September Weekend

 

 

It's starting to become a sort-of tradition.
 

We celebrate my friend T.'s and my birthdays in August, when they actually are, then her husband sends us (along with two friends!) to Niagara for a girls' weekend.

It's phenomenal.
 

The weather...it was perfect. Breezy, warm, sunny.

The traffic, well, let's not talk about it. I believe it is the reason I came back completely wiped out, since, out of the four of us, I was the "fallen soldier" who went to bed at midnight and did not accompany my friends out to the Niagara nightlife (re: casino and more drinks).

I was so tired I didn't even hear them come back in around 2am.

 

Next day: Wine country. Fantastic. Weather, again, beyond perfect.

Tastings, lunch on a quiet patio, a view of Lake Ontario in the distance.

Driving home. More traffic. Some tar substance falling on my car from an overpass (very random--we thought at first it was a bird.. but no--they were re paving the road above and it dropped down--and splattered--all over my car).

To the car wash, then to my mom's for dinner, which turned into an overnight since I had all my stuff with me, and I was zonked, and her couch is so comfortable.  I missed my mom alot when I was away (I missed everyone!) and it was nice to see her for our third dinner together in under a week.

I was asleep, as in fast asleep, by 9:30pm. Not sure what is wrong with me.

Maybe the impending "Monday" made me want to tune out the world.

 

So the image shown here was taken by my friend with her blackberry. Those bags beside me on the hotel couch are from outlet shopping (another weekend perk!).  I am sipping wine from a tumbler, and am getting ready to call it a night while the three of them got ready to begin it.
 

Ah well. I got some great sleep this weekend, saw great friends, and enjoyed the countryside.

And my tan..it's still looking good.

 

 

Mike

 

 

Yea, that's him, in a crazy photo his sister 'posed' him in.

He looks funny to me without his glasses.

I love that he is carrying a whole bunch of essentials.
I assume this must be (one of) the night(s) he lost his wedding ring.

 

Ah well, all is good.

He found it.

He's dextrous (it's hard to carry all that!).

I just saw him...last week as a matter of fact.

It doesn't dull the pain of being away, but it assauges it slightly.

 

Ever so slightly.

 

I trek through the immigration paperwork, tell myself "I can do this" (my personal mantra, yea, you'll be hearing it aLot).

And I can.

I will.

 

I bring you Mike...in all his unstudied, unsung glory.

 

I love you.

Lots.

 

 

 

Things I miss

http://www.schmutzie.com/weblog/2012/9/11/25-things-i-miss.html


I begin this little post for a rainy-Friday with a nod to Elan Morgan and her lovely blog Schmutzie--a fellow Canadian, an all-round balanced person it appears, and just great with words. That's what I love the most.
So, when she ended this blog post with a "what do you miss?" I had to jump in. I miss lots of things, one of them lately being bolts-out-of-the-blue inspiration for this blog, and I wanted to get back to being list-worthy because yes: I still love lists.
I'll begin in a minute. First, I recap this First Week Back to Work.
Coffee played a huge part in this Week Back to Work (and to be clear it really wasn't a week, I was off Monday to a) recover from the drive and b) to run errands like a madwoman. I just can't get it all done. Arrrghhh....
So coffee. I had morning job-site meetings every day this week except Tuesday. And every morning I had a meeting I managed to sneak in coffee--not that I don't drink coffee every morning anyway--I do, just not the take-out kind. I'm frugal about this. About coffee, and about lunch. I make my coffee every morning at home with the French-press, I mix it with milk, I put it in my glass travel cup (my mother taught me: coffee tastes better in glass, it's a French thing, she's right, it does). I drink it in the car while listening to either the radio or my plugged-in ipod in the car. It gets me through the commute. The dumb-assery (as I've taken to calling it) of the other drivers. The traffic. The news I hear. All of it. It trumps my destination.
Morning meetings mean a break-up of routine (always welcome. I'm becoming better at embracing this kind of thing). I go to the meeting, I meet with people. We exchange Ideas, Solutions. We talk respectfully. The meeting ends, we go on with our day. I get a coffee. Sometimes from Starbucks. Sometimes Tim Horton's. Whatever is near by. If there is a coffee place near where I'm parked, great. If not--I find one. That's gotten me through the week.

