The long wait is over

Monday, December 21, 2009

It’s December 21^st, the shortest day of the year and today is going to be great day.

I know this to be true for many reasons, the least of which is the fact that it’s Monday and I don’t have to go to work.

I get up extra early to the sound of big dog ears flopping and shaking in the kitchen—the telltale alarm clock that informs me it’s time to pee.

“Cash” greets me with snarly smiles and vociferous grunts. His long wagging tail bends the dry house air, causing instant static and levitating all the tinsel on the Charlie Brown tree I have near the back door of my kitchen which then jumps onto my housecoat as I brush by on the way to open the back door.

My wish for a new, thick blanket of snow overnight is not met, but what the heck. It’s enough for another practice session with my new snow blower, which I have affectionately named “Little John,” kin to my bruiser lawn tractor, “Big John.”

Me and my boys—all year long we can accomplish great things together.

And oh, yes. It’s the first day of winter and it’s not a gazillion degrees below zero. I can stand outside in my tinsel-covered housecoat and slippers and not freeze solid on the spot. Perfect.

The coffee pot has brewed me up a bold morning beverage and today I can not make it past the fridge without burping the lid on my Christmas baking container and sneaking out a piece of fudge and two peanut butter kisses. Perfect.

Today is going to be a great day.

I am however not completely ready for Christmas just yet. I have gifts to buy for parent-folk who already have everything, including a new kitchen sink.

I consider the sneak art of re-gifting to my mom the “Neti Pot” my sister-in-law gave me last Christmas. It’s up in the cupboard with my collection of un-displayed antiques, where I expect it will become one after 30 or 40 more years of shelf life, unopened.

I consider buying my dad a heater for his workshop or trace lights so that he can find his way from the door to the bench through all the Christmas decoration boxes covering the floor space in there.

On second thought, maybe not.

I have most of the gifts to my children and grandchildren wrapped and ready for delivery in Granny’s little orange Sport Ranger sleigh. At the moment, the brightly colored presents spill out from a corner of my kitchen, just far enough into the room so that I can trip over them on the way to change the TV channel in the living room.

And thankfully the dogs have not yet discovered that some of them contain food.

I’ve mailed out three-dozen Christmas cards—far more than I receive, but who’s counting. The five I have gotten this year are taped prominently to the wall in my kitchen and after I put up the other 25 I’ve received over the last six years—well, I’ll have quite the display. But who’s counting.

I check my holiday “to-do” list, copied 13 times to different slips of paper scattered across the kitchen table. No doubt about it, I am a first-born list maker.

I check the pocket of my wallet for the one scrap of note paper that lists grocery items and stocking stuffer ideas. I decide to re-do those lists, separating the two categories so that somebody doesn’t end up with a head of lettuce in their stocking on Christmas morning instead of a orange.

There’s one opened gift under my tree, exchanged with a gal pal over coffee and lunch at the local donut shop last week. I was supposed to wait just a little longer to open it, but who can resist such things?

Resistance: “the ability to say no to temptation.”

I manage to uphold that law most of the time, except where chocolate is concerned.

And likely tonight at 8:30 p.m. resistance will be futile as well, when I am tempted to bolt through a set of security doors and out onto the tarmac screaming for joy as Peter departs the airplane from the last leg of a 16-plus hour flight from Afghanistan where he has been working.

The moment I lay eyes on his beautiful face is ultimately why December 21^st, 2009 will be a great day, because I haven’t seen him since March 9^th—nine months and 12 days ago.

All I want for Christmas just came home.

On the day that nothing happened

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Each time I think my life is a direct download of nothingness made famous by the ‘Seinfeld’ TV show, the forces of nature step in and stir up my neck of the woods just enough to give me a solid word count for my newspaper column.

The rainy morning has preempted my plans for gardening and set me to keyboard plunking. My collaborative colleague—iTunes—contributes songs from Neko Case, Maino, Shiny Toy Guns, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Kings of Leon and whomever else happens to be in line to inspire me as I write about the day nothing happened.

In an emergency on a nothing day, I could just open my fridge and write a story about what I see inside—wilted old lettuce, a partly-devoured tub of sour cream with a green, crusty topping and a due date back on February 10^th, and an unopened bottle of Marguerita mix from New Year’s Eve. The grim scenario would not qualify for an episode of ‘MTV Cribs’, but then neither would this ordinary, little, old farmhouse and that’s just fine with me.

On this nothing day it is not even noon yet and I’m not sure what rates first in the excitement category; the trailer-full of black dirt delivered by Cohort #1 on Friday evening, or the black bear who was headed to my back door on Sunday morning.

Truth be told--gardeners and landscapers preserve me--I really was as elated to get the dirt, as I am to find a roll of duct tape in my Christmas stocking.

It’s mine and you can’t have any. Oh, the endless possibilities.

I dream bigger dreams for myself than I think God does for me sometimes, and that includes the host of one-woman dirt projects I think I can master.

And as Cohort #1 and his reluctant kin now realize—‘Mrs. Incredible’ can make short work of a trailer-load of dirt long before they decide to get up at noon on a Saturday and come over and help me.

(Wink, chuckle, thanks anyway).

Mr. Bear, who in hindsight appeared rather dejected and lost on his trek through my yard on Sunday morning, was not nearly as excited to see me as I was to see him.

I was edging ever closer to get a picture of him with my camera, and jumping up and down like a two-year old who’d just spotted Santa in Safeway.

The bear stopped, turned, and flat-stared me as I stood there in my housecoat, gum rubbers, and braided Pippi Longstocking coif before shaking his head in disbelief at the country hick paparazzi and sauntering off. 

I shrugged off the snubbing and headed in to quiet the dogs that’d got whiff of the intruder on the outside breeze that blows through the receptacles in this old house.

It was only 9:30 a.m. and too early to allow the canine capers to clock in under their SAEWS collar (Security Assistance Early Warning System) due to the current ‘Quantum of Silence’ proclamation made by cohorts and pundits that restricts all outside noise until noon on Sunday, and includes moaning lawnmowers and barking dogs.

Despite this, I rewarded Dot and Cash for their awareness and handed out treats, most recently found to be old gingerbread man cookies left over from Christmas that I discovered in a container on top of my fridge.

The cookies were so hard that on the way to the dog’s mouths they bounce off the floor, hit and chipped the newly-painted wall in my kitchen, ricocheted off a chair and still not break, leaving the duo occupied with protracted chewings.

Now, here’s the kicker in this entire melee over the day that nothing happened.

If you are not already aware, my husband is in Afghanistan and at the moment he is in the central part of the country in an isolated area of the mountains helping to build facilities at a military forward operating base.

His environment is dusty, dirty, and very, very hot not to mention there’s a war going on.

I thank God for the military troops who do their job so well to protect him and the countless others.

Keep safe all of you. 

So when I think my day is a nothing, I will remember my trepidation and uncertainty that crept in during the online chat with my husband this morning at the same moment when there was gunfire in the background of the world he’s in.

He assures me the barriers that protect the base are taller than he is. Yet I worry for my electrician.

I cannot imagine the worry of a soldier’s wife.

However, Pete was more concerned about the big, hairy live spider that was in his tent—one he called the “daddy” of the camel spider encased in acrylic that he had sent home to me to give to the J.W. Walker students.

Peter had left his luggage open and full of clothes on the floor of his tent (which sounds remarkably like his side of the bed when he’s here at home) and said he was too freaked out to get anything out of it.

Beware the man with aerosol foot deodorant.

“I’m gonna spray inside the suitcase with ‘Tough-Actin Tinactin’ and see what happens,” he wrote.

God help the spider. 

Thoughts on the person I want to be

Monday, May 19, 2009

 

“Four little words just to get me along . . .” 

That’s the first line of a song called ‘That’s Not My Name’ sung by British craze duo ‘The Ting Tings.’ ‘That’s Not My Name’ is a fun, upbeat tune that drives me to grab my pseudo-microphone hairbrush and karaoke my way back and forth across my kitchen floor, pretending to be a pop star.

“They call me Stacey, Mary, Jo, Lisa. They call me Her, they call me Jane, always the same. That’s not my name. That’s not my name. That’s not my name,” I croon.

The dogs, which are my ever-adoring and only audience, shudder and shuffle off to hide under my bed.

I’ve heard myself referred to as ‘she’ on more than one occasion in passing conversations. If my grandson, Adam, is talking to someone else about me and refers to me as ‘she,’ instead of ‘Granny,’ I am quick to remind him, “That’s not my name.”

It’s a throwback to something I was taught in childhood by my mother, who’d also grown up learning to acknowledge people in conversation by their names and not by ‘he’ or ‘she.’ 

It makes perfect sense.

