Category: Uncategorized

A Taste of Canada: Getting Tick-ed

August 29, 2023

I contracted Lyme disease and take anti-biotics to get rid of it, doxycycline tablets for twenty-eight day. Not sure when a tick, those nasty tiny little bugs, gorged on my blood but suspect that when I cycled on a rail-to-trail over a month ago and stopped in the tall grass to relieve myself, a tick may have found me. That night my foot began to hurt, swelled up and was hot to touch, and the next day I could not put any weight on it.

The pain went away in a few days when I decided to see a nurse practitioner to find out what it could have been. She examined the foot but came up with no conclusions, so I ignored it. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

A month later, I had the worst shakes of my life, my teeth were chattering. The following days I had become extremely tired, moved like molasses, and lost my appetite to such an extent that I lost six pounds in a few days, symptoms of Lyme disease. On the positive side, if you can call it positive, I had no headache and fever. And then a rash appeared on my belly, another symptom of Lyme disease, that I was not aware of that time.

The symptoms convinced me to go back to my clinic and this time I saw another nurse practitioner who gave me a thorough examination and sent me for blood tests, including Lyme disease. But impatient to wait for the test results which would take numerous days in the labs, I admitted myself to emergency at the local hospital knowing that it could be a long wait, hours, to see an emergency doctor. But I would have the results immediately at the hospital emergency department.

Enterng the emergency room, a large sign welcomed me announcing that the waiting time to see a doctor is five hours, measuring at least four feet by four feet,. OK. Then I looked around and absorbed the cacophony generated by dozens of people in the room when a middle-aged and heavy person in a tennis outfit rolled around a wheelchair with, I think, his wife in it, who moaned loudly about the pain that she could not bear any more and wished to be dead. The scene reminded me of a lunatic asylum. Across from where I sat was a youngish fellow with a neck brace. Some people stood and shifted their feet back and forth; there were not enough chairs. The loudspeaker called my name and nurses triaged me asking about the reason for my presence here. I explained that I thought I had Lyme desease. The nurses took copious notes while measuring my blood pressure and pulse rate. And then I returned to the waiting room.

I observed the people around me and was struck by the diversity, i.e., including all shades of brown to black. Is this the composition of Ottawa today? Or are these the people who have no family doctors and forced to attend the hospital emergency room for health care? But then the loudspeaker called my name again for registration; I had to provide my address and other information, information that the hospital already possessed. During this time a little girl, perhaps three years old, held by her father, was crying constantly, adding to the loud buzz in the emergency room. This whole experience was emotionally taxing on me and imagined that there were people here who have had much more serious problems than I had. But Lyme disease can be very serious in the long run if not treated.

But after five hours, as announced on the large bulletin board entering the emergency room, my name was called again, and I entered a large room with a dozen or so examining rooms around a central area where the emergency doctors and nurses worked and consulted with each other. A nurse directed me to a small waiting room that I shared with a young teenager. He moaned about how hungry he was, having been here for eight hours with no food. I asked him if he would be picked up by his parents, when finished. Or were his parents waiting in the outer room and could get him some food at the food outlet next door? No, he said, his parents were not there, he will take the bus home after his stay at the emergency room experience. That surprised me and felt sorry for him.

It was close to midnight when an examining room had become available, and I was invited to enter it. I did not have to wait long, an emergency doctor came to see me and in ten minutes, prescribed an antibiotic for the blood test that showed a high count of white blood cells and another drug for the rash. And that was it; he said he did not know about Lyme disease.

Leaving after midnight after a seven hour stay tired me out. And I found it emotionally taxing observing all the people in the emergency room suffering from some ailment. But the simple recommendations of the emergency doc soothed me somewhat even though he did not confirm I had Lyme disease or even identify my illness. 

The bombshell came the next week when the the blood test the nurse practitioner ordered showed I had Lyme disease. I had been tick-ed. And I received the typical treatment: twenty-eight days of taking doxycycline.

I learned a few lessons from this experience. A conscientious nurse practitioner may provide excellent service. An emergency doctor treats obvious symptoms and may not search for root causes. And although I find emergency rooms interesting, I prefer to avoid them in the future.  When I go for a walk in the country now, I wear long pants and long-sleeve shirts and tuck my pant legs into my socks to make sure no nasty ticks can access my body for a blood-sucking treat.

