So, some years ago, we had some problems with our smoke detectors. They were getting close to a due date to replace them all, particularly as we had changed the batteries on one or two a couple of times in the previous year, but they were still prone to regular chirping. They were draining the batteries too quickly, but well, it was batteries, not a huge expense.
While we were doing some other work, we decided to replace all the smoke detectors in the house. The new ones would be directly wired to the electrical grid, come with battery backups, of course, and be linked together so that if one went off, they all went off. It was VERY convenient.
Now with our old stove (yes, I’m still on the same story), any time we used the broiler, it was easy to end up having some extra smoke come out of the oven when we were done, and the alarms would go off like crazy. So we knew they always worked. I checked the batteries for the first year, but with the convenience of direct wiring and the fact that they went off a couple of times a year, I knew they worked, so I stopped checking the batteries regularly.
Last week, there was a power outage in the middle of the night. This is kind of weird, as this has NEVER happened to me before — my CPAP machine had no power so it stopped, of course. Which woke me up. Okay, no biggie, take the mask off, roll over, verify power is out all over, back to sleep.
About 20 minutes later, the smoke detector chirped. Low battery. Ugh.
The power isn’t off for long stretches, sooooo I tried to tough it out. Nope, about 5 minutes later, chirp. It seemed to be happening at faster intervals, and it took me a while to figure out that it was ALL three detectors chirping at different intervals. I have zero desire to be climbing a ladder at 3 in the morning myself while holding my phone as a flashlight. Everybody else was still asleep.
I tried going to the basement only to realize that my incoherent comprehension of the chirping was all three chirping, with the one in the basement the loudest by far. I gave a shot at trying to remove the battery from that one, as it was easy to reach, but I couldn’t figure it out with limited light. I also couldn’t figure out a shush button, although I was pretty sure there was one somewhere. I went back to bed, finally dozed off when the batteries stopped even chirping upstairs, but my sleep was destroyed.
I woke up around 6:00 or 6:30 and the power was back on, but I never managed to recover.
So I added it to our list — put new batteries in the smoke detectors. Which, of course, means I have to take one down to confirm WHAT type/size battery it is — 9 volts. Great, guess which ones we’re out of? Oh yeah, 9 volts. So another day goes by. And the detectors start chirping. I have power, I get that I need to replace it, but we have other stuff going on. Yes, I found out there’s a shush button that keeps it quiet for about 12 hours and then it starts chirping again.
It took me a day or two, but yes, I got them, and yes, we replaced the batteries. Of course, two are one style and one is different, cuz why not add to the fun of figuring out to get them down and change the batteries? I was sure I bought them at the same time with all three being the same, but who knows, maybe I didn’t. Or maybe that was one where we had the contractor buy them. I don’t remember at this point.
But it was interesting. The convenience of having them directly wired led to the problem that I stopped checking them, they always had power. The inconvenience of the chirping led to the solution of updating them.
Now I just need to remember in 6 months to check them again when we change the clocks. Although now I have a question…if I do the check, and it sounds like it’s supposed to, how do I know that’s not just the wired part working but that the batteries are okay too? I assume as is the case with these ones, if it’s too low, it will chirp again but the “test” may not necessarily tell me that, I guess.
Andrea, Jacob and I play a lot of games after dinner. We don’t really keep track of who wins what or how many times, but I’ve always wondered if we could create a pseudo-tournament idea by keeping track over the course of a year. We started the year while on vacation, so we didn’t capture EVERYTHING, but we did keep track each week on a calendar near our kitchen table.
I didn’t think it through in advance…while MOST of our games are the three of us, there are also lots of 2-player events where Jacob and I will play some cribbage during the day, or a Scrabble game that is usually just Jacob and Andrea (I don’t do well at word combination games).
