A Pledge

Younger Daughter (YD) on the left, Elder Daugher (ED) on the right. Clothes by Grandma

 I gave my daughter a piece of advice in the form of a truism a few days ago. “If you do not put yourself first,” I pontificated, “no one else will.”  A trite piece of advice but a sound one and I meant it. It is a working adage that I have tried to follow, off and on for sure, during my life, and a thing that I was sorry I did not do, if I had not been doing it Got that? Right.

JG and I are both in our eighties and, logically, moving toward the end of our ability to live by ourselves and look after ourselves. Much as I want to deny this, my creaking bones, lack of balance, frozen shoulder, reduced blood oxygen level (and lack of patience about all of these) are facts. It is hard work to make the bed, cook a meal, get showered and dressed in the morning, sweep the porch, stay awake while trying to read. JG has ongoing issues as well. Our daughters are doing some eldercare now and will see it increase as time and infirmity go on. Thus the advice in para #1 above.

The cabin 'at the farm'

It will not be the first time that our offspring have had to come second to what we, the parents, chose. When they were just school age, we chose to buy recreational land, a 100-acre parcel, over an hour’s drive from where we lived in the city. Not a cottage on a beach, not a chalet in ski country, but an old abandoned farm at the very end of an unimproved road. (So unimproved was the road, in fact, that for the first few years we accessed the property in winter by snowmobile.) The cabin we built on this land was heated by a woodstove, lighted by propane, serviced by an outhouse, provided with water drawn by the pailful from a surface well and provisioned with food toted in from the city, mostly, as in summer we could not leave food requiring refrigeration and in winter canned goods froze. We chose to spend all of our weekends and holidays ‘at the farm’ and the daughters were part of it by necessity.

I worried from time to time that the girls were missing out on vital parts of growing up, on bonding with groups of friends on weekends, movie dates, sports teams, even television (no hydro, remember). On the other hand, they learned to navigate by themselves in scrub bush, cross-country ski, build a fire in the snow, take their rowboat out onto the creek. They became, faute de mieux, readers and players of board games. They packed their own weekend clothes, packed their city activities into five days a week, and also learned to rely on each other. That they fit their lives into what we, their parents wanted to do, was not entirely a bad thing.

The year that the ED was in Grade 13 my father decided to move himself and my mother from their large Windsor home to an Ottawa bungalow, a short drive from where we then lived. I don’t know if I have mentioned that I am an only child, but that I am is pertinent. My mother was fragile both physically and, increasingly, mentally, and my father needed help in looking after her. I found them the house, facilitated the move and, in self defence, enrolled in a two-year certificate program at our local community college. My father did what he could to cushion me by hiring help summer and winter for their large yard. (They considered apartments when planning but my mother needed flowers and grassy space.) My mother did enjoy my reports of what I was learning and it gave me hours in the day that she perceived to be my own.

I passed that course and actually (and at my age, too) got a job in the industry, but my mother was really struggling and dad could not cope. I got calls at work; I lost weekends. I quit the job and took on eldercare. At the end, at one point I was sleeping on a rug beside my mother’s bed with a light shining on me so that she could see I was there. Luckily for her and all of us, her physical health broke down and she died before the mental stress became unendurable. My father took about a year to regroup, then moved himself into a seniors’ residence and installed his childless sister in the next apartment over. I became a chauffeur when necessary, but dad managed himself and his sister mostly solo. I started a home-based business in the intervals.

The house JG built 'at the farm'

Dad died in September of ’97 and my aunt lasted until February of ’98. Meanwhile my mother’ s unmarried sister’s health deteriorated and I was the caregiver there, first long distance to Windsor and then, after a move for her, in our city. By this time JG had retired and we were building our forever home here ‘at the farm’.  And, up until the big Ice Storm of ’98 crunched our bush, we were making maple syrup. I was a busy person facilitating other people’s lives for a few years in there. But once we got settled, I found several fun things to do for myself in the place where I found myself, mostly by joining boards of interesting activities. I became a busy person in my own right once again.