Monetizing Past Grievances

August 8, 2023

I attended a concert, with fifty people in the audience, in Collingwood, ON, as part of the porch festival on July 26, in 2023. The concert triggered my thoughts on monetizing past grievances.

The porch festival evolved in response to Covid when artists could not perform in closed venues. Instead, people with a porch on their houses and a backyard welcomed artists to play on their porch to an audience in their yard, sitting on camp chairs.

Quammie Williams gave the concert, with Tiki Mercury-Clarke and a local bass player. Quammie, an accomplished drummer, singer, actor and consultant on culture – he was Director of Culture in Barrie, ON – sang and drummed African “resistance songs” with Tiki, who played the piano and ssng in an impressive tonal range.

As usual today at these venues, the MC started out by thanking the Ashininaabi (indigenous) people for letting use of their land for this concert. I am not sure what the homeowner thought about that.

Quammie and Tiki included history talks about slavery in between songs during the concert. Although I heard many of these stories before, I came to listen to jazz and began to get restless as the performance went on with lengthy stories. Quammie’s stories about the emotional toll of slavery on Black people were draining and should have been told with more anger and shouting. But no. Quammie quietly explained the stories behind the “resistance songs”, making his message of slavery even more powerful.

I looked around and beyond the three black artists on the porch, there was not one black person in the audience. But the audience lapped up the talk and the music and gave the performers a standing ovation. Whether the performers meant it or not, the underlying message was unmistakable: white folks were the slave owners creating hardship for Blacks. In my offbeat way of thinking, I thought the enthusiastic clapping was almost an exorcism for the well-heeled senior crowd, consciously or unconsciously, cleansing their souls of having embraced slavery in the past.  

I really enjoyed the music and my negative reaction towards being told to be grateful to the Anishinaabi and being responsible for slavery were fading, when I read that the Black Class Action Secretariat (BCAS in Toronto) sued the Government of Canada for past discrimination of black civil servants for C$2.5 billion in the court system.  I do not question that discrimination has occurred against Blacks in the Canadian federal civil service and wish it had not happened. The government should have solved this issue in the past. What concerned me was that past grievances have become issues for restitution, always resulting in monetary awards.

The mother of all these restitutions is the “reconciliation” process with Indigenous people in Canada. It started out with “reparations” for the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, that ended up with a C$5 billion settlement. Other claims followed. To date, over C$60 billion have been awarded to indigenous people by the government (there were circa 1.2 million Indigenous people in Canada in 2021). And other claims are in the pipeline. Compare this number to the Canadian defense budget that was C$26 billion in 2021.

I am afraid this trend to sue the government for past grievances will continue and the grievances will become weirder and weirder. Any minority group, ethnic, religious, or other, could organize a class action claim and sue the government for damages. Many may be legitimate, but I wonder if we should consider whether grievances to historical events should be compensated. How far back in history should we go to fix past wrongs made by previous generations?

Monetization of past grievances is a dangerous and costly trend and should be stopped. Why should the current taxpayers pay for injustices committed by previous generations?

Seniors’ Agonizing Dilemma

July 10, 2023

The children are gone, and we knock around in the large family home. The question arises: should we downsize? And, if so, should we buy or rent? This is an agonizing decision for seniors living in single-family homes.

If you are an empty nester, what thoughts percolate through your mind pondering these questions? Assuming that you do not have to move for financial reasons, health reasons, or because the neighborhood has changed for the worse, why should you abandon the family home, why should you downsize?

Well, one reason is that you use only half the available space. By downsizing, you would pay half the heating and air-conditioning costs and would have half the space to clean and dust. Property taxes would be less. A condo would have no grass to cut and landscape to maintain; the management company would do all of those, including snow removal. These are the advantages of downsizing to a condo. And since the management company would do all interior maintenance in a rental unit, you would also be spared that activity.

So, downsizing is a solution if house maintenance becomes too onerous, or if you do not want to do it anymore. But wait! How about hiring people to clean and work in the garden? So why downsize? Let’s do some more pondering.

What do we lose when we move into a condo or apartment? Without question, we lose privacy and space and are obliged to follow the rules and regulations of the condo and apartment unit.

