Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Fracture lines
It seems that as every new week goes by, I find more and more reasons to say, “Getting old sucks.”
I suppose it’s common to feel your age a little bit more in the winter, particularly in an Ontario winter where the temperature and humidity wildly fluctuate throughout the season. At least in the Yukon (although I’d only heard about old age when I was living there, I hadn’t personally experienced it), it’s a “dry cold”, and you can count on it being both dry and cold 90% of the time.
This winter in Ontario was tougher than most. One case in point. For the last three years, in January and February, I’ve supervised the publication of the Township’s Spring/Summer Community Guide (which came out with the Feb. 25 Cosmos), as well as the weekly newspaper. In 2008 and 2009, I had coop students from USS to help me do that, excellent talented students mamed Karl and Amy who, I’ve no doubt, will become wildly successful at whatever path they follow. I remain eternally grateful for their contributions to the Cosmos.
This January, there was no Karl, no Amy, no USS coop student at all. So I faced the Community Guide alone, except for a layout guy hundreds of miles away on a mountain somewhere. One year older, one heck of a lot more weary.
Then, just as the Guide was nearing Crunch Time, while we were in Stratford visiting our friend the Star-to-Be, my dear wife slipped on a patch of ice and broke her ankle. Well, not really her ankle, but her fibula just above her ankle. It was a clean break, but a break nonetheless, and since her poor leg was comparatively inexperienced at being broken, the cast-makers took a few tries before they got it right.
While the not-so-good casts were on her leg, Lisa spent some considerable time in some considerable agony. She slept little. I, who was now her Staff, slept little. The dog slept little. We all became sleep-deprived.
Any of you who know my wife can imagine how she takes to enforced inactivity. In brief, it drives her bananas. Many of us would enjoy being waited on hand and foot for a while. Pick me, for instance (although not if it requires pain to get there, but more on that later).
Lisa, however, can not abide people doing her favours, although she tries to be polite about it. For one thing, the Staff are inevitably sub-standard when it comes to undertaking the tasks she usually performs.
To give you an idea, because we are both very busy people, she tried using a professional house cleaner. Once. She spent several hours preparing the house for the cleaner beforehand, and several more completing the job afterward. She is the ultimate neat and clean freak. So you can imagine how she feels about sitting on the couch with her ankle above her heart, watching as her Staff vacuum and dust the living room around her. Torture, compared to which a tight cast is a walk in the park.
It doesn’t help, of course, that I cannot “feel” her pain. Apart from a hairline rib fracture when I fell off a log during my student tree-planting days, I have been fortunate enough to stay fracture-free (avoiding things such as downhill skiing can do that for you).
It’s a good thing, too. I have what is known as a “low pain threshold”. Lisa would alternatively label me as a “whiner in the first degree”. If I were to somehow break my big toe or my shoulder blade, I would be insufferable (anything more serious, and and you might as well shoot me to put everyone else out of their misery). My Staff wouldn’t have time to worry about vacuuming or dusting; her time would be spent entirely in catering to my every pathetic whim. There would certainly be no question of “carrying on” and driving to work, as Lisa has persisted in doing; if it couldn’t be done electronically over distance, it just wouldn’t happen.
At least I’m taking off some weight as a result of all this care-giving, Guide-publishing, box-schlepping activity I’ve been pursuing lately (did I mention we’ve been renovating our basement at the same time - need any old Disco LPs?). When we came home from our wee Caribbean cruise in November, I was alarmed at how large the numbers had become on our bathroom scales.
Over Christmas and New Year’s, any attempt to reduce the bulge was fruitless. But now, thanks largely to my wife’s sacrifice of her ankle, I’m on my way to becoming the svelte fellow I used to know.
But I’m still getting older. And it sucks.
