'U' define Canadian

Living in a border town we are inundated with many things American. I live within sight of the Renaissance Centre - General Motors World Headquarters, in Detroit. I hear the ships on the Detroit River, I get Detroit news on three stations and only one Canadian station, we tend to use both metric and imperial measurements here, and the list goes on.

Here more than anywhere else, it's really hard to define 'Canadian'. Sure we like hockey, we're laid back, we take a different view of the world than most other nations; I still believe we're a peacekeeping nation rather than a fighting one. Our economy isn't in the toilet like many other countries, believe or not. We don't have quite as many boarded up homes around here from when the bottom dropped out of the housing market in the states. Detroit is a mess - take a look from Google Earth and you can see entire blocks laid waste and nothing but empty areas of urban overgrowth. It's really too bad what' gone on there. But here, we still thrive.

I have met many Americans here, most have been quite nice, intelligent and to look and talk to them you would never know their origin. I've also talked to some close minded idiots. Not by choice, believe me. I remember one guy being completely amazed that we had a McDonald's restaurant here, and another guy who thought that all of our cars would be different than American cars. (I really don't know what he was getting at there). I didn't have the time or the inclination to tell him that many cars on American roads are built in Canada. That would have made his brain explode.

Of all the things that make us unique, nothing stands out more than our language and speech. Having worked in publishing for many years I am a grammar nazi. I hate things being spelt incorrectly and used inappropriately. I walk down streets and read signs and when I see a mistake in the spelling I want desperately to go in and smack the proprietor. We use the Queen's English here. That means one thing to most people - extra useless letters, mostly 'U'. For example - humour, clamour, colour, cheque, endeavour, neighbour, etc. Our language is a combination of American and Queen's English, also heavily influenced by our own french heritage. We also have this nasty little habit of switching letters around just for fun, for example - centre instead of center.

I always corrected these idiosyncrasies when I was working, and always will. It's a small thing that bothers me, even though I could pick more important battles. But our identity is not yet truly defined in the world. Canadians as a people are generally boring in the eyes of the world. We don't start fights, we keep to ourselves, we travel a lot without saying a lot, and we play a lot of hockey. Ironically, our national sport is lacrosse. Figure that one out. We tend to take on traits of European nations instead of following the lead of our largest and closest neighbour, the US. We have a parliamentary system, we have a governor general, we still consider the Queen our head of state. But we also have the Canadian Football League. We seem to be towing the line between two different cultures. There's nothing wrong with that, I just prefer to create our own identity and not have one thrust upon us.

So we raise a glass to the maple leaf. Even though one of my neighbours flies the star spangled banner.

Cheers.

The Tree

The tree was our play place in 1978. It was an old oak near the edge of a field that my friends and I would spend hours playing around, on, under and in. Someone at some point had nailed boards to make it easier to climb, I guess they had hoped to build a tree house someday, and never got around to it. But that didn't matter to us, the tree was so sprawling with branches that several of us managed to get into it at once and play.

When you're nine and hiding in a huge oak tree you feel like you're on top of the world. You can see roof tops, and it feels as if birds fly under you instead of over you. We were fearless there, nobody ever felt like they would fall out, and nobody ever did, but that didn't ease our parent's fears about the tree. To us it was a wonderland.

Summer days were spent there. It was our meeting place, our starting place for adventures, we even tried to finish the tree house at one point, but we weren't allowed to borrow the tools we needed from our homes. Long summer days turned into long fall days, and eventually we'd have to leave the tree to it's winter state, stripped of it's foliage, then we played in the snow, under the tree of course.

From the tree we could see our school - Roseville Public; way off in the distance, across a huge park. We could also see the townhouses that made up Roseville, and the farmers fields that at that time came right to the edge of the park, and only yards from the tree. Sometimes we would play hide and seek in the fields when the corn was up, until we were chased out or left for something more adventurous to do. But the tree was always our way back. We never got lost as long as we could see it.

I only lived there for a year, but that was one of the best summer's I'd ever had. When we moved away I didn't think about the tree too often, being as young as I was I found other places to occupy my energy.

But I never forgot about the tree.

