Eleven Days

That’s how long it’s been since I wrote anything here.  I’ve been in a coma.  Okay, that’s not really true. 

Let’s see.  Work schedule changed all around so that I could take this past weekend off, and I’ll be messed around with that for awhile, because now I’m working a weekend for Laura, who is going skiing.  But not really, because she doesn’t ski, so she’s going to sit around in the chalet and drink.  Sounds like my kind of ski weekend.  Jen and kids arrived last Wednesday night and were here through to Sunday.  And Kenzie spent Friday night and Saturday here before going off to a Christmas concert with her other grandma.  So this lucky grandma got to spend a lot of time with her favourite little people, being pulled in three or four different directions all at once.   There is a very good reason why old people don’t have small children around all the time – they would be hospitalized for exhaustion.  No matter how angelic the children.  Because they were all SO good I still can’t believe it.  What wears anyone down is the noise and the non-stop activity and the constant worry about what they may or may not be swallowing or sticking up their noses.  I’m just so out of practice at being on the alert for hours at a time.

But here I am, more or less rested, thankful that they all survived and that we had some fun.  And Kale saying to me “Grandma, you’re the best!”  made it so absolutely worthwhile you cannot even imagine.

My daughter is going through some life altering changes.  She is my child, and it’s hard to fight those mothering instincts that make me want to jump right in there and try to ensure that everything gets better for her.  But she is also an adult.  W. and I are both trying hard to stay supportive but in the background while she makes her own decisions.  She will also survive, and she will be happy.  We do not doubt this. 

I’ve read some interesting articles on my lunch breaks lately.  One was from the August edition of O magazine – 21 Things You Can Stop Worrying About Right Now.  Ready for some inspirational quotes?  Well, too bad, here they are anyway.

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.“  Mahatma Gandhi.

“Finish every day and be done with it….You have done what you could:  some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in:  forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day;  you shall begin it…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.  It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.” Dorothy Dix. 

“It ain’t never no use puttin’ up your umbrell’ till it rains!”  Alice Caldwell Rice.

Haha!!  I like that last one the best.  Then I read some Deepak Chopra,  who says that the mind and the body are the same thing.  “Your body is the battleground of the wars that you wage against yourself in your mind.”   That is so exactly what the psychologist was trying to say to me that it’s freaky. 

Then there’s all this stuff about a quiet mind.  “A lot of people try to be positive all the time, but they’re not, and they become tiresome to themselves and others.  They get so stressed about trying to be positive and think positively that they do more damage.  A quiet mind is much more realistic.  You just exist without getting caught up in the drama around you.  The drama is where most of people’s fatigue and energy loss comes from.”

We’ve all encountered those exasperatingly positive people, haven’t we?  Where they’re so sweet and polite and smiley and gushy you just want to grab them by the necks and give them a severe shake.  I almost prefer the complete grumps who can’t direct their anger inward or they’d explode, so they spew it out to whoever will listen. 

I guess that’s enough (or perhaps entirely too much) psycho babble for one day.  I’m here.  I’m alive.  I’m meditating to obtain that much revered quiet mind.  Last night I fell asleep repeating the phrase “I am.”  Breathe in on “I”, breathe out on “am”.  It works.  You will either bore yourself to death or clear your mind of all those annoying voices and exhausting dramas that want to replay themselves endlessly in your head. 

Hopefully my mind won’t become so quiet that it stops functioning altogether.  GAH!  Another thing to worry about.  haha.  Whatever.  A non functioning mind has never stopped me from blogging.  Well, for longer than 11 days at a stretch anyway.  

We have snow at last!  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!  Life is good.

  

Dad’s Family

Here’s a picture that becomes increasingly more precious as time goes by.  Mom had it in a little 4 x 6 frame on the bedside table in their guest bedroom for as long as they had their little house in town.   Along with all of their valued photos it made it’s way to their current seniors’ residence, where mom goes through things on a regular basis and happily gives them away to the people who covet them.  Like me.  Quite often I don’t even wait for an offer, I just ask if I can have things.  She could say no, but she rarely does; mostly because she’s thrilled that somebody else values these things, and partly because I’d pout for a long time if she didn’t want to give them up. 

I don’t feel like saying who is and who is not still around in this shot which was taken at (I think) mom and dad’s anniversary way back when.  People live on in our memories, sometimes so vividly it’s like they never went away.

