Poke Check

 

These days, people sound like kids trick or treating on Hallowe’en night:

“I got Pfizer.”

“I got Moderna”

“I got AstraZeneca.”

“I got a rock.”

Now that the greater number of people I know have had their first dose of vaccine, the subject has changed though the format is the same:

“I got a headache.”

“I had nausea.”

“I was super-fatigued.”

“I got a rock.”

I’m not anti-vaccine by any means. I’m more “pro-healthy immune system”. I was also somewhat concerned that being vaccinated might worsen my current auto-immune issue, my logic being that rubella caused my rheumatoid arthritis when I was a kid, and the homeopathic flu program in 2016 ignited whatever it is I’ve been dealing with ever since. Not to mention some distrust of a vaccine so new in its development that the potential for serious side effects down the road cannot be predicted. Call me old school; I wasn’t buying it.

The Universe has a clever way of coaxing me into changing my mind. It takes its time, dropping breadcrumbs designed to present another point of view and I, being a perceiving type who tries to keep an open mind, will often consider new information before adjusting—or not—my original opinion.

When Ter eventually decided to get the jab, I supported her because she felt it was important that one of us “take it for the team”, and her immune system isn’t fighting an ongoing battle like mine. Once she made her appointment, however, I began to wonder at the wisdom of relying on herd immunity as my protection against contracting COVID-19. For one thing, I know a couple of people with auto-immune conditions who’ve had their first dose and suffered nothing more than a sore arm and a day or two of feeling slightly under the weather.

Then, during an email thread on another subject, my siblings each mentioned having received their first dose. I explained my rationale for not being vaccinated, whereupon my older older brother metaphorically took me aside and suggested that I might be misinformed. Neither Pfizer nor Moderna contains the coronavirus, and while he respected the logic behind my decision, he hoped I might reconsider given this information.

At this point, I asked Ter what she thought about me being jabbed despite our earlier agreement. She replied that she’d been rethinking the plan but hadn’t known how to broach it with me—so thank you, older older brother, for opening the door to that conversation.

It also helped to remind myself that new technology is as much a miracle as an untried property, and since I live in a loving, friendly and generous Universe, why not accept the vaccine as a miracle and trust that I would be safe? That sealed the deal.

I had my first dose of Moderna on May 21. When I told the nurse (Michaela—she was great) that I had RA, she said I might have some joint pain after the shot, but it wasn’t likely to be severe. Within minutes, I was getting what felt like tiny carpet shocks in my left hip—most strange. It didn’t last long, but during the next thirty-six hours, a weird little zitzit struck random joints without developing into anything more sinister. Otherwise and so far, I’ve skipped the headache but not the nausea, slept like a super-predator for 16 hours a day, and had a touch of vertigo if I move my head too fast. In other words, nothing much different from the usual!

In fact, I now harbour the wild idea that the vaccine might cure my present condition ...

Stuff It

I love single servings!

When I was a kid, the only time Mum cooked a turkey was at Christmas. That means we had stuffing once a year, and I’m here to tell you, though Mum cooked a beauty every time that I remember, the bird was not the star of the family holiday feast. Mum didn’t go in for the homemade sausage/cranberry/chestnut/kitchen sink dressing; for expediency’s sake she knocked out a box of Stove Top and we were fine with it.

“Stove Top or potatoes?” The answer was a no brainer in our house:

Both!

However, if forced at gunpoint to choose one over the other, my younger younger brother once said he’d be content with a bowl of stuffing and gravy—and I completely, heartily, vehemently agree. And while one might argue that a boxed stuffing mix is cheating, you can’t really call it substandard because the bread should be a little stale anyway and most of the herbs in a homemade version are as dry as they are in the commercial product. Fresh herbs just don’t pack the same punch; not in stuffing, anyway.

Mind you, my older sister made a batch from scratch at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, and I would have devoured the whole pan except there were seven other people at the table and it would have been rude not to share.

So this weekend, Ter was debating about veggies to go with our Easter dinner. “You’re doing sprouts, right?” I asked, because we love Brussels sprouts and apparently can’t have them too often.

“Oh yeah,” she concurred, “but instead of carrot/turnip mash, I’ve got a couple of squash that I haven’t used, so maybe the acorn ...?”

