It's a long trip to the west coast, so I also brought along a book - called Good Prose - to beguile any parts of the journey where I had to wait and my iPad's battery was dead.
If you've already clicked on the link above, you know the two people who wrote Good Prose are long-experienced, well-respected, award-winning author/editors who have managed to do for a living what I do for a hobby. Lucky them.
And here goes.
I travelled to Victoria with one of my sisters to be with another sister who had gotten a scary diagnosis and had to undergo surgery. Turns out everything may have been caught in time, so we all breathed a sigh of relief and set about simply enjoying being with one another. We don't do that too often these days and my sister asked if health emergencies were what it took to lure us to the west coast for a visit.
"You could just try calling next time," I said.
But it's true. These sad things - illness, death, disaster - in life are often the thing it takes to bring people together.
For example, we watched The Amazing Race (first episode of the season) on Sunday night and met, among the fresh-minted contestants, the father-son team who, after each had a run-in with cancer, discovered life was short. They said they felt they'd received a wake up call and the next natural step, obviously, was to sign up to be on TV.
I asked my sister if she thought she'd be doing anything like that. She didn't think so.
In a quite related incident, I was coming home from my usual Saturday shopping yesterday morning and was at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton (incorrectly identified in previous posts as the corner of Jarvis and College) where absolutely everything happens to me.
I was paying very close attention to the two men walking a short distance ahead. One of them - I was trying to figure out which - was leaving in his wake a trail of sweet-smelling tobacco smoke. Because my brain cannot leave these mysterious details alone, I was trying to identify which of them was smoking and what they were smoking - a pipe, a cigarillo, what.
Completely focused on the two people ahead of me, I was about halfway past the Lutheran church on the south east corner of the intersection when
WHOOOMP
a mass of half-melted snow and ice from the roof of the church let loose from the tiles and hit me on the head, shoulders and back.
Far more startled than hurt by the teeny urban avalanche, I let out a holler. That and the sound of the falling snow made both of the men I'd been following turn instantly. With looks of unfaked concern on their faces they came to help me.
I said that I was OK. The one fellow, the one closest to me, and my leading smoking suspect, wondered where the fall of snow had come from.
"From the roof of the church," I said, and then a joke occurred to me: "From GOD!"
They both laughed and the probably-not-the-smoker one said, "you should buy a lottery ticket."
Or maybe sign up for a reality show.
Here's a picture of my sister taking a picture of her sisters.
Have a great week!
Karen
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