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.

The Alchemists

What is it about a medical degree that qualifies its owner to write/create? Think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jonathan Miller and Somerset Maugham. I've just finished "Travels", non-fiction short essays by Michael Crichton, novelist and another MD. It's autobiographical, flipping between journeys in the inner world and the outer; between forays into the jungle of New Guinea and experiments with astral planes in California. It's a page-turner.

Lest I got carried away with the heady prestige of being a medical student in London, undergrads from other disciplines like chemistry and engineering--from most of the other curricula, in fact--hastened to point out that medics were the low people on the intellectual totem pole. For most of us this was true. For myself it was a miracle: nobody in our family had ever gone in for medicine. I was single-minded, but a one-trick pony. But there were a shining few who were renaissance men, for whom medicine was merely a sideline. Some finished their degree but never went on to practice.

At Christmas the medical students performed skits to amuse the patients ("ward shows"). By far the most fun for the patients was watching the inebriated students (who spent much of the week tormenting their patients with multiple blood tests and endless questions) stumble around making fools of themselves. One group, the Cambridge Footlights, had class: their skits had most of us weeping with uncontrollable laughter. A tall, quiet guy named Graham Chapman figured prominently in this group, which was odd, because most of the time he was pretty gloomy. The "Monty Python" show still carried recognizable snippets from the Cambridge Footlights team.

Another gifted student was Michael Church; raised in Rwanda by missionary parents, he thought of himself as African; he brought African music to West End theatres. His talents also included replicas of the cave paintings at Lascaux, in France, reproduced on large plaster-of-Paris boards.

For a while I practised anesthesiology in Upstate New York. My colleague for many years had been a virtuoso clarinet player from Juilliard who'd played in the Metropolitan Opera and Radio City Music hall. One day he decided to study neurology, and that was it. He earned his way through New York Medical College on scholarships but, finding that neurology didn't put bread on the table, he became an ER doc.

At least one upstate New Yorker owes her life to his diagnostic genius; I remember the night we collaborated in drilling a trephine hole (with a bit-and-brace) to release the expanding blood clot that was crushing her brain (see "What to do Till the Neurosurgeon Arrives by Helicopter"). At about that time Allan became fascinated by anesthesiology and at 53 started a residency, all over again, in Buffalo, graduating (of course) with flying colours. All this while commuting each weekend (five hours one way) and moonlighting in the Emergency Room. He never touched the clarinet again.

Michael Crichton's fiction is darn good; listening to a tape of "Airframe" on a long car trip I was so mesmerized I missed my turn-off ramp. Now there's a man with a busy brain. In idle curiosity I browsed his website, with its list of staggering accomplishments, any one of which would do the rest of us credit. But if contentment is true success, as I believe it is, he's still looking. Being gifted is hard to live with, like being pursued by demons.

Ah, the pity of it

I mourn the passing of a classical education: when people learned the Iliad, say, in ancient Greek. And Latin's perfectly feasible, even (perhaps especially) for a child.

Just as we no longer embellish our public buildings, our culture is thinner for abandoning its linguistic roots. Latin and Greek aren't cost-effective, so we teach self-esteem instead. Trolling music radio the other day I came upon the Reproaches, that beautiful segment of the Good Friday liturgy; it was a modern composition, in English, and hauntingly sung by a well-trained choir from St. John's church in Ellora. The poetry of the invocations in Greek is like a love song: "Hagiou Theou, Hagios ischyros, Hagios athanatos, eleison imas"...All that remains is a vestige, an English translation that ends the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.

And now we have mangled plurals. The other day I heard "criterias". That's a first.
People: it's "criterion" singular, "criteria" plural. And "bacterium" and "bacteria", "medium" and "media".

But the plural of "Kleenex" ought by rights to be "Kleenices". And is the singular of "cafeteria", "cafeterium"?

All we have now is "like" and "go".