Last night I had a panic attack that was worse than any I've had in months. Kim sat with me and walked me through a peaceful place. In her calming way, she directed my thoughts to a tree in a field, on a bright summer day. A tree so big it's shadow cast out across the waving grass a hundred yards from it's source. As I calmed myself down, I saw my tree. It was like she was in my head. My memories immediately fell back to 1978 and being a young boy playing with my friends at the tree.

It's still there. My son and I went for a long bike ride a while back and we found ourselves in Roseville. I found the tree. It was still healthy and large, but not as big as I remember it. The boards were gone, but I could remember where every one was. I stood there for a while staring at it, and a flood of memories came flowing back, my friends, the branches, meeting under the tree, all of it. The field in the back is now full of factories, but the park and school are still there. What bothered me most though, was that the tree was now on private property of a factory, surrounded by an eight foot fence. No longer would young boys be climbing it. It was so close, yet so far. But at least it's a part of my youth I can still see, even if I can't climb it anymore.

Thank you Kim, for bringing this memory back to me.

Making a list and checking it twice

I posted that as my Facebook status the other day, and for some unbenounced reason everyone thought that my mental illness had taken over and I thought it was still Christmas. While I have had many bad days, delusions have yet to take place. Hence the list - I'm working on not having delusions.

I'm working on fixing the thing in my head before it gets worse. The little part of my brain that says 'you're sick, I'm proof, and you're getting worse'. It's the Oblong Blahblahgetcha or some stupid latin medical term, I don't know. I have learned that my particular illness is the misfiring of serotonin and a couple of other chemicals to the synapses - too much misfiring. The extra chemicals cause me to over stimulate and eventually crash. That's the basis of the panic attacks. I am therefore on meds called SSRIs - Selective Serotonin Release Inhibitors.

To put it in a short term - it stops me from firing all barrels at once.

But the other side of that coin is depression. For that, I need a kick in the ass. It drives me nuts that one day I can be running around doing all kinds of things with all kinds of energy, and the next, I can't get out of the chair. Hence my list.

I have to put everything in writing now so that I get things done. It used to be called the 'honey do list'. Now its the 'get off your ass list'. The main difference is the author.

I have resigned my job, something that scared the hell out of me for the longest time, even though I knew I would never go back to it, but I held on to it because of hope, hope that I would come around and go back, the logical side of me never saw that, only the delusional side. So resigning has added several items to a list - getting my record of employment, getting a letter from my psych explaining why in order to apply for EI, etcetera.

I had a particularly bad week last week, and went to the hospital on my own accord to see a crisis worker, more crap to the list. I have to get my referral to the Mood and Anxiety Clinic and send it to the CMHA.

The crisis centre wants me to get a referral to another psychiatrist, hence one more thing on the list - a visit to my family doctor with a name and a doctor's name. I also need more bloodwork. Side note - I used to have a terrible fear of needles, now I've had so much blood taken since I got sick that I don't care if they take it out of my tongue.

And so much more to do, I won't go into all the details. So I'm not thinking Santa's around the corner, I'm not going completely nuts, I'm just putting yet more ducks in a row. So many in fact, that I dream of ducks. Too many fucking ducks. All lined up in nice neat rows.

Such is the process of the modern medical system. Lists, weird dreams about ducks, and strange un-pronounceable body parts. I'm going on 10 months since my diagnosis of Bipolar, and now it's more of an inconvenience than an illness. I guess that's progress.

Cheers.

Everything for a reason, for everything, a time

For most of my life I've been living my father's lies.

He lied to us from the day we were born about his history, his experiences, his past. He kept everything truthful from us, except his generous spirit and sense of humour. He couldn't fake those, for those were the qualities that beyond everything else is what he's remembered for. Not his military service, not his jobs, or his fetish for building models, but for nailing my mother's shoes to the floor. That's the dad I remember.

All our lives he forbade us from researching his family. When my mother was bit by the genealogy bug years ago, he shook his head and said "why bother - they're no use to us dead". My mom just shook her head and told him to go back to his doll houses. (another hobby - he built doll houses and gave them away to needy kids). Before she died in 2002 my mother had managed to trace portions of our heritage back to the Huguenots in France, and proven United Empire Loyalist Status. She uncovered many mysteries and interesting stories about our ancestors, and for that she left us a legacy of knowledge. We know, at least on her side, where we came from.

