The Eagle & Child

(I’m a fan of simple stats–hit counts, sports stats, etc.–and I’ve just noticed that in June I did not break the 10 post mark for the first time since February 2004.  What an unproductive month.  I don’t even really think what I’m about to post is worth posting.  I’m hoping inspiration will hit on our 3-week Western Canadian Tour of Glory or perhaps once we’ve moved in August.)

We have a virginia creeper (or, apparently, Parthenocissus quinquefolia) growing on the back of our house.  The vine covers all of Olivia’s bedroom window and part of Madeline and Luke’s window.  It’s a beautiful plant and a great feature of the back yard.

In July of every year we’ve lived here, however, the creeper gets infested with some kind of bug.  If you walk near the plant when it’s infested, thousands of little tiny bugs jump out and rattle the leaves.  The infestation causes all the leaves to whither prematurely (but it doesn’t kill the plant), leaving us with a dead-looking plant hanging on the back of our house for much of the summer.  After our first summer, I got some pesticide options from a local person-in-the-know, possibly a horticulturalist, but I’ve never followed up on my plan to defeat the infestation.

This year, however, since we’re trying to sell, I don’t want to show the house with a withered vine, so I’m determined to deal with these bugs before they kill all the leaves.  So it’s a good thing that Dixie spotted a bird’s nest, including a mother and a couple of babies, inside the vine.

The nest is wedged between the virginia creeper and the screen on Olivia’s window, so we can get a pretty good view  from inside Olivia’s room.  I caught a bit of the action on video, but the nest is built quite high up in the window, so there isn’t a good angle to see the chicks.  But it’s still interesting.  Let’s watch:

I haven’t determined what sort of bird this is.

Unfortunately, this also puts a snag in my pesticiding plans.  How long do chicks take to fly-the-coop, as it were?  Is it safe to spray the area around the nest?

(via)

Mom moved Dad to a care home today.  I haven’t talked to her yet, so I have no idea how it went.  It could have been bad.  It may have gone well.  Apparently she told him almost daily for the last week, but it didn’t register–at least, he didn’t really respond.

You see, my Dad has front-temporal dementia (FTM), which affects only the two frontal lobes frontal lobe and temporal lobe.  From what I understand, it’s kind of like Alzheimer’s Disease, except that people with FTM are aware of what’s happening to them, because the other lobes aren’t affected.  They know that they are losing their motor skills, have increasing difficulty with speech, that they are forgetting things.

Some people who have cared for spouses with similar diseases think Dad should have gone to a home a long time ago.  Maybe they’re right–Mom’s health in the last year has declined, but she really wanted to take care of him as long as she could.  Even now it has been a very difficult decision.  But she’s ready.

What a strange, horrible disease FTM is; to see someone you love wither away and almost become someone else entirely.  I always thought my Dad was so strong: strong of opinion, strong of mind, strong of speech, strong in confidence, and physically strong.  I don’t know that he was physically strong, but his rough and veiny hands always impressed me.  I wanted to have hands like his when I grew up.  I think I got them.  He was strong in so many ways, which sometimes made him difficult to get along with.  When he got angry, there was fire in his eyes, igniting fear in my heart.  But he was strong.  I think back to my childhood and see him use a nail gun to install window wells in our house; the sweat he worked up as he worked in his garden, shirt open and untucked; his voice carrying across a sanctuary as he preached (he was a passionate preacher and a shouter).  He would walk and bike with that purposeful, hunched-over Vandersluys gait.  When I was in college, I saw Dad, then in his 60s, wrestle a box-cutter-wielding student to the ground.  He was strong.

But weakness has overcome him now.  He has essentially lost use of one of his arms; his voice is frail and it is difficult for him to put a sentence together; he gets confused and paranoid and cannot be left alone.  He hasn’t been able to read for years, this man who would spend hours reading scripture and commentary and book.  His hearing is poor and he shuffles about the house slowly, unsure of himself or his surroundings.  A man who once had the answers now asks me for help.  The one-time bread-winner and “man of the house” now nearly helpless.  His strength comes back every now and then, but in those moments it is no longer admirable, but violent and dangerous.