Over the first three months of 2025, we played 12 different games:
Jeopardy — We have a calendar and do the questions each week, trying to beat each other by Sunday…Jacob won 5 weeks, Andrea won 4, I won 3, and Andrea and Jacob tied one game;
Alleys — Andrea won 10 games but always feels like she never wins, while Jacob and I won 5 each;
UnoFlip — only 1 game, with my winning;
Moonshot Euchre — 1 game/win for each of us;
SuperQuiz Trivia — 1 game that Jacob won;
Abduction — 1 game that Jacob won;
Scrabble — 1 game that Jacob won;
Epic Galaxies — 1 game that I think Andrea won;
Labyrinth — Not sure who won that one;
Catan — 1 game that Andrea won;
Cribbage — We have played a LOT of cribbage in the first three months, combining normal 5-card cribbage (with 3 players); 6-card cribbage (with 2 players); a variation with 8 cards (with 3 players); a variation with 9 cards (with 2 players); and a complicated cribbage board called Crib Wars…I lumped them all together, and as I said, Jacob and I played a lot of games just the two of us, but the end of the quarter has Andrea with 9 wins, Jacob with 24 wins, and me with 16 wins; and,
Backgammon — Mostly just Jacob and I, with Jacob winning 9 and me winning 11.
The end result was 113 games with Jacob winning 51, my winning 37, Andrea winning 27 (but again she didn’t play most of the cribbage games), and Andrea and Jacob tied one game.
If I count just the games that were predominantly three people playing:
Jeopardy: A 4, J 5, P 3, tied AJ 1
Alleys: A 10, J 5, P 5
UnoFlip: A 0, J 0, P 1
Trivia: A 0, J 1, P 0
Abduction: A 0, J 1, P 0
Epic Galaxies: A 1, J 0, P 0
Catan: A 1, J 0, P 0
Total: A 16, J 12, P 9 plus AJ 1
So it looks like Andrea is leading the First Quarter and sits as Queen of Games.
Most people know the Friends theme about being “always stuck in second gear” when it hasn’t been their day, their week, their month or even their year…and while it’s a cute lyric and metaphor, I mention it only to the extent that it’s adjacent to what I’m feeling.
When we got sick in the Dominican, our last day was a bit of a crunch. Andrea had to go to Punta Cana to a private hospital for tests and xrays; Jacob was visiting the toilet frequently to throw up; and although I was in the best shape out of the three of us, that is a low bar at best if I’m winning. We had to check out of the hotel early, get Andrea to the private hospital, get her back to the hotel, get a prescription, get some food in us before leaving the resort, get to the airport, get checked in, get to the gate, get on the plane, get out of the airport upon arrival, and generally get us all home in Ottawa at 4:00 a.m. when all any one of us wanted to do was just curl up into a ball and ignore the world.
Curling up wasn’t an option for any of the stages, so I went into what I often call crunch or crisis mode. You could view it a bit like fight / flight / freeze, but for me I prefer the metaphor of just “crisis mode”. I become a very linear thinker — problem? Solution! Problem? Solution! And so on. I don’t want to debate food options, I don’t want to discuss what to drink, I don’t want to discuss where to sit. Here’s food, here’s drink, here’s a seat, done.
I don’t go into this mode very often as I prefer to analyse situations more, be more flexible if I can, but crisis mode is my default when faced with any form of emotional drama or physical trauma. Get me through this, get us safe, and then unclench.
Except when we got home, there was no relaxation happening. Jacob was sick for more than 2 weeks, while simultaneously trying to get his schoolwork done for the end of the semester. Andrea rarely misses work, yet pneumonia let her go back a bit but then has been off again. I missed the first week, worked through the other weeks, but there ain’t much “thinking” and “analysing” going on. I’m basically still in “Problem? Solution!” mode, I think.
A chance to relax
I confess that I knew I wasn’t fully back to normal, but I thought it was mainly physical. I’ve had the residual cough, extra phlegm, and I’m tired every afternoon. I just run out of energy. But, as I said, with Andrea and Jacob still sick in there, I assumed it was just that still for me too.
But something happened this week to shake me out of my assumptions.
We had bought tickets for the three of us to go to the NAC to see a “Cinematic Sax” experience, with the NAC Orchestra plus Branford Marsalis doing solos on sax. It isn’t a “must-see” for us or anything, but it’s nice to go and see something different each year. And it makes for an easy Christmas present aka an “experience” not a “gift”.
Except I didn’t think about it enough…it was just at the start of Jacob’s exam period, so I should have figured that out when I first looked at the tickets. It was mostly okay for timing, as it turned out, but still, a late night before his potential first exam. Not a good combo. And he was still behind on schoolwork, playing catchup. He maybe could have gone, but it wasn’t a good use of his time, and still sick, all things being considered.
Andrea was still really sick, so she was out of the running early. Often, if Jacob and I can’t go, Andrea has a big enough social network to find other interested people to join. This time, she was out too.
