West of Hope

Happy Easter from Victoria. I made it, no thanks to the CBC and my own tendency to act before I think.  I was about to leave Vernon at 9 on Thursday morning when I heard on the radio that all the ferries to Victoria were full.  As it was March Break in BC and Easter approaching, I panicked and for the first time thought I should have made a reservation.  I called Jo in Calgary who said I could stay Thursday night in her condo in Vancouver or else with her sister Barb in North Van.  Then I tried and failed to make a reservation on line on the ferry for Friday.  My jumpy state combined with my general computer ineptitude to insure calamity.  I couldn’t even register a password, but I did discover on the website that there actually were spaces available on the 7,8 and 9 o’clock ferries on Thurs.  I phoned and made a reservation for 7pm, called Jo to thank her for her help and tell her the story, cursed CBC for spreading panic among susceptible seniors and finally pulled out of Vernon at 10:45am.  It was a glorious morning and the whole drive was blessedly uneventful.  Spring really sprang just west of Hope, all the trees had a haze of green and daffodils and forsythia were brilliantly yellow, even if only glimpsed at 110 km/hr through transport trucks.  I opened the windows and breezed into the ferry terminal just after 5, only to discover that mom had been right.  I had phoned her to say that I might be a day late because the ferries were full, and she had told me that they never reserved all the spaces.  Sure enough, the 6 o’clock ferry was only 55% full.  My $18.00 reservation for 7 was all for naught.  I got a ticket for the 6 o’clock.  The only good news was that as it was Thursday, I got the seniors’ rate. The sunset ferry ride was restful, and I arrived at mom and dad’s place around 8:30.  I had a drink of Scotch with water, which tasted terrific even though I usually only like single malt.  Dishwater probably would have been fine at that point.  Mom and I had a good talk and went to bed around 10:30.

I’ve been in the hospital for 2 days with dad and don’t know what to think.  Mom is unstoppably hopeful that he will get back to their apartment, but I can’t share her optimism.  It is miraculous that he survived the operation and still has not got pneumonia, but he is shakily frail, bruised from his wild behavior following the operation and his mind is wandering.  Sometimes he looks good and sounds lucid, but this morning when we arrived he was obsessed with the conviction that he had been involved a murder.  When we made the mistake of trying to get him off that track by talking about the fact that Ralph Kline had died yesterday and what a coincidence that was since we had been talking about him yesterday, he immediately wove that into his fantasy and said that that was exactly it; it was Ralph Kline’s murder that they accused him of.  It took quite a while to get him back, and he still wandered off a few times later.  I’m in Starbucks at the moment, after taking a walk.  I left mom and dad resting in dad’s room.

 I’m finishing this at home.  Dad seemed fine when I got back.  He ate all his dinner and with more relish than I have ever seen him eat.  He’s the man who always says, “ You eat to live, you don’t live to eat,” and he looked as if he was eating for his life this evening.  He was very shaky but kept shoving in huge mouthfuls.  Then mom and I left the room while he was hoisted back into bed.  When we returned after talking about how he seemed to be recovering, he was raving again about revenge plots.  When mom tried to calm him, he told her she was beautiful and he loved her, which surprised her because he never says such things.  We finally had to leave him, still troubled by revenge plots and telling us to be careful.  What an emotional roller coaster.  Mom and I had one of our rare but scary verbal battles last night and then in clearing out the fridge and pushing all the yellowing things that should have been green down the garberater, mom blew the system and we got a leak in the kitchen sink which was not so bad after we had removed the pressure of the pulverized vegetables.  Clearing up the mess together brought us back to basics and we carried on with dinner.  Tonight when we returned from the hospital around 7:30, we made a good chicken dinner and had some laughs.  I had another scotch and water.  I look forward to bed soon.  The family ties are getting tight.  

Dad's Fall

Dad fell again, yesterday just before noon.  Again, he was moving around his room without his walker and collapsed, but this time he broke his hip.  I phoned them around noon expecting to talk about the good time they had had during Bill’s visit last week and was surprised when a strange woman answered.  She passed the phone to mom, who was very upset.  We spoke for only a couple of minutes because she was going to drive to the hospital in the ambulance, as usual.  When she got home again and called me it was to say that dad’s hip was broken, the doctors and nurses were wonderful, they were going to operate either Sunday or Monday, BUT because of dad’s age and frailty, they had to decide whether or not to resuscitate him if that became necessary.  Mom was in tears as she explained this to me.  The doctor said that the procedures are rigorous and might cause more harm than good, so they agreed not to do anything out of the ordinary if he fails during the operation.  Mom had had to leave dad in the emergency ward, but she called me back later at night to say that a nurse at the hospital had phoned to tell her that he had been transferred to a room and given painkillers.  I thought she was going to call me this morning, but she hasn’t called yet; it’s noon.  I phoned her, but there was no answer.  We don’t have cell phones, and I haven’t really wanted one.  When I’m outside, alone, I don’t want to be phoned, but this incident might drive me to get one.  Jay has mentioned giving me his i-Phone when I’m in Korea in September; he will buy a new one.  I think I’ll take him up on it.  He can teach me how to use it while I’m there.  I hope all is still well and that she is at the hospital with dad now, but I’m not too hopeful about dad’s recovery.  I spent some time last night making two lists, one of things I’ll have to take to Victoria and the other of details to be dealt with here before I go.  We’ll see.  Those two have worked miracles to keep each other alive before; maybe they’ll do it again. 

