This is going back a bit.

My sisters and my mother visited me back in November, and one of the nights we spent just talking about music and memories and such.

At one point my Mom started talking about her first husband’s (the father of all my siblings) favourite songs while they were dating. The fact that she remembered this one detail was astounding to me. Anyway, she went on to say it was “Hurt” by Timi Yuro. Again, I was a bit amazed but didn’t make a connection right away. That is, until my sister said “Go on limewire and see if you can download it.”

So I logged on and found it, but didn’t say anything until it was finished. Then I said “Ready?” and hit play. And for a milisecond, a brief moment in time, I could see my Mom brought back *instantly* in time. She closed her eyes and listened – none of us talked. It was obvious she hadn’t heard the song in years, and here it was instantly.

We went on to download and share a bunch of songs that meant important things to us. It was a rather magical evening.

“Hurt” just came up on iTunes. The first word of the song is so brilliant I can’t get over it.

I’ve been to the new Canadian War Museum about 9,000 times since it opened two years ago. It’s a great museum. I went again today, discovering a little computer kiosk I had never seen before, entitled “voices in history” or something like that. It was basically first person memories of being in the various wars.

So I was scrolling through the WWII section, looking for names I recognized — not actually expecting to find any. WELL. There under the V’s was my Uncle Puss talking about his time in WWII as a Ham and Radio operator.

It was so freaking neat to hear him talking about it. There’s a little piece of my family recorded forever at the War Museum. It’s just too bad I didn’t know about it when my Mom & sisters were visiting in November.

How Will You Go?

A moment,
A man, sitting Indian-style
Hat out for change.
Pavement below,
Pavement behind.

Did recognition
alight in your eyes?
You feigned it well
Much like your life.

There is no worship
to be found. I’ve searched.
No childish memories
That remain untainted
Like the burnt edges
Of a childhood photo
Long lost to the ages.

I have naught from you
But a name
And a history you never
Taught me.
Not a solitary image.

Do you carry one of me
In your empty wallet?

In the end you were
a bow and arrow,
a tomahawk.

A deserter manitou.

So this past weekend my grandma had two strokes. She’s already got a myriad of other health problems, and we were worried that this might be the end.

Well, Grandma seems to be holding her own. My Mom and sisters saw her again yesterday and she was awake and mostly coherent, talking to them. They said she was repeating herself a lot, but wasn’t too bad, and the hospital was sending her back to her nursing home. She’s still haemorrhaging in her brain, which can really only go two ways. It may be fatal, but it may still heal itself. So again, hard to know where we stand, but going by what my family tells me, she’s hanging in there.
I swear the woman has more lives than a cat. I mean, I want her to live because she seems to want to (and because I’d miss her, of course), but I can’t help but worry that she’s really suffering.