Category: Deaths & Obits

Slow and fast, warm and cold

Right now life is a slurry of goodbyes and re-introductions; changes in temperature, ambiance, the furnace breaks, the filk convention looms, the tooth is snaggled, Granny’s dead, I’m finally back on the ERP at work, I am up again and spinning at a great rate of knots.  The distance between life and the blog is bigger than normal, and I have few venues (not none, fortunately) for venting about it.  Some things are burning brightly, some are swallowed by silence and distrust of the future.  The major thing is allowing myself to be happy by how genuinely pleased people are to see me.  I feel like I’m home, and I’m happy.

My back hurts.  Commuting subjects me to lots of interesting loading on my lower back. This is making me crabbier than normal.

One of my coworkers dreamed I was coming back to work.  I don’t know whether to believe it and I’m not really worried about it either way.  I’ve had one precognitive dream that I remembered, so although my sample size is small my willingness to believe is large.

Pocky.  It’s what’s for dinner. I bought Robbie B lunch.

Long hours of sleep, punchuated in the morning with traffic noise. Lest my mother be upset, that typo was deliberate….. now let me wander off my rails again and think about how we can set up an Aspie friendly place for the boys to do their mourning.  Because as sure as Darwin’s winnowing fan claims us all, I can think of four of my blood kin who need to go off and have their own corner to grieve in.  Of such are the ways of the accommodationist, the ever blooming woman of the boundary layer, who would be, of course, me.

Memorial service will be later

Probably during the week – the staff at the Cedars want to go.

Work is awesome, and will be even more awesome when I have email, ERP and a proper phone for the call center work.

I am thinking of my dad and it’s hard not to cry.  It doesn’t matter how much you expect it, it is still shattering.  And while shattered, you must get up, and eat, and deal with lawyers and doctors and arrange things and make lists.

Memorial Service did him justice

It went long, and it was emotional.  Tre and Battery and Tanya had to leave because Tre got fussy, but Lindsay (strangely enough! my former boss and grandboss at work) came and sat next to me, and while I didn’t speak much to him, I’d like to thank him for being with me.  Tanya came back in to greet Owen with me and then we went home.

Ryan was a very special young man, in a lot of ways, and sure I was crying for myself (thinking about what it would be like to lose one of the kids) and for his parents (whose mental state is easy enough to guess), but I ended up doing most of my crying for his friends, who really loved him and who will have to work very hard to live up to his standards.

I have a packet of seeds of Ryan’s favorite flower in my coat pocket now, and I’ll plant them when it’s a bit more like spring.

It is with sadness and relief that I relate my woeful tidings

Uncle Dave died this morning.  I will always hold him in my heart as a vibrant, somewhat ornery, disciplined, fun, rational person, whom it was an honour to know and a deeper honour to be family with.  I see him sitting on the back deck at the Augur Inn, back on 2nd St, laughing and talking and eating and smoking his pipe after a hard day arguing with the walls, or the flooring, or mudding, mudding, mudding.  Remember the time he and Paul tried to set fire to the house? … yeah, it’s funny now.   I’d be in the kitchen, listening to him and Paul laughing uproariously, and thinking how very happy I was.  That’s the image I will hold. So many anecdotes, about his travels, his time with the Princess Pats, his time on the boat in Australia.

I light a candle for Alyssa and D. and the girls, Paige and Chloe.  I am thankful beyond words that he died at home with his loved ones around him and I so feel for Alyssa, who took herself to the end of her strength to perform this last office of love.  I didn’t cry on the phone with mOm this morning, but I’m sure as hell crying now.

I had breakfast over at Paul and Keith’s so I was there when Jeff called me, and now Paul and Keith know too.  I just called Katie.  It’s not like the world is so full of good human beings that we can suffer the loss of one without impact……

Busy day

Today I am going to go and see a music teacher who lives close by to see if I can take lessons; then I’m going up to my old workplace for lunch; then I’m going to Surrey for a while, and then I should be home for supper.  This is the most I’ve been on transit since the fireworks last summer.

Last night Tom and Peggy and Paul and Keith came over for broiled pork chop, cauliflower and home made cheese sauce, salad, cole slaw, corn and garlic bread.  Dessert was fresh fruit and pecan torte. It was all nommers.  Then we sang and played for a while.

