Random Ramblings, Year's End, All That

 I was alone in the house last night. JG and the daughters were away coping with the aftermath of his brother’s death. It doesn’t happen very often, that I am alone. That I choose my own meal time and bedtime without having to consider anyone else’s schedule. That I can write undisturbed by the ordinary routines of the day. That I am on my own.

What did I do with my unscheduled time? Well, wrote this, for one. I spent most of the day alternately doing laundry and writing the post below this one, a eulogy for the brother who has gone. I wrote it pretty carefully and when I put it up, I only found two errors, one being a wrong date of John’s death. His friend was on the phone about two minutes after I posted, to correct that one, but I had already seen it. Typo. The other was a bad insert erasure. I did a lot of rereading and rewriting before I posted. I wanted it to be good, to be a fair picture of a complicated and somewhat conflicted man. Don’t know if I got it. You never really know how something that personal and subjective will read to someone else.

But most of my writing is subjective. There is not much else going on here, not even in normal times and these are not, for sure, normal times. We did manage to have a Christmas Day with the nucleus of the family, but it was not the gathering we had hoped to have, due to one positive Covid test and one relative who decided, reasonably I thought, not to fly this season. There were gifts and music and a table laden with goodies (and four vegetable dishes, just because). I still have a kitchen full of cookie tins that are full of cookies because the YD baked from the time she arrived until Christmas Eve, non stop. Well, almost nonstop. She took a few naps and walks. It was a fine thing to be together. This is the YD’s first home visit in two years. But she was too late to see her uncle. And that hurt.

I am glad that, from my last visit, my last memory of John is of laughing with him over the completely predictable and totally in character actions of his brother and our ED. We had arranged to have John’s bathroom remodelled to put in a walk-in shower. The work was finished the day before we arrived, and JG, that evening, was talking about getting a shower seat for it. With arms, he thought. The ED demurred. The shower had a good bar that John could use to stand up, she thought. JG said there was no bar there. The ED said yes, there was. The two red-headed opponents rose, in sync, and proceeded to the bathroom to settle the argument. And John and I looked at each other, did an in sync eyeroll and laughed like loons. It was just a perfectly typical thing for them to do. I am glad I can remember him laughing.

It sometimes seems to me that particular bits of memory in turbulent times, get locked into the brain. My last memory of my mother is a sad one – she was in pain and confused. An aunt I cared for deeply, I recall, in her last day of life, sitting in her wheelchair, head at a strange angle, cushioned by morphine. At least she was serene - earlier she had been frightened by reflections in the hospital room window, thinking that they were going to attack her. The end of life, in my experience of helping my parents and aunts through it, is a rough ride sometimes. Not always. My father, I am convinced, died in his sleep, having dozed off while watching his beloved baseball on the television. He was 85 and while he had some pretty major ailments, he was able to his last day to live independently, drive and enjoy a lot of things. I hope that is what is in store for me, but it is not something that can be planned.

The only plan we can legally make is an application for MAID, ahead of debility. Fairly severely restricted eligibility for it, too. John would not have qualified by the time he needed it, as the applicant must be fully competent to agree at the time it is administered. I think this needs to be changed to allow a precondition on the part of the applicant, but I can see that it will be tricky to structure it in a way that protects both the medical people being asked to do it and anyone who is worried that they will be, as it can be said,’ put down’ without their concurrence. 

No one, if they think about it reasonably, wants to die in confusion and diapers and fear, cared for by relative strangers in an institution. But that is how most of us will die because that is how our relationships and medical systems are set up. We live most of our lives in small nuclear families that cannot handle the end- of-life care most of us will need. Our medical system can eliminate or cure a lot of things that used to kill old people. And so, we end our lives in repaired bodies but with minds that no longer function well. And that usually means that we end up in institutions, underfunded and inadequate institutions in many cases. I have thought for a while that Covid may have done a lot of fragile old people a favour by killing them relatively quickly. 

It is now the next day after I wrote this and I am still working on the laundry. I will also try to come up with a plan to feed and/or water the varied G’s when they get back from their quick and frustrating management trip. It is not and will not be easy for JG to clear up his brother’s detritus. He is, in fact, so aggravated by all of it that he says he plans to do a massive clearance of his own ‘stuff’ as soon as he gets home. I am faintly amused. I do not believe it is possible to clear up ahead of death, no matter how much planning and arranging you do.  

Nor do your plans for greeting the returned family, or for posting, last past the first challenge. It is now almost New Year’s Eve. Almost. One day to go. And it was my mother’s birthday and my parents’ wedding anniversary. My father always thought it was clever of him to have arranged to have both events on the same date – he could buy one bunch of yellow roses and cover all eventualities. I am not sure I ever heard my mother comment on this, but she did like yellow roses, so I guess it worked out. 

I am at a greater age now than my mother ever reached, but have six years to go to pass my father. He was lost for a while after my mother died, but he regrouped and made a new life for himself. He moved into an apartment in a retirement complex, made new friends and new interests. He even acquired a lady friend, a retired professor of languages, a wonderful and warm woman not unlike the wife he had lost. Jg and I were engaged in building the house we now live in, and he drove out from the city to supervise our progress. He organized a move for his widowed sister into another apartment in the complex and ran her life for her as well, adding countless codicils to her will, supervising her shopping and generally making sure she did well. I was booked as chauffer for many medical, dental and other appointments, if they were in spots where he did not care to drive. He was busy and he kept me busy too.

