Watching Myself Walk By

What I learned by doing this

Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

My father was a truck driver, a serious non-fiction reader, and a mostly silent man. He once said that when all is said and done, more is said than done. That quip was his creed. Don’t say. Do.

He never wasted words and was quick to detect what he called codswallop — an old-fashioned term for nonsense. In his opinion, politicians talked codswallop. Philosophers wrote codswallop. And my teenage poems (in his pragmatic opinion) were also a lot of codswallop.

On rare occasions he’d talk at the dinner table. He’d put down his knife and fork, clear his throat, look in turn at my two sisters and me, and say something memorable like this:

“It’s a good idea every now and then to step outside of yourself and watch yourself walk by.”

Then he’d pick up his knife and fork and continue to cut into the braised beef on his plate.

I was the talker in the family. When I was about five years old my mother said to me that if there was a limit to the number of words each of us were permitted to say, I’d soon use up mine. This slowed me for a few minutes, but soon I was rattling on again. I poured out thoughts and questions as effortlessly as water pouring over rocks at Lesmurdie Falls…