Canadian culture

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Old Woman

This week my lawyer daughter and I are going to Vancouver to see Aida. I tell you this because I don’t want to suggest Canada is without high culture. Indeed,  there are lots of wonderful museums and theaters in Vancouver that I like to visit.  But then there’s comedy theater.

Jerry and I and our friend Ria delved into the other sort of culture last weekend. We went to the birthday party of a dear friend who takes care of our finances. The party was at a dinner theater (comedy theater) in Port Coquitlam, near Vancouver. We drove up, leaving early since the border crossing can be long. This time it was fast. First we stopped for me to buy a rug at a little shop in Burnaby. The shop-space was tiny but there were many handsome rugs of just the size I wanted and in my price range. The proprietor (I guessed he was Egyptian) was courteous and helpful. All the rugs I really loved were Persian, but he explained that I could not legally import a Persian Rug into the US. If the border guards inspected they might recognize the rug as Persian and make us take it back. I didn’t want to risk it, so I bought an Afghan rug. I like it but I don’t love it.

Afghan rug

Next we went to lunch at an Italian pasta restaurant, Anton’s, recommended by the rug merchant. The pasta was good and we ate heartily. We had been warned that the food at the comedy theater, Giggledam, was, like the carpet, “good, but not great”. I would have been hungry later but for the pasta.

Then we went in search of the hotel where we would spend the night “a short taxi ride from the Giggledam”. It turned out that the address that Jerry brought with us, which I plugged into the GPS device, was the address of the Giggledam. The printout on the hotel Ria had left on her table at home, and we couldn’t remember the its name. The streets of Port Coquitlam were congested but, with difficulty, we found a parking place outside a store-front labeled “Quick Cash”. I thought I would recognize the name of the hotel if I saw it in a telephone book. Quick cash was without customers and the young lady attendant was happy to help us. But we didn’t need the phone book. When I explained our problem she immediately came up with the name of the hotel. “There’s only one,”she said. She gave us directions.

When we arrived at the Giggledam at the appointed time a crowd was waiting for it to open it’s doors. The nice young woman who does our taxes, a good friend of the birthday girl, greeted us and took us under her wing. We had good seats in front near the birthday girl and her father and his wife.

There was a master of ceremonies.

The Master of Ceremonies and the Birthday Girl

He spoke with a British accent which was clearly not real. The name of the show, Cirque-du-So-lame, was based on the premise that all the circus performers had run off, leaving the original circus family (all of whom had Britishy accents – none convincing) to do the show alone. There were a lot of jokes about sex — all sorts of sex. There was a lot of male cross-dressing and male nudity (everything was uncovered except the main frontal components — but these were frequently clutched or pointed at).

The MC in drag (sort of)

Another "dress" and song

Not much female skin was revealed. I wondered why.

There were girls in the show too

The show was long and loud. Dinner was slow in arriving and the food was really bad. After the main course there were short scenes in which members of the audience were recruited to participate — birthday celebrants or anniversary celebrants.

The birthday girl on stage

After dessert came the musical part of the show in which the actors shed their wigs and accents and played instruments and sang. The master of ceremonies did an impression of Elvis Presley during which he summoned a lady from the audience (one who was celebrating her 35th wedding anniversary) to dance with him. There were insinuations of sexual intercourse and orgasm. “Was it good for you too?” he asked her. “yes,” she replied, “I didn’t know you were up to it.”

Jerry was fading fast. In the ladies room somebody told me it would end at 11. I thought the end of the show would never end. The master of ceremonies thanked everybody: the chef, the sous chef, the waiters, the musicians, the each of the other performers, the show’s promoter, the audience, the stage manager the lighting engineer. He recited individual bios and heaped extravagant praise on all. Then one of the other player/musicians grabbed the microphone and thanked the MC. “None of this could have happened without this man.” At the same time the wait staff handed out little paper Canadian flags on sticks and at the final, final end everyone (except the Americans who didn’t know the words) sang a patriotic Canadian song while gently waving the little flags.

Now, I am not saying I didn’t have some fun at this event. Everyone was jolly; I was with people I love, and although the premise of the show was silly and many of the jokes were, as billed, lame, there was yet a lot of energy and talent displayed. The music was far too loud for old ears, the taste of much of the performance was marginal, but clearly these were people who were deeply dedicated to a life on stage, and that’s not an easy life. For the most part the audience (mostly white, some Asian, very few Indian) responded with cheerful enthusiasm. I like Canada and Canadians. This was a side I hadn’t seen before and it rounded my view and showed me that Canadians are not really so different from us Americans.

I promise to tell you all about Aida next week.

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Wandering and life (and death)

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Old Woman

Recently Deborah wrote a sad and poignant post about a friend who had Alzheimers and wandered off, got lost and died of exposure. That made me think about wandering and I  frequently think about death anyway. Forgive me if I continue on my rumination on life and death. The suicide of Jerry’s brother Bert and the fact that both Jerry and I turn 80 this year is the reason that I continue this reflection. I used to be a biologist, and I still think like a biologist. I think of wandering as a biological urge built into our DNA. Death is, of course, part of the chain of life.

When life first formed sometime around 350 billion years ago it spread rapidly through the seas, and when land stabilized it eventually colonized the land. And it diversified. It experimented with new forms. Some were so successful that they survive today, but all life is a continuum. We are all derived from the first life that formed on this planet. There was constant change and movement. I see the need to wander in myself when I walk in a new place. I must see what is around the next bend and I often walk farther than is comfortable on the return. I much prefer a circuit walk to a go and come back the same way walk.

Jerry and I have been watching a series of lectures on colonial America, how Europeans wandered across the ocean to find new worlds.

