Love's other side

Last March, I wrote a post about one of my favourite authors, Madeleine L'Engle, an author known for her children's books and Young Adult novels, who also wrote novels, essays, autobiographical pieces and poetry. (Never cared for her poetry much; loved most of the rest.)

One of her adult novels is called The Other Side of the Sun, a reference to "love's terrible other side", when you pass through the burning agony of love (and we're talking suffering here, the original meaning of "passion") and try to emerge alive and unwarped, though transformed and traumatized.

This is true of even the healthiest and most functional of relationships, because love, whether of a friend, parent, lover or child, always incurs loss, whether through death or estrangement.

Being the mother of a special-needs child, I seem to be moving through the heart of the sun time and again. However, this past summer, loss and the terrible sacrifices love requires were a central theme. Recently, one of my mother's favourite cousins died after a brief struggle with cancer, leaving her siblings and especially her bewildered husband, who counted on her for everything, bereft and adrift.

A week before that, my mother's only sister died at the end of a long, slow, agonizing decline into dementia. I've written about my aunt before, as she struggled to come to grips with her daughter's sexual orientation. (Coincidentally, that was my very first NaBloPoMo post.) As it turned out, she had a better grasp of the situation than I did.

It was easy to underestimate my aunt. Liberals tend to underestimate and categorize conservatives, just as much as conservatives label liberals. My aunt was conservative, no doubt about that. In my family search trawling through historical records, her name shows up as a fairly substantial financial supporter of the G.O.P. Back when Kennedy and Nixon were duking it out for the American presidency, my parents happened to be visiting my aunt and uncle in San Francisco. When my father returned to their apartment one day, sporting a Nixon button, my mother was appalled, especially as my father was a visitor to the United States. So she showed up with a Kennedy button. My aunt refused to let her in.

I wonder what she would have made of all this Tea Party shenanigans. Okay, I don't. This was a life-long Anglican (Episcopalian) who left the church when she thought it had become too liberal, then left the Baptist church for the same reason. She even told my mother that when she was in heaven she wouldn't be able to comfort her burning sister with a drop of water. She said this in an almost jocular fashion, but she meant it. When her daughter emerged from the closet, she was appalled and bewildered.

Yet my aunt was also a woman of humour and warmth. She had great fun gently teasing a very young and very indignant girl at the clinic where she was a nurse, by telling her that she too was African-American. She was, too: born in Kenya, becoming an American citizen not long after she married. Her hospitality was impeccable; a week's stay with her in California would spoil me for months.

She spent many years searching for educational resources for her hyper-active, learning-disabled son, long before such terms became commonplace. When her son became self-sufficient, her husband promptly came down with Parkinson's and she nursed him faithfully and competently to the end. We thought she might finally enjoy a less-burdened life, but a few short years after her husband's death, she was diagnosed with dementia.

And who harrowed hell for her? The daughter with whom she had struggled for years.

Madeleine L'Engle wrote: "It is when I am most monstrous that I am most in need of love." I don't remember which book this was (it is probably from A Circle of Quiet), but it was important enough to me that I wrote it down in one of my journals years ago. My aunt did become something of a monster as the dementia took over, all patience, happiness, and faith seem to flee, leaving her frightened, lost, and oh, so angry. Who could blame her? Yet her daughter persevered, took the verbal abuse, fought for better care, strained her other family relationships.

And some time during my aunt's final weeks, my cousin explained to a nurse that she was adopted. (Both my American cousins are.)
"Are you?" said my aunt, looking up in surprise. "I had forgotten. You....are my own."

And just for that moment, they emerged from love's terrible other side.

It's been a slice

Morning, as autumn wheels inexorably toward winter. The grass is silver with frost and crunches subtly underfoot. The most stubborn of leaves are giving up in droves and plummeting. I'm waiting for the #150, planting myself under a grand maple because it's All Souls Day already and I have failed to catch a single leaf for wishing. I catch two before the bus pulls up then watch gardens full of doomed, sparkling flowers flash by. Amid ghostly filthy snowman made from last weekend's snowfall, abandoned jack o' lanterns glitter with frost on this cloudless, bright, freezing morning.