If I can't take it with me, I'm not going

If you thought a woman’s purse was just a handy way to carry around a few essentials, you’d be dead wrong. A man wouldn’t dream of carrying a purse; he knows all about its totemic significance. He’d rather have a big wallet, even one on a daggy-looking chain. A big leather tool-belt, yes–but a purse? Forget it.

There’s a mystique about purses that’s way beyond the convenience factor. Think back to your childhood; your mother’s purse was strictly off-limits. For all you knew she kept piranhas in it, and a surreptitious dip into it would transform your hand into a bloody stump. My own children knew about this taboo as well; they carried my purse to me and stood at a respectful distance while I rummaged in it for the last-minute cash they needed.

Leafing through the style section in the weekend papers you’ll see gaudy little purses retailing for the price of a semester’s tuition at college, or a Caribbean cruise. These are not just handy little totes, no; they’re where women keep their brains, the nerve centre of their lives. Women in movies stand outside their blazing homes screaming, “Save my baby!” The purse is already safe–it was the first thing they snatched up when they fled. The baby’s an afterthought.

We hate to be separated from our purses, and the older we get, the tighter the bond and the heavier the load. I’ve seen very sick, elderly patients, at death’s door, coming in for emergency surgery, and the purse is right there on the stretcher, at their elbow. Maybe there’s a pass somewhere in there that says,”Pearly Gates. Admit One.”

When I was young I carried a strappy little number that held a comb, lipstick and Tube fare. Now I can lose five ugly pounds any time, just by dropping my purse. I shudder to think what’s in it. Even I’m surprised when I check–it’s like archeology. And we favour the ones with lots of zippered compartments, just right for church. In the hush you’ll hear zip, zip, zip, interspersed with several minutes of burrowing, and finally the extraction, from the depths, of a cough candy with a wrapper that crackles like a five-alarm fire.

And the rubber bands. A few years back, I began slipping rubber bands round my address book and wallet to keep them together, only to look up and catch my eldest giving me a warning glare. Rubber bands, apparently, are the beginning of the slippery slope. Who knew? Maybe that’s the “fixed income” everyone’s on about–rubber bands round the wallet so the money doesn’t escape.

Meanwhile, somewhere, there’s probably an academic in a dusty library toiling away on a PhD thesis about purses. I’m waiting for the definitive article on how to travel light and leave half this stuff at home. When I come across it I’ll save it and slip it into my purse, inside the crossword-puzzle book, to read later.

All this--and beauty too

Remember the teen flick "Titanic"? In the North Atlantic chill the heroine twirled about the deck in a gauzy dress, and the sinking ship filled in an orderly, level way with crystal-clear water. Yes, parts of it were pretty silly. The bits I really liked, though, were almost incidental–the scenes with the machinery. How did they do that, those shots below decks with the monumentally beautiful coal-fired steam engines, the tall brass pillars of the pistons, the great steel flywheels?

As a little girl I recall being mesmerized for hours by similar engines, this time on the seagoing paddle-wheel ferry that plied between mainland England and the island my family hailed from. Never mind the ocean view from on deck–as soon as the boat got under way I was down at the open engine-room door, spellbound by the massive, flying machinery. The huge brass pistons lunged, the flywheels spinning the shaft of the paddle-wheels. There was always a secret shiver of fear that all might break free, wreaking dreadful havoc. The brass was polished to within an inch of its life. Not a speck of dirt was visible anywhere. The whole room roared and clanked with life, and was fragrant with hot machine oil.

There’s something very fine about the unintentional beauty of well-kept machinery. Above all, it’s functional, engineered to very accurate specifications and fulfilling its purpose for many years, like an obedient and faithful animal.

