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.

2012 BC Winter Games

Since most of this week was spent volunteering for the games, I'm going to have a blog full of pictures.  My job as host at Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre consisted of long stretches of boredom punctuated by short periods of action, excitement and chaos.  I could write volumes about the personalities of my fellow volunteers, but I won't.  The kids were the real kick.  I'd almost forgotten why I loved teaching.  Kids can be irritating and moody, but their often just self conscious, and when they're up, their vitality is contagious; although it's also exhausting.  My main jobs were distributing lunches and medals.  I was impressed by how volunteers can pull together such a huge show.  Nothing ever went exactly as our reams of written instructions suggested it should, but there were no major gaffs and I was impressed by how everyone concentrated on the main event.  The presentation of medals always went off with a solemnity worthy of the impressive efforts the athletes had made in the races.  When I took pictures, I concentrated on one girl from the Okanagan Zone because I met her on the first day and was curious to see how she would do.  She has a fairly minor handicap and was the first person to enter the BC Winter Games on a sit-ski.  She did so well that she even entered the final day of team relays as the only handicapped skier.

Emily and some of the other members of the Okanagan girls' team early Friday morning.  They were talking and texting when I asked them if I could take this picture.

Emily waiting for her turn in the Sunday relay

Waiting for the hand off

Coming in to hand off the baton to the third member of the team

Poling off the course

Biathlon was also at Sovereign Lake

Some of the colourful biathlon crew

The winner of the Sunday relay crosses the finish line

Jumping off the podium after the medals presentation.   The Okanagan team won the silver medal, but they were third in this event.

The widow with one wing

A few good things have come from last Sunday’s accident.  First, it has given me another practical application of the theory of relativity.  After a dislocation, all other physical pain seems easily bearable.  And after a few weeks of work with the people at SSASS, a handicap such as a temporarily useless arm seems minor.  Second, it has lead to an exchange of e-mails with Jay and a conversation with Barb Clegg and Elizabeth and Ross Murray in Thunder Bay that I would not have had otherwise.  Third, it has probably been the cause of my getting an MRI, which I was waiting for anyway, a bit earlier than I otherwise would have.  And last but not least, it has given me another reason to be thankful, as I have been so often in the last few years, for the love and help of family and friends, old and new.

This has been, perforce, a quiet week, no more skiing or working with SSASS.  By Tuesday, I had made an appointment for an MRI in Kelowna on March 11, exactly 2 years since Jim died, and another with an orthopedic surgeon on March 19.  I can drive, so was able to tutor and meet with Mi-Sun.  I’ve walked around Vernon quite a bit and had my haircut.  I usually can’t resist cutting a little here and there, the way you might slice a strip off a piece of cake, just to even it, and then have to cut a bit more.  Now that I can’t raise my right arm, all that has to stop.  And unfortunately, I got injured at a time when I’d clipped my hair into a real mess.  It’s been professionally fixed up now, but as usual I’m not completely happy with it.  It’s too manicured looking, and I long to snip it but can’t.  My mother used to say, “Our hair is not our crowning glory, Jan.”  She was right about that; although, of course, I didn’t agree with her at the time.

Me in more active times, with Marie on our last ski at Sovereign Lake

The new activity centre.  It's a pain management device that I sit down and put around my body.  It involves some kind of magnetic realignment of something or other.  I was lent it by an enthusiastic ski instructor and salesman who also volunteers with SSASS.  His wife has MS and uses it when she's in pain.  It apparently works for her.  I find it cumbersome and have not felt any benefit so far, but it was kind of him to lend it to me.

A joke about BC that was in the 'Globe and Mail' this Sat.  Click on the picture and it will enlarge.  The suggestion was taken more seriously in BC than it seems to have been by the Globe cartoonist.  I really like his take on it, though.

Another joke in this Saturday's Globe

A mating pair of mallards in Polson Park today

The same pair taken without the telephoto

Two odd mallards in Pollson Park.  The near one is the mate of the male next to her.  He stuck by her the whole time I was taking pictures, and when I got too close, they swam off together.  The albino didn't seem to have a mate, although there were two albinos.

Ogopogo in Polson Park.  He's all over the Okanagan.

  

You are old father William

The inversion lasted for about a week, and I drove up and out of it into the sun to ski every day but one.  Even though I hardly cook, never bake and make very little mess, I still have to do laundry once in a while and sweep the kitchen and hallway every week or so.  And then there’s grocery shopping and a few other chores that have to be done sometime.  The patterns of many years are slowly changing, and it’s not all bad. 

Seung A and Jun Yung, my Korean students are fun to teach.  I have each of them for an hour a week; of course the class goes overtime.  At $20.00 an hour, which Mela informs me is what her cleaning lady makes, I won’t get rich doing it.  But I do love teaching, and these kids are ideal.  They’re serious students, but looking for fun too.  Their mom is lovely.  She is having a difficult time at the moment recovering from eye surgery and living in a strange land alone with her children.  Her husband stayed in Korea to work.  She’s beautiful and looks delicate, but is actually very strong, I think.  They are only here for six months, and she wants to make the most of it.  She does a lot to get the kids into situations where they will speak English.  My friend Mi-Sun and I were laughing about it because she is just the opposite.  Working at the car wash, she is constantly forced to deal in English with people who speak only English and are often not too understanding of a person who doesn’t immediately understand them and satisfy their needs.  She can’t believe how they stare at her and don’t seem to know what on earth she’s saying when she knows she’s speaking English.  But her pronunciation is often just enough off to make her incomprehensible to people who are not used to accents other than their own.  Every Friday, she brings me lists of words and expressions dealing with everyday car wash matters and we struggle to improve her pronunciation and knowledge of idioms.  Consequently, when she has time off she rushes to places where she will be with her Korean friends, many of which involve church, which I can’t get her to stop calling ‘churchy’.

