Seventy-Three Plus
A year ago, I noticed that my life had gone off-track. Nothing new about that. Life has always seemed to me like a series of false starts and subsequent adjustments: never quite finding a middle.
But here's what happened. On July 7th, 2025, one day after returning from an intellectual conference in Chicago, I was operating the web feed for my community group. Part of the presentation was a video clip of a rude and decidedly un-intellectual social media influencer. The audience seemed delighted with his antics. As I watched them enjoying the show, I suddenly realized that I hadn't actually been paying attention for quite a while. Not to the group, and not to myself.
I saw this freethought group in the local paper in 2013, and for a dozen years it became my vital third place. It helped me build a core group of friends and a wide circle of acquaintances. When I led the group in the early 2020s, we successfully got the sectarian declaration "Jesus, I Trust in You!" removed from a city bus.
We weren't opposed to Jesus, of course, but believed that local Jews, Buddhists, and non-believers shouldn't feel like the city had picked a side on theological matters. That seemed like important work. I wanted us to be a support group for people (anyone) who did not have Jesus to call upon when things went wrong.
Somewhere along the line, the mission crept. I looked around that day and realized I was surrounded by people who were as outraged by GMO foods as by religious oaths of office, and whose main purpose seemed to be attacking conservatives, even if they had been hurt or rejected by religion. I couldn’t say when that happened, but the realization was a harsh mirror, unflinchingly showing me what I had been ignoring.
How did I end up there? Momentum. I guess we all do it. "Things are fine, don't rock the boat, go with the flow." Then, suddenly, we find ourselves living a life we haven't really chosen. I was living the comfortable life of a Midwestern dad — four-bedroom house on a wooded lot, no debt, retirement cushion, and a teenager in private school. By any reasonable measure, I had sold out the hippie values of my youth.
The trouble is, I am not a Midwestern dad. I had forgotten who I was and where I came from.
My mother grew up in Yonkers, New York dreaming of being the singer in a Glenn Miller–style band. She gave us a reverence for humor and for comedians. Her mother was a Kaiser, a foundational Upper Canadian pioneer family whose homestead became the grounds of York University. Her father was a charming salesman with deep roots in County Cork who used his smarts and charisma to build an affluent life in Connecticut for the Glasheen family.
My father, Ontario's electrical code interpreter and high-ranking Royal Arch Mason, straddled the borders of technical mastery and ceremonial mysticism (honoring our ancestral roots in the Scottish Borders). His father was a United Church of Canada minister from County Down who established churches all across Northern Ontario and Quebec. His mother, the granddaughter of Ontario Premier G. W. Ross, was a living monument to old-school class and noblesse oblige.
I like to say that I was raised as an only child, much to the chagrin of my siblings. I spent the 1960s in the Unitarian Youth Group LRY, the 1970s as the musical director of touring bands, supported the Liberal Party of Canada all my life, designed theatre lighting in Toronto in the 1990s, took precepts with Korean Zen master Samu Sunim (becoming Single Breath), then got a Ph.D. and taught university courses in America.
It has taken a minute to get back on track. I meditated with local Buddhist groups, visited some churches with good preaching, and spent a lot of hours back inside the music of Carole King and James Taylor. Although I have no delusions about the "good old days," it was the right place to visit once again so I could restore a sense of balance.
I now spend very little time with the old crew, none at all on facebook, and a good deal more with my own small family. I suppose I'll always be a member of Mensa and the American Philosophical Society. I'll write bad songs that sound suspiciously familiar and sing them off-key into REAPER software in the basement. But I remember what matters now, and it is not Current Events. So, here we go again … let's see what kind of re-invention comes next.