Writing a personal blog becomes a creature all its own, taking on a life, even after it has served its purpose

When I started this in September 2009, a month before my 65th birthday, the intent was to get fit and healthy enough to be able to walk the 18 holes of a hilly golf course in the height of summer’s heat without being too exhausted at the end to raise a glass at the 19th hole. Okay, so nobody’s that tired, but you get the idea.

There were other considerations, of course. The desire to look good in my clothing without having to hide bits and pieces under strategically folded jackets or overblouses, a dressing strategy employed by my late mother. I never realized how much I had picked up from her subtle clothing cues until the notion hit me that it was not a sin to tuck in a shirt or wear a belt. In my mother’s defense, she had a rather startling embonpoint, as the French say. It was an attempt to hide her curves that cause her to favour untucked clothes.

(I am always reminded of a party I had in Grade 9, at a time when one’s parents were mandatory chaperones. My parents met the guests at the door and when one of my friends came downstairs, eyes wide as only a testosterone-laced 14-year-old boy’s can be, he wanted to know: “Who’s the babe at the front door in the blue dress?” I was affronted by his attraction as he was startled to discover it was my mother. Amazing what conversations one can remember verbatim for more than 50 years.)

Once I realized I could tuck in my shirts, I then, of course, managed to lose my waist. It’s a feeling not unfamiliar to a lot of post-menopausal women, who pull out a perfectly good pair of shorts from the bottom drawer, only to find they fit everywhere except the waist. How did that happen? And don’t even mention strapless dresses and bathing suits.

Just over a year ago, I wrote: “My goals are simple: To spend the next year, until October, 2010, trying to reconcile the 65-year-old body with the 18-year-old who still looks out through my eyes, amazed at what she sees. When did my skin forget where it belonged? Who owns that turkey neck? Where did that cellulite come from? And, most importantly, why on earth does any of this matter?’

Along the way, as this blog became more personal – because just writing about dieting and exercising would have put me into a self-induced coma —so much of myself has sometimes unwittingly been uncovered. But it has had the effect of encouraging a whole let of other women to share their stories with me, and much more introspection than I expected of myself.

That’s not always a good thing — the introspection. People like me, who can blithely ignore self-examination even as we pry into other people and their personal lives, at some point have to stop and take out our own copybook and flip through the pages of memory.

Memoir, as Neil Genzlinger wrote in the New York Times book review section a couple of weeks ago, has been overtaken by “our current age of oversharing.” Just because you believe your life is fascinating, doesn’t make it so. Ever so often, people — who have made an entire career our of chronicling other people’s lives and adventures, who were paid to have an opinion on things from war to feminism (don’t think they aren’t related) — need to stop and, as Genzlinger writes, remember “the lost art of shutting up.”

The flood of pointless and uninteresting memoirs needs to stop, he writes. “We don’t have that many trees left.”

The Internet, free as it is from the need for trees and the physicality of paper, has ushered in a whole new era of vanity self-publishing. It has been culpable in unleashing the tsunami of would-be writers who have never met an editor and never believed the world wasn’t interested in their thoughts and beliefs. Their parents always told them they were special, therefore they must be.

In an earlier time, there were boundaries between the personal and the public. The entire world did not want to be on a television reality show. People understood there were subjects taboo in polite conversation — when there actually was a concept of polite conversation that was not riddled with vulgarities and obscenities. (And I am probably as culpable as the next loudmouth.)

So, like all “books,” this needs to come to an end.

But it also needs resolution.

I also wrote a year ago: “Where to start? What to aim for? Why am I doing this?

“The last is the easiest question to answer: I want my body to reflect how I feel about myself. I want to face my senior years fit and healthy.

“Aging is insidious for women. We are judged more harshly than men on our appearance and our age, the double whammy. Men get ‘distinguished.’ Women get ‘old.’ Yet we are not our grandmothers, even if we are, ourselves, grandmothers.”

On the surface, my plan has been a success. I am considerably healthier — notwithstanding the heart medication I must take — and much more fit, a combination of walking regularly and being weekly attendees at core fitness classes. Joining in the Calgary Herald’s first Health Club certainly helped.

But the best physical result is having kept off the weight I lost a few years ago, a considerable change from every other time in my life that I’ve lost 50 pounds only to put it back on — and then some — within two years. Maybe the psychological reason for dong this blog was to keep me alert to the fact that it has happened more times than I care to remember.

In the bargain, I’ve lost another 10 pounds, but alas, still not found my waist. My solution to this is simple: Give away all the clothes that no longer fit.

For those who have never struggled with their weight and lost a million battles, the idea that someone can wake up one day and be 60 pounds heavier is absurd. How can this possibly happen? How do you not notice that your wardrobe is getting larger and larger?

Trust me, self-delusion is an art unto itself. At least knowing that and paying attention helps considerably, as does the questionable habit of standing on the bathroom scales every morning, an action no weight counselor advises. But I’m a grown-up, capable of making my own rules. If I want to stand on my husband’s “doctor’s office” scales every morning, I will.

And I do. And I will.

And maybe having written thousands upon thousands of words in the past 18 months, having enjoyed the comments of friends and strangers, I’ll take on another blog.

I’m open to suggestions.

Until then, as the title of this final chapter says, and as old-fashioned typesetters and journalists wrote at the end of their copy:

-30-

Did I do it? Sort of. The golf improved immeasurably with the help of my brother who — many of his friends and critics would be surprised to discover — can be an enthusiastic and patient coach, albeit one given to shouting. (Not for nothing is our family dubbed the Shout Family.)

Clint’s shouting was mostly centred on my seeming inability to keep my left arm straight in my backswing. As I pointed out to him, let him try it wearing a 38C bra and see how well he can do it. That, of course, is merely an excuse. Other women golf with this, er, impediment. Nonetheless, with Clint’s coaching, his partner’s enthusiastic support, at least once-a-week golf with all sorts of new friends from the Deloitte and Friends golf league, my game has improved.

But the challenge of playing in summer heat didn’t arrive, largely because summer didn’t deign to appear.

And playing a round in the worst of weather with the best of companions I reached a new level, even if I do say so myself. Bobby Wilson, 2010 winner of both the senior and super senior long drive competition, sponsored by ReMax, is as much fun one on one as he is showing a crowd of golfers his extraordinary golf skills. He’s patient, he’s funny and, unlike so many other professional athletes, he’s not full of himself.

Take a 54-year-old good ol’ boy from Waco, Texas, who lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, plunk him down on a soggy, windy hilltop in Calgary in possibly the coldest day of what passed for summer this year and suggest he golf with the sponsors of the Peter Gzowski Invitational tournament, held for the first time at Country Hills Golf Club.

The staff at Country Hills were wonderful to us, the course is great, the reception warm — if not the weather — but nothing can change the geography of its setting, most of which seems to have a direct line to the north and its bitter winds. That Tuesday proved why so many Calgarians go south for the winter. That Tuesday reminded us that it can be bitterly cold without any snow falling. The ambient temperature couldn’t have been above +4C, just warm enough to discourage snow and encourage rain.