I miss, profoundly, being that busy person. Bad health, partly fueled by a lifetime of bad habits, has pretty well parked me in an electrically controlled recliner chair in the living room or here, at my computer, where I feel still in charge. We are very lucky to have the financial resources to hire help for what we cannot do ourselves. (Or we can hire help once we admit we can’t do it; some problems in this regard.) Our daughters take the time to check on us by phone and in person at a level I really hope is not too onerous, and their father has the odd job for them to do (on the roof, for instance) when they visit. Not too demanding yet.

If I am going to be honest here, I would have to say that I resented getting pulled into a lot of care for my elders. I knew it had to be done, I knew I had to do it, I even wanted to do it, but I still got angry about being ‘on call’. Or, I think that was at least part of the anger. The rest was, I believe, anger at fate. Anger at illness that turned my vital, intelligent, funny mother into a whiny child. Anger at age that robbed my equally funny and independent aunt of her self-reliance.  I can identify a mixture of annoyance and amusement at my male-dominant dad’s assumption that whenever he made an appointment, I would be available to take him to it. Maybe the problem was being taken for granted, for coming second in the calculation of what should happen.

Unless and until age and infirmity rob me of my personality, I swear I will do my best not to take my daughters for granted. And to manage so that they can put themselves first. 

Ides of April, Plus 1.

 It is April 16th, 2025 and yesterday was my 83^rd birthday. I was taken out for a fine dinner with my family, given gorgeous yellow roses (a story behind these) candy, cards, a book that I will treasure and a new frying pan and lid. Wait, you say. All of these things to cherish you and a … frying pan. Well, yes.

I have had for far too may years a frying pan that I use for a lot of recipes. It was the exact correct size, for one thing, to make two toasted cheese sandwiches. It had a lid that fits perfectly. It is just the right depth for fried rice, for sausage, the right length for bacon. A long list of pluses. But it was just plain worn out and the coating was probably slowly leaching plastic into our systems. JG has been at me to replace it. We have, I hasten to add, other frying pans in useful sizes. But this one was my kitchen helper. I have been procrastinating about replacing it. JG managed, somehow, to research the pan and yesterday presented me with a beautiful Paderno pan and matching lid, a much better lid than the old one. He went to a lot of trouble, I suspect, to find it. A frying pan to cherish, from someone who knows the exact right thing.

The flowers? My mother loved, above all other blooms, yellow roses. My dad always got her a big bunch on her combined birthday and wedding anniversary. Always yellow roses. My girls remembered this and gave me an opulent bouquet of them, carefully placed in small vials to keep them watered in transit. They are beautiful and they will last and are, presently, front and centre in our living room where I can admire them.

The book? Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words, Conversation in an Age of Rage. A topic and writer that both hit dead on my interests.

The chocolate? Well, yes. In spite of the fact that my scale tells me that I should not have it. Yum.

The cards from the daughters, inserted here. The card from my husband… made me shed tears.

One of my nicest treats, a phone call from a cousin. The topmost treat might have been, though, a conversation with the grandkid who was walking in Montreal on her way to study, and who seems, although loaded with exams and work, to be training for and cheerfully contemplating running a 5-k race next month.

My family, in all its glory.

Trump Tantrum Explored

Opinion column from the Washington Post by Philip Bump. 

 Now fact Checked. Wikipedia, Axios, Newyorker, all confirm. Firing was in first term - not clear in article. "Investigation" as of yesterday.

An official from the first Trump administration is being targeted for speaking the truth.

April 10, 2025 at 4:02 p.m -The Washington Post)

After the 2016 election, when it was understood that Russia had tried to influence the outcome, social media companies introduced a number of changes that allow them to better control misinformation and abuse on their platforms. One effect was that some prominent voices on the right found their posts being removed or muffled. It happened on the left as well, but on the right — in part because of the perceived politics of tech companies and Silicon Valley — these actions were attributed to partisanship rather than practicality. This argument soon trickled up to then-President Donald Trump.

