Robert Paterson's Weblog

Weddings - The Cycle continues

This weekend my daughter Hope and her man Charlie get married. As the father of the bride, I have kept my head down and have been obedient. I have my wardrobe selected, had my haircut, nose hairs too! I have stayed out of a planning exercise similar to D day. All I have to do is be present.

I have to confess that I am very excited. Charlie is a wonderful man. It took me at least 20 years to win the confidence of my in laws and he is already like a second son.

His own father, like mine, died young. But Lorne will be attending his son's wedding - he is buried on the hill above Charlie's boyhood home - and so will look out at us this weekend. There is a stone bench by his grave and I am sure that he will get lots of company and maybe even a drink or two.

I can't help thinking of my own wedding 33 years ago. What a different world it was then. The Vietnam war had just ended. Robin and I were so young, 24 and 22 compared to many who marry today. I had long hair and a mustache and looked very sixties with flair pants on my going away suit. In our first year of marriage we moved 3 times and I put on 30 pounds!

I can't help thinking about my own parents' wedding either. It was in 1948. The war was just over and Dad was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Mum was 20 and he was 22. They went back as a couple to Oxford in the midst of austerity and rationing. On the trip back to England my dad was overcome with sea sickness and confined to his cabin. Mum befriended a nun who chaperoned her during the crossing. There was a coal shortage that winter and it was also the coldest winer since the 1660's. My mum would go to bed in her sweater, a scarf, socks, gloves, a hat and her dressing gown. No wonder it took them 2 years to conceive me.

I wonder what life will be like for Hope and Charlie these early years. It was hard for Robin and I and for my parents - but looking back these early years were good ones for both Robin and I and my parents. We had no money and were buffeted by life but we were young and in love. My mother's letters of that time are full of hope and joy as were mine.

I wonder what their life will be like in 33 years from now. I won't be around to know. It feels strange to know your own mortality. Lorne and I will just have to keep an eye out in our own way as he will this Saturday.

Is your kid safe part 2

Rob Lantz sent me this link to a wonderful article in Macleans called Free Range Children

Snips:

Author, journalist and perplexed parent Carl Honoré recently returned to his old Edmonton neighbourhood, the scene of his formative years and boyhood adventures. He found the streets — still echoing in his memory with the whoops of street hockey battles — were now disconcertingly devoid of play. There were children, it's just that most were indoors, presumably safe from pedophiles and marauding automobiles. Maybe they were watching TV, or cruising the Internet. Maybe they were huddled with tutors, being mathematically enriched. He found it sad, but hardly surprising, that aimless amusements like bouncing balls, riding bikes or climbing trees are considered unworthy, non-productive and potentially fatal pastimes for the offspring of the ambitious middle class. Misplaced paranoia and hyper-parenting have kidnapped childhood, he laments.

Honoré, 40, now lives in an affluent London neighbourhood, with his wife, author and journalist Miranda France, their nine-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. Their English neighbours are just as protective and drive their kids, literally and figuratively, to the clubs and the courses that define success — in their eyes. Madness, thought Honoré, who saw the same tendencies in himself. So did his son, at age 7, after Honoré pounced on his gift for drawing and wanted to dispatch him to art classes. "I just want to draw," he said. "Why do grown-ups have to take over everything?"

Honoré believes that modern parents know, at some level, they've overstepped their mandate. "There is so much sound and fury surrounding childhood," he says in an interview. "We lose sense of that little inner voice we should be listening to." Parents feel compelled to ignore the stuff that gave their own childhood joy because, well, things are different today. Aren't they? Like every aspect of parenting, the answer hides in a thicket of paradox and contradiction. The inner voice is drowned out by the protective pressures of other parents. "Good God, you let your children walk to school?" The 24/7 news cycle wipes out all proportion in a global tsunami of abduction, seduction, accident and disaster. Expert advice abounds. "We can end up being advice junkies," he says. "It ends up eroding your confidence as a parent, not least because the advice is often conflicting."