I have just glanced out my office window and I viewed an horrid mixture of snow, rain and ice pellets pelting down. I hope it quits before the YD decides to drive out here to spend New Year’s Eve. I hope it quits, period, but since this is December in eastern Ontario, it probably won’t. I was looking for a photo to post for a new year’s greeting and found some from our holiday in Bequia a few years ago. Sun and surf. Sigh.

Hereafter

 

My brother-in-law died early in the morning of December 26^th of the effects of a glioblastoma. If he had lived two more days, he would have been sixty -eight. Too young to go.

In my mind, Johnny will always be the little brother. He was a small boy,

nine years old, when JG and I were married and still a young boy, to my eyes, when we had our children. As a teenager, he lived with us for part of a year when our girls were preschoolers, and has, to an extent, spent a lot of time and holidays with us through the years. An only child, myself, I always was thrilled to have him and Anne, the sister in the family, as accrued siblings. I force fed him through some of his Grade 9 final exams, insisted he learn to touch type, ragged him about our common lack of basic arithmetical skills, enjoyed our common interests in swimming and diving, argued with him, endlessly, about politics. Loved him. Even when he was at his most exasperating, he was lovable.

And, oh my, could he be exasperating. He did not have opinions – he had Opinions. Blazingly intelligent himself, and, as he described himself, an autodidact, he expected equal ability in public office and public service. When faced with what I would interpret as stupidity or carelessness, he often classified an action (or lack of action) as deliberate and culpable. ‘The whole council is corrupt’, he would fume. ‘They are in it for what they can get.’ he would mutter about just about any politician going. Well, he liked Trump. We did argue. Long into the night on occasion. And agreed to disagree.

What impressed me the most about this guy, among many impressive actions and accomplishments, was not the skills he taught himself, many as those were, but rather his innate kindness. He was not afraid to tackle anything. Once when, as a fifteen-year-old he was babysitting our toddler daughters, one of them woke up and was sick. I got a phone call from him and he told me about the accident, that he had cleaned the kid, put her back to sleep and put the dirty linen in water in the basement sink. What the call was to ask was if there was anything else he should have done. He was a teenaged boy. And he had calmly and thoroughly done an adult job.

As an adult, this caring behaviour became one of his signatures. Over the years John cared for his parents as they aged and until they died, and for a childless cousin, also until she died. He was a good companion to his brother-in-law and a concerned and caring brother to his sister. In her final illness, he provided support and companionship to her daughters. He supported his mother as she looked after her sisters-in-law, and found tasks and supporting roles for some of his cousins. And that was just family. He always maintained the friendships established in school days and through his many activities. When he and his brother were planning for his death, those friends were the people he thought of.

His friends thought a lot of him. It was those friends who cared for him in his last illness. They drove him to appointments, brought him food and necessities, sat with him, nursed and supported him. His best friend was with him in his last hours and he died in her arms. A former girlfriend spent countless hours supporting him. His friends were his family, in truth, as we live far away. Yes, his brother has the task of clearing up the residue of his life, but his friendships are his testimonial.

Did I mention that he could be a pain, at times? After his mother needed nursing home care, John lived alone in and had the run of the family home. He established, on top of my mother-in-law’s dining room table, still covered with her cherished crochet lace tablecloth, an electronics working station, piled high with components and, at one point, three disembowelled radios. His kitchen table was little better. When we visited, we ate out. He was a packrat, son of a packrat, brother of another. And most of what he and his father had gathered over long years was stored in the basement. Along with the cat’s litter box, access by the cat to this last having been achieved by cutting a small round hole into the basement door. What is not in the basement is probably in the garage, waiting to be sorted. Gilmours – collectors and a collective pain, actually.

John collected skills as well as stuff. He was an accomplished cold and tropical open water diver. He had a pilot’s licence for small planes. He was a certified auto mechanic. He was a designer, teacher and repair expert on some types of computers, all skills that he taught himself. He was a long-time HAM (VE3NKH) radio operator. He played guitar. He ran and rode, both bicycle and motorcycle, the latter on several cross-continent trips. He was skilled at landscape maintenance and had a stash of cash that he had been paid for doing so. He could weld, estimate and build. He was a top-notch amateur photographer, both regular and underwater. Among the skills he taught himself I can identify brokerage, typing, marksmanship and gun handling, cooking … I am sure only that I have missed some. The tag name JOAT? Jack of All Trades. That was John.

He should have died hereafter. In Macbeth, the quote goes “She should have died hereafter; 

There would have been a time for such a word.” It was not John’s time. He should have had at least another decade or two to practice his skills, hang with his friends, cook a beef roast, play his guitar, bomb up here on his bike.  His father lived past his 90^th birthday. His brother is 82 and still a vital, active man. The tumour diagnosis was made in September. John opted to have it treated, and endured the effects of the treatment until it was obvious that it was not doing enough good. He struggled with the effects of the tumour itself, but even as his illness increased, he could still laugh. He was himself for as long as he could be and then, mercifully, he was gone.

