Making Memories

"Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future." - Corrie Ten Boom

I have returned home from a ten day trip to the U.K. spent reconnecting with Merv's family and reveling in time spent with Jacob exploring new worlds.  In so many ways, it was a magical time.  We started with a weekend in a small village in Wales for my brother-in-law's wedding and spent a week in London meeting up with family members who unfortunately didn't participate in wedding celebrations.  They are a fractured family.  Jacob and I spent the final five days of the trip alone after Merv returned home to meet some work commitments.

It was an emotional time for me.  I met one of Merv's nieces for the first time and another for only the second.  We took them on our tourist activities, a spin on the London Eye, a tour through the London Dungeons, hours spent exploring the Museum of Natural History and lots of tea and scones.  It was great to watch Jacob connect with his cousins.  For a couple of days, we had the pleasure of the company of our friend Emma.  It was a whirlwind of museums, gallery, high tea and theatre.  And on our last day in London, we were lucky enough to share lunch with Merv's stepsister and her husband.  I so much appreciated that all those wonderful family members travelled to London from different parts of England.  In the precarious state of my heart health, I didn't feel I could summon the energy to travel about the country to see them all.  Still, I amazed myself with how physically active I managed to be, averaging 20 kilometers on my pedometer every day.  My feet managed to carry me through The National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Natural History and the Tower of London.  I walked the mall, strolled Regent Park, Hyde Park, Westminster, Baker Street, Soho and Carnaby Street.  I climbed and descended the long, steep staircases of the London Underground, many, many times.

But the very best memories of this trip did not come from seeing the sights or attractions.  The best memories came in the quiet moments when I watched Jacob take care of me in the same ways I took care of him when he was small.  He carried my bags and helped me up and down the stairs.  He navigated all of our journeys on the tube.  He dealt with my technology issues several times a day.  And I sat with a lump in my throat as I watched him tighten the laces and tie up my running shoes.

The week ahead will be challenging.  I am feeling a bit nervous about the angiogram I have scheduled on Friday morning.  I know it is generally a safe procedure but like all things related to the heart, it is not without its risks.  Within the next couple of weeks, there will be more - another pacemaker procedure that's a bit trickier than the last.  I am trusting that it will go as planned but if it doesn't, Jacob will always have our memories of London.

Un-busying

"A bee is never as busy as it seems; it's just that it can't buzz any slower." -  Kin Hubbard

I don't know how it happened that I became one of those people who feels the need to fill up every moment with productive activity.  I'm pretty sure that when I was younger I was perfectly content to just watch TV or read a book.  Somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to do one thing at a time.  I still watch TV but I never just watch TV.  I watch TV and paint or bead or make something.

I suspect that as I age and my health deteriorates, I'm starting to cram for finals.  And while I hope finals are still a long way away, I'm not sure. I'm afraid to waste time.  I feel an urgency to create, to cook and can and bead, as though I need the assurance that when I'm gone, I will have left enough things to mark my time in the world.  I don't want to be forgotten.  I realize it is a crazy notion.  People will remember me or forget me, not for the things I left behind but for the impact I had on their lives - or not.  I hope all the young people I took on as my own will remember how much I loved and supported them.  Just the same, I'm trying to complete a project for each of them.  I had better stick around for a while.  I still have a lot of things to get done.

A couple of days ago, I found myself with two unscheduled hours on my hands when a client meeting got pushed from the morning to the afternoon. What I really needed to do was to take a nap.  The new drugs I'm taking to try and get my heart under control are knocking me on my butt.  I haven't experienced this level of fatigue since I was in cancer treatment more than a decade ago.  But I felt guilty about napping so instead, I made four litres of dill pickles.  It made getting to my appointment on time a challenge but I managed.  When I finished, I raced to my mom's for a late afternoon visit.  By the time I was done, I could barely keep my eyes open.  I should have taken the nap.  Bicks probably makes better dill pickles than I do and they're cheaper.  In the last couple of weeks, I've made dill pickles, pickled beets, grapefruit jelly, merlot jelly, riesling jelly and today, three and a half litres of bread and butter pickles. Other than making green tomato relish if I'm lucky enough to score a bushel of green tomatoes, I think I'm done.  I feel exhausted just thinking about carting all the cases of my canning down to the cold cellar.  That's on my agenda tomorrow.

In less than two weeks, I will be a visiting vendor at a show in Collingwood.  It will be my first official sale of Jackie's Creations. So in the next couple of days, I will finish up the few pieces I want to get painted and string up a few necklaces and bracelets.  I'm trying to get my steampunk outfit ready (which the sale host has asked that I wear).  And then I am done.  The whole week before the sale, I'm hoping to just concentrate on my day job and get some rest.