With later marriages and fewer children came the phenomenon of "the child king," she says, the heir, frequently without a spare. Parents invest everything — well, frequently more paranoia than time — into grooming the successor. She has special sympathy for the expectations heaped on daughters. "They have to be virtuoso pianists or violinists, athletes, and good-looking. They have to have big breasts, they have to have a Ph.D. in neuroscience and they have to be married with three kids." Simple, really.

There never has been a golden age of childhood, as Honoré stresses in the book. Still, he encapsulates beautifully what has been lost, in an introductory quote by Virginia Woolf: "That great Cathedral space which was childhood." Was is the keyword.

Space is exactly what Honoré recalls, and time for road hockey, shooting hoops and running battles with homemade weapons. "I wasn't cooped inside like a battery chicken," he says. For Franklin of Colleges Ontario it was the simple joy of Hallowe'en night. "We roamed about the streets for all hours in neighbourhoods we didn't recognize," she says. "I don't think I've seen more than a handful of kids in my neighbourhood in the 20 years we've lived here who haven't had a parent at the end of the driveway." Pacom describes to disbelieving students the luxury of vegging. "It was my responsibility to manage my boredom and my free time, " she says. "I was creating my own toys, inventing stories." The common thread is freedom. What memories will today's students draw on? Mandarin class? The joys of slipping parental controls on the computer and roaming the Internet? Happy hours with the tutor? Ah, good times . . . good times.

Still, there are healthy signs of a backlash. In England, Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler magazine, has a subversive new column in the Telegraph newspaper on the joys of Idle Parenting. "An unhealthy dose of the work ethic is threatening to wreck childhood," he laments. Parents are driving kids to distraction, and overworking themselves in the process. This explains the column's guiding mantra, "leave them alone," and its subtext: a lazy parent is a good parent. "My idea of child-care is a large field," Hodgkinson writes. "At one side is a marquee serving local ales. This is where the parents gather. On the other side, somewhere in the distance, the children play. I don't bother them and they don't bother me." Sloth has its advantages.

Honoré's research brought him back to Vernon Barford, his old junior high in Edmonton. Homework wasn't much of a factor when Honoré attended, but by 2006, levels had escalated to the point where even straight-A students were regularly in the principal's office for failing to complete the latest crush of assignments. The staff rethought priorities. They cut the homework load to a maximum 45 minutes a day for senior, Grade 9 students. The results: happier students and, paradoxically, a four per cent jump in grades.

One of Honoré's favourite finds was Secret Garden, an outdoor nursery school in Scotland. The preschool children spend all day, every day, outdoors, chill winds and rain notwithstanding, splashing through puddles, checking out chicken coops and livestock pens, building campfires, peeing in the woods. Honoré tagged along for a day and realized, as a protective parent, he was well out of his comfort zone. Germs and danger abounded — from the handling of a dead bird to the gathering of mushrooms. Yet, this school and others like it in Norway report fewer illnesses, not to mention more-worldly children. He contrasts this to his daughter's ex-nursery school, where her lax pencil control was an issue. "Pencil control? She was three!"

Discomfort, he's learned, is a parent's lot. It shouldn't be a child's burden. "It's a constant dance," he says of the search for balance. "It seems to me feeling uneasy and feeling unsure of what you're doing is a natural part of being a mother or father. It just is."

It's a part of growing up. Parents should try it sometime, and leave the kids be.

Is your kid safe?

I am about 7 here - ready to go as a wild Indian in the large shared Garden where I lived as a small boy in London. My sister and I were pushed out into the gardens the entire time we were not at school. Pushed out unattended. Diana and I would also walk about a mile to our local sweet shop also unattended.

When I was 8 and Diana 6, we moved to Accra in Ghana. School would end at 12 noon and Di and I would wander the city on our own. We not only explored, climbed tress, ate food that was strange, hung out with the people who lived near us. But also killed snakes and rabid dogs, had pet monkeys that escaped and had to be found and went swimming in the surf. We survived! Not only did we survive but we did what children have done for all time - until now - we learned how to pay attention to what was going on about us. We learned how to make our world safe by learning how it worked.