That’s a lot of cooking and I try to spare her where I can. “I’ll forfeit the mashed potatoes for squash,” I said.

She knows I’ve never met a spud I haven’t liked, so she was sufficiently dubious. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Because it’s really all about the stuffing.”

Stuffing with gravy, sprouts, squash, and a side of turkey.

Happy Easter.

Lemons

When someone’s life goes sour, I’m the first one to spout a platitude. When it’s my life, I’m the first one to want to clock the first one to spout a platitude.

Like this oldie but goodie: “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

If all had gone to plan, this weekend my wee sister and I would have been halfway through visiting our older older brother on Prince Edward Island, and today I’d have been on an in-person artist date with Nicole. Alas, life had another plan that, by ripple effect, changed the original plan, plus a couple of others.

I spent the summer mourning my “sister trip” as well as my mother, and even though the flights were fully refunded, having to do it still hurt. It also gave me a different song to sing when I tired of lamenting Mum. There were a few tracks on the “2018 Summer Sucks” EP, and I played that baby thin. I may even have incurred an eyeroll or two by writing this post, but stick with me – it gets brighter at the end.

It may be human to cry for what might have been, but it’s also terribly unproductive. “What might have been” is as unreal as what once was; all we truly have is Right Now. And while in the Now, even what seems real is merely transient. Sadness is as fleeting as happiness if you choose to make it so. Denying what we feel in a given moment doesn’t make it go away – in fact, it’s more likely to come out sideways when we’re not looking – so by all means, take that moment and relish it. We’re here to experience contrast; however, it’s equally important to remember that we can change how we feel, good or bad, according to how we want to feel.

I didn’t know it before, but I know it now: I don’t like grief. While it’s necessary to the human condition, it’s no fun at all and eventually I got tired of it. I slowly started thinking about other things. Happier things. Creative things. I love and miss Mum no less, yet now that I’m facing the sun again, she’s even more present in my awareness. (How can she be gone and still be present? Only the Universe knows for sure!)

You rarely nail the recipe on the first go; you gotta keep tasting the lemons to get the sweetness right – and while some folks just plain like their lemonade on the sour side, others have no idea that adding the sugar is up to them. Henry David Thoreau said, and I’m paraphrasing as usual, it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

I hated that wee sis and I had to postpone our trip. I hated the reason more, of course, but we certainly haven’t cancelled it. We’ve simply changed the dates.

So Thoreau was right. It’s about perspective. And when you get right down to it, you can’t make lemonade without those darned lemons.

The Ties That Bind

My older older brother and his lovely wife recently dropped in for a visit so short there was no point in them adapting to another time zone. A couple of weeks before they arrived, my older sister put out an email saying they’d been in touch with her and hoped to connect with as many of us as they could while they were here—a trickier notion than it sounds, as three of the four west coast siblings still work and the visit was smack dab in the middle of a workweek. Big Sis suggested an early evening potluck at her place. No problem since, while a couple of us live in the sticks, we all work in town. Why not stop by before heading to our respective homes?

I naively assumed the gathering at Big Sis’s place would be attended by the siblings and perhaps our significant others. I couldn’t imagine my parents tackling rush hour traffic so late in the day, and though we love our nieces and nephews, how big a bash was this going to be? I admit, I hoped for something more intimate. I am an introvert. Large social occasions intimidate me and, as my wee sister observed one day at coffee, “when all the Greigs get together, we can be kind of overwhelming.”

No kidding. My parents arrived with my older older brother and, as staggered quitting times came and went, a steady trickle of siblings, spouses, sons, daughters, sons and daughters’ spouses and their children soon had Big Sister’s house full to bursting. What my mother innocently terms her “small family” has erupted into a group not quite large enough to claim village status!

Make no mistake. I love my family. I am the luckiest daughter/sister/aunt in the world. Wee Sis asked me in high school what was wrong with us because we liked our parents. My mother has often said how surprised she was to discover that her family was not as normal as she believed. Didn’t every family get along as well as we did? We’ve had drama, of course. We’ve had sibling squabbles and growing pains and tragedies like any other clan, but on the  whole, we’ve stayed together even into the kids’ adulthood. I mean, the Big Guys are all in their sixties now! Conversation might be a little awkward to start with, but we compensate with lots of hugs until we gain traction and suddenly it’s as if we were never parted. I have every confidence that my siblings and I will remain close even after our parents have moved on. We won’t see each other every day, but we don’t do that now. What we do do is remember we were raised by parents who taught us the importance of family, of the privilege of belonging to something greater than ourselves, and the responsibility we have to keep that going so in the end, none of us will ever be alone.

