In praise of the kindness of handymen: 33 degrees out there, and there are two sweating men on my roof repairing windows, painting, filling with wood filler ... while up there doing something else, they noticed other disintegrating bits of this poor old wreck of a house and are fixing them. While putting up new walls upstairs, John took it upon himself to repair a chip in the bathtub and replace the sink stopper. Now Kevin is sanding the last replacement wall and John is doing something invaluable, somewhere.
I know you'll find it hard to believe that something else in my life could go wrong at this fraught time, but - woo hoo! - a large piece of my lower left molar just fell out. Yes, it's true, and at 1 p.m. on a Friday before a long weekend. I called immediately, but my dentist had already left. I can go to an emergency clinic or see if I can stand the hole and using only the right side of my mouth, and hope Dr. Kreher can squeeze me in on Tuesday morning. Crisis and disintegration: we are falling apart here.
At least this gives me something to think about, so I don't have to pay attention to the Republican convention. Because what I've seen so far, in flashes on TV, is stomach-turning - politics so debased, so venal, false, conniving, disingenuous, cynical, loathsome. Samantha Bee, interviewing on the convention floor - people saying, America is about individual freedom, everyone free to do exactly as they want without interference!!!
Except for abortion, she said.
Yes of course, except for abortion, they said, smiling, without comprehending the concept of hypocrisy. So my uterus is public property, she said, and they stopped smiling. Ryan's speech full of blatant lies, and the few seconds I could stand to watch of Romney, with his fake folkiness and his paeans of pap - America, the greatest country ever etc. etc. Finger down the throat.
You know that I adore Jon Stewart. But this week, he's more than just the smartest, funniest, handsomest man on television. He and his team, in Tampa and at the convention, are the clarion voice of honesty and insight. They're COMEDIANS, and they're the only people making sense within a thousand miles of the convention centre. How does Jon manage to stay friends with renegade Republicans like Michael Steele and give them a forum on his show? Last night, the film clip they showed of the hidden reality of folksy Romney's incredibly privileged life - brilliant. I hope millions watch it on YouTube. Lefties are clinging to Jon Stewart and to Colbert, too, as to life rafts. Save us, Lord, from sanctimonious, deluded morons.
Okay, got that off my chest. Didn't think about the throbbing hole in my mouth once while I did. Hammering - sanding - a heat wave - a tiny sensation in the molar region - Republicans. But HEY, I'm alive, and if you're reading this, so are you. Aren't we lucky!
A New Yorker cartoon in last week's issue: a man with his arms tightly around a tree trunk. "It'll never work," he says. "You're a TREE."
I know how he feels.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
chez moi
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Van Gogh's cherry blossoms
It's been a summer of tossing and turning through the night; I know these times of extended insomnia as the shifting of internal tectonic plates. A grandson who has overwhelmed me with love, a mother's slow and painful fade, termites eating their way through the bedroom, my own work in confusing stasis ... no wonder I have put a call through to my old shrink, to see if she'll talk to me sometime in September. A great blessing to have someone on planet Earth who knows me so well and has such a soothing voice.
But in the middle of all this, there's one memory that will keep me warm forever. Last month I booked a timed ticket for the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibit at Ottawa's National Gallery for 10.30 Monday morning, after seeing that the bus from Montreal got in to the Ottawa terminal at 10.20, so I'd dash over in a cab. I told my brother that if he bought Mum a ticket for the same time and she was up for it, I'd be happy to take her through; she has often talked about seeing this exhibit, even as she lay in a hospital bed.
On the weekend, my brother mentioned it to her and, frail as she is, she leapt at the chance. But he had not bought her a ticket, and this was the last week the show would be on, hence packed. Oh well, he said, she's a senior and a member of the gallery, we'll get her in somehow. More difficult, however, was the issue of when exactly I'd get there from Montreal, and when he'd manage to get to her place and then downtown. How to coordinate? We discussed general plans and left the rest to the gods.
Who were with us on this one - it went like a commando raid. I realized that the bus stopped first at the U of O downtown, got off there and hoofed it across the Byward Market to the gallery by exactly 10.30, where sure enough there was a massive crowd in the line for tickets that were not pre-booked. I stood in the much shorter pre-booked line, intending to beg for Mum when I got to the ticket seller, when out the window I see my brother's Volvo pull in, and there, staggering into the gallery, was my mother. Just as I made it to the head of the line, she hobbled up beside me, and when the woman saw my lovely old mum, whose membership expired last year and who had no ticket, she sold me one. So the two of us whisked past the hundreds, straight into Van Gogh.