Somewhere in my psyche, I know that I need to slow down and stop fighting the fatigue.  My friend Gail tells me she things it's odd for a Catholic girl to have such a strong Protestant work ethic.  I am going to try to learn to un-busy.  I'm not sure I'll be able to get there but there are some books on my shelf that I'm anxious to read and when it comes to reading, I tend to get lost in my books.  No multi-tasking possible.

Not Entitled

"Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle." - Gloria Allred

All the way around, yesterday was a lousy day.  Another visit to my cardiologist came with no good news.  He doubled up the medication he gave me two weeks ago, added an additional medication, is scheduling an angiogram for September and expects I will need additional pacemaker surgery in a few months.  Needless to say, I'm disappointed.  All this in the same week I had unscheduled dental surgery and a consultation with an endodontist to schedule the root canal I will be having next week. 

Setting all that aside, it's been a bad week in the world.  Seven months into Donald Trump's presidency, we are are facing the first threat of nuclear war. Two childish dictators in a pissing contest can take the whole world down.  It's too terrifying to contemplate.  But there isn't even a need to go so far from home to get up close to hatred and mayhem.  A trip to Charlottesville, Virginia would do the job.

Yesterday's neo-nazi, white supremacist  march in Charlottesville and the violence that erupted with counterprotesters ended with a 20-year-old white man deliberately driving his car into the counterprotesters resulting in the death of a young woman and injury to many others.  As if that wasn't bad enough, Donald Trump made a weak, pathetic statement that fell far short of condemnation of the neo-nazi groups.    For the rest of the day and night, CNN was filled with outraged pundits both in rebuke of Donald Trump's statement and in defense of it.  Several times I heard pundits on both sides refer not to just the rights of everyone to free speech but also to the right of everyone to their own opinion.  I take exception with that.

You can differ with me politically - I'm okay with that.  I may lean slightly left of center and you may lean a little right.  There is room for us both to hold our views.  But I will not defend or even support your right to hold an opinion that is rooted in hate and fear.  You do not have a right to believe you are superior because of the colour of your skin.  You do not have the right to believe you are superior because of the shape of your genitals.  You do not have the right to believe you are superior because of where you happened to be born.  You do not have a right to turn your back on desperate people because you are afraid that one in a million of them may hurt you. Refugees are not Skittles.  You do not have a right to hate.  So no.  If any of those things describe you - you do not have a right to your opinion.  Crawl back under your rock and stay there.  You will turn into fossil fuel soon enough.

Of Teeth and Tickers

"A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets." - Gloria Stuart

I could say I've had a tough couple of weeks but that would be like saying Noah got caught up in a slight overflow.  A couple of weeks ago, I went for all the tests my doctor routinely orders after my annual check up.  I had put them off for a few weeks because I've been really busy but I finally got around  to scheduling the big ones - mammogram, breast ultra-sound and cardiac echo.  No good results in any of them but more of a "six month follow-up" on the breast scans recommended.  The cardiac echo was an entirely different story.  A panicked technician spent an inordinate amount of time conducting the echo.  She was so alarmed by what she saw that I went home hooked up to a 48 hour Holter monitor.  A couple of days later, I saw a new cardiologist as it was deemed unsafe to wait for my own cardiologist to return from his vacation.  A couple of days after that I spent three and a half hours in a nuclear perfusion stress test - perhaps the most brutal test I've had to date.  It would appear that my heart doesn't like being paced and as a result I have developed both A Fib and heart muscle dysfunction.  The pacemaker that I got last year fixed one big problem and created a couple more.  So once again, I'm staring my mortality in the eye, trying not to panic, dealing with the side-effects of the new drugs I've been given to deal with the A Fib and hoping against all hope that there will be some new and effective treatments available by the time the current drug options have run out.  Of all the health issues I've dealt with over the years, I still find the heart stuff to be the scariest.

In the midst of all this heart drama, I went to my dentist for my regular hygiene appointment.  She noticed that one of my crowns seemed to be separating though I've been experiencing no discomfort.  She ordered a set of x-rays and informed me a couple of days later that I needed two crowns replaced as well as another root canal which will also need to be crowned.  Ugh. I spent four hours last Thursday getting one new crown followed by an endodontistry consult yesterday.  The root canal will be next Friday.  Today I went to have the second crown replaced.  It took all of five minutes before my dentist declared that the tooth couldn't be saved so a crown replacement became an extraction and a bone graft with a plan for a tooth implant in six months.  It's been a painful day.

I keep wondering what the universe is trying to tell me.   I can't seem to catch a break these days.  My back is extremely sore, my sciatic nerve is screaming and both my shoulders are shot.  I don't want to whine.  I'm tired, stressed and scared and trying to carry on without showing that I'm tired, stressed and scared.  I've been thinking about the advice I've been given in other tough times.  Though it pretty much annoyed me when my friend David said it to me years ago, it's probably the best way to go.  "Suck it up, princess".  Okay.  I'll try.

