by R. M. Green
The sad, sad, sad news is that in the last twenty-four months we lost dear William, my old mum, Betty, and poor innocent sweet Ali, Habib and Sonya’s only child. He never even made it to Congo. He went to Paris for a year’s training in tropical diseases and on his last night of studies, he was on his scooter on the way home and a drunk driver sideswiped him at an intersection. Ali tried to keep his balance but the scooter went over with Ali pinned underneath it with a broken leg. By terrible, tragic bad luck, the petrol tank ignited and he was engulfed in flame. Some passers-by, including an off duty gendarme, tried to save him but the heat was too intense. Poor darling. He burned to death. Sonya was in pieces and came to stay with me and Jeff while Habib went off to Paris to identify the body. To be honest, he could only identify a birthmark on Ali’s left shoulder. Once the paperwork was completed, Jeff and I flew out to Paris with Sonya and we buried him there. They have borne it so well and we saw a lot of them in the months that followed but six or seven months ago, they decided they couldn’t stay in the house where they had raised Ali; too many sad memories and Habib was close to retirement. So they sold up his veterinary practice and the house, moved down to New Mexico and bought a small ranch that they want to turn into an animal rescue centre. I suppose with Habib being a vet, Sonya being an animal lover and being comfortably off, it makes sense. Actually, I think they both have a deep need to take care, protect and shower affection on living things. Too old to adopt and with no grandchildren, I can see the attraction in caring for abandoned animals. They left a couple of months back with sincere promises to keep in touch. I hope they do, but I would also understand if they don’t.
***
I can’t just give you a litany of death all in one go; it’s too clinical and too difficult. So, let me tell you what happened about the mini-series. Now that was an adventure! Remember my story was called, Behind The Scenes? Well, that was the first thing they changed! It got called Behind The Curtain, which, if you ask me, just emphasises how silly the whole thing is! When they sent me the script for my ‘comments’ which they wholeheartedly ignored, I showed it to Jeff. He reckoned they should have called it ‘Between The Sheets’ given all the ‘love’ scenes they had inserted. Jeff teases me still about being a soft-porn screenwriter and when he insisted on calling Caroline and reading out, complete with character voices, a scene to her, the one where Gary, the daytime heartthrob from Surgeons ends up in bed with Felicia and her on-screen sister, Diana from Hearts and Minds, I could hear Caroline’s, “La-la-la,” from the receiver from where I was standing on the other side of the kitchen! Karma, however, intervened and Jeff was laughing so hard that he a fit of coughing so violent he strained some muscles in his stomach and had to go to the doctor!
In the end, I never made it to the filming because that was about the time William got sick and to be honest, while I am not a prude, I felt a bit queasy about being on set at what really was quite a saucy show. The funny thing is, it never got released; something to do with distribution rights or syndication problems or something. All I do know is that I got another generous cheque and the show is sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. I hope it stays that way! Jeff was disappointed. He had been looking forward to seeing my name as the inspiration for some televised smut! Mind you, we keep the script by the bed for inspiration, if I can be so crude! Don’t tell Caroline! She isn’t a prude either but the very suspicion of a hint of a thought of her parents ‘doing it’ creeps her out so much. Paul teases her about it all the time, “But Caro… how do you think we got here?”
Oh, I have to tell you, Caroline is now a mum! But more of that later or I shall completely lose my train of thought, such as it is. Jeff says my ‘train’ is still intact, it just runs on slightly different tracks to other people!
And the funniest thing of all is that a few months after all this happened, I was contacted by Circe Books from Atlanta, who had published my original story. Surely they didn’t want me to write another one? I was done with writing, and soaps for that matter. Believe it or not, and this may sound bizarre to you coming from a woman closer to sixty than fifty, I am learning the cello. It drives Jeff mad because I take over his basement and he is forced to watch the hockey in the lounge. Ian is teaching me. He gave me William’s cello as a memento and I couldn’t bear to see it standing so forlorn and unplayed in a corner of the basement. So I asked Ian if he would teach me and, bless him, he jumped at the chance. I think it helps him deal with his grief, and Ian is so kind and patient, and says I have some talent. I know he is just being kind, but I do enjoy scraping away, and in the little time I have been learning I can already play three or four simple tunes. Ian says we will do a duet at Thanksgiving for the family. They are coming here this year. After mum died, Dad didn’t want to stay on in Amelia by himself, so he is back now and in a lovely nursing home. I know we are supposed to call them senior assisted-communities but a bedpan by any other name. He loves it though. Although he can’t get around much these days, he still has all his marbles, even at almost 95, and we visit him every few days and he comes to us whenever he wants, odd weekends, birthdays, holidays, you know the type of thing. He is the chess champion of The Maples (I know, not a very original name but they really are wonderful there). I remember when I went to see him a couple of months back and I noticed a little brass trophy on his bookshelf. “Gee Dad, what’d you win?”
