I had a blue weekend.
Just this week I remarked to someone that 2007 was the first year in maybe ten that I didn’t have a bit of an emotional ebb in November. I said I thought it was the daily vitamin D pill I’ve been taking for 6 months. A miracle! But yesterday I felt like I should rebook my old shrink Hammy. We spent almost 3 years together (once a week) earlier this decade after a pummelling of three family deaths, and 5 years before vitamin D made the cover of Time. How could a little white pill the size of a pencil lead give me a normal November?
Three years with Hammy was all talk. Good stuff. He never offered me drugs. Sometimes I wished I’d had them. A guy who builds a cabin on a clearcut in a province 1400km away can’t hide his escapist tendancies. But I’ve never been good with drugs. I once lost my luggage in a laundromat in Amsterdam after smoking up below decks on a scuzzy Botel bobbing offshore. I was 19. It was legal. And the laundry was still in the washing machine when I managed to retrace my steps the next morning. Those were the days!
At almost 40 I can honestly say that the happiest days of my life were those when I had the least stuff. Three months in the Middle East with one change of clothes. A park bench and one candle in the new cabin. A micro-preemie in an almost empty house.
So then today I was skating on the canal with my kids, contemplating therapy, when a family friend joined us. She was in town from Victoria. My mother-in-law’s age. A nice lady with no time, but a better attitude. Theresa was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago, and is in Ottawa to skate on the canal because it’s on her list of things to do before, well, death.
And it was a sunny day. The ice was fantastic.
Simon finally skated away from me on his own.
And I stopped feeling sorry for myself.