Rees and Shae were good this week.  Rees skied better; although, he hardly stopped talking about his new favorite movie, ‘Cars Two’.  He gave a DVD of ‘Cars One’ to Jenny, my fellow teacher and me.  Now we have to watch it and report back, especially our comments on Mater, the tow truck.  Shae arrived in her pajamas with her mother who was clearly close to cracking.  Shae had been crying on and off for no clear reason all morning.  The mom wisely left, and we distracted Shae into her ski boots and actually got her skiing; although, she was much more interested in looking at the snow sculptures, of which there are many in the village now.  When we returned to the SSASS room 2 hours later, her mother appeared rested and ready to tackle the rest of the day.  We may not teach Shae to ski, but I think we will play a small part in saving her mother’s sanity.

I have just returned from a Sunday SSASS training session that started at 8:30am on a warm sunny morning.  The morning went well.  The instructors who offered the class are fun and full of helpful techniques.  The conditions were a bit icy, but things seemed to be softening in the sun by noon, so I decided to carry on to the afternoon class.  That was a mistake.  On the first run I was involved in a crash that threw me into the air and down on my right shoulder.  The pain was so intense that I knew I’d dislocated it, but I had to endure the lengthy procedures that the Ski Patrols are obliged to go through.  They are especially concerned about broken necks, backs and concussions.   Then it took ages to get me wrapped up in the meat wagon and down to the patrol shack for more tests.  Fortunately there was an emergency ward doctor on the hill who came down, identified the problem and gave me a shot of morphine and some other drug.  As the patrols had already given me ‘laughing gas’, I was feeling light headed and dizzy but the pain was still intense.  Finally Mo, who had stayed with me the whole time and is an angel, was able to get me ready to get into her car for the ride to Vernon Hospital.  It was so much like the time Jim drove me from Liz and Ross’s camp to the Thunder Bay Hospital, dripping wet with a dislocated shoulder after diving into Loon Lake.  I’m accident prone, and Jim had resigned himself to being the one to get me out of scrapes or if possible prevent them from happening in the first place.  I miss him daily for this and many other reasons.  His earthy, dry wit often put things into perspective for me.  But my new friends were very helpful.  And after going through the same procedure that I had experienced in TBay, the anesthetic and the goon squad, I awoke almost pain free, Mo drove me home and now I am resting in the haze of painkillers.  If I’m smart, I’ll ‘process’ this information and modify some of my more reckless behavior.

Sorry, no pictures this week. 

Temperature inversion

This weekend I experienced the wonder of the weather inversion that members of the outdoors club had told me about.  On Saturday, Mo and John picked me up at 7:45 am to drive to Silver Star for the Carter Classic.  It’s the big team race/fundraiser for the adaptive ski program.  It was a damp, grey morning in Vernon, but as we drove into the mountains we rose above the blanket of fog into bright sun and blue sky.  It was a warm sunny day of spring skiing, perfect for the race.  The peaks of the Monashees were brilliant white in the distance.  I had a few good runs before and after the race.

 The SSASS room was swarming with racers and workers when we arrived.  Andy, the wonderful, generous but completely spacey man who presides over the whole thing was in his usual state of semi stammering dither.  Pete and Noreen and a few of the other very competent organizers were going about their tasks.  I was given two jobs before I finally settled into my role as screamer.  I stood at the bottom of the racecourse between the timer and the people who told the racers their times and yelled the bib number and time from the former to the latter.  And if you think that’s not an important job, you’re wrong.  It was vital.  The Carter Classic is a team race, four members on each team, one of whom must be a student in the adaptive ski program or a graduate who may or may not be on the SSASS race team.  Each person gets two runs down the course.  After they hear their first time, they have to estimate what their second time will be and the winner is the racer who comes closest in their second run to the time they estimated.  So you can see how important it was that the person yelling the time after the first runs had a good voice, which I do.  Many people complemented me on it after the race.  To add to the confusion, there were prizes for best team costume as well.  The winners were three women dressed as Super Chicks, with flowing caps with chicks painted on them.  Their man, whose well into his eighties, wore a cape that had a softie chick stitched on it and the words ‘Chick Magnet’ painted in bold letters underneath.  All this mayhem was followed by lunch and prizes.  Everyone was given a free ticket for the draws, so by the end almost everyone had won at least one of the many prizes that had been donated by Vernon businesses, except me.  It made me think very seriously about ever buying another 649 ticket.  

Today I awoke to the same damp, grey day in Vernon.  I enjoyed the usual slow breakfast, read and coffee and then got ready to go cross-country skiing at Sovereign.  Again I drove through the low-lying fog into brilliant sun.  This time I had the camera with me and took some pictures.

Tomorrow I will meet the first of the two Korean kids I’m going to tutor in English for the next few months, until I go to Korea in May.

Some of the runs at Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre

The run I was skiing on

The view from the road to Sovereign Lake looking down on what should be Lake Okanagan, Kalamalka Lake and the town of Vernon but what appears to be one frozen lake with Ogopogo, the Loc  Ness Monster of Lake Okanagan, trapped in it while rising

Another view of the fogged in valley from Marie's deck

The magical hoar frost that crystallized on everything at the fringe of the fog.  There was some in my yard, but nothing like this. 

Grass transformed into lace by the frost