Loners Only

While I'm not a genuine loner, I do enjoy alone time. Likely, being an avid reader, computer game lover and internet rambler, I'm close to the real ticket. I hear, constantly, the "dangers" of being "anti-social" and how, for elders, that is most undesirable. That may be the general opinion, but it's certainly not for people like me. As a child I yearned to be by myself even though our family was only the four of us. I leaned more to my Dad who not only read his favorite authors such as Steinbeck, Caldwell and biographies of such as Ghandi and other socialists. He prided himself on being a gold panner and lover of trying to find the Mother Lode during his vacations from work in the wood industry. He and a pal, rented horses and rode into the deep wilderness, old maps in hand, pretending they would locate the biggest gold find of all time. He taught me how to pan for gold in BC streams that weren't more than day away from the south Pacific coast mainland. In the black parts of the pan, sure enough, little gold flecks would appear. He'd point out the gold and tell me about the mid province history of the Gold Rush days when huge chunks of it would inspire seekers to make their claims. He had a tiny vial of some fairly good chunks he and his friend had gathered over the years. He was a loner. He worked with people of all colours and as I grew up he taught me how to walk in the woods without fear, how to hack a bit off a rock here and there and with his guide, learn its variety and its usefulness. Being alone became for me a pleasure. It was not having to think up something to say or do or play how to be part of a group. I preferred the times when I went off alone or found a pleasant woodsy spot to take out my book and enter its world. I am never alone with a book or my computer. I am never lonely. And there are countless others out there, just like me. Leave them alone. They love it.