I light a candle for everybody killed and injured at Fort Hood yesterday.   I am sure there will be an uptick in attacks on furrin brown people as a consequence.  I light a candle for the man who thought he could made a contribution to world peace by slaughtering his fellow soldiers.  It’s just so grisly, and so wrong.

Beautiful day

It’s difficult, when you’re not an art historian or otherwise an art geek, to assess the value of seeing a real Vermeer or a real Rembrandt.  But it is supposed to be good for one, so I accompanied daughter Katie to the current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and was happy to be thrust 350 years into the past, when the current ideas about what constitutes the middle class were putting down sturdy roots. I looked into portraits whose faces bore the stamp of This is my Relation; I was struck, over and over again, by the beauty of details, clouds, ships, insects, trees; by the shine of the silver, the connections to the Dunnett books, and the pushing of art into places where it had never gone.  Why draw a dead and a dying horse side by side?  Why depict the interior of a synagogue (showing the mothers attempting to ride herd on their kids at the back of the shul)? Why elaborate on a new fashion of depicting happily married couples in a fantastic amalgam of backgrounds – he set amid his globe and his expensively bound volumes, she sweetly tugging at him to go into the garden for a moment?

It was the Art of Middle and Upper Class White Folks, writ large and small and in brilliant detail.  As a result, it is comfortable art.  Not challenging, not disturbing, not heartbreaking.  English contemporaries commented on the Dutch mania for everybody, from the greatest to the meanest, having pictures on their walls.  It’s pretty standard now, that your house isn’t a home until the pictures go up, and now I have a solid sense of where that notion came from.

Katie really enjoyed it.  She particularly enjoyed the paintings with trees, the detail and substance of them. We also agreed that the paintings on copper were the most beautiful, texturally.

I only played Art Troll once, forcing her to stand in front of the Vermeer, telling her that it was the first time in 50 years that a Vermeer had come to Canada and that she bloody well better look at it.

Then we wandered up and down Granville looking at the trendy shoes and clothes, I stepped into Tom Lee for a couple of packs of strings, we had a beer and cocktail (Sex on Wreck Beach, fancy that) respectively at Speakeasy, and headed out for Metrotown where she bought hair gunk and I heard the siren song of new smallclothes.  We parted at Edmonds Station.

Then I went to Planet Bachelor to hang out with Keith and Paul (Keith bailed on karate) and sing and play for a while.  Watched the 1929 documentary about the Peking (4 masted barque) again; I never get tired of watching that. I was very out of kilter and didn’t do anything very well; couldn’t remember lyrics etc.

Katie and I had a very good day, and I get some more Katie, greedy me, when she comes back today and I get my hairs cut.

Then she’s off to the PNE and I’m going to cut grass and tidy the kitchen and put away my laundry (finally) and start figuring out how to transfer the John tape onto another tape so that Phyllis can hear her son singing, and get ready for the small dinner party tomorrow night, which will consist of me, Jeff, Keith, Suzanne, Mike and Paul.

John’s interment in London is tomorrow.  Ruth and John and the kids will be going; I don’t know if any other relatives will be there.

Sundry and Various

I’ve been feeling quite odd for the last few days, like I’m coming down with something.  I can’t be too wobbly – my appetite is unimpaired.  I am also completely uninterested in work, which is why I’ve been doing things like posting bits of humour I worked on 15 years ago.  I wrote a couple of movie reviews.  Saw Bon Cop Bad Cop last night and LOVED IT… I will definitely watch it again.  Jeff is starting to see the value in borrowing movies from the library 🙂

Leo and Linda are in Newfoundland.  Here’s a pic of him playing with an outdoor chess set.

leoplayingchess

Tom L’s mother passed away yesterday. I light a candle for the journey.

The carpet cleaning man came yesterday and removed the smell of dog from our house.  The sofa and love seat and the carpet in the games room were all cleaned; Granny’s carpet went away to be cleaned (and the underlay got hauled away, thanks be, so we don’t have to cut it up and throw it out) and will be back in ten days or less.  Harry gave a vivid description of how the carpet is first put into an interesting machine which beats it with leather straps.  Insert random BDSM comment here.

Paul and Keith are back tonight tomorrow night; I have to jump on my bike and get over and feed Kira.

