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 💗💗💗💗Lovely Caitlin💗💗💗💗

When the truth comes home

All week my thoughts have been straying. The weather has been glorious, and yesterday we took a sort of tour of the kwanzan cherry trees, which are now in their full glory all over Vancouver and area. This year they are particularly magnificent, heavy clusters of blossoms that are a rich pink, almost fuschia. Like the choir of birdsong we recently heard at Burnaby Lake, they lulled, calmed, and (wince, I hate the word) even healed my spirit.

It’s difficult when someone dies and there is unfinished business, or even bad feeling. It’s difficult when you realize that a supposedly-kind, supposedly-generous, much-loved figure was quite abusive to you over the years: that he said and did demeaning, even contemptuous things in the guise of “helping” you. That he undermined your most cherished and passionate beliefs so you wouldn't make a fool of yourself by sharing them with the world.

In this case, our mutual interest was spiritualism. He considered me a dabbler, himself a master. One of the last things I said in my final email to him was “no one is more hidebound than a hidebound medium”. He quickly fired back a response, which I deleted unread, because I knew what was in it already. I was so sick of this, so sick of the pattern, needed to break it once and for all.

It was disturbing to me to see how often I had ended up this way. Even “best friends” somehow seem to arrange it so that I have to run back and forth and hit the ball from both sides of the net. It's just so much work to keep the whole thing going. The best I can anticipate is indifference; the worst, abuse.

Not to say I’ve never had real friendships, and some of them have been incredibly rich. But they’re often problematic. They tend to be like rivers: long ago in high school geography, I learned that rivers have a life, and though most of them start off vigorous and splashy and full of liquid energy, some end as a mere meandering swamp. Who knows why or how this happens. But is it beyond the realm of possibility that the toxic swamp I grew up in had serious, though unconscious repercussions, that it bent and swayed my choices in friendship in ways that often snapped back cruelly in my face?

I think my former friend probably served a need, and sometimes he listened when we talked – or so I thought. I had known him about 15 years when he moved away and started his own church, which he retired from (or left, disaffected? Why do I think so?) early this year. Starting your own church is always a bad idea, or at least it always ends badly. The faithful inevitably turn against you  – you lose control, they no longer follow your dictums. All this newfangled stuff comes in, and all of a sudden people want to think for themselves. You have a stranglehold, and eventually it just snaps in your hands and lets go. I won’t get into the bloody mess, the civil war that happened in my own former church when it all melted down, nor the stress it caused, which (incredibly!) I denied was a major factor in my own complete meltdown, the near-death experience of 2005.

But that's another story.

When I first began to share some of my Gershwin stuff with him last year, the vivid impressions I was receiving through his music and his voice, at first he was extremely enthusiastic, almost in awe. He claimed I might even have “undeveloped or underdeveloped psychic ability”. Prior to this, we had gotten together for coffee for over fifteen years and done nothing BUT talk about our psychic experiences. I shared my own impressions and beliefs very freely, and he seemed to be listening. I assumed he acknowledged that I had some degree of ability, else why would we be doing this?

But then, out of the blue, it all changed, and as with most psychological abuse, I don't know why. It took the form of, “Of course, in this case I am speaking as a psychotherapist, which leads me to believe that having these particular fantasies might serve a psychological need in you due to your former psychiatric” (blah blah blah blah blah).

It was not the first time he had used the word “fantasy” to write off my experiences (or pulled the "psychotherapist" card, which is brutal), though his own were always authentic. How did he know? Because everyone respected his gifts, that’s why – this was some sort of proof, the fact he had so many followers. It validated him. But why did everyone respect his gifts? Because his experiences were always authentic.

There’s a word for this: tautology, a snake that swallows its own tail. I was amazed such an educated man could be so completely blind to it.

I don’t know about everything that happened in this particular situation, because it is still murky and muddled. I know he is dead, and his death came as a shock to me. I know that ten months ago I was spitting nails, I was so angry at the stuff he said and did, the way I was dismissed. (Is that the true meaning of "dissed"?). And now this, a completely unexpected development. In fact, bizarrely, I just got an email from him - no kidding, from HIS email account - announcing the particulars of his own memorial service. For a lifelong spiritualist, this is irony taken to the level of the sublime. (The more mundane explanation is that his partner, who has the same first name, is still using his email account.)