We Calgarians know how to dress for the outdoors, so I waddled into the pro shop wearing a long-sleeved turtleneck wool sweater under a V-necked sweater, covered by a thick fleece jacket. Under a pair of lined, winter wool slacks I was wearing a set of pale blue long underwear (my husband’s and don’t ask about the fly) and knee socks. On my head were mink earmuffs which caused one guy to call me Princess Leia, thereby telling me his age and his taste in movies.

I looked and felt like a kid in her new winter snowsuit, but nothing I wore could compare to the getup Bobby Wilson arrived in. Remember the Norwegian curling team (they came fourth) at the Winter Olympics? The argyle white, red and blue pants? Magnify the eye-popping “appeal” over the lanky 6-foot 3-inch Wilson. And those Cherry Bombs were just one pair of the trademarked Loudmouth Pants Wilson owns. He says they help him stand out in a crowd. No kidding.

Wilson charmed all of us, but there’s a special place in my heart for him. With an oh-so-subtle Texas accent, further softened by living in Little Rock, he made a few suggestions and then when my drives improved immeasurably, let me believe it wasn’t him that did it, but my own innate athleticism and talent. Charm? The guy’s got it in spades if, looking at this duffer, he could convince her that she could be a golfer with only a littlie more practice.

I’ve come through this year-long “challenge for change” with a new perspective. I’ve had to admit that my days with a waist are long gone, and unless I want to resort to plastic surgery, I can live with the scrawny chicken neck, but I am most assuredly more fit than when I started.

In our weekly core fitness class, my balance has improved only slightly, but my flexibility and strength is better.

When I started this blog, I wrote that my goals were not outrageous. “I do not expect to be 30 or 40 again. I do not expect to look 30 or 40, merely to be as healthy and fit as possible, as I enter a new phase in my life.” I wrote that just before my 65th birthday. Today, I face 66 with a renewed energy.

I also wrote that I am not alone on this journey. “Men and women my age now expect to remain vigorous and useful long past the traditional retirement age.”

Behind me are many more to come. My generation, born during the Second World War, are the lucky ones who did not have much peer-group competition. My career as a newspaper writer started with nothing more exotic than a letter to my father’s friend, who was the city editor of the Calgary Herald at the time. Dad had called him, asking if Larry O’Hara would “take my older daughter off my hands and give her a job.”

O’Hara did and I have never forgotten his kindness to a friend’s inexperienced daughter. Most of O’Hara’s contemporaries are gone now, as is he, but they live on in the memories of those to whom they passed on the lessons of how to be a newspaper reporter, lessons that can’t be learned from books or in a classroom. Nobody can teach you how to knock on the door of a family whose son or daughter has just been killed and ask for a photograph. That kind of sensitivity comes with heart and experience, and on-the-job teachers.

I had a lot of them.

Behind me is the Baby Boomer generation, including my sister (born in 1950) and my brother (born in 1957.)

While my generation numbered 2.2 million in 1996, the Baby Boomers numbered 9.8 million that same year. They follow me into senior citizen status starting a year from now. I don’t think our society is ready for the aging Boomers, for the demands they will make on everything from home care to hospitals. And let’s not even mention the pension plan.

But all of this is inevitable. As is the end of this blog.

NEXT: What now?

Then there’s a certain husband who believes the only suitable bread for sandwiches is some chewy concoction known as linseed rye, which he buys at a specialty bakery and which has the consistency of carpet underpadding.

But what has Plato got to do with this? As I remember from first-year university philosophy, Plato’s theory simplified meant, for example, that there was one perfect table. Every other table was merely a shadow of the perfect thing. Therefore, there must be one perfect roast beef sandwich existing somewhere in the ethos, because I never got served one. Never, in my many years of taking lunch to school.

I remember few school lunches because rarely was there an occasion to remember them. In high school, there was a small cafeteria in St. Mary’s High, for the approximately 400 Catholic teenagers — boys on one side of the school; girls on the other — living on the south side of Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River. (Catholic students on the north side went to St. Joseph’s.) Whatever was served in the cafeteria other than french fries and gravy has been lost in the mists of time. And maybe my mind was elsewhere, given that the cafeteria was one of the few chances for students to mingle with the opposite sex.

In elementary school, both in Calgary and Edmonton, I walked home for lunch. And yes, everyone’s mother was presumed to be at home during the day.

In junior high, there must have been someplace to eat lunch because going to Our Lady of Mount Carmel meant an Edmonton Transit bus ride to 109th Street and a four-block walk down 76th to the school. Lunch I don’t remember. Presumably, as to this day, we ate lunch in the gym.

Obviously, as far as school lunches are concerned I can’t really remember my mother ever making me lunch. She must have, although by the time I got to high school my mother’s idea of a school lunch usually meant something way too embarrassing for a teenager — something along the lines of a tossed salad, a subtle reminder of how much I weighed.

And my obsession with roast beef? Jackie Carpentier (now Jackie de Bruin – she married Rudy who was one year behind us in high school) used to bring roast beef sandwiches to school every Monday. I though her parents must be really rich, because what late 1950’s housewife would waste a perfectly good leftover roast on her kid’s school lunch?

In our house, roast beef was Sunday dinner and the leftovers appeared for dinner on Monday. By Tuesday, whatever was left became hash. My mother may never have been Julia Child in the kitchen, but none of us went hungry and there was always lots of food on the table. Yet, there was something about school lunches that defeated my mother. When I got old enough to wield a knife without danger of losing a finger, she resigned the job.

As I remember, peanut butter and strawberry jam was the easiest to get together in the morning, seeing that the peanut butter was already out on the counter for the breakfast obligatory slices of toast. But my heart was never in the process of making my own school lunch. Like most teenagers, the lure of French fries smothered in gravy (eew) was far more interesting than homemade stuff, as there was never a chance of getting a roast beef sandwich.

Every year, in September, well-meaning home economists draw up a list of suggestions for making kids’ school lunches more nutritious and more fun. I’ve never been convinced that children want surprises in their school lunches.

After writing a column 25 years ago on school lunches and how kids didn’t want surprises, the Grade 3 students of St. Sylvester School, taught by my one of my university roommates, Carney Wakaryk, invited me to come and have lunch with them. It occurs to me just now that every one of those children is likely now making school lunches for their own children.

I went to the school, they fed me lunch — a peanut butter and jam sandwich on white bread, three cookies, an orange, and some of that flavoured drink in a tetra pack — and they grilled me, including one question concerning my age, which resulted in one nine-year-old saying: “You’re older than my dad.” (Out of the mouth of babes.)

It occurred to me that a smart investor (which I am not, given the fact I didn’t invest in Trivial Pursuit at the beginning, when I was asked, and neither did I buy gold at $35 an ounce) would have cornered the market on some “truly wretched-looking stuff called fruit roll-ups which resembles translucent ironed plasticine, or that sickly sweet, flavoured water marketed in a paper box with a baby straw, I’d be rich,” I wrote.