Perfectly Imperfect

"We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less.  Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.” – Pierre Trudeau

We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less. Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada. Pierre Trudeau
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/canada.html

With our birthdays just one day apart, I’ve always felt a particular affinity with Canada Day celebrations.  I was a day from turning twelve years old when we had our centennial celebration.  There has been a whole lot of discussion about what this year’s celebration means and in my social media universe, many have expressed their reasons for not celebrating the 150th anniversary of Confederation.  I respect their choice.  But it is not my choice.  More than ever, I want to shout from the rooftops this year of my love and gratitude for this country.    

I realize that our nation is far from perfect.  I understand why our indigenous peoples don’t want to celebrate the anniversary of their colonization.  We have treated them shamefully.  We stole their land, their cultures and all too often their lives.  For more than three centuries, we abused our indigenous people and regretfully, we are still failing them in far too many ways.  But even God can’t change history.  What has happened, has happened.  What we can do is to move forward to try and make things right.  We can work toward reconciliation.  We can admit our failures and our wrongdoings.  We can apologize.  Perhaps we are not moving fast enough to do these things, but I think we are moving forward.  More of us than ever before, seem aware of the need for reconciliation.  Our federal government has taken steps and made promises to do more to make things right.  I, for one, am choosing to believe them and I will work my hardest to hold them accountable to keep the promises they’ve made.

Apart from those who were here when the first Europeans came, you don’t have to scratch very deep to find that the rest of us come from somewhere else.  On my mom’s side, my ancestors were part of those first groups of French settlers.  But my dad was a first generation Canadian. His parents came to Canada from Lebanon, his father emigrating first to the U.S. as a young boy before coming to Canada and then his mother coming to Canada many years later to follow her brother and marry my grandfather.  They made their lives here.  While my mom and dad shared a common religion (they met in the church bowling league), their cultural backgrounds were certainly different.  Baklava and butter tarts are quite a combination.  In the community where my sisters and I grew up, there weren’t a lot of others who shared our Middle-Eastern roots but it is far different from that now.  I inherited my dad’s Middle-Eastern looks and carry his name.  Admittedly, it hasn’t always been easy to have the name and discrimination has reared its ugly head from time-to-time.  My dad encouraged me to take my husband’s English name when we married, believing things would be easier for me, but I did not.  I told him that don’t have the nose to pull off an English name.  In truth, I wouldn’t dream of changing my name to try and hide the truth of who I am.  I’m proud of my Lebanese heritage as I am proud of my French Canadian heritage and of my Mohawk heritage which I learned of in adulthood.

Welcoming immigrants to Canada is truly one of the best parts of us.  We know that everyone brings something to the table.  We are a huge country.  We have lots of room for everyone, on our land and in our hearts.  In many ways, I believe it is the harshness of our climate that made us the socially responsible society that we have become.  Our nation builders would not have survived had they not had the help of our indigenous people and also taken care of one another.  Many years ago, I attended a lecture by the late Pierre Burton.  He told us that he believed one of the reasons we Canadians didn’t develop the rugged individualist wild-west philosophy that developed south of the border, is that it’s just too cold here.  Gunslingers wouldn’t be able to get their mittens off fast enough to have a shoot out at high noon in Saskatoon.

We still understand the need to take care of one another.  We need welfare programs, universal healthcare, good public education and sound infrastructure systems.  I rarely hear anyone gripe about paying taxes to support these things. We seem to know that we all benefit from a sound social structure.  And no, it is not perfect, but we’re working on it.

I’ve had the privilege of traveling a little bit in Canada.  There are still a few gaps in my exploration but I’m not done yet.  I still haven’t been to Saskatchewan, Manitoba or New Brunswick and I haven’t made it to the Northwest Territories.  But I’ve spent time exploring the rest of the country and each time I venture to a new destination, I am awed by the majesty of our land from the breathtaking coastal views of British Columbia, to the rugged cliffs of Newfoundland, from the icy crystal waters of northern Ontario to the red sand beaches of PEI.  I am convinced I live in the most beautiful land on Earth.  

So on Saturday, I will wear my red and white clothes.  I will drink Canadian wine and Canadian beer.  I will enjoy a butter tart or two and yes, even a piece of baklava.  I will sing the unofficial, gender-neutral version of ‘O Canada’ because the legislation to change the official version has just been blocked in the Senate and while I had hoped we would have fixed it by now, we have not.  In my heart of hearts though, I believe we will get there.

On Sunday, I will turn 62 and as I do I will note another thing I have in common with my country.  I too am a work in progress, perfectly imperfect and striving to be better.

Happy 150^th Birthday Canada, my true north, strong and free!