I have long believed that people die the way they live. It's a sort of variation of "live by the sword, die by the sword" that proves itself over and over again. They saw off the branch they are perched on, the one they're afraid to climb down from. A lot of workaholic businessmen drop dead on retirement, having lost their sense of purpose. My former friend “retired” from his church/spiritualist centre, where he was resident medium for eight years, but I have a funny back-of-the-neck feeling he left, which is a different thing. The tepid response on Facebook to his retirement notice (just a handful of likes and comments, after eight years?) and even more tepid response to the death announcement tells me something. I don't know why, some psychic flash perhaps (heh-heh), but I can see an "open letter to the members of the Blah Blah Church" stating his reasons for leaving. That's just the kind of thing he'd do. Pedantic, lawyer-ish, pounding away at the same point until you want to scream.

(I know all this is far too personal to write about, but I do get tired, sometimes, of posting Betty Boop gifs, much as I enjoy making them. This blog has never been quite sure what it is about, and it will never have a large readership, but one of the purposes of it is to help me wrestle with/hack my way through the jungle of serious dilemmas. Writing is a way, as far as I am concerned, like the Way of Zen that Alan Watts used to write about. It’s my way of surviving in the world and at least trying to make sense of things.)

This is a rapid turnover thing, however. Already, today I am in a different place, though not through any conscious decision. With my family of origin, eventually I came around to pitying them, pity being the back door of compassion. I didn’t leap into the arms of forgiveness, in spite of the current cultural imperative to forgive people who’ve raped you, murdered your children, etc. etc., because if you don’t you’ll walk around seething with hatred for the rest of your life and it will destroy you. There are no other alternatives, of course: forgive the person completely, or consume yourself in the acid of hatred, which of course you “shouldn’t be feeling” anyway. Nice people just don't.

I’m not for hate, and I never have been, but I was surprised when compassion came in the back gate. It just sort of did, it sat there on the stump in the yard. I didn’t exactly welcome it in for tea, but I was surprised and felt something of a sense of awe. I now felt sorry for all of them, especially the ones who are dead, who I can never talk to again. The more egregious the wrong, the deeper the pity. What else could I feel? Imagine BEING that way. Evil consumes itself, and you don't even have to concern yourself with revenge. The most you will ever have to do is hold up a mirror.

I don’t know if evil was going on here, but I know there was contempt and loftiness and pulling the card of superiority (“you must be very, very careful, Margaret, because I have years and years of intensive training, whereas you. . . “). I know that loftiness and the swirling cape of expertise hides a hole. It only has a few branches and some scrub over it, so I know how easy it is to fall in.

Something about the manner of his dying continues to bother me. It's the same way Lloyd Dykk died, and if ever a man carried a load of poison karma, it was that one. His colleagues stood around his deathbed trying to figure out if they could remember any details of his life. Incredibly, he only worked in one place for his entire career, the backwater arts pages of the Vancouver Sun, and had never spread himself out, probably because his spirit was so small. No one knew if he had kin anywhere - there were only vague, conflicting ideas. So what is a stroke? Something backs up on you, I think. Something in your head disastrously explodes. If you're immensely old, it makes some sense - the vessels age, they wear out - but at 67? At 67, it's a form of autointoxication. 

My former friend the medium seems to have been  struck down in the same disastrous way, though he was three years older. I DO feel sorry for the people who miss him, as they now must cope with mixed feelings over how he must have treated them. His former disciples may be of the “you must forgive" school of thought, not wanting to acknowledge that life isn’t a dichotomy. In fact, sometimes it’s so bloody complicated, with so many confusing and conflicting options, that it’s hard to know how to feel at all. But one thing I do know: it is almost never “either/or”.

