A meadow on the bureau

The other day Ken and I were cleaning out that cabinet under the sink: the one where you throw odd-shaped kitcheny things that you almost never use. He held up a turquoise glass vase that I'd gotten for $5 at Ikea years ago and asked Do we still need this? I said Not really, I only hung onto it from when we used to live close to that flower store and you'd bring me armloads of flowers every few weeks.

Two days later, I came home to find this scene on my bureau. That's my Ken! He doesn't do anything by halves.

Incidentally, the painting was made by Ken's father. I was allowed to go into his studio one time and pick out a painting for myself for my birthday, out of dozens of oils, watercolours and ink sketches piled up against the walls. It was a tough choice to make because they're all this beautiful.

***

I found out last week that my step-dad has Congestive Heart Failure. Technically, it's not a big surprise. He's 72; his mother had her first heart attack in her 60's; and his idea of following a "healthy diet" has been low-carb, high-fat for the last few years. He's a card-carrying member of both the Mayonnaise Fan Club and the Butter Appreciation Society. When I was a kid, he'd always insist that my mom put "gravy" on his meat: his name for the 100% liquid fat drippings from the bottom of the roasting pan. It's frankly amazing that he didn't clog up his arteries sooner than this.

Still, he's my dad. I love him, and getting a strong reminder of his mortality is sobering. He's gotta go sometime, and 72 is already a fairly respectable age to have reached, but that's not going to make losing him hurt much less when it happens.

How much danger is he actually in? That's anyone's guess. Some patients with CHF go on for years, after surgery, or managed on medication, to finally be done in by other causes. It doesn't have to be fatal. On the other hand, one of the potential symptoms is listed as "sudden death".

The truth is, my step-dad is one of those selectively brilliant guys. He's a successful businessman, and reads widely on a number of academic subjects. He's also that guy who might try to back up on the highway if he misses his exit. Sometimes he's unbelievably dense.

(I'm always surprised that he's survived his own terrible driving habits. One time he took Ken to hit a few golf balls at the driving range. He asked Ken, who was in the passenger seat, to take the wheel from him for a minute while he did something that required both hands. Ken proceeded to steer the car all the way to the driving range, a 20-minute trip, while my step-dad worked the gas and the brake. What was so important that my step-dad needed both his hands free during this long interval? He wanted to shell and eat a hard-boiled egg which he had in his shirt-pocket in a plastic baggie. I rest my case.)

On Friday Ken and I went out for Japanese food with my step-dad. I watched him pour at least a tablespoon of soy sauce into his miso soup, which is already basically a salt broth with a little reconstituted seaweed floating in it. I didn't say anything, but later I sent him an e-mail with a link to a medical website that states CHF patients need to reduce their sodium intake. I knew that before I looked it up. He knows it already. I'm not sure if he was being absentminded, living in denial, or feeling like he just didn't care at that moment. It's impossible to tell.

Anyway, one thing's for sure, and that's that no one can control my step-dad. He's one of those guys that really does do what he wants, and doesn't much care what other people think. In some ways it's admirable, and in some ways it's maddening. But it's who he is, and I love him. So I guess we'll just see how things go.

Saturday Stuff

A lot of really good things happened on Saturday.

I brought my wedding dress to my favourite seamstress for alterations. I was worried because the dress is beaded in the area that needs to be altered, and not just anyone is willing to fuss with undoing and redoing beading by hand. But Mrs. Lee didn't let me down. Her face lit up with delight when I unzipped the garment bag. "So pretty!" she exclaimed, "Where you buy? How much?" And when I told her: "Ah, good price, good price." Of course she can do the beading - she has mad sewing skills! So that's one worry off my mind.

I had dinner with my step-dad. We got off to a great start. He rang my doorbell to let me know he'd arrived - I could see the rental car waiting right behind him. (His regular wheels are in Florida for the winter. It's a long story.) He told me he'd wait in the car and as he turned away I shut the door to put my coat on. Moments later I opened the door to the car that was waiting outside my home. The light in the car came on - there was some young Asian guy in the driver's seat saying "No no no!" and pointing emphatically to another car, just down the common driveway. I laughed at myself. Nice one. My step-dad apologized for failing to warn me that it wasn't him parked outside my front door.