All of this was occasioned by suggestions, printed in the Calgary Herald just before the first day of a new school year, on what kind of snacks kids should take to school in order to fend off scurvy or starvation. (Okay, so I made that last bit up.)

But mothers are still, all these long years later, at the mercy of well-meaning home economists and dieticians who suggest creative ways to make a mother’s life more complicated. Add in the seeming proliferation of food allergies (no joke) and the challenge of school lunches and snacks are magnified. The suggestion, 25 years ago, that an ideal snack for mid-morning recess break would be to coat a peeled banana in peanut butter thinned with orange juice, rolled in nuts and frozen won’t cut it today. You can’t take nuts or peanut butter in your lunch for fear of triggering an allergic reaction, but maybe that’s a good thing. I can’t imagine a nine-year-old pulling out this “snack” in front of his peers and enduring the snickers all around.

Lest you think I’m anti-good nutrition for children I offer the following: The Heart and Stroke Foundation has oodles of advice in pamphlet form concerned with healthy eating. I know this because I sit on the fund development board and am thrilled that all sorts of information is available if people just look for it (Try www.heartandstroke.ca for a wealth of information on healthy eating and family recipes.)

Alternatively, log on to the Heart and Stroke Foundation Facebook page and click on the healthy lunches, which includes all sorts of alternatives for my ubiquitous peanut butter and jam sandwich which, given the prevalence of allergies these days, no kid can take to school anyway. (Please note that this blog won’t correctly print an ampersand, so I am forced to use the word “and.”)

And while you’re at it, do what my mother did: let them make their own lunches. That way, they’re never surprised.

NEXT: The final push: three weeks to go.

September brings regular routine back and such routines are necessary when there are children around. There are lunches to pack and dinners to plan and bedtime negotiations to be dealt with. While I’ve managed to escape all of that in my adult life, even childless people move to the rhythm of every school year. Maybe it’s something that’s bred in the bone.

Calgary’s public and separate school students start school tomorrow, on September 2. The year-round schools went back to the books a month ago. Many of Calgary’s private schools started classes last week. But whatever school or program a student attends — and I’m old-fashioned enough to believe school shouldn’t start until the Tuesday after Labour Day — the entire city has a different rhythm come September.

Educational experts have deemed this question moot. Moot as in open to debate or discussion. Really, they don’t care if you’ve planned holidays right through to this coming long weekend, they and not you, decide.

And what administrators have decided in recent years is that schools are no longer “public” places. The latest wrinkle in school-as-prison involves making the kids wear lanyards with photo identification, the better to control who’s in the school and who doesn’t belong there. I’m old enough to shudder at the thought of having to produce “papers” to identify yourself, whether that’s to go to school or to buy something with a credit card at Shopper’s Drug Mart. The latter’s feeble explanation about “security” falls on my uncaring ears.

And no, thank you, I do not want to “buy” a bag if I’ve just spent a couple of hundred dollars on non-essential cosmetics. And spare me the supercilious explanation about how it’s all about the environment; it’s about saving the drug store a bundle in plastic bags while the corporation is allowed to feel smug about it’s “contribution” to the ecology of the planet. Frankly, if the planet is your concern, give me a bio-degradable paper bag for my purchases and spare me the lecture.

Speaking of which, I managed to drop a few hundred dollars at The Bay a couple of weeks ago, and being a good global citizen, this time I remembered to bring a bag because The Bay has also jumped on the “look what we’re doing for the planet” bandwagon. It was a re-useable Safeway bag, but apparently The Bay doesn’t care what kind of a bag, as long as you produce one or buy one.

If you think my nose gets out of joint when the clerk in Shopper’s tries to sell me a bag while willingly taking my money, imagine my reaction when the smarmy Bay clerk asked if I needed a bag while ringing up hundreds of dollars on my account. Need a bag? This snippy women has to stand on her tippy-toes to peer over the pile of bathroom towels (6 bath towels; 3 bath sheets; 8 hand towels; four facecloths; three bath mats and a toilet-seat cover) sitting on the counter and she wants to know if I need a bag? I brandished the one I brought and asked if she thought, in her infinite wisdom, that this pile of stuff — pointing at the towels I had spontaneously bought — would fit in this bag I was waving around? Maybe I was Merlin the Magician and I could wave my wand and everything would magically transport itself to the car?

But, again, I digress. This was supposed to be about schools and school lunches and nutrition and how we all get back into the usual rhythm of life in September, even those of us without school-age children or any reason to follow a schedule.

Instead, this is about some of the irritations in life that vanish during the summer when life is not as regimented. And “regimented” seems to be the best word to describe the parlous state of our schools, desperate to deflect crazies, nutbars, and students with mayhem, mischief or murder on their minds.

Security has become the password of our civilization, whether we are dealing with airlines or schools. When I was working full-time I resisted for as long as possible wearing an electronic card that would open the outside doors and, naturally, tell whoever kept the records what times I entered and what times I left. Exactly what is the difference, I asked nobody in particular, between that and punching a time clock? That is a form of personal humiliation meted out to hourly workers in factories who apparently can’t be trusted to put in a full day.

But those arguments are long lost. At least we have not, as yet, insisted every child be “fitted” with a microchip to identify them, in the same way we insert a microchip into our pets’ bodies.

Oh, that’s right — cell phones with GPS systems do about the same thing, although phones can be easily passed from one teen to another. Still, given the pervasiveness of cell phones these days, what kid needs to borrow one? They all seem to have their own, glued to their ears along with their iPods.

September brings new chances, I believe, and this is partly why I started this blog last September, although the prime reason was my looming “senior” birthday in early October and my seeming inability to walk 18 holes of our golf course without being fatigued. So, while I won’t be hitting the books this month, or teaching any classes, my rhythms change with the school season, too.

For the past couple of weeks our newspapers have been filled with back-to-school stories about everything from physical education to non-boring lunches: How to tempt your kids who take their lunches to school.

This, I have never understood: if there is a single group of people who do not like change, do not want to deal with it and resist it with all their little might, it’s children. Some of us never grow out of that. I’m one. Sometimes my husband asks why, when we go for lunch in Canmore, I insist on eating the same thing — to the point that the Sage Bistro server doesn’t even bother giving me a menu any more, just pours me a Grumpy Bear from the Canmore-based micro-brewery, Grizzly Paw, and waits patiently for Ted to decide which of the menu items he’ll try that day.

It’s not that I’m against change, per se, but when you find something you love, why switch to something else? Isn’t that the reason most of us get married?

And my favourite saying about time and change comes from Marcel Proust, whose taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea causes him to relive his childhood: “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”

So, forgive the rambling and the rant and next time, I’ll talk about school and food.

NEXT: All I ever wanted was a roast-beef sandwich.

We are spending four days in the pristine wilderness at the foot of Mt. Assiniboine, at Assiniboine Lodge, comfortable in a log cabin. Indeed, comfortable without the basics of “civilized” travel – indoor plumbing. And you know what? We don’t care.

What’s an en suite when compared to the privilege of being able to explore the wilderness all around us that is, in essence, our back yard here in the West?

