MARCH 11 2020: A SONNET

Shall I recall the final normal day? It dawned a Wednesday morning bright and clear. The day began with friends and bridge to play Some winning, loosing, chatting and good cheer. We stopped at Kingsway Garden Mall for lunch, The food court proffered Julius and fries. I bought a purse, the cheapest of the bunch I’d get another if I’d been unwise. Two friends and I crooned trios by the bed To comfort one whose death was close at hand, And then I packed a bag for days ahead To be with sisters on a visit planned. Free day to go and do whate’er we chose. I say! When will we next have one of those?

FINDING HOPE HAIKU IN THE TIME OF COVID

Reading with children Facetime is the next best thing When snuggling is out. Walking with Kathy To be outside where life is So spectacular. People delighted By an unexpected call I happened to make. Call from a cousin Who lives in Ontario Remembering me. Grateful for wellness And grocery delivery A home that I love. Making up stories Wednesdays are the send-out days Getting letters back. Balcony pansies Pandemic insensitive Blooming like crazy Media searching For good news to give us hope And give them hope too. Choosing not to clean Because I know there will be Time for it later. Choosing to clean now Because I know I will be Glad I did later. Thinking of places I’m glad not to be in now And those I still love. Sweet whiff of supper Slow cooking tantalizing While I watch Frasier Counting on science Admiring the leadership Of our officials Dreaming a future When this time will be the past That made us all wiser.

AUDACIOUS HOPERS HOPE FOR THINGS

Audacious hopers hope for things No practical person would dream of hoping for, Things we are certain can never happen Given the current circumstances. Audacious hopers drive us crazy Because they simply will not listen To our predictions about the future. Audacious hopers are in denial! There’s nothing quite so irritating As trying to protect audacious hopers From the disappointment we’re afraid they will face. Audacious hopers test our courage! BUT: Audacious hopers change the world And when they do we call them heroes. We buy magazines with articles about them And hire them to make motivational speeches. When audacious hopers tell their stories About the people they met on the journey, I’d rather be named as the one who supported Than mentioned as the barrier who had to be thwarted.

NORMAL THINGS ARE STILL HAPPENING

There comes a day, a few days after the March equinox, when the sun directs a morning beam into my bedroom. It happens just after 7:30 and lasts a minute or so, just after the northerly sun rises enough to peak out from between some buildings on the next block, Just before it angles up to hide itself behind The Athabascan next door. The conditions for observing this phenomenon have to be exactly right. You might miss it the first day or even the second. You’d never see it if you weren’t in the bedroom. You wouldn’t see it on a cloudy morning. I saw it on April 2, 2020. I wasn’t looking for it. I was just talking to myself about getting out of bed and there it was! A ray of hope projected itself across the room from the angled window by the bathroom sink to land on the wall by the mirror over the dresser. “Normal things are still happening,” I said to myself. “This is only one of them.” I know a woman who gave birth to a healthy child in the maternity ward of a local hospital. Pigeons are circling our building, looking for friendly balconies. Neighbours are still spreading rumours. Friends are still making me laugh. Neglected friends are still delighted when I remember to call them. Pandemic buzz is consuming us all. Everybody seems to be talking about the new normal. I am taking some comfort from noticing evidence for the old normal. Perhaps I shall be a little more conscious of watching the morning sun as it alters its trajectory, lingering a bit longer every day until the summer solstice signals a reverse of fortune. It’s part of the old normal that will secure me. Here, in my new normal, I’ll have the time to notice it.

PATIO PARADISE (Nursing Home Life part 4)

