I love this place . . .

"Cold enough for ya, Tina?"


The blonde waitress in her forties, not new at her vocation, has heard this a million and three times yet she cheerily replies, "I know! That wind is just bitter! You having coffee tonight, hon?"
She is speaking to the man of the couple who have just shuffled in, the woman larger and bulkier using a cane as she navigates the tight space in the tiny restaurant, her leg bandaged and swollen from diabetic complications she tells the waitress.


Julie points out that the man is wearing wool pants that look to be about a 1940s vintage and I surmise that with long johns underneath they are likely to give as much warmth as some of our modern outdoors fabrics. He removes his cap and the two of them don't even glance at the menu. They know it by heart. It's Saturday night and the special is -- you guessed it -- baked beans, brown bread and fishcakes. She wants that; he wants clams and chips.


We are probably the youngest people in the little place when we arrive, and it was no doubt packed by five o'clock when the seniors seem to prefer dinner. There is a sea of silver hair, mostly couples, enjoying the delicious fare that Vicki's is known for -- deep golden fried fish and hand-cut Yukon Gold french fries. Each little booth and table, well-worn from being scrubbed clean between customers, holds a squirt bottle of Heinz ketchup, salt and pepper, sugar packets, and napkin dispenser and two types of vinegar, white and malt, the latter much favoured by fish 'n chips afficionados.


I catch the cook's eye in the little pass-through window between the kitchen and the eating areas. He's a sandy-haired man in his thirties who with a nod and a grin shows no sign of the weariness  and boredom of many short-order cooks. The other waitress, Sally, shouts "Order up!" so that her voice can be heard above the bubbling oil and sizzling burgers on the grill. I muse, who'd eat a burger in a seafood restaurant? Give me the ocean harvest any day.


We know what we want as well. It's been almost a year since we've been to Vicki's and our mouths are watering for it. We will split the  enormous seafood platter and have some onion rings. We order tea and water and watch and listen to the hum of the Saturday night clientele's voices, catching tidbits of their lives.


"Insurance fella told me, he says, not to set foot on your own roof to shovel snow and ice off. No, sir. You do that and you're as good as throwin' your policy away. If you damage your shingles or hurt yourself, they won't pay! You hire yourself one of them fellas who does it for a livin', he messes up, and you're good to go."


" . . . no, dear, you had pie for lunch. You don't need pie on top of a three piece fish and chips . . ."


"ORDER UP!"


Our food arrives and she brings the extra plate so we can divvy up the delectable platter of haddock, scallops, shrimp, clams, french fries, every morsel hot, crisp and golden. There's tartar sauce and cole slaw made on site and a tangy horseradish cocktail sauce for the shrimp. The onion rings are perfect circles of savoury crunch -- aah! We begin in earnest, but soon find that, even divided, this is a lot of food, and we slow to a halt with bits left. Just room for tea, although we see the servers passing  by with coconut cream and banana chocolate pie. Who honestly eats an entire seafood platter all on their own?


"Yours is on the house," Sally says to a white-haired gent sitting in the booth near us with his wife. He's pleased as punch as she and Tina begin . . . Happy Birthday to youu . . . . then, it happens. Voices from every table in the place chime in and we are all singing to . . . Happy Birthday, dear Bu-ud . . . and a rousing final line from everyone in the whole restaurant.


I just don't think that happens in big cities.

I want a new dress.

"Tell me the truth. Unvarnished, not sugar-coated. Can I wear this?"
That's what I say when what I mean is, "Does it make me look like: a. I have no ass, b. I'm a sphere with two sticks stuck in it for legs, or c. I'm five months pregnant?"


As a woman I want to look good. Not just presentable, good. I don't call it vanity really, but that may be just a rationalization as vanity has not historically been seen as a virtue, right Narcissus? Oh, all right. I take pride in my appearance and come by it honestly. My late mother role-modeled this in her care of herself, and of me as her only daughter. 


Does this mean that I won't be seen in anything but designer labels? Ha. Hardly. The pieces I do have, I didn't pay full price for, that you can depend on! Long have I extolled the virtues of Winners, TJ Maxx and shopping from catalogues and online. In my working days, when it seems I had need of more varied attire, finds from great labels like Ann Taylor, Jones New York and the like could be unearthed on a good rainy day dig at Frenchy's. (Did I tell you about the time I got a perfect London Fog trench and found a glorious pure silk Liberty scarf wadded up in the pocket? Bonus.)
In my closet is a mishmash of all sorts of apparel.


