Potato Island

Despite the attractions of the Supreme Court clerk’s reunion (written up in a previous post), one of the clerks in my wife’s year failed to make it.  We decided to catch up with him in Prince Edward Island.  He had just returned from Nunavut, Canada’s youngest territory, attending the graduation of the first 21 women to earn graduate degrees there.   The University of PEI had put together a program that made it possible, bringing higher education to the Far North.

Despite his busy agenda, he welcomed us when we broached the subject of an actual visit.  Neither my wife nor I had been to to the island for years.  My wife’s last visit was over fifty years ago, when she was a child.

You can actually drive all the way now, which seems strange when you are going to a  large island that is nearly thirteen kilometers (eight miles) away from the mainland.  The Confederation Bridge, which opened twelve years ago, is the longest bridge in the world over salt water that ices up in winter.  The really good thing is that they only charge a toll for the return trip to the mainland and we took the ferry back.

For years, PEI has been known for three things– potatoes, the  “Anne of Green Gables”  books by L.M Montgomery, and its place in history as the birthplace of Canada.  The potatoes are still there in abundance, but PEI’s historical significance has been eclipsed by Anne,  the lovable orphan who wormed her way into so many hearts through books and television.

We had the chance to meet the  artistic director of the Montgomery Theater (now housed in L.M. Montgomery’s old church) and  dropped into Avonlea for a brief visit.  The grounds are chock full of historic buildings that have been moved to the site as well as reproductions of old buildings and new shops that simply look old.  It is a tiny, rural Disneyland drawn from the Anne books and stories.

In the summer, PEI does its best to take advantage of the tourist trade, luring big name artists to Charlottetown and staging musicals that have little to do with the rural landscape or the sensibility of Montgomery’s day.  In a way, I think I blamed Montgomery herself for the “tourist trap” aspect to PEI, but this visit made me think a little deeper about my flip reaction.

Montgomery was no Disney, manufacturing dreams of childhood; she was a highly accomplished, complex woman, dealing with the challenge of forging an independent position in Victorian times, which was not particularly favorable to smart, strong women.  As my wife once wrote in a college paper, Montgomery was dealing with profound human issues of belonging and dislocation, with the metaphors of orphans and islands (which are orphans, in geographical terms).

In a very quick trip, we attended the opening of a new art gallery, visited a talented artist, saw the set of a theatrical venue in progress, a farm market, a university campus, two fine restaurants, and the mesmerizing, rolling  countryside of red earth and green leaves.  We fell asleep under a gibbous moon.  We got rained on.

The “bedrock” of P.E.I. is coarse, red sandstone.  The early settlers built homes and dykes from this easily hewn stone.  Its erosion over the eons have created endless, beautiful beaches.  The gulf stream does its part to make the beaches idyllic, bringing up warm seawater from the Carolinas.

Even with the dismal summer weather that followed us to the Island, we could not resist a visit to the beach.  There were rare, spectacular, parabolic  dunes and sand and sky that seemed to reach forever.  It was magical.

Dinner with Tanks

It is appropriate that I should be posting this on Canada Day, because it is about our recent visit to this nation’s capital.  Canadians are not known for their patriotic fervor, but on this particular day they revel in whatever feelings they may have for this vast land mass they call a country.   Many years ago I was in Ottawa on July 1.  The fireworks were spectacular.

Once upon a time (this will be hard to believe for any readers under thirty) there were no personal computers. Every single written communication of any kind had to be written out by hand or punched out on a reluctant piece of machinery called a typewriter.  All mistakes had to be corrected with something called white out.  This is within living memory, within my lifetime as a grown up.

Way back BBG (before Bill Gates) and BSJ (Steve Jobs) my wife was selected to be a clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada.  That year, there were ten clerks.  The Chief Justice had two; the others had to make do with one.  Most clerks worked like galley slaves just to keep up.  This was BBG, remember.

