This will be the last post for awhile as we head into another long Covid winter. I plan on just hibernating until the spring. Be well everyone!
Alan Katowitz photo
A little throwback to a tune I wrote on a very different Christmas Eve about fifty years ago. I was living in a cheap three-story walkup in East Vancouver, across the street from an iron foundry, back when the city had mixed residential/industrial neighbourhoods. This was during a very lonesome period in my life which (thankfully!) didn’t last long. Turned out it was merely a rite of passage before life got very busy and much brighter. In retrospect it made me face the reality that life is lonesome sometimes. We all arrive alone and we die alone, and everything in between is what you make it. Heavy stuff for a 19-year-old!
In lieu of TV and the internet I had my faithful record player and a small collection of vinyl. I was living on Joni (Clouds) and had Bruce Cockburn’s High Winds White Sky on repeat. My neighbours were ‘working girls’ and drifters, and I was hanging out in Chinatown and on East Hastings before it turned into the drug-infested mess it is today. I’d walk for hours just window-shopping and mingling with the Christmas crowds, and wonder about the lives of the people I saw passing by.
I guess I’ll always be a minimalist about the season, and I don’t engage with the overblown circus it is now. That said, I’m looking forward to putting on the twinkle lights, cooking a nice meal, and toasting my many blessings. When all is said and done, it really is “just another day.”
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