Category Archives: ageing

I Dream of Etherica: life changing dream #2

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People who say that life is short are generally not old. Although I have not yet achieved old old age, that apparently starts at  85, I sometimes feel like Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando who started out as one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers and ended up as a Victorian mother. I seem to have had that many lives since I was born, although they have all been uni-sex.

One of my lives was esoteric. I meditated twice a day and joined in group meditation at the full and new moon. Every day, I visualized three lighted triangles in partnership with two others (per triangle) in far reaching places -Texas, England, France, South Africa, Australia- to bring light and peace into the world. I read the works of Alice Bailey, submitted essays to the Arcane School and attended conferences in New York City at the full moon in Taurus . We were concerned about world events and considered them in the light of the truth that Alice Bailey had channeled from the being we called the Tibetan.

Now it is true as time went on that I wondered why I never got published in the school’s monthly magazine, whereas my friend, who could afford to donate much more than I, often did. Clearly, I was a poor judge of my own worth. And as I observed the thin, harried, quarrelsome people running the conferences, I wondered if that was what enlightenment looked like.

This was the me that arrived in Los Angeles one August morning about 20 years ago. In the rose-patterened journal, # 23, in my backpack, I had just been making notes: “Tension of heart energy expressed in terms of giving to others- expenditure of spiritual energy can overcome fatigue…”

But not in this case.

My brother, Rob, was supposed to be there to meet me. I hadn’t seen him for seven years. He was flying in from his home in Paris. My daughter met me instead and told me he had been delayed. I was disappointed, I was hot and I was exhausted.

“Take a nap,” Julia said and her husband seconded the motion.

I had my 5 year-old grandson’s room while he was with his father. I lay down on his little futon. I listened. Good. The Buddhist woman next door, who assaulted our ears with her loud, angry chanting, was silent. I breathed deeply and fell asleep.

I dreamed I was on a plane on the way back to Toronto, but something was wrong. We made an emergency landing in a high desert airfield. I was looking out the window at something like snow that was blowing up into dirty little drifts.

I turned to the man next to me and said, to my surprise, “Do you think we are dead?’

“Yes,” he said.

We were herded into the airport waiting room, the walls of which were alternately plum, fuchsia and orange, each one edged with the colour of the wall next to it. We were at loose ends, milling about in vague expectancy. I was frankly appalled at the sheer tastelessness of what was, by all accounts, heaven.

Above us, an LED sign fired up, telling us that our first class would be at 10 p.m. Great! Just what I longed for! Heaven is an evening class!

It was 10:10 already. All I wanted was a shower and some rest. Resentfully, I followed the crowd up a curving, adobe staircase. (Don’t ask me. The journal says “adobe”.) Resentfully. The others were chattering merrily as if they were on a cruise. I was thinking how summer-camp, how awful. I didn’t fit in here either.

At the top, I heard joyful greetings. Each person was greeting an assigned teacher, whom they instantly recognized because they looked alike. A swarthy Mediterranean man had met his Spanish-looking teacher. A bull of a man with a short neck had met a broad-shouldered teacher who could be his twin. Each pair withdrew to a plum-colored banquette to begin orientation. They were all talking animatedly.

Except me. I was standing all alone. Bereft again.

What karmic debt was this? What failure of positivity? I had clearly not tried hard enough. I wanted to cry. And I was very angry. I wanted to clean myself up. I wanted to lie down. Lay my burden down. Oh damn.

Then someone clattered down the stairs that curved up to the third floor. She was running. She was smiling ear to ear – thin, pale, intense woman dressed in flowing, flapping, filmy prints of plum and fuchsia and orange.

“Hello, hello,” she cried, “So sorry I’m late. I’m Etherica. I’ll be your instructor. You can call me Dea, that is “of God”.

Her draped arms were held out, ready for an embrace. She was beaming, smiling broadly but more than that. Her eyes were wide and bright and intensely focused on my face, as if she were beaming light and love as she bore down on me. LIke one of those TV preachers or self-help gurus.  But she was also tripping on her gown and, unforgivably for me as a teacher, she was late.

