Dell on Seniors' Cottages or Camps

Canadian seniors face special difficulties having a camp or cottage. Technology has zoomed ahead with ways of Living off the Grid: that offer labour saving power; improvements in communication to remote areas, along with the advent of the All Terrain Vehicle, have all contributed to many more years living close to nature. That's no excuse for not planning today for the future of the family camp or cottage.

When my oldest brother Bill got cancer, the family had plenty of time to address the issue of what to do once Bill was gone: they decided to continue going to the cottage as long as they were physically able to do so. Unfortunately, the cottage was on leased land: what they failed to do was make sure his wife's name was on the lease while he was alive. Bill's widow faced an increase of five times the former lease rate when she received her renewal notice. She was considered a new lease.

The best way, to my way of thinking, to ensure a positive outcome is to do some homework: ask friends what experiences they have had or know about, check the internet. Once you start investigating matters regarding the camp, you may want to get the most current financial advise regarding estate law. I recommend you read You Can't Take it With You: Common-Sense Estate Planning for Canadians. Once you have narrowed down what you want to do, book in with a lawyer. It's always a deal to do several things at once. Have you updated your will? powers of attorney? for financial as well as medical authority? Maybe you want to start a charitable endowment on your death: now would be the time to combine as many of these legal matters as possible.

The way I figure it, the government pisses away enough of my tax dollars, I don't want to give them one more cent than I have to by law. If I don't take charge and administer my affairs the government will charge my estate after I'm dead to do it themselves. Over my dead body!

When it comes to making decisions about the family camp by the lake, there are basic areas that need reviewing: accessibility, maintenance, family dynamics and financial matters. The family with a history of heart problems should seriously consider selling the camp with access that consists of two flights of stairs over a rock cliff face. The couple with thirteen children may want to register the place as a "corporate" entity so the camp stays in the family regardless of divorce or other changes in relationships, shares requiring either "cash shares" or "work value shares" to be corporate members. Families with children living across the country may have to ask the children outright what they would like to see happen to a place they may have strong or unspoken feelings about. Don't draw the conclusion that because you love the camp, built with your own two hands, your children or grandchildren feel an equal affection for the place. Similarly, don't count on the continued assistance of friends or family because economic, health or any number of problems could suddenly require a laying out of cash to cover labour previously donated.

I think chatting with George this morning got this post percolating in my brain. Hope it brewed up all right. I'm off to my own camp now. I'll get back to you in a bit.

Dell on George and Vampires

Well my feet hurt. Raining to beat all get out. Made it to the clinic okay though. Leona was there so my blood work was pain free. Never thought much about referring to Leona as a vampire until Stephenie Meyer came out with The Twilight Saga Collection. My grand-daughter put it on the Kindle for me and then got me the DVDs, too. I tried explaining the story line to George H___, who was there waiting for his bloodwork, but he won't wear his hearing aids and I'm not sure he knew what I was talking about. He looked kind of startled when Leona said it was his turn.

Personally, I've always liked vampire tales. Blood symbolizes life. In my case I'm not sure there isn't more blood thinners than blood (just a little cut mind you and it bleeds like a sucker), but as long as that blood keeps pumping along inside of me, I'm good for a few more kilometers.

George was telling me (loudly) that he's moving to the city to a "residential care facility". I blathered on about all the good points: no grass to cut, no meals to cook, neighbours if you want 'em, nurses if you need one or want to chase one (that got a grin out of him) and all the things he'll be able to do, being right in the city. I don't expect he'll last long there and I am damned sure he didn't buy my nonsense.

The two of us go back to the late sixties when he and Clare bought the old Hansen farm. They did all right until the government regulated their life to death. The day they told George he couldn't butcher his own cows, had to be a certified butcher, you could see the oomph go out of him. Then Clare took sick, trips back and forth to the city, until she died last winter. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but George has always had a thing for the ladies. Now by that I don't mean he actually had another woman, but he had a habit of making an ass of himself if a pretty lady was around, and I'm sure Clare put up with ten tons of crap from him over the years. Still, he loved her. When she passed on he was kind of left dazed and confused (a great Led Zeppelin tune Kevin played for me on youtube). Clare wasn't even in the ground (cold storage until the kids could get here in spring to plant her) and the family began pushing George to sell the farm to them.