I'm always come over with a sense of loss and waste as I survey smashed, rotting or shrivelling pumpkins. So many delicious pies that will never be.

Every All Saints' Day and for a few days afterward (if I'm persistent and don't allow the rot to set in), I put on my trusty DVD set of the Royal Shakespeare Company's marathon stage version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Dickens, I feel, always smacks of late fall and early winter. Then I put out bowls and chopping boards and reduce the jack o' lanterns to saffron cubes before steaming several double boilers' worth, mashing them and stuffing them into two-cup freezer bags. (Canned pumpkin in my pies? Nevah!!! Canned pumpkin is mostly squash, y'know...)

This is a large project that easily takes up the length of the Nicholas Nickleby DVDs, which are among my favourite things ever. Someone has been kind enough to post nine minutes of what is a nine-hour show. Of the four main actors in this particular scene, only Roger Rees played one character, most of the fourteen cast members played anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen characters throughout the play:
A bit of trivia: the blond actress is Cathryn Harrison, a granddaughter of Rex Harrison. While searching for this clip I found a blurred but watchable version of the South Bank Show on the creation of this production. But I must to bed. I'll mash a bit of pumpkin before I go.

Well, that was...interesting....

Now here's the odd thing. The handful of you who check in with me here know that my younger daughter lives with the label PDD-NOS, a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum. Today is Communication Shutdown Day (along with All Saints' Day and National Vegan Day, but never mind that), so the idea is to cut yourself off from the internet, or at least from Facebook and Twitter, so you can share that sense of isolation that someone on the autism spectrum faces every day.

I guess I'd have to be more addicted to Facebook than I am to experience a real sense of being cut off from humanity. I "tweet" about once a month and sadly, don't even get so many emails that I can't go without checking for a day. I'm also old enough to remember life when houses without PCs were the norm.

However, I do intend to NaBloPoMo this month for the fifth time, so participating in a computer-free day is a challenge. If I stayed up, I could simply post one stroke past midnight. NaBloPoMo is on Pacific Daylight Time, so my post would read "November 2nd" at my blog, and "November 1st" at NaBloPoMo.

Given that my constitution gave up on party hours years ago, though, I simply unplugged the computer at 9 pm last night and logged back on twenty-four hours later. That will have to do. Oh yes, and I did donate and "x"-ed out my profile picture at Facebook.

Did dropping out of the so-called social network teach me anything? Well, depressingly enough, I got a lot more done. Did it teach me more about the challenges of autism? Well, no. I live here with my daughter in the outskirts of Autismland (a suburb of Hades). Taking away the computer doesn't teach us more about rejection than we already knew.

Not my furry child

. . . The morning came, and left
The sunlight on my step like any normal
Tradesman . . . . - Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not For Burning

It wasn't how we expected the day to end. Oh perhaps, with twenty/twenty hindsight, the signs were there, but they weren't apparent that sunny Monday morning. The Resident Fan Boy had taken time off work because Demeter was arriving from Victoria that day, in preparation for a 26-hour train trip out to Halifax with younger daughter to spend Canadian Thanksgiving with older daughter.

We'd booked a place at our local animal hospital for our cat, who has stayed there before. I was getting a little nervous though, because she hadn't been eating over the weekend and had spent the better part of the previous week sleeping even more than usual. Not unduly alarmed, I phoned the vet and managed to get an appointment for midday, so we accompanied younger daughter on the hour-long bus ride to her school and returned for some last minute guest-room cleaning before slipping the cat into the soft carrier for the ten-minute stroll to the clinic.

The vet is new to the practice, but knows our cat from recent stays and inoculations, calmly noting the difference in her. Until she looked into the ears.

"Oh, now, that's not good news," she said, before assuring us that most pet-owners don't pick up on jaundice, although in the natural daylight of the examining room, we wondered how we could have missed it. We agreed she would be admitted and signed the paperwork for more tests before heading home to await the results. But by then, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

It came a matter of minutes before we were due to board the bus to retrieve younger daughter from school. I listened briefly to the blur of descriptions of possible medical interventions, but recognized the kindly hesitant tone, so I asked my standard question: "If it were your pet, what would you recommend?"