We offered the tickets up to various people, some interested but unavailable either on short notice or the night in particular. But here’s where something interesting happened.
Our friend Stephan (the one who introduced Andrea and I) called and said he wanted to go, just for one ticket, and did I still want to go even if Andrea and Jacob couldn’t? My answer was almost instantly, unequivocally, no.
But wait a minute…why? I actually wasn’t really that sick anymore. I could easily have gone. But my whole body said “NO!” quite loudly. Physically, emotionally, intellectually, existentially, NO.
The response was so strong, it was clear it wasn’t an analytical decision, but an autonomic one. My body, my “being” was saying no, not my head.
Huh. That’s weird, I thought.
Unpacking my reaction
Over the course of the night, I thought more about it. So, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I don’t have a large or active social network, never have. I know lots of people but I don’t necessarily “do” things with them on my own. It’s a fear for retirement, how do I replace my social interactions at work so I don’t become an energy vampire towards Andrea and Jacob.
Stephan is one of my favourite people in the world. I could hang with him anytime, anywhere, all good. I would like to spend more time with him than I do, I always enjoy our get-togethers. Yet here I was saying no.
Cuz I was sick, right? Well, no, not exactly. I realized that if it was just, “hey go for a coffee or dinner”, I would have said yes. So I *WAS* able to consider going OUT, without worrying about making him or others sick. But my risk assessment for the NAC, in a big giant hall with thousands of people at the height of flu season in Ottawa, was “hell no”. Potential risk? Hard no. Immediate. Like I was still in crunch or crisis mode. But I couldn’t be, right? That was weeks ago. What else was going on? I started doing my mental “sore tooth” test of other things that I had reacted to lately too.
I’m really worried about Andrea. She has a REALLY bad cough, and she’s missed most of the last three weeks. That is NOT usual for her, and no real signs of progress. It looked good early on when she was on antibiotics, but now, not so much. And I’m not as tolerant of her passive nature on this. Go to the hospital, call so and so, do this, try this, what’s going on, what have you taken, etc. Far less understanding…Problem? What solution are you doing, have you tried this? I’m not comforting, I’m in problem-solving mode, what do you need me to get at the pharmacist?
Jacob has been neck-deep in school crap, trying to get himself to the end of the semester. And while I try to be understanding, my patience on some aspects has waned too. I’m not giving him options, or suggesting things, I’m dictating, “You will tell me what you have left to do for each of your 4 classes, and when, and we aka I will make up your priority list in which order you should focus on which things, here’s your list.” Problem? Solution. He clearly needs help, both Andrea and he agree too, but I’m not helping him figure it out, I don’t have time for that, nor the energy. Decision made, moving on.
At work, I’m mostly focusing on today’s tasks…problems? Solutions! Looking back, it has been more focused on transactions. What do you need? What do they need? What do I need? Who’s doing X? You want it to go that way? Umm, okay, let’s do that. Just to do it and get it off the list. Is it the best solution? I don’t know, I don’t care, I want a solution, not a debate. Not quite being an asshat, but I have been less open, less collaborative, more transactional. An opportunity came up recently for March, a potential trip to Nunavut. Now, Nunavut is on my bucket list, absolutely. And before I leave this job, I want to go to all three of the Territories if I can. So here’s the first opportunity. And the mental load of taking on planning a trip in March was NOT happening. I said no immediately and left it for others to pick up the challenge.
At home, I really haven’t cared much about food. I don’t want to debate option x or y or z, and Andrea has somehow been still doing most of the mental load for cooking without dropping, but I really have had no views. I feel like I’m still at the resort — I’ll eat what’s available, I don’t care too much about quality, so long as edible. I’m looking for fuel and yet I’m finding almost everything bland and unappetizing. Which could suggest part of what we were sick with was perhaps COVID that messed up my taste buds. But regardless, I have been less interested in food options and more interested in consumption of some sort.
For reading, I’ve gone sideways. I’m not really reading. I read a TON on vacation; I do go up and down; there’s stuff I want to read now; but I’m not actually interested enough to do it. Too passive an activity.
I’m not blogging much. It’s January, I always blog in January. All my plans for the year, etc. Didn’t bother this year. Although part of that is related to my retirement planning. I was blogging about that, hit the health category, had stuff go sideways, and I haven’t blogged since. I’m not sure what I’m doing on that front. I feel like I was lying to myself, and a bunch of stuff I planned were maybe just pipe dreams, not realistic. I also found out some of my finances were not quite as good as I thought, which has messed up my confidence about retirement at all. Maybe I should just work to 35 years in 2030, take the biggest pension I can, etc. My head is really messed up about that, and so I haven’t reset to January goal setting when I can’t figure out my retirement blogging.