Ecosystems come into balance when they are undisturbed for long enough. When new kinds of plants or animals (including people) arrive in a stable ecosystem the balance is upset and things change. Eventually a new balance is established, but it takes time and there is conflict as it equilibrates. When the first Europeans came to the new world the native communities were in balance. It’s true that different native peoples fought each other. For instance, it was part of the Iroquois culture to fight, but it is said that if they fought for 7 years 7 people would be killed. They didn’t fight to gain land or dominate other tribes. They fought to prove their strength and courage and sometimes to capture women and children to add new blood to their tribes. When white people arrived wars took on a different purpose: that of acquiring land and killing the former inhabitants. And biology had another way as well. New diseases were introduced which decimated the native populations.

Nor were the white people, newly arrived, in equilibrium with each other. Different cultures and religions existed in the several colonies. They fought with each other and with the natives. The Puritans who settled New England formed alliances with some Indian tribes against the French, and later against other English settlers who had different religious beliefs. They quarreled with the Dutch in New Netherlands (New York) and with colonists in Virginia where an unstable social structure had arisen through settlement by importation of indentured servants. Colonists would bring servants, indentured for 7 years, to Virginia. For this they would get 40 acres of land for each imported servant granted by the British Crown. Servants who survived the 7 years would be freed and given 40 acres. Conditions were terrible, so usually the servants would die after a couple of years and the sponsor would then get the servants’ 40 acres as well as his own. In this way vast holdings of land along the rivers were amassed by rich owners. Gradually, though, conditions improved and the servants began to survive their 7 years. But by this time the best land near the rivers was already claimed, so the servants were given outlying land where they came into conflict with native people who considered the land theirs.

Animal communities work in similar ways. I am plagued by starlings at my bird feeders.

Hungry starling

They don’t belong here; they came from Asia. In 1890 about 100 of them were released in Central Park in New York by a man who wanted to bring every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States. Today there are more than 200 million starlings in this country. They displace native species of birds.

Stellars jay

Occasionally I see a rat under the feeder, picking up what the birds spill. Rats have wandered the world over in company with humans. They live and prosper in the dark nooks and crannies of cities and towns. Their insect fellow travelers carry their own guests who are home in turn to bacteria that bring death to humans. In the 14th century the black death took the lives of half the population of Europe. It started in China and followed the silk road, then the black rats that carried the fleas took up a sailor’s life on trading ships and the plague spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

Country cousin to a rat, but a lot cuter

In my garden I pull up plants that have invaded from other continents, sometimes drifting here on the wind, the water or brought by wandering birds. Life wanders. Darwin traveled around the world and observed plants and animals everywhere he went. He saw that the fittest survived to reproductive age. And the fittest wander.And the successful wanderers survive.

Europe survived the plague. People, rats, and Yersinia pestis are in equilibrium for the present. The American colonies have become the United States, a relatively peaceful place. The native people who survived the measles have developed immunity. Many people live to be in their 80’s. I will learn to live with starlings. I will learn to live with dandelions in my lawn because I won’t put weed killer on the grass. I will root them out of my flower beds.

Dandelions

But the point is that when it comes to DNA and the web of life, the individual is nothing. Life spreads itself in what ever way it can, wandering the entire planet, learning to survive in every kind of place. If a sparrow falls, nobody cares, except perhaps its mate. When I die those who love me will be sad, but my DNA has already moved on and now resides in quite a number of other humans. I did my part. I housed a certain arrangement of DNA molecules for more than 80 years. Now that arrangement is wandering around, getting mixed with other molecular arrangements. That’s what DNA does and has been doing since the beginning of life. That’s what it will do till the end of this planet.

Who knows whether life will come again?

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What I did in Holy Week

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Old Woman

On Palm Sunday Jerry and I went to eastern Washington. We both had colds, and in addition Jerry was having problems with his back. I did some of the driving over and all of it coming back. It snowed on the pass on the way over, but on the way back on Monday the mountains glistened gloriously in the spring sunshine. The trip exhausted both of us, but was still worth while. One thing we accomplished was a decision about Bert’s ashes and the related question of our own burial and the ashes of Susy, Jerry’s late wife of 30 years. (Those are still in a box in Jerry’s work-shop.)

We spent some time with Paul and Sharon, friends of Bert’s. They are fine people who want a place set aside to remember Bert. We hadn’t seen them since Bert’s death and the subject was approached slowly and cautiously. Paul said he felt it important to have a marker. We settled on the Lummi church yard to bury the ashes. Then we decided that Jerry and I will have our remains in the same place and Susy as well. “Just don’t put me next to Bert” Jerry said, laughing. He cared about his brother, but Bert wasn’t easy to get along with. I said he could rest peacefully between Susy and me.

We spent the next three days trying to recover from the whirlwind trip east and got some antibiotics for Jerry’s a secondary infection from his cold. That’s better, but his back is still a trouble.

Yesterday, on Good Friday, we set out for San Juan Island where Jerry used to live and where we were to have a meeting with our lawyer and a phone conference with our Arizona lawyer. There is an opposing will produced by the man whose gun killed Bert, supposedly leaving most of the estate to himself and his girlfriend. Naturally we are disputing the legitimacy of this document.

So this was a big meeting and I was nervously anticipating what might be said. We just made the ferry in Anacortes. The trip takes a little over an hour and I had forgotten to bring my knitting, so all I could do was worry about legal things — things I know little about and thus make me anxious. Just as we were rounding the corner to the Friday Harbor dock there was an announcement from the bridge that the ferry might not be able to unload cars because the ramp was not functioning. They were trying to fix it, but they might have to take cars with drivers back to Anacortes. The foot passengers could go ashore. Jerry and I agreed that he should go on to the meeting and I would stay with the car.

seagull watches us taking pictures of him

The bridge announced that we were going back to Anacortes and the ferry started off. Then, without explanation, it came back to the car loading dock and a couple of workmen climbed around on the dock, pulling levers and working switches. A number of other workmen watched with interest. They spoke to the crew on the boat through intercoms and could be overheard by the unhappy drivers hopefully hanging around. The gist of what was said on the intercom was that this wasn’t going to work. It didn’t. They got the apron within a couple of feet of the car deck and gave up.

