Victoria-Day weekend, 1972 and 2008

It is the first day of this Year’s Victoria Day weekend. It is also the first scorching Spring day we have had, so far. We have decided to stay close to home, take out the garden furniture and putter about the place. It has been a wool-gathering kind of day. i have rested my eyes as they are sore. The bright light hurts them. We are waiting for the cool of the evening to stroll around the neighbourhood with our new, seven year old Scottie, Jessica. When she goes out into the back garden she doesn’t stay out in the heat. The heat almost seems to rise from her compact black body and she tries to take refuge from the heat by digging a shallow trench to lie in. Like us, she doesn’t do well in heat.

Man of Science came to take a cup of coffee with Rumpole. I decided, that since the sun was well over the yard-arm, I could treat myself to a glass of red wine. Man of Science made a hilarious declaration which caused me to sputter and spill the damn stuff on my fresh new white cotton pants.

“I told you white is not a good colour for you. You didn’t waste time in staining those pants.” Rumpole always has to chide me for being a wee bit of a slob. He handed over the Tide stain remover, which upon application to the stains caused them to turn bright blue. I dragged out the lemon juice and salt and did the salad treatment on the stains. That did the trick, and I changed into a blue pareo and hung out the pants in the afternoon sun.

Man of Science has been a friend since 1970. He has seen me at my best and worst. He has no illusions about my feminish capacities. “Once a slob, always a slob!” he intoned. “But you are a good shit.” (Gee, thanks MoS)

I promptly withdrew to my room, wine in hand and lazed about sipping wine and half-listening to the guys chatting in the kitchen. A memory of driving away from Man of Science and Ardent Feminazi’s University housing at UBC exactly 36 years ago flashed in my mind. Then, Man of Science hoisted two year old Renaissance Man up to the open car window to kiss me goodbye. He and AF were looking after RM while a friend and I drove up North to the small community where we had both been hired as art teachers a couple of weeks previously.

Then, as today, the weather was hot and sultry. Lauren and I had done our final practicums at the same Vancouver high school, and discovered during one lunchtime that we both had been hired by the same school district. She, for the senior high, and me for the junior high. Right then we decided we would make our first trip up to meet the principals and see our schools on the upcoming Victoria Day weekend.

We dropped Renaissance Man at AF and MoS’s place, waved our goodyes and began our journey by car, of 465 miles. Lauren’s car was a small Toyota sedan. It didn’t have air conditioning. The drive was hot and long. We stopped outside Hope, and rolled all the windows down. Cranked up the radio to whatever local station it might recieve in the mountain valleys, and sang along on the road. Our hair flew freely in the wind; the windshield spattered with many dead bugs. We raced transport trucks on the passing lanes but kept our eyes peeled for the local police vehicles lurking behind tall stands of trees to nab unwary speeders. At nightfall we arrived at our destination, windswept, sweaty and dust grimed. We found a cheap motel and bedded down for the night laden with local newspapers to check out the housing situation, and the concerns of the locals.

While Lauren washed off the road grime in the bathroom, I perused the “Apartments for Rent” section in the paper, consulted the town map and tried to figure out the best places to contact the next morning. Then it was my turn to use a lot of hot water. Lauren spent her time looking for apartments nearest her school. Before we turned in we primped our hair and put in rollers to set up decent looking hair-dos.

The following morning, we phoned our respective Principals and arranged to visit our schools in the early afternoon. Then we began the earnest telphoning to set appointments to look at apartments in the evening hours. before lunch we drove around the whole town. it took only 30 minutes. The town had one main street, two stop-lights, one hardware store, two grocery stores, several small banks, a small hospital, funeral home, an RCMP detachment office that was easy to miss, post office, two hotels and several gas stations. It was a lumber and pulp town and boasted of a brand new pulp mill, several saw mills as well as novel structures neither of us had seen before - bee-hive burners attached to the saw mills. The town, situated at the confluence of two rivers sat in a valley the slopes of which were covered in mixed conifer and birch and aspen groves. It was a little jewel of a place, and we congratulated each other on having our first teaching jobs in such a lovely setting.