Lower down on the administration’s organizational chart, though, officials were themselves working to ensure that the interference seen in 2016 didn’t occur in 2020. In October 2020, a Department of Homeland Security report identified evidence that foreign adversaries were “using covert and overt influence measures” to try to affect votes “and the electoral process itself.” Despite Trump’s insistence that the 2016 vote (and his election) hadn’t been affected by foreign interference, the government was responding to reality, briefing social media companies on threats and, in 2018, standing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to address foreign threats, including against elections. Trump nominated Chris Krebs to lead the agency.

By all outward appearances, there was no foreign interference that affected the results of the ensuing 2020 presidential election. What there was, however, was a change in the occupant to the White House.

You know what happened next. Trump, who had for months been stoking the idea that there was something uncertain or unstable about the U.S. electoral process, seized on the idea that the election had been stolen. During the weeks after the election, he embraced a wide variety of false and debunked assertions about how he’d been the victim of a left-wing plot to deny him a second term. Anytime a new theory emerged about how the election might have been stolen, Trump shared it with the American public as if it were fact — which at no point it was.

Among the claims he and his allies elevated was that electronic voting machines had been tampered with. Krebs, tasked with ensuring that this wouldn’t happen, put out a statement assuring Americans that election systems had not been manipulated.

Trump took this badly. Within hours, he announced Krebs’s firing on Twitter, insisting that claims about the security of the election were false and flew in the face of available evidence. Again, the opposite was true; it was Trump’s claims that failed to comport with the evidence, much less reality.

It could have ended there. But allegations that the 2020 election had been negatively influenced, leading to Trump’s loss, snowballed. Because early claims about explicit fraud and illegal voting were not substantiated, the pro-Trump narrative began to center more heavily on allegations that the outcome had been rigged. Voters, it held, had been unduly influenced by the suppression of information or false claims about politically potent issues. For example, that social media companies had briefly limited the sharing of a story about Joe Biden’s son eventually became a central element of the idea that they had been acting on behalf of the left.

As people learned that those companies had been briefed about potential foreign threats, a narrative emerged that the government had told the companies to limit the story — however incongruous it was that the government was at that time led by Trump himself. (What’s more, there’s no evidence that the brief restriction significantly affected the election.) Just as it had done before the election, the right attributed to malice and deviousness what was more easily and more accurately explained as explicable responses to evolving circumstances.

CISA’s rejection of Trump’s claims was fading into history until Wednesday, when Trump announced that he was removing Krebs’s security clearance and calling for the Justice Department to launch a fishing expedition, seeking out any scintillas of illegality in which Krebs or CISA might theoretically have been engaged. It was as explicit a manifestation of Trump’s vengeful worldview as anything we’ve seen since his second inauguration. There remains no evidence at all that CISA or Krebs engaged in any systematic effort to violate the law or even to combat disinformation because of ideology rather than factuality.

The president’s targeting of Krebs is in part a product of the massive economy Trump created by denying the 2020 election results. Loyalists who alleged fraud or left-wing deviousness were showered with the pro-Trump right’s most important currency: attention. Not that they didn’t believe Trump’s claims about rigging and theft, mind you; the idea that the election had been determined by nefarious elites is inherently appealing on the right. Particularly given how many Trump supporters knew no supporters of Joe Biden, the results seemed facially incomprehensible to many of them. So, sure. It was the elites.

CISA was a frequent target of these increasingly complicated narratives about 2020 and its aftermath, thanks in part to Elon Musk. The billionaire fully bought into the idea that social media companies had acted against the right, so he bought Twitter and allowed writers who bore obvious hostility to the establishment to cherry-pick from the company’s internal records. They cobbled together a contrived (and at times flatly erroneous) story about malfeasance into which CISA was looped. Boosted by Trump’s allies in Congress, the narrative gained the appearance of being credible, even though it wasn’t. Trump had the pretext he needed for Wednesday’s action.

