The wet coast

We're just back from a week or so on the west coast of British Columbia, checking in on friends and relatives in preparation for our next expedition to Turkey and environs.

It's not fair to call it the "wet coast" really. The weather was almost perfect most of the time. But BC has had such a series of fierce storms in the last few months that I felt we were unusually blessed.

We had tons of people to catch up on, starting with daughter Rachel and her beloved Phil. They're good to hang out with, even if they are Warcraft freaks. Fortunately Rachel has now gone off on a two-month silent retreat, so maybe she'll be able to kick the habit while she's there. I don't even dare look at the site in case I get hooked, too.

We stayed at the Bayshore Inn down on the harbour so we could catch a seaplane flight to Saltspring Island the next morning. The plane leaves from right in front of the hotel! The Bayshore is nothing special, but the seaplane sure is, and so was the evening view from our window.

We flew alongside Stanley Park. I'd expected to see a lot of damage to this priceless Vancouver treasure from windstorms in November and December - the TV news made it look like the entire park was devastated - but the damage seemed confined to the seaward edge and along the road from Lion's Gate Bridge to the city. Bad enough, but there are still lots of trees.

Saltspring Island was quite lovely, as usual, and it was good to check in again with our friends the Weisners. We've known Ron and Cathy since the summer of 1967, when the two Rons were Ontario Hydro trainees. We still find we can reconnect without much trouble no matter how long it's been since we saw each other last.

We caught up with our friends Ruth and Beth the day after they moved into a retirement home. They're among the first women ordained priests in the Anglican Church of Canada. I think of Ruth as my godmother in the priesthood - I think I thought I could be as holy a person as she is if I was ordained, too (vain hope.) She's quite frail now, but Beth's faithful love brings joy to her life.



Then up to Nanaimo to check on "the girls" - Begüm and Mallory, who share an apartment as they go to Malaspina University College. They walked us through some lovely scenery and shared their apartment with us. It's good to have friends who are under 40!


We headed back to the mainland and up to the Sunshine Coast to say hello to my cousin Ardith and her partner Bill. Checked in by phone with our cousin Sandra - the three of us were born within a year of each other - and made a date to see her in the fall. Visited my father's sister Audrey and her husband Tammy, and met cousin Bob, whom I've seen once before at most! It's never too late to discover family.


Finally back to Vancouver and Aunt Elsie, the youngest of my Grant aunts, who is still lovely, active and creative in her late 80s. I don't think she will ever get old; she refuses to grouch about the way the world is going to hell or how her body is falling apart (it isn't as far as I can tell).

One last set of old friends that evening: Brian, who was Ron's best man, and his family at their horse farm in Surrey. More people with whom we don't feel strange whether it's days or years since the last visit. I wish we'd kept in touch with more of the old gang. Maybe we'll work harder at that when we get back.

It was good to see all these dear people, but the highlight of the trip was the last night when we collected another performance of Mozart's Magic Flute. There's never been a performance like it, although 10 years ago or so I sang in the chorus of one in Durham, Ont. that tried to do the same thing. The Vancouver Opera Company worked for three years with First Nations people to develop this production set in the BC forest. The costumes of Sarastro and his friends were West Coast native; the scenery was rocks and trees (well, papier mache and cloth streamers, but they worked), and the libretto was freshly and very well translated using some words from the language of the Musqueam people. We were entranced. This is the third Magic Flute we've seen in a year - Vienna and Banff were the other ones - and it's impossible for me to say which was the best. The singing was better in Vienna, but the production was stodgy compared to the other two. I'd have liked the Queen of the Night and Sarastro to have been more accurate in their pitches, but the spirit of this production made everything else irrelevant. Wow! This site says a bit more about it.

The beginning of March we're bound back to Turkey via Portugal and Spain. You'll hear from us then, if not before.

Political overload

Yesterday I did something I thought I'd never do: I bought a membership in the Progressive Conservative party of Alberta. I've worked for the NDP since I was 15 (I fell and broke my tailbone in their Halifax office, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "busting your butt").

Ron bought a membership, too. But we haven't undergone a radical conversion. It's just that it looked like Alberta was about to go even farther along the road to hell, and we knew we had to do something. The Conservatives are the only party that's going to be in power in Alberta in the forseeable future, so casting a vote in a provincial elections is pretty meaningless. But yesterday members of the Conservative party were voting for a new party leader, and a vote in that election can make a difference. There were three choices: a "suit" from Calgary with fairly moderate views; a southern rancher/professor who is only slightly to the left of the Ku Klux Klan, and a nice farmer from the north. The right-wing crazy man was very likely to win. So out we went and got our memberships. It was a multiple-choice ballot; you indicated your first and second choices, and if no one got over 50% of the first choices, the bottom guy dropped out and the second choices of the people who voted for him were counted. And so the winner was the one who came second after the first choice votes were counted: the nice northern farmer. With any luck he'll be harmless.

Meanwhile the federal Liberals were electing their new leader at a convention in Montreal, so when we weren't out messing around with the provincial Conservatives we were stuck in front of the TV. And the same thing happened, sort of. The leaders were overtaken by a really nice guy who'd been running third most of the time.

The thing that struck me about both these events was how nice all these people were to each other - the Liberals in particular. They'd had some ugly leadership conventions in the past, but this time they seemed to be making an effort to be civilized and kind. It seemed so much more intelligent than some of the alternatives you see in politics.

So politicians really can act like intelligent human beings. Maybe there's hope for this country, at least.

And maybe I'd better go out and buy myself an NDP membership to soothe my conscience

An end - and a beginning?

So I finally told the Bishop I wanted to retire. Last Wednesday we had a lovely chat by phone. Bishop John of Kootenay Diocese is a wonderful man and I would have liked very much to have been able to work with him, but I simply don't have the energy any more to be a parish priest. So now I'm officially retired - or on my way to being officially retired after the paperwork is done.

