Loaves and fishes

Kathleen died last Sunday. We had a hard time getting our heads round it; on Thursday she'd travelled to Ottawa for knee replacement surgery. She and Bill, her husband, seemed to shrug off the serious nature of the operation, optimistic that Kathleen would soon be up and around, if a little sore.

The tricky part of this operation comes after the patient's wheeled back to Recovery; the tourniquet's off, and the raw bone ends and interrupted ligaments and tissues start to lose blood in earnest. Often these patients are older, with compromised heart or brain circulations that don't tolerate bumpy patches in their blood and oxygen supply. Kathleen was one of these; a day or two after surgery she suffered a stroke from which she never recovered.

Kathleen was truly a queen. A retired teacher and mother of nine children, she impacted many lives, especially since she and Bill reached out to many in the community, volunteering with her church women's group, Meals on Wheels, the Agape centre soup kitchen and chauffeuring for the local Seniors' Support Centre. All this when she could so easily have been taking it easy after a life of toil and dedication; after all, she'd reached her early eighties.

Her extended family crowded the front half of our village church: fine upstanding people, adults and children alike all neatly turned out and respectfully dressed mostly in black; not a pair of blue jeans to be seen. There wasn't an inch to squeeze yourself into if you'd arrived just on time: spare chairs had been brought in and people were huddled standing at the back, overflowing into the church hall. The singing was sweet and tender.

Immediately afterwards the women's group served a lunch for Kathleen's family and friends. A dense press of over three hundred mourners filled the hall; how to cater for this group at short notice? The little community didn't let Kathleen down. She who had spent her life conjuring up feasts for her extended family at every holiday and gathering, and whose baking was a thing of legend, would have been proud. Gifts of food from volunteers poured in: sandwiches, cakes, squares, fruit, vegetable, dips, pickles, tea and coffee. Even as the reception was in full swing, men and women slipped into the kitchen with freshly-prepared food from home. Volunteers worked the hall, making sure that plates were filled and cups refreshed, calling out orders for more sandwiches, or fresh coffee. There was even plenty of food left over for the family to take home to serve visitors.

The last guests straggled home. Volunteers cleaned up and tidied the kitchen and hall to Kathleen's high standards. It became achingly quiet and empty. Already we miss her; Kathleen was one of a kind: irreplaceable.

St. Lawrence

When I first clapped eyes on the St. Lawrence, that sunny morning years ago, I was struck by its blueness, the sheer size and might of it. My life since then has been twined around it: canoeing, tent-camping, swimming, diving. Sometimes, especially in winter, when it's un-navigable, I listen to the growl and scream of shifting ice, the twitter of the ice plates along the shoreline and the chime of the swaying willow branches laden with glittering pendants of ice.

There's so much lying beneath the surface: the remains of the Lost Villages and hundreds of wrecks, which make it a paradise for sport divers. Zebra mussels are an ill wind: they have made the St. Lawrence clearer, better than the thin pea-soup that it once was. In addition divers now ride jet-propelled drives, which means less air expended in fighting the current, and fewer clouds of silt kicked up.

My favourite spot was the wreck of the Lilly Parsons (take a peek at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emLY_qMK8QU). She's a beautiful, clinker-built wooden coal ship that went down in 1877 and lies upside-down in the Brockville Narrows underneath the shipping lane, her keel arching up towards the sunlight. The current alongside is fierce, whipping the guide rope into vibrations like a plucked guitar string. Around her lies scattered coal, which will still burn even after so many years in the dark depths, though with a foul sulphur smell.

I wonder if the little moray eel still lives in the wreck, or whether generations of divers have scared it away...

Seeing double, thinking single.

"Jim Brownell's Free Picnic", the wheel-up sign proclaimed beside Highway 2. Jim is our local Liberal MPP; from the number of times I've seen him attending local events from ribbon-cutting to church suppers I can confidently reveal that the man has the ability, like Padre Pio, to appear in more than one location at once, unless he has a body double. He's been at Queen's Park for several years now, but has managed to hang on to a guileless, open face and quick smile. The waistline creep tells another story, of the stress and busy-ness of the job. Jim has done a lot of good for our struggling area, which is why, apart from being a Liberal anyway, I vote for him.