Still, things have to fit. They have to hang properly. And look good.


I am both cursed and blessed in having inherited my mother's body type. And the gene pool goes back several generations I can tell from looking at photographs of my great grandmother Mary Josephine Lawrence. We have large rib cages, full breasts, no actual waistline per se, narrow hips, and not fleshy posteriors. Our arms are average and our legs, slim and shapely, toned and tight.

I am an apple as opposed to a pear who carries her weight more in the hips, behind and thighs.


Ay, there's the rub. Women's clothing, and dresses in particular, seems to be designed in only two ways –– for the hourglass figure, with a defined bust, waist and hips, or for the slender boyish figure with none of the above. Big deal, you say. How often do you wear dresses, Cate? Rarely, but I'd wear them much more if I knew what looked good on me. 


Saleswomen lie, acquaintances are wishy-washy ("Well, maybe without the belt"), and friends don't want to hurt your feelings, but tact can come out sounding a lot like condescension. My wife, God love her, will be truthful, and I love her for it. ("Too poufy. Not long enough. Pulls across your boobs.")


I want a new dress to wear out to dinner when we're in Mexico next month. Anyone want to come shopping?

Say it like you mean it.

You've all seen my bracelet. You know with what pride and commitment I wear it. I love it when someone takes hold of my wrist to admire what they suppose is just a silver bangle and then I tell them to take a closer look. Usually it takes them a few moments as they first squint, then blink, then look at me as if to say does it say what I think it says? Yes, it does.

Fuck cancer.

And this morning, I have yet another person to wear it for. I silently touch the cool metal and say her name in my heart. An ocean away she is having a mastectomy today to remove her left breast and, may it please the universe, every trace of malignancy. Please.

The list of names of family members and friends who have or had cancer keeps growing. Some have remarkable success stories to revel in, but they are too few. And so, I donate in their cherished memories to The Canadian Cancer Society, I participate and fundraise for the CIBC Run for the Cure, I support Movember to raise awareness of prostate cancer, and have my mammogram and check ups faithfully. 

There's a public service announcement airing on TV from a website called www.getscreenednovascotia.ca with a little mocking voice emanating from a tiny, moving dot on the screen saying You can't find me in that sing-songy way that kids sometimes do. This is in an effort to get Nova Scotians to get screened regularly for cancers in the breast, colon, and cervix for which early detection most often means survival. But how many actually do?

So many forms of cancer are just too silent, so that by the time the person is symptomatic and goes to see a doctor, the tumours are already well-established and there are often metastases elsewhere. Ovarian cancer is just such a ‘silent killer’; it took my beloved mother in her sixty-eighth year. And it was only a blood test that showed a slight rise in his PSA level that gave my brother the impetus to get biopsied. Mark had surgery in October just before his fifty-fifth birthday and is, mercifully, cancer-free today.

In 1988, Julie lost her mother at age 54 to bone cancer that had spread from her breast. Her father lived with prostate cancer for over twenty years although he died from other causes. She has shaved her head and held fundraising events at her workplace for the Run for the Cure for several years. 

Cancer makes me so angry. It spares no one. Age doesn’t matter. Babies and children get sick and are put through excruciating treatments in hopes of gaining more years in which to live healthy lives. How do pediatric oncologists do it? I wonder.

Meanwhile, I wear my bracelet every single day. FUCK CANCER.

And I say out loud so many names: Alice. Anne. Louise. Yvonne. Garnie. Lois. Marj. Paul. Marie. Isaac. Amanda. Elias. Kate. Dale. Marion. Sharon. Mark. Kimberley. Ivan. Alexander. Mrs. O’Brien. Millie. Laura. Gwen. Dorothy. Ben. Ena. Jane. . . . and Mary Lynn.

Fuck cancer.

Never fails, does it?

It's Friday, a weekend, or better yet, a holiday. It's as if my immune system says, no way she can get in to see her family doctor now, and emerg will be a nightmare. No triage nurse in his right mind will let her be seen before Massive Head Wound Harry who got beaten over the head with a beer bottle outside The Stone Room Lounge in broad daylight. Better yet, I'm in Halifax at my son's apartment this time.


It's a stealth attack every time. There's no sense of impending doom, mild scratch or tickle. I awake, blink my eyes a few times, and try to swallow. Operative word: try. I cannot produce the necessary motion without a groan and not only does this hurt, it feels like there is no opening in my throat anymore. It's as if the pharyngeal tissues were two loaves of bread dough that have risen and overflowed the pans and now touch! This is not good.