I better back up and mention that George's land has the only easy access to one of the finest little fishing lakes in the area. His brother and nephews hounded poor George saying he could use the money, promising he could stay on in the house as long as he wanted, work the fields, too, if he liked.

Now a lawyer would have told him to make a living lease, but George wouldn't go to a lawyer. He said he'd be damned if he had to get a lawyer to okay any deal he made with his own family.

George sold the farm to his nephews: the deal closes the end of next month. He didn't have to tell me why he's moving to the city. I've met his nephews.

Hell, maybe he'll have a good time where he's going. Bound to be plenty of women his age living there. Do I feel sorry for George? Damn right.

Some folks wear their faults right where you can see them, while others appear all sainted on the outside hiding their intentions.

Yes, George knows all about vampires waiting to suck the life's blood out of a person. I'm going to miss George.

Dell on Reefer Madness

My grand-daughter visits me at the camp for days at a time when she's off work and the weather's fine. For a while she thought I didn't know what she and her friends were up to taking walks in the bush, until I made a point of telling her I hadn't smelled so many skunks around camp since someone threw two dozen eggs in the bushes some years ago.

We had a rousing discussion around the fire that night along with a half dozen of her friends.  Three of them had seen the 1936 black and white propaganda piece Reefer Madness. Corey and his brother Kevin had me laughing until the tears ran down my face as they acted out bits and pieces from the film. The kids said they've made broadway and musical versions of it. Maybe I can get my grand-daughter to see if it's available. She's my IT wizard. Got me all fixed up at camp and the apartment in town. When I asked her about the expense, she said she had a little gardening project that just sort of took off and the total outfit was paid for from the proceeds. I didn't think it fitting to ask just where her little gardening project was located. Knowing her it will be somewhere past my property line.

My grand-daughter and her friends had no idea about Pierre Berton. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush they knew from school assignments, but they had no idea he was a toker. They went inside, got on youtube and watched him give instructions on how to roll a joint: the one from The Rick Mercer Report six years ago. He was 84 (twenty years older than me) and supported marijuana law reform based on his 40 years of recreational use.

Having read history and understood prohibition, these kids shake their heads at the duplicity and propaganda the 'establishment' engage in with almost no accountability. Our young people are suffering a level of misery inflicted on their generation by the baby boomer and me generation (me, too) who were having such a good time getting divorced, buying and selling houses, cars, cottages and all sorts of toys, the job of social responsibility to neighbour was entrusted into the care of government. In Canada that usually means no one is held accountable in a court of law while acting as a public servant.

A decade ago most young adult Canadians could still dream  of ascending to the baby boomer wealth of their parents: jobs for all, a house, car, university and all the trimmings; that hope is no more. My grandchildren work hard but they will likely never have a home of their own or a new vehicle in their lifetime. It's not that it has to be that way. It's the way it will stay because the ones at the top don't want to redistribute the wealth. Hells bells, there's still a fortune to be made..why would they willingly reform?

Add to that the manic speed people call normal life nowadays, and it's little damn wonder they're mellowing out with Mary Jane. Breaks my heart to see one of them turn a drunk, or get into cocaine or heroine; reefer madness? What a crock of shit. I may be old but I'm not stupid and neither are these young people. Something's got to give and I think I might know what it would take. But that's a story for another day.

I'll close this post wishing everyone sunny days, just enough rain and no hermaphrodites. Excuse me while I spark one up...I'll post after I get back from the clinic tomorrow morning. Damn vampires.

Dell on Bad Women

I was fifteen the day Elaine told me about running into Shirley Dun___. Elaine would have been a year younger than Shirley who was a year younger than me. I was home by myself when Elaine returned from her Saturday trip into town where she had gone looking for white gloves to wear to our cousin Peter's wedding just over a month away and one of the last weekends before September's return to school. Shirl had been held back after her mother died and she missed more than six weeks of school mourning. She had been in Elaine's class after Christmas holidays, yet I had never seen her around our house.