It rained all day through my office window today and I loved it. I loved knowing my muddy car was being cleaned with no effort on my part, I loved knowing I had brought  my salad-lunch and didn't have to leave the office to get food in my sandals (I never leave the office to get food. Most days, in our two-storey building I don't even get downstairs). I ate my spinach-and-blue cheese and stared out the window. I finished a proposal. I took calls. I did it all still in my post-vacation haze. It was wonderful I will admit. Then home to Friday Night, the best night of the week (after Saturday). And I was in the mood for what I had planned--a nothing night, a Carolyn night, nail-painting, reading, organizing. Virgo stuff.

Here goes my list. (typo I just wrote "here goes my life". Odd)..
I have no idea how long it will be. I'm spreading this post out tonight so it may take a while. I may even do a second instalment. I miss alot of things...

1. My dad. His voice especially. I had no idea how much I would miss his voice. Getting silly mail from him. Far Side cartoons with smiley-faces drawn on the back of them. They are all over my fridge. I need a new fridge and I know I can't buy stainless because it's not magnetic. This is weird, I know. I love my fridge collage.

{It's hard to follow up the first one because it's a serious one, and obviously nothing on this list will really touch it, and some things will seem stupid in comparison. But I'm here, list-making. Randomly. For myself, for no one else. Just like running. For me}.

2. Speaking of which, I miss running without the fear of what it will do to my head, which is unpredictable and easily spooked, so it seems. In Mike's family, he has two relatives with migraine/head issues. This interested me.

3. Friends. Without kids. I really really miss that. Coffee, spontaneously. Plans that didn't have to made weeks in advance. I love them all, kids included, I just miss that 'let's do THIS!' we used to have. Maybe I just miss my twenties. Except that I don't. I would not go back to that decade if you paid me.

4. My Bathurst apartment. Just in a nostalgic way. The New Yorker of the nineties arriving in my mailbox every week. Reading in the dining room with the window open late at night after waitressing, the air from outside blowing in. My huge bedroom. The quiet mornings (as compared to downtown Toronto where I wake up every single day to the sound of a truck reversing. I dream of that beeping...)

5. Waitressing. Well, wait a minute, not COMPLETELY. I miss the good people I met when I was serving. The fun, interesting people, many of whom I am lucky enough to still count as dear friends today. And others who round out the edges. I don't miss the corporate slant that the restaurant I used to work for took on, I don't miss the people I met who were complete phonies, but I miss having drinks and a cheap steak on a Friday night after working fourteen hours straight. It felt so earned.

6. The Pre-September 11th, 2001 world. I know it wasn't perfect. But it was closer than it is now.

7. No internet. Time sucking, mind wasting. And yet here I am. Wasting my time with the best (and the worst) of it all.

8. Unlike other lists I've mulled over, I don't really miss 'my youth'. I mean, I still retain portions of it (memories, sense of humour, wisdom gained {I think}) but I don't feel the need to relive it. I think it's because I lived the hell out of it at the time. And I was born half-adult so I didn't have a childhood in the true sense of the word. But that's for another post.

9. My childhood home. In the true fashion of an interior designer I miss places. How weird is that? It was a townhouse in a borough of Toronto, red carpets on the main floor, a sunken entryway, an above-ground basement, a little square of backyard, front cement steps (six of them, I think), a small maple tree, a garage, a furnace room (great for hiding and playing in), no air conditioning, and we had a piano. Life was good. I still dream about that house. I think I read somewhere you will always dream about your first home. Or maybe that's just me.

