Cheating Chirstmas

Cheating Christmas   AKA   Avoiding despair   AKA  Emilie teaches me to windsurf

“I have a sudden glimpse of all the Christmases of my life lined up one after another,” says Henry in The Time Traveler’s Wife, “waiting to be gotten through, and despair floods me.” This is a sentiment I can relate to. 

I would have liked to have gone hiking with my kids over Christmas in New Zealand or have chosen a random city, like Rome, to plonk ourselves down in to explore to our hearts content. But such options, this year, seemed beyond my budget, beyond my capability to organize, beyond possible.

I would have liked to have had a traditional Christmas at home with as many family and friends as we could round up with long snowshoe hikes and impromptu games of hockey out on the bay and huge communally cooked meals. But I don’t live anywhere, don’t know anyone, and can’t cook, so again, beyond possible.

Christmas, when you don’t have a family, or your family is totally messed up, is not the happy occasion depicted in movies with a large group sitting round a table together disagreeing on whose dressing recipe is the best.

The Time Traveler’s Wife starts out joyful full of laughter and light but then gets darker and blacker as events spiral out of control towards certain doom. No light at the end of the tunnel. I have read it often and it never changes. Each time the same bleak future first looms and then arrives. I have pulled it out to read yet again but am not sure I want to finish it. Perhaps I ought to stop part way through while there is still the hope of a different happier ending to the story.

But at the end of the book I am surprised, and surprised to be surprised, when, from beyond the grave, Henry speaks, almost as if to me. “Stop waiting and be free,” he says, “Go out into the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”  And I know this is what I must, somehow, do. Soon.

But the world is not my natural element and I do not move through it without resistance, so, instead, this Christmas, I cheat; I run away.

The details don’t matter. Nothing got planned in the fall for a variety of different reasons.  Ben (my oldest son) decides spend Christmas with his girlfriend in the states. At the last minute I convince Fred and Alexander (my younger sons) and Laura and Emilie (their girlfriends) to go to Cuba with me.

And it is, for me, good enough.

We don't do anything spectacular, anything particularly special, anything even remotely outside our comfort zones...

But we do go sailing, and snorkeling, and play tennis, and walk the beach. We explore our resort and the next resort over and the nearby marina. We take the bus into the nearest small town to browse the markets and play mini-putt. We eat at buffets and a la carte restaurants; tiny appetizers with smoked salmon and prosciutto, lovely soups, lots of very fresh fish, and the occasional disaster. (One night my main course, the chef’s special, turns out to be octopus bisque, full of, yes, small whole octopi, complete with floppy heads and tentacles with suckers on them, which, unfortunately, is beyond my culinary limit.) 

When it’s windy the four of them pull out their kites and go kite-surfing and when it’s not Emilie teaches the rest of us how to windsurf. I, I have to say, am amazing. I’ve tried to windsurf before but have never gotten further than pulling the sail up and then falling off. Emilie shows me where to put my feet as I start and how to transfer them further back as soon as I am moving. She stresses the importance of keeping your forearm extended and of sticking your bum out. By the second day I am flying out to sea and back doing long steady tacks without even getting wet. The warm sun above, the turquoise water flashing by below, even the energy consumed by paying such close attention to my balance and the sudden surprising dunkings in the cool salty water when I forget to, all of it is fabulous, fantastic, freeing. As is the whole week. Surrounded by the youthful vitality and vivaciousness of the four kids I am once again wishing one could bottle essences such as these, save the whole experience somehow, to pull out and savour later.

I feel, just a bit, as if we are on The Axiom - the resort ship in Pixar’s WALL-E - because we are kept well medicated with alcohol. There are bars in the main lobby, in the restaurants, in the snack bars by the pools, in the pools themselves, and at various spots along the 1.2 km stretch of beach that belongs to our resort and they make excellent (free) drinks; pineapple with coconut run, strawberry daiquiris, mojitos with lots of fresh mint… and, as we take a break from activities in the afternoon and lounge under the beach umbrellas or loaf in one of the four pools, as we gather and play cards in the lobby before supper or board games afterwards, we drink our fair share of drinks.

By coming here with them I feel I have cheated, avoided somehow the spirit of Christmas. 
But I have also, for this year at least, avoided despair.

Baby hermit crab sand art.

Taxi hood ornament.

One of a gazillion paintings for sale.

Emilie, Alex, me, Fred, and Laura. :)

Dr Apt

Visit to the dermatologist.