"I'd say good-bye."

A quick conference with the Resident Fan Boy during which we agreed he'd fetch younger daughter. A hasty farewell at the door. I did a quick round of the house, stashing a wad of tissues in my pocket and donning the twenty-first century equivalent of a black armband, a pair of sunglasses, before retracing my steps back to the animal hospital on this sunny early October afternoon.

It's clear they have this down to a fine art. The worst bit is signing the papers and paying the bill which, obviously, must be done beforehand. Then they ask you if you want some time alone. I didn't know, never having done this before. (I've had pets euthanized, but that was a long time ago before they let the owners stay.) So I said 'yes', and they brought her in wrapped in a crimson felt blanket. She looked calm, but bewildered. That may have been partially due to the fact that I was dripping tears on her head, despite my best efforts to be a solid comforting presence. As I stroked her and spoke to her, I noticed the bandage on her leg which held the cannula ready to take the injection. I scratched her gently under her chin and behind her ears for one last time, then went to the door and gave a quick nod to the assistant.

It's an odd thing, cradling and crooning to a live animal, then the realization that life has left the body. I've only been present at two human deaths, during the time I volunteered at the hospice in Victoria, and in both cases, there was no dramatic clear-cut moment between being and not being. The vet checked with her stethoscope and told me she was gone, and I could see as I stepped back, by the splayed white paws, that this was true. I left quickly after a swift hug from the vet, sunglasses in place so I wouldn't upset the owners with living animals in the waiting room.

When my elder daughter was three, she kept requesting a "moving cat" and we realized with sinking hearts that she meant a real one. My mother never could deny anything to her beloved granddaughter, so when my younger daughter was one, off went five-year-old elder daughter with her grandmother to the SPCA. It was time, thirteen years later, to break the news to my now eighteen-year-old at her university in Halifax. I tried to do it in gentle stages by text message. She apparently staggered back to her dorm and laptop where she contacted me by Skype, presaged by the sound of her ragged weeping through my computer speakers.

After the bootless exercise of trying to comfort elder daughter through a computer monitor, it fell to me to break the news to younger daughter as she arrived home from school with the Resident Fan Boy. She retreated to her bedroom and shut the door. I emailed her teacher and printed up several pictures for her to take to class the next day. Then I headed out to the airport on the bus, to tell my mother, who had been airborne when all of this happened.

The most surprising reaction came from the Resident Fan Boy, a dog-person marrying into a cat family. Yet, several times over the next three days, I'd come across him weeping, usually in the kitchen in the morning. "It was our time," he said. I, too, had poignant stabs, still do: when I hear movement on the stairs and think she's coming up, when I look for a black form curled in the laundry basket, when I shift carefully in bed around the ball of warmth between my ankles. Which isn't there. On the whole, though, I felt distanced and peaceful. Is this because I was there for her final minutes, because I saw the limp body on the examining table and knew it was beyond pain and fear?

There are people who are a bit dotty about their pets. They buy them clothes and trinkets and call them their "furry children". I beg to differ. Yes, both children and pets deserve love, shelter, exercise, stimulation, and protection. But children are not pets, nor are pets children. I have children. I have never put their food in bowls on the floor before locking them in and going out for a few days while having a neighbour check in on them. I don't have them do their business in a sandbox in the basement. My daughters will, eventually, vote.

There is, however, a cat-shaped hole in our lives. It is a unique shape, the right size for a little black cat with white stockings and garters. It will not be filled, even when we get other pets, who will in turn, leave their own holes. Because loss is the price of love, whether for animal or human. And when the day ends, in the expected or unexpected fashion, love may be indeed all we have left. (Goodbye, Julie.)

A hard rain's gonna fall

It's 10:30 here in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the leading edge of Hurricane Earl has been whirling through for the past hour or so. I see trees and bushes tossing wildly and sheets of rain slicing down the deserted streets, with waves of water sloshing over from the gutters. Good thing Earl was downgraded; he's now a "weak Category One". I wouldn't care to encounter anything stronger. Reports already coming in of fallen trees and power outages. I better get this done...

