New Horizons by Max Roy

                                                Our Garden In The SkY! We are in the fortunate possession of a balcony in our apartment in the beautiful city of Vancouver in the beautiful province of British Columbia. Vancouver is located in the most happy country of Canada. You can understand from my preamble that I feel immense gratitude that my Bride and I are resident here. Many of you out there may have similar feelings about the locale you inhabit. Why not? That is a good reason for gratitude. Indeed, my story is mainly about gratitude. Oh joy, O rapture uncontained! Before we came to Vancouver, my Bride and I, then in our early seventies, shortly after our marriage, fled abroad, spending almost ten years in Dublin, Ireland. How we came to be there is an...

  Leaving Something Behind   I am human. I share many elements of my nature with other beings on this planet. I laugh, I cry, I aspire to things, hope for things, wish for things, work for things. I am the amalgam of the bits I brought into this world as part of my inherited equipment, interacting with all the stuff that has come my way through all my living years. This is no different than what it is for all of us out there. We don't get through life without having things stirring around inside our heads. In my head there are always issues struggling to get out, things I am longing to express, to articulate, if only to myself. Since I am gabby to a fault, and I seem to have no trouble vomiting it all out , this should be no problem. Right?  Not right! The most difficult part of this process is getting it right inside my head. Before I spit it out.   I have to understand what it is that's itching, burning, stuck in my craw. I have to do that first before I ca...

                                Still Here! I’m thinking quite a bit about that because, often, when I see stories about the dearly departed in the News, they are younger than I happen to be. I wonder, was I looking the other way, deaf to all sounds, when the exit whistle sounded? I think, why them and not me? Is it something about my virtuous nature that has singled me out? I know that I have tried with all my might to develop vices, but none of them took. I get depressed sometime like everybody else, but I have never researched the technology of departure. I know I have seen my best days, but is that a reason not to stick around? Is it just that nothing about me in the eighth decade of my life hurts enough? We all have the instinct to live, and when in harms’ way, we fight to stay alive. Living is filled with threats to our existence and ...

                        Body And Soul Our scientists have theorized that life arose on this planet through a series of happy accidents. There had to have been an accident, something miraculous, because, up to now, most scientists don’t understand how the chemicals necessary to support life were transformed into living material without intervention.   Science, to my knowledge, has not yet explained to us exactly how life emerged from the chemical soup that must have existed on the cooling planet that ended up as earth. We have to start with a living cell, somewhere, somehow, if we are to accept the rationale of the theory of evolution. That theory insists that simple life forms progressed over millions of years, through the survival of the fittest process, through changing planetary conditions, to arrive at where we are now. There is evidence of that process taking place...

            Facing The Ugly Truth We have been in the midst of a struggle against COVID- a world-wide pandemic that attacked us all. Of course it hit hardest where people were not aware of what was going on. And then it became politicized, when some people thought they could exploit the issue for narrow political ends. More people died than had to. More people died than should have. Many millions would not have, if we had gotten it right. On top of all the normal challenges in life, we’ve got this turmoil. How do we fight it? How do we protect ourselves? We know the pandemic destroyed the livelihoods of billions, and we are threatened with a recession.? We are still worrying whether our vaccines are dangerous while working on new multi-strain boosters. And what about global warming, and those hurricanes? We know that across the street and just over the horizon there are all those people who are having it much tougher than we have i...