Why does this happen?

The worst part is that I feel nothing.  Or at least I feel like I feel nothing, if that makes any sense.  I’m almost ashamed to admit it.  I could maybe force tears to come, but I’m not overcome with grief at his disease, his withering.  Maybe it’s the years of being away from home; maybe it’s the slow advance of the disease that eases the grief.  Maybe that is one redeeming thing in all this, if such a thing can be.  Mom has said that the entire disease is saying goodbye.  I think she said goodbye to her husband a long time ago.

It’s the best thing for both him and my Mom.  It’s safer and healthier for them both.  The idealist in me asks questions about sacrificial love and all that, but what does that mean in a situation where the sacrifice would be for nothing–laying down your own life without saving another?

And somehow, strangely, this will bring a new freedom to Mom’s life.  Give her new life.

It’ll be strange to visit Mom without Dad sitting in his chair.

He awoke with the realization that he had brewed a pot of tea some hours before but had forgotten to pour himself a cup; the pot had gone to waste.  This startling thought hung about him, solid against the cool air drifting in one window, across the bed, and out the other. A gust of wind rushed through the trees outside;  ”This is your life,” they whispered.

1. Personal convenience is not an excuse to deny my children.

2. It shouldn’t matter what people think of me. Stop worrying.

3. That Nanaimo bar looks a lot better than it will taste. I *will* be disappointed.

What I’ve read so far this year:

I think it’s high time for some fiction.  I’m thinking either The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), East of Eden (Steinbeck), The Power and the Glory (Greene), The Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie–signed copy!  Thanks, R and L!) or restarting One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez–I started reading it about 10 years ago; can’t remember why I stopped).

Any suggestions?

I have said that Jesus is 100% God and 100% human. He is 0% angel. So Jesus did not come to turn us into angels who are constantly engaged in spiritual activities, but he came to enable us to thrive in our human lives. The Christian faith is an earthly, material faith. The physical world is both the object of God’s creation and the scene of his redemption. There is no salvation without a physical incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. So yes, evangelicals who sing the Platonic line [salvation as escape from the physical world] (and they are many) are ironically attempting to be more spiritual than God. This was the Corinthian problem. They thought they were too spiritual to have sex (1 Cor. 7) and believe in the resurrection (1 Cor. 15). Paul told them that they are so spiritual that they are no longer Christian! (1 Cor. 15:12-17).

That’s author Michael Wittmer in an interview on Internet Monk’s blog.  I’ve been meaning to read Wittmer’s Heaven is a Place on Earth–I think I should finally crack that spine in the next couple of months.

I read in the PassPort, the Briercrest alumni rag, that Barkman Arena in Caronport is up, running and officially opened.  In some ways I want to say, “It’s about time.”  They were talking about a new hockey arena when I was in high school–someone had already started fundraising at the time and it looked like I might even play hockey in the new rink, but things fell through.  But good for them for getting it up and running.

Sparrow Gardens, the hockey rink in which generations learned to play hockey, has seen better days.  It’s old, dusty, cold, and the ice is not regulation size.  The PassPort said that it is to be torn down this month, which I noted with a bit of sadness.

I could only find one picture of Sparrow Gardens online (wait–the Moose Jaw Times Herald has a photo gallery with some shots of Sparrow Gardens as well as Barkman Arena, which looks slick):

That’s less than half of the building, but it’s the rink portion.  It’s a converted airplane hangar from the days when my hometown was a RCAF training base.  It’s one of the few remaining RCAF buildings in town.

And it’s filled with memories.

When we moved to Caronport from the Netherlands in 1985, we lived in “the hangar”–we never called it “Sparrow Gardens”, a name which I think was given to it to try to make less what it is (that is, old, dusty, ugly) during conferences and youth events–although sparrows did fly around in there.  We always called it “the hangar” or simply “the rink”.  In the picture you’ll notice portions of the building jutting out, with lower roofs.  I imagine that back in the RCAF days they housed offices and machine shops.  The portions in the picture are now dressing rooms.  However, further back on this portion of the building as well as to the right, those jutting parts were, in 1985, apartments in which student families lived, and they looked the same as they do as the portions in the picture (except they had the old RCAF windows in them).