In signing the executive order targeting Krebs, Trump made clear his intent.

“This was a disgraceful election,” he said about the 2020 contest. “And this guy” — Krebs — “sat back … and he’s tried to make the case that this election was a safe election. I think he said, ‘This is the safest election we’ve ever had.’ And yet every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that’s discovered. He’s the fraud. He’s a disgrace. So we’ll find out whether or not it was a safe election.”

We’ve seen this before, from Trump and others in his second administration: Use the credibility of the office and the government to undermine reality in service of right-wing rhetoric. We need to see if vaccines and fluoride are safe, so we’re launching investigations (run by people who share our worldview). We need to revisit the allegations against the people who engaged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. We need to strip funding for research into climate change and instead boost coal production. And on and on and on.

Election denialism, though, holds a special place in Trump’s heart because he’s seemingly incapable of accepting that voters simply rejected him. Potential administration staffers were reportedly quizzed on their views about the election outcome, with employment apparently dependent on conforming with Trump’s position.

Targeting Krebs is in part about punishing perceived disloyalty and in part about overhauling reality. It is unquestionably also about leveraging the power of the state against a someone who had the temerity to insist that the truth was true. Calling for an investigation of Krebs is flatly authoritarian, perhaps more so than any other example of Trump going after his enemies.

It is a statement from the most powerful person in the country that the federal government will be deployed to monitor compliance with his worldview.

Plaints from a Petulant Pedant

I know that English, like all spoken languages, is mutable. The speakers determine, over time, expression, vowel placement and sound, consonant use, definition. But, knowing that, I mourn for some of the grace notes that I was taught were correct and that I no longer hear used.

For one, the use of few/fewer and less. The distinction between a numeric noun or group and a general one is vanishing, even on CBC and other bastions of good speech. “I hear less birdsong because there are fewer birds.’ Generic ‘birdsong’, no quantity. Numeric for ‘birds’ because they are countable. “I will have less of that noise in the back of the class, thank you.” Fewer than five turkeys survived the winter.”  Fewer people than formerly make this distinction.

And then there are those delightful verbs to lie and to lay. Mostly, to lay is used correctly in the present and past tenses. “The hen lays and egg. The duck laid an egg yesterday. Both of them have laid sporadically this year.” Got that? It is to lie that gets all messed up. “The fallen statue lies face up. It lay there yesterday. I think it must have lain there for longer than that.” When is the last time you heard someone use lain. You hear “He laid there (sometimes spelled layed) all night.” I used to introduce this concept to the Grade 9 classes by telling them that “You have to LAY something.” And then I would pause and wait for the boys to stop snickering. But, some of them at least remembered. Of course - “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

When I hear someone using ‘fulsome’ to describe a generously complete action or item – “He gave a fulsome report, leaving nothing out.” – it rattles me. I learned the word as denoting an insincere overabundance. “Fulsome praise” was too much, over the top, embarrassing. I once had a discussion about me described as “fulsome”. When I called the speaker on it, he assured me that all he had meant was that there had been a lot of it. But. This man was a writer and former English teacher and lecturer. He knew both meanings. And I knew which one he intended.

I have on my desk, tucked behind the computer monitor, Fowler’s English Usage, The Oxford Reference Dictionary, Dreyer’s English and the MLA Style Manual. If the Dreyer title is not familiar, Ben Dreyer was the Copy Chief at Random House for many years and so you might be more familiar with the Penguin Style and Usage title.

And I still get things wrong on a regular basis. Mutable, right?