I work when I’m worried, so that’s what I’ve been doing.  Since noon yesterday, I’ve washed every window in this wee house that I can manage safely with one wing.  We have had 2 days of warmth and glorious sun, which is wonderful except that it reveals all the dust, bird droppings and spider webs on the windows.  Now the view through them is unimpeded, and I will eat my lunch watching the purple finches at the feeder.  They are the only birds I have this season, but at least the males are bright and beautiful.  I even did some gardening this morning.  I set up the perforated hose along the line of cedars so that it will be easy for a friend to water them if I’m away.  There are 4 that I think might not have survived last summer’s 3 weeks of neglect while I went east.  All the weeding I did in the first 2 summers is paying off.  I had very few to dig up this morning, but it’s early yet, and I know that if I’m away long, the more unwanted they are the more they will take advantage of my absence to thrive.

Luck

March 11, 2013 started off well.  It was sunny and already starting to get warm when Mo and John picked me up to go cross-country skiing from Silver Star to Sovereign and back.  We took the Comet Chair to the top, and I was one to the 2 in our group of 4 who didn’t fall on the outrun getting off.  That seemed to bode well. The runs were still a bit icy, but I had put on the perfect wax and was feeling like a real skier.  We had crossed over to Sovereign on a blue run which seemed easy, so I decided to stay in the ruts for the downhill; they don’t put ruts in the really steep hills.  But soon I was going faster and faster and BANG!  PAIN! FURRY!  My right shoulder was dislocated again.  If it had been anything less than a dislocation, I’m sure my anger would have far surpassed my pain.  I remembered Jim saying as he drove me to the hospital in Thunder Bay after my first dislocation that he would probably have to spend his old age looking after me.  I miss him for many reasons, not the least of which being as companion who put the wind in my sails but also knew how to trim them.  Mo stuck by me again.  This time John was there too.  They are very good friends.  We had to wait about 20 min. for the ski patrol to arrive, and by that time I was cold and bent over.  I just couldn’t straighten out to lie on the meat wagon.  Don, the patrol, was a wonder.  He could see that my legs were fine, so he got me up and I put one leg over the snowmobile.  He got on behind me and we drove down that way.  When I moaned or screamed with pain, he said to lean back on him, which I did and felt better.  We made it out of the woods to the ski patrol shack.  This time there was no doctor to call to give me morphine and allow Mo to drive me to the hospital, so we had to follow official procedure and wait ages for an ambulance to arrive from Armstrong, all the Vernon ones were occupied.  The woman on the team was a heartless harridan.  Fortunately, she drove and I sat in the back with the man, who did his best to make me comfortable.  But the back of an ambulance is about as swingy as the tailgate of a truck, so the trip was not pleasant.  I finally got morphine at the hospital and then a brief anesthetic.  I awoke after a total of about 4 hours of pain to the bliss of painlessness.  Now I have to get the arm moving again.  I have an appointment with the same physiotherapist who helped me so much last time.  I hope he can work his magic again.  Mo stayed with me the whole time, her neighbor, a miracle worker was the nurse in the emergency ward that afternoon.  Mo and John drove me home.

We arrived to see Bill sitting on the front porch sipping a beer in the evening sun.  They all came in for a drink; I was still high on drugs, so we had a good time.  Bill stayed for dinner and the night.  He left around noon on Tuesday to continue his trip to Vancouver Island to see friends and visit mom and dad.  On Wednesday, the furnace conked, but I was able to get someone to check it right away, the same man who gave it the biannual check in the fall.  He had warned me of a possible problem, but I had done nothing.  He was able to get it going quickly, and now I will have the chimney liner replaced this week as he had suggested I do last time.