A few years ago our daughter Ruth looked out over the floral profusion on our veranda and front yard and declared: “You people have a flower problem!” We laughed. She meant: “You have a ridiculous number of flowers out there.” I am happy to report that there is good news on this front. We still have the flower problem, only it’s smaller now. A flower problem, so it is said, occupies the space you give to it. On a magnificent June morning I step out on our Laurier House patio. The scent of flowers is positively intoxicating. Deep breaths now, deep breaths. What am I smelling this morning? Is it one of the two varieties of stocks, the alyssum, the bright yellow pansies kissed by the sun? It is probably not the heliotrope, whose fragrant best will emerge some time nearer to mid-day, and it’s not the roses which won’t be open for another day or two. It wouldn’t be the fuchsia or the begonia. They specialize in beauty rather than fragrance. Whichever it is, it smells fantastic! Small patios, I say to myself, have some advantages over large ones. The scents collect and support each other. Then they rush at you in joyous welcome when you step over the doorsill. It’s our second June at Laurier House, our first June with a patio. The two-bedroom suite we occupied last June did not have a patio. So we moved at the end of winter when this one became available. For people who have long been known for a flower problem, this is a definite improvement. Our living room opens to a cozy patch of concrete where I now pet my pansies and stroke my stocks. Tucked in the elbow between the front of the living room and the side of my protruding bedroom, our little patio peeks out through the spaces between the evergreens that shelter it from the bustle of the walk way and parking lot beyond. It’s cool enough to embrace a buffet breakfast on hot summer mornings; warm enough at mid-day to enjoy audio books on cooler days; shaded against the heat of the late afternoon. You can enjoy a glass of wine with friends there before supper. How, I wonder, did I ever get through last summer without this tiny refuge? Last summer this suite belonged to a married couple named Paul and May. I would have been fiercely jealous of them if I had known how a moment out there could transport me into the state of paradise. Unbeknownst to us, they were avid gardeners. Not limited to flowers, they had bonsai trees out there, and tomatoes Paul passed away last winter and his wife May moved out. Without Paul to care for, she no longer needed Laurier House. They left us not only a patio, but a supply of pots and fertilizer that gradually revealed themselves as the spring sun melted the snowbanks. They also left us a social bonus that we had not anticipated. To our surprise, the staff seem as excited about our patio as we are. If we happen to be out there when they come in on an errand, they join us and stop for a chat outside. If they don’t have a job to do, they might stop by anyway. First they admire our flowers. “Just look at that basket of yellow! Oh, what fabulous roses! Let me look at the tag so I can get one with those beautiful colours.” Then they reminisce about Paul and May. “Paul and May had this patio full of garden,” they say. “They had so many tomatoes.” Our hearts are warmed by the attachment they obviously feel. It’s like a promise that we too will be fondly recalled. If they come upon us having breakfast out there, or listening to an audio book, they smile with delight and linger a few moments to celebrate the day. Happiness in this place is a reciprocal process where all parties make contributions to the well-being of the others. I step out onto the patio a dozen times a day, sometimes for an hour with David, most of the time by myself for a moment of pleasure. Most of the days have been warm enough to allow David to spend some time out there too. “I wouldn’t be using this patio if you weren’t here,” he says to me, and he is right about that. He would not be able to move his wheelchair over the ramp and through the door. But we are a team, as we have been since the spring of 1972. Over the years our team member responsibilities have shifted depending on the circumstances. Of all the jobs I currently do, the act of guiding David over the ramps to have breakfast among the flowers is my definite favourite.

GONE

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” --Joni Mitchell I awoke with the robins, flexed my ankle a bit, flexed it again to relieve the stiffness in my foot, and then the truth began to sink in. it was gone. That hulking, gray, plastic-and-Velcro-and-felt monstrosity with the airbags you pump up with a space-age rubber football-shaped balloon that has inflation/deflation tubes on either end was gone from my bed. It was gone from my foot. It hadn’t gone far. It was, after all, standing meekly beside the bed, waiting for to brace me for the trip to the bathroom. So it wasn’t really gone if you insist on seeing the big picture of gone, but in the little picture it was gone. And with it went a tiny sliver of my personal gloom. With that huge airboot standing on the floor, there was room in the bed under the blankets to flex my ankle. With a bit of that gloom out of the way, there was room for a little hope. “Gone from the bed today, gone to the storage closet for used aircasts in a month or so,” said the hope. “And what about me,” whined the gloom. “Will I even be missed?”

WHERE IS THE HOPE TALK?