The mob at Big Sister’s place last week was as raucous and chaotic as I’d feared it would be ... and I’m so glad I was there. It’s magical to be part of something so overwhelming.

With love,

Fun with F***book

It’s finally happened. In my evolving quest for domination of literary cyberspace, I have joined Darth Ter to create an author page for myself on Facebook. It’s still under construction as I write this post, but on the weekend I sold my soul to start an account and the slippery slope is getting, well, slipperier.

Now I’m considering trading my flip phone for a Smartphone.

One should never say “never”. For years, I resisted the lure of social media because good and decent people are daily sucked into the black hole of technology. Bad enough that I spend more time twiddling my thumbs on the taxpayer’s dime when the network goes down at work, or that I have succumbed to the convenience of the Internet at home. It’s horrifying that texting while driving is now illegal as well as just plain stupid, and public service announcements are begging drivers to leave their phones alone. The need for real time uploads in place of genuine social interaction escaped me, nay, compelled me to rebel with all my might against a force that threatens the very fabric of our human connection. I sat at the coffee house the other day, watching a couple sharing a table—and nothing else. They may as well have been strangers, each was so engrossed in the tiny screen clutched in their respective hands. I dunno; maybe they were conversing with each other via FB, but isn’t it more gratifying to hear the other person’s voice and see their eyes while you’re talking?

The A side, however, makes it possible to spend real time with Nicole in Halifax, my older brother in PEI, and anyone else located outside of Victoria. Getting a virtual hug from Nic is as gratifying as a heart to heart hug from Ter, for obvious reasons. And, truth be told, if I want to follow my bliss and be well paid for writing, I must make myself known by whatever means available. Word of mouth is more powerful than a marketing budget, and it costs the author nothing.

My final rationalization for tripping onto the Dark Side is this: social media is merely a tool. It’s as potent or as harmless as the user wants to make it. Again, we only hear of the cyber-bullying, of malicious viruses and hacking of email accounts. Who’s to say this is the norm? I started this blog to send some good energy into cyberspace, and with luck, I can do the same via my FB page.

I may also become a filthy stinking rich celebrity writer from it, and that will be okay, too.

Birthday Gift

VAN 4 - PHI 0

My younger older brother received two gifts for his birthday, yesterday: the Canucks snapped their four-game losing streak, and the Flyers let them do it in Philadelphia.

I could have done without it being a shutout, though, to be perfectly relevant to my brother’s age, the final score should have been 6-0.

Now the Flyers are on a streak of being shut out for two games in a row. Shutouts are normally measured by periods or minutes or whatever is the most humiliating, but this time out, I’m happily appalled at straight games.

On the other hand, no less than three Flyer games have been on TV this week – they won the first one 7-3, then quit scoring for the rest of the streak. Guess they used up their weekly goals-for allotment against Tampa Bay on Monday.

Funny that right after I promise to quit ragging on Rogers, the universe sees fit to reward me with a tripleheader. That my brother’s team happened to play against mine on his birthday was a bonus. That his team won is … well, I’d like to say that I engineered it just for him, but the reality is I’d rather have had the score reversed in Philly’s favour. However, I’m sure he was happy and that’s all that matters. I may be grateful to see my hockey team, but I am far more grateful to have him.

Happy belated, bro.

Extraordinary Miracles II

“The Wedding”

In all honesty, I don’t know my younger older brother’s kids that well, but what I do know of them, I absolutely cherish. His son is a diehard hockey nut with smarts that make my head hurt and who married the sweetest girl on the planet a couple of years ago. It was a summer wedding, held in the garden and celebrated by the entire Greig clan when my older older brother and his wife flew out from PEI to attend with the rest of us. They’re a good match, both Canuck-crazy and now expecting my great-niece/nephew in April.

