Groundhog Day At the Airport

Aug12
Parlez-vous Fracais?

A lilting tune violently tore me away from deep slumber. I resentfully opened my eyes to total darkness. The crisp white bed linen wrapped around me and the huge bed that surrounded my body didn’t feel familiar. In the darkness nearby, I heard my daughter, Tammie, say, “Mamma? Wake up. It’s time to get going.” She turned on the bedside light next to her bed and the brightness blinded me. The last twenty-four hours instantly came back to mind. It had been late when we entered this room and now, while it was still the middle of the night, we had to get up and leave.

Despite the two huge, five-acre sized beds in the room, there was only one bathroom. I told Tammie to use it first. While waiting for my turn to use the bathroom, my thoughts drifted back to yesterday morning. I was up before seven A.M. The alarm clock hadn’t even gone off. Instead of feeling relaxed and looking forward to a day spent on the cruise ship, I mentally listed all the things my daughters, granddaughter and I had to do before disembarking in Quebec City, Canada. Our lovely week spent on a cruise ship had come to an end.

I felt uneasy because I didn’t know how the day would work out. Since our flight at the Quebec airport didn’t leave until the afternoon, Tammie said there was time to use a Hop-On-Hop-Off bus to tour the city, but there would not be enough time to get off at any of the stops. I wondered what we would do with our luggage while on the tour bus. I didn’t know where we had to go to get picked up by the bus. I worried about getting to the airport on time.

The cruise terminal agreed to hold our luggage for a small fee while we went sightseeing. A parking lot bus took us to a spot near one of the tour bus stops. Surprised that everything was falling into place, I relaxed and looked forward to seeing a bit of Quebec City. We didn’t know where the tour bus pick-up was, and all the signs in Quebec are in French. None of us could read them, so we walked several blocks before realizing we had walked a long way past the pick-up spot.

Finally, the bus came. I didn’t want to sit in the sun, so I stayed on the lower level, but Niki, Tammie and Claire sat on the top deck where the view was better. The name, Quebec, is an Algonquian word. These were the indigenous people who lived there when Europeans arrived. In their language it meant, “Where the river narrows.” Quebec is also the name of the province where the city is located. When speaking about Quebec, it is necessary to differentiate which one is being mentioned, Quebec City or the province.

The bus followed a highway that had me swiveling my head to see everything. Below and to the left was the Saint Lawrence River; to the right was a steep cliff that towered over the bus. I saw something on the cliff sparkling in the sunshine. The earbud guide said that in 1540 when French explorer Jacques Cartier saw this sparkling cliff, he was convinced he was seeing diamonds. He gathered some of the stones. But when he was back in France, he was told they were just quartz crystals. Despite that disappointment, the place is still called Cape Diamond.

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It’s All Fun!

Aug5
Our tour of Quebec was on a sunny day. Tammie sat on the top deck. The view from there was excellent, but unfortunately she was painfully sunburned!

Tammie pulled out her phone to take notes, and I had a tablet when we sat down across from each other in the living room. My daughter stated, “Let’s get this all figured out tonight, because shore excursions filled up really fast before our last cruise.” I did remember. There had been some excursions that were fully booked by the time we looked at what we wanted to do!

I also remembered that we had managed to schedule shore excursions at each port of call. The things we saw and did were fun, but when our ship pulled out of dock, I wished that Tammie and I would have had time to visit the town built around the port. Also, the cost of all those shore excursions had doubled the cost of my cruise.

That night, Tammie and I agreed that the only excursion we really wanted to go on was the one that would show us where the story about Anne of Green Gables took place.

Three months before taking this cruise, I had had my right hip replaced. Walking suddenly felt good again. While aboard ship, I surprised myself by walking a few laps around the promenade deck with my daughter, Niki. Although walking was painless, I was out of shape. Our first port of call on Sunday morning was Portland, Maine. Tammie said, “The church where we will attend Mass is just a few blocks from the dock.” What I failed to remember or maybe didn’t realize was that the distance was all uphill! I wasn’t used to that type of energetic walking.

We stopped often and rested along the way. When we arrived at the church, we were told, “Because today is Corpus Christi, Mass will take place at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.” He pointed uphill and said, “It’s just a block or two up that street.”