Later we closed the evening with a satisfying symmetry. A friend of his who he hadn't seen in a few years was in town, staying with his daughter. My step-dad remembered that she lived in the corner house at the end of a certain block. I waited in the car while he went to pick up his friend to go for coffee after dropping me at home. The door was opened by a suspiciously young, good-looking guy. There was a moment of conversation, and then my step-dad returned to the car, smiling and alone. Wrong block, wrong house. I guess it was that kind of night.

The point of all that was for us to have a nice dinner together, which we did. And for the first time in more than a year I found that I could be with him without feeling angry, or bitter, or resentful. Since we had our heart-to-heart talk the last time he was in, despite him still being a complete doofus about how he's handled moving out of my mom's house, I've slowly but surely forgiven him. Or mostly so. And that's a wonderful thing to have discovered, because I wasn't even aware of it until last night.

I wanted to point out all those good things, because other than that, Saturday was difficult. Although I haven't written about it in a while, I'm still having aches and pains on and off, and Friday night was a bad one. The temperature in the morning was 10 degrees C, which fell to -15 degrees C by walk-home time. Even though I brought a bag of extra layers with me to work and wore them on my walk home, my body couldn't handle the extreme change. By Friday night I was on the couch, aching from my shoulders to my toes.

I haven't been able to tolerate Ibuprofen since a few years ago. I switched to Acetaminophen (Tylenol) because that's supposedly easier on the stomach. That worked for a while, but then came the day when I took one little tablet, and got some very familiar tummy pains. I got scared off it for a while, but in the back of my mind I wasn't sure - maybe it was just a fluke and I should give it another chance. On Friday I was in enough discomfort to take the risk.

At first I thought I was OK. The pain receded within 20 minutes and my tum was fine. I was like "Score! Painkillers rock!" But it was not to last. In the middle of the night I felt the reaction come on, and all of Saturday was a misery. My stomach hurt enough that I couldn't ignore it, and at mealtimes instead of getting hungry I got nauseous. For hours and hours it was relentless. I know it could be worse, but it did get me down. The part that was most dispiriting was knowing that one more avenue of relief has been permanently closed to me. With all the other major NSAID's (ex. Aspirin) clearly warning of stomach upset in the side effects, I am left with no option but to slather myself from head to toe in Rub A535, which is better than nothing, but it's not a useful remedy if I'm anywhere other than at home. I can't very well strip down in a washroom stall at work and goop up my back under my proper work shirts.

Here's something: I have a surprise appointment with a rheumatologist tomorrow. I didn't realize that my g.p. was going to refer me. I had blood tests done in early December, and didn't hear anything back from him, so I assumed that the numbers didn't indicate anything useful. When I got a call at work on Friday stating that I had been referred, I was totally surprised. So, maybe my blood tests showed something significant after all. It would be good to have an actual diagnosis, and possibly even some treatments that don't hurt me. I'll let you know how it goes.

That being said, you might not hear much from me this week. There's a high likelihood that I'll be working with half my usual staff all week, as two ladies in my department both came down with the symptoms of a vicious cold that's making the rounds. I'll probably be working late every day, and running off my feet the whole time. So, have a good week, and keep your fingers crossed for me please, around 2:00 pm tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time. I'll be back with an update as soon as I can.

Progress report: No progress.

It's been more than a year since my parents announced to me that they're splitting up, but the process is nowhere near being finished.  This will come as no surprise to anyone who's been through a divorce.  However, one would expect that by now my step-dad would have all his personal stuff moved out of my mom's house.  Clothes, papers, and the like.  

Those of you who were reading over the summer got to hear about my adventures with Ken and my mom as we worked together to pack some of my step-dad's stuff into boxes.  Or more accurately: Ken did most of the work, while I concentrated on distracting my mom, because she couldn't be witness to the process without getting emotionally triggered by every piece of his crap that came to light on its way into the boxes.

We cleared out the whole 2nd floor and half of the first floor by Hallowe'en.  It took a long time because Ken could only be in the house for 2 hours at a time, even with allergy medication, because he's allergic to cats.   Even though we worked on it every Sunday, progress was painfully slow.