“Aha! That! You are looking at The Maples grand chess champion, Kochanie!”
“Wow! Cool! Well done, Dad, I am proud of you!”
Dad started chuckling. “I only won because Max Schneider kept falling asleep between moves!” he grinned (with all his own teeth! Which is more than I can say for me, I am afraid!), “But what do you expect from a Kraut!”
“Dad!” I was outraged! But I could see his eyes smiling deliberately provoking me. Always the joker, always up to mischief, my dad. But I wanted to make my point, so I continued, “Dad, Max Schneider is Jewish and not even German. He’s Swiss!”
Chuckling, Dad held up his hands in mock surrender.
“I know. I just love to make you mad! Max is my brother. We were born on the same day and his son, Morty, brings us in a bottle of Wyborowa when he is in town. We hide it from Nosey Nurse Nelly.”
Nosey Nurse Nelly was actually Doctor Grace Ngoba, a beautiful and dedicated geriatric specialist, originally from Botswana. I kept meaning to find out how she ended up here in Ottawa as the chief medical officer in an upmarket old folks’ home. I must ask her for dinner one evening. She is wonderful with Dad and he idolises her. Plus, she knows about the Polish vodka. When Max’s son Morty brings it in, he gives the bottle to her and she dilutes it with about 80% water. But the illusion of illicit drinking remains and as Grace says, “If they behave like a couple of schoolboys, they have years left yet!”
Oh, sorry again! I was telling you about Circe Books. So, they didn’t want another story, thank goodness. Well, not exactly. They wanted to write the story of my life! I could not for the life of me see what made my life so exceptional from everyone else that it would be worthy of a book and I certainly could name lots of much better candidates. It seems that they had called Sonya and Rachel to get a bit of background on me for their files as I had been a bit coy about telling a complete stranger my life story and Lord knows what those girls told them but they were very keen to write a book about me. I declined, of course. But they still want to send some reporter up to interview me. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they never get round to it. I have had a life more or less the same as most people, some good, some bad, so who would be interested in my story? It’s not that exceptional. Oh I suppose losing my eye at eight might be slightly unusual but what is losing an eye to kids born without limbs or in wheelchairs or whatever, who overcome all sorts of horrors and adversity and triumph? No, I think they should stick to much more interesting subjects. But secretly, I admit, I am flattered.
Got to run, th
at’s Ian at the door for my lesson! Trying a simplified bit of Chopin today. Well, I am half Polish!
***
It’s funny, inside, I don’t feel any different to the person I was that summer of the Montreal Olympics when I was just a kid doing a summer job at the Bay, but I am afraid the years are beginning to, well frankly, to be a pain in the bum! I am no longer willowy. In fact, the plant I most resemble these days is an aubergine! All the weight is in the bottom! Yes, a fat-arsed, shapeless aubergine. I know everyone here calls it an eggplant but my mum was from Pevensey in Sussex and over there they call them aubergines and that’s what I learnt from her. Actually, like many Canadians, I am a bit schizophrenic when it comes to English. I say ‘bum’ or ‘arse’ rather than ‘ass’. I always called my mother ‘Mum’ rather than ‘Mom’ but Paul’s kids call Sarah “Mom”. And don’t get me started on miles and kilometres, or should that be kilometers! I spell colour with the ‘u’ and call gas, ‘petrol’. But I call ‘football’, soccer and ‘football’ to me is CFL, our version, The Grey Cup not NFL and the Superbowl. So you see, it isn’t easy being a Canadian! These days, the American version seems to prevail but anyone of my generation from British heritage can often find themselves falling between two stools!