Well, whisked is not the word - I was pushing her in her walker. But we went straight in. And it was glorious. The first room was worth it all, let alone the rest - they'd blown up a canvas to massive height filling three walls, so you could see, huge, his slashes and dabs and globs of paint - the brilliance and courage, the struggle. Room after room of beauty - this time, for both Mum and me, it was his white branches of cherry blossom on a greeny-blue background, painted in celebration of his nephew's birth, that brought tears. What a soul. I couldn't help but think of Picasso, the blockbuster I saw last month in Toronto. No comparison, for me - Picasso brilliant, no question, and brave too, but without a quarter of the humanity of the simplest Van Gogh canvas.
Most thrilling of all, to be there with Mum, whom we thought we'd lost several times already this year. She loved it all, though by the end was drifting off - so we revived with lunch in the cafeteria atrium. A cab home and a long nap for her, while I watched her sleep. A tribute to my brother, who told me that when he ran in to hustle her off to the gallery, she was sitting in her underwear. He got her dressed and there, so that we could weep, together, in front of the cherry blossoms. Never to be forgotten.
My last day here - so much to be done, her bills, her finances in chaos, huge decisions to be made about the future. My brother's coming to the residence and we're all having lunch together, and then I'll spend the rest of the day until my flight with her. Each moment to be cherished.
But in the middle of all this, there's one memory that will keep me warm forever. Last month I booked a timed ticket for the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibit at Ottawa's National Gallery for 10.30 Monday morning, after seeing that the bus from Montreal got in to the Ottawa terminal at 10.20, so I'd dash over in a cab. I told my brother that if he bought Mum a ticket for the same time and she was up for it, I'd be happy to take her through; she has often talked about seeing this exhibit, even as she lay in a hospital bed.
On the weekend, my brother mentioned it to her and, frail as she is, she leapt at the chance. But he had not bought her a ticket, and this was the last week the show would be on, hence packed. Oh well, he said, she's a senior and a member of the gallery, we'll get her in somehow. More difficult, however, was the issue of when exactly I'd get there from Montreal, and when he'd manage to get to her place and then downtown. How to coordinate? We discussed general plans and left the rest to the gods.
Who were with us on this one - it went like a commando raid. I realized that the bus stopped first at the U of O downtown, got off there and hoofed it across the Byward Market to the gallery by exactly 10.30, where sure enough there was a massive crowd in the line for tickets that were not pre-booked. I stood in the much shorter pre-booked line, intending to beg for Mum when I got to the ticket seller, when out the window I see my brother's Volvo pull in, and there, staggering into the gallery, was my mother. Just as I made it to the head of the line, she hobbled up beside me, and when the woman saw my lovely old mum, whose membership expired last year and who had no ticket, she sold me one. So the two of us whisked past the hundreds, straight into Van Gogh.
Well, whisked is not the word - I was pushing her in her walker. But we went straight in. And it was glorious. The first room was worth it all, let alone the rest - they'd blown up a canvas to massive height filling three walls, so you could see, huge, his slashes and dabs and globs of paint - the brilliance and courage, the struggle. Room after room of beauty - this time, for both Mum and me, it was his white branches of cherry blossom on a greeny-blue background, painted in celebration of his nephew's birth, that brought tears. What a soul. I couldn't help but think of Picasso, the blockbuster I saw last month in Toronto. No comparison, for me - Picasso brilliant, no question, and brave too, but without a quarter of the humanity of the simplest Van Gogh canvas.
Most thrilling of all, to be there with Mum, whom we thought we'd lost several times already this year. She loved it all, though by the end was drifting off - so we revived with lunch in the cafeteria atrium. A cab home and a long nap for her, while I watched her sleep. A tribute to my brother, who told me that when he ran in to hustle her off to the gallery, she was sitting in her underwear. He got her dressed and there, so that we could weep, together, in front of the cherry blossoms. Never to be forgotten.
My last day here - so much to be done, her bills, her finances in chaos, huge decisions to be made about the future. My brother's coming to the residence and we're all having lunch together, and then I'll spend the rest of the day until my flight with her. Each moment to be cherished.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
the meaning of old
Writing from my mother's room at the "retirement residence" - which was called in my youth an old folk's home - as she sleeps before dinner. She slept after breakfast and again after lunch, did not have the strength to go to dinner without another sleep. I went to Mountain Equipment Coop while she slept this afternoon - it's just down the block - and bought her a fleece jacket. It's Polartec, designed for bitter cold, and though we are in the month of August, she has not taken it off. She's always cold.