Mt. Assiniboine Lodge lies at the foot of the mountain nestled into the meadow at the edge of Lake Magog. The lodge and its six guest cabins share the nearly 40,000 hectares of wilderness that is Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park with rustic cabins for hikers, overseen by a B.C. Park Ranger office with the Canadian flag flying in the foreground, and even-more rustic public campgrounds. They are part of an original concept of wilderness tourism first promoted by the CPR. There isn’t a road, a suit, a convenience store, a television or any other modern convenience for miles in any direction.

Access is by helicopter, although the more rugged can hike in (and back out) from Sunshine Village over about 26 kilometers of mountain terrain. Needless to say, we opted for the helicopter which whisks six guests at a time through the mountain valley from Mt. Shark, a spectacular 12-minute ride, hugging the mountainside and swooping over lakes, streams and mountain passes.

We had been here before, many years ago, but when we learned the lodge would be closed for nearly two years for renovations at the end of this year, we were moved to return to experience the magic of the place.

Part of that magic is due to the Renner family who, for the past 28 years, have operated Assiniboine Lodge, loving it and caring for its guests winter and summer. Sepp and Barb Renner and their children, Andre, Sara and Natalie and assorted in-laws in recent years have poured their love of the mountains and their considerable enthusiasm and experience into what they see as a trust for all Canadians and a wilderness experience for tourists.

They lead hikes in the summer — one easy, one more challenging each day — and ski and snowshoe treks in the winter. Breakfast and dinner (they now have a wine and beer license, which obviates the need to haul in wine in your backpack) are provided as part of the package, and lunch is a pack-your-own-for-your-hike deal. I had forgotten how a brisk hike in the mountain air whets one’s appetite, and finding a sunny rock on which to picnic is part of the experience.

One day for lunch we were joined by a cow moose and her yearling calf, wading through Lake Gog and stopping to snack on the lakeside grasses. Ground squirrels and hares are commonplace as is, apparently, a resident grizzly and her cubs that are snuffling around Wonder Pass. She was, said Alex, one of the workers who are preparing the site for renovations, “friendly” and non-aggressive. Should we meet her, “just talk to her,” he said one day. Personally, I’d rather not, I thought, admitting to myself that coming face to face with a grizzly, regardless of her “friendly” status was not my idea of a good time.

But all of that is incidental right now, with Mt. Assiniboine rising before us, 4000 metres into the clouds. On the porch of the lodge, powerful binoculars allow guests to watch the progress of the climbers who, like all of their breed, never met a mountain they didn’t want to clamber up. One day, in the sleeting hail which turned to rain, the consensus was that snuggling down with a book in the sitting room of the lodge made more sense than tackling anything out of doors. This, incidentally, did not deter a group of climbers.

Actually, any whining that might have been occasioned by the weather was immediately quelled the night the staff recognized Margaret’s impending 90th birthday. She was there, with her daughter and son-in-law, Judy and Ken, putting all but the most serious trekkers half her age to shame.

And that’s part of the charm of Assiniboine — the old hands who return every year mix with the first-timers and everyone is on a first-name basis. (The lodge boasts a 100-percent occupancy rate and a 70 percent return rate.)

But one sunny and cloudless day made everything magical again. A seven-kilometre hike through the wildflowers to Sunburst Lake and Cerulean Lake (which is, incidentally, the right colour of sky blue)

The Renners’ stay has not been without rancour or political interference, but that’s my take on the issue, not theirs. They are not critical of the hoops through which the B.C. government (which owns this World Heritage Site), has made them jump over the years. At the most they are frustrated at the typical bureaucracy that perforce surrounds anything any government, likely anywhere in the world, manages to promote.

Even after nearly three decades, the family does not know if the provincial government will find their son’s tender acceptable. Rumour has it that Andre’s proposal is the only one extant.

It is impossible to imagine anyone replacing them and their incredible hospitality.

Getting there from here was an experience in itself. Had we any pre-warning of the state of the gravel Smith-Dorrien/Spray Lakes Highway from Canmore to Mt. Shark, we would have opted for the ride from the Canmore heliport. Whatever provincial department is in charge of such things — presumably the Alberta Ministry of Transportation and the minister in charge, Luke Ouellette — has clearly been playing hooky this summer. The road is pitted with potholes and the parts that aren’t covered in holes that can eat a hubcap, are teeth-jarring, fender-rattling washboard. Nowhere on any provincial government Web site is there a warning about any of Alberta’s highways, let alone this monster. In their colour-coded maps, everything is green all the way, indicating a highway in good condition.

Maybe Minister Ouellette could pry himself loose from Sylvan Lake sometime this summer (he’s the Tory MLA for Sylvan Lake-Innisfail) and take a trip on one of the few highways in Alberta that isn’t paved. Certainly, in the minister’s trips from the Legislature in Edmonton to his constituency office, it’s blacktop all the way. (Although he’s had nothing to do with Highway 11 and 11A, which have been paved since I can remember, so there’s no hint of patronage at work.)

I’m sure some government flunky will patiently explain to anyone who’ll listen that the weather has been iffy all summer and rain has been washing out the gravel roads, but are there no graders available for at least one pass over this highway? Or is it a fact that the Tourism Ministry hold sway over all the tourists areas and nobody wants to tell the tourists to take out extra insurance on their rented car, for fear of frightening away some travelers? Just asking, of course.

How bad is the road? The 42-kilometer ride jarred the battery on the car loose enough to lose the connection. Luckily, there was an SUV at the parking lot, the booster cables were in the trunk, and the profuse swearing at the Minister of Highways in absentia fixed the problem momentarily. The ride back achieved the same end, and the following day a friend gave me a hand and tightened everything back up.

But all that waited for us at the end of our wedding anniversary sojourn

This trip came with a bonus. I still am not an avid hiker, but I realized that the 50 pounds I have shed since our last visit made the rugged outdoors far easier to maneuver. Dare I say it was pleasurable?

Certainly, it was beneficial, and while I already knew that walking was great exercise, it turns out hiking (even without the hiking boots) is even better. Fitness expert Helen Vanderburg says so in The Calgary Herald.

“Hiking can be one of the most comprehensive exercises you can do. Add a backpack and your workout intensity will soar,” she writes. (I admit that Ted hoisted the backpack with our water, lunch, rain gear and the much-used and much-loved book, Wildflowers of the Canadian Rockies by George Scotter and Halle Flygar.)

“Taking a nature hike has added benefits when it comes to training and strengthening the body,” writes Vanderburg.

One of our added benefits? The thrill of running into George Scotter, on one of our walks, as we were consulting his book.

NEXT: “Real” life resumes.

It’s now August and we’re still waiting for summer. It has been a tease this year, promising hot weather and then delivering a stingy day of it with the rest of the week – and the weekends — characterized by rain and hail, cool temperatures (my basil plants are shivering and cuddling up to each other) and way too much thunder and lightning.