I also know that “should” has no place here. Other people’s agendas have no place. “You should forgive”, or, worse, “You MUST forgive” only reveals their profound discomfort with your anger, pain and grief. They want you to freeze that anger, hide it, even swallow it, though they would be indignant if it were pointed out to them that all of this is for their own sake, to save THEM grief and discomfort. In truth, they just don’t want to know.

This whole situation has affected me far more than I thought it would. I do feel sorry for those involved, because I don’t know how many people this man had in his life, how much kin, if any. He did seem to lose his way professionally, and I do think he badly needed the pompous professorial mode (two Masters degrees and a PhD, whew!). And the way he died was simply awful, a massive "cerebrovascular accident" on Easter Sunday which took a couple of days to kill him. His partner posted a heartbreaking account on his blog, and it made for very difficult reading. It also gave me a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, because to be perfectly honest, he was the one and only person I ever formally put a curse on.

Coincidence is a strange thing.

So what now? I don’t know, I guess now it’s none of my business. There is a memorial service in a week - interestingly enough, NOT at his former church - but it’s inappropriate for me to go, and I find I just don’t want to. We either go on after we die, or not. Maybe the energy dwells only in our collective memory, but that’s powerful enough. I was shocked to learn that the church he walked away from had to pass the hat to scrounge up enough money to bury him. Here I’m not revealing any secrets, just repeating something which is stated on the church's Facebook page. There was a plea for donations to help his surviving partner cope with the massive debt he left behind.

This is sad, but you reap what you sow. Debt is a hole you fall into eventually –  it means you’re living on someone else’s money and should be making restitution, but you’re not, for whatever reason. And it usually comes about not through chance or a sudden event, but by a whole series of very unwise decisions.

And to leave massive debt on the shoulders of your surviving partner, particularly a person who appears to be emotionally fragile, is nothing short of irresponsible.

So all this has made for a very strange, sometimes melancholy week. I keep thinking of Celie in The Color Purple: one of the most powerful scenes in moviehood, where she points at her tormenter and flings a curse which is full of righteousness. CAN a curse be righteous? I think it can, because in essence it merely turns the dark beam around at the person emanating it. In an awful lot of cases, it turns out to be too much for them to stand.

(This is a rerun of the "Gershwin time travel" piece that started the whole thing. Or perhaps it started much longer ago than that. My big question is: when does it end?)

Gershwin is a time traveller - you can see him out of the corner of your eye. He did not die in the normal sense of the word, because he did not know where he was. He was in a very high fever and dying all alone in a hospital room after failed brain surgery. When he left his body, he experienced extreme disorientation and for quite a while did not realize he was dead. This meant that a light, loose Gershwin-shaped energy field still moved about the world, and lit up whenever his music was played (which was almost all the time). 

After a very long time, though it was a mere moment in eternity, he began to realize who and how he actually was, that he was no longer in a body and would have to exist in a very different form. Being a soul sojourner from the beginning, this was not a threat but an adventure to him. But even in spite of this necessary metamorphosis, to a remarkable degree, he retained a George Gershwin shape. No matter what sort of problems he was having in his life, and he had many that we don't know anything about, there was a ferocious static-charged supernatural pumped boost of energy that somehow kept on connecting people with each other when he was around. 

But ironically, in spite of his sacred mission to join people joyously, in his life he had many struggles with intimacy, which led to a loneliness even as he was the most popular man in the room. During this strange leaving-his-body-and-not-being-sure-where-he-was period, he began to have extraordinary insight into not just his own condition, but the human condition. GG's emotional affect and his emotions seemed curiously light, but there was a galaxy of melancholy within that he did not show to too many people. The stars in that galaxy exploded out of his fingers and his brain and were made manifest as notes of music on the page. 

Though he lived at a hurtling pace few people could equal, little did he know that he was absorbing all of humanity's travails, gaining an understanding of suffering that would not be fully realized until he found himself in a different form outside his body. It would have been unbearably painful, had his life (as he knew it) not been over, a blessed cessation of all earthly pain. When a soul or entity gains this sort of awareness, mysterious alchemy takes place because the need here on earth for that level of understanding is so dire. Those pained and anguished places in that broken thing we call the human condition began to draw and attract this generous, gentle, deeply broken spirit. There was Gershwin dust in the room sifting down like stardust, particularly when there was music playing. And there was music playing a lot. 

