Dear Diary

Dear Diary:

I'm sure you're very bored with all this nonsense regarding my holdings of 7 acres and its numerous outbuildings, far too numerous to count, that is holding me and my future financial security hostage. I've practised much mindfulness and letting go and shifting importances. And it works, most of the time.

And that window thing? I started that again as we know D, that if the current permutation of this sale goes through I will have to supplement my sad pensions and OAS. So I restarted the window thing the other morning. I witness dawn every day. And right now it is magical as we know. No snow, glorious sun (casting climate change concerns away from me) so I threw out my arms as I used to do when 5 employees were depending on me for their livelihood and welcomed work, interesting work, a project, any non-physical work.

And lo and behold, D, there it was, a distant contact emailed me and asked if I was interested in cleaning up some theatre matters. A bit of a shambles on the books and with grant season coming up? Offered to pay me in advance too, the best kind of client. So yes, I'm started on that - it's all remote work too which is even better - and with many theatre companies in Newfoundland this could be a cottage industry, who knows. And D, did I mention comps? Free tickets for all performances.

So D tonight I'm walking along the gallery (to retrieve my (free) laundry) overlooking our gorgeous community room when the piano strains of The Parting Glass drifts upwards and I stop and lean over and start to sing the words, softly, and the pianist finishes and discussion ensued. My voice is sorta back after a long absence. She plays in a small band and was rehearsing. She's 80 I'd say. I mentioned I'd like to play, practice for a while, I played daily for my own pleasure for years but piano in absentia has been a hole since I moved to Newfoundland 14 years ago. So yes, I'm going to play again and, bonus D, I really liked her, I love seeing older-than-me folks thoroughly engaged with life.

Also I'm feeling better, don't know how this is. I still have 2 more tests to get by. But gift-horses and mouths come to mind D, so we'll just roll with that and play The Parting Glass, shall we?

My Vanishing History

Who validates one's personal history? As long as there are some co-conspirators in the world there is an affirmation of some kind. But suddenly whoof and they vanish. Even though you mightn't have seen them in years and years, there is a fresh hole in life's tapestry.

I worked for a man yonks (35+ years) ago. He was self-made and proud of it. Started out as a shipper and bought the company and then expanded it into a diversified multi-billion dollar enterprise, still ongoing and successful.

I learned a lot from him. We were roughly the same age, in our thirties at the time. Did a lot of drinking together. He was a fierce womanizer. But not with me. I could put on an "off limits" thing quite well and he wasn't the type to harass to get his jollies. More the opposite. Women would throw themselves at him as he was quite attractive. Movie stars even. He was involved in the entertainment business among many others. Many was the time after work we would have dinner together. I got to know him like a brother. He always wore a shirt with two pockets. In one was a list of his assets, in the other was a list of his liabilities and over dinner we'd talk about the financial statements and he'd make minute adjustments to these index cards. And I'd talk for him at meetings with our financiers as I didn't think it a good idea for him to extract these cards from his pockets and have the important bankers sneer at him. Later on of course he didn't give a damn what anyone thought.

He was the most intelligent person I've ever worked for even though he never, to my knowledge, cut a book open. A grade 10 education. His hobby was his business. He told me it came before anything else, family, love, relationships of any kind. And it did. He was driven. His friends (male) were all driven. At the time, being treated like a "friend" by him made me realize I was probably the only close female in his life he wasn't sleeping with. He would freely talk to me about his women and the problems he encountered when they found out about each other. Which was frequently.

He was generous to a fault and rarely got mad except when his business associates betrayed him.

I could write loads more, it would make you shake your head in disbelief as his life was truly stranger than fiction.

He died yesterday. Liver cancer. A multi-billionaire living in the safety of Nassau.

I dreamed of him last night which was odd, I hadn't thought about him in forever. We were having dinner in the lobby of some hotel and he was wearing Armani. And I was in jeans and a sweatshirt and we were talking intensely as we always did. About yachts. He owned quite a few.

An extraordinary man. An extraordinary life.

The Trials of Job....Part 3 of 3

See Part 1 Here
See Part 2 Here


Around ten o'clock that night Harry announced the floor show. Especially for Chairman, in pranced a woman in a very short school girl uniform who presented Chairman with first of all her breasts (on a tray) and then her behind. I looked around at everyone hooting and thigh-slapping. I glanced at Yvonne who was just as appalled as I was. Then Schoolgirl set up her music machine and proceeded to strip. Slowly. Down to her pasties and g-string. To uproarious laughter, Chairman pulled out his wallet and inserted dollar bills in any gap or orifice he found on her body.

