My friends are trying to convince me to buy a house. I want a house, really I do. I just don’t want to live in the kind of house I can afford. Richard thinks I’d be better off buying a house than contributing to an RRSP – and he’s one of Canada’s leading experts on taxes and retirement income security programs. Fred and Sherrie think I should buy a fixer-upper duplex and fix it up and rent half of it and live in the other half. Never mind that I can barely hang a picture straight – they’re convinced I can renovate a house. Based on what? Based on the fact that THEY did it, so I could surely do it. My sister’s a real estate agent, so it goes without saying that she thinks I should buy a house.
I know I should buy a house, but there’s something about it that shakes me to the core.
The fact is, I was poor for a good portion of my life. I grew up in a poor single-parent household. Then I had a baby when I was quite young, and lived in poverty for years. I went back to school when my son was two years old so I could get us out of poverty (that was back when Ontario actually made it possible for single parents on welfare to go back to school….now it’s pretty much illegal). It took years, but eventually I emerged from poverty. I haven’t been poor since 1991. But you know what? Poverty leaves a permanent impression, a scar of sorts. People who lived through the Great Depression still save string, and people who spent most of their lives in poverty never feel safe from it. I feel like I climbed out of poverty but I’m only a step or two ahead of it. One bad decision, one stroke of bad luck, one wrong move, and the jaws of poverty will snatch me back where I belong. In my own mind, I will never be middle class – I will always be a poor person who happens to have some money right now.
And then there’s debt. I live a completely debt-free existence. Whatever I own, I own outright. I pay off my credit cards in full each month. (I never even HAD a credit card until I was in my 30s.) If I want something, I save up for it. If I can’t afford it, I don’t buy it. Every month I put away money for a down payment, and I contribute to an RRSP. I feel that buying a house would paint me into a corner. Not only would I owe thousands and thousands of dollars for the mortgage, but suddenly I would absolutely need expensive things I couldn’t afford: a new furnace, a new roof, things like that. Frankly, that scares me.
But anyway. I’m so ambivalent about this house thing. I’ve got an agent, I’ve been pre-approved for a mortgage, and I’m going to look at the first six places tomorrow – two fixer-uppers and four condos. But deep down I’m hoping none of them are suitable.
Yesterday I was out on the balcony with my son and his girlfriend, and we heard a deep booming voice say “Get out of my house. Now.”
We peered down to the sidewalk below and spotted a man walking by.
“No point looking for Joe,” the man continued, “He’s dead. He was murdered three weeks ago.”
There was a pause, and then he said “I saw her myself. I saw her physical body as it entered.”
Then he turned into the building next door.
I know that guy. He was one of the professional movers who moved me into this apartment in February. He and one of the other movers really liked my old place and decided to rent it. I spent two hours chatting with him while he assembled furniture in my new place. I got no sense at all that there was anything wrong with him. Just a friendly guy and a hard worker. He told me about his parents, his two marriages, his previous jobs.
A few weeks ago he knocked on my door and handed me a bottle of wine which he said was to thank me for helping him get the apartment.
But now he’s walking down the street talking to voices nobody else can hear. His voice even sounds different: louder, deeper, slower, clearer.
“I think he’s schizophrenic,” said Tara, “And I think schizophrenics are actually in another dimension.”
On the surface I didn’t give this theory much credence. Schizophrenic, maybe, but another dimension? Ha.
But over the course of the evening and this morning, it kept coming back to me. How do we KNOW the voices aren’t real? Maybe they’re real, but we just can’t hear them and he can. What if instead of him having a disability, maybe he’s got an EXTRA ability? Maybe it’s us who are lacking a sense, and maybe it’s him who is more finely tuned. Maybe there’s a parallel universe, or multiple parallel universes, and he’s got one foot in this one and one foot in the next one?
I don’t have a cellphone, but I love them. What I love is the snippets of private conversations that I hear while walking down the street. There’s just something fascinating about people having their private conversations in public.
Here are a few examples, all collected yesterday:
1. “So what are you saying, you just woke up this morning and decided you didn’t love me anymore?”
2. “The thing is, I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want him to turn to me in a year or so and say ‘I’ve changed my mind, you’re not what I want after all.’ Because then I’ll have invested two whole years of my life in him for nothing.”