I am hoping Obama will start talking about hope again when the American Democratic convention gets going this week. I am waiting for it, listening with a pricked ear for the mention of it in the mainstream media. To tell the truth, I’ve really missed hearing about hope lately. We’ve been hearing less about hope than we did four years ago. I am not party to any information that would explain the change. Did the advisers suggest that talking about hope would not be helpful? Is it because people sneered at the explicit mention of hope? Is Obama less hopeful than he was, given a four-year dose of reality? I listened for explicit talk of hope in last week’s coverage of the American Republican Convention. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear the word. I thought this peculiar, given how effective the hope talk proved in getting their opponent elected last time. I thought maybe they’d pick it up somehow. To be fair, if hope wasn’t explicitly mentioned, there was an implicit reference that might be perceived as hopeful. There was a lot of talk about “Getting America back on track”. The tug of nostalgia was employed as a forward force. Back, it seems to me, is the operative word here. It suggests that America was once on track, and then it wasn’t. It suggests that the future will be good once you go back to where you were. The fundamental difficulty with this, from the shared perspectives of both hope and reality, is that the track you want to go back to is the track that got you to where you are now—a place you don’t want to be. Who, having thought carefully about it, would really want to take that journey again? The thing I most like about explicit hope talk is that it seems to open up the question of how things can be different, and then requires an evaluation of just how you want things to be. But you can’t stop there. You have to look back to find evidence that things can change. The evidence gives you the motivation to do what you have to do. When hope talk shaped the rhetoric of Obama, he crafted stories that would give voters hope. The mention of hope compelled him to address two populations, the population who was served by the old track, and the population who was excluded. He managed to appeal to both, and they voted for him. Talking about hope is hard work. The easy part is thinking of things to hope for. The hard part is finding the reasons that legitimize the sense of hope. But the whole thing is worth the effort because when people hope, they are more apt to act. Even the most inspired president cannot run a country alone. Like the guide on a white water raft, a president can best steer the raft through the rapids when the people take up the direction and paddle together towards it. As a hope scholar, I like to be able to watch what happens when people make an effort to employ hope in any endeavour. Given how the campaign went four years ago, I had expected to hear more about it this time. I hope I will not be disappointed.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Two people sent emails early on Wednesday morning with stories to bolster my hope. I hadn’t asked either of them for that. Nevertheless, they had chosen the best possible day.
There are days when I really need somebody to tweak my hope. Wednesday was one of those. I was giving two hope presentations, one at the George Spady Centre, the other to the ATA Guidance Council. I was planning to say that you have to pay attention to hope, to notice it in amongst everything else. And there, offered on a silver platter, were two things I could notice—two things that gave me hope.
Jim had sent an article from the Globe and Mail. Secret Santas paying off strangers’ layaway accounts
Generosity, according to the story, had started with one person and gone viral, the way the urge to burn police cars tends to go viral in a riot. It happened in a store in Michigan, where an anonymous shopper paid off some debts for others. Publication of the story set off a trend of copycat behaviour in other stores, stores in other states. The very idea that generosity could be contagious was highly hope-enhancing, given all the Black Friday, threaten-and-crush news we’d been hearing, given the expectation that Black Friday behaviour will soon be present not only in the U.S., but also here in Canada. That alone would have been enough to put me in the mood for a presentation. But there was more.
David sent me a letter to the editor that appeared in The Edmonton Journal. Raise would close salary gap
Accompanying the letter was a note that said: “You could have written this.”
What he meant, but had not said, goes something like this. “Wendy, here is a completely straight-up no-nonsense letter saying something you’ve been harping about since the early 1970’s—that we can reduce the wage gap any time we choose to do so by giving equal dollar raises instead of percentage raises.”
It was affirming to know that one person has been listening to me. It felt good to see it written so plainly. It sounded good to hear somebody else say it. It gave me hope that we might actually begin to do something about the wage gap—some day. All this hand wringing about how we need to reduce the wage gap, need to reduce the need for food banks--gets a little tiring.
I do hope I will soon begin speaking out about one possible solution—to somebody other than David.

GOING YOUR WAY

"Tell me about a time," says hope professor Dr. Denise Larsen, "when something was going your way, only you didn't know it." It's a hope cue, an invitation to remember an incident and then to believe that something you don't know about might be going your way at this very moment.

In October of 2006 David and I vacationed in Nashville after attending a storytelling festival in Jonesborough. I recorded the following on this blog.

We were walking toward to Saturday morning farmer’s market in Nashville Tennessee when a loud booming voice drew our attention.  It’s Abraham Lincoln,”
said my husband.  And sure enough, there was Abe, addressing an audience seated on folding chairs in the sun. 

 What a man he is!  Dead a hundred and fifty years and still riveting audiences, still making people stop their journey and sit down to listen! 

 And what was he doing there?  Well, defending himself I would say.  After all, he was speaking to a Tennessee audience.  Tennessee was not on his side
of the American Civil war.  And he was also spreading hope, inspiring it in the adults, enacting it with the children. 

 He told us how firmly he believed that the slaves must be freed, how painful it was to have so many of his wife’s relatives fighting for the south.  He
got out his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, and delivered it with such trembling passion that I had to search for a tissue because tears came
to the eyes of this previously disinterested Canadian tourist.

 Suddenly he changed pace and began to enact a message of hope to the children in the audience.  First, he encouraged them to stay in school so that they
might benefit from the best America has to offer.  Then he drew them from the audience.  To Emily he said: Ï hope that, in your lifetime, we will have
the first female president.” To Jim he said: Ï hope that in your lifetime we will elect the first African-American president.”  He also wants an American-Indian
president, but he thinks that might take one more generation.

 When he had finished, we left our chairs and resumed our stroll among the vegetables.  But his message stayed with us, grounded in the past, delivered
in the present, showing a hopeful way for the future. 


 
I will never forget that sunny Saturday, first because it left me hopeful, and second, because our imaginary abe was talking theoretically, hedging his bets. He was thinking about a far-off future. He was choosing the youngest people in the crowd and promising a black president or a female president some time in their lives. There was no mention that it could happen in just two years. Who knew? Who would have dared to publicly predict such a thing?