Guy Lauzon is our MP in Ottawa. The thing about having this small rural riding as your turf is that you know you're not going to rise to your feet in the House of Commons and have the attention of the world riveted upon you. You may as well devote your time to improving the lives of the ordinary people in your riding, which is what Guy does. I vote for him in the Federal Elections, though he's a Tory.

When I let slip this convoluted logic to my elder daughter she was aghast, as though I'd confessed to running a cat-house for these past few years. "Typical bloody Boomer," she sneered. "Talking Liberal and voting Conservative." She filled me in on the evils of Stephen Harper, who is not regarded as Calgary's favourite son. (Where have I been? I must have had my head in a bag.) I'd always thought he was too cozy with the US; one morning we're going to pull back the curtains and see that Lake Ontario has been piped down to Arizona, so they can squander it on artificial lakes for their golf-courses, in 45*c desert heat. Or all of BC's water has been siphoned away to fill the swimming-pools and wash the cars of Californians.

"Check out 'Security and Prosperity'" she said. "There's a whole body of negotiations going on without the public's knowledge or input."

Water is the new oil. Will the US one day be parachuting troops in to "restore peace" in Canada, seeing as we're such a terrorist threat?

Guess I'll not be voting Conservative, then.

The kid strikes gold--again

The Western Magazine Awards shindig took centre stage at the River Rock Casino in Richmond BC on June 20th. A Gold Award in the Human Experience category went to Charlotte Gill for her story, "Eating Dirt", published in the Vancouver Review.

For more details, check http://www.westernmagazineawards.ca/

To read the story, check on the link (R)

To think--she taught me everything I know.

Quite the find.

I'm just back from a trip to England, where I

went on an ABC tour* to Edinburgh, York, Durham and Exeter.

In Canada, where the weather goes in a week or two from sub-zero to 32 degrees, masonry takes a lot of punishment and tends to fall down after a while.

These jaw-dropping buildings, created three hundred years before Columbus discovered Wal-Mart, are all over England, but sadly ravaged by that arch-vandal Henry VIII. Later, Oliver Cromwell finished off what Henry had left untouched, his yob infantry knocking the noses off all the medieval tombstone effigies and smashing all the reachable stained glass with their pikes.

Most cathedrals had their saint franchise--Thomas A' Becket in Canterbury, for example. There Henry demolished the saint's shrine, tossing the bones out on a trash pile and looting the gold and precious stones that adorned the shrine to fatten his coffers.

Durham, in the north of England, has a wonderfully muscular Norman cathedral. The looters set to work to pick off its shrines of Bede and St. Cuthbert, but on cracking open the tomb of St. Cuthbert discovered the body intact--incorrupt. Muttering "Blimey!", they shut it up quick and went away, leaving the body undisturbed.

Durham is England encapsulated--a little microcosm of the best of the country. A visitor could do worse than take the express train up from King's Cross and book into a local hotel for a five-day stay. Cobbled streets, knockout scenery (the huge towers of the cathedral rise over the gorge on a cloud of the trees' green spring fuzz), good shopping, picturesque alleys called "vennels", good eating, neat pubs, and the mirror-like River Wear snaking through the town. And it has the some of the world's friendliest people: two smiling local women, dressed in finery for a Saturday night out at the local bistro, offered to help us with our suitcases, and locals went out of their way to find us directions to where we needed to go.

Definitely worth a return trip--longer next time.

*ABC--Another Bloody Cathedral.

The buzz

Geeky--but you gotta love it...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR_GVUWllP4&feature=related

News from a cold climate

It's been so sudden, this spring; one moment we're hunkering down in the gloom, the snow driving sideways in the teeth of a nor'-easter, settling into drifts three feet high on the back lawn. And now, this? What's going on? This week it's sunshine, blue skies and twenty degrees. Sugaring-off season has come to a screeching halt and the maples that only yesterday looked lifeless have erupted into feathery pink blossoms. The snow piles are shrinking almost with an audible hiss and the cats are giddy with the thrill of stalking everything in sight.

The trees have been spitting small branches all winter, and the lawn's strewn with the wreckage. I gather everything up and have a big burn, before the open-fire ban goes into effect, even cooking supper in the embers: baked potatoes. Rampant efficiency--but I look at the scenery wiggling in the heat and wonder about global warming.

Pretty soon the ground will be hard enough for Dig #4--new weeping tile all round the foundation. "Weeping" is right: I work out what it's going to cost, factor in the landscaping when it's all done and just imagine what I could have spent all that money on.