Adverts we’d like to see:

“One euro of this sale goes toward saving the environment; the other 48.99 euros go toward destructing it.”

I sit in the captain’s chair from which my father ruled family mealtimes when I was a child.

I have the good fortune to continue to see my father in this chair at least once a year, usually around Christmastime, looking at his kids and grandkids eating food prepared by my mother.

Today, my childhood next-door neighbour, David Salley, and I returned to our parents’ houses for silent prayers/meditation concerning our wives’ mothers.

David’s parents have passed on to the other realm, as they say.

He and I are our fathers’ age, or older than, when we lived next door to each other.

David is a Christian minister, quite a good one, I hear, a man his father and mother would gladly call their son.

David moved out of his parents’ house in 1976 or ’77. I moved out of this house in 1980, with a short stint or two in the early ’80s.

Thirty plus years later, here we are, seeking…

What have we found?

What do we hear when we listen to the seemingly infinite, eternal voice of the universe as we know it, no matter how we see and define/anthropomorphise it?

Mr. Salley was not only a great father but also a jack-of-all-household tasks.

In addition to his open-to-use workshop/tool shed of a basement, he made elderberry and other local berry-based wines that he shared, as well as belonged to one or more civic organisations like the Masonic Lodge.

Mrs. Salley was the perfect mother next-door.

She always had a snack to share and a warm kitchen that naturally invited us starving kids playing out on the street or shooting hoops in the backyard.

I understand the attraction David has to the house.

Right now, I look at the tree on which Mr. Salley hung goldfinch seed bags.

I fully expect to see him in the yard discussing something with my dad, or my mother and Mrs. Salley talking in one or the other’s carport.

Forty year-old memories, some of them.

Time does not exist, huh?

We are just states of energy?

Churches want spiritual nuts, not religious nuts, where a person is ready to live when that person has prepared to die.

A bluejay and a grackle argue over the birdbath in the Salleys’ backyard.

My niece has a wallet a friend made out of camo duct tape.

If we’re in the habit of laying our problems and emotional issues at the feet of our parents when they are alive, what do we do when they’re gone?

The universe/deities we call our own speak to us through our family, friends and neighbours.

We don’t always listen.

I thank David for being here today to share the kind of quiet neighbourly moment in which we middle-aged men can share the emotional pain of seeing our wives and mothers in-law suffer while we’re supposed to be rocks of support without our parents to readily lean upon.

God may be in control but, without a crystal ball, it’s not always easy to wait to find out what’s going to happen next.