Leaving us with loss. That he left a lot of stuff to disperse is maybe not a bad thing as it provides something to do. I think that a lot of the activities that we do around the death of someone we loved or admired is a displacement of the pain. That is what writing this has been for me. Once I stop writing, once I have, in effect, said the word, time will start again. Without him.

I am putting in a bit of a photo gallery, as time permits and I find the photos.

This is a family shot taken about 1963, at a guess.

From the left, Grandmother Annie Murgatroyd, Jim (Red) Gilmour, father, John in front, left, Anne Hamer, sister, middle rear, her daughter Lori in front, right of John, George Hamer, right rear, Dorothy and Georgia Hamer, front right, Dorothy holding racket down, Georgie holding racket sideways.

This is John with his brother, also Jim Gilmour (the family distinguished by calling this one Jimmy. Year probably 1960- Jim is wearing a Science Faculty jacket from Queen's University and sporting a first year beard. Pity about the colour - the beard was bright red

Here is a young John, probably in his early twenties, helping his brother cut a dead tree - and preventing his nieces from getting under it until it was down.

Around the same time, playing baseball with Jim and the girls.

John and his father often came up from Fort Erie to our land in Lanark to help with the job of getting in the sugar wood. Here are two photos of  firewood working -one of setting the splitter and one of splitting.

Here he is unloading a tractor he helped his brother buy from the float he and a friend brought it in on.

Ans here is another young John, helping his brother construct a garage. It is the window of this building whose frame calculations cost John and Mary a long and painful exercise in arithmetic.

I do not seem to see many photos of older John. I am sure they are in my boxes and boxes of photos, somewhere. 

I found this one of John holding the mother of the baby in the next photo down.

There is one that I really love, however. It is John holding his great niece as a small baby. This is the John that we knew lately. The baby he is holding is now a much changed 18 year old university student, however.

And to finish off for now, this is a middle aged John with his sister - I don't know if this was a serious discussion or if they were both contemplating the dog's state of relaxation.

I am finishing off with a selection of John in his latest iteration - but always himself.

That baby two photos up? That's her in the white sweater. Her father to her left, John's niece, Wendy in the centre with her dog, Shammy, and John in our bush in Lanark.

Last Christmas, dessert time. 

.

The Voices of Our Children

 Tomorrow we will lay to rest one of the oldest men in what I consider to be my community. He was a man who spent his life working for his family and for the people whom he considered his friends and neighbours. He farmed, he made an astonishing number of gallons of maple syrup over many years, he built, he sat on committees and worked on roads, he taught and rescued and laughed. And danced. He raised three strong children who, in their turn, raised capable and generous children, his grandchildren who were his delight and his pride. And in his last year there were photos of great-grandchildren to comfort him. 

His was a life well lived, and as we send him to his rest, I cannot help but wonder what he would have believed to be his accomplishments, his summing up of what he did and felt and was. That he kept his land together and passed it on? He has a grandson making many litres of syrup in from bush he established. He has grandsons with fine building skills and a thriving business with children to follow them. He has a daughter who is as giving and glowing a person as anyone could imagine. He has granddaughters who are also skilled and loving. Grandsons and granddaughters, all fine people in whom he could take pride. He has a league of friends who will remember him with fondness and laughter. But I think that the children and grandchildren are what he would identify as his legacy. 

We live on in the voices of our children. There could be no finer summary of a life than that. 

But they do not need to be physical children. Any child who is helped or inspired can be part of a legacy. I have a daughter who, last winter, was teaching little girls in northern Pakistan how to get up on skates and push a hockey puck. To broaden the horizons of these girls and help to work things out so that they are allowed the exercise and fun is a legacy indeed and one
that will keep on giving. I have another daughter who teaches biology at a university. The students she inspires, coaches and supports and who go on to become informed and skilled adults are a fine gift to Canada. 

Thinking about this made me try to identify what I would single out as my legacy. It is not, proud as I am of them, my daughters and granddaughter. What I see is a plaque on a school in Ottawa with my name on it, among other names, commemorating its establishment as a French language public K to 8 (maternelle a niveau huit) school. I sat on the school board that set it up. I chaired the committee that recommended its beginning. It was a battle. The received wisdom at the time was that French Immersion was the way to go. But it happened and the children whose first language was French got a public school. 

It was an unforeseen bonus that my grandkid ended up going to that school and is now a fluently bilingual young adult, with the fine future that this skill makes easier. It is probably an unforeseen bonus for my neighbour that his grandchildren, spread from here to British Columbia, to California, are all thriving and strong. Thanks, although I guess you can’t hear me, Brien. You and your family are the core of what I think Canada should be and become.

Not the Christmas Post.

 

This last year of having to sit at home hiding from Covid is almost over and I am sure we are all hoping that the end is near. JG and I are now double shot and eligible for the booster, if vaccine were available At present it is not. Luckily, our neck of the woods is amazingly free of cases - as the count goes; our Health Unit is said to have the highest proportion of vaccinated people in the province. Anyway, we are now seeing our daughter and friends in person and are actually booked for a Christmas Party with Dinner. I confess to being rather excited about this dissipation.

