Early Morning Exercise

Canmore Section of Centennial Park on a grey misty morning

I absolutely know I have to exercise every day.

That doesn't mean I can make myself like it.

I try leaving the one hour walk to the late-afternoon or early evening part of the day, but I always know by then that I am too tired and there is a greater risk of a turned ankle going off of a curb or a flat-out trip on a loose rock.

That way, I talk myself out of walking at all

I bit the bullet and decided to take that first hour in the morning and get the exercise over with.

Not that the walk is not absolutely beautiful, going through Centennial Park where I can see the creek rippling by under the foot bridges or notice that the wild rose bushes are getting ready to bloom.

I decided that my ultimate goal will be to see if I can walk to Kelve's condo on McKnight Boulevard North East, so I try walking from my place down to 10th street and back, which is about 28 blocks ... as a starter.

Today he and I were trying to figure out if I can eventually do it, given he thinks the distance is about 10 kilometers and then he rolls his eyes to think I would attempt it.

Wanted: Volunteers to Remove Weeds

I took my camera along yesterday to get a shot of the crocuses that had taken me off the path  a few days ago for a closer look at their bearded leaves.

But yesterday, I saw this great sign: "City of Calgary ... looking for volunteers to remove weeds manually".

What an idea!

My first thought was to put a similar sign on the front yard of my own lawn, given I have been out there 6 to 8 hours a day for the last week, and barely see any improvement.

You know ... one of those times when the more work  you do, the worse things start to look.

At any rate, I am looking for volunteers ... for a healthier looking yard, in the case of my house.

Until that time comes when all looks right in my yard, I will continue to enjoy the walk in the park, especially the little clumps of crocuses that are everywhere.

a bed of crocuses in last year's yellowed prairie grasses

I have already piled some of the boarders into my car to take them over to see the little dots of purple that fleck the hillside.

I tell everyone that as a little prairie girl, I used to carry my mother's canning jars full of water so that I could stop and give them drinks on my way across the hills to the elementary school.

For some reason I didn't connect that fact with my mother's complaint in the fall of the year that many of her canning jars were missing.

Mmmm.

I must not have brought them back home.

 the "after the election blues"

Doral and I talked a little about blogging when he came over for supper on Sunday.

I told him that my critique of his blogging is that he does a lot of explanation around the art work in the D and D books of the early 1980's.

He said that his biggest mistake while blogging is that he sometimes gets political. He says he just can't help himself, but notices that when he does he has a few people, each time, sign off.

So, on my walk on the morning when I took the camera with me, I saw this sign and knew that at the very least, Doral would enjoy the picture.

I went a little closer to investigate.

Post election, someone disgruntled voter had removed, added and changed around some of the letters of Michelle Rempel's election sign, to give her a new title.

Having written that, I am not worried about anyone signing off of my blog -- given my readership is only one person whereas Doral said he has about 600 faithful readers.

...a tulip leaf holding some beads of water...

When I am back from my walk, I am warmed up enough to do early morning yard work.

But it is hard not to linger for a while and take a closer look at the tulip leaf that hangs onto the morning's dew before gathering my shovels, rakes and pick axes into my wheelbarrow and heading for the front yard.

Arta

My Happy 71st Birthday Party

Black Forest Birthday Cake

G

Go-To Chocolate Cake with Ganache and Blackberries

 My birthday and Mother's Day intersected this year, which gives double the pleasure and double the food since both events were celebrated in tandem.

The Black Forest Cake was for Mother's Day.

The Go-To Chocolate Cake was for my birthday.

Two cakes is too much dessert if they are paired with a big turkey dinner, which was the agenda for the Sunday meal.

Do you like the vase I bought you?

Richard and Miranda came over on the way to her moms for another event.

Kelve dropped by the for the day.

Mati, Mak and Amir come out of their rooms just at the appropriate times -- either to help ice a cake or to mash the potatoes or set the table.

I know you love jewellery

I told everyone cards only -- preferably home made.

