Firsts

I’m just back from the first hike of the season with the Vernon Outdoors Club.  I felt mixed emotions as I made lunch, filled the water bottle, gathered my gear and walked down to meet the others at the City Hall parking lot.  I’m still here.  A second season is beginning.  Is this really where I live?  It’s still too soon to think about all that, but it was good to see the faces I remembered, many of whom I hadn’t seen since my Christmas party or before.  I drove with Donna and George to Predator Ridge where the hike began.  It was a beautiful day, warm but not too, some sun and some overcast, an easy 4 hour walk, stopping to look at small flowers along the path or lakes in the distance and chatting with different people from time to time. 

Yesterday I got out my new bike for the first ride of the spring.  There were the usual season-opening glitches.  The tires were a bit flat; I couldn’t find my biking gloves. What about my shoulder?  Did I really want to go?  I found Jim’s pump that you plug into the car lighter.  The instructions were in the battered box.  The PSI was written on the tire rims.  I blew up the tires, and the pride of accomplishment I felt erased all my hesitations.  I was off.  Without the push from the outdoors gang, I’m pretty wimpy, so I rode for about 2 hours, but on the flats, which is hard to do in Vernon.  As I walked to the hike this morning and found one of the tops for the tire inflation ‘thing’ in my pocket, I felt a bit deflated.  My pride had been premature, but it had got me going.  I was sobered the other morning too when I had to search for the house keys before going downtown and finally found them in the back door where they had been all night.  I have wasp spray by the bed and bear spray in the front cupboard to fight off intruders and then I leave the keys to car and house in the back door.  If I were a Roman Emperor, I would not need to have a slave standing behind me in my chariot whispering in my ear, “You’re only human.”   The fact is made obvious to me almost every day.  The bright side is that although Jim is no longer here to laugh at my foibles and help me, I have family and friends who do.  And increasingly, I laugh at myself.  This reminds me of the lines from Leonard Cohen’s song, ‘Anthem”

            “There is a crack in everything

              That’s how the light gets in.”

            

The raising of a new hydro pole outside my house this week

At this point it was beginning to remind me of the coming of Easter

Lake Okanagan, the first stop on my first bike ride

Lake Kalamalka, the second stop on the ride

Hiking on Predator Ridge

Lake Okanagan from Predator Ridge

What goes around, comes around

The first time I heard the expression, ‘What goes around, comes around.’ that I now hear often, was about 15 years ago when my brother used it.  He said he had learned it from the guys he worked with at Richardson’s elevator.  Lately, I’ve being thinking of it in relation to Christianity.  When I was young and going to Sunday school and C.G.I.T. at Wesley United Church in Thunder Bay, I remember that for a while there were boxes outside the door on Sundays with the words, ‘If your nylons run, let them run to Korea.’   Woman would drop their old nylons into the boxes and the word I heard was that they were collected and sent to Korea to be turned into lenses for glasses for poor Korean kids.  As my maximum vision was at about 8”, I thought glasses were a worthy cause; although, I couldn’t imagine making them from old nylon stockings.  Now that South Korea is one of the 10 most prosperous industrialized countries in the world, my Korean friends tell me that you can buy fashionable glasses there for much less money than here.  I’m thinking of buying myself an extra pair when I visit Jay in May.  I’ll have to ask what they make their lenses from.  The ones I bought in Canada recently had to be made in either Thailand or Germany and cost about $700.00.  Why isn’t anyone sending us old nylons?