 And worrying about Christmas. The YD is hoping to fly home from her far, far away job, Covid protocols permitting. She has not been home for two years. And here is this new variant looking to close us down again. Even for those who are fully vaccinated. What impels the ‘anti-vaxers’ is absolutely opaque to me. I remember the polio restrictions from my early childhood, and do not recall any discussion about not getting the polio protection when it became available. I loaded my toddlers into the family car and roared off to the doctor to get their measles vaccine, as soon as I could. Flu shots? Every year. And I cannot remember anyone making any fuss about any of these benefits. But the Covid vaccines? Eep. Poison. Masks are The End of Freedom. What? It makes no sense to me at all.

 Maybe I just have too much time to brood about stuff. But it is something to do while cooking dinner, I guess. If I could figure out some way of having my meals cooked for me, preceded by being offered a menu with plenty of choice, I would be some thrilled. A friend of mine just moved into an apartment in a seniors’ building where that is the case and I confess to the sin of covetousness. It is just a wistful, passing thought, though. I would miss being out here with the flower-chomping deer and seed-stealing squirrels. And the neighbourhood turkeys, five of whom can be seen out back most afternoons. They are big toms, but they are safe from me as I am sure they are extremely tough. (Tough, tough guys. No Christmas Feast for you, decked out with dressing and gently steaming.)

 There is very light snow sifting down outside. It does not seem to be accumulating, a bit surprising for the end of November, but hey, global warming is here. I guess that is not as funny as all that, thinking of the messes in BC and in Newfoundland/Labrador this last while. When I think of what it is going to cost to bring the infrastructure in the former up to new weather standards, I cringe. Has to be done, though, if we are to remain a country. In fact, I wonder about that sometimes as well. (Probably when I am on to washing up after dinner.) Will the changes to the climate with resulting changes in infrastructure, ways and standards of living, all that, allow Canada to remain one country from sea to sea to encroaching sea?

 Our grandkids are going to have a rough ride, for sure. I guess the best any one grandparent can do is help to make sure the coming generation is as healthy and educated as it is possible to make them. And that includes, in my opinion, getting them vaccinated and back into schools, in person, as soon as humanly possible. Nothing else is fair to them. Nothing less is fair to all of us.

 I wrote this in November and it is now the fourteenth of December. So it goes. Today is sunny, and it is forecast to stay that way for the next several days. Long enough, I hope, for me to get my shopping done. This post has been sitting here for a couple of weeks, for various reasons, but I do need to report that we have a skiff of snow left from last week’s dump and that JG is attaching a new, shiny red snowblower to his tractor. Expect unseasonal warmth and no snow. He may run up and down the laneway anyway, new toy whirring. Or, it could snow like mad and he will get to play with it. It is December in Lanark, after all.

 Yikes. It is December in Lanark and I am not ready for it to be Christmas. Not ready. Not motivated. Not organized. (Oh, shut up, Lou!)  Maybe tomorrow.

 

 

Random ramblings

 

My last post was all about November gloom, and it appears that my cactus heard me whining and decided to help out. “Why bloom at Christmas,” it thought to itself, “when the whole house is covered in bright red decorations and glitter?” “I will cheer the silly woman up,” it crowed, ‘and bloom now!” And it did.

 With the orchid that some friends gave me also doing its best to disperse the greys of November, I have a fine and mood-lifting bunch of flowers here.

 (Although MY husband did not supply me with roses as someone’s did (Sue, wow!)).

 We have not had any snow yet, either, and the grass in the field is still green. All the leaves, almost, are down and mulched up by my obsessive and hard-driving husband. The shadows cast by the low November sun make beautiful patterns on the grass. Note the one stubborn maple still hanging onto it leaves. 

 And the poor old oak has shed and is standing there stark and stubborn. I do hope the [censored] caterpillars stay away next year and give it a chance.

 I bought Christmas cards this week. Whether I will actually get out a pen and The List and write them is another matter. Somehow the long, sleepy days of November become the short and even shorter hectic days of December without me noticing. I do have a few early Christmas things to do, besides looking at the pile of cards (Now where IS the dratted list?). I have to negotiate with the ED as to whom (Note the proper usage there. I hope you are impressed. Unless you are Nancy and then you just expect the ‘m’.) is cooking the Yule Bird. I have to think about (whimper) Christmas gifts for all and sundry. (Although sundry may not get anything if he does not keep telling me he wants towels. Towels, for goodness sake!) JG and I have to sort out the pile of demands and decide how to allocate the Christmas donations. And, I guess we are having a tree, as JG has already located it. (Note YD. Get home here early enough to get on the ladder and put up the lights.) And I have to dig out the wrapping paper.

 It is a good thing that the cheerful cactus is doing its thing.

 I note that the US English setting on my keyboard will not allow ‘gray’. It underlines it in red and stares at me until I change to ‘grey’. I prefer the UK English keyboard for spelling, but it will not, stubborn thing that it is, put the quotation marks in the proper place for my brain – and where my keyboard, unashamedly American, has them marked. Double quotation marks on the UK keyboard are exchanged with @. Among other annoyances. I would show you the pattern, except I figure Blogger would not let me.

