connected systems.”

Starting to see a pattern here? For every technological security measure that’s added to our online activity (27-factor verification, anyone?) and banking safeguards, the scammers have their own tech folks to find a way around them. Make no mistake, the guy who scanned your credit card with a card-skimmer or took a photo of it while it lay on your restaurant table is not the criminal mastermind behind the network; that creep is just a small cog in a very big wheel of organized crime. Trying to hunt these players down around the world is like chasing a ghost in a foggy graveyard. The international complexity explains why, although there are homegrown scammers here in Canada, most victimize those in other countries because it’s to their advantage to do so.

It’s a crime that goes largely unsolved and unpunished, although some of the bigger-dollar frauds do get intercepted and some of the money is returned — sometimes. It’s a very tiny light in the darkness, and one of the heroes on that front is Toronto Detective Constable Micheal Lane; here’s how his department describes a win.

Lane was part of Project Friends, which was created to investigate a large organized group that is alleged to have conspired to defraud Canadian banks of millions of dollars.

They are alleged to have used internal bank employees to create accounts, synthetic identities, credit cards, lines of credit and financing for high-end motor vehicles.

Shell companies were used to transfer fraudulently obtained motor vehicles into the company name to avoid detection from the financing companies. Some of the vehicles were shipped out of the country.

A total of 46 vehicles were identified as being obtained by fraud and eight search warrants were executed. The 20 vehicles recovered were estimated to be worth $1.3 million.

A 9mm Sauer firearm was also seized and a bitcoin mining farm was dismantled.

Police have made seven arrests and filed 23 charges.

I spoke with DC Lane, who was incredibly helpful and informative. First, here’s important advice: it may be a huge pain in the ass to manually enter your credit-card information every time you order a string of lights on Amazon, but Lane says to NEVER allow websites to save your payment-card information. He goes so far as to recommend not allowing Google, etc. to save your passwords, but my body is overcome by shudders at the thought of pressing “delete all” and having to find and enter them every single time.

Here’s another of his suggestions to keep yourself somewhat protected:

Our reliance on the convenience of online transactions and interactions make us vulnerable to shitty actors working for legitimate businesses and third parties who purchase our information from them. You might not notice a $5 charge on your credit-card statement, but it could be someone fishing to legitimize the card number, which is then aggregated with others and sold on the dark web, sometimes for under 10 cents a card! Lane says cards are most valuable when they have been freshly stolen, legitimized by a small charge that you might not even notice and your bank’s algorithm won’t flag.

Which explains that $9.35 hardware charge that slipped through on my Visa card!!!!!! And don’t forget how much authorizing information you willingly post online —  things like your phone number, your address, your pet’s name. These are all doors left ajar.

While in Toronto recently, I met Dianne Couples, CEO of Portfolio+, a Canadian company which envisions an open banking ecosystem for data-driven, personalized banking and financial services. So I asked her about the security of our online money and identity.

While everyone works very hard to have everything completely secure, in today’s technology, there is always some degree of risk…outside of employees, there are bad actors who:

* make phone calls to individuals posing as a representative of the card issuing company and scare employees that their card has been compromised and then uses their answers to questions to gather their personal information which they then use to steal their identity or create a cloned card. 

* Set up websites that grab your attention, you fill in the questionnaire but to get the information or report you must give them a credit card which they then steal and use for their own purposes as you have filled in your information

Public wifi is very unsecured and easy for people get their payment information intercepted.

Dianne also recommended a few good articles where you can learn more about credit card scams. Here, and here, and also here.

For goodness sakes, change your router password when your provider delivers it. Lane says it’s astounding that some people stick with the manufacturer’s default. You might as well leave your car running, keys in the ignition, and your wallet on the front seat, along with your passport and birth certificate.

Be wary of tapping your card at gas stations at night. Those places are usually staffed by one person in the booth, without clear sightlines in the dark, allowing scammers to install card-skimmer overlays on the pumps and steal your card information neatly and efficiently.