Someone, not keeping up their guard, felt something strange or warm and not quite familiar in the room, yet also hauntingly familiar. Someone else thought they saw him for a second, or someone that looked like him. There was in some subconscious way a powerful sense that a healing was beginning to happen. As the entity begins to heal, so it heals itself. George's brain gave way, the most disturbing way to die, so that he was basically humbled by losing the genius brain he was celebrated for. Stripped of that, even of that, all that was left was his essence. How can I say how this happens? How can I be sure that George Gershwin is a time traveller and an entity who is basically free to move about within time and space wherever and whenever he wishes?

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Hot town: screams in the night

It was one of them-thar hot, HOT summers in Chatham, in the heel of Southwestern Ontario, when it felt like someone was holding something to your nose and mouth so you could not breathe. Sweat accumulted in layers on your skin, but if it evaporated at all, it provided no relief from the relentless, doggy heat.

We didn't take showers then, because you just didn't - women washed their hair in the sink and wrapped a towel around their head, turban-style (God knows why, or how they ever dried it). If you were so hot you were turning into melted rubber, you lay in a bath tub full of tepid water, drained it, and felt more moist and clammy than ever. As far as I know, people didn't bathe every day, nor were clothes washed as often, but perhaps the predominance of natural fibres kept us from keeling over from each other's stench.

The humidity devil did not let up often. But on certain nights the sky suddenly cracked open, and floods of lukewarm rain caused some of us (mostly kids, or a few heat-crazed adults) to strip down to our bare essentials and go out in it, dancing around, hair streaming, mouth open. The cracks of livid electricity almost made my hair stand on end, and sometimes I felt it zip up my arms as if it wanted me for some awful unknown purpose.

But the buckets of rain did not help. Soon everything was just steaming, the air more choked with water than before.

Cicadas buzzed their long, almost sexual-sounding arches of sound on those summer afternoons in which time seemed to hang suspended. We didn't like finding the adults - "June bugs", they were usually called, big fat things with wings - but the cast-off shells of the nymphs were magical. They appeared all over the bark of the elm trees that would all-too-soon be felled due to disease, never to be seen again.

But at night, there was this - this sound! A night bird, one that I called "the Skeezix bird" because that's what it sounded like. On damp, hollow, star-filled Chatham nights, the Skeezix would begin to swoop in the sky, the sound swinging near and far so that you couldn't tell exactly where it was. I don't think I ever saw one.  It had to be some kind of hawk or falcon. But nobody ever referred to it or talked about it. It was just there, like the sexy drawn-out tambourine-hiss of the cicadas. All part of summer in the city.

But when I heard the Skeezix bird, every so often I also heard the strangest sound, halfway between a burp and a groan. Short, hollow, and - stupid really, because obviously it had nothing to do with the bird, yet there it was, persistent. I even asked other people about it once, and no one had ever heard it. It seemed like nobody really wanted to talk about it. At least they looked at me strangely, though I suppose by then I should have been used to that.

Then one time, my older brother said, "You know that booming noise? It's sound waves from the hawk bouncing off buildings."

It wasn't. In fact, until this very moment I didn't know what the hell it was or how it could be related to the Skeezix bird.

Then came this answer, this beautiful, golden Answer. Simply laid out. Not even any video, just a clear audio explanation with pictures. There WAS a Skeezix bird, even if it was called something else. If it was creating that groany boom out in nature, obviously it had nothing to do with sound waves and buildings.

The real explanation is exotic and a little far-fetched, but it must be true. It just took me fifty years to find it. Play the video above, and be enlightened.

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Haunted: the home town that lives in my head

We lived at 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Such a long handle, and a strange place.

I just had the urge to dig out some photos of the place. Plenty strange, but a beautiful old Edwardian-era house previously owned by the unmarried Terry sisters.