Pay attention to conversations and see how many times it happens to you and to the people you are talking about. You’d be surprised how many of us lose our identities in ‘he’ and ‘she.’ 

I also can think of a handful of other times in my life when “That’s not my name” was central to a conversation—including when I tried to use it in a last ditch effort to avoid punishment from my school principal, the late great Ernie Buchan, when I was in fourth grade in Sixth Street School. 

Mr. Buchan figured out that it was me who had made several alterations to the daily attendance sheet in my fourth grade classroom. 

While waiting for the school bus after school, I had started rubbing out the ‘P-for-Present’ beside every other student’s name but my own, and penciled all of them in as ‘A-for-Absent.’ This went on for a few days, at least. How smart was that?

At the moment when I realized I was ‘toast,’ and as Mr. Buchan addressed me as ‘Beth,’ I wanted to stand on the teacher’s desk and profess, “That’s not my name.” 

Thankfully the reprimand amounted to nothing more than a stern warning and reminder about right and wrong, and yet for a few years after that, I was convinced that the reason I was short in stature was the result of being mortified by the whole affair. 

And then there was life in Grade Seven in Robert Moore School when school pictures were taken. I’d worn a purple t-shirt, had flecks of budding acne on my face, and a wispy scruffy haircut.

We all had our allotted bunch of photos to trade out to our friends. 

Remember how a measure of your “coolness” was how many copies of ‘you’ you had left over? I always had leftovers. Oh well, that’s another story. 

Anyway, the father of one of my friends to whom I’d given a photo of myself took one look at my school picture and determined I was a boy.

“Bert?” That’s not my name. 

After that I started to stuff my training bra, bleach my upper lip hair, and pluck my eyebrows. In public school I also carried the nickname ‘Cuds’—awarded to me I suppose because I lived beside a farm. I couldn’t have had a regular nickname like ‘Shorty’ or ‘Bitsy’ that reflected the fact that I was shorter than everyone else in my class. Nope.

Instead I got nicknamed after the contents in one of four digestive compartments of the ruminant animal better known as the cow. 

And although I am still stunned by the fact that the cow’s rumen can hold 50 gallons of partly digested food or “cud,” I echo -- “That is not my name.”

Another misnomer incident wherein I again thought about denying my true identity was in 1980 when I was working as a course counselor for a driving school in Thunder Bay.

I was in the office listening to a psychic on the radio profess his abilities and who was encouraging listeners to call in, give their name, and wait to hear a future prediction. 

I called in (on company time) and was lucky—or so I thought-- to get in line for a one-on-one with ‘Mr. Clairvoyant.’ “What’s your name?” he asked. (Now remember folks this is live radio.) “Beth,” I said, anxiously awaiting his prediction that would see me running out and buying my lucky million-dollar lottery ticket.

“Well, first of all, I’d tie a big rock around your name Beth and throw it into Lake Superior. It will always bring you bad luck,” he said rather matter-of-fact.

“Oops, silly me,” I wanted to shout out to the doofus forecaster. “What was I thinking? That’s not my name, it belongs to a friend of mine.”

Instead I mumbled, “Okay then. Thanks,” and hung up. 

And while there were stories from my youth that indicated my parents had considered calling me Helen--with all due respect to the Helens of the world--thankfully that’s not my name either. 

On the other hand, a beautiful little soul named Sam once mistook me for ‘Oprah.’ That was my 15 minutes of fame.

And in 1985, a very, very good friend of mine, the late Norrie Godin who was ill and in hospital shortly before he passed away, mistook me for his first love ‘Victoria.’ 

That’s not my name either, but it was one of the warmest mistaken identities I’ve ever had the pleasure of being.

We all work hard in life to build ourselves and being recognized for who we are--or are not—is part of the journey. 

The new website ‘Wolfram Alpha’ predicts that 1 in 8000 women are named Beth and that there are approximately 144,142 women named Beth who are alive today. With a world population of some 6.53 billion people, it does make sense that one wouldn’t hear or see the name very often.

I guess I’ll just have to shout it out a bit more often. 

And while I don’t mind being mistaken for a talk show host once in a while, about a month ago the tipping point came when I suddenly aged about 25 years and was renamed Marie. While I, too, remain on this side of 60, might I remind you—that’s not my name.              

The Tipping Point in Gift Giving

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

I had my first video chat with my husband at noon on Sunday.

It cost me 50 bucks to get set up for the premier event with the purchase of a camera the size of a doughnut hole, embedded with a microphone.

Due to the procrastination virus, I had a small window of about eight minutes from the time I installed the gizmo’s hardware in my computer and the moment of truth when Pete and I would see each other for the first time in 43 days.

All this amid chewing large pieces of my chocolate bar in Olympic record time, washed down with a glass of cold milk.

I smiled and shifted my gaze back and forth between looking into the camera lens and checking out my own reflected image in the little window in the bottom left hand corner of the computer screen, smoothing out the beginnings of the chicken neck that I see has sprouted at Year 48 under my chin.

Startled, I also wiped away the white milk moustache that stared back at me.

And then suddenly, ‘ding,’ and there he was.

I haven’t seen Pete since March 9^th, and he looked like a million bucks smiling at me through that little webcam from halfway around the world.

Gone are the scraggly and wiry dreadlocks of a northern backcountry miner. Pete now sports a wonderfully buzzed head of peach fuzz.

He has a golden tan that also looks like a million bucks right about now, given that Mother Nature is having technical trouble keeping the temperature above cold around here.

But the best treat of all wasn’t the eye candy. It was the first three words that came out of his mouth when he saw me staring at him through the camera lens like a google-eyed deer as I hoped to high heaven the video connection hadn’t been made until after I’d picked my nose.

And no, the three wonderful words he said were not “I love you.”

It was even better than that.

“You’ve lost weight,” he said. “I can see it in your face. It looks skinnier.”

I swallowed the last chunk of ‘Twix’ chocolate bar I’d been hauling on and choked out a "really" and then coughed and laughed almost hysterically as I realized how thankful I was that he couldn’t see anything below my neck, because that’s where everything had gravitated, sagged, and settled when I sat down at the computer and was undoubtedly the reason why my face appeared thin.

“Thanks honey!” I replied, sucking in my Buddha, as the ceiling opened up and poured sunshine on the moment. “You made my day!”

We had 29 minutes before the system at his end would shut us down--and thus, time flew. We are never guaranteed a good Internet connection or one at all so we made the most of it.

I moved the webcam to pan around the kitchen (sweeping over the carcasses of two resting inmates in military dog school) to show off the big box ready for the mail, of the items Pete forgot to pack for his seven-month stint in Afghanistan that included his housecoat, leather slippers, a gym towel, and another blanket.

He then proceeded to tell me about the box of presents he had just put in the mail for me, purchased from an Afghan marketplace. I smiled at the thought of perhaps a beaded hair comb and maybe a necklace or two.

Nope.

How about a camel spider encased in acrylic and a fake scorpion that hisses and jumps out the box when you open it?

And he seriously thought this was cool.

Didn’t this sort of thing happen before? Pete’s genuine and enthusiastic announcement of “I have a present for you!” followed by me expecting gifts of shining trinkets.

I’d tagged along, following him with a curious eye to the back of his truck (at long last, I’d thought to myself, he finally bought me a jewellery box). My anticipation had been high as a kite.

He’d heaved on the door hatch and there it was . . . a buffalo skull?
It just lay there with empty eye sockets looking at me, still in the process of being “cleaned” by the bugs. One molar, embedded with brown stuff, had popped out, leaving a gross cavern in the jaw.
And it smelled bad.

“Well, what do you think?” he’d said, clearly proud.

 I didn’t have it in me to turn him to stone.

And now, here I was with a strange sense of déjà vu and a tracking number for a box being mailed to me with spiders and scorpions in it and oh yes, a tablecloth, a ball cap for my dad, and a package of cheap cigarettes for Cohort #1.

I looked straight into the webcam with my poker face, fetched a big smile from my reserves and said “I love you too, honey” all the while thinking about the box I was about to re-pack for him as soon as the Internet connection was turned off.

Yep, my pink bathrobe, my pink towel, my bunny slippers, and my pink blanket.

 

Something is better than nothing

April 15, 2009

Here’s the thing.

I could tell you that the fact that I don’t write a column anymore is because I’ve been so busy with other things that I have no time for plunking out my chronicles on a keyboard.

But if I took that stance, my nose would grow like Pinocchio’s.

Truth be told, I have loads of time to write and more ideas and dreams and aspirations to write about than anyone can imagine.

Yet, I admit that on a daily basis I readily find countless other things to fill my time so that there is none left in which to write.

I’m a chronic procrastinator who blatantly denies and fights a clear-cut opportunity.