 Is Wordpress better behaved, she wondered in passing.

 Now I have to quit this and go and make dressing for the Sunday bird. A Chicken. Not, please note, a turkey.

Soggy Sunday

 

Most of our leaves are down – fall for certain. And today is chill, dark and rainy. With almost all the colour gone, the yard and field look dreary. Only the rock garden shows blocks of rust and red, the seed heads of the sedum flowers mostly. Deer and turkeys are wandering through at intervals and I missed, through sleeping in, a fine turkey battle yesterday morning, I am informed, when two groups of large and territorial males met while heading for the feeding rock. I did hear, though, a few faint swearwords in turkey-speak from the woods later on.

I could add a few choice swearwords in me-speak, were I so inclined. And I guess I am. My least favourite time of year is now here. And all the ills the flesh is heir to, not to mention the bones, seem to have descended on the family. JG is creaking and his head won’t swivel, he says. My back is swearing at me, let me do something so simple as make the bed. We have a serious, serious illness in the extended family. Luckily the next two generations down seem to be holding up. So far, anyway. What with the weather, a real mood changer for me, can tragic drama be far away?

Enter ten turkeys, gobbling.

JG lured me into reading Conrad Black’s column in the Post yesterday. I am still annoyed. In his usual bombastic manner, Black animadverts on how he has to uphold Canadian politics when among his, no doubt superior, British acquaintance. I feel like sending him a quick message begging him not to admit to being Canadian at all. If we could disown the man, I would be very pleased. Even if he is, for once, right about something, that something being the fact that the flags should be back up for November 11^th. I suspect Trudeau junior has got himself mired into this awkward apology with the flags and has no idea how to get out of it. It can’t snow soon enough for him to take a walk in it.*

Not that I can see a good choice of leader coming along behind him. Too many lightweights. Too many inexperienced ministers; I guess to get the sex and region mix right, they had to make other compromises. And booting Garneau was Just Plain Dumb.

Yeah, it’s almost November and I am just as dank and cranky as the weather and the turkeys. Also, I was convinced we stopped Daylight Savings Time this weekend and we don’t. Next Saturday. Duh.

I have just ordered a winter coat, sight unseen, on line. My friend and I had planned a trip into the city to the bright lights and coats for sale, but she got nailed with medical appointments and it is my busy week of the month anyway and we had to cancel. Sniff. At least we can now go to a coffee shop and, mirable dictu, sit down, take off our masks and gossip happily over our steaming cups. Thank you, Health Unit! Now, about those booster shots? Hello, provincial government, are you there? I think I hear the turkeys. Squabbling.

*American Friends. About the walk in the snow. 

The rock garden. From the deck.

The white thing? Not an attenuated ghost. JG's weather station - bolted into the rock. Why the colour values turned out so different in these photos is beyond me. The Nikon with a mind of its own, I guess. The real colour is closer to the first photo than to the second.

Sustainability, Science and Society sort of.

 

“Students in the Sustainability, Science, and Society Program will....

Gain a critical understanding of the concept of sustainability, its contested meanings, multiple dimensions, perspectives and scales.

Gain an in-depth understanding of a specific set of sustainability challenges, including the interconnection between the three pillars of SSS, scales of those challenges, and relationship to personal choices.

Acquire hands-on experience with a suite of analytical tools used to address sustainability challenges.

Recognize that, while analysis is useful, it has limits, and avoid “analysis paralysis”

Gain an understanding of institutional approaches to inform effective policy making and implementation

Will learn to shine a light, instead of cursing the darkness, and offer feasible alternatives to the status-quo.

Appreciate the role of science in society and also that societal decision making involves multiple perspectives and factors that go beyond science.

Be able to persuasively communicate ideas, orally and in writing, to multiple audiences.”

 The outline above is taken from the course description of the four-year university program in which my granddaughter is enrolled. Somewhat more than slightly ambitious, hmm?

 I enrolled in an Arts course at my university in 1960. My aim was to become a high-school teacher and I therefore chose a four-year English Honours major. I think, although I am vague on this, that to earn the Type A Certificate I was aiming for, I had to select a teachable minor. I applied to History and was turned down. I knew my French was abysmal, and that left Latin, which was taught in most academic high schools at that time, although smaller numbers of students were taking it each year - some when they could not select something more relevant and a few from genuine interest.

 I had very little genuine interest in the language as such although Roman history fascinated me. And so I slogged through four years of increasingly difficult Latin authors, with one marvellous course in mostly Roman history as a lagniappe. And taught it for one year. My present claim to fame is that I can translate the Latin mottos on shields and such. Very useful.

 It seems as if, providing the course is as advertised, the granddaughter’s study field might be very useful indeed. It amused me no end that our Thanksgiving Dinner table (and thanks be we could gather as a family) was enlivened by a discussion of grandkid’s Biology experiment, an analysis of ant behaviour. (Both of her parents are Biology professors and her grandfather is an engineer.) Great enjoyment was had by all. A step up, in my opinion, from De Rerum Natura.

