Doing it for Demeter - Part Three

Demeter was advanced in years when she died, and made quite extensive notes about twenty years ago about her memorial service preferences.  It was a time when she was attending lots of memorial services at her church, and it must have been frequently on her mind.

As a result, it was much upon my mind as well, as she mailed documents and poems to our house in Hades.  I often thought fleetingly about what I might say at her memorial, and imagined it would be about my loss and how each of us loses a different person when a particular loved one dies, because we're all multifaceted in our relationships - never the same person to those around us.

I wrote about this in my blog a decade ago, when I attended the memorial of a friend's husband, and wondered at the varied perceptions of him, reflected in the testimonials. Which one was accurate?  All of them, in a way.

As it turned out, I, as the eldest child, was assigned Demeter's eulogy, and that's a different business, because it meant I had to tell my mother's life story in ten minutes, which didn't leave much room for going on about my own particular sense of loss.

I was actually pretty grateful for that.  I was also grateful for what I'd learned from being a hospice volunteer, and making family history presentations for BIFHSGO.

Hospice taught me many things, but chiefly, that grief may be universal, but it is not, by any means, identical, and varies wildly even within a single human experience.  I didn't journal at all in the week preceding and following my mother's death.  When my entries resumed, they contained a certain amount of sorrow, guilt, and rage -- not always, and not always at the same time.  Fortunately, I knew this was not abnormal, because a tenet at Hospice was:  "Anger is a secondary emotion."  

The primary emotion isn't always grief -- but it often is.

Doing presentations for a family history society is good preparation for taking on a eulogy.  You have to be organised, clear, reasonably entertaining, and accurate.  

But not too accurate.  That's why they call it a "eulogy".

So, just as I had for my presentations, I wrote in chunks, edited, and reshaped.  I read it out loud to myself, and timed it.  I pushed aside the rage and irritation, knowing it was the grief talking, and repeated to myself:  "I'm doing this for Demeter."

The rage and irritation was, of course, largely a result of how Double Leo Sister was manifesting her own grief, i.e. almost frantic over-busyness, not only wanting to run most of the memorial service, but fretting about emptying and cleaning up Demeter's condo.  (Demeter owned her condo outright, and there is no deadline to vacate it.)

DLS was anxious to bring friends with her from her up-Island community to help with the condo-clearing, friends whom I don't know, and who did not know our mother.

"You've done so much already; we want to take some of the burden off you," DLS declared.

I kept my retorts to myself.  I was doing this for Demeter.

I engaged in defensive condo-clearing ahead of my sister's arrival for the memorial service.  I knew I couldn't sort through everything on my own, but I had some idea of where Demeter's private and personal stuff -- her toiletries, her journals -- were stashed, and went in for ninety-minute sessions to dispose of some items and to ferry others out of the reach of relative strangers.  It made me feel better, anyway.

And I hit pay dirt.  Not only did I find photos, documents, and keepsakes that brought my mother's life more sharply into focus, but I found the Once Upon a Lifetime workbook, and an accompanying notebook - two items for which I'd been searching diligently since Demeter's death.

Still available online!

Back when I had two really young children, I had somehow snatched an opportunity to browse at Bolen Books one afternoon, when this item caught my eye. I believe I gave it to Demeter as a Mother's Day present. I was not prepared for how seriously she took it.

She meticulously answered each question (except for the military section - she didn't serve) over the next few years, using, as suggested, a supplementary notebook in order to go into detail.  She added and updated over the next decade.

I now had a tool to help me step away from myself and my perceptions, and steer the eulogy towards what she thought was important.  At least I hope I did.  She would have had some feedback and corrections.  Fair enough.  It's her story.

Delivering the eulogy promised an extra benefit.  My part would be first, after the minister's introduction and the lighting of the chalice.

So, I found myself, sitting in the front row of the sanctuary, listening to the pianist play "Suo Gan", and for the first time since my mother died, suddenly feeling overcome.  