In Halifax, we bought tickets for a Hop-On, Hop-Off bus. This line of ancient, double-decker buses had a set route through the city, stopping at several places of interest. By the time we finished going through the Halifax maritime museum, we only waited five minutes for another bus to roll up.

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Anne of Green Gables

Jul29

Blindingly bright afternoon sunshine streamed through the large western window into my living room. I pulled the drapes shut. The afternoon was warm, and my old brick farmhouse could retain coolness for most of the day if Istopped the sunshine from coming in and toasting the living room carpet. The sweet aroma of baked chocolate chip bars filled the air.

While transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer, I heard the back door of the house slam. My daughters were home. My husband, Arnie, would soon be home, too. I congratulated myself on good timing. The dessert bars were cooling on the counter, and the family supper would be ready in about an hour.

I walked into the living room with a basket of laundry that needed to be folded and found my twelve-year-old and sixteen-year-old daughters lying on the living room floor watching ‘Anne of Green Gables’ on television. Sitting down on the sofa, I pulled the laundry basket closer to me. Tammie popped up at my knee and asked, “When will we be having supper? We want a chocolate chip bar!”

Shaking the wrinkles out of a pair of jeans, I admitted, “I couldn’t resist eating a small wedge of it when it was fresh from the oven. We won’t eat for another hour. Cut a small serving for yourselves. I doubt it’ll ruin your appetites.”  Pausing the VHS tape, Niki and Tammie jumped to their feet and ran into the kitchen.

Buying the ‘Anne of Green Gables’ VHS set with Meghan Follows as Anne, had been a wise decision. My daughters watched the series repeatedly. I loved watching it with them. Both daughters swooned over good-looking Gilbert Blythe. They became frustrated with how Anne Shirley treated him. We all laughed when red-haired Anne smashed her school slate over Gilbert’s head when he called her ‘Carrots’. Anne did many foolish things like confusing a jar of raspberry juice with raspberry cordial. As a result, her greedy ‘bosom friend’, Diana Barry, got very drunk. We cried over sweet, gentle, Matthew’s death and Marilla regretting her decision as a young woman that ended her relationship with John Blythe.

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Mid-West Gourmet

Jul22
Escargot, a.k.a. snails

The hostess led me, my daughters, and granddaughter though the busy dining room to an empty table. Outside the many dining room windows that lined the huge room, we could see choppy, blue-gray water rushing past our ship, the MS Zuiderdam. We had left port hours ago, and were now traveling through the open, northern Atlantic Ocean.

Once seated, and with cloth napkins spread open on our laps, our waiter handed us menus. The starters listed that evening were jumbo shrimp cocktail, tomato and red bell pepper bisque, escargot Bourguignon and lentil Tabbouleh salad with feta. I ordered, “The escargot, please.”

I knew what I was ordering. My appetizer that evening would be snails floating in garlic butter, accompanied by a four-inch-long bun that looked like a small loaf of French bread. Many people refuse to eat escargot because they think they would be slimy and disgusting. I discovered that the little snails are delicious, and not slimy at all! I ordered escargot twice on my most recent cruise.

Having grown up on a dairy farm, I know where milk, cheese, butter and ice cream comes from and how it is made, but when I got home from my trip, I started to wonder if there was such a thing as a snail farm. I knew I had to do some research after a person asked me, “Was the escargot slimy? Because, after all, a snail is just a garden slug that wears a shell.”

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Know Your Neighbor

Jul15

Rain splattered against the kitchen window. I peered through rivulets streaming down the screen. Water-logged trees and bushes in my backyard were whipping back and forth in strong gusts of wind. Feeling chilled despite the warmth of a summer afternoon, I picked up my sweater from the kitchen chair and pulled it on. I felt bored and restless. There were plenty of household chores that I could do, but I didn’t feel like doing them. 

My daughter, Tammie, was sitting on the sofa in the living room busily doing a Japanese thread craft called kumihimo. I glanced around at the dim lighting and turned on a lamp. Chuckling, I said, “I’m turning into Grammie Altmann. Do you remember how she’d always tell us to turn on the lamps because doing close-up work in poor lighting would ruin our eyes?” 