We’re still waiting for some semblance of summer. Instead of garnishing the usual summertime drinks, umbrellas have been needed this year to keep the rain off, although umbrellas and raincoats are not common in our closets. Here on the treeless plains and in the foothills, the climate usually resembles a desert than a rainforest. Few of us who haven’t lived on either coast have the requisite umbrella and raincoat that kind of climate requires.

It’s also not common here in the Alberta foothills, to look out over the landscape this late in the year and see rich fields of green rolling toward the Rockies. By August in a normal year, the unirrigated land would have been burned to an umber shade by now.

But this has not been a normal summer.

Those of you who don’t golf maybe don’t understand that hail, rain and cool temperatures don’t usually deter the committed, but lighting will clear a golf course faster than a bear can clear a campground. . Every golf course is equipped with an ear-splitting early warning system that sends a single message – get off the course and under cover right now. Being the tallest item in the middle of the surrounding landscape and brandishing a metal club is a recipe for disaster.

Six years ago, 19 golfers were stuck by lightning at a makeshift golf course in Colorado. They told the Today show that the bolt arced from man to man as they emerged from their cars — where they had retreated from the storm — thinking the danger had passed. In Canada, about seven people are killed each year by lightning and 60 to 70 injured. As late as last week, a 22-year-old South African working in Southern Alberta was killed by a direct hit.

The most famous golfer to survive a lightning strike is Lee Trevino, the first to win the British Open, U.S. Open and the Canadian Open in the same year (1971). Only Tiger Woods has matched that record. Trevino was hit during a tournament in 1975. He apparently joked that he’d been hit by lightning, had served in the U.S. Marines and he now feared nothing — except his wife. (Insert mandatory feminist groan here.)

In our family, we have a heightened respect for the power of lightning. More than 30 years ago, in the heat of August, my then-20-year-old brother, a university student, survived a direct hit while working on a paving crew for the summer.

That he wasn’t killed is a miracle; that he survived with no scars visible when he’s dressed is astounding. He joked while still in the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton that he stood a greater chance of being hit by lightning again than winning the lottery. It could be one reason why none of us buy lottery tickets on a regular basis, the odds being what they are.

Despite the weather this summer (who still doesn’t believe in climate change?) I do have one of those unmistakable golfer tans on my feet and my left hand (the one that wear the glove) is decidedly paler than the right.

Still, as I told Leslie, my dream of 18 holes without flagging is still in the distance. Of course I’ve golfed more than 18 holes this year, but no game has not required some mechanical help.

My friend Janice , whose knee has been acting up, has needed a cart to golf this year and has willingly given me a ride on the tougher holes, (There are a few at our golf course that seem to require the skill and mentality of a mountain goat.)

Nine holes have become a snap, although the course at which a group of us golf nine holes each Thursday evening demands more walking than seems normal. The day I wore a pedometer, I logged nearly eight kilometers, the average length (five miles) a golfer walks over 18 holes. Of course, some of that distance could be attributed to my crappy golf game which necessitates flailing all over the course.

When Mark Twain described golf as “ good walk spoiled” he likely had no love of he game. I don’t know what ignited my interest in golf, but to this day I regret not agreeing to my father’s invitation to learn to golf. I distinctly remember thinking it was a stupid way to spend a day, but I wish I could take all that back. At the very least, had I learned at a younger age, there would be some muscle memory available to me now. Like bike-riding, one never really forgets. Muscle memory remains long after the finer points of a sport has vanished with age and disuse.

Twain clearly didn’t have the argument that golf is good exercise to counter his ”spoiled” walk attitude. But writer Brent Kelly did, and he quotes a lengthy Associated Press piece outlining a sports scientist’s study that shows walking a golf course contributes to a lower risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So those of us who golf and walk the course can be somewhat smug about the time and expense that playing golf requires

Kelly writes: “The study concludes that golfers who walk 36 holes a week will burn around 2,900 calories per week. The threshold of 2,500 calories burned in a week is an important one; according to the AP article, ‘studies have shown that those who burn 2,500 calories a week improve their overall health by lowering their risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer’.”

The only thing better on the golf course than walking is walking and carrying your own bag. Evidentially, carrying your own golf clubs while walking the course will improve your score, too.

Writes Kelly: “Many golf purists argue that walking the golf course is not only better for your health (no doubt about that), but also better for your score. The thinking is that when walking the course, the golfers sees more: He or she takes in what lies ahead of them on the hole, has time to consider options and to think about club and shot selection.”

Well, the caddying isn’t going to work for me, but I still hold out hope for the good walk.

NEXT: Hiking in the mountains, No, really.

I look at those numbers and think how completely different life is for 65-year-old women today. One of those women is me. A few million of us are still wondering how we got to be this old and how we managed not to be our grandmothers. Credit feminism, work, careers, choice, modern education and, probably, good nutrition and better health care. Those of us 65 years old today were born during the Second World War, but we were raised in boom times, albeit always reminded of the Depression and, of course, the war.

Two of the many things that set us apart from our grandmothers is our right to choose to work and our attitude toward retirement. One does follow the other, circuitous though it might be. The concept of retirement was almost a completely male thing for our grandparents. Many were raised at a time when women might take some job — as nurses, teachers or office workers — but that was not their life. That life was husband and family, and the work never stopped. It would lessen, of course, when the children left home, but the “job” of homemaker never ceased. It still doesn’t.

So the concept of retiring from a full-time occupation, from a career chosen freely and without complaint, is a modern construct.

And, I’ve managed to fail at it. When I took early retirement nearly six years ago, it wasn’t the same as downing tools. It’s not as if sitting in an office and having opinions required much heavy lifting. But a combination of factors — one of which was a chronic heart condition — led me to embrace Freedom 55 plus five.

That was then. This is now. Better health; less stress. So, I’ve gone back to “work.” Not that my husband calls it that. But I’m now writing a weekly column for an on-line news service and newspaper called Troy Media. (www.troymedia.com) It appears every Sunday and has been cheekily titled My Call.

All of this got me thinking about my grandmother, at least the one I knew. My Irish grandmother, Kate Regan Tunney, died in 1950, her husband following her a few years later.

So the only grandparents I knew were my father’s parents. And I remember how old his mother appeared to me. She was an avid sportswoman, but I only know that from slightly out-of-focus photographs of her in a long skirt, standing beside a tent and holding a fishing rod — a willowy young woman in the fresh mountain air. I never knew that woman who loved to fish in the Highwood River and camp in the mountains.

The Kate Ford I and my only first cousin on that side of the family, Paul Perkins — two years older than me — knew was a kindly little old lady who loved bridge, tea, Central United Church, the YMCA and YWCA and playing the piano. We only ever knew the plump grey-haired woman in a housedress or a simple suit and, when she went out, the obligatory hat.

Her generation’s idea of retirement was nothing more exotic than having her children give her grandchildren upon whom she could dote. She had married late, at 30, after teaching school in Ontario. She had waited for her future husband, Clinton James Ford, to set himself up as a lawyer in Calgary and return east to marry her. She had her first child, Helen Margaret, at 31 and her last, Thomas Fullerton, at 42. In between there was William and Robert or, as they were known, Billy and Bobby. Bob was my father.