My point? What is going on today when parents wrap their kids up in chains to keep them safe? What are the risks really? What is the damage?

My friend Chris Corrigan found this excellent article about this issue - Why I let my 9 year old ride on the subway alone

I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door.

Bye-bye! Have fun!

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.

RELATED: Listen to Ms. Skenazy on WNYC.

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

And yet —

Caring for our Parents???

There is an important documentary on PBS tonight about caring for our parents. It shows the struggles that this new role in society brings upon us. For all of you who are raising kids - kids are child's play!

I am going to say something a bit out there - but first a qualification - I have looked after an invalid mother for 27 years and Robin and I looked after both her parents until they died. So I think I have earned my stripes.

Here is my weird idea - Why is getting old and finally not being able to look after ourselves such a surprise to both parents and children? Why is it that we don't make plans way in advance when all are still OK?

For for most of us, we start to act when it is all too late. There is so much anguish. Most of the challenges seem to stem from this one cause - aging is a surprise both for the kids and the for the elderly.  Why do we all close our eyes to what is inevitable.

All the media focuses on is somehow squeezing out more life span - living for what?

I went to see my mum today - I visit her at least twice a week. She lives in a wonderful place but she and all the residents are simply waiting for death - they have a vacancy that is tragic. Mum has been there for a decade and could be there for another.

She has a great pension from my late dad that makes all of this care possible. If Robin and I had to look after her directly, it would kill us both physically and financially. As hard as it is today to look after parents, many of today's very old have been provided for or have some government support.

But will we boomers have this kind of support?

So my dear readers - in the 2020's when there are few pensions and when so many have no savings and there will be so many of us old farts - more that 50% of PEI will be over 60 then - what will happen?

How can our society afford us if we think that we will be looked after as we looked after our parents?

A walk in the snow looks like a good deal to me

Happy Birthday Dad

Dad would have been 82 today. Here he is aged 55 - just before his death

I miss you Dad.

Oh to have been able to talk to you these 27 years.

Instead we meet only in my dreams - happy birthday Dad

In Memory of Bill Hope - Killed Jan 14 1944

Here is Robin's uncle Bill getting his wings at St Hubert. The officer pinning them on his uniform was his father, Charlie. The date is June 11, 1943. He was a natural pilot being a world class gymnast. One of his party tricks was to walk down a flight of stairs on his hands!

Bill enlisted in July 1942. For a while he was on the west coast. Bill and his squadron was shipped to England in October 1943 where they were based at Digby - The oldest RAF station in England - and where they trained as fighter bombers. They moved to Wittering for a few days in December 1943 and the onto Ayr.

Their job was to patrol France and shoot up key installations, trains and convoys. 438 became part of 143 Wing RCAF.

By 1944, the all-Canadian 143 Wing comprised 438, 439 and 440 Squadrons, flying Typhoons. Each aircraft carried two 1000 pound bombs and four 20mm cannons. This was very dangerous work. During the Normandy invasion period, 151 Typhoons pilots were killed from 450 Typhoons operating during this time. There is a monument to their honor at Villous Borage in Normandy, France. Twenty of these pilots were from the Canadian wing.

Bill is 4th from the left in the middle - we know nothing about his service - but the picture suggests that he had a lot of influence in the squadron. He looks very different from the young man getting his wings from his dad. At end of 1943, they moved up to Ayr in Scotland to train on a new plane.

In January of 1944, the squadron was scheduled to replace the familiar and stable Hurricane with a new plane - the Typhoon.

It was a very challenging plane to fly. Bill was one of the first in his squadron to take it up. Something happened and he was killed. He is buried in a graveyard in Ayr that has men from both wars. He was 20.

Here is my favorite picture of him looking so calm and competent.

Shortly after his death, his parents received a rude letter saying that Bill had not yet presented himself as ordered to the conscription board. Robin's grandfather wrote a dignified letter in return informing them that his son had already died for his country. Charlie and Thea never really recovered from Bill's death.