You likely know someone who needs this information. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Lane introduced me to a couple other interesting terms, like “synthetic identities”. In his case against the fraud ring, he came across 58 different synthetic identities (fake identities manufactured with the cooperation of shady bank employees to be used as financial instruments at banks).

He also notes that time and privacy legislation work against law enforcement when it comes to stopping the scammers and getting your money back.

I'm only going to talk for Toronto, but I'm sure it applies across the board, across Canada. We're very limited in the amount of time we can spend. In our office, we get 18 to 20,000 occurrences every year. So they range from, I would say, simple cheque fraud to organized crime that involves cryptocurrency. The anonymous nature of that makes it very difficult for an investigator to get information.

Usually, law enforcement is roughly about six months behind the criminal enterprises, so six months could mean the deletion of, say, an IP address which could be a link to tell us where some of the funds went.

There are a lot of privacy issues, especially in Canada and in our banking system. So for instance, if I get a complaint that you clicked on a link and next thing your money is gone, and even if you know this bank account and I know it’s fraud, yet when I want to get the other information for the bank account to follow up on who it is, I have to write a what's called the production order — technically, a search warrant — and that could take upwards of six months to work through the process.”

Once Lane has the search-warrant equivalent, he must convince a justice of the peace to agree that he has grounds, and get it signed. When he delivers the warrant to the bank, which is already inundated with warrants, and the three analysts it employs to deal with them are up to their ears, even a simple case can take months.

Most of us, when we get the credit-card call, are satisfied when we receive compensation. Inevitably, a new card with a new number is issued and we think that’s the end of it, but it’s important to report scams to the Anti-Fraud Centre, which is the hub that track trends, geographic activity and law-enforcement efforts across multiple jurisdictions. If you report that your credit card was compromised at a particular store or restaurant, that helps the centre in what Lisanne refers to as “disrupting the scammer” and the scamming tools.

And be aware that different banks and financial institutions have different thresholds below which they do not turn your case over to the police. I tried to get more specific information on that, but the Canadian Bankers Association shovelled a steaming pile of PR BS  at me instead of answering specific questions. Sorry about that.

While my focus began with credit-card scams, which are most likely to have affected you, there are many others, and reporting them goes a long way to providing better information to educate the public about what to watch for. Don’t forget, people still fall for the old CRA-is-coming-to-your-door-to-arrest-you con, and somehow think Revenue Canada needs an Apple gift card.

Romance scams are among the most common grifts, according to the Canadian Anti‑Fraud Centre, costing Canadians more than $50.3 million in 2023. Lisette says these are the toughest for operations staff, since caller is generally traumatized, highly emotional and ashamed of being duped, often over many years and many interactions and financial blood-lettings. Once again, if it looks too good to be true…..

Today’s musical offering is not exactly on point, but whenever there’s the slimmest excuse to play some Boz Skaggs, I’ma take it. Until next time, keep your cash close and your cards closer!

Until next time, keep your cash close and your cards closer!

Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The man sitting next to me is a tightly wound bundle of energy, or ADD, hard to tell. He is in his 60s, lean and wiry like a crazed marathoner, and does everything quickly and with gusto. He stuffs a laptop and a book, Michael Lewis’ Premonition into the seatback pocket and pulls out a large plastic bag which contains, as it turns out, multiple sandwiches and some blue cheese (for which he apologizes later. We agree boiled eggs would have resulted in a seat change request.)

Reading on my phone, I sneak glances at him as he’s eating his first sandwich, some deli meat on brown bread, and I smell the distinctive fragrance of lettuce and mayo; you know that smell from childhood? It’s not something you’d normally smell on an airplane but when was the last time you saw someone bring sandwiches FROM HOME, on a flight?

The first repast concluded he assertively bundles up the waste, smashes it into the larger bag and pulls out the laptop which he sets up on the tray table. He’s scrolling through a complex, dense document in the way people do when they know there’s something there and are just scanning to find it in a sea of letters. Every so often he pauses, pulls out an old school lined exercise book, and furiously carves comments into it, pressing hard enough to make 6 copies, if necessary.