I mention all this family history because the idea of retirement would have been completely foreign to Grandmother. When she died, her husband was still working, long past 65, yet to be appointed Chief Justice of Alberta and the Northwest Territories. She did not live long enough to see the only grandson to bear her husband’s name and follow his profession as a lawyer, my brother, Clinton William Ford.

It is the arrogance of the young to believe that youth belongs to them. They will eventually learn that the young person they are now will still be there a few decades along. Still there, but hidden under the inevitable signs of age, including the faces earned throughout life. I’m reminded of an incident at a lunch years ago when my friend said, of the elderly hostess who had invited all of us, that she would like to look like her when she was reached that advanced age. Overhearing this exchange, one of the other guests leaned across the table and said: “You have to start out really, really beautiful to look like that at 80.”

True, maybe, but there are women in this world who start out plain and end up beautiful because age strips away the façade to reveal the inner beauty. I don’t expect anyone without wrinkles to appreciate or understand that sentiment.

Mostly, though, we don’t feel old — at least those of us who aren’t stricken with some disease they can’t ignore. I can only conjecture that, at this age, my grandmother didn’t feel old either.

I belong to the first feminist generation to define retirement as quitting full-time work. My grandmother, the teacher, “retired” to be married. My mother, the nurse, “retired” when she was pregnant with me.

As we retire, even those of us who “fail” and go back to work or work even harder at volunteering, aren’t necessarily following any ground rules. There is at least one simple reason for that: Right behind us, snapping at our heels is what Landon Y. Jones called “the pig passing through the python,” also known as the Baby Boomers. (A phrase Jones coined.)

The first of the Baby Boomers turns 65 in 2012 and just as they have all of their lives, they will again change the priorities of the world they inhabit — for the good, the bad, or the horrible.

(It is noted that the Canadian baby boom started a year later than the U.S. boom. The reason, according to demographer David Foot, is that American troops started coming home in 1945 and the U.S. baby boom began in 1946. “Canadian troops came home later, so Canadian births did not leap upwards until 1947,” writes Foot in his and Daniel Stoffman’s demographic study, Boom, Bust and Echo.)

When the boomers retire, they will rewrite the entire notion of retirement. “When they get interested in a particular product or idea, we all have to sit up and take notice,” writes Foot.

I suspect all I am doing in taking on paid work again is anticipating that my sister and brother — and the millions in their cohort — will abolish the notion of retirement as a time of doing nothing.

NEXT: Summer’s treats, temptations and drinks with umbrellas in them

Actually, that’s a good thing. Thinking I am her in so many gestures and even beliefs makes me treasure her memory more. For all of the difficulties that naturally arise between mother and daughter and all the selfish, whiny books such relationships have spawned, our mother has left a storehouse of wonderful memories for all three of her children.

I know my relationship with my mother was vastly different than my sister’s with the same woman. My sister lives, I believe, much freer of Mother’s influence and much freer of any need for validation from her. In a way, I envy that. I truly wish I didn’t care: didn’t care what Mother thought, didn’t care what anyone thought, other that my own inner compass. And now, I care too much what my sister thinks. Of all the women in the world, she is the most dear to me and what she thinks matters. Maybe that’s more a reflection of me than her — having grown up wanting to see myself reflected back in the eyes of my mother, here I am at 65 still needing validation.

“For all of us raised in the current style of Western family life, the relationship with mother birthed us physically and emotionally, gave us our first experiences with love and need, disappointment and hurt,” write Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach in Between Women: Love Envy and Competition in Women’s Friendships.

That emotional relationship with our mother, its legacy, “is etched in the deepest recesses of our hearts. It is the guide and foundation for our future relationship. It sets up needs, ways of being, ways of loving, expectations and hopes.”

Then there’s the adage that counsels prospective husbands to look to their lover’s mother to see what the future holds. And while that advice is clearly meant as a warning, there’s much truth in the thought. William Shakespeare said it better, though in his third sonnet: “Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee/ Calls back the lovely April of her prime.”

That mirror of our mother colours all of our relationships. Write Eichenbaum and Orbach: “The social context of the mother-daughter relationship is an important key to explaining not only the bittersweet nature of that relationship but its impact on adult women’s relationship. As we understand what could and could not happen for our mothers in their lifetime, as we understand what could and could not happen in our relationships with our mothers, we can begin to understand the forces operating in our current women-to-women relationships.”

I can already hear my mother’s snort of dismissal. Peggy Ford wasn’t much given to self-examination or reflection. For her, what was past is done and gone, what matters is only what’s in front of you in life. In a way, this too, is admirable. Maybe not exactly in the way that the 5th Century BCE philosopher Socrates believed —the unexamined life not being worth living — but the ability to lay the past to rest and move on. If my mother ever had regrets about the choices she made, they were rarely spoken.

I remember only two: her musing one day that she had wanted to be a doctor but there was no money in rural Ireland in the late 1930s for higher education, so she became a nurse instead and, much later, her chagrin that while she was the family “banker” and bill payer, her husband wouldn’t let her gamble on the real estate market.

There were many things to admire about Mother, but maybe the best was her absolute unflappability in a crisis. As my brother said at her funeral, she was the one person you’d want around in any crisis.

When my parents and our across-the-street neighbours went out one night in Edmonton to a formal ball and some deranged nutbar tried to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the window onto the sidewalk, the neighbor who was a surgeon and my mother, the wartime nurse, dashed outside to render medical assistance. She could have been in a hospital emergency ward rather than kneeling on a downtown sidewalk in a formal gown, blood everywhere, she was that cool.

Few diets ever focus on the mother-daughter relationship, ignoring the fact that how our mothers looked at food and their relationship with their own bodies and all the issues surrounding that is a psychological key to our own success.

In an recent issue of Women’s Health magazine, one of the cover “teasers” was the question: Will You Inherit Your Mother’s Body? The writer, Margaret Renkl, quotes Leann L, Birch, a professor of human development at Penn State University, who “has discovered that your mother’s attitude toward food has a powerful impact on the one you develop yourself.”

As for developing my mother’s body, the magazine offers the thought that you can’t “override a genetic disposition,” but you can fight like hell against it. I suspect, along with the writer, that in the end, nature wins against nurture.

After all, more than half a year, more than half-way through this campaign, I still don’t have a waist. Although I have managed — usually — to overcome the habit of wearing loose-fitting clothing, although I’m not quite at the point of tucking in each and every shirt

That, I know, I inherited from my mother who wasn’t ever fat, but dressed to disguise her impressive bosom which attracted way too much attention that she didn’t want.

I take heart from a silly and very funny book my sister received on her 60th birthday: Laugh Lines Are Beautiful and Other Age-Defying Truths, written by Leigh Anne Jasheway-Bryant. My favourite? “It’s stupid to hold in your stomach and your opinions for anyone.”

In second place: “It is possible to be too thin, too tan and too bitchy.”

But the most telling quote from the book is this one: “You’re only half as old as your mother was at your age.”

There are many reasons for this, including better childhood health and better available nutrition.

