Hear Me in the Harmony

True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body: nourishment and refreshment.
— William Penn

In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations.  It is cold, half- French, and difficult to stir.
— Stuart Keate

So when I said last time that I hoped it wouldn’t take me two weeks to blog the next leg of our vacation, what I really meant was, “See you in 6 weeks!”  Sorry.

Anyway, we left Buffalo Thursday morning – another beautiful day – and headed north.  We crossed the border with no problem and checked into our hotel, which was connected to the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays would play that night.  We immediately set out on foot for the Hockey Hall of Fame; David’s been wanting to go there for a long time.  Of course, I made him pose for pictures:

But I got in on it too!

There was so much to see, but the crown jewel is the Stanley Cup, which we got our picture taken with:

Then we wandered our way around town a bit before heading back toward our hotel and the CN Tower.  This is what it looks like from the ground:

Wow, right?  Well, we decided to go to the top.  David, who is afraid of heights, was a good sport on the way up, even though the elevator has glass peephole in the floor:

But that was nothing compared to the glass floor at the top, which freaked even me out:

There were a ton of kids up there, and none of them were scared; they were lying all over the glass floor, face down, or running back and forth all over it.  I could barely look down, but I forced myself to walk across the glass part once.

Then we took in the view, which was amazing.

I took a panoramic “stitch” shot with my camera, but I don’t actually know how to stitch them together to show you (that’s part of #78 on my list – learn three features of my digital camera; haven’t gotten around to it yet!) so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

We headed back to the hotel for a few minutes to rest before heading downstairs, out the door, and around the corner to the baseball stadium to see the hometown Toronto Blue Jays take on the Evil Empire, aka the New York Yankees.

With apologies to Karen, who is a Red Sox fan, here are some photos of some famous Yankees:

Our seats were about 4 rows up from the field.  At one point, A-Rod chased a pop up into foul territory and ran smack into a Canadian police woman.  What’s awesome about that?  Well, in one of those  pictures, you can sort of see me and David!  Here, I’ll show you:

Great, right?  We’re famous!  Anyway, the game was just ok, really, and the Yankees trounced the Jays, but I was psyched to complete my goal of seeing three games in three different stadiums.

All in all, I really enjoyed our trip.  We definitely did not have enough time to do everything we wanted to do, so we are planning a return trip at some point.  You can check out the rest of my Toronto pictures on Flickr, if you like!

“I speak two languages: body and English.”
–Mae West

Dear Person Who Found My Blog by Searching “белые тигры”:

Gesundheit.

Love,

Mel

ETA: “белые тигры” apparently means “white tiger,” judging by the images that come when I copy and paste that phrase into Google.  I love the internet.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear.  Fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.  What he wants above everything else is safety.
— H.L. Mencken

So I’ve been thinking about this post lately.  Not the boy – David’s got that part covered – but the end.  This:  “I learned, eventually, that you have to listen to everything, you can’t just pick and choose the parts that fit the story you’re telling in your head.”

And I was thinking about the story I tell in my head all the time – we all do it, we all tell a story about the life we imagine we live, about why we do things, and what we hope for.  It’s the story we tell to get through the day, because the truth is so often less than we would like it to be.

My story’s about a girl who’s kind, and smart, and funny, and generous.  Who’s successful, by most people’s standards, both personally and professionally.  Whose life is more or less charmed in a number of important ways.

My truth, though, so often seems to fall short of that.  I am often unkind, and particularly judgmental, at least in my thoughts.  I regularly feel like everyone else is smarter than I am, particularly at work, and that I am a heartbeat away from people realizing I’m a fraud.  I haven’t updated my weight loss photo album on Facebook in more than a year, because the truth is, I’ve gained 35 pounds in 15 months and I am terribly ashamed of that, and yet I cannot get it together to take control of my eating.  My so-called charmed life has been scarred by some particularly shitty things, especially early on, and I lack the courage to truly face at least one of them.  I live most of my life with some level of fear of not being good enough while setting such unbelievably high expectations of myself that it’s no wonder I fall short.  I live with the man I want to marry and who I know loves me unconditionally, and yet I spend an inordinate of time and energy fighting the feeling that, sooner or later, he’s going to realize that I’m not quite what he thought.  I drop out of communication with my friends and my grandma for extended periods of time because I just don’t have the energy or the attention span even to send an email, and by the time I do, so much has happened that I can’t bear having to recap it all, so I give up.  That’s my truth.

Is it any wonder that the story I’m telling in my head is decidedly more upbeat?  It has to be; otherwise, I’d never get out of bed.

Her full nature . . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.  But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half doing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
— from Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Some of you have asked after the woman I wrote the last Three Things post about, and I appreciate that.  I’m more sorry than I can say to tell you that it’s my best friend Aimee’s mother.

Jeanette was diagnosed with Stage IV brain cancer this past March.  She underwent surgery to remove most of the tumor and then received both radiation and chemotherapy.  She had ups and downs, and the prognosis was never great, but we all so hoped for a miracle, or at least more time than we got.  She began declining steadily towards the end of August, and by the end, she was bedridden and often unable to respond, though she usually knew when people were with her.

I have known Jeanette since I was 14 years old.  It wouldn’t be exaggerating at all to say that she was like a second mother to me.  In high school, Aimee’s house was the place all the kids wanted to be because Jeanette and Bill, Aimee’s step-dad, were totally laid back.  They were great fun to be around, but they also knew when to make themselves scarce, and as long as we weren’t out of control, they left us to our own devices.  They took all of us in and loved us and counseled us and fed us and, in my case (and in the case of her sister’s friends), sheltered us for a time.

As we grew and went off and had lives of our own, they still asked after us and greeted us with hugs and kisses and questions about what we were up to.  They always encouraged us in whatever endeavor we took on and supported us and shared their wisdom, which was vast, freely.  I loved them dearly.

Bill died in November 2005.  The minister at Jeanette’s memorial service said it best: She was a widow, but she never stopped being married to him.  Aimee told me that it was Jeanette’s great hope that, after she died, she would be reunited with Bill.  I don’t know what I believe, really, about what happens to you after you die, but I hope with all my heart that they are together again.

Three weeks before Jeanette died, I went to Richmond to say goodbye.  It was a difficult thing to do; she was bedridden, nearly bald, and able to communicate very little.   She knew we were there, though, and we had some good laughs and a few tears.  Aimee and her sister were gracious enough to give me a few minutes alone with Jeanette, and I was able to tell her how much she meant to me and how grateful I was to have her in my life.  I know that she understood; she cried a little when she realized that what I was really saying was goodbye.  She grew sleepy, so we decided to go.  I was the last one out, and before I left her side, I kissed her forehead and said, “Goodbye, Jeanette; I love you.”  And that was the last time I saw her.

Aimee asked me to share Jeanette’s obituary with you; you can find it here.