Sometimes things are going your way, only you don't know it.

NOT TO MISS A MOMENT

Yesterday, when we were playing games after eating, discussing how many layers we would need to wear when taking Pirate for a walk, Margaret said she hated to go to bed because sleeping would end the Christmas holidays more quickly. Others might have thought this strange. I understood it completely. Christmas holidays are a friend of mine.
My love affair with Christmas holidays started long ago, perhaps when I started school, maybe even before that. And throughout my working career it has been my great privilege to be allowed time off around Christmas and New Year’s. My deepest sympathies extend to people who cannot choose to have time off. For them I would gladly permit the closure of stores, and I’d wish for wellness to cut the demands on hospital staff, and I’d wish for strong water and power lines to give utility workers the pleasures I’ve known.
Not everyone loves Christmas holidays the way I do. Others who have the choice say it’s good to work around Christmas and New Year’s. You can get a lot done, they say, with so few people in the office and the phone not driving you crazy. You can get more value for your days, they say, because the powers that be are apt to close the place down early. The logical side of me understands these principles completely. Still there’s nothing logical about my love for Christmas holidays. The experience is unabashedly emotional. So emotional is it that, even though I love working, I start looking forward to Christmas holidays—well, some time in October at the latest.
It’s the mornings I look forward to, dark mornings when the outside lights come on at 6:00 with the automatic timer, brightening our bedroom, and I hear Pirate barking at the newspaper delivery, then turn over to pretend it isn’t really morning yet.
It’s the afternoons I look forward to, walking Pirate in the sunshine. Can it really be –30? Feels like –28, or maybe even –25. It’s the evenings I look forward to, night after night of socializing with family and friends until I think I just cannot stand one more dinner, and then there is yet another dinner. There’s the presents on Christmas morning, and whatever happens New Year’s Eve, and the Boxing Day leftovers. I love it all.
Don’t misunderstand me. Christmas holidays are not perfect, in fact they are far from it. But this is the season when, despite the war and tragedy that annually occupies the newscasts, things seem somehow fixable. There is family tension, always family tension, but there is also good will to mitigate the worst of it. There’s over-eating, so much over-eating, and there are good intentions for weight losing in the new year. There is game-playing, all kinds of games, with a lot of game-losing to help build character. There is cold weather, usually cold weather anyway, and doesn’t that promise to stop the pine beetle from reproducing?
Oh I love Christmas holidays! I’ve tried to explain how much I love them, but Margaret said it better than I ever have. Is it any wonder that Margaret and I just want to stay up, to savour every last hour, even though we really like to work?

BANANA DISCOVERY

Here is some information you may, or may not have. If you take a banana, (it has to be fairly ripe, though not squishy) peel it, then pinch gently on one end, the banana will divide lengthwise into three long, curving, beautiful banana sticks. Of course, I am aware that you probably already knew this. Everybody seems to have known it, except, that is, for me. And my question is: Why wasn’t I told?
Is it because I am not curious enough? Surely I could not have been expected to find this out on my own! That would have required playing with my food, an activity frowned upon by the adults of my childhood.
Or was I deliberately left out of the loop? This seems unlikely. Try as I might, I certainly cannot think of any reason why the truth should have been hidden from me. It’s not as if I have a history of cruelty to bananas.
The truth slipped into my sphere of awareness. It came so softly, so unobtrusively that I might have missed it had I been daydreaming. I first heard rumblings of it while having lunch with my colleagues. “What did you say?” I queried, rousing myself from visions of an afternoon nap. “A banana will divide lengthwise into perfect thirds? Describe to me the exact process.” I assumed they were pulling my leg (they are prone to antics like that). But they described a process, and insisted it could work. . I’ll confess it. I didn’t believe them. Trouble is, they’ve been right in the past.
I recalled how the friend of one of my friends convinced my friend that you could boil water in a paper bag over an open fire. He said it wasn’t easy. You had to start with a very hot fire so the water could boil quickly. It was, he said, a race against time. I recall how vehemently I argued. I said the bag would catch fire. Then I reasoned that the water would soak right through it. He praised my deductive skills (I am a sucker for flattery). Then he said that explained why you had to hurry. It is just possible that I believed him for a moment. Tricksters are everywhere. My friend believed him more than I did. I’ve mentioned it to a lot of people over the years. None of them believe it.
But the banana thing? Well, I just couldn’t tell for sure. And so, on the off chance that there might have been some substance to it, I asked David a tentative question about the nature of bananas. He answered me calmly. He said you could split a banana in three by squeezing its tip. He offered to show me. I didn’t know what to think when the experiment did not work on my breakfast banana. He said maybe the banana had to be riper.
Then, yesterday, all by myself, I peeled a banana and deftly but gently pinched its tip. Voila! Three long, perfect, curving banana sticks. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of bronzing them. I almost called my friend in Vancouver to ask her if she believed a banana would split in thirds if you gently squeezed its tip. Then I remembered that it was only 5:30 AM in Vancouver, so I gazed at them in a prolonged rhapsody of wonder. . They were so exquisite I could hardly eat them, though I will say that they formed a lovely pattern on my toast.
Now I am wondering what other amazing discoveries await me. This morning I spoke to a green pepper in the vegetable compartment of the fridge. “What secrets have you been keeping from me?” I asked. I tapped its top, massaged its middle. I bonked its bottom. Nothing happened, no change I could determine at the time, anyway. But it could be that the results have a delayed effect. Science is like that. It’s a lot easier to interpret a result once you know what result you are expecting. And then again, it may be that I aimed my inquiry at the wrong source. I didn’t hear about the banana miracle from a banana.
If there’s an extra spring in my step this morning it is because a window of possibility has opened for me. A lot of things are possible. I can’t tell you what they are. Nobody has told me yet. Well, maybe people have been telling me and I haven’t believed them. I didn’t actually try the thing with the paper bag. I don’t know if I will. Opportunity may be limited. I am hardly ever left all alone with a paper bag, a cup of water and a very hot open fire.
This I can say for sure. In 2009 I will be keeping my ears open for unsolicited tips on the nature of green peppers, or red peppers, or any other facts that have been kept from me all these years.