I have terrible skin. My hands have more liver spots than a typical eighty year old, liver spots in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, colours and textures, some ominously dark, irregular and even overlapping, and my legs are covered in what I call ‘lizard skin’. This is due to sun damage that occurred when I was a kid. I don’t think sunscreen had been invented back then and my mother, with her Mediterranean colouring, didn’t know what to do with a blue-eyed blond-haired white-skinned kid like me. So each summer I burnt. To a crisp. More than once. I would wake up in the morning with the bed sheets literally stuck to my tender red skin and lie there trapped, tears silently sliding down my cheeks as I waited patiently for my mother to notice that I hadn’t come down for breakfast and find the time to come up and gently peel the sheets off of me. This happened every summer. Repeatedly. It was just the way things were. My mother loved me but it never crossed her mind to put me in a t-shirt. So now I have liver spots and lizard skin. I don’t mind terribly that my skin looks horrible but I have carried a low grade worry about the other possible effect of too much sun so long ago – skin cancer – for a long time. Today I went to see a dermatologist for the first time in my life. I figured that since I’m 50 I ought to start behaving like an adult and looking after myself. The weather, of course, was freezing rain, with snow and fog and other ugly stuff in the forecast as well, weather warnings up and down the yinyang, but, having waited months for an appointment, I checked that my health card wasn’t out of date, girded my loins, and gingerly head down the highway towards the city. An hour later, stripped to my skivvies, lying on a paper sheet with the dermatologist leaning over me, peering at me through a huge lighted magnifying glass, I had a strip torn off me. Apparently my skin is fine. Speckled, yes, and dry, but not, evidently, showing any signs of cancer. And, according to the dermatologist, having her inspect me was a waste of my time, her time, and tax-payer dollars. When I asked if I ought to book an annual check-up I almost had my head bitten off. I was not to come back, I was told, very firmly, if my only complaints were that my skin was showing normal signs of aging. (Normal? Normal! Normal for an eighty year old, perhaps.) However, I have to admit that, really, one could not ask for a more positive response from a dermatologist. I go and see a dentist once a decade whether I need to or not. I guess I’ll start seeing a dermatologist on a similar schedule. My actual problems may lie more in the area of hypochondria, there must be a specialist I can visit for that. I wonder if I can book an appointment during the summer….

Little Gems

Little Gems of Joy AKA Nothing Happens to Me.

At the beginning of the first episode of BBC’s Sherlock Watson’s psychiatrist tells him that writing a blog about everything that happens to him will help him. ‘Nothing happens to me,’ he tells her. This is very much how I feel. Nothing happens to me.

Yet I cannot lie; my life is punctuated with little gems of joy.

For example, Shelley invites me to dinner at her house in Deep River one Saturday and I use the trek up the valley as an excuse to do some power visiting. I stop in at Tim’s and spend over an hour sitting with my regular coffee group reveling in the fact that I didn't tell them I was coming and they are still meeting at the same corner table at the same time, in the fact that they are happy to see me and apparently don’t mind at all that I am interrupting their normal routines by appearing and dominating the conversation at first, in the fact that I don’t interrupt their normal routines overmuch and after a while they forget that I am there and return to chatting about the minutiae of their daily lives as always. I have a couple chores to do in town and everywhere I go I bump into people I know. It is almost Christmas and all of them stop to chat for a minute or two. The familiarly of it is bitter sweet. I drop in unannounced and have tea with Catherine and sit and talk with her for hours and then drop in unannounced and have tea again with Suzanne and her family. At Shelley’s her son Nick cooks supper for us and then disappears off to wherever it is that teens disappear to in Deep River and Shelley and I chat for hours. The illusion that I am still living here is so strong that I almost forget I have made the mistake of moving away.

For example, on my oldest son’s, birthday, another of my sons arranges a wing night out in Ottawa. I invite Geoff to join us and he picks me up in Arnprior and drives me into the city. We all meet at Fred and Laura’s place and walk from there down into the market, the first flakes of winter snow falling gently down creating, along with the Christmas lights that are already out, a friendly festive atmosphere. It is a lovely evening, relaxed and stress free, full of a good food and good beer and good company. We feel, to me, like a normal family, perhaps more so even than we did when we were all living together.  I had business to discuss with Geoff and had intended to talk with him about it on the drive back to Arnprior but in the end it had been such a lovely interlude that I couldn’t bear to bring up anything that might be controversial, risk wrecking the affability of it all, and so I let it lie.

For example, most weekends I turn on my computer for an hour or two to catch up on my e-mail and usually end up chatting with one or more of my sons for most of that time. The easy familiar conversations that I have with them, the ongoing dialogues about both the trivial and the critical aspects of their days, are one of the highlights of my week. Part of me would have liked to keep my kids under my own roof forever, to be aware, merely due to proximity, of the details of their daily lives, but now that they are grown and gone everything they choose to share has its own shade of preciousness that would be impossible to explain to anyone else who does not have adult children.

For example, I love the house that I am living in and the open view that I have on three sides of my house. The forever subtlety changing colours of the water/ice/hills/sun/moon/sky fills me with more pleasure than I can easily express. Sometimes I get up early and lie on the couch wrapped in a sleeping bag and fall asleep again watching the sunrise. Sometimes I bring my computer to my spot by the window to watch TV while eating supper but have it sit unheeded as I watch nature’s show instead, a storm blowing in, or the bay freezing over, or even merely the sky washing itself with a glorious range of colours as the light slowly fades in the evening and the two lighthouses I can see from my front window start to blink off in the distance.

For example, though I sometimes find it a little lonely living on my own, part of me also likes the abandon with which I can set my schedule. I can get up when I want to, eat when I want to, listen to the CBC to my heart’s content.These may seem like insignificant details, and I do not dispute that life would be richer were I living with a partner, but, as a woman/mother programmed to put everyone else’s happiness before my own, to not restricted, at all, by another’s schedule does have a certain freedom to it which cannot be denied.

For example, I love the fact that I am living close enough to two of my children that I can pop into the city to have supper with them, even when there is no occasion, or have them phone me up and ask if they can drop by and have supper with me.

I even like my job enough, that, were I hypothetically given the choice to move back to Deep River - which will never happen – I don’t know if I would take it.

So, though nothing happens in my life, though, like Watson before he met Sherlock, there is nothing to write about, I am muddling by. And there are little gems of joy. It is not good enough forever, not by a long stretch. But it is good enough for now.