We lived in two different apartments in the hangar in our first two years in Caronport.  My best friend at the time (James D., are you out there somewhere?) also lived in the hangar.  The first apartment we lived in was right next to the rink and my bedroom was on the inside wall of the apartment, so some nights I went to bed to the sound of pucks hitting the wall and the mesh covering the window.

I don’t remember this, but my mom often recalls a story from our first winter in that apartment in Caronport.  I would have been 7-turning-8.  It was during the first major snowstorm–cold, big snow drifts, white-outs.  My dad would have been familiar with them from his days in Caronport in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but for my mom, who had always lived in relatively mild winter climates, this was completely new and terrifying.  And it just so happened that during that snowstorm I didn’t come home when I was supposed to.  My mom immediately had mental pictures of me frozen in a snowdrift somewhere in the village and both she and dad walked into the storm to look for me, calling my name.  But they didn’t find me.

I don’t know what brought it to mind to look where they did–desperation, I suppose–but they found me sitting in one of the dressing rooms with one of the local hockey teams.  I had never left the hangar and had simply lost track of time.

In later years, Christmas holidays–two, three weeks?–would be spent mostly in the rink.  Many of the kids and some of the adults who were still in town for Christmas would be at the rink first thing in the morning and play shinny all day–maybe stopping for lunch, but then rushing right back afterwards to keep playing.  Those were great days.  Looking back, it’s strange to think of the people who joined us to play.  We had children and adults playing at the same time, people who played very well (I believe Ryan Smyth may have shown up once–he used to play for our high school team) and people who could barely skate.  Even the president of Briercrest Schools (Dr. Barkman himself) came out every now and then (he was among the very good players).

Christmas holidays in those days were about all-day pickup hockey, until one year some parent complained that there was no free skate time for the figure skaters and non-hockey players.  So rink officials stepped in and gave them their timeslot as well.  Picture in your mind 15 or 20 hockey players of various ages, sticks and skates in hand, standing on the bleachers watching one or two little girls twirling around the rink, waiting for them to be done their one or two-hour time-slot.  It was an injustice.

In the summer, the hangar was a cool refuge from the dry, 35-degree weather.  And there were no grasshoppers there.  The summer of ‘85 was the worst year for grasshoppers I’ve ever experienced.  I would step near a 6″x6″ patch of grass and what would seem like hordes of grasshoppers would jump up and buzz around me, crawl on my shirt.  I had never seen such a creature before.  I was terrified.  But they didn’t go in the hangar.  Too cool, maybe.

The hangar was dusty and a little damp, too, as I recall.  It was filled with all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies–places kids would climb into, passages under the floor connecting the hangar to different parts of the old air base.  Rumour had it that some of those nooks and crannies had rat poison in them, but I suspect that was said to keep the kids away.  I never saw a rat in the hangar.   But it was probably not the healthiest place to spend summer days.  I remember mom telling us to go outside all the time.  Being out of the apartment but inside the hangar didn’t count.

Back in the day, Caronport, being a “Christian town”, banned trick-or-treating and legend had it that on All Hallows’ Eve, Satanists from Moose Jaw would come into town and do all kinds of Satanisty things.  Nobody ever explained what sorts of things those would be–we never found skinned cats or any other such rumoured-to-be evidence of Satanist activity.  Except for the one year that a couple of friends found what appeared to be a pentagram drawn in chalk underneath the old wooden bleachers in the hangar.  In chalk. We all bought it and were creeped out.

In later years, the apartments in the hangar were converted into more dressing rooms and weight rooms.

And now it is going to be torn down.  But, if I may speak sentimentally for a moment, I hold onto the memories.

I hope to get out to Caronport this summer or maybe next, just to wander around the place again.

I inherited a love for stationery from my dad; I’ve made no secret of that over the years.  I’ve had an affinity for writing instruments–ballpoint pens, in particular–since I was a young boy.  My dad instilled in me a love for the Parker Jotter, a fine ballpoint if ever there was one.  As a schoolboy, I favoured the classic Bic–sometimes straying into Papermate territory, but always returning to the Bic.