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS MORE OF: HOPE

Today I got a letter from Wilma Clark. It said, “You are what the world needs more of—hope.” I don’t think I could claim to be hope itself, but I do confess to being a great supporter of hope, and I totally agree with Wilma that hope is what the world needs more of.
There are those who disagree with me. They are saying that the world needs common sense, the wisdom of the free market, solutions to all its problems, the annihilation of certain destructive elements. Some are even saying that hope is destructive. Some say it’s a waste of time.
But I still like hope. I like to hear Obama talk about it. I like to know that there is a guy next door who wants to talk about working together to make a better world. I like to hear how he doesn’t blame anybody. It gives me hope.
Of the leaders in my own country, at this time when they are taking a rest, this is what I would like to say.
Let's put all four leaders in one room and ask them hope questions. Each question must be answered with the words I hope.
What kind of country do you hope canada will be?
What do you hope Canadians will have?
How do you hope they will interact with each other?
What do you hope Canadians will do?
What do you hope other nations will say about Canada?
What do you hope to achieve in Afghanistan?
What do you hope other countries will say about Canada's environmental policy?
What do you hope historians will write about your contribution to Canada?
What do you hope will be your proudest accomplishment at the end of your career?
I hope this experiment will some day be tried. I believe it would raise debate to a mush higher level. You will notice that this approach asks for no
promises, no action plans. It will be much criticized for this. It will be called pie-in-the-sky, derided as impractical. But I believe the hopes will
direct the actions.

PAST WARS AND FUTURE LEADERS

November 12 is different for me this year—different because I am still remembering November 11. For as long as I can remember I have spent November 11 doing what the media have asked me to do—remembering the sacrifices of soldiers and their families, gratefully appreciating my own personal freedoms. What I did on past Novembers 12 I frankly have no idea.
But today I am remembering yesterday—not because I reconnected with the soldiers and the wars, though certainly I did do this—but because I also held Baby Matty, 2 days old, weighing in at 6 pounds 10 ounces. What I noticed as I cradled her was that I felt hopeful, hopeful for the future. It felt strange. Hope is something I do not usually feel on November 11. Though I don’t dispute the importance of remembering the sacrifices of the soldiers and their families, I try hard to hope there will be no more wars. While others see this hope on November 11, I have yet to be convinced that remembering past wars helps us prevent future wars. Holding Matty, for whom anything is currently possible, I really did wonder, if more of us held more babies, came closer to the perfect hope of an unfolding life at its very beginning, would we be more motivated to work harder to prevent the wars that cause so much pain?