Why is that?

The last time I put one of these columns out was nearly three months ago. How can I expect anyone to rely on that kind of hiccupped continuity?

In the January 18^th column I was professing my belief and confidence in the Universal plan.

And here’s the kicker. I could be a poster child for it these days. I can’t tell you how thick as thieves the Universal plan is around here, waving its green flag and leaving the days wide open for me the writer, even as I continue to put up roadblocks at nearly every turn.

Why is that?

Heaven knows there remains enough comedy and drama in my neck of the woods to fill the word count even though the main catalyst for my creativity, my husband, is working in Kandahar, Afghanistan for the next seven months.

Yet maybe that is the very reason why my writing in stooped in a vat of literary molasses. Yet again, this faltering began long before Pete took up his next big career adventure.

No matter how I look at, I am my own worst enemy, second-guessing my ability and believing the dream-stealing ego that resides in me, while everyone else around me knows better.

For some reason I am convinced by the misconception that everything I write about has to be funny and roundabout romantic. There goes the pathologically positive me again, cutting my own throat to save myself.

Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, and Tom Russell wouldn’t be the songwriters and musicians they are if they thought like that. Any good author in the entire world wouldn’t be one if they thought and wrote like that all the time. 

Quite honestly, of late I am sad. Among other reasons, I feel a tad misplaced, unsure of this recessed future on the horizon, and where I fit in. I thought I knew.

In the song “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” Elton John sings about whether there are people out there like you. I know there are and I’m with them. Here I sit two shots shy of 50, and my chance at retirement is a trash can dream too.

And then, the other me snaps back in place. I am grateful for many things. I have love in my life though it be long distance love these days.

And albeit old and in desperate need of a facelift yesterday, I have the home of my dreams. And I have my people.

I go back and re-read what I’ve typed here so far and roll my eyes. Ridiculous, poppycock.

And yet, something is better than nothing and this is the chapter of thought that, so far, has been on my mind.

Perhaps all this mind muddle is a product of the infinite winter slump that’s had us under a grip of relentless cold and snow, now thankfully, replaced daily by the glimmer of green grass and temperatures above zero.

Though the smell is never friendly, the job of cleaning up a winter’s worth of dog poop is looking pretty good to me. It means there’s hope for summer after all.

And then there’s the new military school for dogs now being attended daily by Dot and Cash, who unbeknownst to me had done enough barking while I was away from the yard to make their debut on the “Most Wanted” list of area neighbors.

My apologies to all parties.

On my “Most Wanted” list are the magpies currently building their summer homes in the cedar and evergreen trees surrounding my yard. I am reminded at this very moment--by the piece of an old alternator belt the dogs had been playing with that just flew by the front window in the beak of a magpie for the family nest—my slingshot lesson is at sunset.

It is my hope that the days to come will bring me back to this place where I plunk out my chronicles on a keyboard. My life is different than it was even three months ago, and not without some very serious challenges and changes to come, but it’s never boring.

If nothing else, I can write about the strange dreams I have at night, like in the one that played out in my mind a couple of sleeps ago.

 

Copious amounts of honey ham and smoked turkey breast lunchmeat were being passed around from out of my fridge to people sitting outside of my house.

NDP leader Jack Layton, clean-shaven with a bit of 24-hour shadow, was sitting on a lawn tractor in my yard talking to me and eating his campaign office memos and then listening to what the election campaign office had to say through the food. 

 

Fortunately, I usually have more interesting and stirring dreams and most of them include my husband in a bath towel, but those details are best left to the imagination.

 

 

 

 

Write here, right now

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

So goes the Universe, ebbing and flowing over our lives, swirling experiences produced of free will mixed with an unfolding set plan we often do not understand.

Or so I believe, anyway.

For some who are dear to us, the weeks following the first light of 2009 have been cheerless and dark and full of heartache not soon to find healing. Potential and hope are elusive possibilities just yet.

For others of us, the job market has waned. Plan B and Plan C and plans for making Plan D are frank realities. Not yet lured to our backdoor, the whisper of the howling wolf lingers off in the distance. He paces back and forth, but nevertheless knows the way here ever so well.

And for many of us, despite thick talk of the world's dollars and sense, there's plenty of promise in this New Year, especially in Washington, D.C.

For some of us, the New Year resolutions are sticking and we’re losing weight, winning the war against cigarettes, and writing in our diaries every night instead of once or twice in 365 days.

For others of us, we are stuck in old ways that aren’t working for us, and yet we are unwilling to change the one thing that would change everything. We question what our heart tells us and keep doing what we’ve always done because it is grossly familiar and the unknown is a scary place.

Pay attention to your intuition. Follow it. It speaks the truth.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Of particular interest to me, of late, are the little people around us who live in the "now." Many grownups could take a lesson or two from that primary school of thought, me included.

As long as Adam, three, can jump off the bottom step of the staircase, then he can fly and everything is right in his world and if one-year-old, Ben, can make that rocking horse pitch then he’s happy as a lark.

Little children aren’t consumed by worries of what might happen tomorrow, or next week, and they certainly don’t let the overloaded soul get in the way of what’s right in front of them.

Whether it’s the little morsels of toast they have in their fingers at breakfast or the play doh squeezing through the small holes on the top of the hair mold––all matters are in the moment.

If little children are happy, the moment is lived in joy and there is nothing else but that. If they’re angry or sad, the moment is lived thoroughly with tears and screaming and then they leave it behind and move on to the next now.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I too am trying to learn something here.

I do my best to pay attention to living in the present moment, and to listen to my intuition when it whispers to me but I fall through the cracks with the best of them all the time. 

So when that little voice spoke softly to me the other day amidst the chaos of my mind, when I was lost in the losing game of perpetual worry about the impossibilities of tomorrow, I really didn’t want anything to do with it.

I was busy.

“Whas tha?” it murmured.

“Whas tha?” the little voice said again, accompanied by a button-eyed look as the words tumbled sloppily over eight tiny baby teeth and out of the mouth of my ten-month-old granddaughter, Julie.

She was sitting on the floor in the middle of my kitchen playing with cans of tomato soup and boxes of Kraft Dinner, clearly a more interesting pastime than all the toys I’d piled in a heap on the other side of the room.

Her realization that she’d caught my attention drew a big smile beamed up to me as she rocked in place, shaking the macaroni box to the beat of her world.

My universe nagged at me to find solutions, fix errors, challenge already-made decisions, pay bills, play catch-up, lament next week, and kick myself for yesterday.

Julie just kept shaking that macaroni box, swaying, and smiling.

Captured by her spell, I climbed down the ladder from my overloaded soul and lay down on my stomach in front of her, rested my hands under my chin, and my world in hers.

The late Martha Graham, one of the pioneers of modern dance, believed that we learn by practice.

“Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.”

No doubt little children have much to learn, but they already are wise beyond measure.

They are a holiday for the adult mind, a window and a door back to that present place that many of us lost touch with when we started projecting ourselves into some future moment that promises greater fulfillment.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Now, if only I could fit on the rocking horse.

 

The game of wait and see

Tuesday, December 1, 2008

The house is quiet and cold. I've been a very good temperature monitor these last couple of months, trying to do my part to conserve energy and heating costs by turning my thermostat down to 16C every night before I go to bed and during the day if I'm not home.
That little stint will be shelved this week when the man of the house comes home. The warm climate of Italy runs through his veins and he can't stand to be chilly even to save a few liters of heating oil.
Still, he will go outside in minus 40 C deep freeze morning winter weather and smoke a cigarette on the front porch, dressed only in his housecoat and winter boots.
Go figure.
At any rate, Pete is making his way home after three months. I can hardly wait.
I'm running around the house making sure everything is just right, knowing full well that in a few short days the place will lose its organized sheen and gain the lived-in look again.
The dogs have no idea what's coming. They've been sleeping on the floor on Pete's side of the bed on comfy little fuzzy blankets every night for three months.
I tried to ease them into the transition by putting their blankets out in the kitchen one night last week. I thought they took it pretty well until I got up in the night to pee and found Cash splayed out on my new leather couch in the living room.
The time before that I had put their blankets on the floor in the spare bedroom to get them used to being "on their own." A few days later after what I thought was an easy transition, I found enough dog hair on the spare bed to make a sweater for the Incredible Hulk.
And I am sprawled across my bed trying to soak up the last few hours of having it all to myself, free to roll from side to side without interference from those big shoulders and chunky muscles taking up more than his share of space—though I won’t complain when he does.
I could use a little hip check right about now.
I have a small list of "to-do's" on the kitchen counter of things I want to get done before Pete gets here--as if I haven't had enough time to complete those tasks in the last 90 days.
I guess I could put the lingering tasks on Pete's "honey-do" list for over the Christmas holidays, but I don't think he'd be too impressed with having to pay back the $20 U.S. to himself that I scoffed out of his piggy bank back in October.
I'd better do that one.
And I'd best call the "hair ambulance" ahead of time and see if they can meet us at the airport terminal.
It would seem Pete ran out of "product" some 40 days ago and let his long curly locks go dread.
Then, in a fit of frustration, he picked up a pair of scissors and cut off six inches of matted hair.
Yesterday he turned the camera on himself, took a picture and emailed it to me with the caption "look for this guy at the airport in the next few days."
When it came through my Inbox, I ran screaming from the room, convinced that aliens had just landed and taken over my husband's body.
The last time the "hair thing" happened to Pete, he didn't cut it. The wooly mammoth look came home with him and he'd yet to be introduced to all my friends.
They still talk about that unforgettable first meeting.
That brings to mind the undeniable fact that even after 10 years of marriage to this colorful man, we still have unforgettable first meetings, thanks to the kind of work he does that takes him far away and brings him back to me.
It gives a whole new meaning to a fresh start and a first kiss--even if his hair is disaster material.
(And if you call and we don’t answer the phone for the next seven days, just leave a message.)