Why, you might ask, were we packing for my step-dad?  Why wasn't he doing it himself?  Because if he doesn't want to do something, he doesn't do it.  Full stop, end of story.  He's good at two things: making money, and playing golf.  And if you have enough money that you're willing to throw at your problems, you can usually find someone to do the dirty work for you.  Lucky for him that he has cash to spare.

It kind of makes sense that he wants other people to do everything for him.  Outside of his line of work, his incompetence is frightening.  Even when he is motivated to do something, he screws it up in ways that defy imagining.  Sometimes he seems to verge on "idiot savant" territory.  Yes, it's that bad.

My mom is sick to death of my step-dad's habit of sloughing off responsibility.  For 27 years she did all the dirty work in the house, organized his life for him, and picked through the recycling bin every week to pull out the imortant mail he invariably threw in there due to sheer carelessness.

She decided that he should take some responsibility for shipping his crap to California.  When he was in town this past week she told him he should arrange for a courier to come by and pick up the boxes.  Not only that, but she was washing her hands of the whole problem.  It was his job to do everything, including sit around and wait for the courier to do the pickup.

When I heard that she was putting this all on him, I cringed inwardly.  I knew exactly what would happen.  And lo, it came to pass, just as I had predicted.

When the courier arrived, the boxes had not been brought up from the basement into the front hall.  Not only that, but none of them was labelled with an address, and several of them weren't even sealed.  He thought that all he had to do was make one phone call, and the courier would spirit all the boxes out of the basement, directly to California, without him lifting a finger.

My mom was there and told me what happened at the pick-up.  The driver got angry and said that he was on a schedule; he didn't have time to wait for my step-dad to prepare the boxes. My step-dad insisted that he could do it all quick-quick if the guy would just wait a minute.  Then he shoved a marker into my mom's hand and told her that she'd better go downstairs and start labelling boxes. Nice tactic, eh?  He's still sloughing stuff off onto her.

Meanwhile, the courier was standing with the front door open, and one of my mom's Never-Allowed-Outside cats escaped.  So of course my mom freaked out and went chasing after the cat in the snow.  The courier threw up his hands in disgust and left.  The boxes are still in the basement, innocent of all plans regarding their removal.

Even hearing my mom tell the story makes my stomach churn.  It's too much of a reminder of what it was like to live in the house with the two of them for 15 years.  Every simple thing became a fiasco.  The two of them always at odds with each other.  She was always pushing for him to do things which he would simply not do.  Her disappointment and anger were constant.  His lack of caring was equally consistent.

I'm having flashbacks to the misery of my childhood.   And the kicker is, the only way I'm going to get any closure on this situation is to go back and take care of things myself.  She won't do it on principle, and he won't do it because he doesn't want to.  So I'll end up doing it.  When that whole house is packed up and clean, maybe I'll get some peace.

OK, I'm not in a crisis anymore - and I forget how to write about normal life.  How does this work again?  It's so much easier to pick a topic when there is a giant worry on my mind.

I saw my step-dad again.  Last time we spoke, I told him that I was ready to get to know his new* girlfriend.  They've been together for a year now.  It's time to face up to reality and stop pretending like she doesn't exist.  For reasons both practical and moral, I need to build a relationship with her.  But we can start with babysteps.

Like this: he brought in some photos of her.  He doesn't have any current ones.  She's around 70 years old now.  But he did have some ancient snaps of back in the day, when they were young lovers in Scotland.  This was in the early 1960's, when they were in their early 20's.  My first thought when I saw the photo he held out to me was:

"Hey, that's Bjork!"

There was more than just a passing resemblance.  She was a beauty alright, and she could have been Bjork's identical twin.  My step-dad had no idea who Bjork was, aside from the mention she recently got in the news for offering to help out Iceland's economy.  I went online and found some photos.  He was also impressed by the similarity.

I wonder what she looks like now.  Apparently she dyes her hair blond.  I can't picture it.

*By new I mean: they dated in their 20's, split up, and then got back together almost 50 years later, at the expense of my parents marriage. (for the benefit of my newer readers)