My stomach revolted. I thought I would vomit. This was my  angel! This was how I seemed to others! Flighty, incompetent, ungrounded, and showering a blaze of brightness that made them want to wipe it off. She was not genuine. She was not …what…. She was not real. She could not, please God, be what I was meant to be.

GAAA!

I struggled awake, tangled in the wet sheet. I gasped for air in the stifling room. I stood straight up. Oh bad idea. Low blood pressure. I sat back down. Put my head between my knees. I could hear Julia treating a patient in the next room. I was in Los Angeles.  I was still alive. Etherica might be waiting for me, but she’d have to wait a while yet.

When I was able to get to the kitchen and had blurted out the whole sorry story to my son-in-law, he found it vastly amusing. “Sambo’s”, he chortled. “You died and went to a Sambo’s.”

He had to do a footnote for this uninformed Canadian. Sambo’s, he said, was a franchised restaurant that specializes in pancakes. Ah, as in the story of Little Bl….., how non pc.

“You’re really spooked. Don’t want to die?”

“It’s not the dying. That’s bad enough, but is that what I am – desiccated, flakey, ineffective, nervous…”

An unwise question to ask a son-in-law but at that moment the phone rang. He picked it up. I could hear the person at the other end, saying, “This is North West Airlines. Mr Hood’s bags have arrived and will be delivered before five.”

“And Mr Hood?” my son-in-law asked.

“Yes?”

“Mr Hood has arrived as well?”

“Good” said the man and hung up.

Where, I wondered is Rob. How could his bags be here and he not? I cursed Air Canada for showing that movie about Judgement City on my flight down.

My son-in-law took his shaken mother-in-law out, down to the beach apartment to make up a bed for Rob. My urgent need to prevent myself from ending up in Sambo heaven with Etherica had to be put on hold.

When we arrived back home on Washington Way, a van labelled  AirServ stood in front of the house and a delivery man with his phone to his ear was pounding on the door, yelling, “Pick it up. Pick it up. I know you’re in there. Well finally… I’ve got your bags here. Where am I? Right at your door. Your single storey brown house..” He turned to look at us as we came up the walk and Julia threw open the door.

“I think you have our bags there,” my son-in-law said pleasantly.

In the evening, the front room changed from a consulting room back into a living room and we were there watching television when I suddenly got to my feet and opened the door. Rob was getting out of a car across the street.

“Hi there, Sis,” he yelled. “I lost somebody. I’ll be right back”.

Back in the car. he made a U-turn and vanished up Abbot Kinney. We stood shivering in the cool desert air until he came roaring back followed by another car. He stood in the middle of the street speaking rapid French at the people in it. We must meet his friends, hear the story of the lost bags, of being questioned in Amsterdam as suspected terrorists because they were bagless and much, much more.

He had blown back into my life, this force of nature, he who had been stabbed on a train platform in Bombay, spent a week in jail in Turkey and as a camera man had had compartments that no one could ever find.

While Julia and her husband were working we walked on the beach and Rob talked, “And so I said to him, ‘Monsieur Godard, films are not made with trucks. Films are made with people – directors and actors.’ quel triumph…”

We drove north up the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur, where there was no room at the inn but he conned the hostess into letting us have a table. I had been a vegetarian for ten years but I ordered chicken.

“I remember you, Sis,” he said. You used to laugh. You could laugh at anything. You had a root canal that went wrong. You were in agony for weeks and you had people splitting their sides. You’re the one who taught me how to laugh.” He put down his fork. “What happened to you?”

Probably only Rob could have said that to me. Even so, a list of what had happened unfurled  in my mind and I started to cry.

“It’s okay to cry,” he said, taking my hand, “but, when you get around to it, it’s better to laugh.”

And so it was that what Etherica started, Rob finished, and I gave it all up. I gave up esoteric study and triangles of light and group meditation and terrible earnestness. I gave up flowing prints. I gave up a whole bunch of friends who didn’t laugh either. I ate meat.

That night after he had registered us at the Carmel Motor Lodge, he came out and said, “I told her you were my sister. I think she believed me,” and he fell over the steering wheel in gales of laughter.