I sternly put my tears aside.

I'm doing this for Demeter, I thought.

A tale of two memes

A year or so ago, I had a "Friend Request" from a woman whose name I didn't recognise.  I checked her profile picture, and she looked vaguely familiar, so I didn't delete the request.  After weeks, I decided, based on what little info I could glean, that she was connected with Victoria Hospice, where I was a volunteer for several years in my otherwise misspent youth, so I accepted the request, and she cheerfully "liked" my posts.

It was several months before I realized she was, in fact, the president of the student council in my graduating year at high school. Her surname had changed with marriage.  A perfectly nice lady, but I was at a loss as to why she would be "friending" me; it was a relatively small school, but we had not known each other well.  In fact, my most salient memory of her was from a rare encounter at university, where I had also seen little of her.

We were chatting and she mentioned something about her house, but added that of course, I would remember whatever it was.

"Well, no, I've never been to your house."

"Of course you have!  Everyone's been to my house!"

So her posts would show up on my Facebook wall from time to time, mostly references to other things about her life with which I was not familiar.

Then, a couple of months ago, she posted something called "Meeting Between Bread".  This is a meme that used to be called "Meeting Between Breadfruit", but the wording is exactly the same:

Click to enlarge - if you must

Oh gawd. 

First of all, this woman is a teacher. Next, we have the usual red flags of a meme designed for data-mining: the unusual name, the request to copy and paste rather than to share, and the manipulative meta-message that if we don't comply we are inattentive and uncaring.

Finally, one word I'd associate with this woman? The kindest one: "president", I suppose. Less kind: "oblivious".

The meme is undeniably effective.  Responses flowed in, to the point where I hid the post.

There are a number of links I could have shared, but painful experience has taught me that people don't like being corrected.  Fair enough.  I don't like being corrected either.  (However, I often learn a bit more that way, irritating as it is.)  I thought about it for a few hours, while I went about my business, mostly along the lines of what I have set down here.

And I unfriended her.  I doubt she noticed.

Two months later, another Facebook "friend", also a fellow alumni, posted pretty much exactly the same meme.  He too was getting a lot of gratifying responses.

This was a little more complicated.  This is a fellow I've known since elementary school, so we have a history.  In fact, my heart sank when, about 10 years ago, his "friend" request came in, but I couldn't think of any reason to refuse him.  He addresses me, and all other women acquaintances, as "Dear Heart".  A lot of the time, I want to smack him.  Luckily for him, he hasn't been within striking range for years.

He's a IT expert, so I was surprised to see this meme, and, once again, appalled at its effectiveness.  I sat for a few minutes, considering unfriending him (as I have for years), but decided to send this link instead.  He responded in a few minutes, on the post itself, expressing appreciation, then followed up with a further post, name-checking me, and saying that the problem was with the copy-and-paste.

Close, but no cigar.

Then he wrote on my wall.  "Lots of us", he said, had missed me at a recent reunion gathering, and could we meet in person?

Oh gawd, no. "Lots of us?" I said out loud to the screen.  "Who, exactly?"

I went away and did other things for a few hours.  Time and tussles have taught me to never respond immediately to things that irritate me.  Especially people.

When I answered, I went for the truth.  Not the whole truth.

I had an elderly mother and upcoming elective surgery, I told him.  I would be sticking to my bubble.

And then, I unfriended him.  It was his birthday - actually a sort of gift for both of us.

I doubt he noticed.

Almost immediately afterwards, I found this:

On Reddit

The Resident Fan Boy found me by the computer, doubled over with laughter.

Rich in irony (and full of vitamins)

 

During the past year, I've come to see the resemblance between cyclists and wasps. 

I'm not talking about the commuting kind, or those out for a Sunday ride; I mean the jock kind. 

 Our local coffee shop is prone to morning infestations of cycling enthusiasts. They're usually clad in yellow and black; they have hard helmeted heads; they tend to swarm; they buzz -- and they're rather annoying, to be honest. 