Since I first posted a different version of this piece a couple of years ago, a wealth of old Chatham photos has emerged from the vast wonderland of Google images. Thus fuzzy memories are brought into sharp relief, a new phenomenon that must be changing the human brain in some fundamental way (oh, THAT was what the church looked like! I thought it had windows on that side. Etc.) But nobody has noticed that yet. When I hear even the most insignificant names attached to Chatham, I get the queerest feeling, almost an ecstasy, but at the same time a longing so intense that it scares me. Oh, I want to go back, go back to when it was simpler, when milk was delivered by horse and wagon and Milky the Clown entertained us instead of Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb.



Plenty of the old houses in Chatham looked haunted, and very ugly. I used to wonder how anyone could live there. I remember sloshing along in rubber boots, walking home to have lunch (fried eggplant, if I was lucky) and watch Popeye. These were the vintage Popeyes made in the early 1930s, which I didn't see again until I found the DVD re-release a couple years ago.

It's all a pastiche or jigsaw or something. Making story means imposing order, usually, an order that really isn't there. So I won't make story today. Wait a minute. These weren't boots at all, but boot covers, something like the ubiquitous "galoshes" (talk about onomatopoeia!) that we all wore to protect our shoes. They leaked like mad, but that's what we did. Ladies wore little plastic bonnets to protect their hair, something like a shower cap.



I remember a bit of a song about pigeons with pink feet. Never mind. A capital ship for an ocean trip was the Walloping Window Blind. . .

Sugar beets. I remember the burny intense smell of sugar beets being processed into sugar. It reminded me of my Mum making something delicious called Burnt Sugar Pudding, a caramelized confection with a velvety texture. In those days, no one had to limit emissions in any way. There was the Lloyd (no kidding, it was really called Lloyd!) jute bag company. I didn't know what a jute bag even was until someone told me, "Dummy, it's a burlap sack."

And then there was Darling's, the most hideous smell in the world. This was most evident on the infamous sweatbox days of a Southwest Ontario summer, when the fumes were held down by a heavy lid of humidity. It was stomach-turning, a mixture of guts and hides and bones. They used to tell me it was a slaughterhouse, but no slaughterhouse could smell that bad. Later on my brother told me it was a rendering plant, i.e. glue factory: so maybe that's why no one told me the truth, so I wouldn't scream with horror that horses were being melted down so our postage stamps would stay on.



"Horse glue,"my husband said 200 years later. I thought about it. I was licking the boiled-down gluten of an old horse, maybe a retired racehorse with a blown tendon. It didn't bear thinking about.

What else?

A thump-thump, thump-thump. . . no, more like a "stock-stock-stock-stock", some sort of factory. God, Chatham seems now like it seethed with industry.

Plack. Plack. A neighbor, an old man named Salem Aldiss, used to take a flexible board and bend it back and let it snap on the cement. Hordes of starlings would shoosh up and blacken the sky, but soon they'd be back on the trees and powerlines, craaawwww! craaaaaaaw!craaaaaaaaaaw-ing in a vast creepy choir and leaving splats of guano that was most unpleasant to try to remove.



I think I bit my neighbor, it's so long ago. Shawne Aitken, Mr. Aldiss's granddaughter, used to come in the summer to stay with her grandparents. She lived in Sault Ste. Marie. I loved Shawne and maybe even had a mild crush on her, but when I was very very little I bit her I think. My mother was required to march me over to her house (only two houses down, not a long march) and apologize. Then Shawne, still a little weepy, gave me a sucker, and we were friends again. (Purple. The best sucker in the bag.)

I thought I was the only child who'd bitten someone in the history of the universe. That memory was squashed so far down in the "shame" bin that, like compacted paper or Jurassic mineral layers, it won't even come out properly. Maybe it's just as well.

There were two Pauls in kindergarten, Paul Sunnen and Paul Tunks. I didn't like Paul Tunks very much, he was fat and obnoxious, but I was in love with Paul Sunnen because he was thin and romantic, and a diabetic. I wasn't even sure what that was - it was called "sugar diabetes" in those days - but there were whisperings that he had to have needles. We all sat cross-legged in a circle embedded in the linoleum floors of the kindergarten room, and I always sat directly across from Paul Sunnen. We drank milk out of weird-looking little glass bottles and had to have a "milk ticket" to get it.



