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Traveling to B.C.


Friday night after ballet, we drove down to Calgary to get a jump on the long drive to Penticton which is in the Okanagan in British Columbia. Rob’s younger sister and her family live just outside of Calgary and we spent the night there and left just before lunch for B.C. Rob’s mother relocated to Penticton recently.

Calgary is a big city. About one million and it’s probably the biggest city per square mile in North America. It took a while to drive through. Rob, Shelley and the girls lived there for about eight years. First while he was in engineering school and then when he was working at a refinery nearby. Rob’s younger sister, Sheila and her husband and their girls live here now and Rob’s younger brother and his family do as well. We had a nice time at Sheila and Kevin’s, but we didn’t see Ryan and his wife, Natalie.

The mountains can be seen from Calgary without any problem. They are about an hour from the city with nothing but prairie leading up to them. Once in the mountains, they rise and fall alongside, disappearing up into the clouds, falling down to disappear into tree thick valleys.

Our first stop after leaving Calgary was Canmore which is just outside the Jasper National Park. Rob told me to take a good look around. Canmore is an example of what happens to mountain towns that lie outside national park land. Overgrowth without restriction. Some would argue that it allows people an opportunity to live in beautiful areas like the Rockies and that government regulation hampers growth, but the truth is that towns that like Canmore are blights that are no different than the mountain pine beetle that is ravaging the old forest growth in B.C. There are some that go as far as to argue that man is an infestation on the planet and when you contrast the ugliness of a place like Canmore, you might be inclined to agree.

At the first high pass beyond Canmore, we encountered snow. Real snow. Heavy wet flakes driven at the speed of sound by the wind, they looked like giant moths caught in a wind tunnel.

White knuckle driving. I know this because Rob let go of my hand to take the steering wheel with both hands. He always holds my hand while driving, so when he lets go and takes the wheel, it’s bad.

As quickly as it came up, we were coming down and the skies began to clear.

We stopped again in Golden after crossing this bridge, but not before encountering wildlife.

Mountain settlements slow travel in addition to not being as picturesque as they lay claim to being. Sometime well after dark we finally reached Kelowna, and I am glad it was dark. As I told Rob, I wouldn’t want to be able to see the mountains around. The city is obscene enough in the dark. Spreading out and out like a retail Vegas with every chain name you can imagine. It wasn’t even pretending to be quaint and scenic.

Penticton has turned out to be a little nicer but still, a city is a city and there is a natural opposition between civilization and the wild with the former not bending much to accommodate.

1000 Days


It’s interesting the significance that people place on the dates and anniversaries of their deceased loved ones and on keeping track of the exact passage of time. A fellow widow blogger noted recently that she was approaching the 1000th day since her husband’s death. Out of curiosity I found a site that will calculate time elapsed between two dates, so I played with it a bit and discovered the following:

It’s been 654 days since my late husband died. That’s 1 year, 9 months and 16 days.
It’s been 807 days since he went into hospice or 2 years, 2 months and 16 days.
I had to put him in a nursing home on October 6th of 2004 which is 1189 days or 3 years, 3 months and 2 days ago.
1311 days ago I started taking him to daycare while I worked and he began to wear diapers full-time. That comes out to 3 years, 7 months and 2 days.
He finally succumbed to the full effect of his illness the same week we bought our first home together. That was the 4th of July weekend of 2003, 1588 days ago, which is 4 years 4 months and 4 days. He was a complete stranger to me from then on.
The last time we made love? 1629 days ago or 4 years 5 months and 15 days.
The day it was clear to me that he was ill, although it wasn’t obvious to anyone else and should have been. That was the day of his 10 year high school reunion on June 1, 2002. 1986 days or 5 years, 5 months and 7 days past.

And what does all this add up to, really? I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know why people count days and I don’t. I know why I remember these dates, and they certainly aren’t the only ones – just the highlights. They are significant to the demise of something I never thought would end as quickly as it did. Almost as quickly as it began. Each of these dates mark me in a way that no scar ever could, although they cut deep and the ache is never too far from my memory.

I am not sure that you honor a person’s memory by dwelling more on the time that they have been dead rather than the time that they spent living on this earth. Next week will mark what would have been my late husband’s 34th birthday and Rob suggested to Katy and I that we have a cake to celebrate. We didn’t celebrate his birthday last year. I didn’t even mention it to Katy at all. Maybe I should have because it doesn’t really matter how long he has been gone. What matters is that he lived.

Do You Want Until a Song is Over?


On my way to the gym yesterday morning I was listening to the XM 70’s station and it played song after song that I remembered and could sing along with. Just as I was pulling up to the intersection where I turn off the Carpenter’s Top of the World came on. Like most pop tunes from that era, it is of rather short duration but it wasn’t quite finished as I pulled into the parking lot and into a spot, so I sat in my vehicle, head bopping and singing along until the song was through before getting out. And I wondered, how many people sit and listen through to the end of the song before exiting their vehicles? I know it probably depends on the day and whether or not a person is crunched for time, but since I am chronically not on time anyway and have really no earth shattering obligations beyond my husband and our family, I usually sit and wait for the song to end.

It was a good song too. Happy and upbeat. Anyone who might have been watching me could have well wondered what I had in my tea at breakfast. (A bit of honey and vanilla rice milk, actually) Although Rob would be horrified, the lyrics suited the two of us in a way, and it felt good to be able to identify with them.

I remember once back when I was teaching middle school we had a student teacher, I think, who would often sit in her car for a while after she arrived in the morning. When someone finally asked her what she was doing, she replied that she was singing along with a song that hadn’t quite finished and that sometimes she would even “play” the drum part on the steering wheel and even if she was running late, she always waited for the song to end. At the time I thought, how totally cool to be so young and to have such good priorities. For a while after I made it a point to sit and listen to songs I liked. But then, life got busy and sad and I stopped. I had forgotten about her until today. I am going to try not to forget again.