Holding up the braid she was working on for me to admire, she admitted, “Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m starting to understand where she was coming from. My eyes feel a little less strained when the light is on.” 

Pulling the drapes shut and turning on another lamp, I complained, “I feel bored. There are plenty of things I could do, even fun things like working on my latest jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t feel like doing any of it.” Sinking down onto my favorite chair, I pointed the remote at the television and turned it on. Flipping from one channel to the next, I quickly concluded that there wasn’t much that was interesting to watch.  

One channel featured a reporter standing on a busy, big city, street corner, asking people passing him to answer some basic questions. Curious, I paused my channel flipping. The reporter asked a young woman which country was north of the United States.  She frowned, scratched her head and after a long pause uncertainly questioned, “Ummm. Alaska?” My daughter and I exclaimed in disbelief. 

Other questions the reporter asked were just as simple. He asked, “How many eggs are there in a dozen?” “How many quarters would you need to have two dollars?” “How many ounces are there in one cup, one pint, one quart?” “What country borders the USA to the south?” No one gave the correct answer to any of the questions.  

I exclaimed, “Don’t people learn any of these things in school anymore? This show makes me wonder. At the hospital, to determine if a patient is confused, nurses often ask patients questions like, ‘who’s the president of the United States?’ If someone just doesn’t know, does that mean they are confused?” 

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Vacation food

Jul8

Our daughters had wandered away to play in the living room when they finished eating. My husband and I continued to sit at the table discussing our plans for the rest of the day. Arnie told me where he was going and what time he’d get back home. My response was, “What would you like for supper tonight, hamburgers in mushroom gravy or chicken?”

Arnie turned to look at me with a startled expression on his face. He exclaimed, “My gosh, woman! Don’t you ever stop thinking about food? We just finished eating a meal and now you’re already thinking about eating again!”

I responded indignantly, “Do you somehow think that the meals I make are whipped up in half and hour with no planning? The meat is frozen. It needs to be thawed out. Then it must be prepped and roasted or fried long enough for it to get done!”

To be fair, the only ‘meals’ that my husband ever made were fried eggs, fried freshly caught fish or cheese and sausage sandwiches that he hastily slapped together during a commercial. The ingredients Arnie needed to make these meals were always magically found in the kitchen when he wanted them. He didn’t seem to recognize that it took planning ahead on my part when buying groceries.

Shortly after our daughter, Niki, was married, she commented one day to me about how hard it was to constantly make meals. I knew what she meant. Making one meal is easy, but looking ahead to making a lifetime of meals is intimidating.

Through the years, Niki became a pro at planning and making meals for a large family. Every summer, she takes a vacation with her children. Since eating every meal at restaurants would be very expensive, my daughter makes meals ahead, freezes them, and packs them in ice-filled coolers. Motel room kitchenettes are small and inconvenient, but she manages to provide her children with good, home-made vacation food.

My other daughter, Tammie, and I took a cruise last year. When we got home, we talked non-stop about the wonderful meals that we were served aboard the ship. This year when the opportunity for us to take another cruise came up, I invited Niki to join us. She accepted the invitation and commented she couldn’t remember when she last took a vacation that didn’t require her to make meals ahead that had to be frozen and packed in an icebox.

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Destination: Cubby-Holes

Jul1

A growl of thunder woke me up. Rain pounding on my bedroom window clung to the glass and transformed into long rivulets that traced the same path over, and over again. My sister Mary, with whom I shared the bedroom, was already up. I crawled out from under the covers and wandered downstairs and into the kitchen. Two of my sisters were there finishing the breakfast dishes.

Mary said, “You finally decided to get up?”

My other sister made fun of my tangled hair by pointing out, “You have a rat’s nest on the back of your head.” A flash of lightning was followed by a long, low grumble of thunder. The windows in the kitchen were open. A warm, slightly damp breeze caressed my cheeks.

Mom walked into the kitchen and commented, “It’s dark in the house as though it was early dawn instead of ten in the morning.” Turning to me she said, “Go on and get dressed, Kathy, and try to get those tangles out of your hair.” I nodded as I spread butter on a slice of bread and took a huge bite.