And adding to all that is he simple fact that come next year, the first Baby Boomers become senior citizens, turning 65. Grey power, indeed. From 2011 until 2029, millions of them will use their numerical power to rewrite what old age means.

I can’t wait.

NEXT: How I failed retirement

Anyone knowing the mechanics of our household has just snorted at that sentence. The reason is simple: The indefatigable Brigitte does all that stuff for us, including the windows, and we are grateful for her presence once a week. When she occasionally talks about retirement, I have to lie down with a cold compress on my forehead, hoping this is just a passing fancy. I don’t, in fact, know what we’d do without her.

She’s been with me so long that she predates Ted who nervously laughs when I suggest should anything go amiss, he’d be easier to replace than her. And there isn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t agree with me. Indeed, what every working woman needs is a wife. Husbands are a wonderful necessity, a blessing on cold-feet nights, a companion with whom to play bridge, share music, films and taste in art and, most importantly, a lover who needs no additional pampering or sweet talk. The best husbands also know instinctively whose turn it is to be the lover and whose turn it is to be loved.

But having a wife – that 1950s paragon of cooking. cleaning and homemaking; that deliverer of hot meals and cold drinks; the travel-planner, picnic organizer, shirt-ironer, laundry folder, volunteer worker, soother of fears and champion of dreams – that’s what we all need.

Instead, most women get to work full time outside the house and then go home and do all the above with little extra credit or comfort from their friends, peers and coworkers.

And while most women can keep it all together, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the level of neatness and cleanliness they demand of themselves, every year spring rolls around and despite having full days, that urge to toss the house takes over. Brigitte does our windows and blinds, but she can’t clean out the closets and cupboards.

I knew spring had finally arrived when Brenda, the woman who does my nails announced that she had spent the previous weekend at her widowed father’s condo, washing the walls and cleaning up a storm.

There is something atavistic about spring cleaning, some urge buried in history and some calling of tribe. Most springs I can resist, but on the days that the primal urge strikes, beware. I’ll start to look for something in the downstairs freezer and before sanity retunes, I’ve defrosted both freezers, cleaned the extra refrigerator, done four loads of extra laundry and collected enough items for the Women In Need Society in Calgary and the Victory Thrift Store in Canmore that I’ll have to rent a van to deliver everything.

Such are the callings of spring. And now that it has finally arrived i.e. there’s no snow in the forecast, I think I can resist the need to clean by sitting on the deck in the mountains and watching the poplar fluff drive ordinarily sane people into hay fever madness.

The entire half-acre is buried under a profusion of yellow dandelions and the parts of the ground that aren’t covered in these noxious rabbits of the vegetative world (they breed and spread like their animal counterparts) are covered in a carpet of truly vile Scotch thistle. That some books refer to this as the Canada thistle is nothing less than a case of misappropriation. Canada has beavers, moose and Mounties. The nasty stuff is all imported — Budweiser, barking-made right-wing loonies and the thistle. The thistle’s place is rightfully under a sodden layer of poisonous herbicide, about where one would put piss-thin American beer, right-wing loonies like Ann Coulter and all the other noxious imports.

Having just sprayed the weeds in the driveway with Killex, one would think that an application would send the thistle to its just rewards in weed heaven. Alas, there’s not enough killer herbicide for a half-acre and I’d like to keep the trees, the wild roses and clematis and the single, gorgeous wood lily that blooms in the backyard each summer. To do so means living with the thistle.

Yeh, yeh, the thistle has a glorious purple bloom and the dandelion has pretty yellow flowers that little girls make into daisy chains and bracelets, but I regard both with the suspicion born of knowing exactly what these weeds are capable of: they can overrun and kill and dry-drown any attempt to grow wildflowers or perennials in what is charitably referred to as dirt around the mountain house. “Dirt” in fact is a misnomer There is no dirt. We are situated between Heart Mountain and the Bow River and what passes for soil is rocky river bottom. The only vegetation that survives is stuff that is too stubborn and hardy to kill — aka dandelions and thistles.

I remain stunned each spring that the lilac bush planted seven years ago still manages to maintain a roothold.

Ideally, it would have been planted in the giant bag of soil purchased especially for it at the nursery along with the rooted lilac cutting. When I couldn’t get a spade into the ground, and sought young male help, I made the mistake of leaving briefly to drive into town for groceries while the planting was taking place. By the time I returned, the baby bush was in the ground. The bag of expensive potting ssoil that was intended to be put into the hole dug in the hard-as-rock ground, into which the lilac would be cradled like a newborn, was still sitting, unopened at the bottom of the stairs.

Clearly, my pleading to “plant the lilac in the dirt” lacked a certain clarity of instruction while maintaining an efficiency of words.

Yet is survives. And produces at least one fragrant mauve bloom each year. The lilac grows maybe an inch each year, but grow it does.

On the other hand, the wildflowers and perennials — all of which were planted in yet-more expensive nursery soil — have long since vanished under the onslaught of their hardier neighbours, something like what happens to a community when the grow-ops and bikers move in.

Escaping briefly to the mountains led me to foolishly believe I could escape the pressures of spring cleaning.

While nobody around me is beating rugs out of doors, or washing their decks, clearly Debra-Lynn Hook knows exactly what happens each year. She wrote in The Orange County Register: “I know when the snow melts and the first robins come to call, when the spring peepers begin to sing from their mud puddles and the laughter of children returns to the parks and playgrounds, something wonderful is about to happen. Spring cleaning.”

Hook wrote that in the middle of March. Around here in the middle of March, we were still buried under snow. The stupid city robins who make more of a mess on the back sidewalk than they achieve results in their nest-building haven’t returned by then. Nothing peeps above the ground. Being this much more northern than California means our spring cleaning urge doesn’t hit until May, although this year, thanks to a miserable stretch of rain, snow and cold, spring seemed to be permanently on hold.

“Your Spring is important to us. Please stay on the line for the first available harbinger of Spring.”

I believed myself immune to tribal, feminine urges. At least I thought I was until just moments ago, while looking at the keyboard of my laptop and noticing fingermarks and sundry stains from usage, I got up, fetched a damp cloth and the Fantastik, cleaned off the keyboard, the outside case of the laptop, the makeshift desk (upturned log and piece of tile) I’d set up on the deck, the outdoor table, a couple of the chairs, the outside thermometer and — just to prove I’m impervious to all the pressures of spring cleaning — wiped down the outside of the back door.

What Ted doesn’t realize (he’s sitting on the deck with me and his stirred-not-shaken, straight-up- with-olives martini) is that full pressure of spring has hit and tomorrow, out comes the pressure washer in order to clean the wintertime detritus from the outside of our log house.

As Hook writes: “Spring cleaning can’t wait. It is but a fleeting urge, caught in the crosshairs between the dark of winter and the mania of spring.”

It has something to do with the level of melatonin in ones body, the tribal rites of various cultures to clean the house from top to bottom before some momentous religious holiday, and the need to brush away and air out the last signs of winter.

Besides, I tell myself that spring cleaning is great exercise.