My niece is an accountant with a personality, which makes her a miracle unto herself. She and her sweetie have been together for longer than most married couples, so when they decided to make it official, I admit to receiving the news with a measure of huh? I’m not a big wedding fan anyway, having attended enough syrupy occasions during my church days to view the ritual with little more than suspicion and, perhaps, on a subconscious level, a culturally Christian-spawned sense of failure for not having starred in my own. But I love my brother and I love his kids, so accepting the invite to his daughter’s wedding was a no-brainer.

I am so glad I did. It was wonderful.

They were married in a movie theatre, of all things. The same movie theatre, I believe, where they had their first date all those eons ago. The ceremony was presided over by the marriage commissioner, a man with the presence of Shakespearean stage actor and a gentle sense of humour. The stage was lit by a trellis made of stage scaffolding and light bulbs, popcorn was provided for the guests, and I have to say, the seats were comfier than the seats at any wedding I’ve previously attended. No cartoon, my father later lamented, but there was a short film that introduced the bridal party beforehand, and the theme to The Princess Bride played as the procession started.

I don’t know where my head was at because I didn’t figure out why my younger older brother was missing until I saw him walking my niece down the aisle. Despite remembering that his wife was mother of the bride, I’d forgotten that he was the father of the bride! I can only imagine the scene before he and his daughter took that walk—I think she’s very much like him, so emotions would be running pretty high. In any event, he handed her to the groom and the ceremony proceeded as written. The wonder came at the end, with the granting of an Apache marriage blessing and the first official introduction of Mr. and Mrs. Green. If I hadn’t known it before, I knew right then that this match is a true one of lasting friendship, love and joy. It was all over their faces, in mixed radiance and relief at having gotten through the vows without blowing their lines. I have never imagined that any member of my family in any situation could even remotely be considered cute, but these two … they’re adorable. I happily hugged him in the receiving line and he murmured, “I’m in,” with such warmth and happiness that I wanted to squeeze the stuffing out of him. “You’ve been in for years,” I replied. “Yes,” he said, grinning, “but now there’s a paper trail.” He’s so cute, and she is just vibrant. How can they be anything but delightful together?

I missed the reception due to a previous commitment, but I’m sure the party was a blast. If the ceremony was any indication, it would have been the best reception I’d ever attended. As it was, I would not have missed their wedding for the world.

And that is no ordinary miracle.

Make ʼem Laugh

The world got a little darker yesterday. David Brenner, my favourite comedian of all time, passed away from cancer at the age of 78. He was a ground breaker in the 70s, with a true gift for pointing out the absurdities in life.

I loved his south Philly accent, his flashy style and big Buick grin; he laughed at his own jokes and to this day, many of his quotes remain relevant; proof that genuine humour is truly timeless.

Regrettably, I lost sight of him over the past twenty years, though I did reacquaint myself with him via YouTube in 2011. I had also bookmarked his website with every intention of visiting on occasion. Just two days ago, I referred to his story about how the female mosquito doesnʼt buzz, but as she is the biter, if youʼre lying in bed on a hot summer night and you hear nothing, be afraid. I have no idea if thatʼs a fact, but the laughs were undeniably real. So many have rooted in my memory, so many belly laughs and hysterical tears. I remember more of his jokes than I do of anyone elseʼs (with the possible exception of my younger older brother). Thereʼs the legacy, right? That his humour is part of my history and part of my joy. A lot of people will be grateful that he lived.

Count me among them.

Fine Tuneage

pretty much the whole catalogue with a few exceptions

The Father of My Unborn Children is a musician, so is it ironic that an interview on his book tour put me back in touch with my musical history? He did a session in the Google Authors series while promoting his most-excellent autobiography, and during the Q&A, he admitted to a fondness for the old vinyl LP. He still owns a vast collection (and clearly hires someone else to do the heavy lifting when relocating it) though, naturally, he doesn’t listen to everything as frequently as he once did. He likened it to a vintage wine collection, when something is opened and savoured as the mood dictates. After he’s done with whichever Bowie or Roxy album, it goes back into storage for a few years, until he feels like hearing it again.

Most of the vinyl I owned was sent to consignment as I converted to compact discs; the medium is less important to me than the content, so if an LP made it to my CD case, it was a keeper.

