On aging

My honest opinion: don't do it.  

Poh Poh (the Big Yam's Tai Poh) got a spot in a nursing home this past week and was moved into her new digs on Wednesday.  We went to visit her on Sunday evening with my mum.  

The good: the facility is a Chinese one, is close to my mum's house, and is a newer building so everything looks fresher and cleaner and brighter than some of the other, sadder places I've seen (like that one on the corner of Dufferin and Bloor).
The bad: it's a nursing home, people.  They suck, any way you cut it.

The staff were all really sweet.  I think something about the Chinese filial-piety, veneration of the elderly thing means that there's inherently more respect and care for the elderly, but maybe I'm projecting.  I will say that I'd be very surprised if the staff that I met were capable of elder abuse, whereas that hasn't been the case of other retirement residences/nursing homes I've come across.  My Poh Poh's Alzheimer's means that she's on a floor that has restricted access - to prevent people from wandering off and strangers from getting in.  

There's nothing to say - it's grim, but in order to assuage my mum's guilt over having to put my Poh Poh in there, I will say that the grimness is inherent to the generalized process of getting so old/incapacitated that you can no longer care for yourself/be cared for by loved ones who have external full-time responsibilities, and nothing to do with the facility.  We arrived at meal-time and all the residents on that floor eat together at one time, grouped at tables.  The food smelled pretty good.  I think another thing about the specificity of Chinese-run facilities is that (as far as I know), the specific Chinese foods they're serving have to be made fresh and can't necessarily be delivered in powdered form from a Serca or Beaver Foods truck.  

She has a private room that overlooks the courtyard and features utilitarian, hospital-issue furniture with her own bathroom.  It's all pretty institutional-looking but there are activities to do every day (like karaoke - Dotytron: "I have a feeling that particular session is pretty hilare," and cooking classes and gardening) and this is only her first week there.  

The Big Yam, bless his little geriatric-loving heart, was in high spirits.  He's been talking about "maybe see Tai Poh" for the last few weeks and when we picked up my mum to go, he said to my mum, "Go see Tai Poh's new house" and my mum (who is hearing impaired), said, "we're going to see Tai Poh's new home" and the Big Yam replied matter-of-factly, "yes" (more correctly, it sounds like "yesth" with his lisp).  It's pretty cute watching him and my mum interact because they frequently have parallel conversations about the same thing entirely in short, observational sentences with an economy of language.  He was SO HAPPY to see his Tai Poh and of course, the other residents on my Poh Poh's floor (the ones who were more aware of their surroundings) loved him.  

This one old guy was like, "he's grown so much!" (I've never met him before in my life) and kept giving the Big Yam an enthusiastic thumbs-up and big, toothless, gummy grins.  When we went around the corner, the Big Yam pulled on my hand wanting to see "Gung Gung again" (Gung Gung being a general, respectful designation for an older man.)  

It relieved a lot of the internal pangs to see the Big Yam in that environment.  First of all, it made my Poh Poh so happy.  Second of all, it helped make some of the other residents happy.  Third of all, he's at the perfect age where he's so blissfully unaware of his surroundings that he can interact with her without being aware in the slightest that she's not 100% herself.  I'm not going to lie: it was emotionally really hard for me and the Dotytron (and my mum too, I'm sure).  An old woman in a wheelchair was periodically shouting a nonsense refrain from her room, at nothing.  It is a strange hinterland that people with Alzheimers and similar degenerative brain conditions occupy and it hurts you, as the outside observer because of their liminality - my Poh Poh is at once lucid and aware enough of her own surroundings to know she's not at home, and yet, not so aware or unaware that she can either continue to live with my parents or fail to care about her immediate environment (assuming that any level of brain degeneration results in enough loss of sentience that one can reach the point of not caring at all, on any level).  

I try to take comfort in the fact that the Big Yam and my Poh Poh have such a special bond and such a special relationship, but it is a bond that makes us unbelievably happy and sad at the same time.  Because he won't be able to understand when she's gone.  Because he's so young that he won't be able to remember how they were best buds.  Because life is inevitably about losing people you love and being lost in turn.  

It's an old chestnut, but a true one: every day, is a getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster.  The amount of things that have happened in the past 5 years, both good and bad, is staggering.  I blink and I find myself married, with a home, a kid, and down 4 grandparents, and a father-in-law.  I don't know how we're supposed to manage it, and by "it" I mean "life."  

