Sunlight captured on a poppy, Qualicum Beach, July 2014. In real-world and Waterlogue.
Notes toward a Netflicks series:
[scene opens]
Three people - one man and two women - all within single-digit years of retirement, are seated around a table in a small meeting room. The attitude of the man and one of the women is relaxed and playful. The other woman is relaxed and not playful.
The unplayful woman is attempting, after more than forty minutes of free-association-style conversation, to rein her colleagues into something like an agreement that, in light of the challenges surrounding them, they will commit to not making one another's lives any more difficult as they work together on a gigantic and amorphous policy project.
The playful people, as they have done for the entire meeting, move freely from tangent to tangent and neither agree nor disagree with the unplayful woman.
The unplayful woman wonders that she might not be at the same meeting as the other two, but also feels that she has heard some agreement on the topic of working together. To test this, she asks a pointed question: "So what will we do?"
The playful woman answers: "After we've had our dinner, we'll be able to eat our plate for dessert."
[scene closes]
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Seventeen
Sparky here. This is Chapter Seventeen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
I asked Carol where her mom was now.
"My mom died when I was four years old. Breast cancer."
I felt sorry that I'd asked that question, but Carol continued. "That's when Pea really stepped up for my dad, me and my sister.
"Pea never mistook her staff for family. She did not think of us as her social equals, but, still, she was very good to us. When my mom died, Pea let my dad move himself and his daughters into her house - most of it was empty anyway - and that's really the only childhood home I remember. Later on, Pea set up trust funds for my sister's and my university education. She paid for trips. She even bought us cars. She left us money when she died."
"It's just one of life's little ironies that Pea was so cruel to my mother when she was carrying Stuart's baby, yet later so kind to the rest of us."
Carol's story went a long way to explaining Gerry Ringbold's otherwise baffling fury toward Pea and, by extension, the Gardens. The second cousins' vendetta carried through two generations.
Another question occurred to me.
"Did Gerry know you were related to him? He must have known about his grandmother...?"
"Actually, no," said Carol. "Remember, Pea thought Stuart's child never made it out of the womb alive. The deal when my mom and half-brother came back here was that all ties between them would be broken so that Pea would never find out. It really was as if Gerry's dad came out of nowhere. Gerry had no idea who his paternal grandmother was or what my connection would have been to him."
"How come you know?" I asked. "Why wasn't the secret kept from you?"
"For a long time I didn't know. But, just before my father died in 2005 - around the time the two cousins' challenge to Pea's will was thrown out of court - he told me the whole story. Dad wanted me to understand who Gerry was, what my connection to him was and why Gerry was fighting so hard to get some restitution from Pea's estate."
"Do you know why Gerry disappeared without a trace after his death? There was no funeral service."
Carol gave me a strange look. "How do you know he didn't have a funeral service?"
I explained how I had done my research. The strange look changed to a wry smile.
"Just because something doesn't make it onto the Internet doesn't mean it didn't happen. Gerry's buried, right next to my namesake, and she's buried right next to Gerry's dad, in a family plot in upstate New York.
"Not everyone in Pea's clan drew bright lines between who was and was not family."
You can read Chapter Eighteen here.
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