Yes, Caroline is a mum, or a mom if you prefer! And remember I talked about two births, well glory be if she didn’t go and have twins! Just about the perfect everyday miracle! Girls, Heather and Elizabeth (after Mum, of course), five months old, born the day William died and a month after Mum and Ali, who left us in the same week. Mum had been failing for quite a while and Dad hated seeing her waste away. We had descended en masse the previous year for their platinum-anniversary party, which lasted about a week and the children all slept in tents, which was huge fun, while the adults took over the local motel about 100 yards up the road. All except poor Daniel and Caroline who were appointed tent monitors, one for the boys, one for the girls, and had to pitch camp with the kids! Jeffrey and I flew down a few days before the party to help get things organised. I wore a silver velvet patch this time because they don’t do them in platinum! Paul was away on manoeuvres in the Atlantic somewhere but Caroline and Daniel had flown to Halifax and picked up Sarah and the two boys, Aaron and Bradley, and they came down together. What was fantastic was that Paul managed to organise a ship-to-shore call and got though just as the party was getting started and spoke to Granny and Granddad Wisniewski. Jake was there and both his girls, Jeannie and Samantha, flew in from out west with their husbands and children, which was a lovely surprise as most of us had never met their families. Mateusz turned up without Olga unfortunately as she had just had a mastectomy (happily, she is fine now) and stayed in Poland with Ela, their oldest daughter (who was pregnant for the fourth time), and baby Janusz and smaller baby Tomasz, but she insisted that Mateusz go. So Mateusz arrived in a maroon and white 1957 GMC bus which he bought on the Internet for $15,000 with his two boys, their wives and their six kids (three each) and his youngest daughter, Marina, her husband Grzegor, their two sons, Ela’s husband, Andrew (who was originally from Cleveland), and their oldest girl, Matilda. He got everybody nametags, “in case the older folk were getting a bit hazy,” he said looking at Jake and me. But it was a great idea as quite a few of us hadn’t even met in person before, although, thanks to Facebook and Skype, we all kept up with varying degrees of regularity with the toings and froings, ups and downs of each other’s lives.
Come to think of it, I suppose an extended family is a bit like having your own built-in soap opera. I mentioned that to Jeff. “Yes,” he said, “but at least you can switch off the soaps!” Old cynic! In all, including the local friends and neighbours there were nearly forty people there and seventeen had arrived on the same bus! Everyone had such a wonderful time and mum was the centre of it all. She was already showing signs that she was ill but Dad said she didn’t stop smiling for a week afterwards. When Mateusz and his clan returned to Poland he gave the bus to an orphanage in Jacksonville on condition that they gave him and the gang a lift to the airport!
But almost a year on from the party, it was coming to the point when some decisions about palliative care were going to have to be made when Mum, bless her, took the decision out of our hands. That was a grim couple of weeks; flying down to Amelia, staying a few days with Dad, who was much stronger than I would have been. He just said how lucky he felt to have shared so many years with someone so special and then dried his eyes and said, “OK, so find me a place in Ottawa and I’ll be back soon.” Jake flew down for the cremation (Dad wanted to bring Mum back to Canada and bury her there) and to stay on to help Dad sell up and move north. Obviously, Jake never retired to Amelia. He had a much more radical plan! So, Jeff and I flew back and gathered Sonya, Rachel and Larry, who were all staying at our house. Larry and Rachel, well, long story. Anyway we went off to Paris for Ali’s funeral and it was only a couple of weeks after that that we were blessed with two more grandchildren.
It turns out that after dozens of tests and analyses, and years of heartbreak and despair, Caroline and Daniel decided to try and adopt. As part of the adoption process they both had to have a medical. And yes, implausible as it may sound, it was at her medical that the doctor asked if she was sure she wanted to go ahead with the adoption.
“Why on earth would you ask that?” asked Caroline half irritated, half perplexed.
“Well it’s just that you know you are pregnant. About three months gone, I would say without a couple more tests.”
Caroline screamed, jumped up and kissed Doctor Patel full on the mouth (Doctor Patel was somewhat taken aback. No patient have ever upped and kissed her before!) and ran out of the examining room still in her robe to find Dan who was down the hall trying to pee into a cup!
Dan did try to explain to me how it had happened, something to do with his sperm becoming active again and Caroline’s eggs deciding not to evacuate early. A combination of diet, herbal medicine, hormone injections and, in my opinion, divine intervention (although born and raised Catholic, neither Jeff nor I are churchgoers. Sorry, Sister Mary-Joseph, my long-suffering Sunday school teacher) resulted in two healthy miracles.
