Thursday, October 23, 2008

One Day at a Time

Yesterday after I updated my computer security downloads I went for a walk along the seawall. I wasn’t sure where I was headed but it was a sunny and colorful fall afternoon.

I decided to complete a cycle I have been avoiding and return to the Pauline Johnson memorial at 3rd Beach. It was on the day I visited it nearly 3 months ago that I suffered vertigo that sent me to hospital for a week and wiped out my balance.

I finally seem to be recovering and yesterday walked without a cane as I have been doing the past week.

I found that the going was a bit slow but I negotiated my way to Siwash Rock, my first long seawall walk since the accident.

There was a young woman sitting there along the seawall, her head bowed and I thought maybe she was praying but as I passed her, I saw she was writing in a notebook.

I said a short prayer in memory of my mom and then returned to the 3rd Beach concession stand to use the washroom.

I strolled for most of the walk as I didn’t have the energy to power walk. I found that I am still feeling a fair amount of vertigo, but it is not throwing me completely off balance as it was a few weeks back. However, I have to focus to keep from wobbling.

When I got home, Karen was there. She has been staying with me for 2 weeks now after being evicted from her Kits apartment by an unscrupulous landlord. Our son Kadir has gone to stay with his sister Nika, pending Karen finding them a new place to live.

She is also looking for work and so it has been a change of schedule for me which I have had to adjust to. I am usually awake now at 7 or 7:30 which is her morning schedule. This makes for a rather long work day.

But when I came to the decision to invite Karen to stay here temporarily, I also made the decision to deal with the change in my daily routine as I knew I would have to.

Eight years is a long time to be apart, and it has taken a lot of adjustment to deal with the presence of another person in my tiny bachelor apartment.

When Karen came to live with me nearly 30 years ago she gave me a card inscribed with lines on the strategy of climbing a difficult mountain. The lines ended with the words...you can do it by taking it one step at a time.

Little did I realize what lay ahead for us.

God willing we will still overcome the obstacles one day at a time.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

The Rest of the Chorus

It is Tuesday morning my day off, and the knock at my window didn’t come until nearly 9 a.m. as the workers were doing other jobs.

When Basti, my new Kurdish friend and window installer did knock, it was only to retrieve the extension cord he left on the floor of my apartment when he finished installing my windows yesterday. He did a great job by the look of things.

I think he was very happy with me because while installing the first window on Friday he spotted my flutes and noticed that among them was a Persian ney, which was given to me as a gift by one of the Mevlevi dervishes in the days when I played for their sema.

On Monday morning before starting work he mentioned that he would like to try it out, and asked if I would be willing to sell it.

Of course I already knew the answer, and I was pretty sure my decision was the right one. I handed him the ney, an instrument I had struggled with for months just trying to find a single note. He put it to his lips and immediately blew an intricate musical phrase, something that he had obviously done many times before.

While counting the finger holes, as though to verify what he had decided was the origin and type of the ney, he told me he wasn't able to find a good ney in Vancouver. I told him, "You don't have to search any more. This ney is my gift to you."

His face lit up like a young boy's and he began another dancing riff of wavering notes. "This is a really nice gift", he effused.

"Well, don't just sit there playing the ney all day", I admonished, "finish fixing my window". I had the old man tone of voice down pat.

"No problem Baba", he exclaimed and went straight to his tasks.

"And don't forget to lock up when you leave", I threw in for good measure as I left the apartment for the office.

We were both wearing huge grins.

When I came home last night, both windows were fully installed, caulked and the mess largely cleared away. He even remembered to turn my lights off this time.

Friday, October 03, 2008

A Chorus of One

It is a cloudy Friday morning and right on cue Caiaphas the chief high priest climbed up the scaffolding and knocked on my window.

He was a bearded man of possibly Iranian origin maybe in his late 20’s just about the age of the Caiaphas in the Norman Jewison film, with a similar build and look. At first I thought I might ignore them as I was not yet out of bed, but he knocked again and I realized that the time for my old cracked window had finally arrived.

We conversed briefly and he didn’t seem to mind that I was standing in my undershorts. He asked if he could come in through the window and told me he would be using the electrical outlet inside.

He came in briefly and exited my apartment through the apartment door.

When he appeared back at my window on the scaffolding I explained that I was going to be saying my prayers and doing my exercises but to ignore me.

He replied in a Middle Eastern accent…”Cool, I do the same.”

I would not have been too surprised if echoing my Jesus Christ Superstar comment in yesterday’s blog, he had added, “…Mohammad is Cool!”

I proceeded through my prayers and exercises although the heavy mallet blows as he was knocking the old window frame out of position were a bit jarring. I am used to morning peace and quiet.

In between hammer blows he began singing in a very melodic voice and whistling. His presence was very harmonious once I was used to him being there. I can’t say that I recognized the tunes, but the spirit was obvious and totally recognizable.

I then prepared coffee and checked email, in full view of the window with this kindly stranger looking in and hammering away with a modicum of decorum I might add. It was as though he was holding back some force out of respect for the old man inside the apartment.

I prepared my morning cereal and when I sat back down at my keyboard we started to talk again. He told me he was Kurdish from Northern Iraq…and that he was the oldest of 6 children. He talked about how his brothers and sisters now lived in many different countries and when I asked if they communicated by letter, he smiled and said, “We talk to each other all the time on web cam!” Ah yes, it is a different world than the one I knew at his age.

As I ate my breakfast he proceeded to slowly dismantle the window. He told me that it was probably 50 years old as he extracted the original screws one by one. “They built in wood in those days”, he commented. They are trying to take out the old windows but keep the frame intact to hold the new ones.

The old windows were swing-out windows, and the new ones will have sliding panels so that they can be opened without having to secure them in a strong wind. It looks like the new ones will also have screens that can be used in summer.

He stepped back through the window into my apartment explaining that he now had to work from inside and very respectfully exited through my apartment door again.

So my intuition about the workmen was in the ballpark but so far it's a chorus of one.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

A Chorus of Workmen

This morning the hammering and clatter of tools and the sounds of workmen’s voices encroaches on my window once again.

They are re-doing the building envelope and the last 2 months they have been on the opposite side of my building and now for those of us on the western side, it is our turn.

Soon there will be scaffolding erected covering the entire west wall of the building and it will be draped in that porous green fabric that is now so familiar on many older buildings. This shroud will bring 24 hour twilight to my windows.

And soon I will pause before drawing my curtains, preparing for an unfamiliar face to be peering through the glass at me. I already do that since my windows face a neighboring apartment but seeing a person in another window will not be quite as startling as staring into the face of someone hunkered down on a plank two feet away.

Ah well, the good news is that in a couple of months it will all be over and when the really wet and cold weather arrives I will be safe and dry and warm. And the upside of living in a managed building is that my life is not structured around fending off rodents, insects and mould or keeping warm by turning on the oven, as I did one winter on Vancouver Island.

It looks like my intuition was accurate this morning. For the past few days the scaffolding has been retreating and advancing, a few windows at a time. What they put up during the day was taken down at night.

But today it is a full frontal assault. The scaffolding has now been erected from back to front of the building and they won’t be undoing that at the end of the shift.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the cast of high priests in black capes and headgear from the 1960’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar climbing the rungs of the scaffolds singing “One thing I’ll say for him…Jesus is Cool”.

I just hope they sing and hammer in tune!