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

Spring skiing

The sun is warming me through the window as I write.  There’s no snow on the ground, and a professional is pruning the trees in Joyce’s yard across the street, so spring can’t be far off, although up at Silver Star, there’s fresh snow and the base is again over 200cm.  On Saturday I had my 2 regular classes with SSASS.  They went well; the girls were in pretty good humor and met their goals of 6 and 8 runs respectively.  I learned a lot at the presentation on autism that I attended a few weeks ago.  I now talk less, avoid figurative language, present techniques in as graphic a way as possible and set goals for the lesson with the student before we leave the SSASS room.  The latter is one of the best pieces of advice I was given; autistic children really seem to want to know exactly what they are expected to do.  When it is clearly established, they do it, and nothing more.  That’s it; stick to the plan.  A person like me who delights in figurative language and likes nothing better than to wander and be surprised by something unforeseen is not a natural at this job, but I’m getting to like it.  I helped a friend on Sunday with her autistic student.  He’s a much better skier than my girls.  We used the same techniques, and even at that, he had a bit of a meltdown at one point, but we got over it and had a good ski.  I really enjoyed being on the big runs and will make sure that if I work with SSASS again next year I do not get 2 students who have to use the ‘Magic Carpet.’ 

I am making more time for Korean these days.  I really enjoy learning about it; although, I can’t speak it much yet.  Last week I learned that the noun that sounds in English like ‘il’, means: sun, day and work.  Fascinating, isn’t it.  Sunday is ‘il yo il’.  What got me thinking even more is the fact that the verb ‘ha’ means both ‘to say’ and ‘to do’.  I was raised to believe that the two verbs were almost diametrically opposed.  One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  English is full of such expressions:  ‘more easily said than done’, ‘talk’s cheap’, ‘put your money where your mouth is’, etc.  I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s plays lately and copying down quotations that I like.  In looking them over a few weeks ago I realized that many of them involve the idea that thought, talk and action are quite separate functions, so this revelation about Korean makes me wonder if Koreans are any better than English speaking peoples at keeping their word.  Do words have more weight with them than with us?  Unfortunately, at the rate I am progressing, it will be years before I find out. 

Cross-country skiing has been very good lately.  I’m getting to like it better than downhill.  Since my shoulder dislocation last year, I’m nervous about someone hitting me from behind and that means I can’t just let myself go when down hilling.  John, Mo and I have graduated to the cross-country black runs at Silver Star.  They’re not too difficult, and I prefer going up and downhill rather than on the flats.  

starting out on a black run with Mo

fooling around before drinking a flat white after our ski

Balance

Dull, dull, dull, inside and outside.  I need a tonic.  I heard on the CBC radio this morning that the amount of active vitamin D in any given tablet can vary a great deal.  Maybe I’ve been taking my daily dose from a bottle of weak pills lately.  Or maybe it’s the lingering cold I have.  At any rate, I’m going to write this out of my system, move forward, put it behind me, get on with my life and mobilize every other cliché I can think of behind an effort to pull myself up by my bootstraps.   Here’s a picture Jay sent me recently that is his and now my ‘go to’ photo for bad mornings:

And here’s one of my nephew Matti’s baby, Burke Boyce.  It will now be my shot for good mornings:

In an effort to maintain a balanced tone, I will now present a high point from the last 10 days.  On Friday evening I volunteered as an usher at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the ‘Travelin’ Slam Poetry’ show.  It was great.  I was so ill at ease at the beginning that if I hadn’t been an usher, I wouldn’t have stayed in the theatre.  Poets, alone on stage, baring their creations to strangers, how could they do it?  But they were poets, very good ones, and they did it.  The main one was Brendan McLeod from the Vancouver arts collective ‘The Fugitives.’  He’s 33 and quite plain looking, short brown hair, blue jeans and an untuckedin dark shirt, but a gifted MC and poet.  The other 3 were about his age or younger.  Each was unique looking and a genuine poet.  One was a very tall, thin, wired First Nations man, one a round, flouncy-skirted Bahamian-Canadian woman from Montreal and the last, perhaps the shyest of them all, seemed to have a background in heavy metal and video games.  He never took his cap off, but he really ‘gave her’ at times.  They did bare their souls, but within minutes I was completely at ease.  They were used to doing what they were doing, good at it and full of energy.  The format, with judges from the audience and lots of booing and cheering was invigorating.  Brendan led and they all participated in the final set; the audience chanted the chorus and the whole atmosphere was exhilarating.