THE LIVES OF WITCHES AND WALDOS

Last Friday night Susan and her friends dressed up as Waldos and Wendas from the "Where's Waldo" books. There were 3 Waldos and 4 Wendas (Waldo's female friend) and 1 Odlaw (the barely known evil Waldo). They painted striped shirts, sewed red and white hats, and bought cheap glasses. I never saw them, but I heard about it from Susan. It was Halloween. Dressing up is a tradition for Susan and her friends. One year they went as five bowling pins! I, in contrast, dressed up as Wendy. It’s what I do every year on Halloween—a tradition, you might say.
Susan says it’s fun to dress up, and even more fun to have a photo session with your friends before you leave for the party. That’s the jolly time, the optimistic time, the hour when you feel connected yet certain of your uniqueness. If there are going to be other Waldos at the party, you don’t yet know it.
Those to whom I am connected, in contrast, tend not to photograph me on Halloween. Admittedly there’s not much to photograph, seeing as how I look like the same Wendy you’d photograph any other day, except for wedding days when there tend to be a lot of photos of me dressed up, and Christmas mornings when the focus is on the gift I am holding not the outfit I am wearing. When I was a kid I used to dress up as a witch. I wore an old black cape and a pointy hat my mother made of cardboard and crepe paper. The hat had an elastic that hurt my chin. One year I wore the hat without the elastic. It was windy that year. Windy years and calm, I believe I was always a witch. I don’t believe there are any photos to prove it. I liked being a witch. What else can I say?
There is, however, one photograph of me on Halloween. I am an adult in the photograph. My mother was not around to make me a pointy hat, and hat-making has never been a talent of mine, so David made me a hat. It was a memorable evening. I went as a sunflower. I don’t recall the party, but I do remember putting on the costume and feeling like—like—like a sunflower, bright and perky, an unusual situation for a sunflower on Halloween in Edmonton, just about as unusual as Wendy in a costume.
Susan is my niece. She probably wouldn’t have written to me had I not begged her to do so. She used to write to me when she was travelling and I have found that life gets a little bit boring without her letters. The subject of her letter (because it was an email it had a subject) was: An Update On Susan’s Life In Edmonton. She would not likely have mentioned the Waldo costumes, were it not for the fact that she was finding it a struggle to think of interesting things to tell me about her everyday life—going to work, evening classes etc. The costumes were something a little different, a little more interesting. It got me to wondering how much Susan knows about my daily life. Probably very little. If she were to ask what I’d been up to lately, I’d probably say Not much. Then I’d think up the only extraordinary thing that’s happened to me in the past month and tell her about it. The rest of the details I would leave for her to take for granted.
I am told that archaeologists develop a passion for knowing the ordinary details of lives lived in the past. They dig and scrape and survey and catalog in a frenzied attempt to figure out what people ate for breakfast, how they cooked it, and why their neighbours a hundred miles away ate something different. Most of the details are fashioned through informed speculation which may, or may not be well-informed. I wonder how many of these same archaeologists go home after a hard day’s work, never stopping to notice the details of their own daily lives, never quite taking the time to catalog them for the educational benefit of future archaeologists. The relative interestingness of current detail is subject to many variables, distance and familiarity being two.
Come to think of it, Halloween is not the only event which is under represented in our photo albums. I wonder if there is a single picture of me cooking supper, or doing the dishes, or shopping for groceries, or getting on the bus at Corona Station. Future photo lookers will undoubtedly conclude that I opened a lot of presents and took a lot of vacations. Will they think I had a full-time cook? And if they deduce that routine events were seldom photographed, how will they explain the presence of only one sunflower photo? Will they surmise that I probably dressed up as a sunflower on a regular basis, thereby rendering the event unworthy of further recognition?
After so many hours of listening while sad people tell me what they believe to be the interesting parts of their life stories, I think I am developing an appreciation for both the exceptional and the normal. We need the normal to keep us grounded, to give us security. We need the exceptional to shake us up occasionally, to change our position in life. Exceptional things throw us off balance and increase our core strength. It is the core strength that gives us the ability to re-establish our balance. Too bad we fall into the trap of thinking that the normal is boring.
I myself am pretty attached to normal, though I admit to an occasional rash decision based on the need to break the pattern. Had I received Susan’s letter last week, I likely would have vowed to dress up on some future Halloween, not because I like dressing up, not even because that sunflower costume was comfortable. Heaven knows I can still remember sweating like a sprinkler under the brown polyester centre while trying to relieve the future scalp blisters by fiddling with the poky petal-wires. But when I read Susan’s letter I immediately felt the connectedness, that moment of fun when you and your friends get to laughing and taking pictures.
How grateful am I that another letter, one that arrived on Halloween, threw me off balance, thereby saving me from the tyranny of the costume Susan’s letter would undoubtedly have inspired! The letter came from Linda. It was a thank-you letter. In farewell it said: Happy Halloween Wendy, the good witch of North Riverdale! I only met Linda recently. She doesn’t know I used to be a witch. She doesn’t even know about my brief stint as a sunflower! She probably thinks I never dress up on Halloween. But when I read that letter I felt really connected. And just for a minute I felt like a kid again, pointy hat and all, counting up the candy.