The apron worked, the ramp was stuck

We took off for Anacortes.

After 3 hours of riding on a ferry I was back where I started. Since we were the last car on the ferry I was close to the end of the line for refunds. It took about 45 minutes in a line of traffic to be told that they couldn’t give a refund there if more than 2 hours had elapsed since we bought the ticket. We would have to mail in a form with the receipt.

The law office had called to say that Jerry would fly back to Anacortes on San Juan Airlines, and it was almost time for his plane to land. I persuaded my GPS thing to show me the way to the airport even though I didn’t know its street address. I cleverly guessed it was on Airport Road. and the GPS device was satisfied.

When I got to the airport I took the poodles for a walk. Poor doggies had been a long time in the car. An orange San Juan Airlines plane landed. I thought at last I would get Jerry and we could go home, but I watched the plane unload its 3 passengers and Jerry wasn’t one of them. I went in the office to see what I could find out. It seemed that the whole schedule of the planes was disrupted because of the ferry problem. The plane from Friday Harbor had gone to Bellingham. It would be in Anacortes in another few minutes.

I finally collected my frazzled husband with his bad cold and bad back (he had been to Orcas as well as Bellingham) and we drove home, stopping only for dog food. He was encouraged by his conference with the lawyers but not able to tell me much about what was said. He said it was mostly legal talk which he didn’t fully understand. We were home in time to cook a late dinner, and I finished cleaning up the dishes and feeding the dogs.

I sat quietly in the kitchen letting the trivia of the day subside. The radio was playing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, haunting music that echos the deep, universal sadness of loss and suffering; tears dripped down my face.    Jerry came and laid his hands on my shoulders.

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Waiting

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Old Woman

My house is cleaner than usual. My kitchen cabinets are sorted. I cleaned the stove. The washing is done. I am organizing bookcases. My desk is cleaned off. Every day it doesn’t rain I plant a hanging basket or a pot and pull some weeds. I have planted peas, carrots, lettuce and shallots in the tubs along the fence and raked mowed grass for Jerry. When I’m not doing those things I check my email, wander around the house looking for something to adjust or clean or straighten. All this is totally out of character for me. Normally the way I function is to become absorbed in some ongoing project and oblivious of everything else. But I can’t concentrate on anything as we wait for death certificates for Bert.

As soon as the death certificates arrive — they are being expedited from the funeral home when they are available from the county — we have to make trips to Friday Harbor and then to eastern Washington to deal with estate matters. These things must be speedily done. There are bank accounts and deeds and titles to vehicles and airplanes and all sorts of complications with many of those. It will take months.

And I try not to picture in my head the moment he shot himself. I wasn’t helped with that effort by having Jerry tell me, after reading the sheriff’s report, that the gun that killed Bert was loaded with hollow point ammunition. What’s hollow point ammunition, I asked. Jerry said this kind of bullet expands on contact and causes maximum tissue damage and bleeding. Thus the mess in the truck where Bert shot himself. Jerry told me not to read the sheriff’s report; it would upset me. I said I had no intention of reading it, that I already knew far more than I wanted to.

Yesterday the post office called to say that there was a registered package from the funeral home in Arizona. Bert’s ashes. Jerry went to get it and came back with a small brown box which he put on a shelf in his closet. “There’s not much left of Bert.” he said softly.

I am thinking about my age and my new decade – the decade of my 80’s. I was active in my 70’s. I backpacked in New Zealand with my friend Penny and I had parties and cooked (I won a chili cook-off here on the island.) I showed paintings and took courses. I took care of my dying friend John and my dying mother. I built a patio and I mowed big lawns. I feel less capable of those things now, and I am often tired. In this trip to New Zealand Jerry and I climbed many hills — we actually looked for hills to climb. They are not hard to find in N.Z. Here’s the view from the top of a hill we climbed in Whangerei.

View of Whangerei

I wonder how much longer I will be able to climb steep hills. I wonder how much longer Jerry and I will be together. Which one of us will join Bert first? Where will our ashes (or our bodies) be finally placed. My friend Polly, who recently died, had negotiated a green burial section of the Lummi church cemetery. Will we all go there? These days I am tired, and I fight a feeling of flatness and boredom that I think is perhaps depression. Or is it just the waiting?

I am going to a painting workshop tomorrow. I have a 24 x 36 inch canvass which is larger than I use these days. In art school I painted big ones, some 4 x 6 feet. But it’s hard to find room for big pictures in my house, and my grandchildren don’t have that kind of space. My subject for tomorrow needs a big surface.

From the past

On the beach in Motueka

I took many photos of this crumbling wreck during the week Jerry and I spent in Motueka, New Zealand. That carcass of a boat spoke of the essence of death, of change, of decay, of transformation, and of new life. I thought about Ariel’s song in The Tempest:

Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Here’s the view I plan to paint.

Lit by the evening sun

I will put some seagulls on it from another view, and some sea birds in the foreground.

Hunting

I may try to incorporate some of the mountain background. I’ll see how it looks. It shouldn’t get too complicated.

And I am thinking about Bert’s ashes. Jerry says Bert didn’t care about what was done with them. But his friend Paul does care; he feels everyone should have a place, and I agree. I will have my friend Basil, here on the island, make a small stone marker and we will put the ashes in a place we all agree on. I am thinking about an epitaph — short and not sentimental. It should say something pithy about Bert. He was quirky, stubborn, pig-headed, creative and solitary. He was a big man. He lived alone but had many friends, some true, some false. He didn’t think much about people and thus never distinguished
the true from the false.