On the left are Aunt Jeanne and her husband Murray Sutherland.  They lived in Ottawa, where he was a university professor, and their two sons were cousins we rarely saw.  One (maybe both, I don’t know) also became a professor at University, and strangely enough David taught at Brock when W. and I were there.  Donald I met again at the one and only McMac picnic I made it to several years ago, where he was with his second wife and about six children.  Maybe there were more or less, I lost count.  He was saying how he never realized they were poor when he was growing up.  And I said I always thought we were poor, but now realize we weren’t, not really.  Perhaps we said other astounding things to eachother, but for now that’s all I recall.

Next on the left are Uncle Newton and his wife, Marie.  He was a school principal in Thunder Bay, so they had their summers off and spent ‘vacations’ on our farm.  They always worked the entire time and I found it puzzling that anyone would want to spend a summer holiday like that.  I can picture Uncle Newton with his shirt sleeves rolled up and an old straw hat on his head driving the little Ford tractor, and  Aunt Marie out in the garden in the hot sun for hours picking berries.  I dearly loved that about her – berry picking is an insanely boring job that I was always happy to get out of doing.  We also loved our cousins, Margaret and Evelyn, who were much older and wiser than any of us, and who took us on great adventures that involved walking for miles without telling anyone where we were going, and experimenting with smoking without getting caught.  Good times.  Another very vivid memory is Uncle Newton’s station wagon piled high with kids in their pyjamas going off to the drive-in movies. 

The next couple are Aunt Winnie and her husband Howard.  She preferred to be called Winifred, but she’ll always and forever be Winnie to me.  They lived on the edge of the little town of Palmerston where they had an egg production business involving thousands of chickens.  They also had lots of ponies and a couple of horses.   I never knew my cousin Gwenyth very well, and Brian only a little, but Karen (two years older) was probably my favourite cousin of all time while I was growing up. I got the most awesome hand-me-downs from her.  She taught me how to ride a pony and pluck my eyebrows and how to survive a party where we played spin the bottle with actual real live boys.  A lot of the things we did I had to keep from my mother, who was always reluctant to let me go there simply because when you’re a teenager there’s a huge gap between being a 14 and a 16 year old.  So I’d tell her about gathering eggs and drawing pictures of horses on Karen’s bedroom wall, and walking downtown to eat french fries in a restaurant.  And I’d leave out the bits about escaping out of her bedroom window onto the roof and putting on so much black eyeliner that our eyes stung, and the intricacies of the game of post office and being kissed in the dark.  It’s not nice to shock your mother.  And we did do a lot of work when I came to visit, because they were a hard working bunch and everyone had their various chores.  I remember Karen once arranging to pay her brother to do her work for her.  I thought that was an amazingly brilliant idea.  But Aunt Winnie went on and on about responsibility and wouldn’t let her get away with it.  I remember Uncle Howard singing when he drove his Ramblers and telling us that the smell of manure was a good and healthy smell.    

Next in the back row is Uncle Dave, dad’s younger brother, between marriages at this point I guess.  He has survived two wives.  Isn’t that a strange expression – they didn’t survive him.  Then I guess he got tired of getting married, because although he has had a lady companion now for many years, they still maintain their separate residences.  Then there’s Aunt May (the oldest in the family of 10 children).  I dedicated an entire blog to her somewhere in this mixed up conglomeration of meanderings.  And on the right is Gladys, widow of Colin.  Uncle Colin worked as an orderly in a hospital in London.  I don’t know exactly how old I was (maybe 10)when we got the phone call telling us he’d had a heart attack and was gone.  But I do remember saying as the phone started to ring that this was bad news and that somebody had died.  It wasn’t the first time or the last that I had that kind of strange premonition, but that kind of thing tends to freak people out and I’ve learned that it’s better to keep some feelings to myself.  I spent some time in London with my cousin Katherine too.  They took me once to Storybook Gardens, a child’s park which included things like the three little pigs, with real live little pigs, and Uncle Colin thought it was incredibly silly, taking a little farm girl there.

In front of Gladys, and next to mom and dad, is Aunt Lorna.  She and dad shared the same June birthday, so there are reams of pictures of the two of them sharing a birthday cake.  Just like in this picture, they are rarely a smiling duo.  Life and getting older is a serious matter Iguess.  Aunt Lorna worked as a nurse for years, never married, and lived alone in a little one bedroom apartment in Waterloo.  She was a very special lady with a dead-pan sense of humor and a whole lot of quirks.  I loved her dearly. 

