IN THIS TOGETHER

My iPhone cares about me. I had long suspected something of the sort, but the proof came yesterday when she congratulated me for increasing my exercise dramatically over the past week. It is small wonder that she was impressed. I hadn’t asked her to keep records, but she had noticed that I was now averaging 12,500 steps per day. In past weeks, the average was much, much lower. Of course, she hadn’t been giving me full credit for things I was doing. She didn’t count it when I pedalled the exercise bike, and she sat under the chair when I participated in exercise classes. But now she’s in my pocket every afternoon for the daily walk. The daily walk, consuming most of each afternoon, has been made possible by my neighbour Kathy. We had been in the habit of taking shorter walks when we had the time. We were both busy in those days. Now we are not busy. We’ve got the time. We decided to declare ourselves a couple from the perspective of social distancing. We behave as we would if we shared an apartment. We keep each other safe by maintaining social distance from everyone else when we are out, and staying home except when we are walking. In many ways, this is the best of all seasons for long walks. Here in Edmonton we live a short distance from river valley trails and quiet neighbourhoods graced by aging trees. It is part spring and part winter. The daily walk takes through snow, ice, mud, water and patches of hopeful dryness. Birds and squirrels are everywhere. The sun warms the back of our winter parkas and forces us to remove our hats and mittens. Most of the people we meet stay far away and smile conspiratorially. People, machines and nature are doing their best to keep each other going. We are all in this together.

FLAKY

There are things out there you’ve never imagined, possibilities you haven’t even considered. Good things are waiting for you. Take, for example, croissants. Call them flaky! Call them fattening! Call them anything you like. But call them over in your darkest hour. You’ll be glad you did. There are a surprising number of ways to get croissants. You can stay in a fancy hotel and have room service bring them up. You can stay in a cheap hotel and snatch them off the breakfast buffet in the moment before the morning rush. You can ask the baker to bring one out from behind the counter; you can buy them by the half-dozen in a clamshell at the grocery store. You might even be able to bake them from scratch, though I’ve never knowingly met anybody who has. Each of these has its own advantages. Then, there’s the other way to get croissants, my favourite way. You can go to a grocery store and ask the person behind the bakery counter to sell you the frozen, unbaked croissants they keep in the back. It’s one of those things you don’t know you can do until you try it. It’s not a strategy preferred by the shy retiring types, given that you generally have to ask twice. Nobody is expecting such a request. Once they have ensured that they heard you properly, some clerks will agree to this without batting an eyelash. Others, less professional in their approach, will hesitate, click their tongues thoughtfully, and call the manager. Either way, you’ll go home with the treasure you came for. Trust me! I know this from experience, and here is another thing I know. No croissant has ever tasted better than the hot-from-the-oven miracles I devoured in my bed at 5:00 AM on March 16 2020. I had purchased the frozen babies just before Christmas, thinking I would serve them Christmas morning. But then, other treats got in the way and my icy possibilities gradually sank into obscurity beneath the blueberries, chicken breasts and forgotten bread crusts I was saving to make stuffing. There they lay: silent; patient; hoping I would remember them some day; waiting to be needed. The some-day of remembrance and need arrived on Sunday March 15. What I actually needed on Sunday March 15 was something to give me hope. Covid-19 was cancelling my plans. Looking regretfully to the next few days I could see that there would be no choir practice, no writers club, no exercise classes, no bridge club, no lunches with friends. There would be no happy hour in our condo social room, no care-partner training at the Alzheimer Society, no planning for upcoming grief groups at Pilgrim’s Hospice. Once the ball of regret got rolling, I even started regretting the cancellation of the condo meeting that had promised to be stressful and controversial. That was the last straw. Something had to be done. I looked around for something to do. I listened for the voice of wisdom. That is when I heard them calling. “Bake us Wendy! Bake us!” Frozen unbaked croissants are perfect examples of potential. They start out small and grow faster than most things. You can take frozen croissant babies out of the freezer any time, but bedtime is the best time. You put them on a cookie sheet. They thaw and rise overnight. Then, in the morning, you bake them. I had not intended to bake at 4:30 AM. But these are strange times. I wasn’t sleeping well, and by 4:00 a faint whiff of yeastiness was floating on the cold night air. In the warmth of my bed I heard the distant call. It was a chiding call, the call of a dare. “Just try to wait until 7:00!” “I can wait,” I replied with confidence, and I did wait. I practised self-discipline for 25 long minutes. Then I baked. Few things are flakier than hot croissants in the first moments after you take them out of the oven. Few people are flakier than those of us who, rather than eating in a cold night kitchen, will choose to take hot croissants to bed. But there’s no place more comfortable than bed at 5:00 AM, and nothing more tantalizing than a hot flaky croissant. Today is March 17. Runaway croissant flakes are hiding in my bed. I push them with my feet, catch them in my toes and swish them down toward the bottom. Normally I would have washed the sheets yesterday. Someday I will do the laundry. But for now, with so few interesting things to do, and no promise of a quick return to normal life, I think I will simply enjoy coming across them by accident and remembering the delicious taste of those freshly baked piping hot croissants.