Here is the poem that sums up how many young men like Bill felt about flying:

"High Flight"

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
you have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sunlit silence.  Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
my eager craft thro' footless halls of air.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of God".

: Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee

 

What it's like living with the Grim Reaper

Our house guest for the last 5 years - said good bye yesterday and went about his business. He will be back - probably when we least expect him - but it's nice to have him out of the house for a while.

Of course, we all know that we are going to die - but most of the time - we tell ourselves that it will be later when we are very old - or it will be an accident.

Living with cancer is a bit like being on death row. The gallows are just down the hall. So every bump, new ache, feeling of fatigue is noticed. In the middle of the night, you lie awake and wonder - is it back? Then can I go through the treatment all over again - will I see a grandchild?

As a partner, I wonder how many more times will I kiss her good night. How many more coffees will I make at dawn? How many more times will she tell me how to drive? Every little shared part of life, is finite.

There are some good things about all of this - he is not all bad. When every day is numbered, they have a luster. Even winter has its magic - for what if this one was our last? Even our disagreements! The mundane chores like washing up and cooking meals become gifts of grace.

I wonder - is one of the reason so many of us are unhappy, that we forget how precious life really is. Years ago a friend who was dying of cancer was visiting a girlfriend. Her friend had a two year old and was gagging as she changed his diaper - a diaper that only a two year old can produce. She said "I would give anything not to have to do this!" My friend replied that she would give anything to be given the life to do it.

So at this time of Halloween - there is another side to the Grim Reaper - he is the harbinger of our death - but if you let him - he brings the spice of life as well.

But it's good to have him gone for a while. We can coast like most people do for a while and forget that he has an appointment with us that cannot be broken.

A Milestone

Robin has just returned from a visit to her oncologist.

She has passed the important 5 year milestone and her doctor - who has become a good friend - has told her that she would be delighted to continue to see Robin as a friend but no longer as a patient.

What a moment this is!

Of course no one is ever really cured. But statistically this is very good news.

A word of thanks to all those that have helped her.

When she was diagnosed, many well meaning friends told us that we would have to seek treatment in a more advanced centre. Well we could not have got better treatment here on PEI.

Our family doctor knew of the risks but held off for a week or so as Robin's dad was dying. After his death she arranged for Robin to meet her. It was on a Thursday. On Friday, she had seen the surgeon. On Monday she had the lump diagnosed and removed. 2 weeks later she was undergoing treatment. Our hospital is 15 minutes from the house. PEI is also blessed with a great chief radiologist and all her subsequent radiology was here as well.

The team - our GP, the Surgeon, the oncologist and the radiologist all know each other well and we had the benefit of their being able to work as a team.

The support staff - in oncology and radiology all live as neighbors and treat everyone as a neighbor - with great compassion.

This is a great day and we are truly blessed.

Hope is 30

On October 19th, my dearest daughter Hope will be 30. Oh how time flies!

30! I think that 30 today was maybe 21 40 years ago. The end of childhood in the modern age. Just as maybe 60 is the old 40? I should be so lucky.

Every parent thinks that their child is special - so please indulge a father's pride - I am a fortunate man.

So Hopey - may fortune too shine upon you for all time and may you too be blessed with children such as I have been.

The Face of Evil - Cat Jekyll and Hyde

She looks sweet - but - we live with a serial killer. Nearly every night she returns with some poor rodent. Some are simply left to run around in the house like the one last night that ran over Robin's head at 3.30am. I won't go into details but you can imagine her response.

Some are almost entirely consumed with just maybe a furry face or a gall bladder left on the carpet. Some, like the night before last, look as if Pussee (her name) is learning biology and has displayed the inside of the body for us to review.

During the day, she hangs around and sleeps - only interrupted by official meal times. She sometimes prances along with me and the dogs for part of the walk. My favorite times are when Jay feels she is too close and shows her all his teeth - I keep praying!

Well enough is enough. We have taken down the cat ladder that enabled her to get to our bedroom window and meow for attention. I long for the snow when her hunting ceases and we get a break from disposing of all the dead bodies.

The dogs and I are fed up.