During the three months or so when indoor dining was forbidden in British Columbia for what the provincial government called a COVID "circuit-breaker", I found myself huddling in the morning chill at the outside tables, and forced to share space with the wheeler-dealers, who clustered on the patio and talked "jockularly" about their equipment and injuries. 

Once, a couple cautiously mounted the front steps and half-whispered to me: "Have the cyclists gone?"

 "Well, it's Monday," I replied, cheerfully. "They usually turn up on Tuesdays and Fridays." 

"They're just so loud..." they said, in a normal volume, and went to get their coffees.

Particularly galling aspects of sharing space with jock cyclists during a pandemic: a) being athletic, they think they're immune, and hence not likely to social distance; b) if they do practise social distancing, it's only with each other.  I had the opportunity to observe this latter phenomenon several times during the "circuit-breaker".

For example:  One morning, the patio was thoroughly "infested" when I arrived, so I strategically selected a table equidistant from a large cluster of cyclists socializing in the road-side blocks of seating, which have become endemic during the pandemic.  

A forty-or-fifty-something lady with a short blond ponytail poking out of her helmet called out to a gentleman sitting at the crowded table.  He rose, approached her, and they settled on an appropriate distance between them for a prolonged chat, calling over the space between them. Neither of them noticed that they were standing right next to my seat.  Apparently, I didn't count.

I got up, and changed chairs, putting my table between us. This also escaped their notice.

I wasn't listening in to their conversation, but they were socially distanced (from each other, at least), and they were cyclists (and hence, loud), so I did hear some of what they said. At one point, they were discussing a mutual acquaintance who - and here there was some grasping for the correct phrase - "needs something in the way of social graces".  I bit my lip, busying myself with my journals.  It's not often I get such an irony-rich experience.

After more than ten minutes of this long-distance call, Blond Pony Tail bid farewell, and circulated some more, finally riding off with a gal-pal -- on the sidewalk, of course.  I could hear her gears:  clique-clique-clique-clique...

With the relaxation of restrictions, I can now enjoy my mocha and danish indoors, with a nice wall separating me from the wasps.  I can still hear them, but it's more of a comforting buzz.  Winter, alas, will likely bring them indoors.

The privileges of irritation

The Resident Fan Boy is beginning his third week of working from home, which entails his work laptop on the dining room table, phone conferences, and video meetings.

That's not so bad. I can work around him. I can visit Demeter.

The tough thing is, RFB's volunteer work has also followed him home.

At various times of the day, and also on weekends - especially Sundays - our computer screen fills up with the faces of church volunteers, people who are mostly retired, and for whom such meetings are a welcome distraction.

For me, it's a bit like the 1990 movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which the heroine finds her home filled with her deceased lover's music-playing, video-watching dead friends. It spurs her to move beyond her lover's death and find a new love.

Not exactly an option for me; I'm still reasonably fond of the Resident Fan Boy.

Besides, if I needed perspective, it arrived in the form of a tweet this morning. Of course, I can't find it now - the volume of tweets on Twitter these days is considerable - but I believe it came from India, and the gist of it was this: Social distance is a privilege. Self-isolation is a privilege. Even a lock-down is a privilege. Many people don't have the personal space to "social distance" themselves. Many do not have comfortable homes in which to self-isolate - or a home at all, which means hand-washing is a hell of a challenge - to say nothing of WiFi. Let's not even get into the financial hardships being created/exacerbated by this thing.

A few tweets later, in an unfortunate juxtaposition, came this viral video. It's very popular. With people with large kitchens backing on a garden with parents who miss dining out.


Our kitchen is a tiny little galley kitchen, and our dining room is a corner near the window that would look over the parking lot, if not for the translucent reeded glass window. However, we have a large window overlooking the landscaping and the road beyond. The Resident Fan Boy has work. We have a home. We're together and, so far, everyone is healthy.