 In the afternoon, Lauren dropped me at my school for my appointment and drove off to meet her own principal in the west part of town. My principal was a gracious and friendly, almost fatherly man of early middle years. He walked me through the whole school and showed off the facilities for teaching Agricultural sciences which he himself had brought to fruition and manned as part of his teaching schedule. He was very proud of the Science labs, the Industrial Arts  workshops and then showed off the art-rooms and their adjoining storage areas. I was surprised at how well equipped my rooms were. There was a general studio with good tables and stools, good light, adequate cleanup and storage facilities. As a bonus, there was a fully equipped ceramic studio with four kick-wheels and two electric wheels, a large kiln and a small enamelling kiln, pug-mill and clay-recycling tables.  I felt like I had dropped into a dream art class-room. The nice principal said that although I was going to have a tiny budget to work with, he would ensure that there would be enough for me to get by with for the year, and that he was willing to help me forage for local clay bodies for the pottery program. I was thrilled.

When Lauren returned to fetch me so we could go off to look at apartments, she looked crest-fallen. She reported that her principal was a stiff and formal man, her room, in the brand new school had no equipment nor supplies and that she would have to build up her program, teaching supplies and equipment from scratch on a minimal budget. She expressed concern about the wisdom of taking on the job.

On the plus side, she managed to find a pleasant apartment across from her school, while the only apartment that would take me and a two-year old child as tenants was a basement apartment across the river from my school. We drove to a local diner and commiserated on the less stellar aspects of our upcoming adventure living and teaching in a small northern town. We determined to share teaching resources, and I assured her I’d ask my principal if she could have the two electric wheels from my school on loan to her for a year.

The following morning, the last day of the long-weekend, we drove back to Vancouver, largely silent and entertaining our own thoughts and concerns in privacy on the tedious hot drive.

So back to today; here was good old Man of Science, sitting in my kitchen 36 years later, sipping coffee, talking laughing and sounding very much like his earlier self. I like the constancy of old friendships,  shared history and knowing how life has changed us in the intervening years. Then, we were young parents; now we are grandparents. But we still are curious, vital and up for anything life throws at us.

It was pleasant to have his presence today with us as a reminder of how long a life we had in parallel with each other. I hate to see him with his white hair, but his keen blue eyes are as lovely and acute as ever, and he is his sweet, opinionated, questioning and fiercely loyal self.

This is going to be a good Victoria Day weekend, full of visits with the rest of our family, and good friends. But boy, is it ever a scorcher!

A tag from Nita…

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor - Das Land des Lächelns

Nita - http://nitawriter.wordpress.com - has tagged me with a writing tag… to select a song which compels one to entre into a state where writing (or making images) is stimulated. While I rarely work with music in the background, preferring silence or ambient sound, certain pieces of music cause me to disconnect from mundane preoccupations and let my spirit soar into regions where imagination, or “what if”, lives.

This beautiful aria is one I fortuitously found on a record from an obscure little record store, back in 1973. It was a recording of Fritz Wunderlich’s great arias. A heartachingly beautiful tenor, this song is one I always listen to in the springtime. Especially when looking at my apple tree in bloom, which, this year it has not done in April, but rather late right now in May - I hum along in an atrocious alto with glee and intense pleasure.

“Die apfelbluete ist einen kranz…” (The apple tree is a crown…)

I hope you enjoy this lovely song, by someone who was one of the finest lyric tenors in the 20th century, one whose sad, abbreviated life, yielded so much musical pleasure for us all.

 

The Operation…

The operation is behind me. Now, I sport a swollen eye, itchy from the minuscule French Knots which secure the newly carved punctures placed at ten oclock and two-oclock in the white area of my eyeball. Rumpole, bless his little red socks, is doing all the leaning and bending I am not allowed to do right now and being his courtly and endearingly attentive self. However, being courtly and attentive does not preclude him chiding me and bossing me around; this he seems to relish. Martha has been supplying us with a variety of culinary masterpieces - home-made bread, impossibly delicious soups, tempting desserts. Lucky has come to cast her professional nurse’s eye on my newly acquired wound, but she does this subtly, without giving rise to anxiety on my part. She has been encouraging and has said that compared to last April and May’s operation disasters, this recuperation seems to be progressing without hitch so far.