A Post about Puppets

The public school that I attended had an art teacher and a well-equipped art room. One of the things we learned to do was make marionettes. I remember it very well as I loved doing it. We started with lightbulbs and used paper mâché to form the head. The body was sewn and stuffed, with joints. We used a T bar, the simplest form of manipulating a puppet like that, with strings of fishing line. My puppet was Queen Guenevere; she had a velvet dress that my mother helped me make from scraps left over from my Christmas dress. As I recall, she was strung from the shoulders, wrists and knees, the last with the line running through the dress. And we did shows for the school.

This introduction gave me a taste for theatre. I did not much enjoy performing, but making the costumes and scenery and setting things up was fascinating. I carried this into high school, working backstage for musicals (We did a cutdown Mikado, for one) and on sets and decorations for assemblies and dances. My favourite memory from this time is dressing the biggest guy in our class in a hoop skirt and white wig as Snow White. As I recall, my mother sacrificed a double bed sheet for this skirt. It was not all good fun – at one point purple dye from the Angel Gabriel’s wings got sprayed onto my father’s white shirts and my mother was Not Amused.

In university, I also did stage and musical crew work. I recall ordering enough light brown grease paint to turn all of the principals plus a chorus of Canadian girls in February from white and pasty to brown and shiny. Getting it all off again was another matter and I appear in the university’s year book holding a cast member by the hair and scrubbing his face. My worst moment? A Shakespearian character was getting his eyes gouged out when his wig came off and went thump on the stage.

But back to puppets. My next venture was to teach my daughters and their friends – age about five to seven I think – to use hand puppets. They were avid Sesame Street fans, and some of my husband’s work socks became dragon heads. Other puppets were also single arm, but flat of the hand with the head stuck onto the middle finger and the other fingers folded to make shoulders. We used an ironing board for a stage and my mother’s discarded drapes for curtains. JG had a good quality tape recorder and that also was useful.

I got into costuming again when the ED was in gymnastics. I recall a whole set of leotards for a team and a set of costumes for a Christmas pageant. And somehow the YD needed a costume for a school play. And a uniform for a choir. Also, there were, my delight, Hallowe’en costumes. The height of that – a Monarch butterfly that the grandkid’s mother used for an adult party, costuming her spouse as the caterpillar.

But, the most fun. I joined a group called “Kids on the Block”. It is still extant and you can read about a version of it here. My puppet had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. She had speech difficulties. The puppets were full body and we stood behind them dressed in black and spoke for them, after taking a class to learn what they should say in answer to questions from the audience. The audience was mostly composed of public school children, although we did some adult presentations as well, usually to acquaint teachers and parents about the program. It was really rewarding and the group was composed of some very skilled and caring people.

That’s about it. In my house are two beautiful marionettes, gifts from my daughters as adults, and a third, a lamb with floppy legs on a T bar. This last of my toys went on outings when I was working with a small child on basic English skills (and if the father learned the difference between “in” and “on” with his daughter, score one.) 

Jobs and all that - for Nance

One of my fellow bloggers put up a list of all of her jobs, and challenged us to to the same. So, here is my list. She also asked which of these jobs were, to paraphrase, influential. I whipped down my list and left it for a bit. When I got back to it, I recalled several different paid positions that I had simply forgotten to put in. Two of them were summer jobs in high school for the money, and could be seen as preparation for a life as a housewife, one aspect of this being chambermaid. The other one I left off is one from which I was fired, probably justifiably as I look back but painful at the time. Most of what I have been paid for otherwise has to do with words, teaching them or working with them. My love has always been visual art, an area in which I am a modestly talented amateur with enough sense to have realized this early on. With words I am pretty proficient. The theatre, costumes and puppetry have always been for fun. The secretarial stints? A fee paid to a world that has always been kind to me.

And do I talk to the checker at the grocery store? Yes, always, including thanks for not crushing the bread when appropriate.

A timeline on these lists would probably be useful, but as a stopgap, the paid list starts at age 14 and ends at age 60 or so. The volunteer list - high school to two years ago. 