Pork chops marinated in pear juice and rosemary and then barbecued, and home made tabbouleh for dinner last night.  Jeff said, “What’s fer puddin?'” after this minor feast, and I nearly snarled at him; then remembered we had a frozen peach and raspberry pie, and that it’s actually cool enough to turn the oven on.  So we finished up with pie.

sitting on the back deck blogging and thinkin’ ’bout the King of Pop

Gizmo is sitting on the carpet we’ve had airing on the back deck for a week, Miss Margot is chasing fluff around the deck and being a crazy cat, first batch of waffles is on, and Katie’s coming over later to help motivate me to unpack.  Sometime between now and her arrival I must pick off another song. Time’s a-wasting!  At my age a year goes by like nothing!

On a completely different subject I have been thinking about the cultural reverber-erberations around Michael Jackson’s unfortunate death.  He was fifty and I’m fifty and don’t think I haven’t thought about what he did in his life and with it and what I’ve done with mine.  I am the tape measure for everything I perceive.  I must make a big effort to see things otherwise.

If I was taking 10 Xanax every night, my brother would stage an intervention.  It would take him a long time to work up to it, because he’s a pretty laid back guy and doesn’t stick his nose in other people’s biz without thinking about it in a considered way, but he’d pick up the phone, call the kids and Paul, and get me to a doctor.

The saddest thing about Jackson’s death is the extent to which it reveals how none of his friends thought enough of his one, single, precious life to make more than arm-wavy gestures about his drug use. One of his sisters tried, apparently, and one can only wonder at why she didn’t pick up the phone and call the cops.  He needed to be arrested for the godawful stew of illegally prescribed/obtained drugs he had in his house, and so did every person illegally prescribing and obtaining them on his behalf.

The best case scenario was a Robert Downey Jr. style self-reinvention as somebody who beat addiction and childhood trauma to head to the top of his game.  It would have involved his handlers and psychic moneychangers getting their meretricious mitts away from him and into something resembling honest employment. The worst case scenario was dying like Elvis, which, according to published reports by Lisa Presley, he fully expected to happen.  Kinda like Christ knowing he was going to get it; except in this case a willing offering on the pyre of celebrity.

And, of course, once again I think about this song I wrote, because with each passing day it gets more true.  When I wrote “Zombies stalk the headlines” I wasn’t thinking about MJ’s groundbreaking Thriller video, but if I had a buck for everytime I wrote a sentence in imagination to have it come true in reality (or what passes for my reality, as always your mileage may vary), I could stay drunk on the proceeds for a day.

The drugs Michael Jackson ingested and sought cause oblivion. They completely detach your consciousness from the rest of you.  Whether or not you seek oblivion, it will find you, and I would prefer to get more bang for my life.  If it’s true he raised three hundred million dollars for charity, that is a great thing.  The rest of the story is unbearably sordid, sad, full of missed opportunities, and just plain contemptible in spots.  And the horror, the horror!  Like the Anna Nicole Smith saga which triggered my writing Slimfast and Methadone, this sucker’s going to live on for a long time.  I suspect the lawsuits alone will not be resolved for 10 to 15 years.

Pondfilk

Pondfilk / John’s memorial was great.  A neighbourhood stranger wandered in with his daughter and picked up the guitar and started singing Wish You Were Here and THAT was the point I had to flee.  I like two people singing that.  One of them is me, and the other is Mike, and this guy’s version was raucous and came close to being guitar abuse.

I wandered around the pond, talking to Katie on my cell phone, and cherishing the tech that allows me to do that, and all the men and women who maintain the network… because I could BE there for her while she was crying and unhappy about her life.  I told her to quit worrying so hard about finding a job.  To tell her to stop feeling bad about Dax – who has another girlfriend named Kayla now – is pointless, so I didn’t try that.  And I talked to her for 45 minutes.

My Unca Dave is going back for more radiation therapy in Kelowna next month.  He had a health blowout that sounded, and was, very scary, and I got the description from his own mouth yesterday in a phone conversation.  I chaffed him – people who are quite sick get sick of being treated with a pall of frightened solicitude, so I decided to be bracing, rather than go all, There There on him. 