So while we wait I’ll plant and tidy and wash and plan a painting and put this post on my blog.

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Sudden death

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Old Woman

I am always happy to arrive in New Zealand. We landed at 6 AM as Auckland was waking up. The flight was long and our old bones stiffened in the cramped airplane seats. We had, as usual, an hour to relax in the Airport before my cousin Jocelyn and her husband Albert collected us, so I arranged a sim card for my telephone and got a New Zealand phone number; then we had coffee. Jerry remembered how to order it in New Zealand; he had a “long black” and I had a “flat white” (translation: regular size cup of strong black coffee and a cafe au lait.) Sparrows darted through open doors, scavenging crumbs dropped by munching travelers.

The rest of that day was recovery time. We unpacked a few things, took a short rest and walked a familiar route part way up Pukekohe Hill. It’s a steep hill with huge views all around, but we weren’t ready to go all the way up the first day. The next day, Saturday, a family party was planned for my 80th birthday, though it was 4 days early. This was the day my cousin’s 2 children, their spouses and 3 of her grandchildren could assemble at a local Chinese restaurant with us. They gave me a pair of pretty earrings and we had a good time. Jocelyn’s grandson, Bryce, brought his trumpet along and in the parking lot he skillfully blared out a resounding Happy Birthday.

Bryce trumpeting my birthday

Sunday we would rest, then Monday drive 3 hours north to Whangerei to visit our 93 year old aunt and have another family party.

Jerry and I had some things to worry about at home, but I tried not to dwell on them. Jerry’s brother, Bert, was unwell. He had recently had open heart surgery and he was addicted to codeine pain pills. His only caretakers were some people whose motives we had long suspected. We thought they were more interested in his money than his health. We were relieved when another friend whom we like and trust, agreed to go to Arizona to take care of him. We expected this friend to stay with Bert while we were in New Zealand. We planned to go to Arizona to check on him as soon as we got home. A few days before we left our friend called to say he couldn’t stay with Bert any longer. Bert was addicted to prescribed opiates and had been put on methadone to treat his addiction. He was allowed one methadone pill per day, but he demanded more and when this was refused he threatened to shoot himself.  Our friend said he couldn’t stay under those circumstances. So Bert was again left in the care of people we did not trust.

We had left Jocelyn’s phone number so we could be reached in case Bert got worse. Sunday morning as we were having breakfast the call came. I had been jumpy every time the phone rang anyhow, and when Jocelyn answered and  said, “Oh yes, Jerry, he’s right here,” I knew it would be bad news. My quiet, calm husband took the phone, listened a minute and gasped, “Oh no!” and again, “Oh, no!”. Then, “When did it happen?” He listened a little longer, walked into the living room with the phone and stood at the window with his back to the room. I put my arms around him from behind. I could feel him tremble. He listened some more, then said, “Of course, I’ll take care of all the expenses.” and finally hung up. As he turned to walk into the bedroom I could see that his eyes were wet.

What the man who had been taking care of Bert had told Jerry was this: the day before (the day of my birthday party) Bert had shot himself in the head. He had gone to a convenience store with the caretaker. While the caretaker was in the store Bert stayed in the truck and used the caretaker’s loaded gun, conveniently placed between the seats, to kill himself. The man complained to Jerry about the mess in his truck. He did not say sorry for your loss or express any regret.

The rest of our vacation, though we tried to salvage some of it with walks and quiet talks, was pretty much taken up with emails, faxes, telephone consultations with lawyers, lawyers in Washington, Arizona, and we even had to have a lawyer in New Zealand notarize papers for the funeral home.

Bert was a year and a half younger than Jerry. Though they had lived completely different lives, in many ways they understood each other profoundly, intertwined by family, proximity, and the occasional need to act together as they did when their mother was dying. They started out in Eureka, CA. Jerry left there shortly after he got out of the army and went to the University of Alaska for his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Bert didn’t finish high school and did not succeed in the Army. He was out after 3 months. Their mother told Jerry that Bert had had a “breakdown.” Bert was married once for a month or two. Other than that he lived alone all his life.  He followed Jerry to Alaska, but unlike Jerry, he didn’t take to cold. Eventually both of them and their mother ended up on San Juan Island. Jerry and his late wife raised their son there. Bert built things and flew airplanes. That’s what Jerry did, but Bert came to flying late and logged many fewer hours in the air than Jerry. His buildings were never standard so he tended to be constantly in disputes with building inspectors. Nevertheless, with his frugal lifestyle he ended up with a comfortable income and little bits of property all over the place.

I believe that Bert actually had a few good years of life left in him, but he couldn’t give up the idea that he knew better than anyone else how to manage his health. He knew better than the doctors, than the physical therapists, than his real friends and than his brother. The two people who ended up taking care of him lasted by being careful never to cross him, to yield to his all demands even when they were dangerous to his well being, and to flatter his ego. They manipulated him by letting him believe that he was fully in control. And when they thought they had things arranged to benefit themselves they left a loaded gun where he could reach it in a public parking lot full of people. They had lots of witnesses that he shot himself.

Bert’s death is my closest encounter with suicide. I have stayed awake at night these last 2 weeks, wondering what was going through Bert’s mind when he put the gun to his head. I know he was depressed — he was on anti-depressants when he was with us. I think he felt he was losing control of his life. He was angry. He had quarreled with everyone who had tried to help him. He was beginning to be angry even with the caretakers he thought were his friends. Was he afraid of death? Was killing himself an act of consummate bravery? Or was this his last triumphant act to prove his control over his destiny.