10. My dog Shadow. This list is not in order. I miss how happy she made our family. All she did was love each and every one of us, and I think she made us love each other more too.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm sure I'll think of more as the days wear on...
I'm watching the darkening sky after a long walk and some sushi. There is a Californian Chardonnay nearby, not to worry.

I have to pack.
Girls weekend leaves tomorrow morning!

Save it for Later

That's the title of the song playing on my ipod as I write this (I've got my 80s "Nowhere Girl" playlist on right now).
I was thinking of a comment I wrote on my friend (blog-friend whom I have yet to meet but whom I am certain is a slam-dunk kind of person in the best possible way) Julia's blog. About the relationships we have with people who are no longer with us.
How they transmute.

My friend A. first distilled this idea for me (before my father died).

And it's very true really. I often think of something I need to tell my father, something funny or something political, or something that is both, or something scarily political (which is, in my humble opinion, backed by alarming stuff I've been reading through on the twitter-verse, very worrisome). 
And then I do tell him. The stuff about a Mormon running for President of the United States (he would lose his mind. After trying to be rational about it).  About the Mitt Romney-Ashley Madison billboard I also glimpsed on Twitter (he would have loved that). It would be right about now that my father, if he was still here, would be sitting me down for a serious talk about this neighbour country of ours, south of the border, and whether or not I really want to live there, even if it is to be with the love of my life (I do. I will. I already said it in January and I affirm again, a thousand times over).
How would I respond to that question? I'm guessing I would be my father's daughter, something that I wasn't always during his woefully cut-short life.
"Dad", I would say. "How can I possibly infiltrate the real state of American politics unless I live there? I mean really! I will have a much better chance of understanding it all, including this bullsh*t moral climate they're rustling up, if I'm acutally there."
This may or may not have worked to convince him. I guess, in part, this conversation is also to help me. Because I do observe the machinations of this impending (not upcoming. That implies positives. Impending, to me, signals doom) election. It worries me, as I mentioned yesterday.
Alot.

I don't have all the answers for all of those burning questions.
I have my own answer as to how your relationship with a person changes after death.
You still look for them everywhere, as if, in some part of your mind and heart, they are not dead (and in those parts, they really aren't).  You still yearn to tell them things, even if they are mindless things, things about the state of Roadwork in the City of Toronto (clue: Hell on Earth).
You dream about them. They visit in dreams when they are most needed, sometimes you don't even realize the need it's so visceral.  You project a present and a future with them in it. Somewhere, in my mind's eye, though no such item exists, there is a photo of me in my wedding dress with my father standing proudly beside me.

My friend Julia were having a discussion about how there is no way to actually know how you will feel about someone in your life leaving it for good until it actually happens. This is a fact.
But there are clues. I guess all I'm saying here (I'm wading in, I'm doing the practice, thanks for bearing with me) is that you shouldn't save it for later.
Say what you have to say, do what you have to do.
When you can.
Okay, now.

Testing...Testing

Life is full of tests.
And I'm usually a pretty good test-taker. After all, I'm a Virgo. Perfectionism is in my astrological blood.
I'm reflecting on my two-and-a-half week vacation, one that saw me blaze through two provinces (okay, one of them is my own) and six states (at first I counted it up wrong and wondered which one I left out: oh yes, Maine).
I got back, after thousands of kilometres in the car, after logging so much of my precious vacation time driving, and I felt, (I'm just gonna say it) completely deflated. Exhausted. Like I had had zero
'me' time (even though I wanted to visit with my husband more than anything, and hanging with my friend L. and my niece and nephew is as close to heaven as it gets).
But I didn't get to sit on the beach and just be. I didn't get to leisurely stare out at the ocean.  I didn't get to collect my thoughts the way I normally do, which saddens me, and reminds me why I haven't really written (no time).
So, I'm back at work, I've now put down two insane days (it's like I never went anywhere. It's kind of comical). Main difference is I've got the experience of the vacation behind  me, even if it didn't go exactly as I planned it (what, in life, EVER does?).  I'm putting it down at work like nobody's business because I do have that rest, however truncated, behind me. My neck is stiff (seriously cannot check the blindspot, either side, while I'm driving, luckily it's Toronto, no one does) from sleeping back in my own bed. I met with my lawyer re; immigration paperwork and he's confident I can 'do this myself' (really? I'm not so sure, but I am a paperwork wizard. They just want so much back up and I can barely keep my receipts together when I'm crossing the border).