Life keeps me on my toes

Sunday, November 16, 2008

It's been 11 weeks since I've seen my husband and I've probably got three weeks more to go before he gets home for the holidays.
I daydream about seeing him get off the airplane, though I'm not sure what I'll think about the dreadlocks he writes home about these days.
I daydream about Peter spotting me in the crowd of two people who'll be waiting for loved ones inside the airport terminal building here, and wonder if he'll recognize me up close now that he's lost his glasses.
He always claimed he could pick me out a crowd of women with his eyes shut. For the longest time I thought that was such a romantic gesture on his part, until I realized he'd have to use his hands to figure out which one was me.
In early September I’d anticipated my impending alone time would take some getting used to. In fact, it only took about three days.
And I still can't believe how fast the time has gone.
I decided back then to go full bore into my 'INTJ' mode. (That's introvert- intuitive- thinker-judger mode from www.personalitytype.com for those of you who haven't been reading my column in the last few months.)
I thought first (sometimes for days) then acted, focused on one thing at a time, trusted my gut, and thought about future implications.
Surprisingly enough, the days dripped slowly on the page only about 90 minutes total during the last 11 weeks, and when the "slo-mo's" hit, I soaked them up researching my family history and re-arranging the furniture and wall art in my living room.
Unfortunately I could not be convinced by rational arguments because I had no one to argue with, save a dog or two, and they were not remotely interested in anything sensible.
But I did finish my projects and found much comfort in schedules.
On two occasions I went to the big city and fell in love with shopping by myself for myself.
I also learned that when you think something is too good to be true it probably is and it comes with a $300 parking ticket if you assume it's your lucky day to get the parking spot right outside the restaurant door in downtown Thunder Bay.
Yes, I checked for signs and no, I didn't see the little sign hidden behind the lunch crowd mulling in front of it that said, "Handicapped Parking Only."
However, thanks to the power of deduction and a parking authority employee who was in a very good mood, I managed to get my fine knocked down to $100 for my stupidity that afternoon.
And back here at home when I needed a break from myself, all I had to do was invite some of my little grandchildren to come and stay with me.
Now there's a surefire cure for a magnificent case of the Dwindles!
As I have reiterated before, there’s something to be said for spontaneity—for just letting go and letting life have its way with you.
And when life alone makes Beth a dull girl, that's where the grandchildren are the kicker. They are possessed with the all-over-the-place essence of ‘Yukon Cornelius' from the movie classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," just like their Grampa Peter is.
Though I must admit defeat nowadays.
I can't believe I survived raising three kids of my own! Where did I find the energy and the coordination to feed them, wash them, dress them, and not lose them?
These superpowers are a challenge to find today in Granny's magic bag.
As recently as Saturday, during a cookie-making event with my grandson Adam, I forgot to add the peanut butter to the peanut butter cookie dough recipe because I was preoccupied with trying to name each kitchen utensil Adam was pulling out of the utensil drawer while at the same time answering his 20 questions that included where I’d bought each one.
"What is this called Granny? Where did you buy this Granny? Why are you doing that Granny? Why Granny, Why Granny, Why?"
Never answer a three year old's 'Why' question with "Because."
"Why because?" just starts the whole process over again.
And the taste of baby food has not changed in over 20 years. It's still gross.
I'd accidentally ripped off the food label from a jar of the stuff before feeding Adam’s eight-month-old sister Julie, who was poised like a baby bird with her mouth open and at the ready, and had to do a taste test of my own to figure out if it was pureed beef or fruit.
I'm still not sure what it was, but she ate it.
Adam was in the living room at the time and I thought was absorbed in watching ‘The Adventures of Toopy and Binoo.’ When I looked in on him, sure enough there he was watching television--and jamming pieces of Kleenex up his nose.
As I was picking out Adam's nostrils with one hand and feeding Julie with the other, I was suddenly reminded of my brother Jay, who as a little boy shoved pussy willows up his nose and which went undiscovered for some days until they started to ferment.
My other grandson, Ben, who is just shy of being a one year old and who can crawl across a football field in 20 seconds flat was, to my relief, still at home with his parents.
And thankfully Adam waited until he got home to his own house before he decided to shove a big wad of pink bubblegum up his nose and drink food coloring.

You, me, and the family tree

November 3, 2008

It's Sunday afternoon and in a fit of some kind, I've eaten way too many jelly beans.
Awaiting the sore tummy, I shrug off the fact that my teeth are now impacted with gobs of sugar.
I shrug, because despite the challenge for my toothpick, eating jelly beans always makes me feel good.
And when I feel good, then anything is possible.
I sit staring into my laptop screen, ears on the voice of Enya and the violins of Itzhak Perlman.
I toggle between my OneNote chicken-scratch column and email messages from my husband.
He's lost his eyeglasses again and his spelling is atrocious. But blind as a bat, he can type 'I love you' and that's really all I need to see in my inbox.
The dogs are snoring on the floor on Pete's side of the bed, where they will continue to make themselves comfortable every chance they get until the man of the house comes home.
I'm not keen on the windy, fall day.
It's Day one of the many to come that spell shorter daylight hours.
Ho hum.
The dark tan lines are fast fading from the tops of my feet and it's not fair. It's cold in here and it's like summer never happened.
All that hard work outside on those hot summer days . . . . I'd better eat more jelly beans.
Alas, my mind is not on my work.
Instead I'm dreaming about jolly old England, the moors of Scotland, Pinchard's Island in Newfoundland and a visit I've had recently with a woman I'd never met before.
She is 75 years old, her name is Dorothy, and I could hardly wait to lay eyes on her and hear what she had to say.
She is a piece of the puzzle and a part of the story of where I've come from.
My opportunity to meet her could have happened a long time ago-- but as they say, "how quickly not now becomes forever"--a common by-product of the life that happens when you're busy making other plans.
But not that day. That day, the plan was to connect.
Expectations soared and my intuition told me Dorothy was going to play a key role in my discovery of what was behind door number one and the story of a woman named Pearl.
I did not go unrewarded.
I came home one step closer to filling in the blanks about the history behind a beautiful woman who passed away 74 years ago.
She is captured in photographs taken in the early 1900's and into the 1930's; youthful and demure in sepia, serene and blissfully happy.
A young spinster in 1917 whose soul mate would be John in 1923. Then on to become a mother gentle and caring of five little peppers.
Yet, as the Universe would have it, other plans than those who adored Pearl would have hoped for, unfolded in 1934 when at the age of 35 she died.
Her husband and five children would move forward without her.
I grew up knowing it was a love story to dream upon; captured in letters, stories, memories, and photographs.
For as long as I can remember and because she was loved, the woman who was Pearl has been inked in the books of my mind.
How could she not be? Her brief life created one who gave me my existence.
Yet, I miss that I never really knew her.
I always have looked for a resemblance in her photograph and always have believed she believed, as I believe, that anything is possible.
Today I am the caregiver of so many chicken-scratch notes stuffed in file folders by another late great woman named Barbara, who was driven to complete the family tree of her ancestors. An auntie of grandeur and big heart often touted an odd sock among us and chided for her eccentric ways.
Yet, she too is missed.
Truth be told, and though I didn't know it at the time, I think my auntie and I were joined at the hip as genealogy sleuths.
Me and you, Auntie.
You and me and the family tree.
You also confirmed my suspicions that it was you from whom I inherited the first-born trait of the note maker.
Today, you walk in greener pastures with a young mother who waits for her children in fields of daisies. Yet how I wish you were still here to see what leaps I have made in the story of Pearl.
Thanks to Dorothy who nudged the seed to grow, and to all those little notes you left me, Pearl's light is shining back 360 years to a little seaport village in England, where who we used to be lived in an old house with warm light and a little picket fence and where children played and Thomas dreamed that anything was possible.