Half an hour ago, I waved goodbye to elder daughter as she descended to the parking levels of this hotel to drive the short distance to the University of King's College, "Canada's oldest chartered university" (founded 1789, which is ancient by Canadian standards). I slipped into the tiny computer room here and had a quick weep, because once people see someone in here, they decide to come in too.

Being eighteen, elder daughter is eager to get started, and being eighteen, she's still veering between being a child and an adult. This song has been relentlessly playing in my head for the past twenty-four hours:
Oh very young, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancing on this earth for a short while . . . .
There'll never be a better time to change your mind
And if you want this world to see a better day
Will you carry the words of love with you?

And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.

The computer room has people in it now. If I need a place for another quiet weep, I'll have to find someplace else.

Gotta fly. No, really.

It's 8 am in Victoria and we leave for the airport at 10:30. I'm typing this quickly between laundry loads before hurling myself at the vacuuming. Leaving a house-sit is a bit like trying to remove all traces of yourself from the scene of a crime, really. The four Schnauzers (two of them diabetic and blind) may make that a bit more challenging. I don't have time to explain; I suppose it might make a great post --- when I can laugh about it.

Anyway, once again, Eden Kennedy of NaBloPoMo, the post-counter is claiming I've only posted 30 posts for the month of August. Thirty-one, Eden Kennedy, I've counted. All submitted before midnight PDT. So I'll be taking my completion badge, thank-you very much. Just not now. I have to fly.

If it's all the meme to you...

Two more blog posts to go for NaBloPoMo and I'm running out of time. I have to pack, clean up the remnants of four Schnauzers (two blind and diabetic -- oh please don't ask...) and vamoose from this house-sit by 11 am PDT.

The deliciously desperate Belgian Waffle just did a meme at her excellent blog, and I haven't a hope (nor the time) to try to equal her effort, so I'm just rushing through it:

Favourite time of day: Twilight, when the sun has just set, the first stars are timidly appearing in the greeny-blue darkness, and no one has drawn the curtains yet, so you can walk by and glimpse everyone's quotidienne.

Where and when did you meet the love of your life?: Details here.

What three words would your friends from outside the blogging world use to describe you? Persistent. Private. Witty (that's why they're my friends).

What country would you like to visit and why? Well, I've visited England and long to go again. I've never been to either Wales or Scotland, which is a crying shame, given my ancestry.

What's your favourite dish to cook? Um, this would actually involve my liking to cook, wouldn't it? I do fabulous pies, all evidence this summer to the contrary.

Salt or sugar? Sugar. Duh.

What are your favourite make up and beauty items? Not that it does any good, but I generally wear liquid eyeliner and waterproof mascara at the very least. To offset my suede-blue eyes, y'understand. ♪Here she comes again. See her dancin' 'neath the starry skies...♫
Sorry, where was I?

What are your favourite flowers? Roses. They're simple and complex at the same time.

At what time of your life were you happiest and why? One blissful week when I was fifteen and felt I belonged. If heaven exists, that's what it will be.

Memes are meant to be passed on. G'wan. I dare ya.

The little blue man (Part Five of a Google Map walk through an Edmonton childhood)

View Larger MapI am old enough to remember a time when kids wandered free throughout their neighbourhoods. I don't think we were at any greater or lesser risk for being snatched by strangers. I mean, the reason a kidnapped child is big news is because it's a relatively rare occurrence; then, as now, children were more likely to be snatched by members of their own families, abused by people they trusted, and die in car accidents.

So I ranged pretty well where I wanted, provided I returned home at the appointed times. I was required, of course, to say where I was going. My destination was usually the local playground which featured wooden swings you could stand up on, wooden teeter-totters (see-saws) where you could strand or drop your partner if you had the weight advantage, and a rather marvelous summer programme with teen-aged counselors, organized games, crafts and races, and regular visits from a group of acting students from the University of Alberta who called themselves "The Playground Players". A sign posted on the playground shelter would advise us of their arrival and they would trundle across the field drawing a cart of make-shift props and wearing colourful strolling-player-type costumes. I thought they were wonderful. I still remember an exchange between the giant and his wife in their fractured version of Jack and the Beanstalk:
"What's behind your apron?"
"My dress! It's new! Do you like it?"
"What's behind your dress?"
"....ME!"