It was a tragic end to a long life of jousting modern windmills. Just before he died he lost his legal battle with the Lincoln county weed board. He had sued them for coming on his property to spray noxious weeds. He lost his last appeal three weeks before he died.

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Granddaughters and good works

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Old Woman

I have a lot of granddaughters. Seven in fact. I am writing about 2 of them here, but I want to assure the others that I love and remember them all. Usually I avoid blogs about grandchildren; I think they are meant to be read mostly by them and their mothers. But I just have to tell you about these 2.

They have a lot in common. They are both politically left. They are both strictly politically correct; neither of them hesitates to correct her grandmother in the rare instances when she strays from the rigid path of political correctness. They are both softies who love babies and animals and anything helpless. They are both beautiful women.

They are both, presently, in the same line of business.

Liz is the older. I think she is 27, but I tend to lose track of the ages of my grandchildren. They get older so fast. She is a Brit and works in London for an organization that does contract work for NGOs. It is a good job which involves writing contract proposals and then flying around the world to implement the contracts. She wrote a proposal for Save the Children to go to the Republic of South Sudan to assess the needs of children in that unfortunate country. It was highly competitive so she really didn’t expect to be chosen, but she was. She was chosen on Saturday and Save the Children wanted her to go the next day, but she negotiated a few days of preparation.

Liz

This is her 3rd or 4th sojourn in Africa. She spent 2 years in Uganda and 6 months in Liberia. She is now in Juba for 6 weeks. I hope she doesn’t have to go the the part of the country where they are fighting with North Sudan over oil. She writes in Facebook:

I did not expect this, but I am loving Juba! The weather is gorgeous, the food is surprisingly good, and the people are beautiful. Plus they have solar powered street lights. Awesome.

Katy, or Kate as she now calls herself, is a Florida girl. She graduated from the University of Florida and Gainsville is her home base.

Katy

After she graduated she did community organizing and now she is in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. l think she is 24. Here is what she writes to me from her post:

I’ve been working a lot – finishing up the community diagnostic portion of my work.  At the end of this month I will present the diagnostic to the community and after that to my peers and boss at our 3-months-in-service conference.  What I’ve concluded is mostly what I suspected from the beginning: strengths of the community are that they are incredibly involved in the daily functions, very interested in the fate of the neighborhood and very involved in each other’s lives. There are community meetings 6 days a week, it’s incredible. The weaknesses are typical: lack of resources, corrupt government, no water, irregular and insufficient electricity (we get about 10 hours over a 24 hour period), the roads are awful, and there isn’t enough work.  I’ve decided to focus on giving English classes because one of the best ways for the youth to find jobs is using their English skills. I’m also going to work on building a library for the community.  Books are very difficult to access here: they are incredibly expensive relative to the average income: 700 pesos when most families make about 5000 pesos a month. Another helpful comparison: it costs between 200-300 pesos to feed a family of four for a day.  That is like a book costing $100-150 in the U.S., or more.  Absolutely ridiculous. The only library in the town is miles away and you can’t check out the books.

Personally, I haven’t had the time I had wanted to read and develop personal goals like learning French, the guitar, and to draw.  But I am hopeful that after the diagnostic phase the work will die down a little and I will have more time to dedicate to reading and my hobbies.  I hope my English hasn’t deteriorated too much, I speak or read in English less than an hour a day.  Sometimes I go days without speaking or reading a word of English.  I like it that way.  I decided to stop reading books in English for now, and have started reading the history of the DR in Spanish.  It’s fascinating.  Someday I’ll tell you about it with the detail it deserves.

I hope you still plan to visit.  I miss you a lot and think about you a lot.  We practically spent a whole summer together and got to know each other a lot better, I think.  I loved my time with you and when I have bad days I fantasize about coming to the island for a simple life of waitressing, wine hour, and mahjong.  There are many beautiful things to see here, lots of interesting eco-tourism stuff, not just touristy beaches.  And I would love to show you my community.  I love it here.  Even with all the difficulties that come with living in a different culture and with fewer physical comforts, I feel happier here than I ever felt living in the States.  I can’t wait to hear from you and to hear what you think.  Write me back!

Well how can I resist that? I am already thinking about when and how I can go and shall I try to get Jerry to go along. Probably not. I doubt that a crowded country where there is a lot of poverty and English is not spoken would suit him.

One of these days I’ll tell you about my other 5 granddaughters and my 5 grandsons (not to mention my 2 1/2 great grandchildren.) But I’ll wait a while. Descendents are best blogged about at long intervals.

The new header is because Jerry and I are going to New Zealand in 2 weeks! The sheep in the photo belonged to my cousin David when he was a farmer in the North Island.

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Marriage and the family, part II: alcoholism

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Old Woman

I have been married 4 times. I am a reasonably conventional person, and so I find this fact somewhat embarrassing. I often think it means something is wrong with me. People who stay married to the same person for a long long time seem moral, stable, regular, virtuous. People who have married often bring to mind the likes of Elizabeth Taylor or Newt Gingrich.

Perhaps the biggest problem I had in marriage was my inability to understand the way alcohol affects human behavior.  Its effects are all around us all the time, whether one drinks or not. Two of my husbands were alcoholics. I knew Willis, my second husband, had a drinking problem before we were married, but I had only a dim understanding of the disease of alcoholism. I didn’t realize that Hugh, my third husband, was an alcoholic until we had been married for some time.

I was married to Willis for 10 years. I stayed too long, but his drinking finally drove me away. He was often violent and scary when he was drunk. I want to address the issue of domestic violence in another post. It figured in my own life and in my mother’s.

