How I Imagine it Went

A jaunty chapeau for his birthday, April, 2019.

This is how I imagine it went. Ken woke in a comfortable bed under crisp white sheets. The gentle light of early morning encouraged him to open his eyes. He pushed the covers off and stood up. He felt great. He figured someone had been busy while he slept, because they finally removed the catheter that had been bothering him for weeks. He couldn't find his glasses, but he could see all right without them. They'd taken his hearing aid too. The birdsong outside the window was loud enough for him to hear without it. 

 

Birdsong? Window? Where was he? 

“You’re home,” someone said. 

 

Marna put her hand on his shoulder and turned him around. She kissed him and gave him a hug. 

 

"Everyone’s waiting for you."

 

And then Kenneth R. Clarke went with his wife of fifty years to reunite with all the other people who, ever since Marna passed away in 2016, had loomed largest in his mind: his sister Arlie who’d cared for him after his mother died young, his brothers Stan and Gordon, his father Fred.  

 

To us it looked like Ken departed peacefully in his sleep. To Ken, it was the best reunion ever.

Crocs for Christmas, December 2019.

His obituary is in the Kitchener Waterloo Record, which you can see here.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

March 21, 2009
Ken, Marna, Bruce & Jeff Clarke

       

March 21 2009
Ken and Arlie

Put Me In Coach - Part II

Doug Ford has hit rock bottom. Even the strip clubs have turned against him.

In 2017, when I was still working, I wrote "with my dwindling stock of days remaining, I need to figure out how to keep my world full of wonder."

As I enter my third year of it, I can report that retirement doesn't hold a lot of wonder, but that might be because no one expects it to. 

Everyone knows that retired people have a short list of things to do. They travel, golf, and go to medical appointments. They may also have grandchildren to take care of. 

When they’re around eighty, so goes the story, if they’ve managed to make it that far, retired people have nothing left to offer the world and so fully commit to their slide to the grave. Then they die. 

I don't see a lot in the news about retirement as a time of renewal and expansion, a whole new opportunity to take risks, to change perceptions, to learn from the generations coming up. 

Fiction about old people, when anyone troubles to write it, is at best about redemption, at worst about regret, and only very rarely about fresh starts. 

Despite the overweening societal indifference to people past retirement age, I have decided to make a fresh start. 

I'm enrolled in a course to become a book coach. 

What's a book coach you want to know? I'll explain later.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Some bergara daisies to brighten things a bit.

Free Will, Privacy and Other Poorly Defined Argument Tent Poles

Spadina Avenue logic puzzle: two BBQ and two pizza shops ...
what belongs in the place that's for lease? 

Whenever I hear someone going on about free will or privacy, I wonder what it is exactly that they are talking about.

Free will, I suppose, is this cherished notion that tells us we must be masters of our own fate. The opposite of free will is predetermination -- the allegedly soul-crushing state where we have no agency in our lives.

Ted Chiang -- a brilliant sci-fi writer who has been around for years but whom I've just discovered -- wrote a compact tale about a gadget that knows before you do that you are going to press its button. A light will flash exactly one second before you press. You can't push the button in less, or more, than one second. You can't pretend that you're going to press the button and then change your mind. The gadget knows whether you are going to press the button or not. In Chiang's story, the effect of this gadget on the world is it saps people of their will to live. They start to falter, fade and eventually die, because the gadget proves to them there's no such thing as free will. 

Chiang as a writer has considerable gifts, but it's not absolutely clear to me what his point is. I am personally surprised that anyone believes that free will is anything other than one of those fancy notions -- like justice -- that people put up as lace curtains between us and the utter arbitrariness of life.

It strikes me that a better opposite to free will would be chaos. So the gadget in the story would sometimes flash, sometimes not, and sometimes do a third thing you were not expecting at all, no matter what you did.

Speaking of curtains: privacy, that old-fashioned notion that your personal space is something you protect and control. 

People who fret about their privacy these days also post on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, have a YouTube channel for their lists of favourite songs and movies, and find their worth as a human being in the online reactions they get to these things. 

They worry that the data they ceaselessly, compulsively generate for social media companies could be used against them somehow ... like in targeted marketing campaigns. 

There's likely something to be wary of as humans upload their personalities to the cloud, but it doesn't seem like privacy is it.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

This is Lester. He's waiting for Sylvia to throw a stick.
This shot has nothing to do with today's post.

Ken and Bruce's Excellent Adventure

St. Augustine pussy cat, March 19, 2014.

It started at the end of November. Ken, Bruce's dad, had a rapid heartbeat, up around 130 bpm. That's more than a person's heart can withstand for long periods. His doctor felt some medical attention was in order.

She sent him to Women's College Hospital's walk-in acute care department, which, she assumed, would be less hairy than the emergency department at Toronto Western, say, or Toronto General.

