valeriesbookofme

My memoir post will be slightly political again today. I'm getting past it all, hardly read any of my previous political commentators now. Still, there is one person whose column I read because I find his musings interesting. This morning he wrote a mostly positive post about Thanksgiving but then he wrote that those who don't support Trump are part of an "educated elite." I felt strongly that I wanted to comment about this. Because, just as not all people who voted for Trump are the same, neither are those who voted against him. And I want to set to paper my opinion about that. Because that's what this memoir blog is, my perspective on the life I have lived and am living :) My blue-collar father who went to high school at night in his teens while working during the day in the 1920s, who told both his daughters in the 1950s and 1960s that high school was "good enough" for women, would be mystified to hear his younger daughter included in "the educat...

And today is the fourth "morning after", with each "night before" a little easier, a little more "make the best of it but take care of yourself." Before I move back to writing this memoir style blog--going to continue with the South Africa trip of 1977--I feel I would be shrinking if I didn't say something about how I feel about this week's US election. As of this writing, Saturday, Arizona still hasn’t finished its count—the GOP did a great job of preventing the mail-in vote for being counted early and messing up the ability to use the machines—so I still don’t know if we are going to be saddled with the odious Kari Lake or whether the House is going to be Republican too. Still, it’s becoming more “academic” than visceral for me, if you know what I mean. Necesitamos avanzar. Sera dificil, sabiendo que muchos, especialmente aqui donde vivo, creen en los planes de Trump y Vance. (I have been practicing Spanish in preparation for a 10-day December cr...

 December in South Africa 1977, Part One I had never understood candlelight in quite this way before. Oh there had been candles on the table Christmases past back home in Canada. For atmosphere, for festivity. While the electric crystal chandelier above cast the “real” light on a table laden with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce.… But this, this was different. Here in the corrugated iron shack that my friends had referred to as “the cottage”—not any cottage that I had ever seen in my growing up in Quebec—with no other light either inside the cottage nor outside in the black night of the Transkei, I understood how candlelight could draw a world down into the narrowness of those around the light, as if nothing else in the world existed.  I looked at the six faces around the table, illuminated in the candlelight, my own pulsing with sunburn. "Oh you’ll be grand," they’d told me down at the beach that day. "We’ll tell you when to get out of the sun." And toni...

 I first met Eddie the cat in the summer of 2009. Eddie lived with my friend Sheila in an English village called Burnham-on-Sea. Burnham is described as a “seaside town” although strictly speaking it isn’t on the sea, it is along part of the Bristol Channel in Somerset. It's a tidal space, the water comes in and out daily and when it goes out, there's a wide expanse of beach. There is even an old Victorian style pier pavilion that sells ice creams and has an arcade. You do have to be careful of the beach at low tide, however, as it becomes very muddy and cars have been known to sink in the mud, necessitating a rescue. Sheila had grown up close to Burnham and after she retired from her work in Reading and her husband died, she decided to return to the area. She bought a Victorian row house in a narrow street off one of the three main roads in Burnham and settled into a fairly quiet life of fixing up the house, working on genealogy and walking her two King Charles spaniels, Daisy...

  A s I write this on October 1, 2024, I imagine you reading this October 1, 2034. I hope that you are well and happy. I hope that some things haven’t changed for you, and I hope some things have. I hope that, as you read this, you’ll remember some of the things I am describing, that your memory is still as strong and vital as mine is. I hope that in the ten years that separate us you have remained as healthy as I am today. I am currently a little overweight, I hope that in the intervening ten years you’ve been able to keep that in check. Maybe you’ve conquered the “stress eating” that has dogged me so much of my life. I’m doing a lot of things right currently to help that happen, such as watching that I eat less, daily exercise, getting to the root of my recurring depressions, being kind to myself. I hope you have seen the benefits of this. I also hope, though, that you can still enjoy some of the treats that make me feel better. In moderation of course. If I had to pick my favori...

September 1968. My mother hasn’t been well all summer. She’s been tired. Even while on holiday and visiting friends she’s excused herself midday to have a nap. I hear whispers from the adults that she’s drinking too much. My father has taken to measuring the bottles of sherry and port wine in our liquor cabinet.  Worry over my mother’s health in those September days was an escalation of the fear I’d felt since I was 13, three years previously. When she came home from the doctor’s and she and my father sat me down and explained she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. That she could die if she overexerted herself. I immediately volunteered to take over the vacuuming and the ironing. Anything. Anything so she wouldn’t die.  I knew though in my teenaged heart that mothers die. It was a theme that ran through my books: fairytales, even young adult series. Disney movies. I didn’t want MY mother to die at the same time as I grappled with fear that she would.  So for three y...