I was married to Hugh for 20 years. He was a peaceful drunk. A couple of vodka martinis put him to sleep, sometimes just after dinner, sometimes during dinner. His drinking was limited to evening hours (usually) until he retired from being a lawyer, when it came to govern everything he did. He was always courteous and loving to me, but life with an alcoholic is a lonely life.

I was well acquainted with alcohol abuse as a child; it seemed like a sort of inevitable part of the adult world. Neither my father nor my mother drank much but my mother’s second husband (who was a distinguished academic) did, and he was a mean drunk. I lived with my mother and step-father for 2 years just after they were married (I was 8 years old) and later when I first went to college. My step-father had a pattern in the evenings of drinking whiskey until about 11 o’clock, all the while playing hot jazz very loud on the record player. He said he needed to relax after work. At around 11 he ate dinner which my mother had kept warm in the oven for him. As the alcohol began to wear off he got irritable and then angry. My mother, my little sister and I would cower upstairs, where we retreated to keep the sound of jazz a distant, if relentless, beat, hoping he wouldn’t think up something to start a fight with my mother about; a fight that might end in blows.

So I should have learned early in life what alcohol can do. I didn’t and I think these may be some of the reasons. First, though I had a happy childhood — at heart I am a happy person — it was not an easy childhood. Part of how I coped was to ignore the bits that were difficult. I retreated into a private place mentally if things went badly.  Besides mentally blocking out unpleasantness, I had a real place to escape. After 2 years of living with my mother and step-father  I got embroiled in a terrible fight with him (I don’t fully recall it but I know about it) and I asked to be allowed to go back to live with my aunt and uncle.  I had lived there while my father and mother were separated. It felt like a safe place. There was plenty of drinking in that house too but it was fun and at parties and there was no fighting. My uncle and aunt and their friends were educators and artists. They drank to a sort of genteel excess, sometimes they were silly, sometimes there was a bit of amorous hanky-panky, but there was never quarreling or openly disorderly behavior. Thus, you see, I had a mixed picture of drinking alcohol.

The first time I myself had an alcoholic drink was the summer after I graduated from high school. I was staying in Vermont with my mother and step-father, and almost every night I went square dancing with my boyfriend and a slightly older couple. One night there was nothing to drink but beer and I was thirsty and hot. So I had part of a beer. I didn’t like it much. Then I went to college at Northwestern University where my step-father was a professor. To conform there you had to drink. I wanted to belong, so I drank the least nasty tasting thing I could think of, bourbon and Coca-Cola. When I remember it now I wonder how I could have swallowed anything so revolting. Actually, I didn’t like it much even then. Drinking had no pleasure for me. Now I enjoy a glass or two of good wine with dinner, but for me there has always been a stopping point with drinking.

My own response to alcohol led me to believe that anyone could easily stop drinking. It’s still true that after a couple of drinks I don’t want any more, and if there is an attentive host who keeps filling my glass I remind myself not to consume it. It took me a long time to understand how difficult it is for someone who metabolizes alcohol in another way to stop drinking. Some people — alcoholics — want to drink more after a couple of drinks. In fact, they must have more; they must keep drinking. And when the time comes that, for whatever reason, they stop drinking, if they haven’t passed out they can become nasty and dangerous.

Of course, I don’t say that there are only two responses to drinking alcohol. I think that my own response probably is not the norm. I doubt that I could become an alcoholic because I don’t enjoy the physical effects of alcohol on my body. But I do think there is a continuum from my way of responding to that of an unreconstructable alcoholic (like 2 of my husbands.) There are people who can, with a lot of effort and motivation, give up drinking even though they crave the feeling it gives them. There are people who, under stress, can gradually get in the habit of drinking too much. There are people who occasionally drink too much, only to regret it the next day. There’s no one kind of abuse and no one solution to the problem of alcoholism: some people cannot be helped.

Alcoholism is, truly, a disease. There are treatments that work on some people. Mostly it’s a question of wanting to be helped; still, how deep the craving is surely must be a factor. l have had dealings with a lot of people who think they know everything about alcoholism (therapists, counselors, social workers, doctors) who believe if the alcoholic will just follow some prescribed set of rules, principles, and beliefs, that their drinking will be controlled. I have been told by many of these professionals that I am an “enabler”. It seems if you are an enabler all you can do is withdraw, and ultimately that is what I did. It had no effect on the drinking of either of the husbands that I supposedly was “enabling”. Both of them continued to drink until they died, which was long after I was out of their lives and had stopped enabling them.

Jerry and I have a few glasses of wine most evenings. For us wine time comes after our walk and before or with dinner (while we listen to the news on the radio — these days marveling over the Republican primary chain-saw massacre). Wine time is an important part of our day. It seems a normal, festive thing. I remember when I was a kid and my uncle’s sister Ruth, a jolly spinster who often lived with us, used to declare loudly at about 4:30, “It’s elbow bending time.” My uncle would most likely already be in the butler’s pantry rattling the cocktail shaker full of martinis.

As I write this I have had my evening wine with dinner. I don’t want any more and I am perfectly functional. I will have a bath and then Jerry and I will watch 2 lectures; one on oceanography and one on Dutch Art in the 17th century. Sometimes Jerry has a little more wine than I and I admonish him to go easy. He does. On the rare occasions that he has slightly overindulged he is sweet. He is extra affectionate and he laughs more than Finns are normally reputed to do.

So I won’t say that drinking alcoholic beverages is an absolute evil. Prohibition didn’t work. I don’t know what would work. Things like 12 step plans seem to work with some people, but with a drunk like Willis it had no appeal. He really didn’t want to stop drinking. Drinking made him feel powerful and gave him no pain because he was indifferent to the pain he caused others. Hugh wanted to stop drinking part of the time; he was always sorry for making others unhappy, but he was weak. The temptation of the moment was too strong. He was never convinced that he couldn’t stop at just one drink.

