On the Edge

It happened again and so I'm going to write about it. I forget who and where...which is a bit ironic...but someone recently said to me: I remember when you put that note up on your mother's wall...
   My mother suffered from a gentle dementia...she always knew the date....she always knew who was prime minister...she always claimed to be fifty which I found unfair...I said: No mother...I'm older than fifty so you can't be fifty...I'm your daughter.
    She would just laugh...
    It seemed so important to me...

    The one aspect of her dementia which caused her dismay was that she every now and then would look for her mother...granny...
     And so I put a note up on her wall...above the telephone...Granny is dead.
That was all she needed...
But when she had visitors, she would take the note down - it wasn't seeming...seemingly...
How astonishing the human mind is.

A friend told me of his mother who fretted about what had happened to her house. And so he took a lesson from me and put up a note: The house  is sold...
But he couldn't resist homage to the original: And granny is dead.

When he next went to visit his mother, he asked if the note worked.
His mother said: Oh yes...when I worry I just look at the note...and I remember that the house is sold...
My friend smiled but before he could on, his mother continued: But I didn't know granny was dead!

One year the income tax people came after my mother for not declaring that she was living with someone. I wasn't impressed. I had already found the culprit. I had found the registration paper for the Referendum. My mother had convinced the people who came around that she lived with my grandmother. They even had the date of my grandmother's birth...1883. That would have made my grandmother 113 at the time of the referendum...no one bothered to count.

I went to the government offices and the woman in charge peered at me over her computer as I gave her my grandmother's name...and sure enough, she had the grace to blush! They were trying to catch my mother out for harbouring a 113 year-old tenant.

Note: This picture? It's not an airplane...it's a dragonfly!!!

Yeah! The Ikea Catalogue has come! A picture book forever! My life is complete...save for this stolen photograph....I would have liked to have been there!

Ok here's what I really wanted to say. One has to be so careful of becoming the victim of criteria.  My friend's four-year-old son took up cooking. He and his mom made vegetable soup. After the obvious ingredients, she said to him: Now what?

And he replied: Worcester sauce!

And he was right...
And now whenever I make bland soup, I just add Worcester sauce.

I said to him in a pathetically condescending voice: Ah now you'll be able to cook for yourself and make a recipe book.

He looked at me, scrunched up his shoulders and said: I have to learn to read and write first!

I wasn't phased. Hey! you could make a picture cook book and draw the ingredients.

He smiled and left to watch his cartoons!



 I'm thinking about criteria...they were the answer to the empowerment of a student. If we told them the criteria, they would know what to do. They could self-edit...

The problem is that the criteria have become the be-all and the end-all. I wonder what criteria Joe Fafard used to create these wonderful sculptures. Did he have a list to check off or did he just create?

Wait...he learned and experimented and created...perhaps there were criteria to begin with but no criteria to end with.

We must facilitate their moment of glory...that is what  teaching is all about...I think.

We can’t all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as we go by.

Writing, in itself, is like the sound of one hand clapping - incomplete, silent, and without impact. Only when the writer as the one hand, and the reader as the other, confront each other is there that clap, that spark of communication which makes literature alive. Ming Fong Ho

I use this blog as a place keeper for the bits and pieces of my thinking...a sorter out.

I took part in a Bloomsday celebration in June...I keep calling it Bloomsberry...I was asked for a brief biography:

Pat does have some claim to a vein of Irish blood. However when she made good on that claim, she understood the advice of her four foot-five Irish grandmother who had sat in the corner of the living room for all of her growing up and had made sense of the world for her. “Stay in the background and push.”


She met a young man from her grandmother’s hometown of Castle Rock, Northern Ireland - near the Giant’s Causeway - and announced with pride that her great aunts were the postmistresses of said town carrying on a three-generation tradition.

His reply: Ah yes- those are the two elderly ladies who look into people’s windows with telescopes…we all know them!

Pat returned to Canada and became a teacher happily staying in the background and pushing.

This is the local book store cat...I'm just using it as a place keeper.

I don't think I've included this story before. It is yet another example of my pettiness! A friend sent it to me and all I could think was: I wish they would make a pair of red sandals in size eleven which the possibility of including my orthodics in them! Mind you, my friend and I have discussed the fact that I am short with long feet and she is tall with short feet and I have more chance of keeping my balance.

They were so pretty... bright red sandals. Strappy, with a soft red sole. They were perky and full of fun. They said, "come walk with us. It's very warm today and those black sneakers will be much too hot."


So the woman put them on and admired how small and neat they made her feet look. She smiled and set off on her morning mile hike. Afterwards she inspected the gardens and the greenery had grown during the night. The contrast with her pretty red sandals was very flattering.

And then, she went indoors.


She tried to remove the pretty red sandals. They stuck to her feet. She finally peeled one off and gratefully settled her bare foot on the cool hardwood floor. But...horrors! A blood red imprint of her foot appeared. On examination, the entire foot had been stained a deep,deep red.

Gingerly, she removed the other shoe. Bingo! Blood red foot. Walking precariously on the very back of her heels (which was the only place not red), she made her way to the tub.

Fifteen minutes of hard scrubbing with pumice stone and exfoliating salt and soap later, her feet were now only a pale pink version of their former selves. But the red dye swirled down the drain and stained the tub mat.

All that remained was to remove the bloody red evidence from the floor before the CSI team was called to investigate.....

The shoes went into the garbage. The woman went and retrieved her sneakers.

I have struggled all my life with only-child-pettiness. I thought I had conquered the concept of wanting everything I like to be mine. I haven't. A friend sent me this wonderful picture and all I could think was - That's not fair...two raccoons beat a sleeping squirrel  seen through the screen any day!

It's not my parents' fault. I know that but I would have been better able to face disappointment if I had had a sibling who demanded equal bragging rights!