Instead, each night, I’m binging one of about twenty different shows … I can’t even really commit to one, although Game of Thrones has been high on the list most nights. But I’m binging until 2:00 in the morning so that when I go to bed, I fall asleep right away and sleep generally until the morning. No tossing, no turning, just wearing myself out so I crash. I’ve been there before, it’s usually when I’m depressed or avoiding something big.
Soooooo, saying no to Stephan and the way I reacted to the question has prompted me to look at other behaviours in the last month or so.
I feel like I put myself in airplane mode, disconnected from local networks and outside signals, and hunkered down to get us all home and safe. Yet after physically arriving, my brain is still not out of airplane mode yet.
Realizing it, of course, was the first step. And I’ve made some adjustments in the last few days (including blogging this post). But it’s weird that I managed to go on auto-pilot for almost three weeks without noticing. I have a pretty finely-tuned early warning radar detection system in place, I just didn’t realize that I turned it off in the Dominican, and forgot to turn it back on when I got home.
I don’t know what I will do about it yet. Perhaps I’ll write some posts to get my mental juices flowing.
I generally don’t believe in regrets. I firmly believe that life is lived forward, not backward, and while I might learn from the past, I don’t revisit decisions to say, “Oh, it should have been x instead of y”. I try to make decisions with the best information I have at the time, and I live with them. There is no other choice.
Yet a decision we made before Christmas didn’t necessarily weigh risk factors as well as we should have.
Our shared need to relax
I’m just going to say it…2024 sucked.
Work isn’t always a barrel of laughs, but there was extra stuff this year that made it less enjoyable. Nothing egregious, even when it seemed so at the time. Finances are fine, all our basic life elements are covered, etc.
Health was a pain in the butt. Somewhere back in March, I did something to my lower back. I don’t know what, I don’t know how. But suddenly I started getting seizures and spasms that had me literally screaming in pain. Two trips to the ER, Xrays, meds, tons of physio and osteo stuff, and it would get better for a while — only to flare up again. Definitely not fun. By way of scaling it, if that pain was daily, if the seizures never let up, I’d be looking at much more serious decisions about my future come March (1 year in). I have no appetite for that kind of life. But let’s leave it at “sucking” for now.
Jacob’s health has been, well, probably worse although not acute. He’s dealing with chronic pain from what we thought was a concussion but probably wasn’t. Every day he has headaches and dizziness, and while we’ve made progress on the headache front, the dizziness remains unabated. His attendance at school is a crapfest. Every day is a game day decision — can he go? which periods? I’ve been fortunate that work has given me special accommodation to deal with his schedule, but it’s still looney toons some weeks. Plus dozens of appointments for the year, perhaps hundreds now. It feels like a roller coaster we can only survive, we cannot thrive.
Andrea’s health wasn’t great, but not scary bad. More “life”, I guess.
We had three funerals this year, so there’s that. Don, my brother; Andrea’s uncle, Scott; and Andrea’s grandfather, Doug. Just writing that sentence has started the waterworks for me. Each is different, each is painful, each is raw. Not “was”, but “is”. Less acute, but still raw.
So, we wanted a chance to relax. We needed it. And we started thinking, “Hey, how about a trip down South?”.
Not enough nuance to our parameters
Andrea did a bunch of the initial searching. But we were trying to parse some parameters to limit the risk. We were worried about the trip. We wanted to keep the travel process to a manageable level of chaos, partly for Jacob’s stamina and endurance. We wanted a good beach, not too big a resort, nice pool, some activity options. We did NOT want big things like trips to Tulum. It was likely to be a resort trip, not an excursions trip.
Looking through all the travel options that Andrea had found, the trips were inconsistent…one would have a great flight down, and then coming back, overnight in Toronto or Montreal. Or leave really early and take 12-14 hours to get to the destination airport. Until I looked at the Air Transat packages that she had found. All of their flights were direct from Ottawa to the destination airport, no transfers or routings. They had Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Andrea’s been to Jamaica, we’ve all been to Mexico; the DR is relatively simple, and more attractive to us than Cuba. So we settled early. A 6:00 p.m. departure arriving around 10:00 p.m. at night, 4 hour flight down; coming back, it left really late (almost midnight), but again, a quick 4-hour hop back. Hah!