But once at WCH (and after waiting hours and hours), Ken got sent to emergency at Mount Sinai hospital (where he waited hours and hours) because he needed a catheter.

The following week, he was back at WCH for a follow-up visit, waiting hours and hours. His heart was still going a mile a minute, so they sent him to Toronto General Hospital to be admitted (where he waited hours and hours).

Once admitted to hospital, they could do tests on Ken and figure out what was wrong with him without him having to wait hours and hours in an emergency ward.

Things were going well at TGH until Ken's heart stopped beating. They revived him, sent him to the cardiac ICU and ultimately installed a pacemaker. His doctors put him back in the general cardiac ward to recover. Then his heart stopped beating.

Back in the ICU, the electro-cardiologists adjusted the pacemaker. Ken's heart settled down into a nice, steady, beat. The doctors put him back in the general cardiac ward and the conversation turned to when he would be released.

But, Ken's home, New Horizons Tower, is under COVID lockdown, so, while the hospital might release him, provincial rules make it impossible for him to go home.

The work-around was to keep him at TGH for a few extra days. Then they sent him to Toronto Rehab hospital in Parkdale. He's there now, in a bright and comfortable room, waiting for the lockdown to lift so he can go back to New Horizons. 

Along every step of this journey, Bruce was there with his dad, waiting for hours and hours in three different downtown hospitals, helping keep his dad oriented in strange and upsetting surroundings, making sure the docs and nurses were aware of Ken's hearing problems and mild dementia. He advocated for his dad and provided essential care. Also, every day, he brought Ken a butter tart as a break from hospital food.

We're grateful for the excellent care and kindness from all the medical staff who have helped Ken. 

Ken is grateful for all that, too, plus the fact that he has such a wonderful son.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

St Augustine Pelicans, March 21, 2014

2021 RoundUp

I finally got around to COVID baking. This is a "Tre Latte" cake, a traditional Italian sweet. It's a lemon chiffon cake made with olive oil, soaked in three kinds of milk: whole milk, evaporated milk and condensed milk and iced with whipped cream and mascarpone cheese. You're supposed to drizzle olive oil on it, too, but that seems like gilding the lily.

Along with this blog, and all the other writing I do, I keep a journal. What follows are edited excerpts of bits that, until now, I wasn't intending to share.

11 February - These are the depths of winter, even if the days are more bright than January. It’s where we all are in the long haul – and we’re hauling so much. Not just winter, but the loneliness of surviving the pandemic. 

8 March - The surest way to piss off my mother-in-law was to do something differently than she would have done herself.  Like putting jam and peanut butter on the table in little dishes instead of the jars they came in. If I did that, even in my own home, well, it was an insult, and would really sour her mood. 

15 March - I always enjoy the reunion part of funerals. 

29 April -  I’ve been watching Netflix and playing games on my iPad for more than 500 days. I’m a little rusty.

29 May -- I almost never watched Friends. I’ve seen maybe one or two episodes, but, for just about everyone else, it’s the most popular comedy of all time. According to the Internet, the show was about how important it is to have friends when you’re a young adult. For its viewers, the show fulfilled the wish for friends for those who either had no friends, or not the friends they wanted. And now that Friends has been off the air for fifteen years and all its stars are starting to look a bit time worn, the fantasy is not just about the friends you never had, but the youth you've lost.

26 August -- In the future, if there is a future, language arts teachers will astonish their students by showing how many of the common words and phrases they use every day came from Hollywood movies. And that should not be surprising. Shakespeare, who people still unconsciously quote, was great, but he was also popular. So, inevitably, Hollywood and other major cultural engines will provide the words we reach for but can’t find on our own. Titus Andronicus to Fast and Furious … it’s a traceable and unbroken progression.

1 September -- I became aware on Facebook of the ravings of an angry man who hates Feminists because, he explains, they cause chaos in the lives of forlorn men with their racing around in the morning going to work. A proper woman - one who is not a feminist - makes sure than when a man rouses himself from his slumber, his house is clean and full of the good smells of breakfast. Any woman who doesn’t do this should, according to this man, be dead. He says “The only good feminist is a dead feminist.”

So, I'm going to assume he’s pretty upset about something. Maybe his ex-wife had a job. Maybe he never had a wife, or a job. 

****

Last year at New Years, I proposed that people should brace themselves for 2021 because of all the things that ultimately did happen - the worst days of the pandemic, the death throes of the Trump presidency, the Delta variant, and Venom 2. 

This year I'm going to go along with the small but growing chorus of voices proclaiming that Omicron is COVID's last hurrah so that, while the supply chain's in ruins and everything else is on the brink, the worst of the pandemic is behind us.

Might as well be optimistic.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

Karen