SEPTEMBER IS BURSTING OUT ALL OVER

The allusion may be a little vague. I take it from “September Song.” While I am not writing about a May-September romance, I am taking yet another perhaps too long, perhaps too self-indulgent look at getting older.

Perhaps I was spurred by Andy Barrie's farewell to his rating-leading morning show on CBC Radio in Toronto. Andy announced some time ago that he has Parkinson’s disease. I saw him in a TV News item announcing his final goodbye. He looked like the Andy I knew, but I could see the trembling, the slight twitch, the growing loss of muscular control. And I thought: “Isn’t this what getting older is all about?” In “Don’t Be Blindsided by Retirement,” I (and my writing partner Andy) wrote about planning for retirement. Not financial planning, but life planning. One of the items on the check list is a full physical assessment. You are ready, you think, to enjoy the fruits of your labour, but are you well enough to make it work?

Which brings me to my own struggle to keep looking ahead. On Tuesday I did what many older people do: just a second of failing reflex (and a very slippery road) and I plowed into the back of a big SUV. Naturally, my car slid under his rear bumper and, even though I may not have been doing more than 5 KPH I really wrecked the front end of my car. Only today did I learn that, because it was very low mileage and “clean” it would be repaired and not written off.

The next day I visited my urologist at Toronto General. I needed his OK before I bought our tickets for Paris. I’d had the second of two CT scans to discover the source of chronic lower abdomen pain. (Like all cancer survivors, I worry.) He said there was nothing new and that I would have to have an injection of two but I was free to go to Paris.

So I can continue to “Look Ahead.” I can continue to anticipate those three months. (It was supposed to have been four months, but I would have needed a visa and that spells lots of red tape.) I am writing this piece before dawn on Friday, three days after my car crash, and two days after good health news. I am awake partly because I find myself musing about the pleasures of Paris. More than just thinking about improving my fluency in French, I lay awake thinking about finding the “local.” (Apparently the word is similar in French – denoting the corner pub/café/bistro where the locals hang out.) I want this time to be a resident. I want this time to spend more time chatting (bavarder) with the locals. I want to repeat experiences like I had last time in Paris sitting in a sidewalk café on Rue Mouffetard and having a small talk conversation with a couple and their dog. Dogs, for all who know Paris, are ubiquitous – tolerated everywhere, even at the table of a restaurant.
(If anyone reading this knows a good "local" near Rue Guersant in the Porte Maillot district, let me know.)

So perhaps looking at Andy saying goodbye but promising to maintain a presence with “an office just down the hall,” I promise myself that I shall keep finding way to feel alive.

I’m already planning September when a home exchanger from Mexico comes to stay with us. We’ll go to him during the winter.

But, as a recent column in the Globe and Mail about the “other” side of retirement wrote: after you take that month-long trip – then what? Life can’t be an endless game of golf.

So good luck to all of us who sing the song of September. Let it ring out.