Summertime

I can break into song now, about summertime, easy living, and fishing… it’s one of those things that make me happy.  It’s such a great song, and I love hearing it.  Can’t you just see going along, humming, as the song croons about easy living?  Don is having issues with the heat, as it’s above 30C, and likely to inch up above 35C as we croon along.  The temperature is warming up, and it will be less comfortable as the days pass.  Fortunately, I’m OK at the moment, with a fan pointed at me, as it’s comfortable.  But it’s going to be worse if the humidity jumps.  Jerry wants to go out, but the weather is not his friend, as the heat becomes too much for the little dog.  If we take him out in this weather, he’ll vomit everything up and I’d prefer that he doesn’t do that.

Why do we wait until someone dies to say good things about them?  We’ll have tributes to people who can’t see or hear how much we love them.  This is one of the things that I hate about funerals.  We spend a small fortune on a casket and flowers, dress the deceased in their best and go through a routine saying how much we loved them, how much they meant to us, spend another small fortune on a gravesite,  and a marker, after we’d ignored them for years!  We sometimes shoved them into homes where we were too busy to visit, ot visited for maybe 10 minutes over 3 weeks.  Enough tears are shed to float a barge along the Nile, but by the end of the night, eyes are dry, alcohol bottles are drained and we’re out of anything that can hold liquid as we try to mop up after the end of the alcohol.  We’re drier than the sands of the Sahara as we pretend to mop up. 

I’d prefer that we arrange a party, where we swap stories of the one we want to honour, so we remember the good times that we shared.  We want to remember them as they are, human, flawed and sometimes in error.  I think it would be great to do a smaller, more personal tribute to the person.  That way, we learn more about the person we’re honouring, before they die.  We can ask for their memories of different occasions, and then create a memory book, which would give us all something to look back on, so we celebrate them while they’re alive.   Why don’t we tell each other how much we love them when they are here?  I love talking to my aunt, who shares stories of growing up during World War II, and who can tell me about life in Toco — that small, fishing village, which is even smaller now than it was then.  And to my dad, who sometimes talks about growing up in Tobago, and about going to school in England, and all those details.  My aunts are a source of a lot of information, and I love hearing about their childhoods.  My mom’s sister, Auntie Ming, went to the same high school that I did, and it’s amazing how much it changed in the 50 years between when she went, and when I did.  It’s changed even more in the 20 years since I went and my niece now attends.  I realized that there are a lot of things that get lost if we don’t record them.

So yes.  I think that instead of saving all the love and tributes for when someone dies, we should share it while they’re alive, and we should take some time to listen now, when we can ask questions, and make it more interactive.  When they die, we should again share memories, but they’d be a lot richer for the time we spend now, while they’re with us.  What do you think?  Good night!