This week I’ve been looking for signs of Spring in preparation for an equinox party on Wednesday, March 20.  Everyone is supposed to show up with pictures of signs of Spring to entertain each other with.  Until today I had little other than a few pathetic photographs and a couple of short stories.  At Starbucks this Wed. with Lucia, I saw my first pair of really precarious platform sandals on a young girl with long, bare legs and a short skirt, but I didn’t have my camera.  Lucia tried to tell me something funny about that kind of shoe.  Many English words are used in Korean everyday language.  Their pronunciation only approximates that of English because of the differences in the alphabets.  There is no Korean sound that exactly duplicates the ‘i’ in ‘kill’.  The closest one sounds more like the double ‘e’ in ‘heel’, so they think ‘kill’ is pronounced ‘keel’ and thus call those wobbly high heels, ‘keel heels,’ thinking it’s a funny, rhyming English expression like 'kill Bill', two words that don't rhyme when spoken by a Korean.  She made the little joke so confidently that I was truly sorry I didn’t get it instantly and had to put her through the agony of explaining.  However, her explanation made us both laugh.  I remember reading that in the year 2000, English became the first language to be spoken more as a second language than a first.  Now, not just England and the USA, but the whole world can experience the phenomenon of being separated by a common language.  Imagine the difficulties I'm having learning to pronounce Korean in a way that even approaches being understandable to anybody but the most understanding friend.  The other incident that would have to remain a story occurred as I was walking home from downtown in the blazing sun of Friday afternoon.  I saw 3 people ahead.  One was an unremarkable woman standing on the sidewalk.  Next to her was a policeman in shirtsleeves taking notes.  On the road in front of them, pulled up to the curb and leaning on a shopping kart, was a shirtless, skinny, wired-looking man,.  He appeared to be a street person who’d been living on cigarettes and sweet coffee for quite some time, but as I passed them, I heard him tell the cop that ‘they’ were moving.  I don’t know if the cop thought that sufficiently explained the fact that in the kart, aside from some miscellaneous stuff were two very new looking motorcycle tires on pretty nice brushed chrome rims, but I found it a bit far fetched.  This time I had my camera with me but couldn’t imagine trying to give them some lame explanation for why I wanted their picture.  Certainly shirtless and short sleeves are signs of spring and the idea that that guy was doing anything other than shift some lifted wheels from one street to another and yet thought he could convince the cop he was moving seems like a good example of the old saying, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast,’ but again I had no picture to show at the party.  I’ve finally decided that I’ll never get good pictures.  I have two stories to tell and today I went to a piano concert at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre that gave me the most glorious feeling of Spring, so I’ll mention it too and that will be that.

 My friend Marie gave me her ticket because she couldn’t go, so I went with her husband.  The pianist was a young Russian, Sergei Saratovsky, who is now living in Vancouver.  I’ve never heard such wonderful playing.  He seemed to have mastered the technical difficulties and to be free to fly over the keyboard with all the variety and vitality that his imagination and youth could command.  The concert itself was the most uplifting sign of spring I’ve experienced so far this year, and when he played as his encore, a short piece entitled ‘Lilacs’ from a longer work by Rachmaninoff, I was transported.  Lilacs were Jim’s and my flowers.  I’ve caused my self some bad times lately, but I still believe that sometimes you’re lucky; I certainly was to get that ticket from Marie. 

Time change

It’s daylight saving time again, in most of Canada but not in some parts of BC and not in Korea, so I will be Skyping with Jay today an hour earlier than I have been.  The transition was not difficult for me to make because I had my last 2 classes with SSASS yesterday.  It was a sunny day of spring skiing.  We took Shea up a chairlift for the first time in her life; it was a great success.  She was not freaked out by anything.  She loved looking down at the runs under the chair which with their combination of grooming lines and ski tracks looked like art work to her.  She skied with a tether that Marie and I hardly had to hold, made turns that brought her dad who was filming her to tears and managed 3 runs and the ski back to SSASS as if she’d done it many times before.  We were all in a mood to celebrate, and as it was Fox Fun Day, we did, with a fishpond run by SSASS  for the kids, thank you cards with Tim Horton’s certificates inside for Marie and me from Shea’s parents and a barbeque for all.  By the afternoon lesson with Amy, Mo and I were so warm we didn’t wear helmets.  It’s against SSASS policy, but we decided to be rebels on the magic carpet.  Amy also had a good ski, made her goal of 11 runs and gave us each a cute thank you card with her picture on it and a Starbucks card inside.  What a day.  I went back to Mo’s for a hot tub and was in bed by 9:00pm new time.  I slept well and woke just before 7.

I’ve just discovered that my transition to daylight saving time has not been as easy as I first thought it was.  My brain seems to have been knocked back a bit by the spring forward.  I tried to Skype Jay 5 min. ago, at 4pm my new time, only to realize after he didn’t answer that in fact I should be calling him one hour later now, at 6.  So I will write a bit and go to Mo’s for our regular Sunday dinner together at 5 and call Jay from there at 6, after the hot tub.