Dr. Seemore, who is Dr. Blindside’s replacement, had earlier asked if I wanted to undergo this operation under local, rather than general anaesthetic. I opted for the local, this time. I wanted to be in the know as to who was performing the surgery, and what exactly went on during the hour or so it took. Dr. Blindside had put me under for all three of the operations he had performed last year, and in pre-op he had introduced different Opthalimic Surgical Residents who would also have a go at my eye during the procedures. This didn’t exactly fill me with reassurance minutes prior to being given the nectar of Lethe.

Dr. Seemore introduced Dr. Sandman to me in the pre-op room on Friday morning. He had rather Puckish ears poking out from under his surgical cap, a dry British wit, and enough miles on him visible to reassure that he knew what he was doing. He slipped in the intravenous needle into the top of my hand with deft economy, told me he was giving me rations of salt water for the operation’s duration, stuck the heart monitor electrodes into place and clipped me into the hospital shroud with well-practiced motions.

“Relax,” said he, tapping me on the shoulder. “You’ll be able to hear what’s going on. If you need more sauce for pain, make a noise.”

Dr. Seemore adjusted my head to the angle he wanted it to be. Surprisingly, he didn’t immobilize my head with straps. this was something I had expected, little realizing that whatever relaxant Dr. Sandman had administered cause a lassitude that would allow any sorts of procedures, including plucking the eyeball out of the head if the surgeon so felt inclined, to be performed, with the complete willing participation of the one operated upon.

It was rather interesting to be able to see the probes in the field of vision; to hear Dr. Seemore order one instrument after another; to follow his directions for the room light to be dimmed, for the operating lights to be calibrated for brightness; and for his orders to have the laser activated. Every, so often, the blood-pressure cuff wrapped around my right arm would constrict, puff off, cut off circulation and then let go with a sigh and a short mechanical ping. My hands, clenched on my chest, started to go numb. I could feel my neck muscles seize with tension. My feet were dull bricks at the other end of my body, but I declined to keep tempo with the awful 70’s Soft Rock that played in the background. That much hated tune of “You are so Beautiful to me…”, for some reason assaulted my ears with its cheesiness. Billy Joel crooned. Carol King warbled, and Oh No!!! Please No!!!, not John Denver. However I was too out of it to gag! Had we inadvertently slipped back to a serious 70’s time warp, with long-sideburned medical professionals swathed in fitted polyester floral scrubs and platform-soled white shoes? Dr. Seemore and Dr. Sandman were of the same vintage as me, early sixties of age, and wrapped the operating room in an aural atmosphere of nostalgia that would be better forgotten.

I wanted the operation to end, if not to put merciful conclusion to the execrable music. The light show in the eye operated upon was somewhat more reminiscent of the light shows in concerts. You know, the kind where coloured inks poured into oil were projected on the large screen behind psychedelic musicicians. However, Soft Rock was all wrong.

At one point, Dr. Seemore adjusted the angle of my head. For all I cared, he could have severed it from my neck. But that Music! That gave me problems during the operation!

“We’re done.” announced Dr Seemore, patting my shoulder. ” I’ll see you in the recovery room in a few minutes.”

Dr. Sandman unconnected the blood-pressure cuff and the heart monitor clip from my forefinger. He pulled the I.V. needle and had me put pressure on top of its site and wheeled me back into the pre-op holding room. The kindly nurse brought a cup of welcome apple juice and watched me sit up, swing my legs over the gurney’s edge and sip away. Dr. Seemore emerged from the O.R., looking decidedly ordinary in his blue scrubs, nary a floral pattern in sight on his costume, no long sideburns, no platform-soled shoes. He looked just like his ordinary, reassuring self. What a relief!

“We didn’t put the lens in. Scar tissue was extensive and was pulling on the retina. So I removed it and put oil into the globe to help seat the retina. In six weeks, I’ll remove that in another operation and then give you the new lens.” He took pains to explain these specifics and warned me to not bend down while healing and to keep my head back for the next couple of weeks. “I’ll see you tomorrow at seven A.M. in my office.”

The Pre-op Nurse chased me off to get dressed. On the way to the changing area, a man waiting for his operation commented “You seem pretty chipper. I hope I feel like that too when I come out.”