I'm in a melancholy mood.  I re-read The Fault In Our Stars because I picked it for our book club next Wednesday and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The season doesn't help.  Reading about mortality and love and what it means to live and die doesn't particularly help.  That book is SO GOOD.  So good, but not really doing much to dispel the glumness of my latest trifecta of read books.

The Mansion of Happiness is a collection of Jill Lepore's essays on life and death (as the cover says).  The essays are loosely related, but generally use one illustrative example (like, the board game from which the book derives it's title) to use as an aperture into how American views on life and death have changed over the past 150 years.  The essays can be a little disjointed from one another, but I particularly found the ones on birth control and the right to life movement fascinating, as well as the ones that detail the regrettable perversion of Darwin's theory of evolution into social Darwinism and the subjugation of certain races and classes of people.  The first essay is a bit of a slog, but after that, I found the rest of them quick going, with a lot of interesting factual nuggets and a feminist slant.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers earned it's Pulitzer Prize like whoa.  This is investigative, immersive non-fiction that lies at the junction between anthropology, sociology, and Dickens.  Detailing the lives of select residents of Annawadi, a slum that lies at the edge of the Mumbai International Airport, bordered by luxury hotels, over the course of 4 years.  This is a ground-level study of global capitalism and the seemingly insurmountable division between the ruling classes in a booming metropolis of the new millennium, and the shifting underclass that lives on the margins, endlessly searching for openings to grab a foothold on stability and to rise up from poverty.  The book is descriptive - there is little editorializing from Boo on the widespread corruption, hope, despair, and capriciousness that make up the stories of the Annawadi residents.  This is globalisation and it is capitalism in all its raw, unfettered glory.  Where there are opportunities for upward mobility but where these opportunities are dependent as much on luck and fate as hard work and skill.  Here are the clashes between old beliefs and new, between traditional gender roles and a new world for educated women, where Muslims and Hindus are forced to live side-by-side, where caste still matters even as the city churns itself towards a newly imagined, democratic future-self.  I can't say enough good things about this book.  It is staggering in its scope and execution.  The questions that Katherine Boo asked to land in Annawadi are central to anyone hoping to understand the realities of unfettered capitalism outside of the North American context.  

Katherine Boo is so damned smart.  This is her quote from the afterword of the book: "It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people ARE good, and that many people try to be..." 

See?  Smart.  That quote and the experiences of the people in this book also made me re-think some of the unquestioned, institutionalised racism towards First Nations in Canada  that I had unconsciously been allowing to color my views of the "Idle No More" movement that's been happening.  I needed that kind of re-alignment and re-assessment of my unconscious biases and I'm glad that this book kick-started it.

The rest of the weekend was busy.  Chinese school, grocery shopping, visiting our friends R & R and seeing their new little baby M, who slumbered away in my arms like a quiet little sack of teeny tiny (fingerling) potatoes.  We started watching Homeland, which I enjoy 150% more than Deadwood, if only because it provides lots of opportunities to see Claire Danes do her signature-Claire-Danes ugly cry.  It also provides lots of chances to crack up any time someone says the name "Abu Nazir" with intense solemnity.  It's super-far-fetched but I find it way more engaging than Deadwood.

On Friday I made us homemade Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supremes.  These were AWESOME.    I based it off this recipe, which is less a recipe and more of a wake-up call to spark the thought that OH MY GOD, OF COURSE I CAN MAKE THESE AT HOME.  Very filling, but very delicious.  I made my life easier by pressing them in the panini press and also crunching up the tostadas into big pieces, which made folding the (whole wheat) tortillas around the filling much easier.  Big hit:

Sunday we went for all you can eat hot pot with my mum, after R & R stuffed us with a million Babu treats (fish patties and samosas).  The Big Yam seriously ate at least 4-5 different treats (which Babu charmingly calls "Shorteats") and the patties were SPICY!  He kept reaching for another one after I tried to cut him off.  He's a total Tamil Tiger.  Consequently, he was ruined for any food at hot pot.

Tonight we had tuna noodle casserole with my patented buttered challah cube topping, alongside green beans and brussels sprouts.

And that bring us to the end of this lengthy post.

Remember: don't get old (but also don't die young - you can see the bind you're in).

Fin.