Consider the Second-Best Bed

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Shakespeare famously left his wife, Anne Hathaway, his second best bed. Period. Biographers have explained this. Most of his estate went to his daughter Susanna including the best bed, which would have belonged to the master bedroom, but to quote Anthony Burgess in his book Shakespeare, “She (Anne) had her widow’s dower at common law, and her place in the great house that Susanna and her husband took over, She was content to live with Susanna and she got on well with her son-in-law. The second-best bed was installed in a particular chamber and this chamber was inalienably hers.”

Will was not, after all, expressing his feelings for the older woman he married in a hurry and left asap to pursue a career in London. He wasn’t a miserable tightwad either. Having lost his son Hamnet when the child was 11, and being estranged from his daughter Judith who had married unwisely, he was laying his money on Susanna to produce a male heir. Didn’t work. Susanna had a daughter who married twice but had no children. Judith had three sons but none survived to produce children. Pas de heir!

Whew! Good to get that settled.

We all have experience of the second-best bed – at holiday time, on vacations, in cheap hotels, as children at grandma’s – the deep-valleyed ones, the plastic pull-out couch, the couch itself, the hard-as-cement beds, the mat on the floor. We have stubbed our toes on the metal legs of the pull-out and ruined our backs on the ones with blown springs and woken up aching all over in the hard ones. Our host’s query “How did you sleep” has been met with a bald-faced, not entirely convincing lie.

Or we have found ourselves in the best bed, a comfortable place to be, and discovered in the morning that the host and his wife somehow managed to coil together in a narrow cot. Discovering such a carefully concealed secret is a humbling experience.

These days, we have boxed beds that can be blown up with an all-included foot pump and provide our guests with a waterbed experience, long after the death of waterbeds, which was, as you know, watery and unexpected. Whether these air beds leak with rude noise in the middle of the night, I do not yet know.

My own second-best bed sits in the den, rather awkwardly I must admit, because of feng shui demands. It is narrow, has a metal frame on casters and no headboard. It is prone to surprising trips across the floor. In its defence, it has a good mattress -should be for that price- if somewhat too hard. When I realized that I would be sleeping in it myself, I remedied that by topping it with a feather bed. Odd that we think a night in a semi-comfortable bed won’t hurt a guest, but don’t want to spend one ourselves. Then I decided that the thread count of the sheets had to be upgraded to the best bed’s standards and a requisite number of pillows added. I overdid the duvet and find that it works well in mid-winter but after that, the quilted duvet cover is enough.

And why do I sleep in my second best bed about a third of the time. Neighbours. Thin floors. Don’t ask. There’s only so much I want to know about other people’s personal lives.

I’ve got used to sleeping there and never wake up disoriented, wondering why things are in the wrong place. This is handy since those mandatory trips in the dark would otherwise prove disastrous.

One of the advantages is better brain plasticity. Thanks to Norman Doidge (The Brain That Changes Itself) and others, we now know after years of being told that once brain cells die, it’s game over, that in fact new neural pathways can be established and for example, stroke-damaged limbs can learn to move again. To maintain neural plasticity or brain change, however, we need to be learning constantly. One of my tai chi instructors harps on about moving your kettle to a different burner to avoid rigidity and stagnation. The kettle, in this case, is me and the new burner is the second-best bed.

Twas there “I dreamed the latest dream that ever I did dream”. It wasn’t a police procedural with noir overtones nor was it a lucid dream. (See previous posts.) But it was one of two dreams that have been life-changing. Someday I’ll write about the first one, which I call Etherica and which I had while napping after an exhausting trip to  Los Angeles. The latest one isn’t ready for publication yet, but I can give you the highlights.

It was suffused with love, the kind of love that I felt as a young woman for Blake, my high school sweetheart whom I married, and which I saw reflected in my grandson and his fiancé whose wedding I recently described. This nourishing, accepting and all-encompassing feeling made me not want to wake up, but stayed with me once I did. The dream began with me in my early twenties but looked forward in my dream thoughts many years and actually incorporated someone from my real future. As I pondered over its meaning, I understood the “future” person as I never had before. That was instructive, but more important was a shift that had happened.

Like many people who have had abusive childhoods, I have felt like an orphan, bereft of care, human and divine. As I did the dishes the evening after the dream, I knew that this was over. My heart felt as if it were shattering. Not breaking. I wasn’t sad although I cried. It was opening up. It had to be bigger to accommodate what it would now have to hold – another part of me, repossessed at last.