I dressed and sat waiting for Rumpole to come back to pick me up. The nurse covered me with a warm blanket and I watched the next patient being wheeled into the O.R. Soon, the pneumatic door hissed open, and there was Rumpole, looking ever so natty carrying my large black purse. No coffee in his hand though. I would cheerfully have killed for a cup of good Joe.

“Coffee!” I croaked piteously. “Please, get me to some coffee!”

Rumpole, obliging as ever, complied and whisked me out of the hospital to partake of that marvellous substance. And so we got through the operation.

Today, as I sit here typing away, every so often I shut my good eye and try to assess what change there is to the bad one. Amazingly, I can see shapes much more crisp than before. Colours are more clear, less hazy. This operation seems to be successful so far and I am much encouraged.

Rationing…

A person doing scuba diving is equipped with oxygen tanks which limit the amount of time one can safely stay alive underwater. That is a form of rationing; only a fool tries to go beyond the limits provided by the existing oxygen tanks.

In many parts of the world, but not where I live, people consume rations of food-stuffs. Some rations fall short of maintaining people’s health and well being. Meanwhile, where I live, the most exotic foods are readily available to people of average means. Variety of food is naturally rationed by seasonal availability, by the commonplace transport of foods from all over the world, and cost.

All of a sudden, news has arrived that Costco is limiting the amount of rice that can be purchased by individuals and small businesses. The reality that finally we may have to pay “actual” cost for food - the cost of transpost, storage, middlemen, producers - unleashes the first signs of panic in our carefully orchestrated  unreal reality, our waking dream life. No, I have not made my way to Costco to pick up several bags of Basmati, or brown rice to stockpile in our spare bedroom as a hedge toward scarcity.

I remember walking out with my Mother as a young child and waiting in line for the family ration of rice, which had to be taken in a pillow-case, and once brought home we spread out on the kitchen table to take out the chaff, gravel, and other components of the ration. Flour was rationed; as were sugar; coffee; beans and lentils. We live; we thrived; we played; we bemoaned the shortage of fresh fruit and vegs; we worked. Seasonal offerings were cause for joy and celebration. Living meant labour - daily doings which helped sustain us, offered us amusement and distractions from the rigours of living.

In comparison, my life has been one of almost unremitting ease and, yes, luxury. A suburban woman, I don’t perform one quarter of my mother’s labours. Yet I don’t view her life from the heights of condescension - she certainly didn’t lack in appreciation of the “refinements” of life; her tastes were not less sophisticated nor more pedestrian than my own - her ease, appetites, opportunities, ambitions  and labours were rationed in a balanced way.

I think it is high time to consider rationing my activities, appetites and expectations. Just enough, and no more, will most likely be a pleasing way to live.

The Blind… leading the Seeing…

I feel like a dishonest fake, these days. You see, I am still taking painting students weekly, and groping my way through lessons. There is something odd about a teacher of painting who gropes around changing eyeglasses in the middle of intensely gazing out of filmy vision at sections and passages in someone else’s paintings. There must be some worry on the part of students, when I say to them “Get up and give me your paintbrush… this is how to charge your brush, how to scumble, make a clear edge… or this passage doesn’t quite fit, because of….”, grab their brush and proceed to make guess-like stabs in the proximity of their canvas surface. So far, either they have been exceedingly patient, polite and kind in not refusing me to allow access to their materials and have not refused. Or, I am truly and unnervingly pushy with them. I’m waiting for the first “I’m not letting you do that.. to my precious…get the Hell back!!!”

Every so often during sessions, Rumpole emerges from the living room, slouches at the studio door-way and good-naturedly prods “Are you going to take that from HER?” At times like that I cannot help myself and succumb to Annoyed Bitch Mode and turn his mantra of “I do Law; you do house!” into “I do Art; you get lost and mind your business.” After students pick themselves off the floor, madly giggling at this exchange, for some reason they resume their labours, uncomplaining. I resume squinting while juggling pairs of glasses and pretend I can see what I am supposed to see.

So, occupying myself during this process, close to hand, closer than three feet away, I get to note how students go about mixing paint, adjusting to leanness and fatness, systematize their efforts to good end, adjust paint viscosity and brush loading.