Elaine always modelled herself on our mother: a woman given to good manners and social respectability. She could barely hold onto her sense of decorum as she came in the front hall. Fit to be tied, she told me how she  had found her gloves and was coming out of the shop, when Shirl came along with her father.

"You would have thought we were the best of friends the way she greeted me, Dell."

"What's wrong with that?" I asked from the stairs above her where I had been sorting baseball cards.

"Oh, you should have seen her. Formally introducing me to her father." Elaine was pacing about the hallway, tossing her hair and stomping her little feet. "The nerve of her, Dell, all tarted up on a Saturday morning looking more like a bad woman than any friend of mine." Elaine raised  her hand to cover her mouth, having said more than she intended.

Now that last bit had peaked my interest: Tarted up? Bad woman? and my eyes went all round. I grinned.

"Oh, you know what I mean, Dell. Dressed like a woman instead of her age."

Trying to understand how this had angered my sister, generally considered our family's best candidate for sainthood, I attempted to draw her out, "You mean dressed up like mother?"

"Dell, are you serious? Even you must have noticed how she wears her clothes just a size too small, busting out all over the place?"

I let Elaine's barbed dig at me slide, giving my mind over to the last time I had seen Shirl. I had been heading over to the drug store for something for our mother when some older boys had gone by in their father's car, hooting the horn and calling in chorus, "Go for a whirl, Shirl?" as she was heading into the library. I hadn't really got a good look at her with her head down and her hair hanging around her face. Her clothes had looked small on her but not dirty or anything.

"Well, her mother dying and all, I just thought they couldn't afford new clothes for her."

"Those are her new clothes. Mr. Dun___ insisted on telling me how Mrs. Dun___ 's life had been insured and how he was now going to be able to dress Shirl with the best of everything. He was as pleased with himself as if he had won a sweepstake instead of buried a wife," Elaine made a small clicking sound against her teeth the way mother would when father stayed too long at the pub.

"He made a big fuss over my new gloves and when I mentioned Peter's wedding next month, asked if I wouldn't like to come by to have my picture taken beforehand."

Mr. Dun____ had a small studio in what we would have kept as a parlour. People had been surprised how quickly his photography business had grown with the latest equipment. Mr. Dun___ was known to have a gift for photographing his subjects and I wondered if somehow Shirl had got confused about dressing up on account of the business.

"You haven't said anything that's news to me," I threw out,"I don't understand why you're all fired up. If you think Shirl needs a woman's hand, why don't you take her under your wing?"

Now, for those of you who have a large family, you will understand that there is always that one person that wants to drag home every broken thing and fix it up. I was appealing directly to that part of my sister most likely to elicit her kinder side. For good measure, I then used my mother's standard answer to the undertaking of all distasteful tasks,

"Offer it up for Jesus...like Lent...doing something for sorrow for your sins."

"Lent was six months ago, Dell.," and then after a pause," but you've got a point. Maybe when school starts back up if I took her aside with a catalogue or maybe window shopping I could show her what was proper....like a big sister."

"She's got a  big sister," I reminded her, only to have Elaine tell me the sister had moved out west just weeks after the mother died.

"Selfish. That's what I think, " Elaine spluttered, "leaving her little sister like that. Selfish!" she pronounced, "she should have stayed on and showed Shirl how to behave. There's just no accounting for some people's behaviour. I think you're right, Dell. Jesus put Shirl in my path so I could set her straight and that's just what I'm going to do."

I had never thought much about the Dun___ sisters, so later that evening when a bunch of the fellows were out behind the backstop sharing a smoke, I mentioned my sister running into Shirl downtown that afternoon.

"Your sister might want to think about who she's making friends with," Tom said seriously,"Shirl's fast."

"My sister thinks she just needs some pointers on clothes and girl stuff."

There was a roar of braying laughter and then,"maybe pointers on how to get them on. According to Brendan, she and her sister have no problem taking them off." As much as I hounded them for more details, no one seemed to know much. I made a mental note to have a talk with Brendan's younger brother John the very next time we served at Mass together.