I will never forget the day they were born. We were at another hospital, Ian, Jeffrey, Rachel and I, (Larry was out of town on business and Sonya and Habib were still in their own bubble of grief) sitting around a bed covered with tubes, drips, monitors and the regular, crushingly depressing, bellows sound of the respiratory machine. Amongst that paraphernalia lay William. He had caught a chill at an open-air concert on the canal for, of all things, Breast Cancer Awareness Week. The chill developed into a severe cold, the cold into flu, and the flu into pneumonia. He fought it but after two months he had no more fight left and William, our sweet William, was a ghost. On that day William was drifting in and out of consciousness but unable to speak; we were all in tears when, with special permission from the duty nurse for me to leave it switched on (who had had William’s consent granted by no more than a double blink), my cell phone rang: it was Daniel. “It’s twins! Girls! Two gorgeous girls! Caroline wanted William to know.” Just at that moment, William opened his eyes. I leaned in and kissed him, and told him he was an uncle. Despite his pain and the inevitability of his imminent death, William smiled and taking as firm a grip as he could of Ian’s hand, he nodded and smiled again then closed his eyes. A few moments later, his hand slipped from Ian’s and he was at peace.
***
So Jake decided to retire and, after Mum died and Dad returned to Ottawa, he, having abandoned the idea to live in Amelia, decided to make the most of his retirement. He went down to Portland, then to Boulder, to see his girls and his grandchildren, then came over to Ottawa to see Dad and stayed for a few days with Jeff and me. One evening, Ian joined us and we were sitting in the basement, with the cello banished to the corner, having a few cocktails. Well, we did have a cocktail bar and Ian could make a mean Manhattan! Jake had just turned sixt
y-six and was on his own, solvent from some astute oil investments back in the eighties, and he announced between sips that he had sold up and was moving onto phase three.
“What were phases one and two, may I ask?” I enquired.
“Phase one was youth…phase two was adulthood.”
“So what is phase three, senility?” Jeff and Ian giggled. Jake snorted.
“Listen, Long John Silver,” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Phase three is called ‘Golden Time’. And I plan to make the most of it! And Dad knows all about it and he loves the idea!”
“What have you and that crazy old man been plotting?” Jeff asked.
“I am off to New Zealand. I am going to buy a plane and fly myself to Fiji and as many islands as I can!”
There were precisely three seconds of silence before Ian and Jeffrey fell about laughing. But I didn’t laugh. I knew he was serious and I beamed. He got his pilot’s licence twenty years before in Alberta and was an enthusiastic occasional club pilot. I got up went over to him and hugged him tight.
“I bet I know what Dad said when you told him.”
“Yep. He said that it was about time there was another pilot in the family!”
Three weeks later we took Jake to Macdonald-Cartier airport and saw him off on the Air Canada flight to Vancouver where he would connect with Air New Zealand to Auckland. He had just one suitcase for the hold and a Canadian Army backpack as hand luggage and a grin on his face like that of a ten-year-old boy locked in a sweet shop. And that was that. Off he went and we get to Skype from time to time. He sailed through his medicals and got his New Zealand licence but has encountered the problem of finding a suitable single prop plane that had decent range. So, he took a commercial flight to Fiji and visited Tonga and a host of other islands. His plan has changed a bit but the Golden Phase seems to be even more gilt edged. He has a travelling companion; Karina, is Dutch, a widow of 59 and a former diplomat of all things, and seems as much of a lunatic as Jake! The new plan involves them going to Australia, buying a Cessna and hopping around the interior while their vineyard in Adelaide settles in! I cannot wait until we visit them next year! Mateusz has sold up too and he and Olga have bought two houses and knocked them into one on a small part of a big old estate for the brood, which now numbers twelve grandchildren. They plan to grow their own organic vegetables, enjoy fishing in the lake and entertaining the hordes when they descend upon them for the school holidays. The funniest thing is that the estate used to belong to a cousin of the Baron Karol, who taught my dad to fly back in the thirties. Dad was tickled when I told him. He never spoke to me in Polish. By the time I was born, he was so used to speaking English at work and to Mum that he never taught me. I sort of resented him a bit for that but at least I can insult people in Polish as he always cursed in his native tongue and I was a quick learner! But Jakey and Mat, being older, did learn it and when they speak on the phone, they speak in Polish, although you have to shout a bit these days as Dad’s getting a trifle deaf. Although I believe that his deafness is selective. Mum used to say, “Your father hears exactly what he wants to and not a word more!”