Do you

The new favorite saying around here revolves around variations of "do you." As in: "Do me?!? Do YOU." Or, when I'm complaining about somebody/something the Dotyron likes to say: "She's doing her right now, you focus on doing you." LOL. Love it. Words to live by.

In good news: our Cleveland pictures came back from the ether!!! Huzzah! I've put them pon the FB - don't know how to put them on Google+ yet but when I do, they will magically appear.

We had Poh Poh and my mum over for dinner last night. I made us that grilled Vietnamese pork meatballs with rice noodle salad dish - nice and cool for a HOT day. For dessert I buttered and grilled slices of pound cake and then topped it with grilled figs and a maple-syrup sweetened whipped thickened yogurt:

It's hotter than a witch's butt out there today. I spent most of yesterday driving around to three (!!!) Canadian Tire locations on an agonizing search for air conditioners. First Canadian Tire was out of stock, even though the website showed in stock. They check their system and tell me to go to Canadian Tire #2 in North York, which purportedly has NINETEEN of the model that I'm looking for. I show up, and OF COURSE they don't have it. So they send me up to Richmond Hill where I finally get it, but not until I've wasted like, 3 hours driving around town dealing with inept retail staff. I was so mad I left a poop-filled diaper in the parking lot of Canadian Tire #2. They're lucking I didn't chuck it at the front doors.

Then we drove back downtown. I needed rice noodles to make the dinner, so since I already had the car I figured I'd break my usual, grocery-shopping-at-multiple-stores-on-the-Danny rule and go to the Loblaw's near my house to get the rice noodles and the rest of my groceries for next week. I have a full cart and I can't find rice noodles. BECAUSE THEY DON'T CARRY THEM. BECAUSE THIS LOBLAW'S MUST BE FREQUENTED BY RUBES. I was soooo mad that I left my full cart of groceries to melt in the aisle. WHAT GROCERY STORE IN TORONTO DOESN'T CARRY RICE NOODLES?!!!???? Brutal.

Came home super hot, super mad, super frustrated. Dinner with my mom and Poh Poh helped. That is until my grandma locked our bathroom door on her way out of the bathroom, thereby rendering us bathroomless. We tried picking the lock with paperclips for half an hour before I knocked on my neighbour's door and he went to town and busted the handle with a pair of vice grips. Lesson learned - better that it happen now before the Big Yam locks himself in one day. It's just the motivation we need to get those glass handles on our doors, stat.

I'm supposed to hang out with my friend M and her baby C today...but it might be too hot to do anything but loll around in the a/c reading books. We'll see. I'm also supposed to head out to get some grocery shopping done...but it's already hot as a mother out there, so I might avoid until tomorrow. I have a passel of book reviews to do - I've been reading up a storm and don't plan on stopping anytime soon, what with two weeks at the cottage looming. Wahoo! Two weeks, mother effers! Although I will miss my Dr. Rei something fierce.

I'm deep in the middle of trimming up my chevron blocks for my quilting project - I'd really love to take my sewing machine to the cottage if it was at all feasible...then I'd be able to get my quilt top finished sometime during the two weeks...hopefully. At this point, the car is so packed to the tits it's not going to be likely.

Fin.

The attack of the killer cat hand

...the thrilling tale of how an over-testosteroned cat almost ruined my weekend. Wednesday afternoon I was sitting out on my neighbour's front lawn doing the usual after-work street hang thing with the Big Yam. The Dotytron opened our screen door to ask me something and I guess Smudge, our cat got outside, immediately saw Lil' Bit, our next door neighbour's cat and started going buck wanting to eat him. Now Smudge is truly the gentlest cat around, INSIDE the house. He routinely sits passively as the Boobla Khan mauls him and cheerfully pulls his tail and yanks out handfuls of his fur. But, outside in the world, he goes a little insane. So I separated the two kitties and then tried to hustle Smudge back into the house, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. He was so amped up that he turned around and chomped down on my hand, pretty deep, before running into the house. This whole exchange took about 2 minutes. Later on in the evening, as I was eating dinner with our Discerning Coyote friend at Bairrada - my hand started swelling up like crazy and it hurt when I lowered it below my heart level - like the dickens.

