Indolence and Fireworks

I did my undergraduate study at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a State school in western Pennsylvania some 6o miles north east of Pittsburgh. One of my college chums was Denny Steffy. He studied physics while I studied biology. Some of our common bonds were folk music and dry humor. Several decades after graduation I found myself living and working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Much to my surprise I found that Denny had come to Alaska also and had been working on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage for a number of years. He had built a cabin on Peterson Bay, south of Halibut Cove, across Kachemak Bay from Homer, Alaska. Several times we drove down the Kenai Peninsula, met Steffy and his family, and boated across the Bay to their cabin, stopping along the way to pull their crab pots and harvest some fresh Tanner crab for dinner. That is when I first became a fan of real [aka, fresh] seafood. We’d sit around after dinner spinning yarns and singing songs. It was there that Steff shared his secret family motto, a motto that Denny strove hard to infuse his entire life with: “Indolence is its own reward!”

Taking a page out of the Steffy family motto playbook, yesterday Jane and I spent an entire day [the first in either of our adult memories] doing as close to absolutely nothing as possible. For example, there is a delightful Canadian television show we discovered a few years ago – “Corner Gas. The show is situated in tiny town in Saskatchewan. We had seen a couple of episodes, which we really enjoyed [the show is a bit like the “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency – the characters and dialogue drive the show, not action]. Well, son-of-a-gun, the basic cable Comedy Channel had a Canada Day “Corner Gas Marathon” that started at 6:00 am. Jane and I jumped on-board after breakfast and watched until our dogs, Sophie & Dinah, reminded us that they needed to be walked and fed, and that we also should eat something. But outside of these minor distractions, ah, we were just absolutely indolent, watching Wanda and Fred plotting against one another, Karen and Davis, the Dog River police officers, setting limbo-like, ever-lowering benchmarks for police behavior, etc. Oh, yes, we own this day of indolent decadence, but in our defense, we were enabled by the motto of the Canadian Comedy Channel: “Time Well Wasted!” We don’t plan to do this often, but for one day, hey, it was indeed time well wasted, eh?

Sometimes people [usually Americans] forget that Canada is not the 51^st state of the U. S. Canadians celebrate some different holidays than Americans do. For example yesterday, July 1, is Canada day, their anniversary of the July 1, 1867 enactment of the British North America Act that united Canada as a single country. For this annual celebration Charlottetown provides the largest fireworks display east of Montreal. Since we are further north than Connecticut, it gets dark later. So around 10 pm we walked down our street to the house where there is a path to public access to a beach on Charlottetown Harbour, found good seats, and sat and watched the fireworks. Even with the greatly diminished budgets, the display was impressive. There were no long delays between firings, and our viewing point was perfect – watching the colors burst in the sky while simultaneously being reflected in the water. After ten to fifteen minutes of eye candy we applauded the show and trundled back home. Today we actually had some things scheduled, and we quickly re-adapted to organized routines.