We'll skip the sommelier.

You know best, dear (Write of Passage Number Forty-nine)

There's an older couple sitting next to me in the bus shelter on Fort Street just up from Douglas Street. They look a bit like tourists - lots of white in their clothing, comfortable shoes.

Nuthin' wrong with that.

They're conferring about something, looking at a bus schedule in the wife's hands, and although I'm not listening in (I swear!), I hear them say 'the 24 bus".

I decide to intervene.
"The 24 doesn't stop here," I tell them, gently and politely, I hope.

The husband gestures westward.
"We saw it pass down there; it has to come up here."

I'm a little taken aback by his logic, but actually get up to check the sign.

Sitting down, I say, "The #24 is not on the lists of buses that stop here." (I knew this, having taken buses in Victoria for years, but he sounds so sure of himself, he's got me doubting myself.)

Wife is checking the timetable she's clutching again.
"It says "Maplewood'," she begins, but husband overrides her.
"We saw it pass by down there," he repeats, pointing, "and it has to come by somewhere."

In this face of this brand of reasoning, I decide I don't have the time or inclination to argue.

"Well, there was a big fire downtown this morning; maybe the bus has been re-routed," I remark, in my placatory Canadian fashion.

My bus, which bears one of the numbers on the bus stop sign, has pulled up, so I board it, with my dark, indignant thoughts.

Left to her own device

I'd been waiting to see The Shakespeare Show for over a month. I mean, it's clearly my kind of entertainment: Shakespeare, David Tennant, Shakespeare, the cream of Britain's acting community with a couple of foreigners thrown in, Shakespeare, ballet, Shakespeare, musical theatre, Shakespeare, jazz, Shakespeare....

We arrived at the cinema early enough to snag our favourite seats in the middle of the back row. Soon, I was in my element. I even enjoyed the intense hip-hop performance about a quarter of the way into the two-hour show. That's when I started to become distracted by a bright light to my left.

A woman seated about four empty seats over appeared to be reading in a Kindle-like fashion on what was either a very large phone, or a very small tablet. She sat like a toad in white capris, with the device held out in front of her. Each time she shifted or tapped the screen, the glow would change and draw my eye back. I held up my ticket print-out to shield the left side of my face, and endeavoured to ignore her.

Every now and then, she'd set the device aside - presumably when something interested her in this pageant chockfull of different styles of delight. I let my hand fall, but shortly, the bright light was bobbing again.

As heaven is my witness, she was watching a video.

I debated inwardly. Should I take action? I wanted to throw something at her, or better still, hurl her damn device down to the bottom of the theatre, but that would cause more problems than it would solve, and a woman who comes to a special showing of a once-in-a-lifetime event and spends it reading and watching videos is probably not in the best of mental health herself.

What do you suppose would be her rationale?

I'm in the back row.

I don't have the sound on.

There's no one sitting immediately next to me.

I don't give a #*&@$%.

Most likely, she hadn't given this any thought at all.

About three quarters of the way through, she packed up and left. I sagged with relief, and settled to watch the show.

The two young men in front of us started texting.

Now, these guys were in some danger, because I was reaching the end of my rope and they were within an arm's reach. We were also watching Othello strangling Desdemona, and Lady Macbeth brandishing bloody daggers - fuel for my darkening fantasies.

These remained fantasies because I didn't want to embarrass my family nor disturb the other patrons who were attentively appreciating Judy Dench, Ian McKellan, Helen Mirren, and a host of others. Elder daughter, alas, picked up on my body language and thought it was directed at her. The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter were having a lovely time, being on the right side of elder daughter.

The lights came up and as I descended the side stairs, I mentioned the lady with a device to two kindly women preparing to leave. They gazed at me in astonishment: "Why did she come?"

That is the question.