I say to Quin in his sleeping bag in the living room (he always does the gentlemanly thing and gives me his room), "My throat is so swollen." 
"Take a drink, Mom," he says. "Have an Advil, too."


Water helps things a tiny bit and at least encourages the saliva to start up and assist. I'm not dying or anything remotely like that, yet my first thought is to immediately default in my brain past tonsillitis (yes, I still have them at 57), past pharyngitis, laryngitis and other -itises, directly to strep throat. I've only been treated once in my entire life for strep throat, but I could swear, this is exactly how I felt with it.

But it's Friday. I'm driving back to the valley now. How am I going to get it looked at, or get a swab done to be cultured on a weekend?
Feeling defeated before I even try, I drink my Venti Starbucks as I drive and realize that I also have a runny nose, headache and sensitive eyes. Good thing I have sunglasses as the sun on all the snow along the 101 hurts to look at.


I am a terrible patient. I self-diagnose and believe the voice in my head that insists that I must have a streptococcal infection. Then I remember that I might have a refill left from the erythromycin I was prescribed last spring for a sinus infection. I pull into the driveway and am phoning the pharmacy in minutes.

"Yes, Cate; there are two refills on that. Fill it? Great. When will you want to pick it up?"


I go upstairs with some herbal tea and lie down on the bed, two Springer spaniels' soft brown eyes regarding me with sympathy. I'm just nodding off when my brother Mark calls, and I explain my state.


"Don't start that stuff, you don't know what you've got!" 
I love this man, and he is a vet, but I swear I can feel those little strep bacteria multiplying. "Don't self-medicate."


My friend Todd calls later. 
"Call your doctor."
He's American. I explain that at four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, my doctor's office isn't even taking calls. And that I really don't feel sick enough to go sit at outpatients with all the really sick people.


By this time, Julie is home with the meds which I leave in their bag on the counter. I pick at my dinner. She watches me and says, "I don't think you should take anything until you get your throat looked at and swabbed."


So now it's Saturday and I feel like hell, although writing this has kept my mind off how sore my muscles are. And the erythromycin? No, I didn't take it. Probably wouldn't be smart.


I'll make do with ibuprofen, soup and tea. Argh.

Clothes don't make the (wo)man . . .

I opened my eyes following a little power snooze during Dr. Oz today and was startled into laughter by my own attire. Yes, I laughed out loud. Bear in mind that this show airs between one and two on weekday afternoons and that most civilized folk are fully dressed at this hour in clothing they wouldn’t mind being seen in by all and sundry. Now understand that I am a happily retired woman over 55 whose spouse is at work and who occasionally chooses to remain in comfy clothes until Julie returns at 5:45 p.m.

What if someone comes to the door you ask? I hide. Yes, hide. I keep all the doors locked anyway. I pretend not to be here. The dogs will bark obligingly, but I will not come to the door.

Comfy clothes sometimes means not very many clothes. (Fake blush.) Hey! It’s my home, my fortress, my domain. On major cleaning days it makes little sense for me to get up, get dressed, get myself and clothes all dirty, then shower and change. So I do housework in my nightgown. Or less.

Okay, okay. Mostly I do this on the second floor only where there are no windows without shades or curtains. Relax. The cats and dogs don’t care, so why should you? For the first floor tasks, I will don a t-shirt and yoga pants. And sometimes I’ll even coordinate them if I know the UPS man is coming or I’ve called for someone to come fix the front door lever assembly.

Many days, however, when no such interruptions are expected, I grab what’s closest with little or no regard for anything except its warmth and coverage value. And that’s what cracked me up when I opened my eyes from my little nap earlier. I was wearing my grey t-shirt with the screen-printed aqua, red, lime green, coral, black and yellow Travel Tarts in Mexico logo; a pair of fuzzy fleece pj pants in a lovely pea-green and black check with little dogs all over, and my eggplant-hued slippers. As if that were not a sufficiently rude assault on the eyes, I was wrapped in my silky faux-leopard throw. I looked like Frenchy’s had mated with Animal Kingdom.

People who know me well don’t drop by unannounced. They know better. You can try it, but I won’t answer. I’ll be upstairs laughing at my get-up.

How did they manage?