We roared. Very risqué stuff for little kids.

On more ordinary days, the counselor, a charismatic girl who couldn't have been much more than eighteen but who was as old as the hills as far as I was concerned, led us through summer-camp sorts of activities. My favourite was a game called "I Come From Edmonton" where the leader (usually the counselor) would parade around the inside of the circle singing:

I come from Edmonton,
Jolly, jolly Edmonton!
I come from Edmonton.
Here she would stop in front of someone and both would swipe their hands and scissor their feet to the words:
Can you feel the heat?
The heat?
I smell your dirty feet!
Pew!

On the last word she'd jump 180 degrees, holding her nose, the child would grab her waist and they'd march off to collect another kid in the circle until all were in the train. Marvelous stuff. I must have been pretty easy to entertain.

Our counselor also regularly serenaded us with a goofy surreal ballad about a persistent little blue man who stalks the hapless young women he "wuvs". I was far too young to know that this had been a novelty hit in the fifties for Betty Johnson and had been written by Fred Ebb and Paul Klein, the men behind Cabaret, and later, Chicago. Here's Petulia Clark's version:

(This is my continuation of the exercise suggested by John Reid at his blog Anglo-Celtic Connections.)

The blackberry statement

We got an unexpected surprise on the way home to the house-sit from downtown: rain. Brief, but glorious and enough to leave puddles. It rained the hardest as we made our way down the most rural of the three streets home. After days of dry sunshine, the air filled with the scent of blackberries. Younger daughter and I have been sampling them over the past two weeks and noticing that they have been becoming sweeter and sweeter.

Years ago, in the dying days of another summer with little rain, I was sitting in a church hall rehearsing on a recorder. I was second recorder and the alto singer of a quintet which featured three accomplished musicians. I was one of the other two. Under a government grant, we were spending the summer making the rounds of senior residences, hospitals, libraries, and other institutions singing folk songs and playing late Renaissance to classical music. As a summer job, it was pretty hard to beat.

This particular August afternoon, we were between concerts and the other girl in the group (a talented song-writer and guitarist whom I'll call Kitti for narrative purposes) and I were awaiting the return of the three boys. Kitti happened to glance outside and leaned over conspiratorially: "Let's go and get some blackberries!" There was an abundance of them, gleaming at us like dark jewels. We grabbed a bowl and set to it, happily chatting and picking.

Now, maybe I need to clarify here. There are blackberry bushes all over Victoria, along the highway, roads, in parks. These berries were dangling over the fence which backed the church. So we were very startled when the lady in hair-curlers began screaming at us.
"Just what do you think you're doing?"
Kitti and I blinked at each other.
"Uh, picking blackberries...."
"Yes, on private property!"
Now we were really bewildered. "Well, the church knows we're here; we have permission to practise."
"So you sneak back here to steal the best and the juiciest ones in the middle...."
Slowly, as her tirade continued, we began to realize that she was the resident of the house backing on to the church, and that the blackberry bushes were in her yard. We must have reached beyond the fence top to the berries that were on her side, not surprising because, as Victoria kids, it didn't occur to us that wild blackberry bushes might belong to somebody.

She was also apparently further incensed by our appearance. Our costumes for our concerts had us in peasant blouses, long skirts and head scarves. Worst of all, we were bare-foot. Kitti shook her head in disbelief and made to hand her bowl to the howling lady.

"No! You eat them, if you're so hungry."