The judge my wife worked for was smart, hard-working, very diligent and exacting.  He left a legacy at the Court that people still talk about; he is  regarded as one of the best judges the court ever had.  My wife admired him, but he was not an easy boss.

Ever in search of the perfect clerk, the judge would always choose someone completely different from the previous worker bee. We know this because of the reunions that were held at his estate on his birthday every year until he retired.  The assembled individuals seemed to belong to the same species, but that was about it.  Aside from brains, a willingness to work very hard and a good legal education, they had little else in common.

Every five years there is a reunion of clerks for the entire court.  I had never been to one before, but this year we not far away and I had my good suit.  It seemed like the perfect opportunity to put in an appearance.  We could catch up with my brother-in-law, see a good friend who lives and works in Ottawa, and hobnob with the high and mighty.

Now that each judge has three clerks, the numbers have ballooned.  The atrium of the Supreme Court itself was large enough for the cocktail party, but seating six or seven hundred for dinner requires a very special venue.

Capital cities are not my favorite places.  They tend to attract people who like power, as well as multitudes of civil servants, interns and secretaries. I spent one summer in Ottawa and three years in Washington D.C.  I found  both cities excruciatingly dull.  In Ottawa, at least, it is easy to get out into some lovely country very quickly, and a handful of the buildings are beautiful.

The architecture of The Parliament Buildings, the National Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Civilization are worth a trip to the city. I can’t say the same for the exterior of the new War Museum. but it does have room for a sit-down dinner for seven hundred.  As long as you don’t mind tanks.

I had never thought of Canada as being a particularly militaristic country, but for many years this country was part of Britain, and the same cannot be said of the U.K.  There were the never ending wars between England and France that finally came to a head on the Plains of Abraham.  In one half hour battle, years of warfare in North America was finally resolved.

Then there was the Boer War, the War of 1812, the horrendous trench warfare of World War I, the battles in France, Italy and Africa of  WW II.  Canadians paid a huge price for their European heritage.  And then all the Peacekeeping, which is another form of war.  And now, Afghanistan.

Our venue for the grand evening of the reunion was an extraordinary space.  It was a cavernous room of concrete and glass, big enough to hold a full-size fighter plane overhead and a football field of tanks.  And not just tanks, field artillery and armored vehicles of very description.  What made this disconcerting was that all the enormous guns were pointed directly at us.

If I hadn’t had my Brioni, 007 suit on, I might have considered a quiet exit, but the discrete flak jacket sewn inside comes in handy on just these kinds of occasions.  What with the interesting company, the food, the wine and the extraordinarily injudicious entertainment, we had a very good time indeed.

Stay tuned.

The Bay of Fundy View

Back in the days when I ran a bed and breakfast business in the Stewart House, I was always on the lookout for attractive words and phrases I could plug into the minimal amount of advertising we did for the place.  The tourism season was very short (basically July and August), so it really didn’t pay to put a lot of money into marketing.

The province of Nova Scotia offered the best advertising around, a write-up in a telephone-size book called the “Doers and Dreamers” guide.  The books were widely distributed to tourist offices up and down the Eastern seaboard.

In the early years, I took great pains to put together an attractive brochure,  and get them distributed in time for the summer season.  They disappeared off the tourist bureau racks, but I never saw anyone walk in with one in hand.

At some point in our decade of doing business, the title of this post made it into our advertising.  I used to kid my wife about it, because it was her doing. We are only three kilometers from the Bay, but the trees across the road make it difficult to see more than a band of silver when the sun glances off the water. The attic has the best view, but our guests never went up there.

The phrase reminded me of “Fawlty Towers”, which was my favourite John Cleese vehicle, for obvious reasons.  At the end of every season I would get grumpy, beginning to identify with the irascible innkeeper in the show. In one episode, an unpleasant older lady with a hearing problem takes Basil to task for the rather ordinary view from her window.  Basil retaliates:  “It is Torquay, madame.  What did you expect to see, thundering wildebeasts?”