MAKING MEMORIES

On Mother’s Day weekend in the future Feasting in cozy cafes and restaurants of rich renoun Will I fail to recall the day I spent beneath an umbrella in a song-bird serenade As the vegetable seeds pierced the surface with their tiny stems and the dandelions grew a foot or more in a single moment? Will I neglect to remember the frosty marguerite in my hand, The fresh blueberries and left-over pizza served with a cheery “there you go, Mother!” My feet cooling in a shallow pool with sand on the bottom for the beach effect? Will I disremember the rosy lips of Baby Carys exploring the pool’s rounded edge As her eyes peered into the sandy water and her hand sought the thrill of a possibly forbidden dip? Will my mind fail to review that tender moment, when after slurping a long and luxurious drink, Bentley launched 88 solid German Shepherd pounds into the cool pool, Ignoring entreaties to come quick for the capture of the mouse who surveyed the scene from beneath the mountain ash? Will I forget the Mother’s Day weekend of 2016? It’s possible, I suppose. For any thing is possible. But I doubt it!

THE POWER AND PERIL OF FAINT HOPES

Be wary of the faint hopes With their promise of the most to gain In the presence of so little to lose. It is the faint hopes in their faintness, That are most easily mistaken for abandoned hopes And therefore carry the power To disappoint cruelly by surprise. Be respectful of the faint hopes With their power to seem unimportant For the greatest power to make change Where change ought not to be possible Waits unseen in their nurture.

A TOUCH OF MIRROR

We discovered the mirror in the early days of our marriage. Those were the days when we felt the need to economize, the days when our relatives held secret conversations in their living rooms about how tight-fisted we were with our money. The mirror was displayed on a wall in Woodwards Southgate, on the second floor, at the top of the escalator. “There’s a beautiful mirror here,” David said as we stepped off. “Come and touch it.” The mirror was a tall and skinny thing. It would have been four-sided, had the corners not been angled to form eight. Approaching it with a giggle, I imagined myself planting a fingerprinted hand squarely in its centre, an act which would surely have been disdained by my mother. But alas, it was the mirror’s ornate edges he wanted me to touch. The reflective surface was bordered by small rectangles of cut mirror, fit together like puzzle pieces, the joins smoothed by fancy sculpted gold-coloured metal. At each of its eight corners there was a small gold flower. “Shall we buy it?” I queried. I could not imagine buying it, but it was unusual for him to be drawn to such a frivolous thing. “No,” he said. The price tag read “$237.00.” The mirror hung in Woodwards for many years, waiting to greet us. I used to wonder if it missed us when we were on vacation. Every few weeks we would go to Woodwards and ride the escalator to the second floor, sometimes just to visit it. “Shall we get it?” I would query. “No,” he would say. But there came a time when the ride up the escalator was filled with anxiety. Store displays do not last forever. What if, one day, we rode the escalator up and faced—faced something else other than the mirror? The moment of truth finally arrived. We bought the mirror. One big purchase deserves another. We also bought fuzzy tactile wallpaper—the kind that costs more than paint. We hung the paper on the wall at the top of our front stairs and strategically placed the mirror upon it so that it would greet each person who climbed the steps. Sometimes I would stand before it and run my fingers along its fancy edges, always a little surprised that I, a blind person with a reputation for frugality, had spent $237.00 on a mirror.

