Thursday in Oak Bay

This is Thursday, and I’m sitting again in the Oak Bay Library while dad reads the paper and mom has her hair done.  I’m settling into the routine, more or less successfully.  It’s limits are set by my parents’ lifelong habits of rigid planning which have now calcified with the physical and mental restrictions of age.  But considering their ages, 89 and 90, they are pretty active, certainly mentally.  We had a lively lunch at the Oak Bay Marina with Barb and Terry, who commented to me later on the fact that my parents are certainly interested in contemporary issues and express their minds on all matters eloquently, if at times caustically.  There’s a lot about political correctness and computer technology that they don’t understand and don’t care to, but they love an invigorating political exchange.

Talking about limits makes me think of the song that popped into my mind when I first thought of this blog, the lyrics of which I have referred to a bit.  I must have heard my parents’ record of it by Bing Crosby many times when I was young because most of the words are still in my mind, in fact it’s becoming what Miche would call a brain worm and I wish I could eliminate it as one would a tape worm.  I looked it up just now in Wikipedia and discovered that it was written by Cole Porter in 1934 for a musical that was never produced.  What a coincidence, our house in Vernon was built in 1934.  Now that I’m alone, the lines, “Let me be by myself in the evenin’ breeze,/ And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,”  take on more meaning.  I’ve always loved listening to the rustle of poplar leaves, but I haven’t heard that sound since I left Wakefield. However, after leaving mom and dad’s, I have spent some time alone in the evening breeze watching the moon become full with Jupiter bright beside it.  When Jim and I were visiting his aunt in Belgium, she told us that her late husband used to tell her when they couldn’t take a trip to Spain on certain years that she should go to the end of the garden, sit on the bench, shut her eyes and listen to the poplar leaves.  Their sound was like the sea, he said.

Wishing you all well,

Jan