I got up and quietly left. It was just before Christmas and I thought, I will call in sick. I will call in sick for as long as it takes. I will get a medical certificate. Maybe they'll fire me. Oh please let them fire me and give me severance. Please. And then I can get unemployment insurance while I look for a job, any other job.

Ten days later, I finally showed up at work only to have Harry call me into his office before I had taken off my coat. He regretted, etc., it wasn't working out at all, etc., I lacked the company spirit, blah-blah, they would give me severance in lieu, etc. I restrained my glee. Unseemly laughter and joy might remove the severance package. Still coated, I went into my office and prepared the papers and the cheque and had Harry sign them all but I could not contain myself in the parking lot. I danced in front of the Lincoln, I danced on the lawn and then fled the scene, jacking up the music on the car radio, screaming my release to the sky.

If there is a hell I've done my freshman, junior and senior years. Remember that, Mr. Jesus Jones. When it comes time, I mean.

The Trials of Job....Part 2 of 3

See Part 1 here.

To add to the fun, Harry was a firm believer in socializing. Golf days, bowling days, baseball days, barbeque days, picnics in public park days. This was a far, far worse nightmare than the office. And there was no choice on attendance as he was encouraging company spirit by (a) giving the day off and (b) paying us all. I remember at one baseball hoot where I wasn't chosen to go on either of the teams, sitting on a bleacher and thinking: “Sweet Mr. Jesus Jones, what effing planet have I landed on” amidst the squeals of delight and laughter all around me as the others ran around in their Briggs Blue uniforms. I got to the point where I thought I was the one at fault. Why the hell wasn't I a Stepford Munchkin like the rest of them?

I was saved from hare-kari by Yvonne who was the quality control supervisor in the plant and who also wasn't chosen for one of the fun-filled baseball game teams. She turned out to be Harry's sister-in-law (sister to his wife) and just about hated his guts as he did hers. I could see the grim set of his mouth when he saw us together. Yvonne was employed there because of her husband who was Harry's best friend and was the shipping manager.

When you're trapped like that, very much a square peg in a round hole, there's very little energy left over to seek another job. It's all about survival - there are kids and other responsibilities of the household. This one pay cheque away from disaster life does exist. I lived it. And I'm sure my ill-concealed misery and isolation did not endear me to anyone there, apart from Yvonne who was suffering equally. We were on the outside looking in on this surreal blue comraderie and non-stop jollity, Harry in the middle grinning benevolence on everyone but us, poking his staff on the shoulders from behind their office chairs to raucous laughter, telling off colour jokes involving animal sex et al to his appreciative audience who lapped it all up. I felt my face was set in a permanent lemony pruney construct. The nun amongst the rabble. I was absolutely wretched.

I stuck it out, made the best of it, sat for hours in the computer room (yeah, those were the days!) inserting those huge old floppy disks into behemoth machines, feeding room sized printers with enormous boxes of perforated paper with 4 layers of carbon, tapping those huge old keyboards, listening to the grinding and chugging of all the machinery around me, waiting for the weekly breakdowns of some essential component like the printer or the floppy drives or an outraged orange message on the tiny black screen of the (blue) monitor. Sitting with Harry in his office, reviewing all this vomitous output. Harry liked to highlight and annotate every line with a (blue) highlighter so he could revise and revise and revise his annual budgets every month (seriously!), all changes that I had to input over many hours and for a grand finale to this he would obsess about minescule government tax rebates which took me forever to complete in triplicate. On a typewriter.

It all came to a head for me at the Christmas Party held at a swanky hotel which involved dinner and dancing and a special floor show for the chairman from California who was our guest of honour. I sat with Yvonne and her husband. To this day I thank Yvonne. a very funny Yorkshire woman.

To be continued.

The Trials of Job....Part 1 of 3

I've written about some of my workplaces before but here is one from the other side of the fence, so to speak. There were a few of those too. Here's one:

In chatting with Daughter the other day, I was recalling a particularly appalling work position I took back in the day when I was in my late thirties. I was hired as controller/office manager in a small manufacturing plant I'll call “Briggs”. There were five in my department who reported to me. What struck me as odd from the beginning was that I was the tallest person in the office at 5' 8”. The president was a wee British man, and by wee I mean about 5' 3”. (Sorry, I'm of the age where metric for the most part is a challenge.) The two salesmen were equally short. And I noted I drove the smallest car. The president, Harry, drove a blue Lincoln Continental with a cushion on the driver's seat to keep his head above the steering wheel.