Thursday morning I called to make an appointment with my doctor, just to see what was going on - when the receptionist triaged me over the phone and I said "cat bite" she immediately got me an appointment for later that afternoon. I wasn't going to keep the appointment, but am I glad I ever did! Dr. T was scaring the bejeezus out of me and totally stoking the smoldering embers of my hypochrondria. He said that the bite was definitely infected and that he was very glad that I came to see him when I did and that he was going to start me on oral antibiotics but if that didn't work then he wanted me to go IMMEDIATELY to the hospital as the next stage was INTRAVENOUS antibiotics. WTF?!???!! He was saying stuff like, "I want you to have a very low tolerance for seeking emergency help if anything changes." !!!!!!!!!! Who knew?!? He also gave me a new tetanus shot (even though I'd had one just 5 years prior) and he called me on Friday and he wanted me to come back first thing Saturday so he could monitor the situation.

Is that insane or what? I was like, what the hell? Who knew cat bites were so serious? Apparently because cat's teeth are so sharp and thin, they can puncture really deep. Their mouths obviously harbor a lot of bacteria, which means the bacteria can be deposited quite deep into the hand and infect tendons. Hands are also considered "high risk" areas for animal bites, because they don't get great blood flow (extremity) and the network of tendons, musculature, etc. is so complicated, which is why he wanted to re-up my tetanus immunization and why he wanted to make sure the infection didn't spread. So he drew a mark around the redness on my hand and told me to go straight to emergency if the redness spread beyond the outline or if the swelling increased or if I broke a fever. Insane. I couldn't believe it. But when I came back on Thursday and told my neighbour, she said her friend got a cat bite on the hand and it spread to his elbow with his forearm all swollen in like, a couple of hours!!!!!!! So let that be a lesson to you - cat hand is no laughing matter.

I was especially bummed about cat hand ruining my weekend. We had plans to go with Supper Club to the Island for a picnic - luckily, by Canada Day the swelling had greatly reduced and the redness had retreated somewhat. So we loaded up the Chariot and biked to the ferry docks which OF COURSE were INSANE with tonnes of n00bs also going to the Island that day. The lineup stretched all the way back to Queen's Quay. Luckily, everyone is going to Centre Island and the Ward's Island ferry was empty. Unluckily for everyone else, they were all crammed onto the Centre Island ferry like sardines, not realizing that all the islands are connected and that the difference is, as our buddy Fox says, "purely psychological." No matter - we sat on the sandy beach of Ward's which looks onto the Leslie spit, facing away from the city and it's lovely. It was a bit of a hipster hang - everyone around us was like 20nothing and look like they ambled out of an American Apparel ad, but it was a hot, sunny day and we picnic'd like kings. Evidence:

The Dotytron and our friend R pulling daddy daycare duty - Dotytron is sporting a women's sun hat.

Master T sporting Liz's sunglasses

Liz holding T and looking radiant

T's buddy, D.

We left the island in the early evening and had grand plans to go to a lobster boil hosted by B's work friend down the street from us, or to catch drinks with Fox and his gf, but by the time we got home, showered, bathed and fed the Big Yam, we were all exhausted. So we had the roomie over for Pakistani take out and front stoop hangs with the neighbourhood kids. It was a lovely way to spend Canada Day, even if we were asleep by 11pm. I love the feeling of being sun drunk - lying on a blanket in the sun all snoozy and lethargic with heavy limbs. Like you could sleep the whole day away...it's one of the few times I let myself be lazy.

I know I've said it before, but I really think I live on the cutest street in all of Toronto. On Thursday evening a few of the neighbours rounded up their kids and we all walked to the ice cream store together in a little caravan - toting kids in strollers, walking, kids pushing other kids on plastic buggies...it was the cutest!!! I love my street - so lucky we have this.

We headed up to Markham after I got the a-ok from the doctor on Saturday - after begrudgingly spending the night downtown on Friday. We hung out with my sister and her kids and celebrated Poh Poh's 89th birthday:

It was bittersweet. I came home last night all sad and on the verge of crying. Sunday was an emotionally draining day. My sister and I had breakfast with my dad on Sunday morning - an airing of the grievances if you will, that was cathartic but still taxing. Then we had a physically draining excursion with the kids to the splash pad in Markham, and then dinner for Poh Poh at Big Mouth Kee.