In kindergarten at McKeough School, we had two elderly spinster teachers, Miss McCutcheon and Miss Davy. In my memory, they are about nineteen feet high. My mother was tall as a sequoia. I remember hanging on to her apron and looking up, far up. Family legend has it that one day my mother said to me, "You don't like me." I answered, "You not bad." This sums up our entire relationship.

What else? Ann Peet, who could be nice to me or awful. They were Dutch and lived next door. They were poor in a much-mended sort of way, but clean and presentable, which my mother approved of. There were a lot of kids, Annie and Susan and Charles and Brian and. . Garnet, named after the mayor, Garnet Newkirk I think. Garnet John Cornelius Peet. When he was born, Ann went door to door to tell everyone, telling us his name was Garden John. Ann's father was in the war in Holland and told stories. Once he told her that the people were so hungry in occupied Holland that a woman ate her baby.



All this somehow made its way into Mallory, my second novel. Not sure how it evolved into such an autobiography. Anyway, Mr. Peet (Cornelius: did anyone call him Corny?) had pigeons, and I liked to climb over the (actual) white picket fence in our back yard and watch them reproduce. I had no idea what was going on and one day asked Mr. Peet what they were doing. "Dancing," he said, with a sly smile. One day I saw him bring home a live chicken in a jute bag (probably from Lloyd's). He grabbed its neck and took a knife and sliced its head off. The chicken's body flapped and convulsed all over the yard, while the beak on the severed head opened and closed.

My parents had dirty books. Under my Dad's underwear in the bureau drawer. My God, I must have had nerve. When they were both at choir practice, I would burrow around and find them. One was called Ideal Marriage and didn't say very much. Another one, much more dirty, was called ABZ and was a sort of encyclopedia of sex, originally published in Sweden or somewhere. There were whole pages that were blanked out that said, "This page has been removed by the publisher for violating obscenity laws," or something like that. They didn't just edit it out, they obliterated it. My Dad sold books and would sell Ideal Marriage to someone under the counter, but where the hell did this one come from - and, more to the point, what the hell was fellatio?



Oh, don't let's get into sex and Carmen Ferrie (she's probably still out there somewhere and is still red-haired and funny and smart and popular). She told me stuff, but I simply didn't believe it. Jesus! Even though I already knew from experience what an orgasm was, it was hard to believe that people would actually want to do that stuff.

I will leave horses aside, as I've covered them thoroughly in other posts. I will also have to leave Bondi for now, though it was a rapturous two weeks out of the year. Bondi hasn't changed a whole lot in all those years, and is still run by the same family, which somehow gives me hope.

Stamping on puddles with the little plastic boot-covers that fastened with a button and a piece of elastic. Plash.Stamp. And best of all - the spring flood, when the pitiless endless aching Ontario winter finally let go and released several tons of water all at once. It shooshed and roared. The street was like rapids. Some of the bigger sidewalk hollows still had ice over them, and it was pure ecstasy to stomp them and see and feel them shatter under your feet. Stamp. Crunch.


Around the corner, oh my god there was a little hill in the sidewalk! A little drop. It seemed like a thousand feet down. I was probably three and riding a tricycle. Is that drop still there? Back then a three-year-old was given complete freedom outside, not even watched. I couldn't ride up the hill and had to drag my tricycle up the grass, but I did it over and over again.

There was a strange church on the corner that said Jesus Saves, the kind of church we didn't go to, thank you very much. Too much singing. There was a sort of bar at the front entrance, and I'd hang off it like a sloth and pretend I was riding a horse that I called "Bet".