We are going to lose the use of the front and back yards, the long double driveway, and the wide street in front of the house. And we have less living space. Much less space, and our friends, who downsized, confided in us that they ended up buying new furniture to fit into their new living space.

Other disadvantages could be noisy neighbors above and below, the smell from their cooking penetrating your unit, especially when windows are open, and access to the unit would be via parking in the garage and then an elevator and finally a hallway instead of just entering the current family house directly from the garage, a huge advantage when carrying groceries and stuff. Should I go any further?

I can see seniors agonizing over whether or not to downsize and then whether or not to buy a condo or rent an apartment.

All these ideas were racing through my mind when I heard good friends just sold their house and rented an apartment. But something was bothering me. My reflections concerned space, privacy, and freedom of action. But what about my lifestyle in the family home that I occupied for decades? Am I going to miss the BBQs on the deck I built in the backyard? Or, sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee in my hand watching the traffic on the street? Or my big office in the basement where I wrote a couple of books? And the other large recreation room where I practiced yoga watching the big screen TV? All these activities have acquired a familiar aura that I would throw away if moving to another place. Would I pay too high a price for moving out of our family home?

If you have lived in your home for a few decades, you have almost certainly changed your home to your taste, to your liking. The paintings, furniture, and objects in your home are expressive of your personality. The physical house becomes part of your identity, regardless of how much of it is embedded in your memory.

We are still in our family house. If we moved, I would certainly retain the knowledge of how I lived but it will not be the same as experiencing the real thing, for example, enjoying an outdoor BBQ with friends on a deck I built. I would lose part of my identity.

To My Blook, Where the Writing Hobby Took Me

June 11, 2023

You may ask what is a blook? Well, the word is a combination of the words blog and book. And a blook is a book consisting of blogs. It is a new word, first coined in 2003 by Jeff Jarvis, a well-known journalist from New York. Since then, several blooks have been published and the “Blooker” prize was established in 2006, fashioned from the “Booker” prize. Julia and Julie, by Julie Powell, was awarded the first Blooker prize in 2006; it is a cookbook based on blogs preparing the recipes of Julia Childs (a film by the same name was made in 2009).

I was intrigued by the concept of a blook and was inspired to compile my own do one since I have been blogging for a few years. The pandemic was the trigger for the start of my blogging. When avoiding people, and staying home had become not only desirable but periodically mandatory, when my gym and community center where I played bridge closed, what was I to do at home? I was retired with plenty of time on my hands. Expressing personal opinions and describing my activities in writing seemed like a good idea to keep me busy.

But my blogging begs another question: “What experience did I have in writing”? This is a relevant question since I had never worked as a professional writer; my writing was limited to technical and policy papers. After I retired, I did publish two books, a memoir, and a travel book.

I can anticipate your next question: “What made me write these books”? And the trigger to start writing my memoir was a friend who challenged me to write it because she said that my children do not know who I am. And she was right: I was a Hungarian refugee/immigrant to Canada in 1956, married a Welsh girl, spoke English at home, and never discussed much of my history with the family.

All of our children attended university, married, and settled in the US, limiting opportunities to discuss my early background. When my friend challenged me to write my memoir, I had to agree that she was right, and I got motivated and even excited, to write my memoir, primarily for my children and grandchildren.

To prepare myself for writing my first book, the memoir, I enrolled in the online university Coursera. I took several of their writing courses. The Coursera Zoom classes include lectures led by Wesleyan University professors and writing assignments reviewed by fellow students. I found it interesting reviewing others’ work, some people I found to be excellent writers, while others were novices. I thought I was somewhere between the two camps.

And I enjoyed receiving comments on my work, I learned much from these comments: one reviewer rebuked me for sloppy writing when I said I was at Kennedy Airport in New York City in 1957. The reviewer criticized me for my poor memory or for not having done the research. The correct name at that time was “Idlewild” airport. It is important to check your facts, especially when you write about events sixty years ago. Overall, I found the courses very helpful in practicing my writing skills.

To further my writing knowledge, I also signed up for writing blogs such as The Write Practice and took free Zoom lectures on how to do a memoir by Marion Roach Smith. In addition to reading “How to do memoir” books, I also read many memoirs. My favorite was “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah, written with humor, and sensitivity about growing up in South Africa having a white father and a black mother. 