My guests at the B&B would inevitably ask, disarmingly, where they could see the tides.  That was is a difficult question to answer without seeming evasive.  The Bay of Fundy tides are the highest in the world.  One hundred billion tons of water rush in and out of the mud bathtub twice a day, but the land surrounding Grand Pre is flat, so instead of climbing up the side of a cliff, the salt water covers and uncovers vast areas of mudflats.

During low tide, one third of the basin is exposed to the sky.   Many thousands of migratory birds take advantage of that, stopping to stuff themselves with mud shrimp before tackling the long trip down to South America in the fall.

It is difficult to get a true sense of 17 meter (fifty-five foot) tides without a wharf or bluff or a very small harbour where fishing boats can be seen sitting on mud one minute, then heading out to sea the next.

For a good time-lapse view of the tidal change, have a look at this video– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2AtORivSY

Check out the “Not Since Moses” video to get a playful picture of the kind of a one of a kind race held once a year on the other side of the Bay of Fundy.  It is truly amazing–  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LBYX4aj340

Days of Long Light

It is over 17,500 kilometers (10,874 miles) from Melbourne, Australia to Halifax, Canada, as the plane flies.  After watching more movies in one night than I had seen in the previous year, I was glad that I had scheduled a layover weekend in Los Angeles.

The drive from the airport to a  friend’s bungalow in Santa Monica felt very familiar, even after twenty-two years.  The road was still shabby, littered with discount stores, gyms, car dealerships, taco stands and tattoo parlors.  Only the Whole Foods store was new.  It signaled gentrification that seemed a little late in coming considering the value of the property.

I have moved many times since my seven-year stay in L.A., but I still have one old friend in LA who puts me up and a few others who will buy me a beer or a glass of wine.  Most of them worked in the “biz”, as the entertainment industry is called.

They were always working too hard or hardly working, which is the norm in La La Land.  Right now, the economy is in free fall and the state’s finances are in serious trouble.   Much of that can be blamed on the referendums that plague every election in California and, of course, the Terminator.

None of this impacts on the traveler.  I had a good time, catching up with the few friends who were in town and not otherwise engaged.  Gordon and I  went out to the Getty villa in Malibu (recently re-opened after extensive renovations) and took lunch at the fish restaurant we used to frequent 25 years ago.  It hadn’t changed at all.

On my last night in town, we went to the new “Terminator” movie.  My friend, Bob, who has been editing the most expensive animated film in history for the last three years, emerged from his cocoon for the evening.

The Terminator movie was one explosion after another.  My ears rang when we came out.  It is hard to believe that the “Gov” actually injected humor in the first one.  The latest battle-fest has virtually none.  Some good actors are wasted in their roles and the movie seems interminable, but it will no doubt make a fortune overseas.

When I arrive at Grand Pre and resume life in the Stewart House, some work compulsion creeps in and takes over my body.  A two hundred year-old house is in constant need of care.  Everything exposed to the maritime weather tends to rot, amazingly quickly.  Last year it was the back porch and the fasteners on storms and screens that needed attention.  This year it is the front porch, the attic, study and carriage house.  There is always more than I have time for.

On the plus side, there are the fiddleheads, strawberries and rhubarb, summer evenings with long light.  There are the rain clouds, intense green in the trees, and friendly neighbours with whom I have some history. There are dykelands for long walks, spectacular sunsets and a lovely room for curling up with a good book. For all that, I can easily do some work and not complain.

Buddha gets his cake

In addition to gearing up for our annual pilgrimage to the Stewart House in Nova Scotia, I’ve been attending to my wife’s birthday celebration.  She was happy enough to delay the actual purchase of a present until she found something that pleased her, but there was the card, the cake and fill in present to be found.  In deference to her feelings, I won’t mention which life marker just passed, but it was one she hadn’t expected quite so soon.

And we had a cat crisis to deal with.  I have written only once about our cat in this blog, and that was when we sent her on a very convoluted route from Florida to Melbourne, and then into the dreaded place called quarantine.  Unlike the tom next door, Tibbey is a very quiet, well-mannered Maine Coon cat.  Her principal focus seems to be grooming herself, something she takes very, very seriously.  She is an attractive cat and wants to stay that way.