Oh and, the pervert in the park. When we were pre-teens, Shawne and I in those endless sweatbox summers went to Tecumseh Park because there was a swimming pool (kind of) and baseball games. I hated baseball but went with her anyway because it was something to do. There was a man, this guy. He had a funny smirky smile. He was sort of like "The Big Fat Man" of our very early childhood, a version of the Boogie Man (a rather fat elderly gentleman whom I am sure was completely harmless. When he saw me, he always said, "Hello, boy.") This guy, the funny smirky guy who looked a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald, just loitered around. He was always just out of eyeshot, and we giggled and ran away, having fun. Jesus, we could have been raped or killed. One time, just one time in the Chatham Daily News, there was a one-paragraph story about a paper boy who had been sodomized (how is this possible? But it's true) by an unknown stranger.



I retain memories of Chatham and feel a kind of bliss, which is weird because my childhood was anything but blissful. My Dad's drinking slowly and inexorably escalated until he became a staggering, booming tyrant. My older sister refused to believe any of my stories. He was a fine upstanding man, a wonderful father. But she hadn't been around him for ten years. She had gone to Europe, as far away as she could get, the other side of the world, even speaking another language that none of us knew. He sent her money. Briefly she acknowledged his alcoholism in a letter, and once told me she found him "oppressive", but she took it all back when I told her I had been sexually abused. The wagons went in a circle, and like all oppressive patriarchs, he was once again crowned with many crowns.

Dylan Thomas, you were wrong, this stuff is all shit, and jumbled as hell. I don't want to make story today. This is my life. I somehow came out of all this jumble. Branch led to branch. It's amazing I am still connected to one friend from those days, a little surreal. All this came from the rather ghastly sight of McKeough School, which I never really looked at because I was too busy marching in to military music.



Post-blog observings: I just realized, as I dug out a previous post about my old church being haunted by the notorious Russell Horsburgh, that all of Chatham-Kent and its surrounding communities is thick with apparitions. No kidding, there are ghost tours you can go on. When my friends and I walked by those old Gothic-looking brick buildings on Victoria Avenue, it would not have been much of a stretch to imagine they were haunted. But I never heard of any ghost tours. My own flirtings with the paranormal have never lead me anywhere significant - nothing has really happened, as far as I am concerned, to convince me that it's anything more than wishful thinking and/or my imagination. We all long to know what is on the "other side", and I suppose being a ghost is better than being nothing at all. Though I can see them wafting in and out of the windows of McKeough School (above), which is supposedly being renovated and used as a heritage site, I kind of hope they stay out of my house. Go back to Chatham where you belong!






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Kathleen Wilhelmina Gunning: a great lady,and sadly missed

Kathleen Wilhelmina Gunning

GUNNING, Kathleen Wilhelmina (nee Hitching) - Peacefully in her sleep on Thursday, December 1, 2011, surrounded by family. Kathleen was in her 97th year. Beloved wife of George Clifford Gunning, who predeceased her in April 2005. They were married for 63 years. Mother of Bill (wife Margaret), Port Coquitlam, BC; Judith (husband Wayne), Oakville, ON; Ronald (wife Joanne), Kingston, ON; Alan (wife Janet), Caledonia, ON. Lovingly remembered and now sadly missed by her six grandchildren Shannon (Jeff), Jeffrey (Crystal), Christopher (Melanie), Cory (Keri), Kyle and Lauren. Kay was also richly blessed with nine great-grandchildren whose photographs adorned her home at The Village of Wentworth Heights in Hamilton, ON. The family wish to extend heartfelt thanks to the Scotsdale home area caregivers who lovingly attended to her needs throughout her ten year residency. Kay will be fondly remembered by her nieces, nephews and all friends and family who knew her. A private family interment will be held at a future date. If desired, donations made to the Canadian Cancer Society or the Hospital for Sick Children would be appreciated by the family.                                                                            

Published in the Toronto Star on December 3, 2011

I guess we knew it was coming, when my husband's brother called from Ontario to say she was getting weaker, not eating much, not able to rouse herself from bed.

To that point, her appreciation for life was a gift to everyone around her.

In forty years of knowing her, of having the privilege of being her daughter-in-law, I have too many memories to share here. Mostly I remember her kindness, her rather peppery humor, her straightforwardness. As an army nurse in World War II, she never lost the nurse's keen diagnostic eye, and if you didn't feel well she scanned that eye over you and told you what you should do. Like, go to bed, now!

