How to While Away a Dreary Saturday Afternoon

The grounds turned white this week at Falling Downs. The cows are standing around looking forlorn, waiting for the guy who rents our pastures to take them to their home farm for the winter.

We can see them from the kitchen window. A couple of hours ago the Farm Manager suggested we let them in the house, where they could gather round the fireplace to keep warm.

Don’t laugh. I remember taking a visit to see some of my father’s relations in the former workers’ paradise of East Germany. These folks still had the old shtetl-style barn/house combo going on. The cows weren’t actually in the living room, but they were right on the other side of the door, in what today we might call the… rec room? Mud room? Milking parlour?…

Another relation lived in Berlin, the eastern part. Had a sweet little house on a large lot. It’s largely been lost to the passage of time that there were folks in the commie east who owned their homes. A few years before the wall fell, these folks sold part of their property as a building lot. They got enough to buy a colour TV!

That was the most expensive colour TV of all time. When the wall was finally breached, that building lot became worth a few hundred thousand deutschmarks overnight.

But I digress.

When the ground turns white it’s time to face the fact that most of your to-do list for this summer is being deferred to next summer. No matter how you slice it, that’s always a bit of a bummer. Especially when you consider that there’s stuff on the list that’s been deferred and deferred and deferred again.

To avoid letting that reality get me down, I take solace in the Biblical maxim, “sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.” I take that to mean, “don’t worry about it.”

So I don’t. Instead, I’ve spent the afternoon shopping for antique Cadillacs at Carsonline.

There’s something iconic about the Cadillac brand. At some point in time it exemplified the “American Dream.” That was when Americans still had dreams.

My father actually had more relations in the US than in Canada when he and Mutti came to the New World in ’56. He came to Canada instead. Having grown up in Hitler’s Germany, he correctly figured that Canada was less likely to draw his children into stupid wars than was the USA.

He was right, and my siblings and I will forever owe him a debt of gratitude for that.

But back to the Cadillac.  While that iconic American brand may have exemplified the American Dream, it also exemplified the “DP makes good” narrative. You get off the boat with nothing, and fifteen years later you’re tooling around in a ’71 Sedan DeVille.

That was followed by a ’75 Eldorado, butter yellow with a white vinyl roof. If Dad was in a good enough mood he’d occasionally let me borrow the Caddy for an important date. That could make all the difference…

Then Dad lost his mind; he bought a Subaru.

That was the end of borrowing Dad’s car for an important date.