After a year’s work, I published my memoirs on Kindle Publishing and sent copies to all family members, awaiting their response. Some thought it was interesting and commented, “I never knew this” while one granddaughter found parts of it boring. At any rate, the family got to know me a little bit better.

Buoyed by having a book published, I was motivated to embark on another one, this time on our travels in Southeast Asia. As before, I read travel books such as the annual Best American Travel Writing series and took some Zoom courses as well on how to write about travel. My favorite travel authors were Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson.

I learned a few key lessons from the courses I have taken and the experience I have accumulated writing my two books: write about subjects that you know, express your personal opinions and feelings, and “show and not tell”.

The first one seems obvious, but it is interesting how easily one can get involved in matters unfamiliar to you, only to start looking up the internet for information. Although that avenue is useful and available to everyone, it is mostly informational. I found people are much more interested in your personal experiences and opinions. For example, a hotel in Barbados might tout its beauty on the oceanfront while someone who has been there may point out that the furniture is old and decrepit.

Before I started studying the fine art of writing my writing had reflected my positive, non-critical attitude.  But I soon realized that, in the writing of others, my interest was drawn more to their personal reflections and observations rather than my descriptive, non-critical approach.

And “show and not tell’ advises you not to use general statements like “it was a beautiful sky’ which is a “tell”, but rather “show” it in terms of its color, shading, cloud formation, and your reaction to it and let the reader interpret your description.

Having improved my writing skills and enjoying writing, I wondered, “What is next?” Another book was not of interest to me, and the pandemic had shut us down from travel and socializing. But I was still interested in writing, and I had the time to carry on with writing short pieces on select subjects where I express my thoughts and opinions.  

And so, I started writing; I wrote blogs about the pandemic, about the Ukrainian war, and about Canadian and Ottawa issues and controversies. The number of blogs I have written has grown and I thought that I should try to weave them together into a book format, the idea behind a blook. Look for my Kindle blook by the end of the year!

Riding the Virginia Creeper

May 20, 2023

Our arrival in Damascus, to ride the Virginia Creeper Trail was exciting. We struggled with the lock on the Vacation Rental by Owner’s (VRBO) door with no success until we turned the knob counterclockwise. With the door open, we faced a large, young woman, staring at us along with two crawling babies on the floor. I am not sure who was more surprised; us or the woman. When we got our breath back, we tried to explain that we had reserved this house and showed the documentation. She was speechless and yelled for her husband who appeared in shorts. He was a huge specimen and we got worried about guns in the house, having read recently people being shot just by driving onto a driveway. The husband explained that he rented this unit for six months and provided us with the name of his contact.  We concluded that we had no choice but to leave and find another place to stay. It was seven o’clock by that time, but fortunately, still light.

My daughter Megan, who had made the reservation through VRBO for a “premier” host called VRBO on the phone to find answers. After an hour and a half, VRBO offered money to rent accommodation in the vicinity because they were unable to find accommodations in Damascus for us; we were also told that the unit we had rented had been sold six months earlier, We drove and called around Damascus, searching for vacant units and found the River Trail Cabins had a couple of vacant units which we immediately occupied. These log cabins were exceptionally well appointed with a small kitchen where we cooked our supper and ate it on the verandah, overlooking the trail and the river. A large hot tub was next to the bed, but it was way too late to fill it up to use it.

We had come to Damascus to meet up with our daughter and husband who were on their way to Blacksburg, Virginia to pick up their youngest son from Virginia Tech where he finished his first year of college, and to ride the Virginia Creeper Trail. The Trail starts in Abington, VA, and stretches to Whitetop Mountain in the Rogers National Recreation Area, close to the North Carolina border. It is thirty-four miles long. Damascus is halfway along the trail, from where it climbs 2000 feet.

The right-of-way for the trail goes back to the 1880s when a railroad line was built to haul iron and coal. When the mines were depleted and it became uneconomic, the line was shut down. In 1977, the Norfolk and Western Railroad Company, owner of the rail line, asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to allow the abandonment of the rail line. Soon after the ICC’s approval, the removal of the tracks began, and the right-of-way was turned into a recreation area by the US National Forest Service and the National Park Service. A caboose at the center of Damascus commemorates, and reminds people of, the original purpose of the trail. The trail now accommodates hikers, cyclists, and equestrians, crosses a National Park and the Appalachian trail, as well as many rebuilt trestle bridges.  