Dad just shook his head and reaffirmed to us that he did not want that route taken with his side. We willingly obliged him, and short of his stories, never pursued his family.

Dad began getting sick around 2006. Eventually dementia wore its way in to his wonderful head and heart. He began getting his stories mixed up. His facade was falling. He began to mistake his children for his siblings, all of whom he said died in the Coventry blitz in 1942. He always said he was the only one who survived because he was off at war at that time in India and Burma. One day he said something to Kim and I that unravelled everything - he said "I wonder if any of them are still alive?"

Kim and I both looked at each other, and knew then that the stories were fabricated. We knew he had led us all down the garden path he created for us. Now we needed to know.

Knowing that his time was short we began having leading conversations with him. Kim is especially good with this, she had a bond with dad that none of us could, and she began asking more questions, which he freely answered, without straying too far from the wartime storyline. Bits and pieces of a former life were coming through.

We knew then that somewhere in Scotland, we had cousins, and possibly aunts and uncles.

We never broke our vow to dad. We did not pursue anything at that time. It wasn't until he passed away in 2009 that we decided we needed the right answers. My sister did all the dirty work, sending away for documentation from the Scottish government. These docs proved our theory - we had family there.

For the past two years we've been following leads with no luck. This weekend, we struck gold. Several weeks ago out of frustration I posted a Facebook message to dozens of Wilsons in the area in Scotland we knew the family originated. The message was full of names and dates that would surely convince someone also related to these people that we too were family. I also wrote on that message that if this doesn't apply to you, please forgive our intrusion and move on with your lives. One person replied on Saturday confirming that he is indeed our cousin.

We found a living relative in Scotland.

After 43 years of lies, we are closer to truth than ever before. The elation of that moment will stay with me. I stared at his message for the longest time, and could not reply. I could not even read it to Kim - I called her over for her to look at. Then I called my sister and read it to her - she started crying.

This person was skeptical, and wanted proof we weren't scamming him. I understand that in this age of electronic deception, and we had to find him proof of who we really were. I can only imagine his reaction as well - he are these people from the other side of the world claiming to be cousins. We gave him proof and answered his questions. But we have so many.

Yesterday we arranged a group chat that lasted about 2 hours, and just got to know one another. We asked a few questions, but tried not to overload him. He's younger than me, so he's not of a generation that knows the answers readily. But he is willing to dig for us. That's a great start. That's the beginning of a relationship that we hope will first off bear fruit and answer the lies, and secondly, open relations between one family on 2 continents.

We found the answers we were looking for. The feeling of overwhelming jubilation set in. Last night I couldn't sleep. I just kept thinking about the weekend and what we've found.

I wonder if winning the lottery feels like this. Somehow, money can't compare to the feeling of having your heart lifted so high.

Cheers.

Huge Elephants

I'm about an hour away from doing something that will affect me greatly. It scares the hell out of me.

My diagnosis has messed up everything I know in the past year and I've had to make a lot of difficult decisions. But everything to this point pales in comparison to the one I have to make this morning. I will be meeting with my psychiatrist soon to decide whether or not to go back to work. Part of me wants to, but a bigger part of me realizes that I can't - not in the job I have waiting for me in it's present form.

The medication and therapy has not worked as it should and I'm still having major issues. Most days are good, but bad ones are enough to make everyone around me cringe. The fear and panic associated with the disorder is unbearable at times and I just want it to stop, but I have to let it ride it's course. No medication helps. No soothing music, or calm voice helps, I just have to ride it out. There is progress on this, I'm getting a referral to the Mood and Disorder Clinic this morning, problem is the waiting list for that program is six months long. I'm also on the list for a CMHA worker to begin working with me soon. (Canadian Mental Health Association).

So here I go, into the unknown yet again, list of questions and arguments in hand. Hopefully I can make more progress today, but the one elephant in the room isn't shrinking. He's growing. Gotta stop feeding that damn elephant.

Cheers.