Next year I am going to introduced the idea of recycled paper, so no one has to do much more than a 2 fold on a piece of foolscap -- not that I would have wanted to miss the greetings on this year's cards.

Doral's kids all brought me presents.

There were a few tears over Meighan's gift of a vase.

She dropped the first one she bought and so a second had to be purchased.

Four strings of gold beads for your birthday, Grandmother.

It is going to look beautiful full of daffodils, which are blooming in full splendor in my back yard.

Dalton wrote lyrics for a grandmother-rock-song

I told Doral, "no gifts", but he took the kids to the store and Ceilidh's eyes fell on these gold beads.

"No matter how much I tried to turn her to another isle to buy something else," Doral said, "she kept returning to these beads."

They are splendid.

I put them on my neck for the party -- all four strings.

As well, I intend to wear them to the second opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle this week-end.

I expect to see even more gold and silver on the shields and the Norse headgear than will be hanging on my neck.

My guests for the day came in two sets.  The first group of us went around the table, each telling something about their mothers.

Thomas told us all that Grandma Bessie had an eye for line and colour and though she had little in the way of art supplies, she took what she had at hand -- a few oils and the back of a  window blind, and used her talent.

Amir said that his mom believes "family is everything" and likes to hear from him on the phone  twice a week.  I told my boys that even though, I also believe that family is everything, I don't want that many phone calls from them.

Mati reminded us that that motherhood is everywhere around us -- in mother earth, in science and in our personal family lives.

Mak was orphaned when before he was ten years old, and now is wishing he knew more about his mother.  The last time he saw her, she was on her way to the hospital, but before leaving told his other brother's and sisters to let him watch T.V. as late as he wished.

I love memories like that. 

Who wouldn't want to have those be the last words their kids ever heard -- besides the words, I love you.

I had a lovely party.  Thank you for all for phone calls, emails, letters and gifts.

Arta

Lessons My Mother Taught Me by Catherine Jarvis

May 8, 2011

To mark this Mother's Day, I have decided to follow my mother's own example and write in 10 paragraphs or less, Lessons My Mother Taught Me. 

My mother taught me that you can never make too many treats.  There was always a Tupperware container on our counter filled with either cookies, cinnamon buns, butter horns or a loaf of fresh bread.  Although I think I only realized that homemade bread was a treat when I became an adult.  Somehow as a child, "store-bought" bread seemed decadent as it was the kind of bread you could easily peel the crust from and was endlessly soft so could be squished into a small compact ball.  Doesn't sound very appealing anymore.  There was also the cardboard trays of chocolates stored in the cool garage on homemade wooden racks.  I think the garage door should have fallen off it's hinges for the number of times the door was opened each day by children sneaking a few chocolates on their way to school, or running outside to get a bowl of ice cream for an evening snack.  If that wasn't enough in terms of treats for a lifetime, there was always the enormous silver bowl filled to overflowing with hot buttery popcorn that magically appeared on the table about 8 p.m. every evening. 

My mother taught me to use my best dishes everyday.  Don't save them for company and for heaven's sake, let the children use them.  Who are our best dishes for, if they aren't for us?  She knew that every meal was important.  Those momentary gatherings around meals were the cross-roads of life.  The endless coming and going of kids stopped for a moment when all gathered around the enormous arbourite covered table to feast.  Homemade pizza, spaghetti, soups, and the occasion dreaded parsnips or squash.  Lunch time meals of cinnamon buns eaten only using forks, while the sugary syrup stuck to the wooden cutting board that became a platter.  As we slid onto the old church pew converted into a corner bench, the world stopped for a moment and we were a family.  Although there weren't many fancy dishes in her cupboard when I was a child, the walk in pantry is now full to overflowing with holiday dishes, festive platters, colorful matching sets and crystal goblets.  Even now she still brings out the crystal goblets for lunch and lets event the youngest grandchild use the stem-wear. 