In between meetings, and driving, and phone calls, I'm trying to keep it all together with this constant mantra to myself, "You can do this". I did this through-out the drive (part one) home dipping down through New Hampshire, then up into Vermont, while listening to weather reports that told me there was a tornado watch (this was Saturday) in effect until 8 pm that night. I vaguely thought, where, for the whole damn state? This worried me enormously. The sky darkened. I drove with determination, trying to make up the ground I was going to lose due to what was looking like  a serious storm.
I stopped seeing birds flying, a sure sign that the clouds were about to unleash. Then, those first few big, fat raindrops. The sky feeling like it was only about two feet above the roof of my car.
Then a thousand big fat raindrops, melding together to form what I describe, what I've heard described as "sheets" of rain. Burlington, Vermont exits. I took one without hesitation, pulled into a gas station, sat there in my car eating a sandwich that Mike had packed for me from our dinner the night before, and read my map. The good news was it was not yet 5 pm and I was less than forty minutes from the Canadian border. This rain couldn't last forever. And it didn't.

It subsided, I got back on the highway heading north, and by 5:45pm, I was back in Canada, Quebec to be exact, on my way to the city of Montreal to meet my cousin for dinner and stay with her in a hotel overnight, allowing me to split my drive right in half and to visit with her for the night.

I will admit--I have not been to the city of Montreal in over ten years, except to drive through it last year on my drive home (while cursing the traffic and affirming my hatred of the city).
Well, Montreal didn't exactly redeem itself (I'm a confirmed Anglophone, and their recent provincial election, blamed on 'the polls' cements this for me, despite my French-Canadian roots, I don't even speak the language), we did get some beautiful cloudy, windy, residual weather in the city that night. We did have a delicious dinner (I had wine too) and my cousin snapped this stunning pic from our hotel room on the twentieth floor.

 

 

So, the skies in Toronto continue to change too, the light is falling on a slant in the evenings that signals "fall" to me, and I'm loving the cool, breezy weather that marks a welcome change from the summer of hell-hot temperatures that I had grown to hate the way only a city dweller can.

 

 

This post is all over the place, but it's okay, I'm out of practice as Natalie Goldberg would say.

I'm reading "A Drinking Life" by Pete Hamill and loving it. It's all about Hamill's boyhood in Brooklyn and how he watched his Irish-American father go deeper and deeper into the grips of alcoholism, and then his own adult life and his subsequent 'drinking life'. I'm about a third of the way through. I bought "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" while in Maine too, at a used bookstore I've grown to haunt, and it awaits.

I'm not eating lobster everyday like I did in Maine, instead I'm making my standard chicken dinners and eating arugula and saltines every day at lunch. I go to bed at eleven pm after watching news on tv and shaking my head. The pending election in the U.S. The unrest all over the world. Canadian government decisions that send warning signals to me about the future of this crazy planet that seems so bent on destroying itself.  I wait to see my neurologist again to get some kind of clue on my condition. I employ my acupuncturist and thankfully that seems to be the only thing that is really working. Like, really working. And I talk to Mike every day, mostly more than once a day, and I thank God for him every day, too. And I work. Work and work.

 

And another fall rolls around and I marvel again, at the swiftness of time passing.