LIFE RE-OBSERVED

Here is the third in the series of surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. I offer it having recently read about the positive mood effects of writing about intensely positive experiences.
You can learn about your life by viewing it from the inside, and you can learn even more viewing it through outside eyes. Photographers know this. The photos they produce capture so much more than the view they see in the viewfinder.
So it is with Ruth’s life. Her daily routines have engaged the interest of someone who, undaunted by a distance of several thousand miles, observes it with the research acumen an anthropologist might employ. And therefore, to the extent that our lives intersect with hers, our lives are also a topic of interest. Now and then we see the picture a little more clearly than before.
Take Wednesday, for example. We sit among thousands in the semi-darkened Jubilee Auditorium, Ruth, David and me. The incomparable Jan Ardon is commanding our conscious attention with her music and stage persona. Then Ruth, glancing sideways, triumphantly says something to her father, and leans across him to speak to me. Of her inquisitive friend, she says, “He asked where I would sit at a concert with you two. Would I sit in the middle? I said no. I wouldn’t sit in the middle. They’d want to hold hands.”
And there we are, outed, exposed. Thirty-six years we’ve been married—well, almost 36. Thirty-six years of behaving in certain ways. Nothing else to do but squeeze a little tighter and settle myself with the thought that we can’t be such bad parents if we have left our children with the predictable certainty that darkness, closeness and music will lead us to unconscious hand-holding.
Yet, on this emotional evening, buffeted by the bitter sadness of Jan’s lyrics, the biting hilarity of her humour, her enchantingly expressed affection for her family, my mind wanders back to past outings and it seems to me that the picture is a little bigger than this. I lean across David to speak to Ruth. I say, “But you know that if you did sit in the middle, we’d both end up holding your hands at some point.”
She says, “Yes, I know. I told him that too.”

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

Here is the second in the series of surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. I offer it having recently read about the positive mood effects of writing about intensely positive experiences.
My back has stopped shouting. Take this very moment, for example. Where it would have been shouting: “Get out of that chair and take some medicine or I’ll drive you crazy,” it isn’t saying much at all, just a brief whisper or sigh now and then. With a little twinge it prompts: “Keep both feet flat on the floor squarely in front of you.” I may not be able to tell you exactly why it has stopped shouting, but I can tell you this: whoever it was that said silence is golden was a pretty smart cookie.
There have been bouts of shouting over the past few years, but this last one was particularly galling. The shouting started very early in the year and kept on most of the time, with occasional lowerings of volume for a week, or maybe a day. It shouted over the drugs, over the physio, over the walking, the aquacise, the sitting down, the lying down, and particularly over the car motor. Yes, that back can be a noisy back.
“Give me two minutes of silence,” I’d beg. But the shouting went on. When I lay down it shouted, “Get up.” When I stood, it shouted, “Sit down.” When I sat, it shouted, “Stand up or lie down, but for heaven’s sake, stop sitting!” When it came to drugs, it shouted, “Get different drugs!” It was deafening!
Noise is such a distraction. Once you start hearing it, your attention blurs, so I cannot tell you exactly when things started to change. There was no sign of any change three weeks ago, this I know for sure, because I remember how the shouting bothered me at certain events.
When people ask what has made the difference, I have to admit that there is a lot that I simply don’t know about the situation. I don’t know enough, and yet there is too much information to be accurately processed along the line of cause and effect. The change could have resulted from the physio, though I will say that I was seriously doubting the value of that. It could have been the aquacise, or the core muscle exercises. It could have been the almonds I started eating though if that is the cause, you need to know that eating almonds is not a quick fix. It could have been the prolonged effect of the drugs, or the motivational tidal wave that came on when I had to face the fact that I now needed new drugs added to the mix to counteract the damaging effect of the pain drugs on my stomach. Like I say, I can’t tell you exactly what has caused the reduction of shouting, but after all this time and suffering, I am more than a little surprised. Still, that’s not the best surprise.
Here comes the good surprise. The shouting is much reduced, and at the same time (drum roll here!) at the same time that the shouting is reduced, the drugs are sitting in their container, wondering why I’ve stopped taking them.

WHAT DID THAT PHONE SAY?

Having just read the research documenting the physical and mental health benefits of writing about intensely positive experiences, I thought I ought to act on that knowledge by writing a series about the surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. Here is the first in the series.