I am sitting here listening to the soft hum of the dryer going downstairs in the laundry room and recalling a conversation with my dear aunt Freda and cousin Lynda on Monday of this week. We've decided how important it is for us to get together more to record the bits of our family history before no one is here to tell how it was in her coming of age days. Sadly, my own mother, the eldest of three girls, died in 1999 at age 67, and the youngest, Lois died in the summer of 2008 at age 72. With them went parts of the story except for what we remembered, sometimes accurately and  sometimes vaguely, depending on how interesting it seemed to the listener.


In my thirties, I was keen to take notes from my grandparents' tales of their own childhoods and teen years, growing up in Hants County from births in 1910, and 1911. Through the years of WWI, the twenties, marriage in 1930 and onward. How happy I am that I wrote down as much as I did. Nothing gives a stronger sense of how historical bias and revisionism happens then trying to piece together the whys and hows of your own family story.


Back to Monday, however.  Over tea and cake with lemon filling, Freda shared with us some notes she had begun writing of her earliest memories of life in Morden, then moving down into the valley to Aylesford when her father went to sea in the merchant navy in 1940. Even before her husband went away on ships, our grandmother as a young wife had to be resourceful and was absolutely insistent, no matter how little they had, that her family be comfortable and presentable. Much emphasis, then, was placed on having clean laundry.

Hauling well water to be heated if there was no indoor pump was normal for her. The washtub and scrub board with homemade lye soap and later Sunlight occupied many of her days, as grandfather's clothes from the sawmill or cranberry bog got very dirty. How hard this must have been on the hands of countless women who toiled and scrubbed their family's laundry clean! Not just shirts and pants, but sheets and quilts and heavy outer clothing. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.


No wonder my aunt's face lit up when she told of the luxury of them owning a machine when they moved down the mountain! I actually remember this behemoth which stood in Nana's kitchen corner, silent and hulking, until laundry day. It was electric with mysterious levers and rollers and on "the day" we were cautioned to keep fingers away and be scarce.

On fine breezy days, baskets of wet things were taken out the back door and hung to flap dry on crisscrossed clotheslines all over the back yard. All I could see sometimes were my grandmother's feet several rows over as she hung piece after piece up with wooden pins. In winter or on rainy days there was an apparatus in the kitchen which could be lowered to hang clothes on, then raised by a pulley-system to dry over the woodstove's heat.

Gaaaah! So much lugging and scrubbing, and wringing, draining, rinsing, wringing. And I haven't even mentioned the ironing.


I count myself so lucky to have been born in the fifties and to have had the true ease of automatic laundry appliances all of my life. Still, there is something so comforting about the smell of clothing dried on a line in fresh valley air that nothing can replace.


Thank you Great-Gram, Nana, and all my foremothers. I don't know how you did it.

Be prepared

People, people. Do you suddenly forget everything you know about about cooking when there is snow in the forecast? Why does the mention of the white stuff in amounts over twenty centimetres send otherwise sensible folks to the supermarket in droves for bread and milk? Why those two items? What cataclysmic force will make you forget all the other good things in your cupboards and refrigerators in favour of a loaf of sliced bread and a two litre carton of Farmers finest one percent? What about the lure of fresh vegetables, diced and sliced for a crunchy stir-fry? Are thoughts of a slow-simmered lamb curry obliterated by the cascading white flakes outside the window?


It is unlikely here in Nova Scotia that a blizzard will interrupt our normal routines for longer than a day or so.  Our towns are well-equipped with snow plows and removal equipment, and we are not novices when it comes to digging or snow blowing ourselves out of the drifts in our driveways. "Snow events", as the TV and radio meteorologists like to call these storms, are nothing more than what we're used to living where we live. A good nor'easter or two is a fact of life in winter.


And yes, sometimes when the snow is heavy and wet, or the wind is wild, we do lose power. But what sensible Canadian doesn't have a propane barbecue or Coleman stove? Many have wood stoves for their primary or secondary heat source; it's not as if we have to subsist on cold sandwiches. But always at the stores, it's the bread and milk shelves that are emptied first. 


Milk, I can understand somewhat. There are things you need milk for, especially if you have kids who will eat cereal without hesitation but look suspicious when you offer them chicken soup that you made from scratch and cooked on your woodstove. You need milk to make (acckkk!) Kraft Dinner. 


But milk and bread? Come on, what are you thinking? Bread pudding? French toast? A poultice to draw an ingrown toenail? Are you planning to mix the two and use it to caulk cracks around that old window?


Sheesh.