From my very first day there I sensed a resentment from my staff. They had adored my predecessor, Vivian, whom I had met during the transition. I had the impression that they firmly believed that Lucy, the accounts payable clerk, should have succeeded Vivian. Lucy ruled the roost now that Vivian was gone.

There were very strict rules in the office. Every pencil, note pad cover, pen, paper clip, stapler and coffee cup had to be in the colour favoured by the company, fondly called “Briggs Blue”. Even the office chairs, in-baskets, and out-baskets, teapots and water cooler. No other colour was allowed. Harry was adamant on this. Harry liked to stand behind us as we worked. He would come into my office and walk behind my chair and even when questioned as to what he wanted, he would just humph and say in his nasal cockney voice “Oh carry on, carry on, act loik I'm not 'ere.” It only took me a half a day to find this behaviour offputting - and I reported to the man!

Single mothers with a household to maintain can't be choosy when it comes to employment. I persisted in trying to turn this whole scene around. I was able to escape every day with the bank deposit for I had taken that task away from the credit manager, but not without a struggle. I added office supply shopping, purchase of bank drafts and letters of credit and mail pickups and drop-offs to my daily outing and then added my lunch hour. I could escape every day for two hours. Liberation! A brief reprieve!

I mentally prepared myself every morning when I got up for my "Blue Life with the Munchkins”. Mean-spirited, I know, but in this hostile atmosphere (and it was increasingly so) it was sometimes the only humourous thought that would get me through those workdays.

To be continued.

Do I hafta?

Daughter says the big mistake in getting up is in first heading into the interwebz. Screen-sucking as I call it. I don't have a device yet and am holding out. Having a device could completely destroy my life as I could take it to bed and play Lexulous until the cows come home. Or not. Because I wouldn't care, would I? But I have to agree with her, once in the claws of the interwebz it's might hard to smash those leg irons and emerge, battered, bruised and bedazzled.

I had these thoughts this morning as I fixed a lampshade that Ansa had inadvertently knocked off a window sill. I like a light in a window, don't you? Something welcoming about it. I was restitching it in a rather attractive earthy-heathery wool and my mind went to the piles of work in my office and the usual guilt set in.

Deferring gratification is the first sign of maturity, did you know that?

Well, I always knew it but to practise it? "Sin sceal eile" as my people have it. "That's another story altogether." Can't seem to master that skill set at all.

I'd rather play in my house or read my book or knit or write (like now) and feel the stress of mounting workpiles and do absolutely NOTHING about them.

I keep thinking life would be so simple if I dealt with the work first. Then it would be over and I could be free to play.

That's my father's voice. Not mine.

I answer back ' "Oh do I hafta??" "Oh please, just one more row, just one more chapter, just one more episode of 'Homeland'".

Blog Jam

There is so much I want to do right now but I am completely engulfed in the work that pays my bills. Nearly.

I think a combination of age and a desire to be doing OTHER STUFF is the major burden I'm working under. I tire easily and lengthily. I neglect self-care. My writing life is shoved to the side. I rarely get out and take art photos. I want to experiment with some photographic software. I briefly jot down some knitting designs. Oh to execute!

I was sending off - by mail, how quaint - one of my cards to a friend who has been diagnosed with a mass in her lung. She quit smoking too late. And get this - she was an emergency room nurse. I've known her an awfully long time. She was married lots before she outed herself, having surprised herself immensely by falling in love with a woman late in life. She had great movie and Scrabble parties. And you'd think that would be all there is to her, right? Well, no.

You see about twenty years ago she went off to Africa for two years. Her mission? Both to prevent and heal clitorectomies. How many of us can say that we made one small change in the world that would go on and on and on? Well, she did.

She did.

And do you know what she said to me, among lots of other positive stuff today on the phone?

"I'm ready to go if that is my next step. I've had a bloody marvellous life".

I felt immensely cheered after the phonecall. I was expecting tears and grief for I love this woman.

I looked around the scads of files, the mountains of paperwork.

I thought: one file at a time, duckie, one file at a time.

And be glad of it.

Appearances do not Match Opinions

"Oh," sez I to my guests, "You'll have to excuse the weeds all over the lawn, Leo did a really patchy job on mowing."

"Gee," sez I on the morning of the following day, "Leo is going from bad to worse here, I've never seen such a shabby job as on this lawn".

