Good advice

These days I am not taking a lot of photos, so pictures for my posts are going to be scarce.

Last night I ushered at the Jeremy Dutcher show. Wow. Powerful music. I'd never heard of him before, but last night was amazing. We ushers were invited to a reception for Dutcher after the show but I had already agreed to meet another usher at a local pub so I didn't go to the reception. Some nights the last thing I want to do is usher but I go anyway and sometimes it is really worth it. Dutcher and the previous show, Between Breaths, were spectacularly worth it.

Dutcher talked about his (and his parents') efforts to preserve their language, Wolastoqey (Maliseet). He said that there are only a hundred native speakers left now. He said that it was not just about the words lost but the unique worldview lost. Every language expresses a worldview, when you speak that language you participate in that worldview. When a language goes extinct, so does that worldview. I think this is true.

* * * * *

The usher that I met at the pub is francophone, from Montreal. At 77 years old she is one of the most beautiful women I have met. I love the sound of her voice and her laugh as well. Mostly I spent the evening just listening. Our server recognized her as someone who had participated in a panel on women aging in her sociology class. The server said she really appreciated my usher friend's advice. After the server took our order I asked my friend what her advice had been.

"I told them to get an education, it would set them free."

She said that living free is the most important thing; and maybe a university education these days doesn't get you as far as it used to, but it is still important enough to help young women be free in their lives. Apparently our server took that to heart.

* * * * *

I gave myself a good scare this week, really silly of me. It started out consulting Doctor Google about some signs (symptoms?) that Hapi was displaying. I came to the conclusion that she had Cushing's Disease. Among other things, one sign of this disease is increased appetite, so one day I let Hapi eat as much as she wanted to see just how far she would go. She used to be very picky about what, how much and when she ate but that seemed to be changing. So that day I just kept refilling her bowl to see how far she would go. She ate twice as much as usual. In my mind that kind of confirmed the Cushing's diagnosis. However the next day she didn't eat a single thing and she seemed to be in pain. All she really wanted to do was hide in the basement. So I made an appointment for Friday with the vet to discuss, by which time Hapi had recovered from her day of overeating.

The vet darn near laughed in my face. She waved the results of Hapi's recent bloodwork at me and said, "She's healthy! Old, but healthy!"

I got myself all worked up for nothing. Hapi might have Cushing's, but it's kind of irrelevant. The tests are expensive, there is no cure, and dogs can live for years with it. I'll try not to overfeed her again.

May 1998, and a play

Middle-aged Yohan, in Ottawa

Not only is this month the fiftieth anniversary of les événements de Mai  it is also the twentieth anniversary of a personal sort. In 1998 I went on a four-month road trip across Canada, managing to visit every territory and province except Nunavut. I travelled in my 1991 Chevy S10 truck with my 16 year old dog Yohan. He died a few months after we returned from that trip. He was a good companion for road tripping and I knew he probably wouldn't survive the year, being so old. It was my fiftieth year and I felt I needed to do something to mark it. I managed to convince my employer to give me a four month sabbatical and took off toward the end of May. I kept a journal, I wrote emails and I took a lot of photos. When I got home again I packed it all away and focussed on my dog's last days. Then I moved on in my life.

I always intended to do something with all that material but it seemed like a daunting task so nothing happened. Yesterday I revisited that idea and hauled out the photo album and journal. I went through my saved emails and transcribed them to Word documents. At the time I was using a now-defunct email program, Eudora, so transcribing was a bit finicky. But it's done now. Then I went through the photos. At the time I thought labels were not necessary, my memory would suffice. Hah! In the journal I at first noted whenever I took photos so that looked promising, but apparently I soon dropped the practice due no doubt to unwarranted trust in my memory. Some of them are obvious but a lot are not.

Youthful Yohan, in Wolfville

Anyway, what I hope to do is post some of this material on the days that correspond to the journal entries. I don't know how far I will get, it's a lot of transcribing and scanning of photos. I may end up doing some of it retroactively. The most memorable part of the trip was from Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island to Inuvik near the Arctic Ocean and back to Whitehorse in the Yukon. During that time I came close to losing Yohan which was traumatic. I would have cancelled the whole trip and headed back to New Westminster where I lived if that had happened. One veterinarian I took him to recommended that I let him go and I simply couldn't do it. But he survived and in some ways the rest of the trip was a postscript to that moment.

Old Yohan, in Toronto

What got to me yesterday was looking at photos of Yohan. For some reason I had consigned all the photos of Yohan to this album so for years I wondered why I didn't have any pictures of him, I forgot that they were in the 1998 Road Trip album. But there they were, especially a favourite taken when he was still a mature but healthy beauty. After he died I missed him a lot, I used to dream of his return for years after. In fact those dreams did not stop until I got Hapi, my current doggy companion.  When I looked at these old photos of Yohan I felt very sad. Not because I missed him but because I didn't. I had forgotten him. I looked at those photos and felt nothing, and that made me sad; that it was so easy to forget someone.

The feeling of sadness stuck with me for the day. In the evening I was ushering for a Stage Prophets musical, The Children of Eden. It was a joyful musical but I had a hard time feeling joyful. A friend of mine was responsible for costume design and the costumes were truly imaginative and amazing. the first act was about Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, the second act about Noah and the Flood. In both acts a host of animals participated, from mice to elephants, alligators to ostriches. The giraffes in particular were applauded. I do have to say though that the musical did not portray God ("Father") in a particularly positive light. he seemed a tad vindictive, who justified his actions as the exigencies of fatherhood. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it was definitely an enjoyable performance. Not exactly a cast of hundreds, but pretty darn close.

FYI, the photos of Yohan here are clips from other photos which I did because I had apparently "lost" all my photos of him. I'll try to scan some of the better photos of him from that old 1998 road trip photo album.

My summer thus far

It has been a while and a lot has happened:

• Went to Newfoundland to visit fellow blogger Wisewebwoman (see this post)
• Been busy around the homestead with yard work and so forth and so on (more detail here)
• Trying to plan a trip out west--nerve-wracking! stressful!--also described here 
• My (probably last) grandson was born yesterday.

Right now the last item is the biggest news for me, I am so excited but am having to contain myself because they (the parents) are out west and I am here and while some of my local friends are almost as excited as I am, many are like: oh how nice for you dear, and let me tell you about the horrible day I just had.

Are you kidding me?!? I'm over the moon and you want me to commiserate with your bad shopping experience?!? Sorry, sarcasm off. The one friend I could count on to be almost as excited as I am was out of town at a lovely family wedding. I left her a phone message, she responded as expected (gratifyingly) today. But yesterday was a little weird, being terribly happy and excited and not being able to talk about it.

My son asked me not to go on Facebook until they had a chance to make the official announcement, which they did a few hours later but I was then busy with my volunteer ushering job. It was for a play that quite frankly was boring as all get out. Two actors who sang and danced very well but the play itself was the problem. Polite clapping but no one gushing about the experience. I think the actors' talents were wasted. I was in the second day of an earache--I suspect brought on by stress--and I had spent the previous night awake with an 85-lb dog lying on top of me panting in my face due to an intense thunderstorm outside, so I was not in a mood for it.

I'm still in trip-planning mode and I still have a bunch of homework to get done before I can leave. I have lined up a house/dog sitter for the duration but I will worry about Hapi. It will be the longest time I have left her. The dog sitter comes recommended but I will still worry. I won't see the new grandchild for about 6 weeks and I wish I was there right now.

Also, this is kind of silly but what can I say: I just finished (yesterday) a 14-book series that I have been reading for several months now. I have become invested in the story characters and it's over; I feel a sense of loss. I am strongly tempted to start rereading the series but I am resisting. It was quite a time-consumer and I just can't afford that right now. But I miss them.

Weekend of theatre, film and music

I'm doing very little today, in compensation for an overly busy weekend. It was a good busy, but perhaps too much of a good thing.

I won a pair of tickets to see the National Theatre Live performance of Peter Pan, so a friend and I went to the pub for supper and a beer and on to the cinema to see it. Absolutely wonderful. The production was wonderfully done, it was totally enthralling in spite of the fact that they played games with the characterizations. Captain Hook is a woman, Nana the dog is a big black person (I think it was a man but it might have been a very big woman), Tinkerbell is a man, and all of the children are played by adults. The flying scenes were quite ingenious.

It poured rain all day Saturday. Sunday was going to be a nice day but I was going to be away all day so I spent most of Saturday running errands. One of my errands was to the garden centre at Kent Building Supplies, I took Hapi along in the car but had no intention of walking her in the downpour. However when the employee came to load my purchases into the car Hapi jumped out. I joked that this was going to be the extent of her walk today, the little bit of parking lot around my car. The fellow told me that actually, Kent is pet-friendly and I could have taken her indoors. It's a huge big box store and I think it would take me almost half an hour to walk all of the aisles, so next time I might just do that!

Saturday night I went back to the same cinema which also is used as a theatre and a music venue, to hear the band Hillsburn. They were very loud and energetic, I stuffed bits of tissue in my ears to dull the sound a bit. But they were fun to watch.

On Facebook a few days before I learned that a significant member of our community had died almost two weeks ago. She was 79 years old, she died of cancer I think. That I heard about it after her celebration of life was a little disappointing, that she died at all was even more disappointing. She was politically active, an artist, and just an all round good person. At a certain point in her life she worked as a counsellor at the local university student counselling centre. I was a single parent working on a degree there and having a tough time of it; I saw her at the counselling centre and she told me to come see her once a week and explain to her why I wanted to quit. If I gave her a good enough reason she would give me permission to do so. Apparently none of my reasons were good enough, I kept seeing her until I graduated. So she was personally important to me, she got me through that.

Anyway, I've had a hard time not thinking about that loss and I think I would have enjoyed Hillsburn a bit more if it wasn't occupying my mind.

Sunday was the busy busy day. Up early to walk Hapi then breakfast and a shower before driving to the neighbouring town to catch a ride with friends down to the other end of the valley to see the King's Shorts. The King's Theatre is in Annapolis Royal, a very picturesque little town near the mouth of the Annapolis River. Also the oldest permanent settlement in Canada (a bit of controversy there but I'm going with that position). Every year they hold a competition for 10-minute plays; writers from all over the world submit their scripts in the winter and a local committee selects eight to  show. Directors and actors are chosen and the eight plays are put on over the Father's Day weekend in June. Every year two or three of my writing group submit plays and every year at least one of them makes the short list of eight (this year there were 93 submissions altogether). So we all go down for lunch and the final performance before the winners are announced. There are a first and second prize with a little bit of money attached and a People's Choice selection as well (no money, just fame). So this year two of our members and the spouse of one of them were selected for the final show, and amazingly, they all won! We walked away with First, Second and People's Choice!

We were too big a group to descend on one small restaurant so we split up into smaller groups to eat at three different establishments. I went to the local pub which was very 'pubby' and had scallops and chips. I'd have had a beer but lack of sleep the night before made drinking alcohol in the afternoon seem risky. At the theatre each person is issued a poker chip for voting. At the end of the show there are eight large cans for dropping your poker chip into, then they count them up and announce the People's Choice. It is all done quite quickly, I think it was less than fifteen minutes from the end of the last play to the announcement of the winners. It was all great fun and even greater because we took all the prizes back to our end of the valley with us. Anyone can enter, there are a few restrictions on format, length and newness, but no restrictions on who can play. Maybe one day I'll try my hand but at the moment I feel like playwriting is a bit beyond me.

So after all that we drove back up the valley and I returned home briefly to feed Hapi and eat some cold leftover pizza before dashing out the door again to go to Sunday night movie, "Burn Your Maps". While waiting for the movie to start they announced on screen that another significant member of our community had just died, also 79 years old. He was a neighbour of mine, someone I've known a long time and who was instrumental in bringing movies to our town. I knew he wasn't in good health and also that he was just barely making ends meet. I was sad to hear he was gone.

In "Burn Your Maps" there's a scene where an elder wise person is talking to a young couple who are struggling with the death of an infant child. They say to him that they lost their child when it was only a few months old. He tells them that the child is not lost, it came and stayed briefly with them and then went away. He said it was not the child that was lost it was the grieving parents who were lost. I think that is a good way to look at it. The sadness I feel is about my loss, not the loss of the people who have gone away. I still feel it. My friend at the cinema stage-whispered to me, "Get used to it! We're at that age!"

Good bye Macha, good bye Bob.

Theatre off the grid: Rockbound

Theatre Off the Grid is the theatre company Two Planks and a Passion when they perform at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, because they perform outdoors without electric technology. This summer's performance is Rockbound, a musical drama based on the novel of the same name by Frank Parker Day. Rockbound the novel was written in 1928, and is set on a small island, Rockbound (East Ironbound Island), in Duren (Mahone) Bay on the south coast of Nova Scotia.

The stage was built by my neighbour Mike and it is quite impressive. In the story there are scenes set on the island itself (the main stage), a boat at sea (the boat around which the stage was built), and a small island lighthouse (a lantern on a platform on the left of the main stage).

Seating is in bleachers; you are issued a blanket at the Box Office to use as a cushion or a wrap in the cool evening air. Nancy invited me to go with her to a preview of the show (the official opening is on July 12), she said we should try to get seats on the top row of the bleachers because that is the only row with a back rest. Good point!

It was a lovely sunny evening with a breeze to keep the insects away, although sometimes the breeze also made it difficult to hear the actors. And the stage is oriented so that the setting sun was behind us, so the audience did not have to deal with glare, although I imagine it was a bit of a problem for the actors. The whole performance ended just before sunset, so we also got to watch the sunset afterwards. Gaspereau Vineyards served wine before the performance and during the intermission. How civilized!

It was a wonderful performance, the music was just great, the singing dramatic, the story quite intense. It is difficult to single out particular actors or scenes that stood out, they were all so great. Nancy and I got a kick out of the performance of one actor (Kyle Gillis) falling into the sea off the boat, it was slow motion and slightly comic.

The orchestra (Mark Adam, Chris Churchill, Sandy Moore) is in a small pit in the centre of the main stage. They played double bass, accordion, drums and xylophone(?). At one point, during a xylophone solo, a small songbird fluttered around the stage singing in response to the xylophone, only leaving when the xylophone player stopped and one of the actors started his lines in a loud voice. Quite cute!

The actors played several parts and also served as a chorus, sometimes in the orchestra pit, sometimes onstage, and sometimes in the "aisles" between the bleachers. Basically, the story is about a power struggle between Uriah Jung (Frank Moore) who essentially rules the island and his nephew Davy Jung (James Macdonald) who wants to claim what is rightfully his and make a life for himself on the island. Also a love story involving multiple triangles and dramatic confrontations. A lot going on, on that little island! Uriah's sister and Davy's aunt Anapest (Burgundy Code) stood out as a classic east coast matriarch standing up to all the menfolk for her rights and what she thinks is the right thing to do. Artfully played!

Wonderful show, can't recommend it enough, and if you're from away, you get a discount and your name entered into a draw for a prize. I gave my local address so did not qualify for either, but since it was a preview show, did get the preview discount.

Having mentioned a few of the actors' names, I should also say that the musical adaptation and direction was by Allen Cole, the choreography by Alexis Milligan, and the theatrical direction by Ken Schwarz. Other actors include Bridget Bezanson, Marty Burt, Amanda LeBlanc, Cliff Lejeune, Ryan Ragerson, Margot Sampson and Leete Stetson, all delivering wonderful performances and making their characters come alive for us.