After our noon meal, Mom announced, “Since I can’t work in the garden today, I’m going to spend the afternoon sewing.” I slowly followed her upstairs where she had her sewing machine. Since rain was forecast to come and go all day, that meant I’d be spending the day inside the house, too.

One of the small closets in our house that my family called cubby-holes was near the sewing machine. I pulled the door open. Even I had to bend over to enter this storage space. On the right side of this closet were boxes of clothing patterns and scraps of material. Down the center, there was a taut wire filled with clothes hangers holding fancy clothing like prom and wedding dresses. I instinctively didn’t touch my sister’s wedding dresses but took down the prom dresses to play dress-up.

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What is weird?

Jun24

My late husband Arnie and I met at age eighteen and married within the year. Being so young, we fought like name-calling little kids when we had disagreements. One weekend while playing Scrabble, we disagreed about a word I used. My old, ragged dictionary came out to prove a point. In a huff, Arnie took the thick tome and wrote on it, “Kathy The Weird-One Altmann”.

I didn’t know what made me angrier: that he called me weird, or that he used my maiden name, or that he wrote on a book! We came from similar backgrounds, but we were very different in nature. Arnie always insisted that my family had a weird sense of humor.  He held to this point of view right to the end.

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Countdown

Jun17

My daughter Tammie cheerfully announced, “Our cruise ship will be leaving the dock in seven days, eight hours and thirteen minutes.” Looking down at the cruise ship’s navigator app in her phone, she questioned, “Have you looked at the dining room menu? What would you order if you were on the ship today?”

I complained, “The closer we get to leaving for the cruise, the more anxious I feel. I feel like a child waiting for Christmas Eve and Santa’s visit.”

“That’s wonderful, isn’t it?” exclaimed my daughter, like a true high school cheerleader.

Frowning, I slowly shook my head no and explained, “When you and your sister were little, the last few days before Christmas was painful. Your anticipation and hopes made you emotional, anxious little people, which made me feel sad. The holiday was supposed to be fun. Instead, you wished away all the days and the fun things we could do leading up to Christmas. You just wanted that one day to arrive.”

Holding up her phone for me see the screen, Tammie asked, “Doesn’t looking at the navigator app make you think about the fun things we will get to do, to see, to experience?”

I insisted, “The app does make me think about all those things, but since I can’t do them until we get to the ship, I feel like I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I feel like I am wishing my life away.”

The phrase, ‘wishing my life away’ made me think of my mother. When I was in third grade one evening before Christmas, I lamented to my mother how I didn’t like waiting for Christmas Eve and wished it would hurry up and come. My fifty-five-year-old mother’s sage advice was, “Don’t wish your life away.”

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To Bend Again

Jun10

The minute I turned into the parking lot I saw them: tall, shelved carts filled with colorfully blossoming plants. The store’s garden center appeared to have more plants than room, so the workers had lined the sidewalk beside the store with the overflow.
Usually, going to a garden center fills me with excitement and anticipation. Today, remembering that I was only two and a half months post hip replacement, I felt ambivalent. I wanted to buy plants, put in a garden, and take care of flowerbeds, but I didn’t know if I could physically bend over far enough to do the necessary work. Immediately after the surgery, bending at the waist more than 90 degrees was prohibited.


I’ve been feeling afraid to bend down to weed my flowerbeds for fear of hurting myself and find that I quickly tire after a very short spell of work, but I keep trying. Slowly, I’m hoping to build my stamina back up.


As I walked though the aisles of plants, picking out a modest amount of baby plants that needed to be tucked into a moist, earthen bed, my excitement mounted to the point where I ended up buying more plants than I had originally planned to buy. When I reported my purchases to my daughter I explained, “Do you remember the comedian who liked to claim, ‘The devil made me do it!?’ Well, the devil had nothing to do with my plant purchases. What happened was that an able-bodied gardener temporally took possession of my body and made me do it.”


Speaking of the devil, besides worrying about my post-surgical ability to bend enough to garden, I also worried about the overwhelming number of blood-sucking insects in my yard.

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