The only sibling not represented here is Aunt Marguerite.  She was a teacher, married to Art, and lived in Dryden.  Their son Murray lived with us for awhile when we were very young,  when Art was away and Marguerite was teaching.  Murray and his family were wonderful to make the trip east to visit the farm lots of summers when their family was growing up.  And when W. and I lived in Kenora and Dryden the relatives who came to see us never missed stopping by to see the Dryden relations.  I have wonderful (although very old) memories of “baby Elaine”, better known now as Laini.  And one not so hot one about taking her and her mom down to our spring fed pond to show them – what – frogs?  who knows – and getting too close to the edge and falling off a narrow cement pad into the freezing water.  Aunt Marguerite couldn’t stop laughing, so I told her Elaine pushed me!  Wasn’t true, and didn’t help, she still thought it was hilariously funny. 

It has taken me days and days and days to get all of this down, and now that I read it over, I realize it skips over a thousand things.  I am SO proud of my mother for the way she embraced every member of my dad’s family and all their spouses, and welcomed them and their families to our home year after year.  Not that it was ever a difficult thing to do – they were and are all incredible people.  And that’s why this photo means so much to me, for all the memories it conjures up.  I’ve only just begun to skim the surface of the still waters that run deep.  There is no doubt in my mind at all that I’ve been repeating myself, or that I’ve lost a huge percentage of the details, but that’s what us old geezers do.  I have this need to get it all out before it’s all gone and lost.  And if someday somebody cares, that would just be a bonus.

Picture Perfect Personality

I saw a psychologist today.  I think I’m normal.  Well, as normal as it’s possible for anyone like me to be, and who knows what that means.  That’s kind of how we talked.  I found out it was impossible to exlain how I actually FEEL about stuff without getting completely choked up.  I’m very smart at knowing how I’m supposed to feel, and I act like that’s how I actually feel.  But it ain’t necessarily so.  And those repressed emotions have to surface somewhere, somehow.  And they do so in the form of anger or tears. Quickly surpressed.  God, what am I talking about, I’m a mess!  But that’s okay.  I learned today that it’s okay to be sad and worried and even angry.  I must give myself permission to accept that however I feel is legitimate and to let myself express those things.  Except I have to draw the line at homicidal, which I’m pretty sure I can manage.  So there.  That was well worth the money. 

Perhaps I could have found out just about as much on the picutre presonality application on facebook and saved myself the drive downtown.  Here’s the results of that:

Temperament

Flexible

Nothing seems to bother you – you sail through life crisis free. It’s not that your life doesn’t have its ups and downs, it’s just that you handle everything without unnecessary drama and antics. You approach each day fresh, not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow. You are confident that you can handle anything that comes your way and experience has shown that you are absolutely right about this.

Interests

Simple

You are continually pursuing a simpler and less complicated life – you don’t allow yourself to fall victim to all of the “should do’s” that society continually bombards you with. You are thoughtful about your life choices and think in terms of yourself, others and the world in which we live. You have a great sense that we are part of something much bigger and we must be good to others, if we want others and the world to be good to us.

Amusement

Thoughtful

You are easily stressed out and overwhelmed – you need to take care of yourself first and foremost. Because you tend to be self reflective, you know your limits quite well and must remember to not exceed those limits. When you overwhelm your life with obligations and responsibilities, you tend to shut down and go into yourself even further. Take some time to find your serenity and kick back your feet.

Passion

Traditional

Your notions about romance are viewed as unrealistic by many, but don’t let that stop you. When you think of romance, you think of huge gestures of commitment, sacrifice and love like we see in the movies. Flowers, chocolate, and wine are just some of the ways to your heart. You want to feel loved and treasured by your partner and you expect to be courted, admired and hotly pursued. You long for old fashioned dating.

They had me right up until the “hotly pursued” bit.  I’m way too lazy to want to put up with that kind of nonsense.  The rest of the passion thing I could learn to live with.  And all that stuff that came before?  I really can’t disagree with any of it.  Wow.  Time to find my serenity.  I think that should be everyone’s top priority and fervent wish.

Making Up History

Mom found this picture in one of her many albums.  The original size is about 2 inches square, so with her macular degeneration it was impossible for her to identify anyone even using her enormous magnifying glass, until my sister took the photo home and blew it up.  I love that expression.  We all want to blow things up. 

I tried various things with it, but the larger and more clear I tried to made it, the more obliterated were the fine details.  This will have to do I guess, blank looking faces and all.