My mother taught me that learning should be fun, although I didn't realize she was teaching me this until I had children of my own.  One Saturday, she cajoled 5 teenagers into the car and took us downtown for a "art tour".  The "city's museum of corporate art", as outlined in the paper.  A free walking tour of important works of art hanging for all to see in the corporate towers of downtown Calgary.  An educational adventure.  An outing.  A chance to walk around the downtown with her kids and to explore.  Why she didn't pack it in after the first hour of complaining, I will never know. I can not remember a single piece of artwork we saw that day, but I do remember a "Mother-Theresa-patient" woman trying to teach her children the value of art.  I do remember a woman trying to educate and open the eyes of her children to the fascinating world around them.  I do remember a mother trying to make an adventure.  I still repentantly remember, the carefully chosen reward at the end of the tour.  Beautiful glazed donuts graciously given by a mother to undeserving teenagers who sheepishly and undeserving received them after a morning of ceaseless complaining. 

My mother taught me that there is always room at the table for another person.  No friend or visitor was ever turned away.  There was always room to squeeze just one more person onto the church pew bench, or another chair to be found in the sewing room.  No one ever left the house hungry.

My mother taught me that love is spelled TIME.  I can't count the number of hours my mother spent watching junior high and high school basketball games, volleyball matches, track events, or attending Kiwanis festivals and recitals.  In fact I think she put in at least a 40 hour week attending the various events of her 8 children.  I can quickly easily the number of things my mother missed.  ZERO.  I still don't know how she found the time. Often she was the only parent at these events.  I would listen for her voice cheering me on from the bleachers.  Some of my favourite times were the quiet moments after these events when she would take me for a slurpee, or stop by Sears to buy some candy from the candy counter.  The candy counter was a visual delight.  Each see-through container filled with a different and unusual treat.  Goodies, chocolates, pasties, smarties, liquorice allsorts, hard white mints, gum drops, etc.   I can still remember after one Kiwanis Festival Event her suggestion to try "chicken bones", a long thin pink candy filled with a chocolaty centre, and her buying me a small bag of the same to celebrate my win.

My mother taught me to record the small moments.  I remember her sitting at the old type writer punching the keys down hard to make the metal letters fly up and hit the ribbon.  I loved the sound it would make as her fingers would fly across the keys.  clip clap clunk clunk space clip clap clunk clunk clunk space clip DING and her hand would fly up to send the rod back to the beginning of the row ZZZZING!  Row after row of information about the events, activities, misdeeds, embarrassing and tender moments of her 8 precious children.   The carbon copy papers would be pulled from the roller and sent to the church for duplication.  Then pages would be collated, folded neatly and inserted inside envelopes to be sent to far flung relatives and friends.  These mundane events turned into stories to be told and retold.  A complete history of family life trapped on pages and captured so as not to be forgotten.   I watch as she continues to capture the life of her family, especially her grandchildren now on the electronic pages that have taken over cyberspace.  No more papers to fold or stamps to buy, but rich stories of adventure to be shared across the distances.  Although I can't say I have inherited this same prolific gift for capturing daily events, I am endlessly indebted to my mother for her efforts to record and remember these powerful small moments of life. 

These are some of the many lessons my mother taught me.  

May my life continue to be filled with such lessons.

Catherine
 

The Woods are lovely, dark and deep ...

For Mother's Day, Joaquim suggested some outdoor time. The sun was shining and we all dragged some old brush down to the burn pile, cleaning up the area around the "10 drum garden". Then we went to check out the "skunk cabbage reach". Arta told me she used to play Hansel and Gretel with Trell and Rebecca in that sacred grove by the stream. We even found some twigs wrapped around a long dead but still standing tree that are almost fossilized now. They are the remains of a fort Arta made with her first two children while doing pretend play of Fairy Tales. It will be fun to go play in this spot this summer, so all cousins of David, please come, even if just for an afternoon. We miss you.

