It’s no easy task thinking back to when you were 13 years old. My grade 8 brain had all sorts of notions about where life would go and what it would mean to be successful. Man was I an idiot. The best part of that year was the fact that we wrote ourselves a letter that was supposed to be opened when we turned 50 years old. By some stroke of luck, I found the seed envelope a few months ago and told the story to Mary. She was fascinated by the concept that something I wrote to myself had been unopened for this long. What had I written? What would I become? An astronaut? A baseball player? All I could think about were the stupid things my teenage mind would have written. Time will tell as I will open it in 2022 but for now I figured I would take stock against the things a 13 year old thinks makes you successful.

Strike out – Own a house with a pool (indoor would be awesome!)

No chance here. For one, we live in Calgary where you might be able to use a pool for 8 days a year. Not much value in that. Secondly, it one of those things that is the kind of luxury that very few people have the money to buy and less have the money to support. My luxury money has better uses.

YES! – Own a Big, Big, Big screen TV

That always seemed like something only the rich people would have. When you were 13, you were happy to have a 21″ colour TV and by 1985, you had at least a dozen channels to watch. The real lucky ones had a Superchannel cable box and more programming than you could imagine. In those days, all the good stations we on cable boxes and those of us without it were shut out. Like any typical teenage boy, we would spend late evenings watching the CBC French channel hoping to catch the occasional nudity or something dirty that only existed on the French channel. Now we take for granted that we all have TV’s larger than life and 900 channels of stuff we never knew we cared about. The is always a bigger TV out there somewhere and mine certainly isn’t the biggest around but the combined amount of screen in this house would make one hell of a TV.

YES! – A car phone

You know the ones from 1985, the phone built into the dashboard of your car or even better yet, built into the backseat! Nobody I knew had anything like the ones on TV and you would have thought that it would have been one of those things that would never happen. Suddenly, the microprocessor is created and we have phones that can basically do anything. It’s not the way I envisioned it back when I was 13 but I essentially watched a movie on my phone today and that’s amazing to me still.

YES! – A home basketball hoop that looked like an NBA hoop

This was another pipe dream for the pre-teen basketball fan. Most of us has a wooden pole with a wood backboard. If you were lucky, you had something mounted to the roof of the garage to shoot at. Even the luckiest of kids, had nothing that resembled the pro version. In today’s world, you can buy some sweet hoops now. We are lucky the boys are totally into basketball and we have a cup de sac to use it in so we bought one of those sweet hoops for them to enjoy. No wood backboards for these guys.

YES! – A home computer

You remember the computer of the 1980’s…

Nope, I didn’t have a Commodore 64 or an original Apple or even an early version of a PC. It took us until the mid-90’s before I invested my hard-earned dollars into my first PC. It was a clunky piece of shit but it was amazing. It connected me to things that my brain never had even thought of outside of my ole’ Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. Like we all did in the 80’s, we just wanted to be a part of the digital world. I was lucky to have an Atari 2600 to see what happened to the video game console evolution but through sampling programming and other simple computer options when in school, you wanted to have one of these things. It seems pretty trivial now with the technology we now see.

Being 13, these “might” be the kind of things that I would have written about in that time capsule letter. It could always be worse, as I might have written about the following:

Time will tell what my adolescent mind used valuable paper and ink to write about. It will be fascinating to me no matter what it says. My advice is get your kids to write something down for themselves as 50 years comes faster than you could imagine. Can you only imagine the amazing things they will predict will be in their future!

Canada is an amazing country with amazing sights and things to do. I love most everything about it and its people. There is one thing I could do without is the weather. Thankfully, the weather mostly turns around in June and if we’re lucky, it lasts until October. The shortness of the warm season is one of the big drawbacks of living north of the 49th parallel. Like a lot of us Canadians, we clamour for the warmth and try to pack in as much as possible as we can into these months. Covid-19 has made this year’s summer solstice more complicated than other years prior. I have some very specific things that I need to get done this summer to make it complete.

Simple time spent outdoors

It seems like the logical starting point for summer but easier said than done when things like work chew into the available daytime hours. This would be an easier task if you could wake pop everyday and just hit the outdoors but not totally realistic at this point of my life. My best ways to capture some of of the rays come from the the combination of evening walks with the pups, playing some family basketball and getting some selected moments with the family sitting on the deck. Getting outside doesn’t always have to be momentous, it just needs to be outside.

Lake-time Living

Mary has always been the driving force behind this in our family. I didn’t grow up camping, had done a bit in my early 20’s and with the boys when they were younger but largely never developed the full itch. What I did develop the itch for was the simplicity of sitting in the sun and doing very little. I like to read and write and there is no better time sitting in a lawn chair to do either. Oh sure, there are traditional lake fun things to do like boating and swimming but the best times are had sitting in the sun and soaking it up. Mary was right. Camping can be fun if you are with the right people and the sun is out.

Take up a new sport – biking

Like the old adage goes, Before buying a lighter bike, start by making yourself lighter. I could use some new exercise in my life after Covid took its toll on my routine and I think biking may be it. I have been on some recent rides and realized that it might be the perfect storm of my favourite things to do; exercise, music & sunshine. There are so many amazing places to bike in Calgary and I plan to try and explore many that I’ve never seen. I would also like it if Mary would take this up with me as I think it would be amazing to have a partner along for those rides.

Spend some time with Mary, outdoors.

We spent the early part of Covid doing some work around the house inside and out. The weather was pretty good in mid-April and we took advantage of the time. She loves to camp and I’m a fair-weather camper. I like to exercise outside and she likes to do her work inside. I am not a fan of the rain and she is not deterred by it. Through all of that, we generally like being outside more than inside and we will do as much of that as possible in July/August. I think I’ve finally realized that it’s less important what we are doing and more important that we do it together. There is no better place to hang out doing something, outdoors with her.

Do some travel within Alberta and Canada.

Normally, we would be using the summer months to travel to destinations unknown, trying to get away from normal life in Canada. This year, it’s time to do exactly the opposite and stay closer to home. Let me be clear, I am not a “staycation” guy. It’s impossible to escape the business needs and this model won’t work for me. But you don’t have to get very far away from home/work for you to turn things off and relax. Seeing parts of Alberta is something we all should do, and do it in a way that allows you to soak it all in. We don’t spend nearly enough time in the mountains and there are some amazing parts of the eastern part of the Province that need to be seen. I think we are all looking for new adventures to take us places this summer. Travel close to home, wherever you live.

There will come a day where Mary and I will spend parts of our year in places with far better weather than Calgary. In the meantime, the 2020 goal is to embrace the summer Calgary-style. There are amazing things to see and do here and why not do it during the best weather of the year. Take on your own personal challenge to spend more time outdoors, wherever you are this summer.