What I have noted is that Lucky keeps a chaotic pallette, despite my cautions to the contrary. I bet as an OR nurse she keeps a tight ship of equipment and procedures - so, why the gay abandon of undisciplined material use while painting? She has a lovely looseness to her painting, and she is starting to watch how paintbrushes can make clear and soft edges. She loves colour and pattern, but she is hell on her equipment. She has lost more paintbrushes to improper cleaning than I ever though possible. And that after my riding her ass mercilessly at cleanup time to do a thorough job. “Yes, Mother, my Fuehrerin!” she says in mock apology as I kvetch and carp about her careless slovenly attitude toward her tools. I gotta work on her. What, is she and her family made out of money? Aha! That’s something to mention tonight when she comes for her painting class.

Barb, on the other hand is tidy, methodical and plans ahead. No rude surprises for this gal. Control!!! She is one to give skilled trompe l’oeil painters a run for their money. I swear she knows exactly how many hairs each of her paintbrushes have and how to deploy them. She is sensitive to paint consistency and her pallette looks like an experimentalists careful one. Man, I’d love to loosen her up. But then, I am reminded that we each have our personal tendencies and peccadilloes - our own way we are meant to work. Still, I can’t help but bug her. “Why use a large paintbrush to efficiently cover large space, when a tiny one will make a more satisfactory and laborious work for you,” I’m wont to needling her.

Still, as the blind leading the seeing, I am learning a hellofalot about individuality, human nature, my blind spots and preconceptions. I value greatly what my experiences in the studio with Lucky and Barb have brought to me. Perhaps, when I gain more eyesight back I can give them greater value as a teacher. I hope so!

Maybe a resolution…

Upon the advice of numerous friends, several of whom are health-care professional, I have fired Dr. Blindside after an unsuccessful effort to have him explain to me in detail about further eye operations he was planning for me last November. The new retinal surgeon I have been seeing since December has been candid and to the point as to how much he might be able to do for me to restore some vision to my left eye and what needed to be done. His manner with me is good. He has not treated me like some fluffy little old lady who could be satisfied with blandishments and false-reassurances. He answers question I have had, not with the off-hand, ‘don’t you worry, nice little woman, we’ll fix you right up’ or surprised reaction to very specificqueries about treatment and prognosis by Dr. Blindside, but with straight-forward, detailed and patient answers which have given me much more confidence to undergo the knife, yet again.

So, the operation is to happen on April 25 - soon, now. There have been numerous tests up to now, and good follow-up with information about those tests. The date for the operation was set for a specific time, not on an on-call basis depending on cancellations, as was the custom with Dr. Blindside. We can actually plan our lives and doings based on a firm operation date. Rumpole has booked off the day to see me through the operation.

It has been exactly a year since the first of the eye operations. Now, finally, there may be some sort of resolution to the question of how much vision may be improved for me. Even the slightest improvement will be a gift. Right now, my sight is so poor that even watching television, movies or a video is a drag. I have to sit about 3 feet from the screen. I have become house-bound as I feel vulnerable in the outside world where unpredictability reigns. The Spring sights, which previously never failed to thrill me, lack in specificity of detail which increases visual pleasure. I miss drawing and painting, wandering around and looking about. And am cautiously anticipating a small promise of even slight return of my previous freedoms, occupations and pleasures.

Flesh-coloured…

I have stretchy elastic skin, moleskin-soft along my seams, constructed to withstand months, maybe years of flexing, breathing in and out, bending, tortion, pulling, supporting the weight of flesh-coloured globes. My straps, narrow and supple, dig and dimple the trapezius masses, leave angry red furrows on skin.

I encircle the circumference of torsos, bone-thin, firm, fleshy and over-ripe; awkwardly embrace my manikin. Clips for harnessing around girth line up tidy in vertical rows. These are my teeth, grasping my ends together.

Sometimes capable and nimble, at others arthritic and awkward, fingers, sure or trembling wrestle to help me conform to my corporeal host. I am flesh-coloured for camouflage, lying beneath veils of polyester, cotton, wool and silk; obscured but very much present. I mask the sagging contours of my host, massage them into controlled, contained forms because naturally swinging flesh is vulgar, an embarrassment, and hints at an animal nature.