There must be an infinite variety of ways in which our interests shape what we learn and what we learn shapes our subsequent interests and occupations. I got into a discussion of how our parliament functions the other day and recognised the truth in the comment that in the past lawyers were, perhaps, overrepresented and that this bias contributed to the adversarial nature of the debate.

 I did a considerable amount of formal debating as a teen and young woman, both in set topic discussion and model parliaments. The key, as I was taught and as I found, was to define your terms. There is certainly a degree of persuasion and sheer stubborn reiteration necessary to making your definition of the terms the accepted base of the dialogue. “Be able to persuasively communicate ideas” is how the Program description presents it. Sadly, what often happens in our modern political discourse is that there is in fact no ‘idea’ as such and we are fed slogans like ‘sunny days’ and ‘build back better’ but not offered substantive actions to choose among nor even any expansion on what is to be built and what will be better. If I have to hear about ‘reconciliation’ one more time, I swear I may end up banging my head on the nearest hard object. Just after asking what the speaker is actually planning to do.

 If anything.

 I feel, some days, an awful lot like the elephant whose photo I took many years ago during a sojourn in Zimbabwe. We were established in a blind above a water hole and there were a lot of species and ages of animals tearing about and generally looking a bit like Aberdeen Street in Kingston last Saturday. And this stolid and stalwart gentleman stood back and surveyed it all.

 Please envision me draping my trunk over a tusk and enjoying the sunshine.

 

Working from Home

 

From The Atlantic, July 29, 2021 “Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, this [distrust of working from home] has often been cast as a battle between the old guard and its assumed necessities and a new guard that has found a better way to get things done. But the narrative is not that tidy. Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great “disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “a pure negative” last fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad.” Ed Zitron is the author. The whole article is well worth reading, especially the paragraph about how suck-ups get ahead in an office environment.

 I found this article in a quick Google run – the work-from-home debate is top of a lot of minds these days.

 I ‘worked from home’ in the late 1960’s. I had been teaching at a secondary school, but resigned late in my first pregnancy (as was often expected then) and had a second child fifteen months later. My husband was working toward a PhD. Money was in short supply. When I was offered a job as a lay marker for a Grade 13 school, I jumped at it. And so, large piles of essays were turned over to me at frequent intervals. I did have access to child care – with a good neighbour. But I was also working as a supply teacher on call, and needed to save her time for days when I went into the schools to sub for a missing teacher. Accordingly, I worked on the piles of essays at home.

 My desk was the kitchen table. My link to my employer was a telephone. My timing was entirely his – he wanted to be able to return the work to his students as soon as possible. Almost all of the material was hand-written, with concomitant degrees of legibility. I had lots of sharp red pencils, a pamphlet titled ERRORS IN COMPOSITON (stolen from the Department of English at Queen’s University) as a reference, and two rug rats alternately under my feet and at large on the ground floor of our house. And I did what I believe the modern term for is ‘multi-task’; that is, I fed, wiped, toileted, wiped, cooked, wiped, read and marked, reread, wiped and …………… yeah.

 What saved my sanity was the television. From where we lived, we could access American and Canadian television. There was quite a new children’s program available every morning from 11:00 to 12:00. It was called Sesame Street. The girls were rivetted to it for the whole time it ran. Less enthralling, but still useful, was Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood, which came on from 5:00 to 5:30 and allowed me to prepare dinner in peace. If the pile of essays was too high, I could stretch the TV time with The Friendly Giant some days.

 Anyone who has ever had small children can imagine these conditions – noise, constant interruptions, short work periods, limited space. Looking back, I am amazed at how well I did. I had my husband detour as he drove me to the hospital to deliver our second child so that I could drop off a pile of marked essays. I was reading carefully enough that I once identified a student at risk through her essay and could alert her teacher to get support for her. If it has to be done, I think, it gets done. And all the parents (and pet owners to some extent) who have worked from home this last year can attest to that. Things got done. Even with the distractions and the sometimes unreliable media. Even without peer interaction. Even with the less than ideal setup for doing the work.

 Here comes another batch of quoting, this time from a magazine called “New Scientist” from an article, (August 14 issue) again well worth reading the whole thing, on how the work setup influences how well the task is done. Entitled “Thinking Space” by Annie Murphy Paul, it talks about how creating a sense of belonging and identity in a workspace improves cognition. People who feel an ownership of their space work better – the home team advantage is an example. It discusses how noise and movement detract from concentration, making open-concept offices less productive. Conversely, thinking is a social process, one box avers. Some of this may explain the frequently observed fact that although we provide our children with nice desks in their bedrooms, they do their homework at the kitchen table.

 It seems that what has happened is that a lot of adults, having been forced to do their work as homework, whether on the kitchen table or elsewhere, have discovered that they like it, and their managers have found that in some cases their productivity has increased. Although many people describe the stress that comes from fewer interactions outside the family, and people who live alone identify as being lonely, a great many workers are prepared to continue at home. (Um, if the kids are back in school, that is.)  It is the managers who want the office, with its easier supervisory ambiance, back.