I was sad when I came home because I was remembering previous year's celebrations of my Poh Poh's birthday - when Kung Kung would organize a giant banquet and book out the whole restaurant and it was a big to-do with like, 9 or 10 tables of guests and a full day of mah jong. This year was a quieter affair - Poh Poh still played mah jong but the cake cutting during the "afternoon tea" portion was much more subdued. It's natural, I suppose - since Kung Kung was the driving force behind all the ostentatious gaiety. But I was just sad. Then I started remembering how ungrateful I was and how I was a jerk one time to my grandparents (I was a jerk MANY times to my grandparents but I was remembering one time in particular) and I started feeling so guilty about awful ways I behaved as a kid and remorseful that I never had a chance to tell Kung Kung I was sorry. This has been a hard year - with Poppa getting sick around this time last year and Kung Kung passing away...it's definitely had a lasting impact on me. The Dotytron and I were talking about it last night - your 30s are such a transitional time. We have experienced so much joy and love from having the Big Yam and maturing into our relationships with our family and extended friend-family network and at the same time, as you get older the reality of it is that you're going to start losing more and more people and that's just the way it is. I was sad last night because I wasn't sure if Kung Kung died knowing that I loved him and was grateful to him for everything he ever did for me.

It's so weird how these random moments can fill you with guilt after the fact. When we were prepping for my fatburger shower last year, I had filled a piping bag with frosting for the mini cupcakes and my sister perked up and said she wanted to try piping the frosting on. So she was doing it and then I saw that she was getting frosting on the floor of the dining room and she wasn't wielding the piping bag properly so I kind of hustled in and took it out of her hands and took over and I'm like, FILLED WITH GUILT about that to this day. For being such a jerk and being so controlling and bossy and perfectionist when my sister had done SO MUCH for me and was so excited for the arrival of the Big Yam and had been so amazing about throwing me a shower and going so above and beyond. She continues to do so much for me. And look at me. I'm an ingrate. I barely did anything for her when she got married and when she had Miss E because I was a no-good 20 year old raver and an underpaid slave drone in the restaurant industry, respectively, when those seminal events happened. Ugh ugh ugh. Soooo guilty!

Sis - I love you the mostest...and even though I won't cut and paste Facebook status memes out of principle - I hope you realize that you're the best sister to me and I feel guilty all the time for not being half as good to you.

See? I'm an emotional wreck. I don't know if I'm hormonal or what. I'm a total suck now. I blame a combination of: turning 30, the loss of 2 great men in my life in the past year, having a baby, my own maudlin sentimentality, and watching a David Simon series (remember how I got when I was watching The Wire regularly? Treme apparently has the same effect).

The plus side of going to the doctor's on Thursday was that they had a table set up for the East York Senior's services network or something, which has volunteer opportunities for people to connect with and help seniors in the community. So I think I'm going to sign up. There's stuff like visiting seniors in their homes or taking them to appointments. The Dotytron: "That's great beebs. But are you just going to cry the whole time?" (I hadn't thought of that. Note to self: get a handle on crying about old people before volunteering with old people organization).

Here are some shots from the splash pad - I have the cutest niece and nephews in the world. Little Big Cuz was not feeling the water so much:

Thursday night's dinner was boss. Pan fried smoked cured pork chops from the mennonites (it's like eating a thick piece of english bacon/ham), new potatoes boiled and tossed while still warm with creme fraiche and scallions, and sugar snaps steamed and tossed with sesame oil from our CSA.

Finally, here's a video of the Big Yam doing his new fish mouth thing while eating. It's the cutest - he does it at the 23 second mark. He's also showing off his "slap the table" technique for more food. We're trying to do the baby sign language for "more" but he much prefers yelling at us and slapping the high chair tray with his hand. Incidentally, baby sign language is kind of weird. There are a bunch of signs for stuff that has NO PRACTICAL PURPOSE! Like "cow" or "butterfly" or "blueberry." I don't need my kid to tell me when he sees a cow! How is that ever going to come up? I think we're going to try for "more" "water" "please" "poo" - you know, the communication that makes MY life easier.

Our friend Pingy is in town so we're hanging out with her in the afternoon. The drop-in centre we usually go to is closed for the year, but one of the parents organizes a Monday thing that runs all summer in a nearby park with a splash pad, so I think we're going to go to that this morning. Our pool is opened so we have TOO MANY possible things to do during the week now. Yay summer! Bye bye sad, hello being grateful and loving life and the awesome people in it!

Fin.