I am a gentle, genteel carapace, an aid to realize ideal firmness and proportions. I am bought and sold, am much in demand but only in worlds where animal natures are suspect of being disgusting. Of engineered construction, many have laboured to make me perform my function well. And so, in spite of my flesh-colour, I have a utilitarian appearance which my makers try to doll up with lace edgings, silk ribbons and rosettes. My name is Maidenform, Cross-my-heart; euphemisms for fighting the forces of gravity.

Eventually, as all things do, I fail, become stretched and flaccid, my connective tissue of elastic and rubber loosens and I conform to the true contours and weights of the flesh I carry, or that carries me. I am flesh-coloured, skinlike, and subject to the same stresses as my host. In the end, my host and I resemble each other.

GM 2005

Written as a 20 minute free-write, to the image provided by the workshop instructor. The image, above, she clipped from an unknown magazine, hence I cannot give the photographer credit, here.

Equus in Agrum Est…

What a sentence - “the horse is in the field.”

Does it imply a horse-inhabited landscape

of fields rolling,

pocked with wild-flowers, a crop,

as far as the eye can see?

Does it suggest a legion of soldiers

marching by with their kits,

a simple farm-boy among them

who gazes on the browsing horse

with longing for his homestead?

Does it foretell of a scene

where an unmanned horse nuzzles

fallen men, strewn in the casual,

splayed, abandon of the dead?

Does it intimate that a horse is

 a guileless companion to man,

a witness to all that takes place

in fields everywhere?

GM 2004

Pitt River, looking West…

 Lila and I gathered our outdoor painting stuff at 8am on a warm April day, piled them into her Ford Focus and drove to the end of Harris Road in Pitt Meadows. The road ended at the dike and we parked right next door to the barn in which Dry Sherry kept her beautiful Percheron/Andalusian, Paris. He was out in his paddock cruising around, munching hay, a splendid dappled, distressed grey -white monolith in motion. Because I was busy gawking at him I nearly ended walking my easel into the ditch. Lila meanwhile, being much better organized and less of a wool-gatherer, made an efficient job of carting her easel, large canvas, and carrying bag up onto the dike. I dragged my easel and set it up. Had to go back to the car to get my drawing board and paper pad as well as my bag with my drawing stuff. Once set up near each other we sussed out the place; looked about us to select an area to work with and from.

I had earlier in the morning determined that  in no way was I going to get precious or self-conscious about my materials or the imagery which would absorb my attention. I was in a rebellious mood. No museum quality paper, archival drawing medium, or picture-worthy, picturesque subject would distract me from the pure pleasure of looking, seeing, making marks, moving freely and playing.

So, the paper was plain old 18 by 24 newsprint. The tools, oil pastels. The challenge for me today with the subject was to take the least picturesque aspect of the landscape in front of me and to find the rhythm and unity of forms in front of me. It didn’t have to be an earth-shattering or mind-blowing image. So there was the spring growth of sedges near the river’s edge; shrubbery, low-lying near the shore, denser and taller, more vigorous further from the river, and in the distance a massing of vegetation, then the sky. The log-booms snugged along the river provided a warm contrast against the sky-reflecting blue of the water.

I windmilled my arms to get the blood flowing, did some knee bends and lunges and then selected the pastels colours and began the drawing dance. And kept drawing until the study reached the above stage. Lila may as well have been on the moon, for aside from hearing her brush scratching and swishing on her canvas somewhere to my right, her presence didn’t infringe on my concentration.

We spent the whole morning, working in silence, absorbed as the sun rose to the zenith and we began to tire. Lila worked on an ambitious 22 by 30 inch oil of the mountains and river and had a strong start with which to work later in her studio. I made the three oil pastel studies and felt satisfied with having met the goal I set for myself.