If a tree falls in the forest . . .

September 29, 2008

Does anybody hear?

"TIMBURRR!"
And down it came, crashing like the clod of earth thrown into the sea by legendary Irish giant, Finn McCool.
My silent concentration was splayed like a bolt from the blue.
"For the love of Pete!," I spluttered aloud, spewing out eight tiny nails I'd been holding in my mouth. They landed, pointy side up I'm sure, in the long grass at my feet, where they instantly disappeared.
I'll find them next summer when I'm running around without my shoes on.
The piece of window screen I'd had in my hand went flying like a frisbee, yanking the dogs’ attention to retrieve. I paused, listening for expletives born of a tree headed straight for the roof. None came.
Another tree had just bit the dust in the name of "The Glen."
Slightly cranky, I picked up the skin I had jumped out of.
My canine follies woofed incessantly in the general direction of the commotion and glanced back at me for reward, garnering only a flat stare.
"You think?" I said snidely.
As it was, Dot and Cash were in the bad books for remuneration of their patrolling duties. That exclusive contract had gone right out with them when they'd jumped through the screen door window during a recent hot pursuit of Ozzie the cat.
I still can't fathom how two dogs, one of which is the size of a small car, had managed to explode through a rectangular space 22-inches wide by 11-inches high without losing a limb or something.
Maybe they were magicians in a former life.
When I'd arrived home to find the screen door massacre, I'd wanted to test their magic skills by hanging the mutts upside down from a four-storey roof like illusionist David Blaine did of himself during a stunt last week in New York.
Of course, I wouldn't do that, and it went out of my head as fast as the dogs' legs that carried them around the back side of the barn when they realized their screen debut wasn't getting rave reviews.
Ozzie, in his own vanishing act, was AWOL for the rest of the day.
In fact, I found him the next morning at dawn-- after considerable investigations based on the feline drawl "MOWW, MOWW"-- locked in the garage with my truck.
I'm not even sure why I spent half my Saturday afternoon replacing the screen in the stupid door. The entire structure was begging to be torn down. The door's 17 coats of white paint were peeling off in curly layers. Next to it, another ginormous section of screened window was flopping loose in the fall winds.
One of many cats that had boarded here over the summer had rubbed against the screen long enough to lift it from the slats, making a convenient entry way for small animals to come and go as they pleased.
Oh, brother. Where's Pete when all these jobs need doing?
He emails me every night. "I miss you, I love you. How was your day?"
I flat stare the computer screen and type.
“Same as usual. I sat around all day eating chocolates and painting my toenails. The dogs did the vacuuming, cleaned the bathroom and retrieved the mail. The cat folded laundry and mowed the grass and then all three did yard repairs while I had a nap.”
Pete replies, “Sounds great honey . . . I can barely make out your email because somebody stepped on my reading glasses . . . "
I pumped out another email that said, “Thanks so much for the go ahead on hiring a contractor honey, you’re a gem.”
Can you hear me now?

Note to Self: Make a List

September 22, 2008

This is not news.
I am methodical, organized, and multi-tasked. And like women everywhere, I too can begin by washing the dishes, leave the room to get another dish towel, and while I’m gone for 30 seconds-- finish folding the laundry, vacuum the bedroom floors, and clean the bathroom.
I am first born, and I am a list maker.
I make lists for the day and for weekend chores I want to finish. I have a pad of paper at my computer desk and one on my dresser just in case I think of something I should do and can't get to the mother list. I invariably, at any given time, have a list sitting on the front passenger seat of my truck of things I need to do in town and one for the things I must take on my next trip to my little village of solitude.
As back up, I have a file in my laptop's Office OneNote where I keep a computerized catalog of "to-dos," just in case.
Of note is that, thanks to Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, I've joined the ranks of tomorrow's overzealous onlookers who've started compiling a Bucket List of must do’s for this lifetime, before I'm reincarnated as a tree.
So far, I have eight things on my list including popular destinations like seeing the Grand Canyon.
But I left 'parachuting out of an airplane' off my list.
Now way am I going to purposely propel myself towards anything at a speed of 190 km/hr just to be able to say "I did that."
Anyway, knowing me I'd deploy the chute, make a wrong turn, and end up in Dryden.
Come to think of it, there's one instance where I will propel myself at high speed and that's at my husband when he steps off the plane at the airport in three months.
Unlike the movie's own list, I don't desire to see Rome or drive a Shelby Mustang. But Ireland and a Hummer would do just fine.
And of late, I've developed a palate for deliciously bold coffee and I'd love to sample some of the world's very best roasts as part of my Bucket List.
However, I am not inclined to try ‘Kopi Luwak,’ the coffee made from the pooped-out beans eaten by civets.
If I want to get that close to nature, I can do it in my own backyard where as recently as yesterday I forgot to wash my hands before eating lunch and in licking my fingers, thereafter remembered the toad I'd rescued from the canine brigade that had peed all over my hand.
As I await the frog flu, I shake my head at the oblivious child who wanted to be an animal doctor and thought she could raise the occasional stunned bird that hit the living room window of the house, by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Bird flu anyone?
And if there is a coffee made from bear scatter or deer droppings, I just might be able to find enough ingredients around here to be a local supplier of that brand.
I worked on my Bucket List a few days ago, while on a hiatus to my little village of solitude, a place that at this very moment seems like overkill, given that I am in the presence of myself nearly all the time here at home.
No need to go away to do that, but anyway . . .
I was sitting outside enjoying a bonfire, when I put the half-cooked list down to tend to it and got too close to the flames while jamming another log in the brew.
A whiff of burning hair singed my nostrils and I dashed from the patio into the trailer flailing my arms at the smoldering patch I was sure to find when I looked at my head in the mirror.
Much to my relief, the only hair missing was what had been growing heartily on my fingers between the knuckles.
In my moment of relief, I was drawn to heed nature’s call and when I stood up and turned on a dime to flush, with it went the last 10 of Uncle Sam’s dollars I’d had in my back pocket. I dove to retrieve the cash as it dropped down with everything else into the loo’s holding tank.
I stopped short when I realized that if my arm got stuck in there, being alone, it would be days before someone would come looking for me.
I washed my hands and went back outside to the fire and my Bucket List, ripped off a corner of paper and wrote ‘Note to Self.’
On it I added ‘buy a lottery ticket and a wallet.’
On my Bucket List, on the chicken scratch side reserved for selfish desires I wrote ‘buy RV with bigger bathroom.’
I put the list down again and trotted off to rake up some old leaves, hoping to find more sophisticated ideas lurking under all the fodder.
All I stirred up was an angry nest of fire ants, which I flat-stared and continued to rake havoc on, all the while oblivious to “Sid Vicious” and his gang that had crawled up inside my pant legs.
Suddenly, I felt bursts of tiny, pinpoint pain going on where I couldn't see. I ran into the trailer contorting uncontrollably and jumped out of my pants to find three little ants clinging and biting maliciously to the skin around my kneecaps.
My Bucket List has ‘saving a species from extinction’ on it.
That’s doesn’t include ants, right?