How can I break the news to Best Bed, the black Hemnes bed from Ikea, so solid, so high, so comfortable, that its second-best Sleep Country cousin has bested it in dreaming?

Blue Now – how not to be

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The designer of the website for my book, sent me an email headed, “Blue Now”. My first response was how does he know. What he meant was that he had done some html magic so that the links on the “Buy” page showed up blue. My mood had nothing to do with it.

In fact, my mood began to lift after I got my nephew who is a WordPress genius to help me with irresolvable problems, irresolvable by me that is. I had actually found the solutions to most of my problems in “Help”, but either I couldn’t understand them or I couldn’t implement them. I am, after all, the woman who had to try 8 times to get her pressure cooker to work. (See “Hapless Human vs Pressure Cooker” posted May 22) I began to climb back up out of that pit of low self-esteem that not being able to centre a picture or single-space poetry had dumped me into. I know -too sensitive for my own good.

Later I spent an hour or more with the delightful people at my satellite company rebooting my PVR so that it would actually record instead of just telling me it was doing so.

The rejection of my appeal of my income tax is not so easily handled and has to go down under the category of “things I cannot change.”  I can, however, rejoice that I had the wisdom to know the difference.

Meanwhile, I received in the mail a new shipment of supplements from Endomet in Arizona and the report based on a hair sample I had sent them. The report confirmed what I had begun to suspect that the blues can be primarily physical -tired adrenals, sluggish thyroid, poor metabolism of nutrients. As it turns out I had won a trifecta of low scores. I got much advice among other things to eat more protein and less sugar. Not sure I am up for 12 oz. steaks and giving up maple syrup on porridge may put me off brekkie, but I promise to try. In addition, they tell me that the supplements they sent may make me feel tired. They are intended to get me to slow down. There’s a slower gear!!!!

Nevertheless, I had already decided to incorporate relaxation in my recovery program. One of the advantages of age is that you’ve already done most workshops, including the one where you learned to relax. It has been a stressful 6 months in our family, but things are settling down now and it’s time to let go of constant vigilance. That strategy seems promising. It will lead to a more comfortable life.

I think that these strategies added to the techniques I usually use -reading Rumi, listening to music-rock, classical and jazz (where does she get the time?), walking in the woods, having flowers about the place, counting my blessings- will make the persistent inner editor who tells me how flawed I am and how I have failed myself financially and in so many other ways just shut the you-know-what up.

Septuagenarians at Sea

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Here continueth the adventures of the septuagenarians who were previously on the road.

The sail past on Sat. June 2nd didn’t happen. The lake was too rough for all those sail boats to bob around in close formation. Instead I got a lesson in where and when I was permitted to wear a hat. (See “Dress Code” June 6th post)

But this Saturday, June 30th, Lake Ontario is calm and the sky is bright blue as we wait for Blake, who buzzed away on the water taxi, to bring the 29 ft. Sirocco in from its mooring. And wait and wait and wait. Sailor’s time. How could I forget? Everything slows down once you put yourself at the mercy of “canvas” and wind and people like Blake who just naturally move at that speed.

There are four of us waiting, all of us female. The other three amuse themselves by raiding the snack bag. I sit on a curb in the shade, listening to the marimba-like clang of halliards on masts.

Eventually, Sirocco putts up on its engine. Blake throws us the blue lines and we walk the boat up to the wall and tie it. But wait, it’s not that simple. Blake has promised to teach the youngest of us, a fifteen-year old, how to sail and instruction begins with knotting the line around the bollard.

“You can’t tie up here, not on Regatta Day,” a moustached gentleman in regulation white declares.

Blake greets him merrily and continues loading the many bags of snacks, lunch, ice and beverages.

“He’s kidding,” I tell the other women.

Well, he is and he isn’t. That’s the rule, but the regatta boats are all out on the water racing. And this is Blake’s old friend who is wearing a devilish grin as he does his official duty.

So here I am back on Sirocco, which was once mine, well, half mine, for four glorious sailing seasons. I’m sure a forensic expert could still find evidence of that. Certainly any decently good clairvoyant would find my psyche print all over it.