We got cancellation insurance, option to bail for any reason, which seemed good just in case we weren’t up to going. Between Jacob’s dizziness and my back, we weren’t sure everything would be going smoothly. A few days before going, I began to wonder if we had made the right choice. Jacob was behind on school, and had worked really hard the week before Christmas to get caught up. Which he did. But if we stayed home for a week, instead of going away, he could get a jump on the stuff he had to do in January before he got to his summative exams and final project deadlines. I was wondering if a staycation might not have been a better weighting of “value-added”. Yet we all really wanted the break, to go somewhere and get our heads out of our existing lives. We stuck to the plan.
The flight down, a 4-hour hop, was a bit misleading. It left later than scheduled, no big problem. There’s a one-hour time-difference to DR from Ottawa, so we actually were getting in an hour later, although that goes out in the wash. The deplaning and luggage process took forever — customs was easy, but everything else took almost 90 minutes. We then found our bus to the resort, which was supposed to be about an hour, and was actually closer to 90 minutes. The last 30m of the trip was listening to, I think, Placido Domingo singing opera which seemed like torture honestly. Once we were at the resort, maybe 20 of us checking in, it took forever. And I was completely spent. I couldn’t deal with people. My patience was at zero at this point. It literally took them 25 minutes to check the three of us ONCE WE GOT TO THE DESK. We were last of 20 or so. It was about 3:30 when we got to sleep. Not awesome.
For the week, we had a good beach albeit with very limited visibility in the bay. And Jacob’s dizziness? Exacerbated by being in the ocean. We had hoped to spend a good portion of the week reading and swimming at the beach, and Jacob couldn’t do it. Equally, I had trouble getting in and out of the ocean as there was a drop-off close to where we started (there were other options farther over with more gradual entry, apparently). And yet, I still have problems with my shins with repeated wounds. Which I did something to about a week before leaving, and it was still weeping. I could go in the ocean, but I couldn’t / shouldn’t go in the pool. We made compromises, but our swimming plans for the week were heavily messed up. We didn’t plan for many excursions, thought we could do some stuff on the property but there really wasn’t anything to see or do. There was a small plaza across the road we went to a couple of times for specific things. It wasn’t a bad resort, we just planned on more relaxing and found that it was too quiet for us. We needed a bit more oomph. The daily activities looked like bad summer camp, and the nighttime shows were laughable. The food at the main and secondary restaurants was okay, not bad, but not particularly scintillating. It was fine, with decent desserts. There were also three a la carte restaurants — Italian, French and Mediterranean. We liked the Italian the best; the French was okay, we didn’t feel a need to go back, while the Mediterranean was heavily seafood-oriented yet not amazing. If we were at home, we would go to the Italian one, occasionally, although there are better ones out there; we probably would not go to either of the other two more than once to try it.
In short, we were bored. We had booked for 9 days, but after 4 days, we looked into the cost to switch to just 7 days and to go home early…it was exorbitant to change, the flights were full, etc. so we left it as is.
New Year’s Eve was Tuesday night (we arrived on Friday), and we enjoyed the night. Dinner was late, we went back to the room and played games, and then they did fireworks at midnight. By some fluke in avoiding a dancing crowd across the street that was too loud for Jacob, we ended up walking a bit down the road for a better view, and it was like we were all alone having our own private fireworks show for 20-25 minutes. It was really great. Not so great when something hot landed on Jacob and Andrea, but they weren’t hurt, just surprised. We wandered down to a gazebo on a pier after midnight and said goodbye to 2024. I embraced a small ritual I had read about of taking a stone, imbuing it with all your negative thoughts from the past year, and just chucking it in the ocean. I hadn’t realized how stressed I was about the year until we did it…I felt a large release, and was even a bit emotional hugging Jacob and Andrea.
The real problem though is that I got the flu on Tuesday / Wednesday. Tuesday afternoon, I had a scratchy throat and was starting to feel a bit off; full cold-like symptoms on Wednesday. Spent a bit of extra time just at the room trying to sleep it off. Andrea started getting sick on Thursday, Jacob on Friday. By Sunday, Andrea was so sick that we had to go talk to the doctor on the resort, who recommended shipping her off to Punta Cana by cab to get them to do xrays and stuff. Her lungs had extra stuff sounding in it, and with Andrea’s medical history, we agreed it was a good idea.