3. “Look, you’re responsible for taking care of the kids. If you can’t find another babysitter, then I’m going by myself. If you want to come with me, find another babysitter. It’s not rocket science.”
Paddy Mitchell is Canada’s most famous and best-loved bank robber. He was the leader of the Stopwatch Gang, (in)famous for a string of well-planned and precisely executed bank robberies across Canada and the US in the 70s and 80s. They timed their robberies to maximize the take – while other bank robbers would net a few thousand dollars per robbery, Paddy and his gang were consistently pulling off heists in the hundreds of thousands. They never hurt anybody in any of their robberies. Equally impressive was their phenomenal ability to escape from prisons. Interestingly, everybody liked Paddy Mitchell – the police, the media, the public, everybody.
I’ve had a long-standing interest in Paddy Mitchell. I read all the books, including his own (This Bank Robber’s Life, written from Leavenworth Prison several years ago). I spent many hours in libraries, going through the microfiche files of the newspaper coverage. In university I wrote a paper about the atypical media coverage of Paddy Mitchell, and interviewed a couple of reporters who had covered him extensively. Last year I finally sent him a copy of that paper, and I’ve been corresponding with him in prison.
About a year ago, Paddy found a lump “coming through” his chest. He attempted to get medical attention in prison, but was told it was probably nothing. “I’m still waiting to go for surgery for that egg-size lump on my chest. I’m beginning to get a little perturbed. I’ve had this thing for about ten months and all I’ve got the medical staff to do is send me for a CAT Scan. No one seems to know where the results of that scan are. I think they’ve forgotten about me in the shuffle. And this “thing†keeps growing,” wrote Paddy in March 2006.
Finally, in April, Paddy had a chance encounter with a doctor who was visiting the prison on another matter. He pulled the doctor aside, yanked up his shirt, and showed him the lump. The doctor said it was probably a cancerous tumor and ordered tests immediately. It was lung cancer, and it had spread to his brain. Treatment has now begun, starting with brain surgery.
Paddy’s positive and optimistic about beating cancer. Good for him. But I’m MAD. It seems to me that if we lock someone up, we’re effectively denying them the right to meet their own basic needs – and so we must assume responsibility for meeting those basic needs. There is something gravely wrong with a system that does less than that.
So many people make such a big stinking deal out of the fact that inmates get so many ‘privileges’ like television. What about access to life-saving medical attention to a tumor growing out of your chest? Shouldn’t that be a right?
The Dave X Change Challenge entered its fifth month today, and as you can see, Dave continues to maintain a comfortable lead over Zoom & Co. We commiserated on Saturday about how slim the pickings have been lately for all of us. I expected a bonanza of loose change to emerge from the melting snow in March and April, but it never materialized. Dave says he had well over $60 by this time last year. But he encouraged me not to give up: all it takes is one stroke of luck, one moment of being in the right place at the right time, to cause a complete reversal of fortunes. You just never know when the fates are going to smile on you. You could be resting on a park bench when a hundred dollar bill comes floating by on a gentle breeze….
This was not one of my stellar weeks. I ended up making an appointment to have Sam, my dog, put down. This was towards the end of four days of diarrhea all over my apartment. It’s hard to be optimistic about your dog’s prospects when he no longer eats, can’t take his medication, is weak and deaf and arthritic, looks utterly miserable, can barely climb the stairs, is having anxiety attacks, and is pooping bloody diarrhea everywhere.
At the same time, things at work were such that I had no choice but to go to work and leave poor Sam alone at home. Every morning I would wake up to a miserable dog and an apartment full of messes. I’d clean it up as best I could, and go to work. Then I would come home to more of the same. I spent a lot of time trying out different carpet stain removers (if you can recommend one that truly works, I’ll be forever in your debt).
Finally I decided it was time to let him go. In addition to all the physical ailments, he was also suffering from the indignity of it all. Dogs have a strong sense of dignity…Sam was clearly feeling humiliated, even though I was trying to be matter-of-fact about the messes.
I called the vet’s office to make the appointment, got about two sentences into what I was trying to say, and burst into tears as soon as I said the word “euthanasia.” I hung up and tried again an hour later. I made the appointment for May 4th – about 10 days in the future. Dr. Pukay called me back the next morning, and I told him about the diarrhea – he said not to worry unless I noticed blood in it. I told him there was, and he suggested I move the appointment up a week. I said I’d consider it.