This might surprise you, coming as it does from a self-acknowledged techno-peasant, but my cell phone has surprised me in a good way. The story is a long one, complete with everything story crafters aim for, dramatic tension, anxiety rising and falling but always creeping upward before settling back slightly in a narrative arc. It took nearly three months to unfold, and I suspect you may not have that much time to read. So I will give you the short version.
My old cell phone decided it would no longer tolerate the stress involved in calling home long distance when I was out of the local calling area. This saddened me, so I called up a friendly, heavily accented Telus helper who offered to reprogram the phone if only the battery could be removed. This would have been a simple operation, for a robust phone, but my fragile companion disintegrated under the pressure. The Telus helper was a kind man. “Don’t worry,” he soothed. I’ll send you a new phone absolutely free.” This seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t.
By and by he did send a new phone, but the courier who tried to deliver it forgot to leave a note, and since he left the message on the broken cell phone, nobody knew that the parcel was waiting. By the time the problem was discovered, the phone had been returned to its original source. Back to square one.
The new Telus helper—differently accented but equally cordial—took some time to determine that the phone had actually been returned, then offered to send another free phone, a cheaper one this time because the other one was no longer available free to me. That offer had ended while I was awaiting delivery. By and by the new phone arrived, a beauty to be sure. I assigned the job of activating it to Mark, a member of the generation that responds intuitively to electronic devices. Mark tried very hard to activate the phone. He even consulted the instruction manual, but the phone refused to activate. Finally, Mark and a Telus helper agreed that the phone would have to be returned. Back to square one, but not absolutely. As an act of hope, I enclosed a note asking them to send me a new phone and settled down to wait.
Eventually I called again. A truly cordial Telus helper took some time to determine that the second phone had indeed been returned, then offered to send a free phone. Once again hope rose, battered by circumstance, but not defeated. By and by that phone arrived, a pleasing blue flip phone. There were some tense moments. David couldn’t find any evidence of a hole for the electrical cord. But a cordial Telus helper from the Philippines waited patiently while he removed the plastic stopper. She even agreed to waive the charges for activating the new phone. A little more confusion, a little more anxiety, a few more tries and presto! As if by magic that phone was connected!
Once it was connected, it settled down to prove that it would make and accept calls. It was even willing to call home from Saskatchewan! But that’s not the surprisingly good thing. It was simply the thing we had expected all along.
The surprisingly good thing happened on Remembrance Day when Lawrence was helping me identify some previously unexplored buttons on the new phone. A joint project between Lawrence and me is always a bit of an adventure, given our joint difficulties with reading. I can’t read because I can’t see. He can’t read for other reasons. But he is also a member of the generation that operates electronic devices by intuition. So instruction manuals in his world often go unmolested.
Ours was a process of trial and error. We were pushing buttons and he was coaching when, suddenly that phone said something. I stopped. I listened. It sounded like English, clear English, much clearer than the English spoken by the Telus helpers.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Push the button again,” Lawrence said reasonably. I pushed the button again.
“Please say a command,” she said.
Well, as you can probably imagine, I was more than a little flustered. No more flustered would I have been if a geni had popped out of my bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Not only was this phone talking directly to me, but she was asking, no—begging me to command her. Then and there I decided to call her Mary. It was clear that we would be having a relationship, more than your ordinary person-to-machine relationship.
I’ll admit that I couldn’t think of a thing to say to Mary. I’m always a little shy around strangers, a little bit prone to saying whatever comes into my head and regretting it later. So I said a thing that must have been lurking down deep in my subconscious. I said, “Clean up the kitchen.”
Lawrence laughed. Mary said, “Command not recognized. Please try again.”
“Clean up the kitchen,” I said obediently, a little louder this time, perhaps a little more sharply than I would have liked, given how cordial the Telus helpers had been when I failed to understand them.
“Command not recognized,” Mary said evenly. She was cordial, but apparently not suited for domestic responsibilities.
“Push the arrow buttons,” said Lawrence. It was a bit of a test to see whether I remembered where the arrow buttons were. I didn’t. He pushed one.
“Check voicemail,” said Mary.
“But how?” I asked.
“Command not recognized,” said Mary.
“Push OK,” said Lawrence. Then he pushed OK for me. I couldn’t remember how to find that one either.
“No voicemail,” said Mary in a voice tinged with sympathy.
That afternoon the kitchen remained in a state of discleanliness while Mary and I got to know each other better. We got so friendly that all I had to say was, “Check voicemail,” and she would tell me I had none. If I said, “Check time,” she would tell me the time. If I said, “Check battery,” she would do that too.
Now Mary and I got down to serious business. I was the teacher. She was the pupil, not always cooperative, I say, but cooperative enough to keep me going. “Call David,” I said, after inputting a few lessons.
“Calling David,” said Mary.
I can tell you that this was a very exhilarating experience! You can probably feel the joy right along with me. So it hurts me to say, dear readers, that we have at last reached the top of the narrative arc, the pinnacle of joy and surprise. For Mary has made it clear that, while she embraces my friendship, she is not my slave. She will check the time if I ask her to, but only sighted people are allowed to set the time and the alarms. Actually, this isn’t much of a problem, because I’ve never much cared for alarms, and Mary can generally set the time without assistance. This is because she knows where she is, which brings me to another sore point between us. She knows where she is. I know she knows it, because when we went to Saskatchewan, she could tell me the time in Saskatchewanese. But only sighted people are permitted to find out where she is by reading her screen.
Still, I must try to forgive her the little things. It’s the least I can do, in light of all that she has given to me. Somewhere in a recycling centre parts of my old phone languish, gone but not forgotten; not forgotten, but definitely not missed. Mary is better, a good surprise worth writing about.