Somehow she managed to slice open her pad.  We didn’t notice it until Saturday night, which meant that we had to take her to an emergency clinic.  Since then, we’ve been shuttling her back and forth to our regular vet on what seems to be a continuous basis.  Despite sporting an “Elizabethan” collar, (which looks much better on Cate Blanchett),  she has no difficulty shedding bandages that wrap all the way up her leg.  And then there are the pills.

Needless to say, I needed a diversion.  What could be better than Buddha’s day?  It is celebrated over the weekend of February 16 and 17 at Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne.  It marks the birthday of Prince Siddartha Gautama, who was to become Sakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.

Soon after his birth, nine heavenly dragons appeared and emitted two streams, one cool and one warm, and the purest fragrant rain fell to bathe the newborn Prince.  He immediately took seven steps and seven lotus flowers sprang from his feet.  Flowers drifted down from the heavens.  Not bad for a new baby.  He was born into a very wealthy family and not allowed to venture from the palace.  One day as a young man he ventured out and witnessed distressing sights that changed his life forever– people plagued by old age, disease, poverty and death.  Siddartha dedicated the rest of his life to finding a way to be free of earthly troubles, to put an end to suffering.

In Melbourne there are a number of nationalities with large Buddhist populations– Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Japanese and Indonesian.  The event is sponsored by the Buddha’s Light International Association and Fo Guang Shan Melbourne, one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the world.  In Australia, Buddhism is the fastest growing religion, the second largest religious group in every state.

There were a good number of activities and events spread out over the two days, from flower arranging to Tai Chi,  meditation to demonstrations of  vegetarian cooking.  There was an interfaith prayer for world peace, a baby blessing ceremony and the ritual bathing the Buddha.  According to Buddhists,  it is simple to wash away physical dirt, but much more difficult to cleanse one’s inner dirt of greed, anger and ignorance.

Buddhism is the only religion that has appealed to me since I cast off  my Christian upbringing.  It seems to encourage the practice of peace, not simply the preaching of it.  Have a joyful attitude and keep an open mind;  have courage and compassion for all things.

Our cat’s philosophy has a certain appeal as well.  Wash your paws, keep a clean coat and the rest will take care of itself.   With any luck, your keepers are reasonably intelligent, well-intentioned, and trainable.   Cheers.

Fair Warning

The government of Victoria is going through a hand-wringing exercise about the devastation of the bush fires, particularly Black Saturday.  Thirty-four people died in the town of Marysville following the delivery of a report (prepared for Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner) declaring that everyone in the town was safe.

That the intensity of the bush fires took everyone by surprise is not at issue; the real questions are about the wisdom of the “stay or flee ” policy that is currently in favor and the CFA (Country Fire Authority) warnings that seem to have been seriously negligent in giving  residents at risk  timely warnings of the dangerous inferno.

A national review of disaster preparedness done three years ago found the states’ ability to warn its citizens inadequate to the task.  Most people here simply call 000 in the case of emergencies.  When the lines get overloaded, the calls get farmed out to centers that do not necessarily have adequate information to assess a risky situation for the caller.  In the case of the bush fires, neither the telephone or the internet was up to the task of saving citizens.

Even though the adjacent town of Narbethong was under ember attack hours before the blaze approached Marysville, there was no idication of that on the CFA website.  A map indicating that Marysville was in the path of an inferno was faxed to a nearby incident control center just one hour before the town was engulfed in flames.  The nearby town of Srathewen was not even mentioned in the warning. Twenty-seven people died there on February 7, the infamous day now known as “Black Saturday.”

Kinglake fire devastation - Reuters/ Mike Tsikas

Ironically, a team of American fire fighters from California has been here recently studying the Australian example. They seem to have concluded that the spirit of volunteerism which makes the Australian policy of ‘fight or flee’ an option  is missing in the U.S.  The policy in California is based on a more authoritarian approach:  get people out whether they like it or not; worry about houses and property later.