One of the expressions that has been buzzing around the CBC radio and tv this week is, ‘the aging tsunami.’  Once that network gets its teeth into an idea, it holds on like a terrier and shakes the blood out of it.  I like the CBC, it’s the only radio station I listen to but they do go on and self promote.  At any rate, they make it seem as if our generation has had quite a ride, coming in with the ‘baby boom’ and going out on an ‘aging tsunami.’  I wonder about how much debris we’ll leave behind us to wash up on the shores of the world.

On Tuesday evening, walking home from my class at the library, I saw The Big Dipper and across from it, Orion, both brilliant in the black sky.  That was a joy.  

The old cold

 I have the cold that has been going around for so long.  I haven’t had any illness since the persistent cough that wracked me most of May in Korea.  I tried to ignore it this morning; I did 2 loads of laundry while listening to Korean cds, walked downtown to the bank, came home, ate some soup and lay down for over an hour.  Now I’m sitting in front of this laptop staring at the cursor, finally admitting defeat.

I’ve been making an effort to get back to Korean lately.  If I compare this to the building of the railway across Canada, I’m at the stage of laying down track.  Sometimes the effort of remembering such strange words makes my brain hurt almost as much as if real spikes were being driven into it, and I’m still a long way from Craigellachie, let alone from buying rolling stock.  When I’m sitting in the living room listening to my cds, I can repeat Pimsleur’s phrases as if I were a lifetime resident of Seoul, but when I try to make an appropriate comment in Korean to Lucia or one of my students, I can’t.  It really is testing my determination to learn ‘anything but bridge’ in my old age to keep my mind alive.

Tonight I’m going to listen to a presentation on autism with the gang from SSASS.  We’re having a potluck before.  I was too lazy to cook anything, so, I picked up a pizza at a really good Italian deli nearby as I was wandering aimlessly around town in the warm sun on my way home from the bank.  We seem to be heading into an early spring; that’s what the groundhogs predicted, isn’t it?  Most of the snow has melted in the yard, but there’s still a lot in the hills.  I was cross-country skiing on Monday and Thursday and tomorrow I will have 2 classes with SSASS.  I was talking with Jay about the fact that since I dislocated my shoulder last February, I have not really enjoyed down hill skiing.  I’m too frightened.  We agreed that I should probably quit, so I think I’ll enjoy some easy stuff this season and next year I’ll just do cross-country.  Our decision was reinforced this morning.  As I was carrying my pizza home across a parking lot, I saw and stopped to talk with a friend from the VOC.  She had just come out of the doctor’s office after seeing him about an aching knee.  She had spent 3 consecutive days downhill skiing before one of her knees became very stiff and sore; the doctor said that the scan showed it to be pretty worn-out.  At our age we have to moderate ‘use it or lose it’, and that’s not all bad, since we are our age.

Now it’s Sunday.  I didn’t work with SSASS yesterday.  I was coughing so much at the meeting Friday night that one of my colleagues moved away from me and everyone suggested that I stay home and rest on Saturday, which I did.  My head aches, my nose runs, I have a heavy cough that practically gags me at times, etc., etc.  Tomorrow is Family Day in BC, and I think I’ll spend it at home too.  By then the worst should be over.  The main thought I have is that I hope my dad doesn’t get this.  He couldn’t cough his way out of it; he’s so frail.  When I talked with mom and dad on Friday, I discovered that he had fallen earlier in the week and mom had found him bleeding from the ear.  They were unable to get him up, so she called the ambulance, for the third time in 8 months.  Luckily, they discovered at the hospital that the blood was from a deep cut by his ear and not coming from inside.  Within a few hours, they were back at home, but he sounded very weak on the phone and mom sounded weary.  They are at the limit of their abilities to keep themselves going independently. 

The 'real deal' Aussie flat white.  It was made by the only barista at Silver Star who actually worked at The Dome, a coffee shop Mo remembers from her time in Australia.  Mo took the picture.