Get to know your neighbour, Tony Dalton at The Wexford. Click to watch his inspiring retirement living story or read the transcript below.
My name is Anthony Dalton. I refer to myself as a writer. I’m a classic example of how to stop any conversation. People say, “Oh, so what did you do?” Assuming that I have retired. I used to lead, organize and lead professional expeditions in Africa and the Middle East.
At that point, the conversation dies because no one knows what the next question is. I used to take people across the Sahara in four-wheel drive vehicles.
On one occasion we took a very small group, four people, myself and my business partner, and we rode camels from southern Morocco across to Timbuktu for six weeks. Didn’t make any money but we had a great adventure. We did things like taking film crews into the desert and we took CBC TV Ottawa for two months into the Sahara
Then all hell broke loose in the Middle East and political problems were really bad in West Africa. I came back here, back to Canada and I was single.
I went to visit my sister in Edmonton, and while I was there, I went and had coffee with a friend, and he said, “So what are you going to do now?” I said, “I don’t know.” And we talked for a bit, and suddenly he said, “Why didn’t you write?” I said, “What the hell would I write about?” And he said, “Write about your experience.” “Oh, I don’t know. Write about Timbuktu.” So I did. I wrote a 1,000-word article about Timbuktu, which miraculously appeared in the Edmonton Journal six weeks later, and I got a check for $250, and I thought, “Oh, this is easy. I can do this.”
And that was the start of my writing career, and it gradually expanded because I had a different product from most writers. Most writers, you know, they’re fictional, they write non-fiction, but it’s non-fiction based on historical reference to the area in which they live, and there’s this weird former Englishman who says, ‘Well, I’ll give you a story about Timbuktu,’ or ‘’ll give you a story about coming face to face with a Royal Bengal tiger in Bangladesh, or a story about falling off a mountain in the Karakorum.’
And I was a proficient photographer, so I supplied my own photography, and suddenly I was a sort of a star on the magazine circus, not in North America, but Britain, Germany, particularly. and Middle Eastern magazines lapped it up.
We moved back to Canada in 2000 and bought a house up on the bluff in Tsawwassen, a big old Cape Cod style house and I was just starting on another book or on a book which became my first bestseller. I don’t have it here. There is one copy in the building, but I loaned it out to someone, and it was called Wayward Sailor and it was a story of a Welsh adventure sailing author who claimed to be the greatest small boat sailor of the 20th century. He wrote beautiful books, really exciting adventure books and he probably was the greatest liar ever put on this earth. He did sort of one-tenth of what he said he did but he could turn it into a wonderful story.
That was followed by Baychimo Arctic Ghost Ship, which is a story about Hudson Bay Company ship. He got trapped in the Arctic and disappeared and then kept reappearing. Adventures with Camera and Pen, that was done for a publisher in Toronto who wanted a book of every chapter to be a different story about one of my assignments or anecdotes in my life. One of my passions is the Hudson Bay Company, the fur trade. I think it’s one of the greatest stories in the world. And out of that,
I wrote a book called The Mathematician’s Journey, which is fiction. It’s about a young mathematician who goes to sea with Henry Hudson, and it’s his adventures. When COVID came along, I lost interest in writing. I think we all lost so much during that time. Penny spent her time playing bridge online and with friends on Mayne Island, where we lived at that time.
And I sort of wandered around with my dog and went canoeing and rambling in the woods and didn’t do anything at all. Then Penny got cancer, and that turned life upside down completely, and I didn’t do anything worthwhile until about a year ago.
And then one of the residents in here and I were talking about classical music one evening, and he said, through the conversation, he said, “What would you like to learn to play the cello?” And I said, “Yeah, I’d love to, but I’m not gonna spend $5,000 on the cello.” And he said, “I have a second one in my room, and I really don’t have room for it. If you’ll store it for me, I’ll teach you to play.” So I’ve been learning for a year, not as diligently as I should, because I have too many interests now.
The only way I found I could survive without Penny was to go back. I used to write music years ago when I was a kid. So I went back to…I found an envelope containing about 15 songs I’d written in the ‘60s. I’d never done anything with. Two of them have been recorded, and the rest were just in the envelope. But there was one in particular that I really liked.
As soon as I read through it on the manuscript and the score sheet, I knew it needed work. My knowledge of how to put together a song and coherent music in those days was not what it should have been. Although I’ve never actually studied music since then, I have a better understanding of it.
I rewrote the music. It came out as probably my favourite of all the things I’ve written. It’s called ‘Let me live in dreams’. So this has become my life actually. It’s writing and recording music and through the modern technology I can play the music through a synthesiser in my laptop and I sound like an orchestra and have fun with it.
Find it an interest, that’s the most important thing. Get out, go walking, go sit over on the wall behind the rec center and watch the farmers working in the fields. Talk to the ducks, get out the birds, and find something interesting.
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