As my vision has failed me now, to the point that I no longer can make such distinctions visually as in these three-year-ago drawings, I like having these rather flimsy pieces of paper up on the walls of my studio. As I come and go from the house the drawings are an aide memoire. Now when walking along the dike this is not how I see what is there. It has changed so profoundly that patterns have lost their crispness, shapes have lost their clarity and tones and colours have become of paramount importance. Now, I realize that already, three years ago my vision was starting to change from the almost painful acuteness and clarity I have been gifted with throughout my first fifty years of life. These drawings represent a change, though not necessarily for the worse. A change toward some different ways of seeing, maybe a different way of being.

Toilet-seat trials and tribulations…

Such a world we live in, a world of almost unlimited choice of ‘things’. Such a ‘free’ world where choosing which pair of socks to wear today, right now, takes on momentous proportions. In hindsight and memory, I can’t remember Anyu agonizing about which socks went with which of our shoes when she was readying us for the day. Maybe she was too much preoccupied with mental exercises involving what she might cook for our family for the rest of the week depending on what might be in stock at the various grocery stores. Perhaps choice of white, pink or striped socks for us didn’t register on her housewifely radar of ‘important things to be concerned about’.

I know. I sound like the stereotypical little old lady bemoaning the passing of the ‘good old days’. This is my version of “when I was young things were thus and such…”. Of course, all my life, I have been a prematurely old woman, whether at twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years of age, given my tendency to question the manner in which life in Canada has unfolded in my experience. This Canada, this ‘Xanadu’ to which foreingners from all over the world seek admission. This Canada of almost unlimited consumer choices - kiwi fruit the whole year round, strawberries out of season, exotic cheeses from all over the world, case-goods from everywhere - a sort of consumable material cornucopeia. Little did my parents think that this selection of available choices not only were of food, consumables, education, health care, transportation and housing but also of toilet seats.

 I have recently run afoul of the availability of choices and the weighty weighing of pros and cons before being able to purchace a replacement toilet seat for the only bathroom in our house. Naively, I assumed that replacing this worn out toilet seat was a simple matter of visiting the neighbourhood building supply store from whence came out toilet and its simple seat a mere five years ago. The old one died. It broke into four pieces as the plumber was pulling it up when we were replacing the bathroom floor lino. The replacement toilet was an American brand, made in Texas, fairly inexpensive and low-flushing. It was a ‘moped’ toilet, not a ‘Rolls Royce’ toilet and entirely appropriate for our downwardly mobile life. I mean we were not ever contemplating having royalty using our facilities. It functioned, and therefore we were rather pleased.

Th old toilet seat is in process of giving into the forces of entropy. So, Rumpole and I decided to zip down to the local RONA and buy a replacement. Easy, what? Nope, we were not so lucky. In the plumbing section and bathroom aisle we came upon a marvellous array of toilet designs. If Marcel Duchamps were alive today he would have a field day coming up with variations on a theme of his famous urinal - a veritable galery exhibition of things toilet. Wow! The choice was staggering. But, alas, in no dusty corner could we find our home toilet, nor any toilet seats that would fit it. If had become extinct, like the Dodo. The toilet seat varietals were amazing in their differences. But whatever happened to just a one-for-all type of seat. No such a thing.

Disgusted, we next drove to Home Depot. Before entering the football-stadium sized store we decided to give our quest exactly ten minutes. No luck here either. Only even more elaborate toilet sets to be had here. We left, defeated, and returned home.

On the way across the bridge, I expressed to Rumpole, “If I were Queen, or whatever leader, there would be standardization in toilets, cars, etc.,etc. There’s too damn much choice, or illusion of choice about unimportant things. And this obsolescence business makes us all sitting ducks to the guns and whims of fashion. Aaaargh!”

“Calm down, my commie-pinko love,” reassured Rumpole as he blended into a lane entering the bridge. “Once we’re home  you can grab a nice glass of wine and we’ll connect into E-bay. Maybe we’ll find the ’seat of our dreams’. ”

Sure enough. Here we sat in front of the computer, me with my wine, Rumpole with his pen and paper. And, yes, we did find a limited number of our toilet seat on E-bay. We made the order and now await the package. It’s coming from a plumbing supply place in Utah.

One small consolation is that it’s not made of plastic or coming from China. I think when the new seat arrives, I’ll set Rumpole to making a home-made wooden seat with all the tools he has amassed in his workshop. It’ll keep him from being bored and off the streets.