Perhaps medical science will come up with a magic potion to cure alcoholism. Or perhaps it won’t and there will always be drunks.

Posted in Memoir, Uncategorized | Tagged | 11 Comments

The north wind doth blow

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Old Woman

We have snow. A lot of it. Everything is closed. The Seattle Airport is closed. Local schools and universities are closed. The temperature outside our house is 18 F. There is freezing rain falling on the roads south of here, but fortunately, though there is ice everywhere, here we have no precipitation just now. Jerry and I have not been able to take our walk for 2 days. We don’t want to risk falling.

At first when the snow begins to outline every tree and roof people flock outside with cameras. A major snowstorm in this part of the world is enough of a rarity to make an event that transforms the world we know. Every year I take pictures and then I look at last years pictures of the annual snow event and they look the same.

I worry about the birds. They are so little, and they need to eat constantly. I am putting out about 4 times as much seed and suet as I ordinarily do.

Varigated thrush

Instead of streamlined flying creatures they look like puffed out balls of feathers, trapping insulating air close to their bodies.

Chickadees at the suet feeder

I dislike starlings, but I can’t help feeling sorry for them as they camp out in the feeder looking cold and disconsolate.

Starlings

Starlings are quarrelsome birds, but the cold saps some of their fighting energy, and they may share the little bit of shelter.

Starling with Flicker

The bird life brightens the monotony of the black and white winter scene. When the flickers fly there is a flash of orange from their bright underwing feathers. The brilliant scarlet of the pileated woodpecker’s head always makes me grab my camera. Sometimes I get a good shot.

Pileated woodpecker

It’s time to struggle into my boots and replenish the feeders. The birds are hungry. Their little lives are precarious in this bitter cold.

 

Posted in Day to day, Island life | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

2012 Looks better

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Old Woman

Yesterday, as usual, we walked our daily circuit: down Granger Way past the llamas, where we look across Hale Passage at the white snow capped mountains which this time were splashed with orange by shafts of sun flaring through the clouds, up the hill to Legoe Bay Road, past our fire department that steadfastly guards us from all disasters, back around the other side of Granger Way where we look across the bay to Orcas Island and the sunset in the west. The days are getting longer. I know that rather than see it. The weather is strangely warm, but high winds have blown down a few trees. Jerry is just now sawing up a dead tree leaning on our fence from the next property’s woods.

The world is looking brighter in this new year. Jerry talked to his brother Bert — a short but friendly chat. Bert has difficulty talking on the phone. He gets breathless, has to pause, and then loses his train of thought. In talking to some of Bert’s friends we know that he is still having hallucinations of bugs and he sees flash-backs of vivid scenes from his past. What pills he takes is a mystery to the friend who is supposed to be taking care of him. But Jerry may be able to help now that Bert is not so hostile.

My son Ben, who is getting divorced, had his children here for a few days during the holidays. They are lovely children, and although they are clearly having a difficult time with the divorce, I believe that they will be well in the end with the loving attention he will not fail to give them. It was good for me to have some time with my grandchildren.

Playing in the loft

Ben is now in school, attending the local community college. He is taking English and psychology. And, best of all, he has a job! He will begin working this week at a good restaurant near our condo in Bellingham where he will be staying. He likes the people there, says all the waitresses look as if they came from a model agency, and he will make enough money to pay his expenses.

My new great-granddaughter, Alison, was born just before the end of the year and I have finished knitting a pretty little sweater for her.

Jerry recovered the lost pictures from my virus infected computer’s hard drive. He bought (on the internet for about $20) a device that you plug into the infected hard drive. It has a cord that goes to a USB port so you can operate a second hard drive through a working computer which has an intact operating system. Then he extracted the pictures. Thus, I now have the pictures I took in San Francisco and among them is a picture of Maria (Small Change) and me in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins hotel before we had lunch together. That was a highlight of the trip. Jerry took the picture, and for some reason he was not able to get it in focus, even after 3 or 4 tries. But I think, when you get to a certain age, out of focus photos of yourself are not all bad.

At the Mark Hopkins Lobby

I am still hoping for New Zealand in February, but we are worried that Bert’s rather precarious condition might be a problem. But, for the most part, 2012 is beginning better than 2011 ended.

Posted in Day to day, Island life | 15 Comments

Marriage and the family, part 1

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Old Woman

In the old days when I was in college, marriage and the family along with basket weaving, was a course to take if you wanted an automatic A without doing any work. But you did have to show up for class. My first husband (who is still alive) managed to fail marriage and the family when he was in college.

I don’t know why it was such a gut course, because nothing, in my experience , is more complex in real life than marriage and family. Jerry is my 4th husband. We have been married for 5 years. He had 2 previous marriages and fathered a son in each. My three previous marriages lasted 10, 10 and 20 years. In my first marriage a son and 2 daughters were born. My second husband came to me with a little girl of 3 whom I raised and adopted, and I had a baby boy with him when I was 40, just before we parted. My third husband, who happened to be the brother of my first husband, brought me 4 stepsons, who were first cousins of my three older children. My frist husband married again and had another son and daughter. They are the half-brother and half-sister of my first three children. My second husband, Willis, had a daughter with his third wife (the one after me) and another daughter with his 4th wife. Nancy, the wife after me, said his rule was: “one child per wife.” These girls are half sisters to my adopted daughter and my youngest son.