After my rather "political" post last week, I decided this week I would return to my usual style of memoir writing. Today's post is about my childhood, no deep psychological ruminations, just memories. Enjoy! When I moved there in the early 1950s, Rosemount was a very new suburb of Montreal East. Carved out of small plots of farmland in response to the influx of new immigrants from post Iron Curtain Europe and newly middle class factory workers, returning soldiers and the Baby Boom, post-war housing sprang up. These consisted mainly of smallish row houses and duplexes that hardly held the members of some large Catholic families. For example, my friend Brenda, with her eleven siblings, springs to mind. My friend Danielle, who because she was the only girl among five brothers, never had her own room and slept on the living room couch, keeping her clothes in the hall closet. But our bungalow had been built in a smaller section of the area. All of the bungalows in the neat av...

1971. I was 19 years old and still caught between wanting to embrace the new women's liberation movement and also wanting desperately to be loved. So I chose to be dependent on a boy/man who smirked at my going to a women's lib meeting at my university. I never went again.  But that song kept ringing in my years through the years. And there were lyrics that I repeated to myself when I was told that I couldn't do certain things. When I was promised things--by men--and then disappointed. Lyrics such as "You can bend but never break me, for it only serves to make me, more determined to achieve my final goal." And, later, the more poignant, "Yes I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained." Meanwhile, on the public stage I saw women making steps forward and steps back. In Canada, we had Kim Campbell as our first female Prime Minister for five months in 1993. In Canada you can become the Prime Minister by taking the helm of the governing party ...

 Our car trip from Sierra Vista to Tucson was uneventful. Richard was relaxed thanks to the anti-anxiety meds. Traffic was light on the I-10. As we turned onto the road leading to our hotel, which was meant to be a Holiday Inn, we were confused by the “Holiday Inn” sign having disappeared from where we knew the Holiday Inn used to be. There was a sign for another hotel, one whose name we didn’t recognize at all. We parked in front and went into the lobby. The lobby smelled dreadfully stale, the chairs looked dirty and stained. It looked like the Holiday Inn we had stayed at in the past but it also looked as if it had been left to molder. There was a line in front of the rather unkempt-looking hotel clerk. He wore a baseball cap advertising some mechanic shop and an old t-shirt. As I took my place in the line, I heard snippets of conversations from various would-be guests— ‘I’ve looked at the room, it isn’t made up.’ ‘Here’s a photo of the bug that was on the sheets.’ The clerk peer...

Back in November during the Black Friday sales, Richard and I decided to book a cruise to Alaska. This was despite the fact that we had traveled to Alaska in May of last year with Holland America with somewhat mixed results: I had twice been locked into bathroom stalls with faulty locks on the ship, necessitating an alarm call from the stall. We were allocated a cabin that seemed to be directly above the ship’s engine room; so noisy and vibrating was it that we couldn’t sleep at night. And finally, on the second to last day of the cruise, my husband tripped on the last step of a staircase on the ship and sprained his ankle. He was wheeled off the ship in a wheelchair, a mixed blessing because that meant we were allocated priority loading at the taxi rank and in the airport. It took him two months before he could walk normally.  With all that having happened, you might wonder why we chose to do another Alaska cruise this year. Well, we actually loved the cruise itself. Alaska was be...

Having finally come to terms with living in one foreign culture, rural Arizona, the Fates have decided I need to tackle a new one, that of living with someone who is increasingly becoming more mentally fragile. Who is showing signs of, perhaps, early dementia? I am no doctor and, actually, that's what I/we are now trying to determine, what exactly is going on with them? For all the years I have known them, they have from time to time suffered from anxiety. They've withdrawn into darkened rooms, sleeping during the day, up at night. Bouts of delirious joy at some strange scheme they've dreamed up and then days or sometimes hours later, despair. They had a big fixation/obsession/problem in their lives that for decades I've tried to help them resolve. A lot of the mechanics of it were resolved a few years ago but the memories still linger on for them.  In the past we've, both of us because for better or for worse we are a partnership, each dealt with this in different ...