On a visit to the Mediterranean island of Malta recently I got to know the famous yellow buses that form its transit system, a marvel relied on by tourists and locals alike. It’s cheap, frequent and reliable, which is all the more amazing because the buses are over fifty years old.. Made in England, they’re lovingly maintained by skilled local mechanics who have to make all their own parts to keep them in running order. Bright yellow, picked out with orange trim, each bus is adorned with masses of glittering chrome. Each one is different, but they all shine like mirrors. It’s obvious that each bus is somebody’s baby. The driver’s cab is a shrine--garlands, lights, statues, medals, pictures of saints and family members.

It’s a wild ride; as the bus swings round the bends you stand a good chance of sliding out–there’s no door, and the old leather seats are burnished to a fine polish like chestnuts. The manual gear lever, tall and slender, has to be wrestled into position with much grinding of gears and some nervous glances from passengers. You’ll see a local get on, sink thankfully into a seat and promptly cross himself. Or a nun pull out a rosary and begin to pray. These people obviously know a great deal about the buses and aren’t leaving anything to chance.

These old buses will disappear soon. Since Malta’s joined the European Union they’ll be legislated out of business, but it’s worth a trip to Malta just to see them, besides being a wonderfully intimate way to see the island.

Islands seem to breed colourful workhorse buses–perhaps the most artistic are the Tap-taps of Haiti with their bright hand-painted decorations and vivid slogans painted in Creole on the front.
Let’s not overlook our own home-grown brand of fine old machinery. The last locomotive of the Grand Trunk Railroad, the Moccasin, sits on a few yards of the original track on Highway #2 just west of Upper Canada Village (which also has a dazzling antique car display of its own on Transport Day, this year on Sunday August 12th.) Fancy a trip on a working steam train? The Hull-Wakefield train runs on a daily basis in the summer and early fall, with original cars and locomotive. It travels at a stately pace, with a fine plume of steam, enabling riders to appreciate the knockout scenery on the way. Jolly Tours runs a day trip with dinner in October, if you like to go in a group. The highlight of the trip, for the machinery fans, is the up-close and personal check of the locomotive as it’s slipped on to the turntable in Wakefield, and four strong young people spin it slowly round to face south for the homeward trip to Hull.

We’re getting to appreciate these gems of engineering much more. Speed and convenience, after all, aren’t everything. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to give my 11-year-old VW van a hug.

Conspiracy theory

Harry's posted to Iraq;
Wrong DNA? He won't be baq.

Weird, or what?

This is what happens when you let two eccentric grammarians loose on a cruise ship.

When is a tip not a tip?

The ground under the traveller's feet is shifting at warp speed. Before you embark on a bargain trip, consider this:

Fares have been kept low by ruthless pruning on the travel operators' part. First the in-flight meals went, and the pillow and blanket. Next, you paid extra to book a particular seat, and some more to get a little extra leg-room. Then miscellaneous taxes were surreptitiously added to the tantalizingly low offer price, bringing a "bait" price of 89 pounds sterling to just under 200 pounds.

What's left to cut? People, that's who.

Some airlines pay their desk staff minimum wage and cut back on staffing so there aren't enough personnel at check-in. The ones that are there figure they're not paid enough to take grief from the public--or to help them when flights get cancelled or delayed. Airline rules mandate a hotel when your flight's cancelled or delayed overnight--but just try getting one.

Enter the bribe. A tip, offered up-front when the going gets rough, sweetens the day a little for harrassed staff and taxi despatchers, and can make the difference between your sleeping on the airport floor and a clean bed in the right city.

I discovered this quite by chance, asking the despatcher at the head of a long taxi line, with the clock ticking, for change for a twenty so I could give him a tip. Immediately we had a cab. Our bags were whipped into the trunk and we were off. Incredibly, we made a flight fifty miles away that took off in an hour and a half--and this despite another line-up there to check in, and excruciatingly painstaking security.

So--word to the wise: Pack a handful of twenties when you travel. Remember the working stiff on minimum wage who's enabling you to ride for that low fare. Just as you now pay for your own in-flight meal, you are now going to be subsidizing the pay of the airline staff.

The difference between a tip and a bribe? Timing--and discretion, that's all.