. . . and then there were none

September 15, 2008

Let me begin with a big round of applause to a certain 17-year old the possibilities for whom have only just begun.
Proud of you? Nothing this talented writer can come up could convey how my rewarded heart pounds for you.
However, I doubt you will empathize with anything I'm writing about in the next few paragraphs and most likely, if I know anything, you won't even read this column until 15 years from now, when stuff your mother did back then, seems cool to you now.
That's okay.
It's a mom-thing.
------------
"Hey Beth! Write a story about me! Something really exciting!" shouted Dan the H20 man—and the world's most excellent conversationalist--as he zoomed past hanging his head out the driver's window and gesturing to me. His work van swerved slightly in his excitement and nearly ran over the writer's foot as she stepped out onto the street from the sidewalk.
When I talk to (or mostly listen to) the H20 man, I’m always sure to come away with a new perspective on things, be it outer space or the cost of gas.
Come to think of it; gas prices are headed to outer space, but anyway . . .
The H20 man always is in good spirits and it tends to rub off on you.
As far as I know he and the Mrs. have an empty nest. Maybe I should talk to them about what to do next.
Maybe they have some alternatives to the path I'm beating around the house as I pace the cage.
------------
Me. MmmmMe. That's mmme. Uh huh, me.
I am among the lyrics in a Bruce Cockburn song and the one for whom the website flownthenest.com was written.
My final shift --Daughter #3-- headed to the big city two weeks ago for University.
Alas, my house is very quiet. Remarkably clean, but very quiet.
Maybe, like something from a Van Morrison song, I'll find some 'Enlightenment' in this empty nest.
“This must be what paradise is like. It is so quiet in here, so peaceful in here.”
I have proven myself so many times as a mom since 1985. Parenthood is all I have known, all I still know about, it's who I've been, and where almost all of my emotional and intellectual skills have resided for 23 years.
23 years.
I'm like an old debit card. A mother whose magnetic strip has worn thin. Time for a replacement card that includes free space, time, and all that.
Now I have to live with myself. Can I do it?
In fact, I never have really done that-- really had the opportunity in my lifetime to do that.
Even before I was done College I had met the first guy I would marry, so I never really had time to get to know myself. By the time I was separated and divorced I had very young children to raise.
Motherhood took notes and Beth was 82nd on the dictation list.
I never got past 81.
Then I met Peter. Thank God for Peter.
Yet, I was still a mother with young kids and now a wife again. Roles rolled on.
Last Friday, the dogs heard the school bus coming down the country road and they stopped and waited for Daughter #3 to get off.
The bus passed the driveway. They still sat and waited.
I expect they'll do that for weeks.
I miss my kid. A lot.
It's brand new desert, a new dawn, the high road, the road less travelled, blah, blah, blah.
I can run around buck naked if I want to, not worry about picking a certain someone up from work at 10:30 p.m. six out of seven nights a week, cook a meal or not, and be done with arguments about whose turn it is to do dishes.
No more head-banging rap music to roll my eyes at, no 'how was your day at school?' repertoires at the supper table.
My house is very quiet.
My husband, who was unexpectedly put on hydro tunnel duty on the Pacific Rim is gone until Christmas.
I miss my husband. A lot.
Now I really, really do have to live with myself.
And Heaven help his side of the bed!
The days do indeed drip slowly on the page Mr. Cockburn.
And I pace the cage.
I quit drinking alcohol in January. It changed my life, my health, my weight, my destiny. But I sure could use a drink right now.
Company for one. I will not go there.
Life without kids at home will take some getting used to. I’m trying that on for size every day. Looking forward not backwards at all the possibilities that lay ahead for me, too.
Forward instead of backwards—that’s the view I should have taken when I returned to Fort Frances from the big city after hauling Daughter #3 and all of her stuff to University.
Instead, I got lost.
The Lone Ranger had warned me before I left the big city heading east, to watch for the sign or I'd end up in Dryden.
So what happened?
In my faked anticipation of life without kids--driving like the rear view mirror was torn off and ‘I ain’t never looking back’ attitude-- I thought I'd overshot the junction.
I kept driving until I found a long stretch of abandoned highway, just outside of Dryden I was sure, and did a U-eey and took the first left on a road I was sure would lead me back home.
I drove on into a town I had no recollection of on the way into Winnipeg and suddenly feeling even more alone than I already was, with emotions of a dejected mother brimming at my eyelids, I started to cry.
It was the city of Kenora and I still didn't know how to get home.
The guy pumping gas at the Kenora gas station must have thought I was a dork, when I stopped to ask directions to Fort Frances, especially when I blathered on about living there nearly all my life and how I couldn’t find my way home.
He just started to laugh and pointed ‘that way, keeping going around until you get to the highway, hang a right and then watch for the sign (or you'll end up in Dryden) and then hang another right.’
This alone time will take some getting used to.
Days drip slowly on the page.
What is my story? It’s going to be fun to find out.
As Jonathan Galassi said, “Eyes ahead companions, life is now.”

Thoughts on days such as these

August 6, 2008

It’s 8:45 a.m. on Saturday.
Peter and I should be snuggled in bed together, wrapped up from the morning chill and planning our weekend—or doing those fun woodtick checks missed from the night before.
At any rate, we’d look like a comfortable pair of new shoes in a shoe box, undisturbed and quite content just to be.
Instead, he is there (sprawled across both sides of the bed pretending my pillow is me and watching music videos and eating Corn Pops in a bowl much too small to hold the Jethro-sized portion of breakfast cereal he prefers) while I am here, 140 km from home watching a perfect summer day arise outside the window of the little village of solitude that has become my writing pad.
I’m on my fourth cup of java from a cup picturing the red, bulging eyes of a green tree frog asking “Got Caffeine?”As I crank out my column, my peripheral vision spots the amphibian and the sight of him drives me to pour another cup.
The resident chipmunk I’ve named “Ray” has spotted me through the kitchen window. I think he remembers the dessert trail of chips from my last visit, as he is sitting on the picnic table using all of his staring powers to get my attention.
I wonder if chipmunks have cholesterol issues.
Cheerios seem a much healthier option than chips this time around. He pokes them in his cheek pouches without hesitation, and I feel better until I realize I have initiated endless expectations from the little rodent.He returns every 10 minutes in search of more.
I miss my husband and I wish I hadn’t come here alone. There are no phones and I can’t even call him to tell him that.
But then again, if Peter were here, there’d be endless fun and I’d get no writing done.
Scents of other village people’s bacon-and-egg breakfasts waft through my window. I’d give up chocolate to have my one and only here to enjoy a meal like that with me. Alas, it’s fruit, yogurt, Cheerios, and another visit from Ray.
It’s 10:30 a.m. and my writing mind wanders to what Peter is up to in his parallel neck of the woods.
If I know anything, the bed is unmade, the dishes are piled in the sink, and he’s flew the coop to hang out with the other woman in his life—the old red barn—where he’ll spend the day tinkering with this and that in his ongoing passion to lead her back to life after countless years of disrepair and solitude.
My grandfather would, with deep pride, understand that passion.
Here, there is no breeze and the temperature inside has gone up almost 10 degrees since I woke up. I toy with moving my writing station outside to the picnic table, but Ray has brought back-up “munks” to move more inventory and I change my mind.
Two children on bicycles fly by like race horses, followed at heels by their barking family dog, sending “Ray and Company” scurrying for cover under the wood pile. Dog takes short cut over my patio, stops short to eat Ray’s cache on the edge of the picnic table, and then moves on.
I drink in the slow motion of a weekend away. I haven’t been here in 21 days. Is it just my imagination or is time really attached to a rocket ship bound for outer space?
This particular summer has been busier than an ant hill disturbed by a shovel, and like the ant, I cannot move fast enough before the shovel comes down and spreads my goals for these warm months across acres of time and space.
I think twice about the shovel.
I’ve been using one quite regularly these days. In mid-July, for instance, I took on the hardy task of digging up and flattening dirt from a 30-foot long, lumpy strip of earth left over after our new well line was laid in the ground there in the late summer of 2006. We weren’t supposed do to anything with the big heap of dirt for two years. Ever since, I’d been mowing around it, walking over it, and watching the weed forest grow on top of it.
When the two-year alarm finally went off, I ran for the phone to book the local landscaper to flatten that eyesore. Then my wallet screamed a plea of mercy and my DIY-self kicked in. Besides, how hard could it be?
If my grandparents could excavate a basement by hand all those years ago, surely I could do this one thing. The 950 sq. ft. home we live in was once an old schoolhouse in La Vallee and it was transported here in the early 1940s when my grandparents bought it. Not much has changed in 65+ years, save the roof being lowered and a small addition in 1967.
As far as I know, the original slate chalkboards still exist in the walls of my kitchen (once the classroom).
The house has two connecting basements—affectionately referred to as the “old” and the “new.” The new one was built in 1967 to support the addition.As the story goes, the old basement was dug out from under the house in 1944 by my grandparents, Joe and Florence, who took shifts carrying pail-fulls of earth up a steep flight of stairs to dump outside.
I have thought about that feat, and I’ve been driven by that feat for the last three weeks as I’ve dug up the heaping trench and dispersed the countless wheelbarrows of dirt.I’m not done yet—and sometimes I think I’m crazy for not ordering up a machine that could have picked it all up and flattened it with one swipe.
On days like that, I stand back and take it all in, and I’m reinforced by how gratifying it is to at least try to live up to old digs.
It was now 12:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in this little village of solitude that has become my writing pad—and where I was supposed to spend the entire weekend. “Ray” had moved on to other village eateries, and the world was lonely and quiet.
If I pack it in and go home unannounced, what might the consequences be?
For starters, time will take to a rocket ship and then I’ll find the bed unmade, potato chip crumbs and Corn Pops in the bed sheets, dishes piled high in the sink, laundry to do, and the remaining heap of dirt just where I left it.
But the fine-looking man who’ll walk out of the barn with a big smile on his face at my early arrival will make all of that worthwhile.