I lived in L.A. for seven years, through bush fires, earthquakes and mudslides.  In terms of fatalities, nothing came close to the horror of Black Saturday.  I am not suggesting that my native land does these things better than Australia.  The response to the hurricanes in New Orleans gives the lie to that.  But in this particular case, reliance on peoples’ instincts for survival, mateship, rugged individualism and the myth of the brave Australian battler may have been carried just a little too far.  Fire doesn’t respect rugged individualism or mateship.

In terms of warnings, the most troubling example of late may have been the one that was blatantly ignored right before the devastating earthquake in Italy just a month ago.  The seismologist, Giampaolo Giuliani, drove through the town of L’Aquila in a van with a loudspeaker warning the public about an impending earthquake in March. He was accused of inciting panic and threatened with charges of public mischief.

The city government shut him down and Italy’s Major Risks Committee met in the town on March 31, playing down his disaster prediction, saying it was impossible to predict earthquakes with any accuracy.  The quake hit at 3:32 AM, six kilometers northeast of L’Aquila.  Over 200 people died.  Seismologists from around the world have dismissed the prediction as a fluke, insisting that such detailed predictions are impossible with current data.

But the fact is, he did offer fair warning to the good people of the town and he was roundly rebuked for his efforts.  Did anybody say I’m sorry?

Pies, Pasties and Sausage Rolls

You could be forgiven for thinking we don’t actually eat here.  With the exception of breakfast cereal, I have written virtually nothing about restaurants or local foods, such as kangaroo or Tiddley Oggies.  It is a serious omission.  We don’t dine out often, but we do eat, and I shop for groceries two or three times a week.

If you could rate people on some sort of sliding scale with carnivores at the top of the scale and vegans at the bottom, Australian males would be at the top or even over the top.  Since their post-aboriginal culinary heritage began in England, it is not surprising that part of the meat eaters’ consumption is associated with the bakery business– meat pies and sausage rolls. It is said that these date back to Egyptian times.

In Melbourne, there are two family names solidly linked to the bakery business– Ferguson and Plarre.  “Percy” Ferguson was born here in 1880; Otto Plare was born in Germany in 1882.  From the time Otto sailed for Melbourne and set up shop on Puckle Street in Moonee Ponds, these two men were rivals. Both men enlisted their family members in their bakeries; both families lived above their shops and both bakers found their best customers among the immigrant population.  They emphasized quality and good service.

The bakeries thrived when Melbourne boomed and struggled during the Depression.  Otto had traveled and worked in highly cultivated places before emigrating, so he had an advantage when it came to “fancy” cakes and pastries.  Ferguson had perfected very popular pies.  Their sons took an avid interest in baking.  Ray Plarre was actually caned for drawing pastry designs in school.

On a brief visit to Melbourne in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force One was met by Eileen Plarre’s  little green Prefect (car). There was a large crowd of people who had made a corridor to the plane, but instead of the President coming out, Eileen took advantage of the opening to deliver rum truffles, green frogs and other fancies directly to the President.  She had the perfect cover, a police escort right from the Puckle Street bakery.

In 1980, under ever-increasing competition from other bakeries, the two firms merged.  Their meat pies include country chicken, steak and onion, beef and cheese, sweet curry etc.  The company’s pasties got a name change when Ken and Pam Ferguson discovered that the original name for pasties (which has an entirely different connotation in North America), was “oggies.”  Tiddley means proper.  Pasties are stuffed with vegetables instead of meat.

According to Wikepedia, Australian meat pies were generally locally produced locally because of the lack of refrigeration in the early days of pie production.  One brand that began at a local bakery in Bendigo has been branded by its association with Australian Rules football– Four N Twenty.