It's brutal, this journey into aging. On top of her physical and mental struggles, just to survive - oh the state of her legs - my mother cannot accept that she will never cook again. She has cut a recipe from a Martha Stewart magazine, and wants us to make it. But there's no stove here, I say. Let's just go to the dining room.
It's expensive, she exclaims. And I've bought fresh corn. I love fresh corn.
Perhaps I'll try to wrestle her back to her condo tomorrow, and cook corn, and eat a homemade lunch. I hope this will set her mind at rest.
But we have met wonderfully heartening souls here - two Audreys, one at dinner last night, an artist, a mere 86, newly widowed and newly arrived here, still trying to figure out how this place works, and another today at lunch, a remarkably feisty and cheerful old woman whose macular degeneration appeared last year, she said, as she was driving home, and in 20 minutes she was nearly blind. Eventually her son moved her from Windsor, where she lived, to Ottawa, where he does, and she began her new life at Amica. "A new chapter," she said confidently, squeezing my mother's arm.
"If I may ask, Audrey," I said, "how old are you?"
"I don't tell people usually," she said. "I'm 97."
97, nearly blind, a new town and residence and chapter. I want to be like Audrey when I grow up.
How will we age, we boomers? I was in the elevator at 4.30 today and nearly got trampled by walkers, because that's when dinner begins. 4.30. I just can't see my cohort aging in the same way - but when the time comes, will we have a choice? Today for Mum, just staying awake is a battle. And yet yesterday, at the Van Gogh exhibition, she, a painter herself, was marvelling at colour and brushstrokes and beauty.
I can tell you one thing: ca brise le coeur. It's heartbreaking.
It's brutal, this journey into aging. On top of her physical and mental struggles, just to survive - oh the state of her legs - my mother cannot accept that she will never cook again. She has cut a recipe from a Martha Stewart magazine, and wants us to make it. But there's no stove here, I say. Let's just go to the dining room.
It's expensive, she exclaims. And I've bought fresh corn. I love fresh corn.
Perhaps I'll try to wrestle her back to her condo tomorrow, and cook corn, and eat a homemade lunch. I hope this will set her mind at rest.
But we have met wonderfully heartening souls here - two Audreys, one at dinner last night, an artist, a mere 86, newly widowed and newly arrived here, still trying to figure out how this place works, and another today at lunch, a remarkably feisty and cheerful old woman whose macular degeneration appeared last year, she said, as she was driving home, and in 20 minutes she was nearly blind. Eventually her son moved her from Windsor, where she lived, to Ottawa, where he does, and she began her new life at Amica. "A new chapter," she said confidently, squeezing my mother's arm.
"If I may ask, Audrey," I said, "how old are you?"
"I don't tell people usually," she said. "I'm 97."
97, nearly blind, a new town and residence and chapter. I want to be like Audrey when I grow up.
How will we age, we boomers? I was in the elevator at 4.30 today and nearly got trampled by walkers, because that's when dinner begins. 4.30. I just can't see my cohort aging in the same way - but when the time comes, will we have a choice? Today for Mum, just staying awake is a battle. And yet yesterday, at the Van Gogh exhibition, she, a painter herself, was marvelling at colour and brushstrokes and beauty.
I can tell you one thing: ca brise le coeur. It's heartbreaking.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
eating, drinking, talking, walking
Those of you who follow this blog know, perhaps, that my dear friend Chris, who was adopted as a baby in Vancouver, found his birth mother in his forties - to his delight, she was a French-Canadian actress. This man who grew up anglophone on the West Coast, but had felt compelled to go to France to learn French and was making his career in the theatre, discovered a whole artistic Quebecois family. Today we went to meet his cousin Jean, who works in the post office but is really a composer; he brought us a CD of some of his compositions and told Chris about his grandfather. What a story.
As usual, we ate outside and watched the people parade - the most interesting of any city I've ever visited. The same at lunchtime; we ate with Glenn in the gay village. Fascinating.
Very very hot. We had to go into stores to cool off. Mr. T. has increased his collection of shorts and t-shirts, and I simply had to buy, on sale, a pair of sandals for my aching feet and a pink rain poncho, ideal for the bicycle. Fun.
Ottawa tomorrow. Not fun. But important.
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