Usual lamentations

originally written three years ago.

Paintings by Munch. Sometimes I (Ric) get so depressed. I feel I am drowning in a black pool of murky slime. Luckily my mood changes again. Either I am crazy or I am sane and everyone else is crazy. Whisky helps though. "Whisky when a man is well makes him sick. Whisky makes a man well when he is sick." Bet you can't say that without looking at the page. You have to end with "sick" both times. My father told a joke, a little rhyme: "As I was walking down the street, I saw a man with several feet and each foot had twenty toes. He used them all to pick his nose."

A favorite conundrum of my dad and his siblings was "A man was looking at a photograph and said "Brothers and sisters have I none, but this man's father is my father's son." What is the relationship between the man and who he was looking at?"

Another one was "Two Americans in uniform were walking across the Harbour Bridge during the Second World War. One was the father of the other one's son. What relationship were they to one another?" (That seems easy now, because attitudes have changed.) A family math question every kid was asked was "What's twice the half of 2 and a half?" and then to rattle the questioned one "Come on now. Don't be all day with the answer."

I, like other members of the family, was sent to the tool box to get a left-handed hammer.

I live in an area of Vancouver known as Little Mountain, adjacent to Queen Elizabeth Park and a golf course. The grounds are park-like and well tended. The stairs and grounds are cleaned as is the free laundry room with six washers and dryers. Five minutes away there is a sports complex and community centre free to my son and myself and has olympic size pools and spa. There is a hockey rink, games room, restaurant and a whole host of participant centred activities, none of which I use. I walk occasionally to the big duck pond in the complex and feed the various migrating waterfowl and the too friendly Canada geese. A couple come right to my apartment door every year and seem to recognise me. I give them oatmeal which they like. There are squirrels in the trees outside and a resident family of skunks go around every night eating slugs and snails. There are coyotes which sculk in bushes on the golf course and nightly run through the grounds here, sometimes taking a small dog or a cat. Most apartment owners have dogs or cats. Not myself, though there was a black cat which would come in our door every evening and look around, as he considered his right, since he had actually lived in this apartment before we came nearly seven years ago. Though I have a parking space and still have a driver’s permit I don’t want to drive and long ago sold my last car and don’t miss it. I have a senior’s bus pass for $45 a year which will take me down to the U.S border or anywhere within a fifty mile range. My senior’s gold pass for my free medical and free medication will also let me go free on ferries to most places such as the gulf islands and Victoria Nanaimo. I go free on the sky train, so I don’t need a car. I am too old to go up into the mountains and anyway we are not allowed to take a gun, only cans of bear spray. To my mind there are too many black bears which come down in to the back yards of North Vancouver and raid the trash cans and fruit trees. The grizzlies are further up the mountain and every year one or two people get killed. They are dangerous. There are cougars too and a couple of years ago one jumped onto a woman riding a horse and killed her. Her two children also riding ponies got away.

I usually take the bus downtown about ten a.m. and go to my bank etc and then to a senior’s centre where I talk to some acquaintances and then go a block to the Community college and buy fresh bread and apple strudels or blueberry pies. I meet several acquaintances in the dining room where I sometimes have excellentChinese food.

I had a friend who died several months ago. He was just over eighty. Lung cancer. He was a millionaire, owning a small hotel several blocks away and a racehorse that actually won some times. He did not leave a will. You can imagine the trouble that is causing. Another friend Lenora a kiwi travel writer is trying to straighten things out with lawyers.

Another friend whose name is Richards was his best buddy and misses him. Richards has a second wife who is getting altzheimers. His first wife died from cancer when she was 57. He is 80 and a retired math high school teacher. Richards’ father came from Wales. At 10 years he had to leave school and went down the mine pushing coal cars for ten hours a day six days a week. When adult he came to Canada in 1904 and worked in a coal mine in the Rocky Mountains. His wife and child followed four years later. Things were grim. Even when my friend Richards was a youth he could only afford to study to be a teacher and was sent to a one room schoolhouse at a salary of $600 a year.Now teachers start at $40000 a year.

When I came here in 1961 from USA via Mexico from Australia as a stowaway, the wages were only $40 a week minimum wage. I got $75 for my first job and twice that when I became a social worker.

I soon gave that up to become a painter selling my paintings in a gallery I rented in Montreal and with a street concession. I made lots of money for a while and could afford to travel to Mexico or Asia for five months a year. The money I made I lost with my various families and a house in the Philippines and a cottage in Quebec. Now I have no property, though technically I suppose I still own the one in the Philippines, but I don’t want to go back there. I guess I am just rambling on. I am feeling so low tonight..................

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