A thunderstorm was raging overhead when our 14 year-old son called up from the cabin, “What does it mean when the mast glows.” “It means don’t touch it,” I screamed back.

Here is the safety line, he had fallen backward over in a raging sea and I had grasped him by his wrists and held on until a wave tilted the boat and threw him back.

Here is the tiller that my 15 year-old daughter had gripped as she drove the opposing boat up and up until it lost the wind. “That little guy has sure got nerve,” we heard some one on it mutter.

Down in the fore cabin, I find the personal flotation devices and lace one on over my windbreaker.

How can you tell I am one of the septuagenarians? So is Blake, but he can still swim the way he always did. Lake Ontario is dark and deep and cold and I never could swim well.

So we putter on the motor out of the basin through the breakwater, Blake’s stepdaughter on the tiller while he reefs the main up the mast, all the while instructing his aspiring sailor. It is the first time, the main has been up this season so there are kinks that have to be worked out.

I zone out, recalling soft evening sails through dove grey water, moire-patterned, lying on my back on the bow reading, running before the wind with the rainbow spinnaker bowing out ahead.

Once the engine is off, we do sail before the wind with just the mainsail into the bay, where a tight circle of dingy sailors is racing and where the ferries and tour boats and speedboats are supposed to give way to us. Blake is busy updating his stepdaughter as to which sailboat has the right of way. I don’t have a task to perform, unless sitting and staring can be considered one. On our port, there is the city, on the starboard the islands, one green and natural, the other an airport from which largish planes and helicopters are landing and taking off. You have a wide variety of vistas. Choose your pick.

By the time we get to the end of the harbour, the wind seems to have died down, so we break out lunch. Blake takes the tiller, saying he will eat later. Lunch is leisurely.

Then it seems as though more sail is required. I hear Blake and his student down in the fore cabin debating which jib to choose. A few minutes later they have pulled up the  genoa.

“Couldn’t you find anything bigger?” I crack.

Then the wind hits. It hits with all the vehemence of a line squall. Suddenly, we are moving, the big sail is catching the wind and billowing out over the water, the boat gains speed and begins to heel. It goes on heeling and heeling. Those of us sitting on the starboard scramble up to the other side, hanging on hard. Those on the bow shriek as water comes in over them. The rail is almost underwater.

Blake is of course laughing delightedly, but even he remarks that he might have too much sail up. He starts to take the genoa in. It luffs and flaps as he lets it off, just a fraction too late for the boat is no longer moving forward. We are aground.

Soft aground. That’s as opposed to hard aground. I have been hard aground in Sirocco. It hit a rock in the St. Lawrence and came to a thunderous, terrifyingly sudden stop that seemed likely to be fatal. This was more like a scuff up onto a sandbar, but no less fixed.

Blake takes the tiller, does NOT vent the fumes from the bilge and turns on the engine. Once it catches, he begins to rock the gears. No movement. He isn’t worried. I can see that – just full of adrenalin. I’m worried. I can barely make myself stand up and go with the others to stand on the narrow edge of the deck around the cabin, our weight leaning out over the water. It is not easy to stand on a narrow ledge of a pitching boat and lean over the water. This is not necessarily a function of being a septuagenerian. I found it was equally true when I was 39. Eventually, Blake says, “We’re off”. Not that I would have known.

I descend to the cabin to get him a beer.

Meanwhile a siren sounds and a police boat races by. It passes the upturned catamaran with its wing well under water and makes for a sailboat slightly smaller than Sirocco. And there is another police boat advantageously placed to observe beer drinking skippers. It is suddenly clear that apart from these five boats, no one else is on the water. Even the ferries are docked. Now I don’t want to read too much into this and I’m sure the ferry captains are not afraid of a little wind, just saying.

“That’s what happens when you’re sailing, ” Blake explains. “One minute there’s no wind and the next, there’s a gale.”

We sail back on just the main, the 15 year-old on the tiller with Blake giving patient, generous instruction.

Yes, he made a great sailing father, but, I swear, he has a deep need for adventure that calls these things up, if he does not actually cause them.