Of course, that was our last day. And checkout from the room was supposed to be noon. I tried to get them to extend, and they gave me the runaround. I was completely caught…I had to checkout, but we wanted to leave Jacob at the resort even though he was feeling like crap now, and Andrea needed to go to the private hospital, get looked at, and get back so we could take our evening flight. It was a complete mess. The hotel was useless. In the end, I had to send Andrea off on her own, and I stayed with Jacob. I got nasty with the hotel staff as they were completely f***ing useless, and then later said, “Oh, we extended you in the room”, 2 hours after I had already checked out. They didn’t bother to tell me. F***ing asshat. So Jacob and I spent the day in the big open-air lobby, charging our phones, repacking bags, and Jacob running to the bathroom to vomit while I tried to connect with Andrea who was at the hospital in Punta Cana (90 minutes away) with a dying phone. She made it back, we got a prescription filled, found a way to pay the cab driver, packed our stuff, got on a shuttle bus and went to the airport. Jacob was really not well and travelling was horrendous for both him and Andrea. Flights were delayed, and we didn’t get home until almost 4 in the morning, which was 5:00 DR time. Not a good combo in the end.
Post-holiday recovery
On the Sunday for the return trip, I was vertical and probably in the best shape of all of us. I had some meds, I jacked the cold stuff even with decongestant which I’m not supposed to take, and focused on what we needed to check in, get us to the gate, etc. The flights were delayed as I said, and he was sick a couple of times at the airport. Andrea was focusing on breathing. My problem was more diarrhea, and I had Imodium on speeddial, but it was still messing me up.
We had planned that all three of us would take the Monday off when we got back as we knew we’d get in late at night / early in the morning. I missed almost the whole week of work. I was off the first couple of days, easily, and then slowly back online a bit by the end of the week, but not fully working. It was a full extra week after the trip to get back to something resembling functionality.
Andrea ended up back in the ER, twice actually, and it turned out the first doctor was right. She DID have stuff going on with her lungs — full pneumonia. She missed work for all of the first week, most of the second, and now two weeks afterwards, she is still fighting a persistent cough.
Jacob? Well, our decisions might have f***ed him for school. Our whole schtick for the last year has been getting him back to school more regularly and for longer periods of time. And after catching up before Christmas, he just missed almost all of the last two weeks. He has had a full-on flu case for two weeks. He managed a couple of classes this week, but he’s still fighting a bad cough. And because he has small lungs, it’s hard for him to clear phlegm and stuff. He’s doing everything he can to finish his semester but it is a rough go.
Not regret, but…
In the end, I suspect I picked up something on the plane on the way down. It took a few days to take hold, and then once it did, I infected Andrea and Jacob. Andrea was sleeping next to me, Jacob was in the same room, the physical path of contamination/contagion looked like a straight line in the hotel room.
And to be honest, that risk was nowhere on my radar. Sure, travelling on a plane is always a risk. COVID, flu, colds, whatever. But we’re fully vaccinated, and if I had thought of it at all, it would likely have been a relatively minor annoyance. I did not envision that it could knock all three of us on our butts for 2-3 weeks.
Is what I feel regret? If I had thought about it, we would have discussed it and rated it pretty low-risk…medium probability perhaps, it’s easy to get sick on a plane, but with relatively low impact. Sick for a few days, move on.
It’s easy to conflate a bunch of stuff together. A less-than-exciting trip; bad logistics at times; terrible experience at the end; and we got really sick. But if we hadn’t got sick, it would have been a shoulder shrug. New Year’s Eve was great, one of the better ones that I have had in recent memory perhaps. I liked getting away, I liked our ritual. I can lament some features of the trip, but I wouldn’t have even come close to “regretting it”, more just it didn’t work out as well as our previous trip to Mexico. We didn’t get the parameters right for balance perhaps. One of the benefits of our driving trips is we had stuff inherently built into each day; the DR was more emotionally flat. Except for getting sick, it would have been more disappointing than bad.
And if we had stayed home, we likely would have gone out for dinner a couple of times on our staycation, or to some museums, etc. And we could have just as easily gotten sick sitting next to people in an IMAX movie.