HOPE KIT

Today I am making a hope kit, a collection of objects associated with my hope. It’s the first hope kit I have ever made, which is rather surprising, given that people were making hope kits before I started working at the Hope Foundation, and I have been working here for 13.5 years. Hope kits are like first-aid kits, or picnic baskets. You put stuff into them and then later you get the stuff out. You open your hope kit when you are hungry for hope, or when your hope needs to be repaired. Like I said, I’ve never made a hope kit.

But tonight I will be asking a group to make hope kits, and they might not understand how to make one, and they might think it’s a stupid idea. So I am making a hope kit to show them. As I gather stuff together I am thinking about past, present and future. I am thinking about people, places and things. I am avoiding anything I hate, like decorating special containers, which is one of the things hope kit experts suggest is meaningful to people when they make hope kits. It’s not that I think you shouldn’t decorate a container and call it your hope kit. It’s just that I hate decorating containers. So I have chosen to use a bag I was given at a dinner a few years ago. It’s so hard to know what to do with all those extra bags people give you. Now I’ve found a good use for one. I’d tell you what’s on the bag, but to tell you the truth, I once asked somebody to tell me, and they told me, but I can’t remember. It’s something Hopey, I know. The dinner where I got the bag was a hope dinner.

Here’s what’s in my bag—my hope kit.

A small pine cone. Just last week I sent a group of care-givers out on a walk to look for hope. One of the walkers picked up this cone and handed it to me, along with $15 to pay for a book called It All Begins with hope. I would have been pleased even if it wasn’t so easy to see the hope in a pine cone. I was out of town and I would have had to carry home all the books that didn’t sell that day. A pine cone isn’t nearly as heavy as a book.

Key Elements of Hope-Focussed Counselling. the first and only book I ever wrote. Some day I might write another. But if I don’t, it won’t be so bad, knowing I wrote one.

Finding Hope, Ways To See Life In A Brighter Light. the book I most often sell. It’s just a little book of pictures and short essays about hope. I saw it in draft form and to be honest, I thought it was a bit fluffy. But after it was published, so compact, so real, I suddenly realized that it was a little book I could give to anybody, knowing that they could read any page and start a conversation with me about hope.

This Little Light of Mine. That’s a book with a story of mine published in it.

A little wooden flute Lawrence bought me in Jasper. Lawrence rarely buys gifts, and he was thinking of me.

A shiny oriental flute David bought me in the Philippines. He said it sounded so beautiful when the man played it in the store that he knew I had to have it. Every time I try to play it, I think of how beautiful it must have sounded.

A laughing cup mark gave me. I can just imagine him in the store saying, I have to get this for my mom. Every time I turn it on it makes me laugh. Where there’s laughter, there’s hope.

A picture of Ruth that Ruth gave me. I was never gorgeous, but I do have a gorgeous daughter, and she’s even smart and generous as well.

A harmonica I bought for $4.95. I bought it at a gift shop in Nashville. Tennessee is a hotbed for two of my passions, music and storytelling.

Hopey, my first-ever hope-opotamus. Gary gave him to me as a gift of thanks, and I later gave him to my mom. He stayed with her in the hospital and she told me stories of the adventures they shared. When she died I got Hopey back, and I have the stories to go with him.

This is the seven-minute version of a hope kit, things I could pick up without wondering why. There are a million other things that could go in. I’d have a story for each of them. But you don’t have to put stories in a carrying bag. You carry them with you always, and I like stories, which helps to explain how I’ve worked at the Hope Foundation for 13.5 years and never made a hope kit—until today. .

LEAVING LEAVES

When the kids were little, and Daddy would rake the leaves into a huge pile, I would say: “leave them for a day, so the kids can jump in them.”

And last week, when Mark raked the leaves into huge piles, and his dad said, “Think you for raking up those leaves. I’ll get some bags”, I said, “Remember when you kids used to jump in the leaves?” Mark said he remembered, but he didn’t say, “Let’s jump in the leaves, Mom.”

But I am getting wiser as I am getting older. A plan is surely taking shape. The next time there’s a kid in the yard at leaf-raking time, no matter who has raked the leaves into huge piles, I will say, “Could you leave the leaves for a day so we can jump in them?”

DISTRACTED BY HOPE

I had intended to write an essay
On despair and its relationship to computers
With reference the way my scanning program crashes
And the fact that my emails to my sister are rejected.

But then I was sidetracked with writing instead
A poem about my writers community
A community I hoped for but never had
Until I started keeping a blog
And reading the healing stories list serve.

A happy ending in many respects
Since hope is better than despair
And poems are shorter than essays.

FOLLOWING THE HOPE TRAIL

I followed a hope trail early today
Over to Ed South 221
Where the university class on hope
Has been taught in winter on Tuesday evenings
Sustained for three years running.