On our first morning, we walked our bikes down the steep embankment on which the log cabins were built, to find the trail, eager to try it out.  We found the trail surface smooth, often with small gravel that was easy to ride. The trail wound its way through Damascus, passing by the SunDog Shuttle service where we inquired about their $25 shuttle service to the end of the line on Whitetop Mountain. We told them we’d be back the next day to experience the 17-mile downhill ride from Whitetop Mountain to Damascus.  In the meantime, we decided to cycle up the trail to experience the ride.

Once we left the town, we rode in a bushy, leafy valley, next to the Laurel River that was maybe fifty feet across, and which looked like whitewater kayaking territory although too shallow for my taste. The river flowed fast over large rocks creating a crashing but relaxing sound. We met some cyclists coming down the trail; it looked like easy riding with the low gradient.

The sun was up creating a dapple effect on the trail that bothered my vision, but also made me sweat although I had only a t-shirt on. We rode for a couple of hours, covered maybe ten miles, and decided to stop and have our lunch on a bench. There was also an outdoor toilet and a parking lot behind us.  We realized that it was possible to drive to several points along the trail, park the car and start riding from there.

Turning back towards Damascus, we cranked the pedal of our bikes a few times and rode for considerable distances, coasting much of the way with a slight downhill gradient; the going was easy and provided an opportunity for observing the forest around us. The return trip was fast, we arrived back at our home in less than an hour.

The next day we drove to SunDog Shuttle service and got on the bus with a dozen other passengers with a trailer behind us loaded with our bikes. The friendly driver related stories of cyclists along the trail; one story was funny in that some wild pigs chased one of the cyclists for a quarter of a mile before going back into the forest. The story did not give us a comfortable feeling, hoping we would not meet a wild pig on our ride down the Creeper Trail.

The driver also said that during the once-a-year Appalachian Trail days, up to a hundred thousand people converge in Damascus. The people attending these days are current and past hikers of the Appalachian Trail. The Appalachian Trail days this year are from May 19 to 21; it was a good thing that we did not come at that time; it would have been overly crowded.

On the forty-minute ride to our starting point on Whitetop Mountain we, of course, conversed with our fellow riders, who came from Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina. One cyclist shared his experience in doing the Trail this last winter that he described as a somewhat freezy trail with icy spots that he had to navigate.

And we were all white-haired! I expected more young people, but I found our fellow cyclists close to our age, and that made me feel very good; this was a mature, recreational cycling crowd. Many people rented bikes at SunDog indicating that they may not have been serious cyclists but came for the experience.

After the requisite photo at the trailhead, in front of the billboard identifying the Trail and distances along the trail, we jumped on our bikes, and we were flying down the slope that had a gradient of five percent. There were some rocky spots and I had to grab tightly the handlebar that almost jumped out of my hands a few times. The first few miles went fast and after half an hour we stopped for a break to catch our breath.

Eleven miles down the trail we found the Creeper’s Trail Café and enjoyed a morning coffee where we met with a group of cyclists from Tennessee; they were part of a walking club in Knoxville and came for a different experience. I engaged with one of the riders who surprised me by showing me his electric bike. I asked him why he would need an e-bike when this trail was all sloping down, would his bike start rolling down too fast? He agreed that he did not need such a bike but back home he rode on hilly terrain.

Further down we stopped for our lunch sitting on a bench and watched the other cyclists go by, waving to them. When passing a cyclist, the typical protocol was to call out “on your left”, when approaching from behind. Everybody followed this routine. We arrived back at the shuttle place in three hours, a seventeen-mile ride with stops. I was not tired, since we rode downhill almost all the time, but my butt was sore from all the bouncing on some rocky parts, and where we crossed the numerous trestle bridges where their beginning and end was a jump up and then down, with our bikes.

SunDog shuttle service has a well-equipped store for cycle equipment and clothing, and I could not resist buying a t-shirt with the Creeper Trail logo, and with text on the back: “You do not stop riding because you get old, you get old because you stop riding”. That was apropos. Good advice!

I would recommend the Virginia Creeper Trail for cyclists of all kinds with a stay at the River Trail Cabins. And have a chat with the people at the SunDog Shuttle service for local color.