Now before I continue, I want to share one of my little insights with you. The mind has a way of grabbing onto something and adding whatever it wants to fill in the parts that are missing. It's the damnedest thing.  Instead of just leaving a piece of information alone, the mind will just naturally begin plastering its own interpretation all over it. Worse yet, the human mind will fight tooth and nail clinging to that faulty vision it created despite whatever other information becomes available.

Armed with raging hormones and no experience beyond hand holding with Connie O'____ , my natural sense of curiousity led to countless hours of torment over Shirl, lying in my bed each night, face to the wall.

Before I got a chance to quiz John at Mass, all hell broke loose the day of Peter's wedding. Shirl's father or Shirl herself had done something rude: we knew it had something to do with photographing Elaine in her finery that morning. The house got quiet as a death when Elaine returned in tears. The usual whispered words, we children gleaned from eavesdropping on our parent's discussions, failed to materialize and Elaine wasn't talking. What I remember clearly is how our entire family had a great time at Peter's wedding. I had a great time, too, not knowing anything else was possible.

With Elaine receiving a sudden burst of parental affection that weekend, we surmised that whatever had taken place, Shirl had somehow wronged our sister and family. No one said anything. There were thinned lips, furrowed brows, heavy sighs and the bottle in back of the pantry went down significantly.

Come Monday, I went looking for Shirl only to discover she had been put on a train to her sister out west. Her father moved on within the month and I more or less forgot about Shirl until some 12 years later.

Home for my father's funeral and to help set his affairs in order for mother, I was reading over the sympathy cards mother had received. Among them was one from a Shirley Dun_____ Masterson, with a picture of her, a husband and kids. Under the part printed, 'In Deepest Sympathy', Shirl had scrawled , "God Bless him. He saved my life," and taped to the other side of the card was an old stub of a railway ticket.

Dell on Missing Pieces

As a young pup I was known to party until dawn just to see the sun rise. Should have waited for old age since I now rarely sleep more than a few hours a night and had no idea until my sixties how much better a sunrise looks without the blur of alcohol.

When I stay in town for my regular  donation to the blood sucking vampires over at the clinic, I find my pattern doesn't change. Waking up around five, I sneak out of the apartment building to see the day breaking. On this morning's walk I got to thinking about my post yesterday.

Maybe I should have mentioned that there's a whole range of things one can do between doing nothing or something. There's no black and white to this world. I should have been clear on one point: I have led a less than virtuous life (more on that later) and done my share of shit on other people's backs. Not on purpose, always: I just didn't have all the missing pieces to make a good decision at the time. Now when I see what the world has got up to, all I can do is shake my head and ask myself, "what was my part in all this?"

Seems to me whether you're talking about a single person or the whole world, you find a range of good and bad and everything in between. Countries are like people. They have personalities and are misunderstood  because information is skewed or unavailable. I don't judge a book by it's cover (most of mine have the cover missing - not for resale) and if I were to read only a few pages or look at the ending, well I won't learn anything that way.

Recently I found a book I had never read: Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing". For a while I thought I'd lost my mind. Around page 188 it started...for the next thirty pages, each page was out of order switching back and forth between characters, conversations and happenings...printing error...(gotta wonder who paid for the reprint on that one)...anyhow, I plowed on ahead and eventually the pieces I'd held back in my mind, waiting to fit them into the rest of the story, finally sorted it all out.

Life is like that: little pieces of information that seem to make no sense whatsoever, but if you keep going and remember the general story line you may just be surprised at the understanding gained by this method. 'The Crossing' turned out to be a helluva good book and part of a trilogy: typical Dell, I started with the middle of a story.

Puzzling things out seems to be a necessary part of the learning process. No man can take in the whole world all at once, and it's the not knowing that helps keep a man humble: I know, but I don't know all.

It's been my experience you get one piece of information over here, then another over there, and neither makes sense until you get twenty years down the road. By then the picture has filled itself in; promptly, I readjust my thinking and behaviour armed with this additional information, only to find out I still haven't got the whole picture and worse I remember what I did while I didn't know what I was doing.

Just to show you that I was guilty of knee-jerk thinking from my earliest days, I'd like to share with you the tale of a sexy little miss back in my school days ...unfortunately that'll have to wait until my next post...the coffee has done its job and now I'm off to do mine.