•  Babysitter
• Library Assistant
• Kitchen help, chambermaid, server, Doon School of Fine Art (in exchange for lessons, board)
• Chambermaid, Bigwin Inn
• Swimming teacher, swimming team coach and lifeguard
• High School Teacher
• Essay marking for Hamilton Collegiate Institute Grade 13 English*
• Supply teacher, both panels
• Trustee, Ottawa School Board
• Personnel Officer, Ottawa Board of Education
• Maple Syrup Camp worker/ Maple Salesperson
• Assistant, Advertising Consultancy
• Secretary, Incorporated Investment Company
• Free Lance Advertising Consultant

So much for the paid employment. As a volunteer

• Makeup artist, wardrobe, theatre, high school and university
• English language coach, essay marker
• Editor, Cook Book
• Costume maker, gymnastics teams
• Secretary/treasurer for several organizations
• Puppeteer
• Kitchen staff, local hall
• Advertising member, executive, local hall
• ESL for adults teacher

*An explanation here. The Hamilton Board of Education gathered the students in the Grade 13, a university preparation year at that time, into one school in downtown Hamilton. The Head of the English Department there was extremely busy in management as the school also attracted a large component of Hong Kong students with a huge range of ability in the language. He wanted to teach but knew he would not be able to keep up with the essay stipulation in the syllabus. I was at home with first one and then a second newborn. We discussed and he hired me to mark the essays for his students and to flag any problems I saw as I read them. He had four classes, 100 students approx. And so, I marked. With comments. And added a comment sheet for his information as needed. We found and supported one suicidal girl this way; I have always been pleased about that.

Iced

 April Fool’s Day anyone? We have a dandy here; a return to winter conditions that is more than annoying. We had a ten-inch dump of snow late last week and then freezing rain and then a day of warmth and fog that did little to the snow but fuse it into a soggy mess. And today we had a freeze and lovely sun shining on all the ice. The freezing rain seems to have brought down every dead twig and branch on every tree around and all of this mess is strewn across the ice. Although there was enough melt to clear the laneway, we have a complete ice cover on the lawn and field. It is amusing to look at the tracks the turkeys have left. Friday, they left a hole for every step they took and today they can stroll along right on top. But, of course, there is nothing much for them to eat.

I am worrying a lot about the songbirds. The male red-winged blackbirds arrived about ten days ago. They come before the females, I think to set up their defended sites. But the marsh where they should be doing this is frozen. A flock of at least two dozen was mobbing our feeders – the sunflower silo as well as the corn on the platform feeder. And the suet ball has been eaten away the last few days at a great rate. I figured it would be the last one this year, but if this weather holds, we will probably put one more out. And as for the robins – there is little or nothing available for ground feeders nor will there be until we get a good melt and a few sunny days afterwards. It may be a quiet spring.

We have more freezing rain forecast for tomorrow, too. At least we had only a minor power outage. Our Hydro crews are heroes, truly. With all the clobber being pulled out of the trees by the ice, most of us in this area had only a few hours before repair was completed. Farther south, I gather, it was much worse. We have, as most of our neighbours have also, a generator, a good one that allows us to run the stove and electronics as well as the frig and water pump. We do lose the internet because, although we host a node, the tower is too far from the house to be powered by the generator. It is a good thing my car is a hybrid.

It is salutary, in a way, to be without electricity. It makes you realize how dependent we all are on it and other modern conveniences. The pioneers who opened up this land had nothing. No light at night except firelight, no screening on their windows, no heat except wood, no food except what they grew and foraged themselves. There was no easy access to medical care. In fact, there were trails, not roads, and not a plow to be dreamt of. At first, there was no schooling for their children although the Scots who settled here got that up and running pretty fast. They also put a library together, and a meeting hall that did double duty for prayer and everything else. Amazingly tough and adaptable people, in truth. And neighbourly. As their descendants still are – I got checked by two different neighbours in this latest mess just to make sure we were warm and safe. It still goes on.