Over the years, I accumulated quite the collection of both “fine” refillable pens (Parker, Cross, Schaeffer, etc.) and cheap disposables.  I was always in search of the perfect pen, but that journey always brought me back to the Parker Jotter and the Bic.

In recent years, I have begun to recognize the pointlessness of collecting–in fact, I realized I had a deep distaste for accumulation, which (ironically) was vexed by my concommitant compulsion to buy more pens.  So I worked at losing that habit.  But I’m not stationery sober.

As I write this, I anxiously await the arrival of a box of 12 ForestChoice #2 unpainted Incense-cedar pencils, which I purchased online.  Apparently they write like (almost) no other pencil.  Where did this new compulsion come from?  I’ve always liked pencils.  My handwriting is noticably better with a pencil than a ballpoint pen (fountain pens are nice, but I find they need to be positioned awkwardly to write) and there was just something about a plain old pencil…so simple, so earthy, so malleable.  But people didn’t write with pencils–certainly not in professional and academic settings, or so I thought.

I’ve dabbled in the pencil world–trying out and liking very much the classic Dixon Ticonderoga and the Mirado (which I recently discovered has a wax-infused core for smoothness!).  But what sparked this?  I confess: I think it was Murray, band manager (Flight of the Conchords), who always has a Ticonderoga in hand for band meetings (”Brett?”  ”Present.”  ”Jemaine?”  ”Present.”  ”Murray?  Present.”)  That got me thinking again about the pencil as a primary writing instrument.  And then I read somewhere about pencils and pads being given out for high-profile executive meetings and that sealed the deal.  Who cares if a pencil can be erased?  Why does the pen get all the prestige? It’s a legitimate primary writing tool, folks!

So I eagerly await the unasssumingly packaged set of 12 #2 unpainted Incense-cedar graphite pencils by ForestChoice.

And in the meantime, I’ve also ordered (don’t tell Dixie) a package of six Palomino pencils, which are also, apparently, quite something.  They are crafted in Japan by a renowned pencil maker.  So they say.

And also in the meantime, 14 reasons (woodcase) pencils are awesome:

1. They are natural — wood and graphite.  Can’t get more natural than that.  Pens: plastics, inks, chemicals, etc.

2. They are simple.  Wood + graphite = pencil.  Well, technically, just graphite stick = pencil.

3. They are erasable.  I know there are erasable pens, but how many people do you know who use them?  They must not work well.

4. It ages with you.  What I mean is, you can see a pencil age in a way that the draining ink in a clear-barrelled pen does not allow.  The pencil gets shorter, the print on the sides wears out, it gets covered in teeth marks, etc.

5. Pencils are somewhat edible.

6. No surprise empties.  You’re not likely to pick up a pencil to write something only to discover its out of lead (unless it’s mechanical).  This will happen with a pen, all the time.

7. Pencils don’t dry up.  If you can see graphite, it will write.  Not so with ink.

8. Pencils make that delightful scratching noise as you write.

9. Better handwriting

10. I can use a pencil to underline and mark books in good conscience.  I cannot use a pen.

11. A pencil will not leave a stain in your pocket.

12. A pencil is, arguably, more environmentally friendly (largely made of natural products–I can toss a pencil and feel no worse about it than if I was tossing a branch and some rocks).

13. Any pencil will write upside down.

And, finally, some pencil-related blogs:

• Pencil Revolution
• Pencil Talk
• Pencil Things

Posted this on Twitter yesterday, in response to the ridiculously low June temperatures:

Hey, June, don’t make me mad
It should be balmy
But it’s getting colder
Remember you’re two months later than March?
It is the time to make it hotter, hotter, HOTTER, HOTTER.

Nah, nah, nah, nanananaaaaah, nanananaaaah! Hey June!

(I hope you realize that it’s a parody of “Hey, Jude” by the Beatles).

Dixie continues to insist that I’m no good at these parodies.  Maybe she’s right.  But I persevere.