Not too Jovial

Reading Week draws to a close, with a sore throat and cough setting in between stuffed ears. Joy of joys.

The shining news is that the sky cleared tonight after the biggest one-day snowfall we've had in ten years. And there was the new(ish) moon, escorted across the evening sky by two planets: Jupiter and Venus. Jupiter is Holst's Bringer of Jollity. Jupiter may be bringing it, but I'm not receiving it. Jupiter=Jove, root of joviality, and I'm not going there, either. Venus is the goddess of love, but I'm not feeling that, any more than the joy. Still, I have to admit, with this conjunction, tonight's view was spectacular. 180 degrees away in the east, Mars made his contrary way up the night sky as well.  Last night, we waded through the unshovelled new snow, with more still coming down, to the LRT to get to an ESO choral concert, a concert that was worth the wade. Two faces of late winter, each brilliant in its own way.

In the next room, Eva and our neighbour, Dale,  talk of getting a card for Tina, whose old black lab, Allie, had to be put down earlier this week--a lumbering old sweety, Allie, but her kidneys gave out, with no hope for recovery. Dale explains that she can't even begin to imagine what comes after death. That the shmaltzy sympathy cards about meeting again do not seem to cover the territory. I recall thinking, the day I heard that Mom had finally finished "living with cancer," that at least she now knew what came next, if anything.

We did not have a funeral service for Mom.. She had some strange ideas about disappearing quietly, so her sisters had her ashes interred with her parents in a cemetery in Surrey, B.C., that would not even allow another marker on the site. It took ten years, but I finally broke down at a memorial service for a woman I hardly knew, for me to realize I had done a really bad job of grieving. Had not done it at all, actually. Mary Charlotte, the assistant rector at the neighbourhood Anglican church, arranged a private ceremony in the chapel, just her, Eva and me. We entered Mom's birth and death dates into the registry, and I began to understand the concept of "closure."

This week was also the first anniversary of Dad's death. His birthday (he would have been 90 this year) was the first February 16th I can recall for over fifty years I hadn't sent a card or letter, or made a birthday phone call. Last year, when I'd called him in England (where he had been living for much of the last ten years) beginning Feb. 16th, there was only a full answering machine responding, for several days. Then a phone call about 9:30 the evening of the 21st.

We did have an interment ceremony for him in mid-April, on a snowy wet Saturday in Union Cemetery in Calgary.  Dad's plot (which has Mom's name and dates of birth and death on the same marble plaque as Dad's, a province away from where she is actually buried) is within a short walk, and sight, of Great-grandfather Andrew Porter's plot, where Grandmother Perkins and her sisters are also interred. It was a small service, led by me (I got that news from my sister, Vicki, the evening before). So that was better closure.

And a year later, my sister and brother are still trying to get all the legal and government forms filled out (some for the third time, because one bureaucrat cannot hand the same form or certificate across the hall to another in the same department without one or the other losing track of it). His estate is not large or complicated (except for the fact one bank account is in England, so we need an English solicitor to handle the paperwork. Ever try to hire an English solicitor from Canada, over the internet?), but it still has taken a lot of messing about. I have shivers, thinking of the case in Chancery in a Dickens novel (Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in Bleak House)--a case that went on for years, until all the estate had been devoured in legal costs. There is a life after death--but it's a half-life, in legal documents, computer files and unfinished, at times seemingly unfinishable, business. The Ojibway three-or-four-day road wouldn't be even decent a start, anymore.

A messy day in a messy week

I guess I'm pretty average. Start with great plans and a list of things to take up. Then every day happens. Or every week. Annnnnd....the meetings come along. And the e-mails demand answers. And the big revelations and epiphanies short-circuit into the "self-delete" file. Or they look pretty puny on the screen. Doesn't stop the nagging sense of unfinished or even unstarted business.


Right now I'm having a visit from my old friend insomnia, from all the little worries of the day that I didn't get put in place by bed time. Like our dog's snaggletooth. It looks pretty harmless, even comic the way it puts a permanently puzzled look on George's face, with the lower right canine tucked inside instead of outside, but it's apparently been erupting even further, or he's bumped it, or something, so now, instead of  leaving a little rubbed spot on his upper gums, it's digging into the back of his upper canine. So he needs dental work or he could lose both upper and lower. I didn't want to do much earlier, because he's so darned cheerful and playful, and trusting. When we had to have our Springer Spaniel's broken toe set, it made him pretty suspicious of everything we tried after that, and gave him an erratic temper. I'd hate to see George get the same way. But he'll be a lot worse off if we don't do something. Poor little guy. No dental plan for the dog, either.

There's a piece in GEIST Magazine this month, from J.R. Carpenter: "Words Dogs Know." Perfect the way it puts a canine Zen spin on things. My favorite right now is this:

melancholia When playtime is over and the long nap in the dark is over, and the early morning walk is over, sometimes in a hurry, sometimes even in the rain, the people shut the door behind them and the dog is left to his lonesome.

Left on his lonesome, George eases his melancholia by redecorating. One recurrent signature is to centre my boot carefully in the middle cushion of the white leather sofa he is never supposed to get on.  When he's had a bout of removing everything from the pocket where we temporarily house all the plastic tubs and trays and cardboard tubes for the recycling, or of playing hamster with newspapers and magazines, or of just getting into things, he disappears to the bottom of the basement stairs as we come in the front door, and becomes deaf to our calls. When he's done nothing but nap or chew his pigskin stress-relievers, or stand on the coffee table beside my wife's easy chair and stare out the window (which he can see out of perfectly without getting on anything), he greets us all happy and bouncing and shaking himself with pleasure. So when he's not at the door, we have first to go looking for what he's done, and couldn't stop himself from doing.

I think his word would be perspective: When the people aren't wasting the barbecue to cook fish (which is fit only for cats) or chicken (which they don't seem to realize is fit for sharing with the dog), its flat top is best valued as the highest point in the back yard, the command tower from which to keep a dutiful eye out for all those things one has to keep an eye out dutifully for, and from which to bark the bark at all those things at which one has to bark the bark. 

Maybe this space is my barbecue top, tonight.