Skiing

Sarah and I went skiing today. We went to the leftmost of the three ski hills, Mount Seymour. It's about a half hour drive away; we can just see it from our living room.

Sarah's never skied before, and it's been about ten years for me. We struggled with our bindings for a while, then struggled to get up after falling, but once those two skills were mastered, I was chasing Sarah downhill like a henchman after James Bond.






Sarah took a few of me, too. This was her favourite.


As the afternoon wore on we grew tired. For something where you slide downhill, and get towed uphill, it somehow takes a lot out of you. I collapsed when we got home.

I Used To

The other morning I was getting breakfast at a coffee shop and I saw a guy reading a letter. On yellow lined paper. Handwritten. Multiple pages.

"I used to do that!" I thought. I used to write letters to people. I used to get letters in the mail. It's not the novelty of paper - that hasn't gone away yet. It's writing letters. One of my favourite tracks on the new Arcade Fire album is We Used To Wait, about how we used to write letters, and wait for a reply.

This all got me thinking about things I used to do. I used to ...

• Tune a radio. With a dial.
• Record favourite songs onto cassettes and give them to friends.
• Get up to change the channel.
• Breathe secondhand smoke in restaurants, pubs, buses, airplanes.
• Dial a phone.
  
• Get a page while driving, then get off the freeway to find a pay phone in order to return the call.
  

"Thank You"

I ride the bus here quite often. As people depart the bus, at most stops, one or more people will call out "thank you" to the driver. I do sometimes, but much of the time I'm distracted or shy or not in the mood.

But today I got to thinking: how did this come to be? How does this protocol sustain itself? I mean, it's not like there's an entry in a bus rider's handbook saying you must thank the driver when leaving. But somehow we keep doing it. I think it's a beautiful thing.