Thank you, Poseidan, I have survived another sail with Blake.

The Void Again: Something out of Nothing

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A friend of mine beset by ill health and economic downturn, bewailed the fact that at 50, she has nothing. Her business is being sold. Her house is under water (over mortgaged in the failed housing market). She has no pension and she has used up her savings.

Ah, yes, the void again, the great emptiness.

Here we go, my dear, my answer to you: like me you have made you living by talking to others. It was the principal way you helped them heal. All those generous and compassionate words took wing and settled in their minds. They carried your words away and gradually understood them. They became better and better people for it. There is no way to see or measure this effect.

This week, Charlie Rose interviewed Oliver Platt, Lily Rabe and the producer and director of As You LIke It which is being presented in Central Park this month. Lily Rabe, who plays Rosalind, said that she never feels as alive as when she is playing Shakespeare. There is something about just saying the lines over and over that improves her mental health.

I know that feeling from years of reading his plays aloud and listening to students read them and listening to them go out the door still speaking in iambic pentameter without the slightest idea they were doing so. The very cadence and rhythm of the poetry change your brain waves. Behind that, lies Shakespeare’s deep understanding of feeling and his brilliant logic and insight into life. A bracing stimulant like a cool Perrier mist in a tropical bar above a deep blue lagoon.

All that talk just seems to vanish, like my grandmother Gladys’s deep throated story-telling and her great laughter of, for example, the time her French cleaning lady came running downstairs crying, “Gladness, Gladness, the house is on fire.” Indeed the house was on fire and subsequently burned to the ground, but fifty years later, Gladys rocked with laughter. After 96 years and 2 burned-out houses, Gladys is gone and only memory can hold that treasure now.

But it is real no matter how invisible.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. (Hebrews XI, 1). Now faith is a slippery thing. As best as I can see it is the light of our looking and the sound of our listening. It isn’t some dread effort of will. The important idea in Paul’s words is that what is invisible can have substance, can indeed be evidence.

So we could count up what you really have accomplished substantially and visibly, mention, for example, two brilliant male off-spring and a soul mate. Or we could have faith that much more is going on here, the love that people bear you in their hearts is your Pulitzer, your Nobel Prize, your pearl of great price.

This is, after all, only an imitation of defeat and not a very good one at that.

Septuagenarians on the Road: part 2

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Checking in is simple when the room has been paid for since January. Now to find it. We are not on the fourth floor where the rest of our family is. We are on the ground floor in a wing that runs out to the back. Okay, down the stairs, whoa! seems like a dead end, turn right, turn left, ah, a corridor with rooms on either side. But a pattern has been established: for the entire weekend we will feel as if we are caught in a giant maze. Figuring out how to get to the right parking lot so that we can bring our bags in through the patio door takes all three of us, scouts and outriders.

And what have we bought for $200 a night? Let’s see. No terry cloth robe as Georgia hoped. No minibar fridge. No queen-sized beds but, yes, there is a ‘cot’ standing on end like an escaped Murphy bed and when it is wheeled over to the window and let down to horizontal, it proves to be at least as comfortable as the beds, if not more. Georgia pulls down the covers on it and discovers she can see the mattress through the sheet. She and I stare in wonder. I pull down the covers on my bed. Same diff, as we used to say. Well, at least the mattress looks clean and works fine. The three of us collapse as one. What a pleasure to feel circulation in our feet.

There is a certain amount of uncertainty, of the sort I would experience if I were at a house party in one of the great English houses. Where to go, what to do? There is no library to hang out in on the chance of meeting others, but there is a lobby and the breakfast tables there. Feeling a little rested, I go back up the byzantine route and find my daughter has arrived, having flown across the continent. General rejoicing. But she is to have dinner with the groom and his father’s family. So back to the room. My son had called in to ask us to eat with him and his girl. Blake has said we aren’t hungry yet.

“I’m starving,” I object. So we go to Applebys next door where my son said they were going. Can’t see him. Have to wait for half an hour in the bar. Finally get our table. Once we have ordered, look over at the people across the aisle who are inexplicably waving. It is them.