Variations on "Lessons My Mother Taught Me"

My mother, Wyora, taught me that it is OK to give a child extraordinary freedom.  In fact, I didn’t know I had that freedom until the women in the writer’s group asked me how I got out to the movies so often when I was young.  I thought everyone in the world did their assigned housework on Saturday morning from 8 am to noon and then could go to the movies with the babysitting money they had earned for the week.  I didn’t have to tell where I was going or when I would be back. That is just the way things operated at our house.

My mother taught me that there are extra-ordinary treasures in doing unassigned house work.    I liked to make her bed in the morning.  I knew that sometimes under the pillow on her bed, there might be a partially eaten large Jersey Milk chocolate bar.   She worked on using intermittent rewards with me, never asking where the chocolate bar had gone.

My mother taught me that anyone can do the laundry.  The washing machine was downstairs – a wringer washer.  The only difficult part of doing was to pick the clothes out of the hot water with a stick, get the clothes close to the ringer, and then get the stick and my hand away before one or the other got into the ringer.  The clothes fell into the rinse water where I was to plunge them up and down again, swing the ringer around and squeeze the water out of them,  and then they were taken outside to hang on the clothes line.  I was taught to put thee diapers on, the last corner of each diaper being pinned to the first corner of the next diaper, thus saving on the number of wooden pins, since we didn’t really have enough to hang out all of the wash. I was thrilled when my mother brought home an apron to put around my waist, the pockets of which were large and bulky, and slanted on the sides so that I could get at the pins easier than when they were hanging in a bucket from the trolley of the clothesline wire.  She also taught me how to get good at holding the clothes pins in my mouth, the small end  facing my tonsils to that when I slipped one clothes pin out of my mouth and pinched it, it was ready to go on the clothes lines. Two clothes lines were strung across the yard – one from the basement to Mrs. Cockerton’s fence and one from the side porch door to Mrs. Cockerton’s fence.  We had long lines of washing.

My mother taught me to serve Sunday dinner on the dining room table and with the best dishes in the house.  Extra table leaves were added to the table for she also taught me that Sunday is the day to invite guests over for dinner.  The menu was standard at our house: a pot roast, seared before we left for church and then roasted in the oven until we returned home. She added vegetables and a salad and guests.

My mother taught me to make dessert a regular event.  I  thought everyone had pie for dessert on Sunday -- banana cream, or lemon meringue or apple pies in the fall.  Then the kind of desserts moved with the times and fads.  We had refrigerator desserts for a while – a frozen chocolate filling with graham wafers crumbs above and below, or a maple version of that dessert called Honeymoon Dessert  When Doral learned he could buy two and a half gallons of ice cream from the Palm Dairy outlet at a discounted price, our deep freeze could be opened and ice cream would always be there -- dessert every day of the week.  Sometimes there was already a spoon in the ice cream left there by last person dig out their evening snack. 

Wyora like maple walnut ice-cream, not a favourite of anyone else in the family.  When Doral would buy it, there would be a look pass between the two of them.  He would always say the same words to the groaning rest of us:  “This is your mother’s favourite.”   She would say, “Yes,” give a small apologetic smile to the rest of us who didn’t like that flavour ... and then his eyes would be filled with love and her eyes would dance as she would eat it.  Yes, my mother taught me, dessert is good.

(More to be written on the theme "Lessons My Mother Taught Me" for Mother’s Day 2012)

Arta

Lessons My Mother Taught Me by Francilia Greaves

Eric Jarvis mailed me a book he thought I would like:  Lessons My Mother Taught Me: A Celebration of Caribbean Motherhood, edited by Francilia Greaves.  The book is a collection of the stories of 36 people who tell what kinds of lessons their mother taught them.  As I was out walking yesterday morning, I was wondering what Eric would write if he had been the 37th person asked for a story and had to tell about his own mom.   The project is to tell in 10 paragraphs what one's mother has taught him or her.  Brevity is difficult under these circumstances.  And brevity would be especially difficult, given the quality of Eric's mother's parenting.  Then I wondered what I would write if I had been asked to write on that subject.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  By this morning,  I had forgotten about Eric and was wondering what I could write about Wyora, as I walked at 7 am along Centennial Park, idling half-watching the city workers taking the Kinsmen Christmas decorations from the golf course as I passed under fourteenth street.  “She was never that late taking down the holiday splendour,” I thought.