I’ll write in future about our actual trip, and the activities we did. In the end, I don’t think it was a bad holiday decision, just one that didn’t work out as well. And perhaps we didn’t adequately consider the risks of the impact for Jacob for school if he gets really sick and misses more time. Sigh.
Ultimately, Everyone’s fine. The news of our deaths was (slightly) exaggerated. But we sure don’t feel rested or like we had a good break.
When my dad and mom passed away, I did the eulogies for them, and while the first one for my dad was mostly from “me”, I made the second one more inclusive on behalf of the family. I then wrote subsequent follow-ups that were more just my thoughts. And both of those seemed natural…my parents, my thoughts.
When my brother passed away earlier this year, I started to write about him, and I struggled at first. It was like writing a eulogy, yet I could not and should not have tried to capture his role as a son, father, husband, and friend. I could only really write about him as my big brother.
Andrea’s grandfather, Doug, passed away this week. He was born in ’26, and whenever I spent time with him, it felt very much like my parents would have seemed in outlook. My father was born in ’27, my mother in ’29. They lived very different lives, but as I never knew my grandparents much (they were mostly gone by the time I arrived on the scene), he seemed more like a half-step past parent rather than a full “grandparent” to me.
Of course, he wasn’t “my” grandfather. At first blush, mostly I feel gratitude for his love for Andrea and Jacob, and so thankful that my son will retain that long-lasting memory of GG (great grandfather). A few years ago now, but the photo below has GG with his three grandkids and four great-grandkids.
A little over ten years ago now, I helped create a photobook for Doug’s life. It was for a big birthday, 85 I think, and the idea was a collection of photos from across his life. Some early days as a child, photos throughout his life with his siblings, entry into the Air Force as he finished high school, photos with his wife and then children, later shots of various houses etc., and then even later shots of him alone. I never met Andrea’s great-grandmother; I met GG at her funeral, as I recall. It was shortly after Andrea and I started dating, but the details are fuzzy.
When I met Doug, I felt I already knew him. While the mannerisms and personality were completely different from my father, I always feel a certain reverence for men of “a certain age”. They lived through the Great Depression, seeing their family stressed and struggling. They lived through WW II, and even enlisted as the war neared the end, even if they never saw combat. Doug learned to fly in Canada, my father made it as far as Halifax, mostly cutting hair in between drilling. I loved hearing Doug’s story about the end of high school, and how there was an exhibit of some sort with the names of people who had enlisted from the school aka patriotic nudges to encourage others to enlist and do their part. A glimpse into the routine of life, not the parts that make it into the history books.
A number of years ago, I was looking at music on the first of the Billboard lists and its predecessors. I had a blast chatting with Doug about some of the songs, and he practically chortled at the memory of “Is you or is you ain’t my baby”. 🙂
After the war, men of that age started to figure out their lives and what they wanted to do, who they wanted to be with, when to start a family. And with the memories of the Great Depression and WWII, how they would pay for having that family. I remember hearing the same story from Doug on several occasions of his first job, first apartment, interactions with his bosses. Again, the everyday parts of life that stay with you, that you remember, even if they were small at the time, but that you can remember.
I think that I remember most his stories about work in the production side of the newspaper business. Checking out why newspaper boxes weren’t working the same way in Ottawa as they did in Toronto. Flying copies of each morning’s publication to various parts of the country. Switching from multiple editions per day to just one. Moving from everything being printed in Toronto to local printings across the country. Trips that he was given as rewards in his career for big projects successfully delivered or on retirement.
And then, in the middle of one such story, he says, “Oh, yeah, that’s when she got shot.” I was like, “WTF? How have I never heard THIS story before now?”. They were travelling in the Caribbean, walking down the street, and Andrea’s grandmother got shot in the leg by a kid with a BB gun (probably deliberately trying to shoot the white woman). Don’t worry, she was fine.
Doug’s goal in recent years, a bit glibly, was to be the last remaining veteran from WW II. In 2021, there were about 20,000 veterans; by 2023, that number was down to less than 10K. He didn’t quite make it to that goal but he is in good company.
While I enjoyed Doug’s memories, my lasting images of him are likely to be playing cribbage with Jacob at the cottage or in Peterborough, or showing him around the house in Lindsay. If there is an afterlife, Doug, and you meet my father, he’ll be up for a good game of cribbage too.
As I say goodbye, and mentally shake your hand, I want you to know with all my heart, love and respect, the honour was truly mine.