I remember when my daughter was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, back in 1977, and she flew out from Ontario to help me. She'd never been alone on a plane before in her life, and I didn't ask, but she offered, and we could not refuse.

While I nursed a fractious, difficult baby, she did everything else, cooked, cleaned, kept my 18-month-old son amused. I just didn't have anything left for him, but Nana saved the day, and I will never forget it.

She made the best, and the most, of everything she had. She lived through the Great Depression, then dealt with many lean years while raising four kids by somehow stretching the resources, so that no one ever felt "poor".

My husband is the science nerd on the right. Looks like someone out of The Big Bang Theory, doesn't he? But his parents were extremely proud of the fact that he was the first Gunning to go to university (at age 16, ending up with a Masters in biochemistry. Sheldon, are you there?). This doesn't happen by accident.

Note Mum reflected in the background. I don't remember my Dad-in-law cutting up like this! Bill probably took the photo.

Going steady.

This is what Christmas looked like in 1947. Little Billy in Dad's lap is now 65!

My personal favorite. Surreal, misty, full of love. "Billy + Mummy, 5/6 months."

Lovely bride (1945).

Dedicated nurse.

Beautiful soul.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

A horse is a horse is a horse

Last week I had a wonderful riding experience on Vancouver Island at Tiger Lily Farms. I got to ride Bentley, a lovely roan Quarter horse with an amiable personality and a penchant for grabbing leaves that brushed his nose over the trail. Oh how I wish. How I wish I could've taken Bentley out on my own, for a nice meander and perhaps a canter or even a bit of galloping, but this isn't an option for me now. Riding for an hour with a guide cost $40.00, which seemed like a lot until I checked prices around here and found out they're $55.00 per person per hour, minimum booking of four, with a $100.00 deposit.

Did I appreciate having a horse of my own when I was age 10 - 13? Of course not. I am embarrassed to say I eventually lost interest. I was in high school and it wasn't cool to be horsy then. Rocky wasn't a registered anything, certainly not a Quarter horse like Bentley (though I used to say he was "1/4 Quarter horse"). He was a trail horse well-trained to tolerate any kind of rider, even a kid who steered him into some pretty bad situations (like being stuck to the shoulder in a mud-wallow).

I realize in these primitive archival photos that he seems to have too big-of-a-head, which he really didn't. The style of his mane could be described as a Mohawk, more for ease of grooming than anything else (I think his unshaven mane would have been a tangled jungle in which curry-combs would have been lost forever). He was what was called a strawberry roan, a sorrel (redhead) with a lot of creamy white sprinkled through his coat, especially on his face and rump(though it's hard to see it here).

My mother used to say "Rocky has a pink-and-grey face." I remember a kind eye and a rubbery nose perfect for kissing.  He was a "character" who would prance around the pasture trying to evade the bridle (prance? My ass - he was putting it on to annoy me). If we crossed a stream, he would stop and splash vigorously with a foreleg until I steered him the other way.

He once broke out of my back yard and took off like a shot (back yard? Yes, these photos were taken when I had the bright idea of riding him the 2 miles or so from the boarding stable to my house). My Dad said, "I didn't think that horse was so fast." He was a strawberry blur, his hoofs clopping the pavement at a furious rate, and by the time our car caught up with him he was contentedly munching hay in the barn, his coat unusually dark with exertion.

I think horses have taken on an almost mythical significance to me. I was born in the Year of the Horse (not that I believe in such things!) and have come to see the horse as a symbol of absolute freedom. Even the most highly-trained have a streak of wildness in them, much as cats do. The quietest horse can spook (as Rocky did once, seeing a gum wrapper on the trail, causing me to say, "You idiot, you're doing that on purpose").  I have sat on bolting horses, horses who tried to scrape me off under a tree branch, and I stayed on. Not because I'm a good rider - I'm not, particularly - but because I feel like I'm one with them. Or one of them? Almost.