 

 

 



 

 

Signs of (after) Life

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/hartfordcourant/obituary.aspx?n=rita-hennessey-skelly&pid=159685846&fhid=7277#.UEjaNQUOx8M.facebook


I'm home. From Maine. From Conneticut. From my drive to both of those states. Through New York state on the drive in. Through Mass. Through New Hampshire. Back through NH and Mass to Conneticut. And then, back again.
Mike lost his grandmother, a woman who lived a long and well-lived life, from what I could see, as a bit of an outsider looking in on his amazing family ties, with their tolerance of each others intrinsic differences, with their particular brand of unconditional love towards each other. I met cousins. Second cousins. Third cousins. Fourth cousins. I visited his grandmother in the hospital on the last two days of her life. I visited her brother in another hospital and watched him recover (prayers were said. Mike's great uncle reminds me of my own late grandfather. A war man. A scion. A breed of understated masculinity that we don't get many glimpses of today in this revolving-door world). I met a second (third?) cousin of Mike's who had just had major surgery. I met another cousin (in law?) who suffers from cluster headaches. His wife and I had a long discussion about this topic.

I took the news to Mike that his grandmother had passed Wednesday morning.
I attended the funeral Friday morning, after a hurried shopping trip on Thursday for Mike and I to purchase funeral attire. I came dressed for beach. So did he. We just didn't think. But, then, you never do, do you?

We woke up super-early Friday morning, after spending a late evening working on Mike's writing piece that he was to read at his grandmother's funeral mass. We drove through the hills of Conneticut in deep fog. We had Starbucks. I straightened his tie.

The funeral home. The open casket. The feeling I alwasy have at events like this: that I've been lifted out of my daily life.
The funeral mass. The new church. My realization, as I sat with Mike's family. my in-laws, that I had never in my life been in a church outside of Canada. Mike's mom reminding me I get three wishes, since I had entered a new church. I didn't know about this--I made three wishes. Three slient, secret, selfish ones. Selfish for me and Mike, for our marriage. All for us.

Mike was a pallbearer with his cousins on this 80-plus farenheit day. They lifted the casket, six of them, from the funeral home to the hearse. From the hearse into the church. From the church into the hearse again. To the cemetary.
I looked for signs. I hadn't seen any yet. Or, if I had, I'd filed them away. Songs on the Conneticut radio that played twice (old song, "She Talks to Angels". They never play that. Anywhere).  I parked with Mike at the cemetary and looked around after he and his cousins had laid the casket down.
The crowd was dispersing. We slipped a prayer card from my dad's service into the casket. His sister and I took some flowers from the grave, the beautiful arrangements of champagne roses, white gerbera daisies.
Mike's dad found a grave-bench to rest on. The sun was beating down, it was noon.

Our sign came then.

Near the bench grave was a new grave, as yet un-stoned. Just a marker and a small plant of yellow flowers held the place of the person buried beneath. It was for a baby, who'd lived only four days. August 22nd, 2012, to August 26th, 2012.

A baby named Keegan.

My tears welled up.
I laid down the white gerbera daisy I had been holding on the baby's brand-new grave.

Gifts

I haven't written.
I left for my Maine vacation on August 23rd and I haven't really been 'online' so to speak.
It's felt great.
Here it is, a rainy cool morning (last week seemed to be it for summer here in Maine) and now that my guests have all departed (I'm sad) it's just me in the early morning while Mike sleeps after working late into last night.

What can I say? I'm still having running issues, my eye is still irritated, and I await (impatiently, impossibly) the next test results.
Not being able to run everyday while I'm here has been really hard.
Knowing that the half-marathon in October is not going to be something my health is going to allow me to do is devestating.

So I reach for perspective in these situations. I'm learning to (kind of) enjoy walking.
I'm putting some real effort into "just being". It's hard, but I'm doing it.

The trip has been amazing thus far.
Seeing the unmitigated joy on the faces of my niece and nephew as they rode the waves in the ocean on their little boogie boards was a gift I will treasure always.
Having company on the drive over was amazing too.
Seeing my friend L. for the first time in two years was also a gift.

The time itself is just that too.
Gifted.

So...that's really it.
I'll be in touch, soon-ish.