Passages
Sometimes you have to step back and just take a look around you. In my own case I’m your typical Canadian, up to my eyeballs in jobs to do and with a finite amount of energy to do it with. This past weekend I actually drove down to Atlanta Georgia to attend the wedding of my farming buddy, Carl Macko. It was a beautiful day with the temperature reaching 80°. I think in November I’ll take that any time.
It was quite a contrast and cultures at the wedding because Carl married Bettina who is originally from Lima Peru. I found it interesting that the wedding favours placed on the tables at the reception had maple syrup from Canada and some type of sexual aphrodisiac in the liquid form from Peru. Needless to say I think maybe that Maple syrup and that Peruvian aphrodisiac will come in handy. Of course everything came with Spanish translation.
The weekend was an interesting contrast in another sort of way. Here in Chatham Kent I think there is always a temptation to think that maybe we are the center of the universe. We have our problems with a declining population and the local economy suffers because of that. I live and work here all the time and even though I have traveled the world I think there’s always a temptation to judge things on how things are here in Chatham Kent. So when I got to the Buckhead area of Atlanta Georgia, let me just say I saw the way the rest of the world lives.
My friend Carl farms in the Dresden area but he also has a financial management business in Atlanta Georgia. You can visit his website by clicking on www.synergycapitalmanagement.com. So for selected periods of the year he is in transit between the two places. However after about 15 minutes of looking around I could see why he enjoyed Buckhead. There was every restaurant known to man in that area and life seem very vibrant and alive. At the same time it looked like people had space to live. So I don’t know if my friend Carl and his new wife Bettina will be living there but it sure is a nice place.
At the wedding there were a few of us from Chatham Kent who made the long drive down I-75. Carl was an excellent basketball player in his day and some of the wedding party was made up of former players on his high school team. I ran into Dave Tricker at the wedding and we had a real nice conversation. Dave is originally from Dresden who now lives in the Atlanta area. Dave brought up my column I wrote last week about the Berlin wall and it’s always nice to know that somebody might have enjoyed something I’ve written. He said that he followed me on CK times.ca.
Dave is an interesting guy. He is probably the most dominant basketball player ever to come out of Dresden, a place that has produced more than one dominant basketball player. Your loyal scribe actually got to play against Dave many, many years ago. He had actually been a walk-on at Syracuse University and very nearly made the team except for the fact that he wanted to concentrate on his academics. He had come home for the holidays and he played some of us in the Dresden high school gym. It was a scrimmage I will never forget. Dave was so used to playing basketball at a high level, he could dribble rings around the rest of us. I found it comical and I reminded him that when I saw him last weekend.
Dave at one time in his career worked in lower Manhattan, I believe on Wall Street. So I brought up in our conversation the financial meltdown of 2008. I asked him where he was when he heard that Lehman Brothers had evaporated over the weekend, an event that precipitated our financial meltdown last year. I told him that as an economics writer I truly didn’t know how to judge that. It was almost like the apocalypse was coming. I was interested to hear his response because he had worked there at the time. His response to me was very similar to the way I felt in that he found it unbelievable that Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. He also related to me how at the time he really didn’t know what was going to happen moving forward. Needless to say, after talking to him it made me feel little better that maybe I do know what I’m talking about from time to time.
As the dancing in celebration was winding down, there was really no choice but to start heading back north to meet all of our obligations come Monday. It was a wonderful celebration of two people’s love for each other and how they met each other, one from Peru and one from Dresden in Atlanta I’ll never know. Seeing all the friends and family gathered together was a wonderful experience and something that we should always cherish. Life in many ways is about passages, passages on to better things ahead. Weddings are only one example of that. I suppose the Lehman Brothers debacle is another. However, sometimes it’s just good to get away from it all at least for a day or two. As my friend Forrest Gump once said, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. “