Paul turned up at Pondside about 7 and we sang and played and talked until about 11, when I hauled him out of  there pleading exhaustion (no, it was some guy playing Wish You Were Here with no delicacy or spirit of overwhelmed longing).  Thank you mOm for putting up with both of us.

Breakfast (porridge and decaf coffee with skim milk and no sugar) has been consumed, and now Paul and I will turn to the great Stack of John’s Books and try to make some sense of them.

Carrie and her spouse John attended, it was lovely to meet John.  They are headed back up to Telegraph Creek soon.  She seems to think I’ll be going up there, but alas, unless I fly most of the way, or somebody gives me a ride in an extremely comfortable vehicle, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell.  The wine was awesome!

Douglas sang Bigfoot.  I updated John’s memorial site… the man who wrote, and taught John, “Hit them in the Bottom Line” Alan O’Dean, was there so I got the skinny on that song and by the blessings of reason, did we make a loud singing noise on the choruses.  Or Chori, as Douglas would say.  Also found out that the Mother Nature song was written by the Berrymans.

It will be sad to see them go.  With John dead, Juliana has little reason to stay in Victoria; she’ll be heading off to Columbus OH sometime later this year.  They have purchased a house there.  They’ll need somebody to stay in the house but she’s hoping to arrange that through church. 

I missed Tom and Peggy by minutes.  Sigh. Her bass on Tapioca is always something to look forward to.

The Devon Rexes, especially Sugar, previously shown on this blog, were in fine form, as was John’s erstwhile cat, Vincent.

Anyway, apart from a little residual sadness from talking to Katie, who really is having a rough go of it if her facebook posts are anything to go by, I am in a really happy, centered place.  So I guess I can be more or less guaranteed that something interesting and challenging is about to happen… cause you know, it never lasts.

Lovely email

I sang Careless at the housefilk and Carly asked me for the tabs.  I may turn into a musician at this rate.  A lot of people love John’s songlist.

I can now sing, or sing and play When you’se a viper, Careless, That godforsaken Hellhole, Long Black Veil, 2&20 Blues, A Christmas Carol (Tom Lehrer), A Fierce Unrest (Don Marquis and Ananias Davisson),  Absolutely Bonkers (Brenda Sutton Three Weird Sisters), Acts of Creation (Cat Faber), Ain’t No Cure For Love (Leonard Cohen), Anna Marie, Cats in the Dawn (Heather Rose Jones), Clem’s Song (Just Call me Clem, Allegra Sloman), Columbus Stockade Blues (actually I got John singing that!),  Demon Java (Steve Key/David Goldfinger), Dirty Movie (Steve Sajich), Don’t Go Looking For Trouble (Steve Goodman), History is Made By Stupid People (The Arrogant Worms), Honky Tonkin’ (Hank Williams), I Can’t Get Over You… (Nate Bucklin), I Pop Pills (Nate Bucklin), I Will Not Sing Along (Actually it’s called the Anti-Singalong Song), I’ll Fly Away, I’ve Been All Around This World (and GOSH did I like Creede Lambard’s version at the housefilk), Jack Frost, Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon, Let’s Go Down to the Water (Willie P Bennett), Livejournal Shanty (Brooke Lunderville), Lost Highway (Hank Williams), Mind Your Own Business (Hank Williams), Nessie, Come Up (Dr Jane A Robinson, the singing paleontologist, who is now James as of 2004), Never Set the Cat On Fire (Frank “You Scum” Hayes), No High Ground (Leslie Fish), One Meatball, One Time Only (Tom Paxton) which I also think that I encouraged John to learn… and nautilus3 and Loki will remember it well, Paint me A picture (David Essig), Paradise (John Prine), Pornographic Pictures of Queen Victoria, Ramboing, Rastus Brown, Show Us The Length (Bob Bossin), Some Other Planet (Joe Hall), Tapioca Song (Allegra Sloman), That Godforsaken Hellhole I Call Home (Austin Lounge Lizards), The 20th Century Is Almost Over  (Steve Goodman), The Jig of the One-Celled Organisms – anon, but John and Paul taught it to me, We Didn’t Know – Tom Paxton, The Word of God (Catherine Faber), Horizontal – Original Sloth Band was who he learned it from (Ken Whitely) but no idea who wrote it.

And I keep updating the songlist, because man o man he knew a lot of tunes.