And even though a hundred other classes have been taught there
Day after day, year upon year,
The bulletin board at the back of the room
Stands resplendent with cheery cartoons,
Serious poetry, powerful sayings,
Mobiles depicting theoretical models
Of hope from an academic perspective.

How has it happened that this hopeful display
Accumulated over three years of classes
By students depicting their passion for hope
Persists unassaulted by cleaners or vandals
To welcome this year’s hope class?

A BLIND PERSON CELEBRATES CROSSING THE STREET

Many thanks to the City of Edmonton for installing an audible traffic signal on Rowland Road at 89 Street. This retrofit to the visual signal makes a huge difference to me. For the first time ever, I now feel confident that I am crossing to my bus stop at the appropriate time. I also want other blind people to know that this new signal is there so they can use it when they pass by, though I haven’t yet figured out how to communicate it to them.

Although many Edmontonians believe that these signals are installed wherever they are needed, this is not the case. Audible signal installation has received minimal attention compared, for example, to curb ramps. I am told that the current plan calls for installation of only three per year, and since new lights are not equipped when they are installed, the possibility of making all walk signals accessible to blind people gets further out of reach each year.

Though budget limitations are a contributing factor, the responses I got when requesting the signal show how the situation is made worse by the persistence of myths about blind people. Officials use these myths to defend policies when blind people ask for signals. In turn, we blind people are silenced by these myths. Having spent so much time trying to gain acceptance by proving ourselves, it is difficult for us to change gears and admit to our needs.

When I asked for the audible signal, I was told that the CNIB could solve my problem. This is a myth, though the official who told me this believed absolutely that it was true. Contrary to popular belief, the excellent training provided by the CNIB does not take the place of knowing when the signal changes. Like sighted people, blind people need a signal that tells them when to walk. The CNIB trainers are sighted. They teach blind people how to guess when the signal has changed. They watch the walk signal, and they pull you back if the traffic conditions don’t allow you to guess accurately. After they leave you, you’re on your own.

When I insisted that the CNIB could not solve my problem, I was told that blind people have a sixth sense which they use to cross Edmonton streets. Unfortunately this is not true in my case. I only have four senses, the number that sighted people have when they cover their eyes. If you think blindness gives you a sixth sense, try guessing at walk signals with your eyes closed several days in a row. You will still be able to peak to make sure you got it right.

When I confessed to having only four senses, I was told that the street I live on would never be a priority because it makes sense to spend limited resources on putting signals in central locations. In fact, signals are needed in central places, but these are usually the places where you can get help from other pedestrians. It is near your own home, where traffic is irregular and the streets are empty of pedestrians that you generally cross unaided on a daily basis.

When I argued that it would be difficult for me to reach a central location without leaving home, I was told that the neighbours complain about the noise when audible signals are installed. No numbers were produced to show the extent of the complaining, but I took their word for it and offered to reduce the chances by doing some P.R. work in my neighbourhood. No response was made to this offer.

I will admit that I was discouraged. I thought it would be impossible to influence a system that seemed so disinterested. I likely would have given up had it not been for the unwavering support of some people who love me.

The good news is that the City installed an audible signal that doesn’t make any noise unless you keep it pressed for about five seconds. . I am absolutely delighted with the 89th Street signal, though I don’t understand why this quiet version is automatically de-activated between 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM. Still, I hold out the hope that policy changes can be achieved, another reason for writing this piece. We have organizations that could be taking an active role, using information to shape policy change—the City’s advisory committee on disability services, and the CNIB, to mention two. The city’s advisory committee has begun to show an interest kin the past year. And though it takes both work and courage to make even a small change amid the apathy and ignorance that holds things back, individuals do have the ability to make a difference.

Today I joyfully crossed the street after getting off at my local bus stop. Had it not been for the audible signal, I would not have known that the light had changed. There wasn’t anyone there to help me, and there wasn’t quite enough straight through traffic, and two cars were turning in different directions. But I knew I could go because the signal told me so. I found myself hoping that audible signals will some day be considered a given, rather than a gift, that, like ramped curbs, they will be automatically installed. I am hoping that visually impaired people will step forward and ask for the signals they need, that they will challenge the policies with facts, and that they won’t feel ashamed of admitting that they have difficulty knowing when to cross. Any person asking for a signal should remember that sighted people also find it difficult, and that the problem is addressed by giving them visual walk signals.

THE DISTRACTED CENTIPEDE

If ever there was a poem to describe how THE BEGINNING OF THE September ROUTINE GETS THE BETTER OF ME, it HAS TO BE this one.

THE DISTRACTED CENTIPEDE
By Edith L. M. King (1871-1962)


A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run.

BUT DON'T WORRY ABOUT ME!!! The historical perspective predicts that I'll be fine by October.