My own parents were divorced when I was 8 years old. Both remarried and my mother had another daughter, my half-sister, and my father had 3 sons, my half-brothers. My mother’s husband had 2 sons by his first wife, my step-brothers. I did not meet them until I was an adult because their mother was bitter over the divorce and would never let them visit my step-father and mother. For most of my childhood and adolescence I lived in the houshold of my father’s sister and her husband. This was because my parents were sometimes separated and after they remarried my relationships with my step-father and step-mother were difficult. My aunt and uncle had 4 daughters, all younger than I, cousins who seemed like little sisters to me. From time to time my grandmother, my father’s mother, lived in my aunt and uncle’s house, my uncle’s parents spent summers there, my uncle’s sister lived there and occasionally my father’s brother lived there.

Who could pass a test on this sort of thing?

The above is just a skeleton of complexity. With most of these people I had a relationship, each specific to the individual. With some of them only a connection through my children. I have never met the second wife of my first husband, though I have spoken to her on the phone, nor do I know the children he had with her, though they are my children’s siblings. I did not meet the wife and 2 children of my younger step-brother until we were together at my mother’s funeral. Then we became good friends.

In November when I went to Florida for my granddaughter’s wedding, my Lawyer Daughter and I stopped for a couple of days to visit with her father’s third wife, Nancy. I had known Nancy slightly before Willis and I were divorced but didn’t get to know her well until Willis’ funeral. She organized it, as it was boycotted by his fourth and final wife, an extremely unpleasant Russian woman. I had only met the Russian woman once when delivering my son to his father for a visit. She was very young then, younger than Lawyer Daughter, Willis’s oldest child. Though I heard later through the grape-vine that she often declared herself to be irresistible to men, I thought she was unattractive. She was short and thin, with stringy hair. Apparently she belonged to the school of fashion that believes in all things natural so there was no removal of any of her copious leg or armpit hair. Eventually she persuaded Willis to end all contact with many of his former friends and all his children by his first 3 wives. For this I was permanently angry with him and I shed no tear when he died.

Nancy is a lovely and remarkable woman. Her heritage is Cuban. She lives in the Spanish influenced old part of Tampa in the house she grew up in. It is full of things of her mother’s, and her own accumulation of interesting and odd possessions. There is a lot of art work, some by artist friends of hers and Willis’s. She deals with all the finances of the English Department at the University of South Florida where Willis taught philosophy and where I finished my Ph.D. She has tried to retire more than once, but they need her. She is full of life and energy and has a house full of cats. Her yard is even fuller of cats. Her neighbor who was in the habit of feeding about 25 or 30 feral cats died, and the cats migrated to Nancy’s yard. She solved the problem by calling in the experts, who trapped the cats, neutered them, found homes for those that were tame enough and then brought about 14 of the wilder ones back to live in their old neighborhood. Nancy feeds them daily, and gradually their numbers are diminishing.

Nancy’s daughter Carmen joined us. Carmen is a charming young woman, about 15 years younger than Lawyer Daughter who is Carmen’s half sister. Nancy was, for a time, Lawyer Daughter’s step-mother. Over the two days we were together the four of us formed a sort of family, joined by common memories and by the binding element of the dead Willis. We told each other stories of the past. Nancy told me how Willis had taken Carmen, a child of about 9, to Russia with him on some academic project where he had met the unpleasant (but self-styled irresistible-to-men) Russian woman, who was then the wife of a Russian academic. When Nancy joined them about a month later the affair was in full flower; she took Carmen and fled to Greece, where there were old friends, a student of Willis whom both Nancy and I knew well. Willis and I had stayed with them when we were traveling in Europe on his sabbatical in 1973. With Willis and me then were Lawyer Daughter, British Daughter and Ben, baby son. At the time Lawyer Daughter was 11, British Daughter was 20. B. D. and I were wild to know what was going on with Nixon and Watergate. Papadopolous, the failing Greek dictator, kept banning the International Herald Tribune because it printed unflattering things about him. But Nancy’s experience many years later was of a different sort. She was reeling from the events in her personal life in Russia. Our Greek friends were very angry with Willis.

As we talked into the night I realized that Willis had seemed a different person to Nancy from the man I knew. I was four years older than Willis. I met him when I was a first year graduate student and he was just finishing his undergraduate degree. He was a hippie. He had a common law wife and a baby. We became friends, but to me he was just a kid, a college student, who introduced me to beatniks and gays. His undergraduate mentor was a professor, Herman Lynn Womack, who was later jailed for publishing pornography. Willis was funny and knew how to have a good time. During our marriage I saw him through his Ph.D. and helped him write his thesis. He and my father became good friends through a mutual interest in philosophy, but though my father was fond of Willis, he told me privately that Willis, in his opinion, was a second rate philosopher. Willis used to  proclaim loudly that no woman was smarter than him; nevertheless we both knew that of the two of us I had the better mind.

Willis was about 15 years older than Nancy. When she met him he was the chairman of the philosophy department at the university where she worked in administration. He was a sort of campus celebrity. He had declared himself to be a Marxist, which gave him an aura of daring. I am not sure just how he got away with that, but he always said the right thing to deans. No matter how drunk he was at parties, he could always moderate his act if a dean appeared. He promoted himself successfully as a giant intellectual. Students adored him.

I found that while I remembered him with bitterness as a little man with a small mind who abused his wife and children, an alcoholic and a womanizer, Nancy thought of him as a sort of heroic figure, a man with faults but because he stood so much above other men in talent and achievement she could, at least to some degree, remember his “goodness” as somehow mitigating his flaws. She gave me a video disc of his memorial, which I attended because my children with him wanted me to. And she gave me a folder of testimonials read at the memorial. I thanked her, but wondered to myself why I would want those things. Perhaps the grandchildren he never bothered to know would like to have them.

What I will not forget is the way 4 women, Nancy and Carmen, myself and Lawyer Daughter, came together with good will and love to share common cares and memories and put the painful past into some kind of order.

Posted in Memoir, Romance | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments