9:45 a.m.

The phone rang yesterday morning as I sat here reading email. It was my sister Jill.

“Can you be at Grandma’s in half an hour?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “What for?”

“I want to go to the city for my fish and do a few other things. And you and I could go to the stained-glass place.”

“Hm. Well, I’ll wolf down some granola and throw on some clothes, and meet you at Grandma’s.”

I left a stickynote above the fridge-door handle for Farmbeau, and bolted. My uncle was sitting at the table when I walked into Grandma’s kitchen 20 minutes later.

After the usual hello-how-are-yous, I said “What do you think of Grandma getting that Life Call thing for 35 bucks a month? Think she can afford it?” He looks after Grandma’s banking.

“Oh sure,” he said. “Get it.”

“I don’t need that,” she insisted. “I only have so much every month, and last time I spent nearly all of it.”

Grandma owns her house and has no debt. Her property taxes are $700 a year. She weighs 91 pounds and eats like a bird. She doesn’t spend much money; she doesn’t travel, she doesn’t buy clothes.

“Grandma. You have money sitting in the bank. What are you ever going to spend that on? Do you think when you die any of your kids would rather have the $400 you’ll spend a year on Life Call, than the peace of mind of knowing that if you fall or have a stroke or anything, you can get help?”

“Well, I guess so,” she said.

Jill came in.

“What do you think of Grandma subscribing to Life Call?” I asked her.

“I think you should,” she said to our little granny. “You never know when you could fall and break a hip or something, and not be able to get to the phone.”

“Well then, we’ll see if all of you have it when you’re 86!” Grandma retorted.

“Grandma,” I said, “it’s not because you’re 86! Anyone who lives alone could use a service like this. At any age!”

Life Call provides a pendant you can wear around your neck or on your wrist. If something happens within 200 feet of your phone, and you can’t get to it, all you have to do is press a button on the pendant and an operator will come onto a speaker near your phone. He will verify that the button wasn’t pressed accidentally and find out what has happened; or if you cannot speak, the operator then goes down a list of contact phone numbers until someone is reached and can come over and check on you. That, or an ambulance is called.

One way or another, you are not left suffering or dying on your floor for hours or even a day before someone wonders why you don’t answer your phone, and takes the trouble to come and find you.

Jill and I got on the road.

“Even if she gets it,” Jill said, “ I bet she’ll never learn how to use it. You know why? Because it’s something new, and she refuses to try anything new. It doesn’t matter how simple it is, she won’t do it.”

In the city, we went first to the pet store and hauled in a TV cabinet without its guts. She wants to have an aquarium built into it. It wasn’t that heavy, just bulky, yet as I lifted my end of it through the shop door, I felt a crack lightning horizontally across the middle of my back. Oh oh. This was not a particularly heavy object. I should not have to worry about carrying things like this.

We hit a couple garage sales, and I found a bike for $20 -- a Spekine, “a good bike in its day,” the stained-glass guy commented later when he followed us out to the truck to have a look at it.

Jill took a stained-glass class this winter, and has offered to make me a piece. We spent almost two hours in the man’s shop, choosing a pattern and glass. What a lot of beautiful things you can do with stained glass. I have always wanted a substantial piece, and this one is going to be simple — Jill’s a novice, after all — but a good size -- about 16” square. Its intended destination is the porch window, whose ledge is now occupied by a row of my beeswax candles.

We drove home through rain, but arrived back in home country on dry roads, disappointed that it did not rain here even though grey clouds hung ominously in the sky all day.

I could smell pork chops when I opened the door to this house; Farmbeau had made supper, and I was starving. Don was still eating, while Farmbeau and Barney were downstairs watching TV. I put a cold pork chop and some cold macaroni on a plate and sat down to eat with Don. When I was finished, I went downstairs. Farmbeau said “The Sheikh’s coming over to use the computer. He wants to find something on the internet.”

Less than half an hour later, the Sheikh was here.

“Sit down in this chair,” I said, “and I’ll show you how it works.”

“Oh, I can’t do it!” he said. “No way!”

“You’ll have to. Sit down. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

“You don’t know me,” he badmouthed himself, “I’m useless.”

“Oh, smarten up,” I said somewhat impatiently. “Sit down. It’s the only way to learn.”

He stood looking fearfully at me.

“Sit down!” I said firmly.

Reluctantly, he sat. I showed him how the mouse works.

“Here, try it.”

He was afraid to. “You’ll have to help me.”

“I will,” I told him. “But the best way to learn is by doing. Look. Here’s how you go online. These are links. You just put the cursor on them, press the mouse, and the page you want will open up. Here’s how you go up and down the page. That’s all there is to it.”

“You don’t know me,” he said, sitting in the chair, giggling nervously. “I might wreck something.”

“Impossible. Here you go.” I walked away, into the kitchen to put away some dill, garlic powder and parsley I’d bought at a garage sale, bagged out of an old lady’s garden.

“I can’t!” he insisted. “Barney, can I bother you for a few minutes? Can you come and help me?”

Barney left his playstation game and came and showed the Sheikh the same things I had, and hesitantly he started scrolling and clicking. He sat there for 40 minutes, calling for help periodically, reading links aloud (he is interested in the Face on Mars thing) and remarking that he already knows this shit, it’s old hat to him, where is the picture he is looking for?

Finally he’d had enough and was ready to join Farmbeau and I downstairs to watch a few of CBC’s Friday night comedies and then the news. The National news had a good documentary about Canada’s participation in D-Day; it explained where Hitler’s troops were, where Allied troops were, and what strategies the two sides were using to fight the war. It showed actual footage, described what happened, and how the Canadian landing at Normandy changed the course of the war.

People always talk to me when I’m watching TV — Farmbeau is really bad for that, so that I miss something I was trying to hear — and I am not able to adjust my focus immediately either, so he feels ignored — it’s more like there is a noisy gnat buzzing around my head — an irritation — usually something that could wait, but he doesn’t understand that I am very interested in what I am listening to, or chances are I wouldn’t be doing it.

It’s not so bad when it is done during a video, where one can rewind and hear what was said if it was important to the plot. But when it’s a TV show, well, the conversation is lost for good.

I feel guilty when I put TV or radio before the people around me. It’s the same when I am reading; someone speaks to me and I literally do not hear them at first; my concentration on what’s already in front of me is too intense. It takes a few moments to make the adjustment, and sometimes making that adjustment is jarring.

The Sheikh left after the news was over at 11, and I woke Farmbeau, who was asleep next to me on the couch, so we could go to bed. I was beat. I’d asked him to bring home The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, but I was too tired to read much of it. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the library got the book in after I requested it, and thought good, now I will start asking for others that the library doesn’t have.

I have to be careful though. There are two large, hardcover Iris Murdoch books on my office shelf, due in a couple weeks and barely started. Since reading her husband John Bayley’s memoir of her, and a couple years later seeing the movie Iris, I was curious about her many, many novels and asked the librarian to get some in for me. But these have not grabbed my attention at all. They seem to take way too long to get into the meat of the story.

Reminds me of another book, a murder mystery I took along on the road to Saskatoon to read aloud while Farmbeau drove. I read the first eight chapters, and still no murder had taken place! Needless to say, eight chapters was more than enough investment to make without any return, and that book went back to the library without wasting any more of my time.

****************************************

At the fish store, Jill bought two blue dolpin fish for $35 apiece, and I almost stepped on a pigeon. The little fellow had been left for dead and was found by the petstore owner. Almost all its feathers had been plucked out by heartless, cruel kids. Now it made itself at home in the store, ruffling its new feathers at my feet and tilting its puffy self, bright-eyed, from side to side on skinny orange legs.

xoxo
etc