Curb your enthusiasm

July 9, 2008

I am a do-it-by-the-book woman and I wear logic like a body-hugging Playtex girdle.
I plan, I read the instructions, I play it safe, I like to spend time alone, and I almost always know where everything is around here.
A few days ago, when I had nothing better to do, I took to the Internet and “Googled” myself.
According to www.personalitytype.com, I really do know Beth pretty well.
It would appear that I am an introverted, intuitive, thinker, judger—or “INTJ” for short.I think first (sometimes for days) then act, focus on one thing at a time, trust my gut, and think about future implications.
I am convinced by rational arguments, prefer to finish projects, and find comfort in schedules.
When I review the profile again, I am struck with the real possibility that my character is rather monotonous and stuck up. I suppose that’s why the Universe teamed me up with Pete, who has the fearless, adventure-driven, all-over-the-place essence of “Yukon Cornelius” from the movie classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
So, when all work and no play makes Beth a dull girl, life sends her husband home to muss up her hair, make absurd spontaneous decisions that involve money, stir the pot by using my tools and then not return them to their original location, and make our neck of the woods an unpredictable land mine series of events.
He’s generally home for a week, with the first seven days being an adjustment reaction period. Sure, we have oodles in common—the least of which include the fact that we share the same inseam measurement, enjoy tea and chocolate, and dig “Alien” movies.
We love pigging out on ice-cream and doughnuts (though not at the same time), share an affinity for the color green, and love technology.
However, there are times when still--after 10 years of happy marriage--I am confounded by and shake my head at the remarkable and magnificent case we make for the law of attraction between persistent opposites.
According to www.personalitytype.com Pete is an enthusiastic, playful extravert and a non-conformist who questions the need for rules and is disorganized.
That’s why I check all of his jean pockets when I do the laundry. While I often fail to notice the Kleenex ball until it appears in a million pieces in the bottom of the washing machine, I never miss the handful of loose change.
Until Pete gets to about here while reading this, little did he know that a recent rummage netted me ten bucks.
However, such giveaways are but a drop in the bucket of debt that remains unpaid by the Household Corporation to the multi-skilled phenomena that is housewife.
And because I suspect this unpaid compensation package will remain in the unwritten rules of no fee for service that comes with marriage, I will continue to rake in the coffee money.
Pete’s personality also rewards him with a high creativity level. Anyone who remembers what the inside of my grandfather’s barn used to look like, would take one look at it today and concur that only a man of great imagination could have accomplished what Pete has done in there.
But the bucks for the barn stop short at the stripper pole.
“A stripper pole?” I said, in slow motion, lowering my head so that Pete could see the future implications of the horns growing out of my skull. Time stood still for the once bitten twice shy; you’re in deep “doo-doo” moment.
Did he not remember that three years ago at another home we owned, Beth had bravely stepped out of her safe zone and suggested to her spontaneous husband that he build her a stripper pole. Beth was going to take lessons and spice up the atmosphere in the bedroom.
One little giggle at the notion from the man of the house and I’d packed that idea in an iron chest, clad it with 14 padlocks and threw it and the keys into the deepest part of the ocean.
Now all of a sudden, my adventure-driven husband thinks a stripper pole would be cool?
“You’ll have to find somebody else to use that thing because I’m not going to,” I snorted, drudging up muddy waters and the universal red flag end-of-conversation signal of arms crossed.”
Would you repeat that,” Pete quipped, bouncing about like a slinky.
“Could I have that in writing?” he added.
“Curb your enthusiasm,” I scowled, before Pete’s smarty pants laughter caught me up too.
Yet, little did he know.
The late Marlene Dietrich said, “Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”
I agree.
But sometimes I burn his bacon.

Time is for the dogs

June 25, 2008

Summer is less than a week old and already the pages of the Sears Fall/Winter catalogue are bent and crinkled as society tugs at us to plan what we are going to wear five and six months from now.
And here I am behind the times again, having just found my jean cut-offs and the three tank tops I didn’t give to Goodwill last October.
What’s the sense in rushing things anyway? As it is, I can barely keep up with mowing the grass every three days to stay ahead of the dandelions.
When I’m not thinking about yard work, working, or cleaning the house, I have my face buried in the endless pages of the Undergraduate Guide and “How-To” tutorial that precedes Daughter #3’s impending stab at university in the big city.
Deadlines for post-secondary fee payments loom like bats in the belfry, swooping down and into my wallet only to find food coupons and Canadian Tire money. And if that’s not enough to think about, I find myself measuring the week by the amount of days I have left to write this column in time for the following week’s paper.
When I refuelled this mission to write “The View from Here,” I made a pact with myself that I would have a new column lassoed and tied each Friday morning. The late author Lloyd Alexander once penned, “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
All I know for sure is that for six of the last seven days, I’ve been looking for the answer to this question: “What am I going to write about this week?”
I have a million beginnings running around in my head, 16 pages of snippet notes, and a little brown notebook I carry with me everywhere that is full of chicken-scratch and half-cooked ideas. One of my biggest hobbies is collecting philosophical quotes. I suspect it has something to do with my insatiable longing for another person’s viewpoint.
My husband would beg to differ and he’d be right.
When he’s around and it comes to brass tacks, my viewpoint is the only one that counts (I love you, honey). Column-wise, I had a good thing going for three weeks and then the ’flu bug came a-knocking and relieved me of all grammar and language abilities except for the word “Ralph,” which I repeated several times in the wee hours of a mid-week June morning.
I guess I should have listened to Mrs. S. when I closed in for a friendly hug at the store and she said “Don’t get too close, I’ve been sick and this is the first time I’ve been out and about in three days.”
It was four for me.
Time melted into a big heap and with it, all my energy. My bed never saw so much of me. The dogs—bless their canine souls—slept at the foot of the bed patiently waiting for my “get up and go” to get up and play fetch. When I finally did come up for air and went outside to take in the sun, the grass was around my kneecaps and the dandelions had gone to seed.
“Dot” and “Cash” bounced around in mid-air clearly overjoyed by the rebirth of the one who has treats. Then, as dogs do, Cash took a break from the frenzy, lifted his leg, and peed on an evergreen seedling I planted last summer for my dog, “Griffon,” and whose ashes also are buried beneath it.
I took one good, long look and realized that Cash had been making regular stops at the little tree, and had rendered it a stark and dingy former skeleton of itself (no pun intended).
Dogs pee on trees, that’s the truth of it, but I think Cash has hierarchy issues. He certainly has poetic timing. About two hours ago, he got up from his spot at my feet near my desk chair and put his big, fat mutton head on the keyboard resting on my knees and, with one flick of his snout, deleted all the work I’d just written for this week’s column.
But that’s another story.

Patience is a virtue, right?

June 11, 2008

“I have about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.”
My brother, a.k.a. Mr. Smooth, uttered the statement last weekend after spending three-quarters of his two-day visit here from Thunder Bay trying to figure out why his old truck wouldn’t start.
“Wow,” I said to myself. “That’s impressive.”
The Sunday afternoon was teetering on 5 p.m.—one hour past the time he’d decided to head back to the big city. If it had been me turning the ignition key over and over again, and staring at the engine until my head looked like a question mark, I’d have stomped up and down, lit a match with the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes, and smoked the half-ton long before my patience had time to run out.
And I’d still have had enough tantrum energy left to clean my entire house in about 15 minutes.
As much as I’d like to boast that I, too, was born with the patience of Job, sadly, I think I was behind the door when the storks handed out that virtue. However, in my neck of the woods of late, matters of normal human tolerance are clouded by merry menopause.
In any given nanosecond, the hormone roller-coaster and its forces of evil cause me to start on fire in the middle of a cold shower or morph into Cruella De Ville and send every living thing in the farmyard scurrying for cover.
A woman’s day-to-day agenda is a big test as it is, without being drafted kicking and screaming by the war department into the Change of Life.
I suppose I should be thankful for some things, though. At least for the moment, it would appear I’m not on the list for symptomatic weight gain. In fact, I’ve lost 15 pounds since January—a direct benefit of no alcohol, no breads, no sugar, and plenty of exercise scrubbing tubs.
On the other hand, there’s a downside.
My apple-bottom and piano legs have shrunk, but losing bulk from “the sisters” and from the skin above my eyelids has caused those parts of me to droop farther south. While an 18-hour bra can improve what’s abreast, where’s the hope for the slinking skin above my eyes, short of a scalpel wielded by a plastic surgeon?
Come to think of it, I could do what my dear Ottawa-based cousin, Carol, humorously suggested. Gals with eyelids like us can self-rejuvenate our smoldering youth by maintaining a constant look of surprise on our faces.
I set a mirror on the kitchen table this morning and tried that pose at breakfast over coffee. I looked 15 years younger for about seven minutes, then my eye sockets dried out and my contact lenses bonded to my pupils.
Peter walked in from his morning rounds, took one look at my wide-eyed “deer in the headlights” expression, and checked his pants zipper and his hair to make sure everything was buttoned up and beautiful.
As if he hadn’t seen that look on my face before. It’s the same one I use to showcase disbelief when the space junkie that I am is overrun by the unorganized territory that accompanies a man about the house after his three-week stint away at work in the far north.
And it’s the same face I confronted Pete with just the other day when he insisted that his new diet program, which he began just two days before his work medical, included of a jar of Nutella and a dozen corn muffins.
It’s also the same bug-eyed look Mr. Smooth did not see when he jumped into the front seat of my new truck and ripped open a big bag of corn chips and a runny jar of jalapeno cheese dip.
He has no idea how close I came to sending him back to 1972 in a sewing basket.
Lucky for him, I was starving—and had about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.

