Bach's Pralidium Number 1 Played by the Jacques Loussier Trio

Since about November 2017 I have been going through varying degrees of stress and anxiety induced by work for the very first time in my life.  It is not nice and thankfully it is going away.  However, in an almost selfish way laden with nuances of guilt, I take comfort in knowing there are people;  people possibly behind closed doors in the very same street as I live in who are going through much much worse than me.

When I want to gain some peace, some my space, some of my time, some of my own thoughts I sit at a desk in the office at home.  It is nothing like the desk at work which unlike the one at home is impersonally paper and ornament free when I leave it at night.  Like the old story about putting your hand in a bucket of water and then withdrawing and illustrate that you haven’t made any impression at all, that is my desk at work.  The desk at home cluttered, highly personal and comfortable with memories.

Memories that are manifested in physical objects.  A horseshoe inkwell and a silver-plated inkstand.  They both came from my parent’s home and carry a patina of age from when they walked past them every day.  I am sure a forensic scientist would be able to identify less than a micron sized element of DNA which could be tagged directly back to my parents.  There might even be the remnants of their fingerprints somewhere where I haven’t overwritten that type of digit memory.  Am I thinking like this because I miss them and crave some connection with them or am I being romantic?

Pictures, books!  Oh so many books.  Some have been read from cover to cover.  Some are still waiting to unleash their words, their sentences, their paragraphs, their chapters and their stories in full with the literary equivalent of racehorses geeing themselves up in the starting gates just waiting to be opened and be released at a full gallop reading pace.

The Pralidium Number One at the fingertips of Jacques Loussier and his trio is four minutes and forty five seconds long in purely temporal terms.  What other measure is there?  This is how we measure our lives.  In seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.

In that four minutes and forty five seconds I become my own self contained time lord.  Looking outwards at pictures, artefacts, books, notebooks diaries.  Looking inwards on memories.

Amazing! I can travel back over fifty years to when I used to have afternoon tea with my English grandparents.  Fresh white bread sliced as you needed it. Salted butter.  Hot milky tea and strawberry jam.  There was always homemade strawberry jam. Then forward seeing my mother’s body in a hospital bed bereft of what was her ever shallowing breaths that left her just minutes before I arrived.  Dad sitting beside her bed looking lost and lonely.  Then back in time again to happy sunny days on holiday at a lakeside in northern Alberta.  I didn’t have a clue what the real world was about.  I didn’t work out the equation whose formulaic components were work, money, holidays.  Perhaps my parents shielded me from such harsh realities or I was just naïve?

It was on one of those holidays that I did get hit with some of the realities of life.

One morning I found seagull sitting on the shore.  I walked towards it.  It didn’t fly away.  It just sat on the shore looking out over the water.  So pure, so white. So clean.  So peaceful.  Surely it could not be dead.  It was dead but I didn’t really understand ‘dead’ at the time.

Then I am back again looking at my collection of books.  Those there opened my mind to the Middle East.  Or, was it because over the English teas fifty years ago my Grandfather told me about his time out there during World War I?  Then the ones on American politics.  Where did that interest come from?  In front of me is the iconic shot of John Kennedy standing with his back to the camera in a window of the Oval Office.  I was born in Canada but I have no fascination with Canadian politics.  I don’t have books on Trudeau, Diefenbaker or Pearson but I have books on Kennedy, Bush, Kissinger and Clinton.

The music stops after four minutes and forty-five seconds.  There is applause.  Jacques Loussier thanks his German audience with a French accented ‘Danke’.  Time travelling is over, my mind is clear and now I can start to write.