It took me the whole walk to come up with some simple ideas: she taught me how to share food; she taught me that everyone loves a friend; she taught me to love children.  I will see if I can flesh those a few of those ideas about Wyora out for tomorrow and put them on the blog.  I have had it on my mind for a few hours now and even I am going to be surprised at what I will write ... given how difficult it seems to me, to articulate a small essay like that.

Arta

Shopping with Miranda and Richard

Last night, Richard was putting brake shoes on his car and I was standing beside him, chatting, when he said, “Curses, Canadian Tire sold me the wrong package.  These are not going to fit.  Back I go for an exchange.”

“I will come along too,” I said, “since I need a cable to hook my printer up to my laptop.  I left mine in B.C. and so perhaps we can stop by Staples as well as Canadian Tire.”

We picked up Miranda and it wasn’t long before all of us were at the Customer Service Counter of the store. 

I always tell people that my brother Glen says, if they don’t sell it at Canadian Tire, you don’t need it.  However Richard was having trouble negotiating his deal – they wanted him to take the $70 new package, straight across for the $90 old package since he didn’t have his receipt.  He was trying to have them agree to give him the $20 difference when he brought the receipt in to them. 

Everything else I am going to type happened in the same 20 seconds.  I was standing back, watching the transaction, and standing close to Miranda was standing another customer who had spoken to me at length.

“Do you want me to get you a cart,” he said.

“No, I am fine.  I am just waiting for my son.”

“That is your son?  You should kick his butt,” he said.

“I did.  That is why he is such a fine man.”

“You are being recorded on video,” he went on.  By this time he was close enough that I could see that his mouthwash was serious alcohol and he was sweating profusely.   I moved a step away, giving him the view of my cold shoulder and I was watching Miranda and Richard finish at the till.

The man then moved to be beside Miranda and began to rub her buttocks.  She was quiet.  Then turned to him and said, “Keep your hands to yourself.”  At the same time, I was at the counter saying to the young clerk who had no patrons at his till, “You have to get rid of that man.  He is assaulting your customers.”

“Oh, I can’t do that.  I am just a clerk.  That is a job for the manager,” he said and he stood there stunned.

The three of us began moving toward the Exit door and I was leaning into Miranda’s shoulder saying, 

“Just what happened there, please?”

She said, “I don’t know exactly.  I felt someone rubbing my bottom, and I thought it might be Richard ... until I saw his both of his hands on the counter.”

“Is this something Richard does often in public?, I asked.

“No, never,” she went on. “That is why I was checking where his hands were.”  Then I thought for a split second it might be you,” she continued “trying to move me over and so that you could get in between Richard and me, but over my shoulder I could see you were directly behind me.  That is when I realized it was that guy next to me who had his hands on me.”

“Great job,” I said to Richard.  “You let Miranda take care of that without stepping in.”

“Well, you can say that if you want,” he replied, “but I was right out of the loop.  I had no idea what was going on until you guys just started talking about it as we were leaving the store.  I was intent on getting my $20 back.”

I said, “Well, as Glen says, if you can’t get it at Canadian Tire, you don’t need it, and in this case, there was extra involved in the transaction.  All hail Canadian Tire.”

Still shaking our heads, we wheeled over to Staples to get my USB chord.  “That will be $31.28,” said the clerk.  As I was peeling my money out of my wallet, Richard replied, “You have got to be kidding.  I can get a new printer for about $50."  On hearing that statement, I began to put my money back into my purse. I had no idea where I was going to go to find the cable I needed, but I could tell it wasn’t going to be there from the sound in Richard’s voice.

“We are off to Memory Express,” said Miranda.  She was right -- $6.23 for a similar chord.

All’s well that ends well.