"Good gawd," sez I apologetically that afternoon coming back from a trip, surveying all the wood stacked by the barn,"You'd think Leo would get cracking on all those weeds rather than cutting wood we won't need in the summer."

Today, Leo walks in. My guests are all gone now. I had come home last night to a ready-to-be-lit fire. (It's freezing here.) Thought at the time: Oh here he goes sucking up to me for the sloppy lawn job.

"I didn't like to come in when you had all those people in and out," sez Leo. "You need gas and mix for the mower and the whipper snipper, but I managed to borrow a mower to get some of it done. And by the way I got that old concrete basket ball base out of the dirt on the driveway which you kept hitting with your tires. Took me most of the day while you were away in town but it's gone now. I borrowed a special crowbar for that and kept hammering away. Can we go and get gas and mix tomorrow?"

*Skulk* *Blush*

Health & Safety Meeting

I was over visiting at Stan's place when a memory I had submerged was triggered by his wonderfully humourous post on the nature of mergers and corporate madness.

And I am delighted to report that I started laughing at this memory until I wept. I can see all the characters so clearly still and the pompous pricks around the boardroom table and the one truth speaker being ignored.

I was the controller at a plant that made incredibly boring parts for roadways. The parts that held the concrete in place. The underpinnings if you will. I just wiped out my more specific terminology for such items as I realized this might breach some privacy concerns.

In the eighties, Toronto was busy with its suburban sprawl, so busy, that our plant was working three shifts a day to keep all that gear flowing out the door to meet the demands of sixteen lane highways being constructed.

Of huge concern to the self-important Health and Safety Committee at the plant were the frequent small fires breaking out on one of the production lines. They called many meetings to address the situation and had experts in to examine the production line in detail and to micro-manage the workers as they went about their duties, with no solution.

One of these workers was Seamus from Achill Island and Seamus and I had become friends and spoke to each other "As Gaeilge" ("In Irish") as he was a native Irish speaker and I had a lot to learn from such a man.

On the fifth such Health and Safety Meeting, they called in the line superintendent himself, my pal Seamus. The door of the boardroom was left open and as I had the office next door to it I was privy to what went on at the Seamus portion of the meeting.

C(ommittee)"All these fires, Seamus, maybe you can, ha-ha, throw some light on the subject?"

S(eamus)"Well, I brought up many times how the buckets the laminate is decanted into need to be replaced?"

C: "Seamus, this is no time to be bringing up that petty grievance, we will pay attention to the buckets when this crisis is behind us."

S: "But it's very important and I can tell you why......"

C: (patronizing, impatient)"Seamus, Seamus. The health and safety of the plant and its people is the utmost priority at the moment, please leave the matter of the buckets with the plant shift supervisor where it belongs."

S: "But..."

C (huge sigh): "That is all Seamus. Please remember in future that these meetings are no place for your petty grievances. That.Is.All. Go back to work."

S (passing my office, sticking his head in and winking and saying loudly, in Irish, to me: "They can all kiss my arse so. The aul bloody buckets are full of pinholes and they're leaking bloody plastic on to the burners and catching fire. They need to repair or replace the buckets!"

He was right. It took another two meetings and more experts to determine this, of course.

He was never given credit for his diagnostics.

Blog Jam

Picture is of a spot in Costa Rica in 2006 where the clattery bus broke down and disgorged us into a concrete bunker and I found this around the corner.

Up to my neck in real work, the work that pays the bills as it is tax season in Canada and even though I've substantially cut back on my client base to create room for more creative endeavours, there are still quite a few clients kicking around -keeping me stoked up on coffee and four hours sleep a night and absolutely no blog readings, dying to get at you, my favourite bloggers and catch the latest.

Though I have to admit, sometimes, it is just grand to get a full four course dinner of my favourites when I catch up after being backed up like this.

I'm a little stressed too as I committed to 30 pages a week of the Great Newfoundland Novel (this is a different project than the Newfoundland Short Story Collection) so all in all far too busy. But grateful too as I watch the man across the road do his dash and run details ten times a day and just about iron his driveway.

I'm moving on soon, leaving here for Newfoundland on April 29th. Catching the ferry on May 3rd from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port Aux Basques, Newfoundland.

Lots to get done before then, friends to see, taxes to complete, novel to review, and most of all family to be with.



Here are four random blogger awards, a tiny sampling from my lovely list:

Nick
Orla
Twilight
Verna

You all never fail to enlighten, inform and delight me!