In a little while he nudges me gently and gestures to the window, enquiring quietly if I’d mind just…gesture…pulling down the blind. He points to the laptop screen which is blinded by the 30 thousand foot elevation, unmitigated sunshine. I happily comply as my arm and shoulder are burning and I’m working up a sweat down my right side.

Am I peeking at the document he’s reading? OF COURSE I AM! From what I can tell it’s an overview of some technical, land based project with maps and graphics and pointy arrows indicating important features.

Are you an engineer? I ask. He gives a quirky little smile as if it had been his childhood dream, thwarted by harsh reality.

Well, sort of…I’m retired and work for a citizens group that monitors open pit aggregate mines to make sure they don’t impact nearby towns and neighbourhoods.

There are obviously a lot of technical reports to digest. He goes on to tell me that southern Ontario is littered with these open gravel pits and that many of them are cheek by jowl to homes. Who knew?

I glance out the window and see thousands of sun dappled, smallish farmsteads, laid out in that wonderful checkerboard you see only from above. They spread out below us and into the distance in all directions.

And then I see them. The open pit aggregate operations. And there are dozens of them just in the small slice of Ontario below me.

My seatmate continues to whip through the report on his laptop, continues to carve comments into his lined exercise book, and eats another sandwich. This is when the blue cheese comes out.

I begin to tally the number of interesting conversations I’ve had while travelling, also the number of mind-numbing conversations I’ve been subjected to from people sitting behind me, the nuggets of new information and observation I’ve tucked away like an airborne squirrel, nuts for another day.

For example, it’s lamentable that Westjet’s endearingly familiar breeziness has devolved into a patronizing over familiarity and am sad that such good things must pass.

And then I head to the Uber stand in search of Nedungeril who will tell me his story.

Much as travel has it charms, challenges and rewards, the best one comes at the very end, when you get to come home.

With that, here’s a 2008 David Foster concert where Michael Bublé and Blake Shelton perform together, singing Home.

Until next time, happy trails.

My Friday morning yoga instructor announced today she was leaving and I became ridiculously sad and emotional even though I don’t know her all that well. I attend most of her sessions and have done for a couple years; we chat often, mostly ritual how-are-you’s but occasionally more personal. I don’t know much about her outside of the studio. I know she has a UK accent, pronounces something and anything as if they ended with the letter k, and is always smiling and welcoming. I know she struggles with being so far from family.

As I lay on my mat, with tears trickling into my ears, I began to probe why this should be so upsetting.

I imagined her going away into the wild blue, untethered from this local life where we intersect. It seems my sadness was on her behalf, on what she will miss while she’s gone but it was also my lost opportunity to learn more about who she is and what matters to her, what she’s done and where she’s been.

Recognizing the shallowness of my knowledge I also was shocked to discover how little I likely know about those near and dear to my heart. Despite knowing them for years, many of them from when I gave birth to them, I can’t possibly know or predict how they will respond or react on every single occasion, nor can I know how they think or feel about absolutely every issue. To be honest, I probably never did.

It’s like driving past your friend’s house and seeing a political support sign on their lawn which shocks you. OMG I had no idea they are [fill in the blank]. We assume, because we are friends, that they believe what we believe, think what we think, become incensed about the same things, share the same dreams and aspirations, like the same music.

We are so driven by our own cognitive biases, and generally don’t even know it. How many different aspects of cognitive bias spring to mind? I generally think of social projection and fundamental attribution error but check out this great list!

Have you had the experience of trying to get into someone else’s head, to figure out what they’re thinking or feeling about a particular moment in time or challenge of some kind? We observe people reacting certain ways, or interacting in ways we find intriguing and we immediately leap to conclusions about what’s driving it. To make it worse we then act upon our own assumptions and respond or intervene in ways that come as a shock to everyone.

As to Tina? At the end of class she clarified that she would be back in the spring and now I feel much better.

There is no other choice of musical presentation today. It simply has to be the late, great Gordon Lightfoot.

Until next time, stay well. Please like, share or comment. Would love to hear from you.