We beat a hasty retreat back into the church hall and were just beginning to giggle over our misadventure when Kitti peered over my shoulder and gasped: "Geez! She's called the police!"
My face must have been a picture, because Kitti laughed comfortingly, and said: "Oh, don't worry; the Saanich Police are really nice!" I had only a split second to wonder just how Kitti had come to this conclusion, when there was a knock on the door, and an officer motioned for us to come outside, where Blackberry Lady was in full throttle: "....and they took the best and the juiciest ones in the middle! They'd brought a bowl! And it was this girl and this girl! When I caught them, they just stared at me!"

This was too much; I blurted out: "What on earth did you want us to say?" Yowza. Her voice went up a whole 'nother octave. The policemen quickly led us in one direction and the lady in the other.

"We just went out to pick some blackberries and she started screaming at us..."
"Yeah, well, did you reach over the fence?"
"Probably. I mean, you usually just pick blackberries, right?"
"Well, she's a little hysterical, don't provoke her and leave those blackberries alone."
"Oh, don't worry about that..."

The boys arrived shortly afterward and had to be talked out of a harassment campaign involving putting snarky signs in the the church lounge window. One of the boys was the rector's son (hence our rehearsal space) and later reported that the woman had phoned and written to the church demanding our removal.

This was a long time ago and I remember the incident with amused and bemused disbelief when I remember it at all. I have the sad suspicion that it may have been the most exciting day in that woman's life.

Sorry I might be

What I've rather missed about my annual Victoria stay is what I call "The Yoda Buses". For the past fifteen years or so, buses which are returning to the garage have flashed this message in two parts: "Sorry I am" then "Not in Service" reminding me of this gentleman from Star Wars:
Alas, I have seen no Yoda buses this summer. Instead, I have been confronted with the unwritten rules of the Royal Oak Exchange.

The Royal Oak Exchange is where Royal Oak Drive meets Elk Lake Drive north of Victoria. You really need to know exactly which bus you want because it takes ages to cross this impossibly busy intersection, which is a mess of advance greens, to the side of the road from which the bus you need may depart. If you fail to hit the button on time, you miss your walk signal and must wait through the whole damn cycle, unshielded from the wind, rain, or blazing sun, while watching your transport drive off without you.

Unless they are one of the 70-number buses that pass between downtown Victoria and Sidney, the buses drive into their section of the Exchange, discharge their passengers and change their signs to "Not in Service" while the drivers take a break. This means you have to wait until the route number and name light up again before you know if it's the one you want. Apparently part of the game is dashing for the bus as soon as it identifies itself because the number's reappearance is a signal of the vehicle's imminent departure.

I discovered this one hot and oppressive Saturday afternoon. I arrived to find two buses waiting on one arm of the Royal Oak Exchange, one lit with a "30", the other "Not in Service". Having read my trusty schedule, I understood the 30 to be leaving in 14 minutes while the "Not in Service" (presumably a masquerading No. 6) would leave a few minutes earlier. Either route would work for me that day, so I wanted to catch whichever bus would be leaving first. While I was double-checking the posted schedule, the 30 suddenly started up and left. Startled, I turned and exchanged looks of disbelief with a girl sitting in the shelter.

The bus driver sitting on the steps of the "Not in Service" bus watched us with relaxed interest.
"His signs were on. That meant he was about to go."
"According to the schedule, he's not due to go for more than ten minutes."
"Oh, that. Don't pay attention to that."
"Uh, well, I do use it to plan when to show up..."
"Well, when does it say?"
I fumbled for the right page.
"You mean you don't know?"
I'm a West Coast girl, so I recognized the tone and knew not to take umbrage. He was playing around.
"Look, it's the same time that's posted up there."
"And what time is that?"
"Uh..."
"You mean you don't know that either?"
"Well, I don't have the schedule memorized!"
"Well, the written schedules are wrong; I wouldn't pay any attention to 'em."
I gave him a mock glare. "So any schedule is wrong?"
"Well, there's a car rally going on, so all the 30's and 31's are being held up, so he's probably way behind."
I decided not to mention that his delayed buddy had been reading a large novel for five minutes before suddenly taking off. This didn't need to escalate beyond banter. As I said, I'm a West Coast girl.
"So you're the No. 6?"
"I might be."

Please tell me Victoria bus drivers aren't becoming like Ottawa bus drivers....