Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Life 101

When a friend of mine (in earnest or not, I cannot be sure) invited me to speak to the members of his Toronto golf club (presumably as the dog and pony show at a tournament or some such other event), my immediate reaction was that I couldn’t imagine myself having anything of interest to say to a pack of linksmen. First, my foray into the rarefied atmosphere of golfing was so long ago as to be little more than a faded memory, and since then my brush with the denizens of the club house has been limited to that of a social member of our local golf club, where I host annual luncheons and dinner parties for family and friends who profess to enjoy an outing to rural Ontario by the cool waters of the slow and meandering Mississippi River. However, upon further reflection on the subject, the more fundamental question of what I might have to say to anyone (either by way of entertainment or wisdom) occurred to me. Golfers after all, notwithstanding their pretense to singularity, are still mere mortals; and surely they could profit as easily as any others from a bit of general conflab on one subject or another. One of the relics of advanced age has to be the possibility that, having endured a lifetime of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, one must surely have something of consequence to share with others, be they golfers or not.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Saturday Night

It was a raucous foregathering last evening in the subdivision! The lights, the fireplace and everyone in between were ablaze!

Things began innocuously enough, as they always do in these casual Saturday social circumstances, with a frozen vodka martini, nourished by some salted roasted pecans. But the pace picked up steadily, accompanied by asparagus spears wrapped in smoked prosciutto crudo, then surprisingly followed by an equally tantalizing and quite unexpected serving of spicy grilled prawns in the shell.