NEXT: Am I really turning into my mother ?

Within days he’s back in Iraq, defusing bombs. The comparison is not lost on the audience – it’s easier to take an improvised explosive device apart than it is to decide among a bewildering array of choices that daily civilian life offers.

Surely there could be no person who doesn’t know how that leader of a bomb disposal squad felt. Who hasn’t been faced with the kind of simple decisions that leave you standing in the middle of rows and rows of jars and cans and bottles, unable to make a choice? Maybe that’s one of the reasons I so dislike grocery shopping — too much stuff on the shelves, too many choices, too much bewilderment. So, I let Ted do the shopping. He doesn’t appear to be lost in the midst of plenty, as I am.

So much of life is about making choices, from what politician to support to what brand of detergent to use. The former is obviously more important than the latter. But after years of writing about politics and the men and women who choose to run for office, desperate to win a popularity contest at the polls, I’m convinced we spend more time deciding among Tide, Cheer and Sunlight than among Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat.

Worse, too often when given a choice between brains and beauty, we choose beauty. Given a choice between smart and educated and folksy and likeable, we choose the latter. Maybe it’s because we want our politicians to be the kind of men or women who would make great neighbours, rather than great leaders.

As Frank Swinnerton, an English novelist and essayist who died at age 98 in 1982 so aptly put it: “We would rather be in the company of somebody we like than in the company of the most superior of our acquaintance.” That may explain why so many talented, educated, well-spoken and brilliant men and women get nowhere in politics. Too often, we simply don’t like them. They’re too cerebral, or too snooty or too this or too that — what it comes down to is a matter of likeability, not qualifications.

Rather than make a choice at election time, too many of us elect not to choose and stay home. When the Tories recorded their 11th straight majority win in the 2008 Alberta election, 59 percent of the electorate stayed away from the polls. That 41 percent voter turnout was the worst in Alberta history.

Alberta has had only four different governments since it became a province in 1905: Liberal from 1905 to 1921; United Farmers from 1921 to 1935; Social Credit from 1935 to 1971 and Progressive Conservatives ever since.

The Tories survive in Alberta because only once has there been a credible alternative on the horizon. Leader of the Liberal Party, the late Laurence Decore, managed to toss away what had been predicted as a sure thing (a Liberal win in the province in the 1993 election) when within the first days of that election campaign he came out against a woman’s right to choose. The ever-wily Ralph Klein, then the new Conservative leader and premier, simply said abortion was a matter between a woman, her doctor, and god.) We may not like all the choices with which we are presented, but above all, we want the right to make our own choices.

Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes … and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”

The real underlying message is that life is all about choices and the privilege we have of making them for ourselves. That so many of us choose not to make those choices is not, as in the noted “jam” experiment because there are too few or too many options. Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School conducted the experiment and has written about it in her brand-new book, The Art Of Choosing.

As it turns out, making choices isn’t all that easy, and we are influenced by factors we may be unaware of. It’s not science, says Iyengar, it’s art. And despite the Western belief that the more choices one has, the better one’s life, it turns out it ain’t necessarily so.

Iyebngar writes: “It is a common supposition in American society, that ‘the more choices the better’ — that the human ability to desire and manage choice is infinite. From classic economic theories of free enterprise, to mundane marketing practices which provide customers with entire aisles devoted to potato chips or soft drinks, to important life decisions in which people contemplate alternative career options or multiple investment opportunities, this belief pervades our economics, norms, and customs. Ice cream parlors compete to offer the most flavors; a major fast-food chain urges us to ‘have it your way.’”

So she set about to test the theory. Customers at an upscale store were offered a choice among six “gourmet” jams or 24 of the same brand of exotic jams, with the more favourite flavours — strawberry and raspberry — being left out. Over a series of experiments and days, it turns out that customers were more likely to buy when their choices were restricted.

So it comes as no surprise to read in the Globe and Mail business section, a quote from Duncan MacNaughton, chief merchandising officer at Wal-Mart in Mississauga (just outside Toronto.) He said: “Folks can get overwhelmed with too much variety. With too many choices, they actually don’t buy.”

The retailing giant had just pulled two of the five brands of peanut butter it offered off its shelves without losing a single sale. Reports Marina Strauss: “Retailers are now reducing the amount of choice in their shelves, after years of tempting customers with ever-expanding arrays of brands, hues, sizes and flavours, they’re racing to simplify their offerings.

“Reducing the number of products can help companies increase sales by as much as 40 percent while cutting costs by between 10 and 35 percent.”

So what does peanut butter and jam have to do with my campaign? (Other than being two of the three constituent parts of my favourite sandwich — the third being bread.)

Because if you’re on a self-improvement campaign, you need to take that kind of ruthless attitude to your closets.

If it doesn’t fit, give it away or throw it out. It’s not that I’ve been good in this department, but I’m getting better. I’ve managed to donate at least a dozen business suits to an organization that helps women get back into the work force with the proper clothes, but it took five years of retirement before I realized I was never going to need those “uniforms” again, regardless of their original price tags.

But the hardest chore was parting with all the expensive clothes I had put aside when my weight crept up yet-again. Even the words of advice that rang in my head — “so your reward for losing weight is a five-year-old dress?” — so sagely (and appropriately sarcastically) offered by a Weight Watchers’ leader still wasn’t enough to make me clean out the closet properly.

The “dressy” stuff is the hardest to get rid of.

I claim the right to a certain amount of sentiment – the ivory-coloured dress and coat with satin lapels and the turquoise raw silk suit with its matching hat and purse I’ll keep forever, although likely never wear again. Nobody discards the outfits in which they were married, right?

Only bridesmaids’ dresses are eminently disposable, although even the ugliest live on in pictures. The yellow net dress and bolero jacket I wore as one cousin’s bridesmaid is one of the more unfortunate of its kind, although as close to high fashion as was possible in 1958 in the wilds of Saskatchewan. By the time the bride’s only sister was married, the fashion had advanced to less-formidable amount of frothy cloth and that dress was a simple green peau-de-soie. As I was the only bridesmaid, my mother suggested she make the dress from her choice of fabric, a suggestion readily approved by her own cousin, the bride’s mother. The bride made only one request — so that the flowergirl would match, could my mother send a couple of yards of the fabric she chose to the flowergirl’s mother, so that the wedding party would be coordinated?

Mother complied. What she neglected to do was to tell the little girl’s mother — who had never seen peau de soie before — which side of the fabric was the “right’ side.

The flowegirl’s dress came out backwards, with the matte side out and the shiny side in. It was one if those “wedding” moments that live forever, and every time I look at that wedding photograph, I can’t help but smile. Of such things are fond memories made.

I’ve kept the white grecian-draped gown I wore to meet the Queen about 30 years ago and my collection of hats — likely never to be worn again —doesn’t take up any room in the closet, being stuffed into hat boxes on the top of the shelves. Who knows but tea parties may come back into style?

But all the fat clothes are gone — donated to a worthy cause. It’s like a ton of weight — pun intended — off my shoulders.

NEXT: Spring cleaning should include one’s memories.