During my recent bout of “writing is not meant to happen”, I rediscovered my joy in the Alan Parsons Project. Rightly or wrongly, I associate my sizeable collection of their work with my younger older brother, who introduced me to the concept of orchestrated rock and album-oriented FM radio when I was a teenager. I vividly recall the instance when he started his car and “Hyper Gamma Spaces” (an instrumental from 1977’s “Pyramid”) poured from the souped-up speakers, but I’m sure he had me hooked before then. In any event, I became a fan, collected all the APP albums I could find, and have revisited them in sequence over the past few weeks. And I’ve loved it—so much that it finally occurred to me that there might be a website.

Alas, the Project broke up and co-founder Eric Woolfson passed away in 2009, but Alan Parsons himself continues to produce and record new material. His website is now bookmarked and I am trying to get over the fact that “I Robot” (my favourite after “The Turn of a Friendly Card”) has just been remastered, expanded, and re-released in a 35^th anniversary edition! 35 years? Really? Playing it last week, I closed my eyes and was immediately transported to the couch in my parents’ living room, flaked out in one corner with my older older brother in the other, both of us floating on the groove of the LP’s first release. The memory was so clear that it couldn’t have been that long ago … could it?

The studio technology, so sparkly and new at the time, is dated and sounds a little clunky nowadays, but the albums themselves remain a magical link to my past, to time shared with both of my brothers, and my own visions of a creative future. Now that I’ve heard them all again, back to the wine cellar they go, to be opened and enjoyed again some time down the road.

Shootout at the Rodge

everybody grab a partner

Holy cow, what a bout at Rogers Arena. Two seconds into the Calgary/Vancouver finale to Hockey Day in Canada, every player on the ice except the goalies got into a fight and when the penalties were assessed, 176 minutes were assigned, including four game misconducts. The Canucks’ coach lost his mind and started screaming at the Flames’ coach, the players on either bench were chirping back and forth, the guys in the penalty boxes continued verbally abusing each other after the doors closed, and it took me forty minutes to get the dinner dishes done because Ter kept yelling at me to “come and see this!”

It was unbelievable, if only because no one in the game was wearing a vintage Flyer jersey. It got crazier at the end of the first period, too. The Vancouver coach was seized outside the Flames’ locker room, apparently intent on berating (or worse) the Calgary coach during the intermission. This set off the talking heads between periods; one guy was so upset that he couldn’t focus on anything else they might have discussed about what hockey had been played so far. Eventually, the teams did settle down and the game progressed, but with the shortened benches on either side, it was like watching two periods of playoff overtime when the guys are so tired they start tripping over the blue line and bumping into each other. They were tied 2-2 at the end of regulation, and still tied after 5 minutes of 4-on-4 OT, so appropriately enough, they went to a shootout. Vancouver won in the fifth round.

I could only imagine what my younger older brother must have been saying. The Canucks are his team. They were mine, too, last night, because I really dislike the Flames, but I must hand it to them—they gave us a darned good show of “ we went to the fights and a hockey game broke out”. It was wild.

Some form of league discipline is likely to be delivered to the Vancouver coach for his behaviour. Whatever he was doing in the corridor between periods had everyone up in arms. Even I can’t figure out what the heck he was thinking. He might have been choked at the visiting team playing their fourth line at the puck drop, which resulted in him having to send in his goons … The saddest thing is that one kid had been called up from the minors to play his first NHL game, his folks had flown out from Ontario to see him play, and he got tossed from it in the first two seconds. I still can’t get my head around it. In the old days, stuff like this happened all the time; they say the quietest room in the league was the visitors’ locker room in Philadelphia (oh, yeah, babe), and though scraps and staged dances are sprinkled throughout an 82 game season, for the most part, bench-clearing brawls don’t happen anymore. Philly is still the most penalized team in the league, but that’s guilt by historic association. It might also be untrue after last Saturday night.

Was it a good game? Yeah, it was. I loved it. No peace-loving beatnikery here, boy. I have a dark side. I also disagree vehemently with hits from behind and deliberate attempts to injure; fights don’t cause injuries the way sticks and knees and numbers-crunching do. I love the speed and skill of a fast forward, but I also admire the third and fourth line players, the guys who don’t score that much but can motivate their team by causing a ruckus or pulling the other guy’s jersey over his head. Saturday night was a tad extreme, and I do feel bad about the kid from the minors, and I cannot condone the coach’s conduct, but it was fitting that, in a day of celebrating the great Canadian game, the final match was a shootout in the wild, wild west.