Georgia has in fact brought her own terry robe and pjs although she hates them, out of deference and modesty. Blake’s nightwear are his black skivvies, the size of a speedo. Fortunately, his body looks as lean and muscular as it did at 18. He does not notice her eyebrows disappear into her hairline.

Blake has cautioned us so often about how often he gets up in the night that we give him the bed next to the bathroom. Blake sleeps like a log, never stirring all night long. So does Georgia. I do not. After one trip with my tiny flashlight, I lie listening to them. Blake has worked up a snore that sounds on the out breath as if he is being murdered, a desperate cry from a cut throat. I listen to ten such expostulations. Enough!

“Blake, turn over,” I command, sotto voce. He stops. He stirs. He opens his eyes.

“Why,” he asks.

In the morning, we find each other in the lobby and consider the continental breakfast. My son and his wife partake and then take off on their bicycles. The rest of us go into town for real food. And we tour the Emily Dickinson house (see “A Poem a Day Keeps Blues Away”) Then my daughter hands me her iPhone which she has programed to lead us to Shutesbury and her son’s home that afternoon.

But first, we three septuagenarians (one only in training mind you) need to have a time out. The room looks pretty much as it had when we left. One bed is tucked in. The other two not so much. There is another blanket as I requested and extra bath towels, but all of the hand towels have vanished. The ice bucket needs to be refilled if we are to keep the chardonney cool and the desk, dresser and night tables need a bit of a tidy. I set about that chore, devising a sort of kitchen spot around the coffee maker. Georgia choses to believe housekeeping staff had been overwhelmed.

After a delicious lunch of rice crackers and peanut butter, we are on the road again. By now we have established a pattern. I give Blake more warning when he has to turn and he inevitably misses it. On the way back from the town centre, we had a tour of the country after we turned the wrong way on 116, but I take no credit for that since I was silently sulking. That turns out to be a good thing because the wedding is going to be out there.

So I pull out my daughter’s iPhone. No problem, this time.

There are apparently three basic ways to get from the Russel St Ho Jo’s to Shutesbury, two of the involve going back to the centre of Amherst. We go that way. Then something happens. Instead of seeing the map and hearing directions, I see only a green blip moving along a street. As I stare in wonder, all unaware, we pass our turn. I try in vain to enter a new search. It is the same phone as mine. Why can’t I get it to work. The others seem unconcerned. The scenery is green and beautiful, woods, rolling hills, fields. Leverett Rd turns into Cooleyville Rd. The green blip that is us bops along. Then somehow we are on Prescott Rd. I phone the groom. No answer. Their house is in a dead zone cell-tower-wise. They line up their cell phones on one window ledge to try to get a signal. I try again. No answer. I phone the land line.

“You’re where? he asks disbelieving. And well he might. It was a 20 minute trip and we had been on the road 45 minutes. “When you come down a steep hill to a T intersection turn right.”

But there are dozens of steep hills.

I recall Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could not stop for death”:  “We passed the school where children strove/At recess in a ring/We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain/We passed the setting sun.”  It has been over an hour. In my desperation, I imagine realizing that “The Horses’ Heads” really are turned toward eternity. And then, magically, we are there.

Slouching out of the car, and more or less ignoring a warm welcome, we fall into mutual recrimination. Georgia assumes all future navigational duties none of which will, according to her, involve technology. I am happy to retire.

She gets us back to the hotel with hand written instructions. Rehearsal dinner is just up the road, although I would have headed in the wrong direction. The wedding site, we have already found.

The return trip just means reversing the route we took to get there, so I have no role. As we near Buffalo, I begin to worry. How to get through the city to the bridge? I say nothing. Blake has driven and sailed everywhere and anywhere and never got lost. (Maybe confused as Davy Crockett would say, but not for 3 days.) Blake has an intuitive sense of direction. Let him be. Then we are off the highway onto city streets. Arrrrgh! I think, but I stay silent. Blake drives without comment, and drives and then, there it is the high ramp up onto the Peace Bridge.

Just one more slight snag – we head off the Queen Elizabeth Way following a sign to the Keg, a steakhouse of note. Can it be this far from the highway? A ship moves slowly through the Welland Canal blocking our path. Blake drives on. Fifteen minutes later, the Keg appears, a Canadian idea of a highway restaurant.