And this in the Land of the Free, fast becoming a banana republic.

The furry dogmother.

This, retrieved from http://charlottegill.com

My late lamented furry grandson. Hated to be tied up. Hated not to have me right there where he could see me. The result was that he'd lie in the exit doorway of the hardware store till I came out, tripping up the village's old ladies.

What a character. I miss him.

Wash and...where?

Alex, my American son, roams the deserts of Arizona working for La Migra, chasing Mexicans.

Visiting him last winter I learned that you have to check uniform pants for live ammo before putting them in the dryer.

Another little irony is that the Border Patrol uniforms are made in...Mexico.

Bad press

Found, in a corner of my favourite used bookstore, The Mutiny on Board H.M.S.Bounty, by none other than William Bligh himself. What a great page-turner!


Bligh had to get his story out before the mutineers reappeared and aired their side of things. Naturally he presents himself as an able and concerned skipper whose mens' heads got turned by the lovelies of Tahiti (and who could blame them?). Not at all the ogre he was reputed to be, more like Santa Claus.


Know what? This was an experienced sailor in love with the sea, whose aim was to keep his 90-foot ship intact, and his crew alive and well (no small feat when thousands died of scurvy on long voyages). The Bounty survived a month in terrifying storms trying to round Cape Horn, and failing. Quit? No, Bligh simply turned the ship around and sailed clear across the south Atlantic to South Africa, reaching Tahiti by almost circumnavigating the globe.


After the mutiny Bligh and eighteen others (mostly the "idlers", tradesmen who happened to work on a seagoing ship) were cut adrift in a small open boat with five days' rations. So overloaded was it that the sea came to within seven inches of the gunn'ls. And this in open, uncharted ocean, with storms, sharks, hostile natives on every islet--and the Great Barrier Reef.


Forty-one days later, after subsisting on a cup of water and half a slice of bread a day each, plus whatever seabirds they could capture, Bligh brought all but one of these castaways alive (one man having been killed by natives) to Timor, 3,600 miles to the west.


This is the kind of leader I'd pick to run the USA right now. Foul tempered, abusive and violent, maybe. People skills? None. But a committed man who'd not lose a single seaman under his command if he could help it. Determined, skilful and courageous to boot. Where are these men when we need them? Compare that with the needless waste of soldiers' lives in Iraq today.


Cuddly, no--but the man had a wife and six, count 'em, six, daughters. Go figure.

Kitty corner

And now, by popular demand, cat pictures:

Mom's the word.

You know those calls--the ones where you hop out of the shower and dash, dripping, into the bedroom, grab the receiver and are greeted by...silence. You should put the phone down at this point, but curiosity gets the better of you, until finally a bright young female voice you don't recognize asks "And how are you today?"

'Tis the season. But here's a new twist: tapping away at the keyboard I was interrupted this evening, first by the silence, then a chirpy child of oh, ten, saying, "Hi, Mom!"

Last time I checked I had three adult children, at least one of whom communicates mostly in gruff monosyllables. Was there something in my past I'd blocked out? A hidden pregnancy, perhaps? A forgotten promise to raise someone else's child as mine?

It's a new telemarketing twist, a kind of capitalist kiddie-porn where they launch the underage at your heartstrings, this time for leukemia research. Realization finally dawned (OK, I'm not the brightest bulb on the tree). "I've got three children, " I said, "and you're not one of them."

Years ago one of my darlings, a wee slip of a thing at the time, decided that since some of her playmates got to call their mothers by their first names perhaps she would too. I soon disabused her of this nonsense. "Mother," "Mom," "Ma" or whatever is one heck of a proud title that not everyone's entitled to call me, just the three people closest to my heart. Anyone can (and usually does) call me by my first name, but few get to use the M word.

I don't know who thought up this fool promo. It got my attention--my goat, too.

Ladies and gentlemen...

I give you...Mr. and Mrs. Turpin.