GREAT ONE'S DON'T FALTER

Just the other day, someone asked me if I was still doing any radio. (I am always asked about my radio “career” as if I had never done anything else. The past haunts me.) It was at the Andy Barrie farewell, and it was another of those aging fans who remember me for my Open Line radio days. (I saw rankling because I really did do other things.) Echoes of “old soldiers never die…” and I have faded away. As I always say, sometimes grudgingly, “that was then – this is now.”

Lying in bed at night, collecting thoughts and recollecting memories, I found myself returning to memories of one of the greatest men I ever knew, or at least partly new.

During my years on the news side at CBC TV, I was sent to interview a physician who was visiting Baycrest Centre. He was the man who virtually “invented” geriatrics – the study of aging. A little wisp of a man with a withered arm, a published poet from Cambridge university in England, a man who would later rise to fame in the world of sexuality – he was Alex Comfort.

The geriatric centre at Baycrest was opening and there was no one in the world better to help it come to life, than this remarkable gerontologist. A physician, a scientist, a poet, and a man who devoted himself to understanding the process of aging. Perhaps if he were now to examine “Looking Ahead” he would congratulate me for not caving in.

A few years later I met him again. This time he was not a physician known only to insiders, but a world renowned expert on sexuality. He had written and illustrated:”The Joy of Sex,” which was followed by “More Joy.” The very explicit drawings were perhaps the most compelling element of the book. Comfort, having celebrated aging, now celebrated sexual behaviour and unabashedly, the joy of it.

By now he had moved to California where he became, thanks perhaps to the book, part of the:”touchy-feely” movement that was all the rage in the 70s. The “encounter” group was dominant. Erhard’s EST movement was in full swing. When I interviewed him he had gone from poetry to a kind of loving prurience. (I use the word positively, because he was a man who understood lust.)

He and his wife were part of the "encounter" group movement. He told me about how they spent time at Sandstone (I really forget the name) but it was a place where you and your loved one “got naked” and sat among other naked couples touching and enjoying. I remember picturing Comfort, the little wisp of a man and his short, pudgy, or to be uncharitable “dumpy” little wife – blissfully touching each other in wonderful, soaring, sexually joyful contact. He, always the poet, said “Larry – you can’t imagine what a turn-on it was. Cool.”

It is more than a memory. It is reminder that there is so much to look forward to. It is a reminder that none of us should mourn the passage of time, but treasure the moments ahead.

Last night, my wife, in one of her dream-state moments, thrashed about the bed and seemed to be throwing something at me. She remembered the dream. She was furious because, in the dream, I no longer cared about our marriage. Maybe that’s what brought me back to Alex Comfort and his own special brand of “Joy.”