 I have worked in an office, and on my second day in it I hung a painting that I brought from home on the wall opposite my desk, just to mark it as mine, I guess.  That stretch of time was enjoyable in many ways. It was a privilege to have a room of my own, with a door that I could shut and find privacy behind. During that stint I chose, on several occasions, to go in to the office on the weekend and work alone on a complicated job that needed to be organized. I can imagine, however, doing the bulk of what I did there, in pre-computer days, on line from home. And yes, doing that would preclude the coffee breaks where you can sit back and understand more about your fellow workers by parsing body language, tone of voice and positioning far more easily than on Skype or equivalent. I would hate to do job interviews on line, I really would. But I think it could be learned – I just have not had to.

 Many of the workers who have been doing a lot of jobs on line appear to have learned a lot. And want to continue. How many and how often is going, I think, to be the big negotiation when the vaccination levels and transmission rates allow the country to open up again. It is going to be fascinating to watch – from my now quiet house where I have a whole room dedicated as an office and library. But I will be glad when our Book Club is no longer meeting by Skype, even if I have figured out how to do a personal comment and where the mute button is. As for ambient noise – my husband watches a lot of television. With earphones.

Edited to add this just found.

 

Caterpillar Hell

 We are in the second year of a heavy infestation of Gypsy Moth caterpillars. In our vicinity the tree trunks are festooned with squirming masses of the wretched things, the little ones are swinging from an extruded thread in order to travel, and the leaves are getting smaller and lacier by the day on our cherished oak trees, oak being one of their preferred  foods. As I drove back from our shopping town today, I could spot tree after tree that is at least half defoliated. It is going to be a sad year. Last year both the closest trees were completely chomped, but they did put out a second set of leaves.

JG is determined to salvage at least the two closest oaks to the house, if not the other ones in the nearest copses, and to do so he is spraying the trees with an enzyme. This adheres to the leaves if there is no rain before it dries, and when the caterpillars eat it, it kills them, without killing anything else. But it has to be sprayed onto the leaves and these are not small trees. JG has rigged up a sprayer. I got some photos of the first iteration yesterday but did not manage to capture the full arc. I will try again tomorrow. In the meantime,

here is the best so far.

Down by the Tay

The first day of really nice summer weather. A friend and I decided on a socially distanced lunch meeting at a local park. All of the picnic tables have been removed, annoyingly, as an anti-Covid measure, but the park does have one bench secured in a concrete slab that is still in place. And so we took our sandwiches and coffees there. 

All four of these photos are taken from this bench, looking downstream. When we first got there, the air was still cool and very still. I have always been fascinated by reflections and so I took one shot as a reference and then zoomed in on the best of the reflections. One of the most intriguing things about the outburst of spring in our part of the world is the variance of shades of green, and I think this second photo captures that quite nicely.

This is the mid range of the telephoto in my small camera, a Coolpix P7000, that I use a lot because it fits in my purse or pocket and has a wrist strap, handy when holding a sandwich in the other hand or a walking pole or whatever. 

As I put the camera down, my friend, who does not like snakes, spotted this charmer forging upstream against the current. He, or she I guess, is barely visible, except for the wake, but this is the extreme of the magnification the Coolpix will do. My friend was glad it was not closer. There were four of them, as we watched, and they all went happily by us.

There were no bugs, also happily. And no one bugged us for using the bench.
 

All Experience is an Arch

 

Our younger daughter, the YD, has just completed a walking tour of part of the coast of Turkey. She sent us an itinerary and we have been enjoying the photos as she tramped through, over and down the mountainous coast. She did it solo, a bit of a worry for her father and me, but she is not only competent and prepared, she is also lucky, and this combination has taken her through many treks in strange, wonderful and sometimes dangerous (Namibian desert, solo) places. Some of these adventures have been on foot, some on a bicycle and many in a white-water capable boat. The time that she sent a photo of canoeing down a waterfall comes to mind.

The reassuring thing about these photos, however, is that she has had to live through the experience in order to send them. Whether we live through the thought of what she is going to do next is a different matter.

 Parenting is a strange and wonderful thing. You are handed a fragile bundle weighing in at three kilos with a shriek that would shatter glass and no instruction booklet. (Forget Dr Spock and all the ‘What to Expect’ tomes. No matter what, it is not going to be what you expect.) And so, no matter what, you manage. The shriek turns into varied noises that can be interpreted in a general sort of way. The varied noises turn into words … and ‘NO’ arrives very soon after ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’. The bundle becomes mobile and grows out of its clothing at short and regular intervals. Before you are ready for it, the adorable moppet is hanging from trees, wielding paring knives and coming home bleeding from a fall off a skateboard. And before you recover from that, the offspring is looking you in the eye, passing a driver’s test and applying for post-secondary courses in far-flung lands. Plus, it is convinced that you are both dumb and old-fashioned.