A floater  is a an inverted meat pie, smothered in a plate of thick green pea soup.  It is typically covered with tomato sauce, often enlivened with mint sauce or malt vinegar. The Chiko roll consists of boned  mutton, celery, cabbage, barley, rice, carrot and spices in a tube of egg, flour and dough, which is then deep-fried.  The wrap was designed to be unusually thick so it will survive handling at football matches.

By this time in this post, you may be positively salivating, your taste buds overwhelmed with the idea of these delicacies.  I cannot claim responsibility for the stampede of gastronomic tourism that is surely about to begin, but if Australia wants to shower me with some of the  dollars they have left over from the “Australia” campaign, I won’t mind.  Not a tiddley bit.

Anzac Revisited

An antarctic blast brought in some wintry weather yesterday.  It seemed singularly appropriate as a meteorological comment on Anzac Day, when Australians all over the world commemorate the brave Australian “diggers” who fought and died in other peoples’ wars over the years.  I wrote about Anzac Day two years ago and I’m happy to say that what I said then still reads well. You can check it out by doing a search for Anzac Day.

Anzac is an acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.  April 25 was the day the troops landed in Gallipoli (in Turkey) in Churchill’s ill-considered plan to take Istanbul and break through to the Black Sea.  The Aussies and Kiwis met a hail of machine gun bullets from the Turkish army dug into the hills overlooking the beaches.  The landing quickly deteriorated into trench warfare, ending  in a stalemate that lasted eight months.  Over ten thousand soldiers from the southern hemisphere were killed during the campaign.

It seems a strange choice as the national day commemorating Australian soldiers, but I suppose the first day of a disaster is as good as any.  There seems to be a tendency among Australians to idealize warfare, to see it as some form of extreme sport for which they are very well equipped.  Like Americans, they appear to believe that they must measure up, to prove their bravery in battle.

In Melbourne, forty thousand people gathered for a dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance.  Other Australians commemorated the day in Gallipoli and at the Australian War Memorial on the hill above Villers-Bretonneux in France.  46,000 Aussies died on the Western Front.  For a country with such a small population, the decimation caused by the First World War reverberated through every single community.

Every evening at dinner I pick up a silver napkin ring that once belonged to my wife’s grandfather.  It is inscribed “My Dear Boy 1914.”  He was seventeen when he went off to war.  His mother told him before his departure to the Western Front that she would rather he came back in a pine box than dishonored or disfigured.  When he got a leg full of shrapnel, the young man refused amputation, knowing that it could cost him his life.  Fortunately, he survived the bullets and bombs and managed to keep the leg.

In a recent interview, Amos Oz, the Israeli writer and peace activist, suggested that his politics have been shaped by his imagination, a novelist’s primary tool.  It has allowed him into the heads of Palestinians, many of whom are living in conditions not dissimilar to those Oz knew as a young man before the United Nations voted to establish Israel. Oz grew up with the sensibility of a Zionist terrorist; his first words in English were “British, go home.”  But now his point-of-view has shifted completely and he is considered a traitor by mainstream Israelis for suggesting that real peace can only come with the creation of a Palestinian state.

Maybe that is what war comes down to, in the end:  a willingness to be blind, a failure to look at the shades beyond black and white, between us and them, between good and evil.  A failure of imagination.  Let us honour brave soldiers and honor the fallen, but imagine the world John Lennon sang about, a place where peace grows and spreads like poppies on the fields of Flanders.

A Cloud in the Eye

I did a lot of foolish things in my thirties.  I thought about some of them while I was under the knife.  One or more may have helped trigger the cloud in my left eye that the doctor was attempting to remove.  The whole procedure wouldn’t take much more than ten or twenty minutes.  It was the preliminaries which took forever.  Antibiotic drops, drops to dilate, drops to numb.  At some point the assistant anesthesiologist slipped in an IV to help reduce my anxiety level and I ceased to be concerned about anything at all.

When I lost my glasses over a year ago, I was dismayed to discover that my eyesight had deteriorated considerably.  I had cataracts.  I could have had an operation then, but I’m very reluctant to have surgery of any kind, especially on eyes, so I procrastinated.