So once the appointment was made, I felt sad but fairly confident that it was the right thing to do. No sooner than I had reached that point of acceptance, Sam started to get better. He stopped pooping. He started eating. He started taking his medication. He wagged his tail. He greeted me at the door. He got that jaunty spring back in his step. He smiled at me.
So…I think I’m going to cancel the appointment for the 4th. But I’ll wait until the 3rd before I do that…
Here’s Sam, feeling better, with the seedlings that are now taking over my apartment.
I finally got around to starting my clapotis. I bought the yarn – Cherry Tree Hill Silk & Merino DK in the peacock colourway – from Sandra Singh way back in October. I cast on this past Tuesday, and completed the second section yesterday. Here’s where I’m at:
Immediately after taking these pictures, I attempted the first deliberately dropped stitch, which went reasonably well. Minutes later I had a crisis, in which about 10 stitches fell off the needle, and I somehow (I have no idea how) picked up the stitches in the completely wrong order AND I dropped the twisted stitch next to the intentionally dropped stitch. It was a mess. My biggest problem as a knitter is making mistakes worse when I try to fix them. Experience has taught me to put mistakes away immediately and take them to Penelope, my knitting guru. However, I was eager to keep knitting, so I decided to try to fix it myself. I think I sort of fixed it – at least I ended up with the right number of stitches in the right order. It’s not perfect though…some twisted stitches got untwisted, and some untwisted stitches got twisted. I can live with that.
I honestly don’t think this day could get much worse.
My dog is having anxiety attacks during the night again, after a drug-induced respite of a month or more. So I didn’t sleep well. Last weekend I started cooking for him, since he was apparently starving himself. I’ve been making him a nice tempting casserole of cooked turkey, rice, eggs, carrots, and garlic. He likes it. He eats it.
This morning I woke up to doggy diarrhea all over the living room and hallway carpets. Even as I was cleaning it up, he was producing more. I interrupted my cleaning efforts to get him outside, only to discover huge pools of it at the bottom of the stairs – and of course he walked through it on the way out. I took him to the park, and when we got back I tied him up outside so I could clean up the entranceway before he walked in it again.
After cleaning the mess as best I could (more work will need to be done), I didn’t feel like eating breakfast, nor did I have time. I headed off to work, saw all the neighbours’ recycling boxes, and realized I’d forgotten to put mine out. I went back, got my recycling box off the balcony, and started carrying it out, only to realize it was leaking all over my white shirt. So I had to go back in and change my clothes.
It started pouring rain as I was walking to work, and I didn’t bring my umbrella, so by the time I got here I was cold and wet and my hair looked goofy. It looks even goofier now that it has dried.
I am so not looking forward to whatever I’m going to find when I get back home tonight.
Somehow the topic of weather, below, turned to the subject of religion (see the comments). It reminded me of Angie. Angie was a sweet little blonde girl, and her dad and I lived together about a hundred years ago. Angie was about 10 at the time, which would make her about 110 now.
So Angie, who lived in a small Ottawa Valley town with her mom, came to visit for March Break. One evening she was sitting on the couch looking around, and she said “Sue, your place is really nice, but it’s missing one thing.”
“What’s it missing?”
“A cross, over the door,” she replied.
“Like a crucifix?”
“Yes,” said Angie, “You should have a crucifix over the door.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know exactly why,” she replied, “But you should. All Catholics have them.”
“Oh, I’m not Catholic,” I told her.
Angie looked stricken, scandalized, shocked.
“You’re PROTESTANT?” she asked in what appeared to be abject horror.
“No, no, I’m not Protestant,” I quickly reassured her.
“Then what are you?”
“I’m not really any religion,” I said.
Apparently this was even worse than being Protestant.
“But what church do you go to?”
“I don’t go to church,” I said.
“But what about God?” she asked.
“I don’t believe in God,” I said.
“You have to believe in God! Everybody believes in God!”
I was starting to feel I was traumatizing the poor child.
“Not everybody,” I said, “Lots of people don’t go to church or believe in God.”
“But…but you’re so nice!” she blurted out.
“Well, I believe in being nice,” I said.
It was weird being someone’s first atheist…or agnostic….or whatever I am.
I don’t have a cellphone, but I love them. What I love is the snippets of private conversations that I hear while walking down the street. There’s just something fascinating about people having their private conversations in public. 
Popular Posts