The Milkman's Son

before the Leppard show in 2005

According to my mother—who should know; she was there—it was a dark and stormy night. The pipes at home had frozen and flooded the flat. My older older brother, a toddler at the time, was staying with his maternal grandparents, so rather than help Dad clean up the water, Mum went into labour. She says she was still cold at the maternity hospital, but at least she was dry, and at the end of the night she had her second little boy, my younger older brother, the self-proclaimed Handsome One, so she figures all was worth it.

On paper, he doesn’t fit the family profile. Four of five kids were born in September. He was born in January. Four of five kids have green or hazel eyes. His are blue. Four of five kids have brown or black hair. His is auburn. In fact, he looks so much like our maternal grandfather that a family resemblance to the Greigs would have to reveal itself in personality … and I’m unsure that it does. His deadliest charm is his sense of humour – razor sharp, lightning fast, screamingly funny, and practically identical to the wit of our mother’s father.

Hmmmmm …

Wedged between my older older brother and my older sister like the jam in a sandwich cookie, he was, quite simply, the brightest splash of comedic colour in my growing up. Six years lie between us, so my earliest memories are vague. I remember a fairly active temper, mostly when I was goading it, but when there was laughter in the house, he was usually in the middle of it. He and my older sister were the perfect comedy team, recording their own radio shows on the old reel-to-reel in the basement (he asked me to provide Indy racetrack sound effects for one skit). He taught me to tackle him like a football player on the front lawn. When he wasn’t putting together models of them, he was downstairs with his pellet rifle, shooting at pictures of old WWII airplanes. He took me to my first hockey game (the Victoria Cougars vs the Medicine Hat Tigers) and drove me to the record store so I could buy my first Elton John album. He’s the headbanger in the family, gunning his electric guitar like a Sex Pistol while my older older brother favoured the folksier acoustic form of modern music. He’s crazy-ticklish. And he’s a one-man Goon Show, able to mimic any of the characters made famous by the British radio troupe of yore.

Actually, I can voice a mean Bluebottle, myself. My brother and I carpooled with Dad for the course of a summer in the early 80s; Dad drove, bro and I bantered in non-stop Goonese. My (our?) father is not a morning person, so getting him to think of cracking a smile is monumental. On those mornings, he’d sometimes take the role of ultra-slick Grytpype Thynne or the frazzled Major Bloodnok, and we’d howl with laughter all the way to town. Those hysterically happy rides to work would never have happened without my younger older brother.

A lot of good times would have been missed without him. The family trek across Canada in 1971. Riotous suppertimes when my arthritis was brand-new and raging. Attending a Def Leppard concert in 2005. Trash talking hockey with his son and recognizing his deeply affectionate nature in his daughter. I don’t recall any serious moments with my younger older brother. I’m afraid that if we tried one, we’d both burst into tears and drown in each other’s arms. A mother lode of passion is packed pretty deep within us; if avid support of our respective NHL teams isn’t hint enough, I suspect that our similar senses of humour are employed in precisely the same way for precisely the same purpose: to deflect and disarm incoming missiles that might otherwise reduce us to emotional rubble. I think sometimes that he and I are more alike to each other than we are to any of the other sibs – that’s why it seems appropriate to wish him a happy birthday today in a language I know he’ll understand:

YING-TONG-IDDLE-I-PO, bro!

Twins Ten Years Apart

Mum holds the bairn while a diligent older brother looks on - 1964

Most boys probably want a bicycle for their tenth birthday. A bike or hockey equipment or airplane models or some other boyish-type nod to their boyishness, especially when one already has a younger brother and two little sisters.

When he turned ten, my older older brother got a baby sister. In truth, we all got her, but for him, as good a soul as he is, it would be fair to imagine he was a little dismayed. Until that day, September 21 had belonged solely to him. From 1963 onward, his birthday was a shared event.