I ordered new glasses based on the stronger prescription and started to do my research.  I asked around among our limited set of acquaintances here and finally came up with the name of a doctor who had operated on both eyes of a fellow cyclist.  She was very pleased with the result.  Dr Burgess has been at this awhile.  He has done thousands of cataract operations.

The last postponement was for the trip to Italy, but when I returned there did not seem much point in putting it off. Despite my trepidation, the surgery went well.  I did not need anything more than a topical anesthetic.  I had actually watched my wife’s cataract surgery on a large screen video monitor, so it was not difficult to imagine what was happening.  But I can’t really say I was aware of very much during the operation.  The mind goes elsewhere.

In post op I was offered a sandwich and coffee.  They had sent a car at 6:45 AM to pick me up and bring me to the clinic and it nearly 10 AM when I came out.  I was going into caffeine withdrawal.  I inhaled the coffee and watched other patients wheeled out.  Some had eye patches, which meant they had required (or requested) more than a topical anesthetic.

One of the foolish things I did in my thirties was to accidentally blast my eye with compressed air.  Another was to drive around for days on the freeways of Los Angeles scouting locations for TV shows most people have never heard of.  It exposed the left side of my face (the driver’s side) to a heavy dose of California sunshine, to ultraviolet light.  Even with decent sunglasses, that much exposure to strong sun is hard on eyes.

One of the directors I met was an eccentric old-timer by the name of Andre de Toth.  He had an eye patch.  His claim to fame was one of the most successful 3 D films ever made, “House of Wax,” with Vincent Price.  Not bad for a guy with no depth perception.

By the time he came to work for “This is the Life.” a Lutheran television series I worked on, his glory days were over.  I was utterly charmed by his larger-than-life charm and his great stories.  What I hadn’t counted on was his lack of tact.

For some reason I no longer remember, Andre blew a hole in the minuscule budget of the show by replacing the lead actor two days before production.   Before the filming began for every episode, the producer (an ordained Lutheran minister) said a prayer.

He had barely begun when Andre broke in in his booming voice and said:   “Thank God you backed me up when I fired that sonofabitch.”  There was stunned silence for a long moment as our small group digested that comment.  Then, a tentative chorus of “Amen.”  Andre was never asked back to direct another episode, but he had done  a slew of movies and TV shows over the years.  He finally took his comments and complaints to his Maker at the age of ninety in 2002.

The operation on my left eye was successful and my eyesight is back to 20/20.  The color blue has returned to my left side.  I hadn’t even realized that until I went to see the physician for a follow up visit.  He brought up Monet, pointing out that the paintings in his later years got more and more yellow because of his cataracts.  Finally he got up the nerve to have an operation.  Overnight, the blues and purples came back into his work. One more operation to go but that can wait.

The great news is we have a brand new granddaughter, Zooey Marie, born April 18th.  6 pounds, 12 ounces.  I have no doubt she will be the most photographed child in Portland, Oregon.  But she’s beautiful so it will be a treat to see her smiling face up on Flickr in thousands of permutations.   Bonne Anniversaire, Zooey!

Tripping to Emergency

The prospect of two days on the Southern Rail Trail sounded good.  I had ridden part of it in 2007 on the Great Victorian Bike Ride. I remembered a smooth packed dirt surface and trees lining much of the path.  An occasional break in the shrubbery offered views of pastures covered with sheep or a glimpse of rugged Wilson’s Promontory, the popular national park at the southern tip of Gippsland.

Our home base would be a motel in the small town of Meeniyan.  The main question mark for the Easter weekend was the weather.  Easter arrives  in the fall here in the southern hemisphere, and the weather is highly changeable.  It can go from summer to winter overnight.  There were showers predicted, so we packed rain jackets and fleeces.

The morning of our first day’s ride, my wife stepped outside and failed to see the edge between two concrete pads functioning as steps into our room.  She tried to cushion the fall with her arm.   Aside from some bruises and cuts, she did not seem to suffer from any lasting pain.  After breakfast we got the tandem out and started riding the path with the rest of our group.