The last 10 days have had a vague yoga theme thanks to the fact that Marie turned 60 on March 8.  Last Friday her friend Danielle had a laughing yoga party for her.  The young woman who led it was an ex-stand-up comedian from Calgary who’s trying to start a new life here with laughing yoga.  Good luck to her.  I don’t know if there’s much call for that in Vernon; although, a friend of ours, Sherry Anne Kelly does it in Thunder Bay.  We certainly had some laughs.  At one point, we each had to tell a gibberish joke.  Marie began and while we were still laughing at hers, she said, “ And now Jan will tell a joke in Korean.”  At first I balked, but then I realized she had saved me because I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do and now I knew.  I started saying random Korean words with exaggerated generic Asian inflections followed by a pause, a couple of quick short words and they were in stitches.  I used to think that being able to joke in a language was a sign that you really knew it, but I can’t say a sensible sentence in Korean and yet I had half a dozen French Canadian women in stitches.  The yoga was followed by champagne, so the afternoon laughed on.  This Friday her husband George arranged a cross-country ski party with lunch at the Black Prince cabin for her.  The conditions were perfect for skiing and the lunch was good.  There was also the wonder of meeting a Masai warrior at the Black Prince cabin.  He is married to a daughter of one of Marie’s friends and was there with his wife and baby girl.  At one point I was standing beside him looking up and talking; I couldn’t resist telling him that every time I do my yoga balance move on one leg I imagine I am the Masai warrior I saw in a National Geographic Magazine when I was young.  He seemed to find that mildly amusing, but as he was a man of few words, although he spoke English quite well, he just smiled and said that at one time he probably had looked a lot like the man in the picture, but he hadn’t looked like that for about 8 years, and when he did he had had a spear for balance.

Today is warm.  I watered the cedars for the first time; I don’t think any amount of water will help about 4 of them, but the rest seem fine.  I saw the first crocuses in the garden.

I often think of Jim, but tomorrow especially.  He died on March 11, 2010.

Danielle, Lise and Marie at her party

The first crocuses in my garden

Burke and Bill at White Court.  Bill will be here tomorrow.

March

March is a month of changes, variety, lambs and lions.  For me it is also the month of joy and sorrow.  Jay was born on the Ides of March, 1981, and Jim died on March 11, 2010.  Even though they are far away from me this March, I feel close to them both. 

There’s good news from Jay and his gang in Korea.  The girls are in their new school.  Their first impressions have been positive.  Because it is a school for international students, there shouldn’t be bullying to the extent that there is in the Korean schools.  They will begin with a clean slate; now it’s up to them to make the most of it.  The school is close to their home, but they will board there from Monday to Friday.   I think this is their first week away, so I should get more news when I Skype with Jay this evening.

Jay’s birthday parties used to go from tobogganing on Lee Stewart’s hill or whooshing down the sauna slide onto the ice of the Gatineau River to driving to snow-free Ottawa to swim at the wave pool.  I experienced the same contrast this past weekend up at Silver Star.  Saturday was so warm that the snow was slushy and I was dripping after each SSASS class.  Working with young autistic girls on the magic carpet does not tax my skiing skills, but it takes energy, bending to try to get them to bend and improve their balance and lifting when they don’t and fall and can’t get their limbs in order to get themselves up again.  On Sunday, I awoke to the alarm at 6:30 with these memories in mind, dressed lightly and drove up to gate-keep for a paralympic race.  It was quite warm in Vernon when I got into the car at 7:45, but when I got out on the hill it was dark grey, cold and windy.  I’ve lost my Thunder Bay/Gatineau toughness.  It was probably only -8, but with the wind I was perishing by the time I got into the SSASS room.  I put my SSASS jacket over everything else I was wearing and went out onto the frozen snow to take the tow to my gates.  What had been slush on Sat. was ‘death cookies’ by Sun. morning.  Quite a few of the racers from Alberta were not able to get to Silver Star because parts of hwy. 1 had been closed because of avalanches, so there were only about 20 racers.  They each got 2 runs on a slalom course.  Some of them were great, considering the fact that on top of everything, the visibility was flat.  The 2 blind skiers were probably least hurt by that fact, but the noise of skis crunching on ice nearby put one of them off course a bit; she lost contact with her sighted partner.  I was cold when I got home.  I had a hot bath and was glad I had volunteered to help in the concession for the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Spring Breezes’ concert that evening.  By the end of Mozart’s ‘Linz” Symphony, I was feeling the warm side of March again.

The girls outside their new school

One of the racers taking a gate just below mine

One of the 4 really good sit ski racers