Koreans are, however, trying to convert us back to Christianity.  Last night I had my 2 Korean students and their mom for dinner.  Over the last couple of weeks, I have made an effort to find out what they like to eat, and yesterday I spent quite a bit of time cooking, considering the fact that since I’ve moved to Vernon, I’ve hardly spent more than 20 minutes putting together a dinner.   My efforts were rewarded.  The kids loved the food and ate lots.  I had gone into a box of Jay’s old toys and got out a few things for them to play with.  One was a recorder, which they both could play.  They had fun with it because they hadn’t brought theirs to Canada.  The girl, Seung-A, is really musical.  She can play anything.  The mother has a beautiful voice, and after dinner they entertained me with music.  Seung-A played the recorder and Keung-Wha and Jun-Yung sang.  Some of the songs were in Korean and some in English.  Most of them were hymns.   They had quietly said grace before dinner, and later as Keung-Wha and I talked, it was clear that she is a devout Christian.   As I am older than she and Koreans are very polite to elders and teachers, she was circumspect in her suggestions that it would be wonderful if I returned to the church.  With my recent loss of Jim and discovery of the kindness of many different people, I was able to talk openly with her about my position outside the institution.  We enjoyed each other’s company and the evening was a very pleasant one.  It’s spring break this week in BC and they are off for a 2-week trip by train down the west coast of the USA.  They are taking the West Coast Star Line, the same one that we took to Tucson when Jay was 15 and we spent the year in Puerto Vallarta.

This has not been my only recent brush with conversion.  The woman I teach English to at Immigrant Services is also a convert to Christianity.  Whereas Keung-Wha was a Buddhist, Kiran was Hindu.  She mentioned in our last class that it would be wonderful if I could just come and listen to her minister.  The seeds planted in the East by Christian Missionaries from the West in the nineteenth century produced fruit, the seeds of which are being blown back to our materialist shores.  These boomerang missionaries have a refreshingly childlike conviction.  It’s hard not to feel jaded in their company, but I’m determined to stay for the moment on my path of discovery, outside institutionalized faith.      

Native Canadian boys doing a hoop dance at the Diversity Health Fair that Immigrant Services organized this Friday

The view of Kalamalka Lake and Vernon from the top of a  huge rock I walked up today.

Graffiti on an abandoned wall on the top of the rock.  It reminded me of the graffiti on the pill boxes at the top of most of my hikes in Hawaii.

Remembering Jim

Tomorrow it will be two years since Jim died.  As I think of him often anyway, I decided to read a bit of Epictetus this week because that is what he read most before he died.  He always tried to consider what was reasonable and act accordingly; although, he was given to imagination and emotion and sometimes had to exercise real effort in order to impose what was reasonable on himself.  Epictitus was a Stoic philosopher who stressed the importance of developing ones being independently of external circumstances, the realization that happiness comes from within and the duty of respecting the voice of reason.  I know little of this, but I was aware of how Jim mastered many of his less noble instincts in his final days and made a serious effort to face what he finally accepted as his inevitable death with Stoicism.  It made living with him at that time much easier for me than I could have imagined it would be.   I hope and truly think it helped him.  In the last few months, he never complained and always tried to do all he could to make the most of the time he had with his family and friends.  When he had completed his first bout of Chemotherapy, he wanted desperately to be accepted into a trial at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto.  They were experimenting with some form of immunization as a way of prolonging the lives of patients suffering from exactly the lung cancer he had, but as his metastases continued to grow, he was not accepted.  He continued to do everything possible to improve his chances, but in the last few months he accepted that there was no hope of prolonging his life.  Near the end he entered a trial solely because he thought it might help the general understanding of the effect of certain terminal drugs.  He was on Tarceva, the last stage of Chemo., and as it seemed that it worked better on people who took statins for high cholesterol, he agreed to try a very high dose of a statins; although, he knew it would make little or no difference for him.  Ultimately, it destroyed his kidneys and he died very quickly.  He seemed to have accepted his life and death at the end.  It had not been easy for him.  He was a born malcontent and had had to bridle his emotions and accept that he had lived as he could and now he must die as he had learned.  Certainly for me, his death was an admirable one.  He cherished his family and friends and did all he could to help them face what he had accepted.  Being with him then has helped me continue without him since.