The following is a much-discussed (and much shared) portion of the evening, featuring several Hamlets bickering over the correct delivery of the opening lines of the most famous soliloquy in English theatre. The "Hamlets" are, in order of appearance: Paapa Essiedu (the most recent of the Royal Shakepeare Company's Hamlets, age 25), Tim Minchin (Australian songwriter, comedian, and a particular favourite of elder daughter), Benedict Cumberbatch (being mistaken for Eddie Redmayne here), Dame Harriet Walter (an accomplished stage actress who is also known for films such as 1996's Sense and Sensibility, and is a niece of the late Christopher Lee), David Tennant, Rory Kinnear (apart from his stage accomplishments, a son of Richard Lester favourite Roy Kinnear), Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, and some guy from the audience.

What isn't shown in the clip is the aftermath. Paapa Essiedu, after all this hilarity, still has to deliver the soliloquy and win back the audience. (He does.)

'To be or not to be_' featuring Benedict Cumberbatch & Prince Charles - Shakespeare Live! - BBC from Mai Martin on Vimeo.

In the spirit of the season?

I stumbled across a BBC Magazine article this morning while I was avoiding writing Christmas cards. It's ten pro/con items about sending Christmas cards. On the whole, the article encourages the sending of cards, but Item #9 drew me up short: the expert (some guy who wrote a book about the vanishing art of letter-writing) . . .implores: "Please no pictures of your beaming family."

Oh, damn.

The Resident Fan Boy and I have sent picture cards for the past 21 years, starting with elder daughter's first Christmas. People tell us they like them. But they would, wouldn't they? I've always figured we were gifting both our friends and "frenemies". Our friends would get a kick out of watching the girls grow up; anyone who didn't care for the RFB or (more likely) me, could derive grim satisfaction out of watching us age.

The BBC and I seem to be in agreement on the subject of what Britons call "round robin letters" and I call "newsletters". I have loathed them from the get-go. At best, they are impersonal documents pretending to be letters; at worst, they are painfully tedious itemizations of events that really aren't that interesting, usually accompanied by a painfully long travelogue for good measure. The nadir was the sweet young mother of two who informed us and everyone else on her list, in photo-copied splendour, that she had recently suffered a miscarriage and that her heart went out "to all those of you unable to have children".

So, for the record, I've never sent a family newsletter, journal, gazette, or year-in-review. Given the fact that elder daughter is now of the traditional age of majority, our friends and frenemies soon may be spared the gurning family photo as well.

So long as they keep off Facebook. I'll get back to scribbling illegible holiday greetings now; I've already bought the damn stamps.

Shame and indignation at the movies

Last night I dreamt I tried to board a bus with a hot iron. The bus driver turfed me off, and I gave her the finger. I awoke wrestling with feelings of shame and indignation, upset I'd been tossed off the bus and ashamed I'd been so churlish, after all, she had every right to refuse to let me ride. Which is a lot of unpleasant emotion, considering none of it really happened.

As I've mentioned before, my dreams seldom make any sense. Oh, I imagine they would, if I really settled down to analyze them, but dammit, I can't be bothered. I have a sneaking suspicion I wouldn't like the interpretation.

I like to think of myself as a pleasant and considerate person, but then, I imagine most people do. Even that woman at the ByTowne Cinema last Saturday. The Resident Fan Boy and I had scuttled away to take in a late matinée showing of A Single Man, partly because I wanted to see the film and partly because Colin Firth might get an Oscar nomination for his role in it, and mainly because we like to have seen at least a smattering of the nominated movies and performances before the Academy Awards broadcast.

The RFB headed off to find us a seat while I hit the concession for a small bag of popcorn and a headset. Bytowne Cinema now offers what they call an "FM audio assist" and since my hearing never has been fabulous, I've tried it for the last couple of movies there. I just plug in my own earphones and gee, I can hear most of the dialogue.