It was also closure, in a way. My parents started their family on September 21, 1953, and finished production exactly ten years later – a notable credit to my mother’s organizational skills. Five kids in ten years. Nice and neat and tidy, unless you count the log jam with my older sibs, who were born within four years of each other and were known collectively by my wee sister and me as “the Big Guys”. I shudder to think how they referred to us when the parents weren’t looking. Managing a litter takes some doing, but Mum and Dad pulled it off like professionals. Sure, we indulged in the usual sibling scraps, vying for position and attention within the pack, but to this day, whenever we see each other and no matter how much time has passed since the last meeting, we always embrace warmly and pick up right where we left off. There is great affection among the kids in our clan.

But back to the ten year twins.

Today, my wee sister turns 50. That means my older older brother is 60. She is here on the west coast. He lives on Prince Edward Island. When we all lived in the same house, he was the best older older brother in the world and she was … well, she was “the bairn” and 50 years later, she still is. I’m less sure how she feels about that than how my folks must feel knowing their youngest is now a half-century old and their firstborn is this close to qualifying for CPP. Physical age means nothing, though, except when the aches and pains set in: get the gang in the same room at the same time and we fall into line in the order in which we were born. He has four younger siblings and she has four older siblings. The three in between love them both from different vantage points, but I’m pretty sure we’re all glad we have them.

I know I am.

Mrs Bones

Another Hot Red Cantaloupe

No walk for me today – my right knee blew up like a red cantaloupe overnight (again), and while I’ve managed to get it to bear weight, it fights me on bending so better not to attempt the stairs without someone home to call 911 if it buckles. It’s not an excuse to avoid walking, either; I’m miffed about it because I really enjoy my solitary sojourns on my mornings off.

No matter. I have appeased my OCD regarding dust on the dark wood furniture and am ready to hit the writing computer when I’m done here. In fact, horror of horrors, I got an idea for untangling the knot I left in the novel at the same time I got a nibble for my next scene with Cristal. This means a little internal duelling to decide which thread gets my attention. It’ll be a good writing day.

I got my marathon Newsroom viewing done yesterday, when my right knee blew up the first time and kept me off work as well as off my feet. Two days running, it’s flared at 4:00 in the morning and I can’t figure out why. The usual suspects are notably absent from my diet, so it must be, er, um, hormones. These wonderful shifts in the female cycle can cause arthritic flares. I swear, whoever said it was great to be a girl had to be a guy.

Not only have I been dealing with hormones since I was thirteen, I’ve been dealing with arthritis since then as well. My younger older brother, The Handsome One, tagged me with the nickname “Mrs. Bones” when I was a teenager and still calls me by it thirty-some years later. It’s nice to be special that way. I have a few nicknames, but this one is my sentimental favourite.

I don’t know how my illness affected the rest of my family. I do know that I wasn’t the only one who had to cope with it. My focus was exclusively narrowed on getting through every day, sometimes moment by moment, so either I didn’t notice how everyone else reacted or they did such a good job of hiding it that I wouldn’t have seen it if I had been looking. We’re a pretty stoic bunch despite the powerful emotion roiling beneath our collective skin. I don’t remember talking about it with any of them. I tried not to talk about it at all. I just … got through it. My mother believed that she had done something to make God mad and He was taking it out on me; I hope she’s let that go because I never ever believed that. My bones were my challenge, but being aware of how much Mum suffered for my pain, I did all I could to be as normal as my healthier siblings – thrice-weekly physio and ongoing medical appointments notwithstanding. Mum was with me every step of the way, for which I am eternally grateful, but I also know the rest of the family, my wee sister especially, felt the loss of her attention.

Ironically, both my mother and my wee sister have been diagnosed with the same cursed thing during the last decade, and my father is starting to feel the effects of “everyone’s bones” – the arthritis we all get as wear and tear builds on ageing joints. Each of them has said to me at some point in the past few years, “I don’t know how you did it.”

You know what? Neither do I. I sat with a bag of ice on my knee this morning and stupidly said to Ter, “I think my walk is toast today.” She gave me the look that warned I’d be toast if I tried to push it – my parents once worried how I would manage when I left the nest. With Ter on board, they truly have no need to be concerned. I’m more afraid of her than I ever was of them!

Annoyingly painful as these incidents are, they serve as a good reminder of where I came from and what I was able to overcome with the support of my whole family. Even if all my brother could do to help me feel better was to give me a nickname, he did it. And it helped.