“Reflect that the chief source of all evils to Man, and of baseness and cowardice, is not death, but fear of death.  Against this fear then, I pray you, harden yourself; to this let all your reasonings, your exercises, your reading tend.  Then shall you know that thus alone are men set free.”  Epictitus

“Try to enjoy the great festival of life with other men.”  Epictitus

I am looking after Osito at the moment, and we have had some good walks.  The film festival is on here, so I am either walking or sitting watching movies.  Bill had told me that ‘Starbuck’ was very funny.  I saw it last night and it was.

Back to the Grey Canal.  It's one of Osito's favourite walks.  This time I saw a sign that talks about early Belgian orchardists.

Eeyore and two cavorting llamas

The llamas carry on celebrating spring

A view across the valley.  If you click on the picture, you will see the snowy mountains in the distance.

Signs of Spring

As I can’t ski, I’m walking these days.  If I get the operation on my shoulder, I think I might never downhill ski when I can walk.  I’ll follow my dad’s motto, “ Never stand when you can sit.  Never sit when you can lie.” Which reminds me of how the poor verb ‘to lie’ is being replaced by ‘to lay’.  People never lie down any more.  They ‘lay’ down even in the present and when they’re alone.  Enough.  I don’t want to start mourning the passage of ‘There are,’ which seems to have succumbed to ‘There’s’, whether what follows is singular or plural.

Today I walked rapidly up East Hill until I reached the fields beneath the hills that surround Vernon.  Then I ambled across the stubble and stopped at the end of the road.  Here I did stretches and rested.  I watched and heard a lot of birds.  Spring is in the air.  And on telephone poles, where two flickers entertained me for a while.  The pole was very old and mottled grey and they were well camouflaged against it.  One of them was passive and only moved when the other squawked and bobbed toward it.  I sat watching as they made about a dozen revolutions around the top of the pole.  Then the active one flew away revealing the buff colored patch at the base of it’s tail that I read when I got home is the sign of a flicker. I think I heard it later hammering on a tree.  In the last two weeks I’ve listened to quite a few woodpeckers drumming on any metal surface they can find.  It has made me laugh because it reminds me of the sight of Jim, naked and furious standing in the early morning light among the rocks of the Japanese garden in the front of our first house.  It had a tin roof and was the preferred spot for local woodpeckers to try to drum up a mate in the early spring.  Jim had had enough at around 5:30 one morning, so he bounded from bed, grabbed the slingshot and stormed out to the centre of all small stones, the Japanese garden.  From there he had a good shot at the sleep-wrecker.  Fortunately, fury is as blind as love and he missed the bird.  However when the stones started hitting the tin ever closer to its perch, the woodpecker bobbed off and left the morning silent and Jim alone among the stones with nothing but his slingshot, an image I enjoyed at the time and still do.  I also saw two hawks, a lone heron and a murder of crows on my walk today.

Since I had dinner and watched the Academy Awards with Mo and John last Sunday, I have seen two more of the winners.  Now I’ve seen five of the big ones.  This week, ‘The Artist’ and ‘The Iron Lady’ are in Vernon, so I will finally have seen most of the winners, ‘The Help’, ‘Hugo’, ‘Beginners’, ‘My Week with Marilyn’, ‘The Descendants’.  They’re not a bad group of movies.

On Saturday, I went back to Silver Star to help with the Fox Fun Day.  I had a good time back with the SSASS gang, even if all I could do was flip burgers.

Mo and me, wearing a Hawaiian apron to flip burgers at Fox Fun day

Lynne and me, still in the Hawaiian apron Caroline made me.  The man in black behind me is Richard,the evil colleague who ran over the backs of my skis and caused my fall.

Some of the SSASS gang

One of the houses I saw on my walk around Silver Star, before I started flipping burgers.  The snow is thick on the mountain, but there is no snow in Vernon.

Some of the runs at Silver Star

Ranching and silver mining are part of the history of the Vernon area, so the theme of Silver Star is nineteenth century mining.  Many of the houses are this style.  Each is painted in about five different colours, mostly brighter than this one.