Now what? We're happily settled into our life in Canmore, enjoying not freezing our little behinds in Izmir(my goodness it gets cold there in the winter!), and being totally lazy. We belong to two choirs and are working a bit on the music they're doing next month, especially the Bow Valley Choir's production of Rutter's Reluctant Dragon and some quite lovely Christmas carols by Rutter. I'm working an afternoon a week at the Canmore Museum shop, which is about all I have the energy for. Eventually I'll see about getting licensed as a priest in Calgary diocese so I can help out at the church here. We're going back to Turkey in March for a few months, so I really can't get deeply involved in much else here. But eventually I guess I need to do something (as in "Don't just stand there..."). What?

One idea is to create another blog, a more commercial one, and write something about the spirituality of computing, or spirituality and computing, or something like that. I'd like to call it Mother Geek, but the name's taken. Saint Geek? Who knows. If it brought in a bit of money that would be nice.

Meanwhile, winter is here in the Bow Valley and the mountains are white about halfway down. The days are crisp and sunny and very short - the sun sinks behind Mt. Rundle about 3 p.m. But our apartment is snug and comfy, full of sun in the mornings so I can lounge in my comfy chair wasting time on the Internet and enjoying the luxury of laziness. Life could be lots worse!

Surprise!

Sunday morning this is what I saw out the window. That was Sunday October 29. The temperature in Izmir that day was 22. In Canmore it was -10, and it's stayed like that for 3 days.

I wanna go back to Izmir!

Quote for the day

My Google desktop started my day with this quote:

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It occurs to me that maybe we're all like Frenchmen that way

Surprises

So here we are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about as far from land as we've ever been. I'm lounging in our comfy little cabin, munching an apple and gazing out on a choppy, bouncy sea, when a bird flies by. A bird! And not just a seagull, which you don't see this far from land anyway, but a tiny olive and yellow warbler about half the size of a chickadee! It lands on our balcony, discovers an Azorean wasp that died there the day before, gobbles it down and hops under the divider to the next balcony.

In the dining room later that evening the steward gave me a little box of granola and the dining room manager came over to compare notes about birds - he has birds and fish back home in Indonesia. I'm hoping word will get around among the Indonesian members of the crew - most of the dining room and cabin stewards are Indonesian - and I'll hear if the little one shows up somewhere else on the ship.

We're skirting the edge of a tropical depression and had quite a rough, windy day yesterday, so I suppose the tiny little thing was blown like a feather from its regular migration route to our ship. I hope he can hang on until we get to Bermuda in 4 days.

Now we're cutting across the northern part of the Sargasso Sea, a calm, rainless vortex in the middle of the Atlantic. Another thing I've always wanted to see - another tick-mark for this trip. The weather is much better than yesterday, calm and sunny and very warm. Sailors have dreaded this area since the days of Columbus (or before - I'm reading a book called 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about the great Chinese expedition that explored the world between 1421 and 1423. They were here, of course, just like they were nearly everywhere else). One reason I'm glad we've got good strong diesel engines and don't have to rely on sails. Anyway, the surprise here is that there really is seaweed floating around. Not thick out here at the northern edge, but in streaks that look at first like some other ship (certainly not the Noordam, which works very hard at being environmentally friendly) has emptied its sewage tanks. But if you dare look more closely, it's just seaweed, the bladder sort that you see on rocks around Peggy's Cove and everywhere else. Kinda comforting, really, but surprising out here in a place that redefines nowhere for me.

While we're at it, there have been a lot more surprises on this voyage:

• Florence: how lovely it all is.
• Pisa: more than just the tower. The whole area around the cathedral is lovely. The cathederal, started in 1063, is my favourite.
• Monaco: all about money, but so clean.
• Barcelona: I knew Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church would be wonderful, and it was, but his other stuff made me laugh with delight too.
• Valencia: ladies making lace in the middle of a circle of needlework shops.
• Cadiz: it felt like home. Not spectacular, but familiar in a way that makes me wonder if my Spanish ancestors lived there.
• The Azores: green! and lovely, every inch. But too humid for me; I'd go moldy in a week. Pity. Otherwise I couldn't think of any place I'd rather live.
• Ron in formal dress. You really can clean that guy up. Just wait until I can post a picture or two!

So it's a fine trip so far. I just hope my little warbler turns up.

All at sea

What day is it today? Wednesday? It must be Cadiz.

We're on board the M.S. Noordam, the newest of the Holland America Line fleet, bound for New York. It's our first ocean cruise, and it's awesome. Of course our more experienced shipmates say this is the best ship they've ever seen, so maybe anything else would be an anticlimax. Anyway, it's pretty good.

Our original plan was to drop in on Rachel in England to celebrate her birthday and get a look at Yorkshire. And then Ron started thinking about alternative ways of getting home and discovered that there's a mass migration of liners from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in the fall. So we flew to Rome, wandered around there for a couple of days, hopped a train for Civitavecchia, got onto the Noordam, and here we are.

We've had days in Livorno (= Florence and Pisa), Monaco, Barcelona and Valencia. After Cadiz we head out into the Atlantic towards the Azores. Couple of days there, then on to Bermuda and then New York.

The Mediterranean has been wonderful - but hot and steamy. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm looking forward to the cooler Atlantic. I'm curious to see what my father spent his life in the Navy cruising around. But there's always the chance of a hurricane at this time of year - might be kinda exciting.

Anyway, here we are, and when I get home there's going to be such a flood of pictures hitting our Flickr page! Maybe I'd better ration myself to just a couple of dozen a day.

Home on the 15th. Look out for more then.