Balancing my trophies, I went in search of the Resident Fan Boy who was waving from a couple of nice seats. An older couple were seated in the aisle, and did not get up to let me pass, so I had a brief tussle disentangling my ankles from the bag the wife had left at her feet as I squeezed past her knees apologetically. At the time, I was feeling charitable enough to assume she had physical reasons to stay put.

I had decided to try a different set of headphones for the film, rather than my iPod ear buds which are mildly uncomfortable. This may have been a mistake. Early in this particular film, there's a flashback to a very rainy evening in LA when Colin Firth's character George first learns that his partner of sixteen years has died in a car crash. As the rain pelts down outside his study, George receives a phone call from someone connected to his lover's family who tells him (nearly two days later) about the accident and that the funeral will be "family only". George, obviously in shock, is detached and polite, until we see him running in a coat-less panic of grief through the storm to a friend's house for comfort.

"Would you stop making that noise?"

Startled, I turned from George's anguish to see non-rising woman who is seated two seats away from me.

"What noise?" I asked, in genuine bewilderment. She made an angry gesture and turned back to the screen. What's she going on about? I whispered to Resident Fan Boy, who shrugged. As I tried to re-focus on the movie, I wondered if she was bugged by my popcorn, but that had never seemed to have been an issue before. Then it gradually occurred to me that the scenes involving the rainstorm were over. Was it the hiss of the precipitation escaping from my headphones? I sneaked my iPod ear buds out of my coat pocket and put the other headphones away. I heard nothing else from old lady, but I caught her looking daggers at me later when I attempted to fold my popcorn bag away quietly. Oh dear. Am I becoming one of those people? Or is she already one of them? To tell you the truth, watching films at the ByTowne is a bit of a minefield, due to art-film-revering regulars who have strong views about where they should sit and how others should behave while they are sitting there. I'm not unsympathetic, but a bad-tempered growl doesn't help me rectify the situation. That's all I'm sayin'.

A Single Man is great, by the way. A dream-like sepia-view of a rather more innocent Los Angeles about to be hit hard by flower power. Colin Firth should get an Academy Award nomination at least for a performance of heart-breaking dignity.

I'll go do that ironing now.

Buzz Stop

This post is not about Verna Aardema's excellent picture book which won the Caldecott Prize.

This post is about the bloody buses again. As we coast to the end of our second week of mega-commutes, we're settling into a sort of routine. OC Transpo is still letting me down roughly every other day: late buses, early buses, non-existent buses. I'm finding alternative routes and ways to cope, but there is no way of predicting whether a bus will be crammed from one day to the next. Yesterday was a crowded bus day, a day in which I became keenly aware of different standards of hygiene. You know what I mean: the scent of "adolescent boy" (some of whom are well into their twenties), "dandruffy middle-aged lady", "garlic-lover", and my absolute favourite, "unwashed old man".

To accompany the olfactory assault, mosquito mood music. All of our routes are packed with students ranging from middle school through to grad school. Eighty percent of them are equipped with earphones of varying quality, so the rest of us are treated to the high-pitched scratchings of today's music: Nickle-gnat, Tickney Spears, Kanye Pest...

Here's Write of Passage Number Five, from a Victoria bus back in the days when Sony Walkmans were still pretty cool:

Somewhere in the back, a fella is playing his Walkman so loud that you can almost make out the lyrics, which is my personal gauge in personal-player-loudness. Another youngish man tells him to take the earphones off and let everyone hear instead of making us listen to the tinny crunch of the percussion. (These aren't his exact words because he is imitating the sound and I'm not sure how to put that in print. "Sksh-sksh" is the closest I can get.) The younger fellow switches off his player to hear, says something faintly obscene, and goes back to crunching away. Since, in the long, honoured tradition of bus etiquette, I don't turn around, it gets to sound pretty funny after a while:
(Tinny crunch)
Other fellow: Hey, why don't...
(Tinny crunch abruptly stops)
Young lout: Hunh?
Other fellow: Never mind.
(Tinny crunch resumes.)

This went on for some time.