Serious Cold!

Sunday was a gorgeous day, but it was very cold. Of course, when it is this cold, the first thing I want to do is to light the fire. I went out, chopped a bit of wood into kindling and put it into a box, and then I loaded a couple of thick pieces on one arm, and headed into the house. I left the kindling behind, knowing that it would be too much for me to carry.

As I approached the hearth, I felt myself collapsing. Luckily, I just dropped myself onto the bench I use as a coffee table, and I desperately gulped air. Thank God I have my heart imaging in only one more week. 

I might have had a spa to get immediately warm, but I cannot lift the lid open, so I am awaiting an opportunity to ask for help from Jay or François because both neighbours, Dave and Pete, are in tropical climes. My plan is to turn the cover 180° so that the heavy half is over the half of the tub that I don’t use. The other half of the cover is much lighter.

As I read yesterday on the chaise, I kept looking out at the dense growth of trees that meet my view. In Winter, with the sun so low, the trees across the street sometimes glow golden in the sunlight and I think that I am the luckiest man on earth to have such a view.

Sheba took her sock off in the morning, so I cleaned her wound, added some Polysporin and a small bandage, and put a clean sock on her. She is clearly sick of being eternally indoors at home. I take her outside often just to get some fresh air and to pee, but I can tell she is eager to return to normal. I think we’ll be taking it easy for another couple of days.

I’m reading my last Thursday Murder Club book. I just love how Richard Osman writes. I hope they capture his wit in the movie they are making of the TMC. The four main members of the Thursday Murder Club are played by a crew of talented thespians: Helen Mirren plays ex-spy Elizabeth, Ben Kingsley is ex-psychiatrist Ibrahim, Pierce Brosnan portrays ex–union activist Ron, and Celia Imrie takes on the role of ex-nurse Joyce. I can hardly wait.

We’re back on our regular bed. I’ve got a little plush cushion that Sheba uses as a step up onto the bed. I shall miss sleeping by the fire. I don’t miss our walks in this cold, but I know that if we were walking, I’d be enjoying it because I have a great coat to keep me warm.

•

As usual, there’s been some thinking in advance of my session with Dr. Shoja tomorrow, and something made me think about when I went to visit the orphanage I’d been in. I was twenty-five at the time, and I’d made an appointment to speak with a representative. I told them I was coming to learn everything I was legally able to know about myself that was in my files.

A woman came up to me as I sat on a bench in the reception area. She took me to an office and motioned for me to go in. A woman who had been sitting at her desk in the room, rushed to me. She took my hand and shook it. She was beaming in high beam. I told her my name and she burst out with glee saying something to the effect of how brilliant it was to see so handsome and polite a young man I was, and that nothing thrilled her more than meeting the wonderful results of successful adoptions.

In her first short exclamatory welcome, she offended me and took all the fun out of my expectations. That incident deeply hurt me. They never followed up on my adoption, and now they were basically using my visit as an excuse to assume my story was a wonderful placement success for them. They did not want to ask or know about my experience, but that didn’t stop me from telling her. But I was neither angry nor rude. I was calm and clear. She’d been very kind to me, so I did not want to, in any way, hurt her, but registering my experience as a failure of the church to do right by me, helped me.

My birth mother, Françoise, had her first child at age fifteen. Her experience with her mother, her family and the church the first time, had her flee to Vancouver when she got pregnant a second time with me. And yet, it was to that church that she left me. Also, very, very, sadly, she told me many lies, including about my birth father, and she would not tell me who my father was.

She was also an actor and a theatre producer of renown in Québec. I can tell stories about her, but I won’t anymore. I gladly brag about her co-starring role in A Special Day, in which Sophia Lorena and Marcello Mastroianni star. That is one of her many amazing accomplishments. That I can be proud of. I worked in theatre for many years and wrote plays that I produced myself for friends.

Everyone loves her theatre stories, but her mothing stories are naught but disappointments. I was warned. One thing about our reunion that really was soul satisfying was simply seeing her. I look exactly like her, and I can prove it.

At her funeral in Montreal, much of it was filmed. There were a lot of cameras there. There were many reasons for that, but I mention them because I could not stop crying. I felt awful, and I was there alone. I knew no one in the room. Besides, I was in no state to have to speak to anyone. So, I stepped outside. Shortly thereafter, two women came walking through the parking lot near where I was standing, and when they saw me, they turned and approached me.

“You must be Françoise’s son,” said one.

I said I was and I asked how they knew that, and she said it was because I look so much like her … and … they hadn’t seen her since she was eighteen. I really do look a lot like her, and for a person with no ties to anyone, that was an intensely wonderful experience. I could look at her and know with certainty that through her, I was linked to everyone. That’s how I felt.

Best though, of all, was knowing for certain that I was at least half Quebecois. She instilled her French in me. She planted a seed that took and thrived inside a very appreciative soul. 

•

I am a Boomer. I was born in 1947 and as world boomed right after the end of the second world war. One evening in the Winter of 1974, I laboured through deep snow to the bus stop in the coldest weather I had ever experienced. The tiny shelter was a long way from the building where I was taking introductory French classes. I fell onto the bench, after asking permission of the elderly couple already there.

We waited forty minutes for the bus, and I talked with that couple the entire time we were together in the hut. Talking to them took my mind off the cold. I love meeting strangers who are open to conversation. I’ve always enjoyed meeting people of other cultures. This couple were from New York. They’d come to a wedding of their son. It was the first time they had ever left New York City.

They enthralled me. I could not stop with the questions. They bought a place somewhere in the city, and they were still there. When they bought their place, horses were the main means of transport. I could not believe I was talking to these people. They were living history to me.

Being a Boomer meant growing up in a period of optimism for the future. And it was realized as technology and populations growth changed our (Western) lives. And now, as my end approaches, I am extremely sad to be leaving this world believing that mankind is doomed. Greed is the devil.