The Seated View

 (credit: David Govoni) "On the other hand, I feel lighter these days. I spent much of the summer feeling like I was about to die and just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing has changed really except that I seem to have decided to enjoy living. It's so much easier to exist this way." – Laurie Kingston Many of us talk about wanting to leave the world a better place. My dear friend Laurie actually did. I don’t remember the exact particulars about how Laurie and I became friends, but I know we found each other through blogging. She wrote about living with metastatic breast cancer — with the emphasis on the living bit — on her blog Not Just about Cancer and in her wonderful book Not Done Yet: Living through Breast Cancer . At the Toronto launch for Not Done Yet In Laurie, I found a steadfast friend and we were lucky to share almost a decade together. She was madly in love with her spouse Tim and proud, adoring mom to her wonderful b...

Alcatraz, 1992   At some point in the ICU , I had a transcendent experience. Buzzing with excitement, I waited for The Boy to arrive for his daily visit and then told him all about it. That as soon as I was better, the first major adventure we were going to have was to go to Giraffe Manor . Do you know about Giraffe Manor? If not, you simply must click that link. It’s a hotel in Kenya that’s has a herd of domesticated giraffes wandering about the grounds. Giraffes that stick their heads through the windows and steal your breakfast!    I’ve wanted to be a game warden in Africa ever since I read Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds as a little girl, but for now it’s fairly obvious that this job option is going to have to wait until my next life. The photo safari, too, because the savanna isn’t too accessible. But there it is, Giraffe Manor, and it is at the very least partially accessible! So, anyway. The reason that we were going there was because I’d d...

    Jack Layton died yesterday . And Canada is heartbroken . For the uninitiated, Jack Layton was the need of the federal NDP party (see CBC interview with him here ). He was the man who took it from obscurity on the national scene to being the official Opposition in the last election. But he was more than that. Much more. I got up yesterday to the news and spent the day crying every time I turned on the TV, read a newspaper or talked about it. Everyone is devastated, both the people who are NDP supporters and, oddly, refreshingly and wonderfully, people who aren't. I watched an interview with his Chief of Staff yesterday who said she had read a letter to him on Saturday that said something like "you drive me crazy, I disagree with everything you say, but we need you. Please come back." And that's it exactly. This country needed Jack. We needed his optimism, his hopefulness, his enthusiasm and his joy. And we needed the way he reminded us all of what makes Ca...