The weather gods cooperated, and our 65 km (40 mile) ride to the town of Foster and back was tiring but uneventful.   We enjoyed the chance to catch up a bit with some riding friends we hadn’t seen in a long time.  The town of Foster was lively. There was a huge outdoor market going on in the sporting grounds where I had camped during the Great Vic ride.  Our odd recumbent bikes barely drew a second look.   We had a nice, leisurely lunch in the park, and returned to Meeniyan.  The climb toward Hoddle Summit seemed longer on the way back than it had earlier, the gates at each road crossing more numerous.  I was weary by the time we wheeled into the parking lot of the motel.

Dinner at the pub next to the motel offered such specialties as Outback Parmigiana (with cheese, bacon and gravy) and spatchcock (fried and flattened young chicken).  The food came quickly and filled us up.  We had nearly finished when I looked up and saw that the color had gone from my wife’s face.  She was getting sharp pains in the wrist of her left arm.  She had broken that same wrist two years earlier.  We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the knife and fork that triggered the pain.   By the time we got back to the room she was in shock.

In a Christian country like this one, Easter Sunday evening is not the very best time to head out in search of medical care.  We had ridden our bikes past a clinic in Foster, but Lorraine, our innkeeper, suggested the hospital in Leongatha.  I drove as fast as I could, but it was dark and there was fog hiding in the dips of the hilly road.

The hospital was right where Lorraine had said it was, but despite a scattering of parked cars, it looked dead to the world. There seemed to be no lighted area inside, and there was no sign of an emergency entrance.  I circled the parking lot, then parked and went on foot down a road designated ambulances only.  It threaded through a complex of buildings, none of which showed any sign of life.  I rang a buzzer at one building.  Nothing. I returned to the lot, got in the car and drove out in search of a petrol (gas) station.

The lady behind the counter was wary.  We had strange accents, after all, and we were asking for information that was not in her line of work at all.  I may have appeared a little anxious.  My wife was in pain and I did not relish the prospect of driving two hours back to Melbourne to find a hospital, then returning for our stuff.  Assured that the local hospital was open, we drove back.  Same action, same result.  Why did I expect it to be different?  There was no sign of anyone anywhere.  It was frustrating and I was losing my patience.

In the end, I asked our less-than-helpful gas station lady to call an ambulance.  It was the only way I could see to get the medical castle to let down the drawbridge.  We were less than five minutes from the hospital, so it showed up in no time.  The paramedics were very friendly.  They gave my wife a mild anti-anxiety drug in an asthma breathing device and popped her in a wheelchair.  I followed the ambulance back to the hospital.

We went to the main entrance.  There was still no sign of an emergency entry, but there was a button I hadn’t spotted earlier and a special keypad for the ambulance guys.   They wheeled her in and I followed.  A nurse came in right away and asked her questions.  One of the paramedics kept us company while we waited for the doctor.  He had participated in the creation of the bike path so he was keen to hear the good things we had to say about it.

The doctor came at last.  She was an older woman, friendly and nice.  She would wrap it up and put it in a sling but the X ray technician was not on call and would probably not be in the next day.  She could hand out pain killers.  That was the key thing.  My wife slept better than she had in years.

Next morning we packed up and drove back to Melbourne.  We hit the Royal Melbourne emergency ward in the early afternoon.  They had a busy waiting room.  On holiday weekends everyone drinks too much and gets careless.  The X ray guy was available, but there was a two hour wait for the doctor, a very young woman who seemed like she could still be in medical school.  There was no discernible fracture on the X ray, but she slapped a cast on anyway.

Scaphoid bones in the wrist are very small and sometimes breaks don’t show up for a week or more.  We’re still waiting to confirm the fracture, but our family doctor has no doubt it is broken.  In the meantime, I’m keeping the codeine just in case.  It is going in my medical kit.  I may need it for the next adventure, or I might need it for walking out the front door. You just never can tell.