Stalk of the dandelion

June 4, 2008

In the news these days, there’s a lot of talk about kids spending too much time in front of television and computer screens, and not enough on physical activity.The truth is what it is.
In my youth, physical activity was as regular as rain. If my brother and I weren’t digging huge forts out of the mountains of snow piled along our driveway in the winter, we were bag-lunching it across the field or the creek every day of the summer with our cousins.If boredom set in, netting cabbage butterflies from the garden earned us five cents apiece, or we could pick dandelions—the arch-enemy of my dad’s well-manicured lawn.The insect pursuit would land us 10 or 15 cents before the winged creatures figured us out, or we lost interest.As a kid, the stalk of the dandelion lasted only as long as it took to pick a handful of the yellow dander and run it in to my mother who, like all mothers, would accept the bouquet of weeds with a smile.I was just shy of being a teenager when the audio visual entertainment industry became a household commodity called a TV in my parents’ home and computers existed nowhere that I knew about except on the starship “Enterprise.”My parents’ decision to wait to buy a television was kin to an old western gunfight at the O.K. Corral. They were one of the last hold-outs.In hindsight, given the statistics that some kids today are watching TV or playing video games up to 12 hours a week (and getting fatter by the minute), parents like mine had made the best decision of all.Until the early 1970s, if anybody in my family wanted to watch television, we had to go next door to my grandparents’ farm house, where we’d get to sit in on watching whatever the older folks had in mind. “The Wonderful World of Disney,” “Lawrence Welk,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Bonanza” ruled the coop.If I could be a kid again, I wouldn’t change a thing.I have a storybook of fantastic childhood memories built on country living, outdoor play with my cousins, and farm yard fun. Yet, I loved the novelty of television, too, just about as much as I did playing with kittens and baby chicks.And I’m still a big fan of all three.Once TV came to my house, the way things were didn’t change a whole lot. The only show I really was interested in was a spooky black-and-white series called “Creature Features,” and it started at midnight on Friday nights.Of course, the middle of the night was way past my bedtime and I only remember seeing the show once—after tiptoeing downstairs as everyone slept.I remember my dad had two weekly television series favourites—“The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” and “Hockey Night in Canada.”Back then, I wouldn’t have thought twice about knocking my little brother over and into a sewing basket on the way to the couch when my dad sat down to watch the Loony Tunes.They still rock.On the other hand, I dreaded Saturday night and sitting through the “the good ol’ hockey game.”If I could have managed to slapshot that hour of television into outer space where Captain Kirk voyaged, I’d have done so.And with all due respect to hockey fans, I’m still not among you—though I am very familiar with the terms “offensive zone,” “poke checks,” and “clearing” as they frequently apply to the disaster on Pete’s side of the bed.I also know the meaning of goalkeeper (though I must admit I rarely stay on my side of the centre red line).These half-cooked meandering thoughts of my youth, television, cartoons, and hockey were going round in my brain as I looked back at all the dandelion stalks popping back up in place in the cut grass of my entire yard after a four-hour elimination mission with the master tractor “Big John,” and the push mower, and the cordless weed eater.I wondered if a short-tempered attitude approach, like that of Yosemite Sam, would make a difference. But for every clump of dandelions I hammered back into the ground by jumping up and down, another 300 of them popped up three feet away.Maybe the neighborhood kids could pick them all.But I couldn’t think of anybody under the age of 15 who lives around here—and if there were any, they probably were watching TV or playing video games.Maybe I could pull the “good ol’ hockey game” out of my bag of hat tricks and slapshot dandelion heads into outer space with my baseball bat. Maybe I could just wish them away like I did the wart on my big toe when I was 10 (my dad had told me to do that back then and it worked).I convinced myself that the lawn still looked well-manicured despite the stalk of the dandelion, and then went inside to put on a pot of java for the lone ranger who’d often stop by for coffee at 3 p.m.We were sitting at the kitchen table talking about this and that when he looked out the front window at the green grass and said, “With all the dandelions out there, it looks like you need to cut the grass again.”
The truth is what it is.

The meaning of 'should'

May 28, 2008

One of my favourite songs to listen to on my iPod is the spoken-word lyrics of “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” written by Baz Luhrmann. The seven-minute sage narration has been around for more than a decade and yet remains timeless in its message about what’s important in life.
For me, the “Sunscreen Song” holds some of the best third-party advice I’ve ever laid ears on, and I should listen to it more often because there are many a day when I still need to be reminded of what matters most.
The “Sunscreen Song” is sort of a to-do list for me to check my life against, especially when I think things aren’t going the way they should. If you are familiar with the words, then you’ll understand when I declare I am among the people over 40 years of age who really doesn’t know what they want to do with their life.
However, make no mistake.
Not knowing doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. Where I am—or am not—in this great big world, and that things will continue to change, makes for great adventure. I only get one shot at this particular shift on Earth and I’m keeping the door open to possibility until long after my hair is long and grey.
Of course, if I quit paying attention to what’s important, there’s a good chance my interesting life won’t get its chance at fulfillment, as was nearly the case one evening in late January.
With the deep freeze of winter mighty in the night air, there I was sitting mindlessly in an idling truck after pulling into the garage. For far too long I was oblivious, with my eyes closed and a large smirk on my face, deep into an episode of Stuart McLean’s “The Vinyl Café” on the radio as the engine exhaust cowered in the outside air and backed up around the truck.
As the “Sunscreen Song” touts: “Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you . . . on some idle Tuesday.”
Hmmm. I should thank my lucky stars.
Thank you.
Oh, yes, and I’m supposed to dance—even if it’s only in my living room. As the matter of fact, the last time I danced in my living room was in 1997, all over the new flooring Peter and I had spent hours putting in at the first home we rented together before we were married.
The last time I danced in public was in February at a Collective Soul concert in Thunder Bay, but not until my #3 daughter corrected me on protocol.
I don’t get out much and, consequently, the musical event was my first rock concert ever. Ever.
When it became apparent that no one was going to sit down after rising to a frenzy as the band came out on stage, Mrs. Know-It-All blew a gasket.
“If I have to stand up for the whole concert, I’m leaving,” I scowled to my 17-year-old jiving beside me.
“It's a rock concert, Mother, you’re supposed to stand up,” she replied with the flat stare she inherited from me.
Scream, shine, spit me out “wa huh, wa huh, wa huh.”
All that I know is I should do that more often.
I also know that even though good eyesight isn’t on the to-do list of the “Sunscreen Song,” my husband should never go without glasses. The latest news flash in his neck of the woods is that he can’t tell the difference between me and a vulture.
We’d taken an exciting day trip to the local landfill site to dispose of old farm fodder and as Pete chucked, I snapped digital photos of gigantic eagles and other carnivorous fowl huddling on mounds of muck off in the distance.
After I had downloaded the photos to my computer at home and was checking out my cache for any hint of National Geographic quality, Pete stopped short behind my armchair, his eyes all squinted and wrinkly.
“Is that you sitting on a hill?” he muttered, unaware of the forces of evil about to descend upon him.
“That’s a turkey buzzard,” I said with a whole whack of attitude, clicking the mouse repeatedly on “zoom” until the old bird filled the screen.
Pete, ever the master of recovery, quipped back that if I wore Victoria Secret underwear more often, perhaps it would correct his vision. I just squawked and pecked his eyes out.
The “Sunscreen Song” tells us to accept certain inalienable truths. Contrary to what I thought my intention was last November, when I decided to quit writing this column, clearly that decision was not part of the universal plan for me.
In a quirky sort of way, my writing sits right up there with credit card debt. There are some things that are impossible to run from or forget about.
And to those of you who conspired with the universe to remind me over the last six months or so that you missed me, and that I should write in this space again, thank you.
Here I am.