 And of course you are old-fashioned. Your parents and your era formed you in many ways and each generation needs to push off from that and conform to a new reality. Or not, but that is another matter. If you are lucky, your child becomes an adult friend – sort of – who remains part and parcel of your life. You may get a phone call from another continent asking for a recipe. You may get a phone call most days from a mobile phone at drive-home time. You may get a phone call asking for an emergency baby-sit. You will get an email to warn you when a grandkid is arriving for a stay or a granddog needs a temporary home. You may be gifted with potted plants, with refugees from the kitchen cupboards or refrigerator or be tasked to sell a house. You may need to get a cell phone to monitor a grandkid. You will certainly find that the grandkid knows more about the cell phone than you do. And you are going, no matter what, to feel not just old-fashioned but a century out of date.

 Or so has been my experience.

 Friendship, in my experience, comes in two levels. One level is shared experience. I have one set of friends from right back to childhood. My closest friend from that group is a woman who grew up next door; we shared school days, a university double room, parallel marriages and almost parallel childbirth. I have other friends from different sources, one the wife of a friend my husband made in grad school. Again, common experience. I also have friends I have made from living in the same place. The second level grows out of the first and the friendship becomes one in which not only experience but also thought and emotion are shared. We make a coffee date and fulminate about the last annoying thing our husbands did or how our age affects our health and ability. We laugh at the same things and share opinions about books we are reading and current events. To an extent, the friendships are shaped by location – the ties can be in letters and phone calls or face to face meetings. Friendship with adult children can be one or the other or both, sometimes distanced, sometimes close.

 I believe that I am very lucky in that my children like me. Or I think they do. I have just come off a Whatsapp digital discussion (new process for me and I become a mouth breather as I try cope with the phone keyboard) with the daughter who is presently in Turkey. She visited a museum and sent photos and a link to a website that discusses what she saw there. It is a source of great contentment to me that she wants to share that experience. The other daughter, the elder (ED) was here on the weekend with her partner to pick up an exercise bike. We got caught up on the doings of the grandkid in a quick conversation. We cheated on the Covid required distancing with this daughter and her family to celebrate her birthday. Shared experience in both cases. 

There are a lot of photos of festive meals over many celebrations to be treasured. In fact, there is a shared photo website with this daughter (also at the upper limit of my computer skills to access) full of shots of places and things that have caught her eye. She takes marvellous photographs. It is a source of great joy that I have access to this sharing of  her life. Here is a sample - a photo she took in our woodlot of the grandkid - with dog.

When this daughter's daughter was born, I was asked to stay for a couple of days to start off the parenting experience. I have never been more flattered or happier to oblige.

 In my experience, my children have not been the only source of joy and satisfaction in my life but they have enriched it beyond words to describe.

 

An Old School Blogging Meme.

 This  is a steal from The Department of Nance. It's an Old School Blogging meme, and it's easy fun. Here we go.

1.       What's something you're looking forward to doing once you get your vaccine or things open up after the pandemic is over?

Hugging my daughter and my granddaughter. I guess they will also have to have been jabbed and seasoned before this can happen.

I am amused by how we refer to the act of getting the vaccine. In North America we get ‘shot’. In the UK they get ‘jabbed’. That verb certainly has a different feel. I can’t help thinking about the doctor I had as a girl. He had delivered my mother and her sisters as a young doctor, and so he had been practicing at least 32 + 8 years when I remember going to him. And I think that as a young doctor he had purchased a set of hypodermic needles and, as happened in those days, he sterilized and reused them. When I was his patient, it is my firmly held belief that he was still using the same needles to give shots and that they had probably never been sharpened. Oh, ouch!

2.       What simple thing made you happy recently?

We have a robin. He is not happy, but he is here.

What was your favourite subject and worst subject in school?

English, of course. But I always took as much math as I could because I could get high marks in it and bring up my average. Worst? Um, your choice of physics or chemistry.

4.       Which of your blogposts is your favourite?

This one. It is heartfelt. Little Stuff’s Tea Party would be a close second, I guess. Little Stuff is now about to graduate from High School and attend a prestigious university on scholarship. Sigh.

5.       Coffee or Tea? Beer or Wine? Hard stuff?

Coffee. Lots. Black. Strong. If it is a hot summer day, beer. Cold. Very cold. Hard stuff. No. But JG and friend hold a Scotch and Stock Market evening from time to time and I like the way the Scotch smells. Oh, and it has to be single malt, just as a passing comment. 

6.       What movie, if you happen upon it while channel surfing, will you always stop and watch?

I do not channel surf. I do not know how to run JG’s complicated system. (Up to four remotes, given what he has selected.) If I could access the TV without help, probably TLOTR.

7.       When shoe shopping, what's your biggest problem?

Buying sandals with covered toes. I have the world’s ugliest toenails. They cannot be seen in public.

8.       Ice cream cone or cupcake?

It has to be a cupcake if both are available. An iced cupcake, thus not a dry one.  If not, I will take whatever you give me with sugar in it, except coffee.

9.       What have you learned about yourself during this pandemic?

It has been forcibly brought home to me that I am not as nice a person as I would like to be. The shutdown of my activities has left me restless and depressed. I lose my temper when I should not, lack the willpower to do the things I should be doing and am not supporting my friends and family to the extent that I could and should. It is all very well to say that we should be giving ourselves a break during this crisis, but there are limits. I think I have exceeded them.

10.   Does your family think you're the eccentric one?

No. Just a bit crazy.

That wraps it up. 

° yahoo.