Strange how a phone call can change your day/ Take you away/Away/From the feeling of being alone/Bless the telephone. – Lyrics from “Bless the Telephone” by Labi Siffre.
Before I forget, I want to share with you some good news about government and US-Canada relationships. Our mayor, my friend Tom, sent this Valentine of sorts to the mayors of our two closest Yukon neighbors. Haines is after all, a border town. My son had an emergency appendectomy at the Whitehorse hospital and it may well have saved his life. Chip is a longtime board member (and we are longtime volunteers and participants) of the biggest annual event in Haines, the Kluane to Chilkat International Bike Relay. About 1500 cyclists (and their families and friends) arrive here on Father’s Day weekend and they are mostly Canadian. The board is too. Our choir knows all the words to “O Canada” because we sing it at the opening ceremony of the Southeast Alaska State Fair and at dual swim meets.
This morning, I read and heard three wise things — one was from a psychologist who suggested that we look at today with eyes on what we will be nostalgic about years from now. Like Chip sharing his cheese and apples with the dogs. Those particular two dogs– driving my granddaughter Ivy, 12 going on 13, to school in the snow turned to rain. She wore sheepskin slippers. I had on rubber boots.
On the way home Marley played a song on the radio about talking to a friend on the phone, Bless the Telephone-– and I thought, today I’ll make that call I have meaning to—
I also read about Vincent Harding, a historian and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King who believed that understanding each other requires knowing something about who we are, and that “something” is where we came from. When he met people for the first time he would ask where they spent their childhood and where their maternal grandmother spent hers.
I shared all this walking in the snow-ish rain this morning with Beth and now I’m thinking in my sometimes humming brain– these are the good old days. Also, it was comforting seeing the other tracks in the snow and knowing who they belong to. Even the small moose prints. She has been nibbling the dogwood bush at night.
It was a hard week with a harsh reminder of how suddenly we can go from here to gone. How fragile this peace, the minutiae of days, is. I wrote an obituary for an old friend, a great writer, Tom McGuire, who died skating on my favorite lake. Falling through the ice on a beautiful, perfect afternoon. So many layers of grief there–
But in that weird way the world has of righting itself, a little bit at a time anyway, Ivy and her cat arrived a few hours after I turned the obituary in to the Chilkat Valley News. They are staying with us this week.
I was worried about taking Kit Kat from their house to ours without a kennel. I imagined the escape, the kitty lost in the snow. The search. Will she be lost or found? You know how it is. I loaded my car with Ivy’s stuff and the cat accessories, then opened the back door and Ivy dropped Kit Kat in a shopping bag and dashed for the car. Kit Kat was unfazed. She purred on the ride to our house. “Are you moving in for six months?” Chip said as we carried duffels, blankets, stuffed animals, books, back packs and the cat-scratch toy, cat food, her dishes– a litter box– all inside.
The dogs are a little afraid of her. The cat, I mean, not Ivy. And so far the cat, not Ivy, has spent all of her time upstairs. With Ivy at school she will no doubt venture down– I can hear her calling now. I will do my best to remember exactly (I hope) how nutty it was when a tiny black cat subdued two large golden retrievers and took over our house.