The four small children in the picture are baby cousin Audrey way in the back held by her dad, Uncle George, who was married to Edna, mom’s sister, second from the left on the bottom.  I wish I could just point.  But that would be WAY too easy.  The two little girls in the center are my (sort of) (second?) cousin Betty and me.  Betty is being held by her older half sister Mary, (her adopted brother Alma is way in the back) and I’m in front of Mary and Betty’s mom, Amy,  second wife of grandma’s brother Iden (his first wife’s name was Abbie), and he’s that bespectacled face also way in the back beside baby Audrey.   Does your head hurt yet?  It gets worse.  Dad’s face is between those of Audrey and George.  Obviously little thought was given to placement here – just snug up and make sure your face is visible.   The contemplative little boy on the right is my brother Ron, thinking, Gawd Almighty, what possible future is there for me with all these weirdos in my recent past.  Or maybe he’s just thinking he shouldn’t have eaten those last 6 spoons full of Christmas pudding.

My sister (who at this point in history wasn’t even born yet) and I were feeling pretty smug about being able to identify so many of the people in this shot.  Robert-John and Levi were two old bachelors who lived together and came to church every Sunday.  I’m not sure if they’re actually related to us in some way or not,  but I do remember the church ladies always doing church lady stuff for them both all the time.  Thus the invitation to Christmas dinner.  Grandpa William Scott’s brother Jimmy is the other little face in the back wearing glasses.  Lot’s of people who knew him remark that my brother resembles him in many ways.  Mom and grandma are behind Ron, going up and to the left.  Grandma Scott had a lot of younger siblings, all brothers, and three of them are in this photo – Iden, Carl and Jack.  Jack’s wife Nellie (who my grandma never liked much) is right up front and their son Alan is squatting on the left, holding some kind of thing that looks like it might be a camera.  Alien tracking device seems a little far fetched for the 1950’s.  But nothing would surprise me.  Grandpa’s skinny little face is to the right of grandma’s, and their son Gomer’s chubby one is to the left.  

Mom was quite happy to get the identification thing all sorted out, but the thing that made her positively gleeful was figuring out WHERE the picture was taken.  I would have thought that the big leafy wallpaper would be a dead giveaway, but apparently everyone had paper like that.  (Everyone??  No one had any taste at all?) But mom chose to ignore those comments as she pointed out the ceiling to us, and told us that she remembered that it was a silvery metal kind of panel, and so this of course had to be her maternal grandmother’s living room!  Who could forget such an interesting ceiling?  Well, yes, who indeed?  We had to admit, nobody would be likely to ever completely get that out of their heads.  I’m guessing that great grandma passed this house along to one of her sons, and maybe it was Jack, and maybe that’s why grandma had a hard time liking her sister-in-law Nellie who got a house for nothing and Jack besides.  Or maybe that’s all pure conjecture and Nellie was just a bag that nobody liked.   

The other thing we discussed at length was “who took this picture?”  It really doesn’t make any difference, but mom was having such fun telling us why all our guesses were probably wrong that it kinda spurred us on.  Somebody’s spouse?  Alan wasn’t yet married.  This might have been before Carl married Julia.  Or after she died.  Or his first wife died.  Or was he even married twice?   Alma was too young to have met Shirley yet, and Mary was too young to have met Ross.  We kept throwing out random names of future couples.  Alan had a brother Bob who was kind of a black sheep and ran off to Cuba at one point in his life, so he probably didn’t even show up for Christmas – another reason to think less of poor old Nellie.  She really couldn’t do anything right.

Eventually we gave it up, but now that I’ve looked at it all again, the obvious missing person is Mom’s sister Mabel.  She was the picture taker in the family, and the only missing sibling of the four of grandma’s children, so I’m thinking it had to be her.  There are dozens of pictures of us and our cousins taken by her.  She married late, so when she was the only one without a bunch of kids, she had the time.  And aunts always think little kids are way too cute for words, take dozens of pictures of them and then go home alone with a huge sigh of relief. 

So are all the mysteries solved?  I wish we had time to do this with every picture mom has, but we don’t want to exhaust her with our questions or get her too exasperated with all our making fun.  (Like laughing at the names Alma and Gomer.  Come on.  Who does that to their kids?) 

Aw, well.  Families are fun.  Figuring out relationships and directions that lives took can be an intriguing process.  Especially when you fill in the blanks with big doses of imagination.