Paul A. Merkley
Bio
Mental traveller. Idealist. Try to be low-key but sometimes hothead. Curious George. "Ardent desire is the squire of the heart." Love Tolkien, Cinephile. Awards ASCAP, Royal Society. Music as Brain Fitness: www.musicandmemoryjunction.com
Achievements (1)
Stories (106)
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Close Friendships
I met Lou in the spring of 2019. I was recently widowed, trying to find my place in the world without my wife of 39 years. I met him on the tennis court. He was the convener of a mixed doubles drop-in session. I was picking up activities I had not done since I was a teenager. The funeral director had warned me that I needed a social network, that otherwise I would just hang around the house and fade away. We had just moved to a new city four months previous, so this was a concern for me. I had written "Tennis? Bridge?" on a note pad as ideas for meeting people.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout 10 hours ago in Men
Twelfth Night
I started my first paragraph explaining that I need an extra winter ritual because I live in a city with a cold winter and the hours of daylight are too few, but I realized that is not true. First of all there is always a colder, darker city, for example Thunder Bay, Ontario, or the military bases at Alert or Thule, to take more extreme examples. Secondly, there already are rituals to bring light to the dark: Christmas lights, Diwali, or one could join the Druids at Stonehenge on the Solstice, for example. More importantly, that is not the reason for my ritual. I do it for social connection.
By Paul A. Merkley3 months ago in Humans
A Mere Bagatelle
Damned arthritis. Thank God I put in the corkscrew staircase. You can't fall very far on that. The fellow who installed it demonstrated that vividly. He knocked me off balance. I fell two steps and stopped. Ingenious. Of course I could always fall upstairs, but, as my father explained, that's good luck. When I asked him what made it good luck he said, because you didn't fall downstairs of course.
By Paul A. Merkley3 months ago in Fiction
