That time just before everything changes

When something suddenly happens to you that has the potential to change your life forever, you look back at those moments just before to search for some sort of meaning.  Was what you were thinking some sort of clue that went ignored?  Was choosing one path over the other just a decision among dozens we make every day, a different choice just delaying the inevitable?

I’m sitting here starting the second week of six with my right leg gripped in a brace from the ankle to hip after blowing out a tendon skiing, getting emergency surgery, and spending nearly a week in hospital.

I was skiing along a ridge following little red-haired girl as we made our way back to Samnaun, Switzerland, when I stopped to look at the vista spread out to the right.  It was like everything you dream a day in the mountains should be.   The sky a deep blue, the roiling froth of mountain peaks spread out in all directions.  No wind.  Uncrowded.  Just a Dad and his girl seizing the day we’d planned and looked forward to for months and months.  The second day of two weeks and it was already perfect.

We were in Austria, but the Swiss mountains loomed closer, and as I glanced over at to my right down the cliff and the blinding clarity of the snow across the valley, I called out ahead for her to stop and just take a look at it herself.  I wanted to catch up with her so we could stand there together, so that I could remind her that this is what it’s all about.   It’s not just the feel of your skis on the snow, the sweet spot you hit when years and years of practice lets you accomplish a fluid and effortless turn one after the other.  It’s not the speed – though that’s part of the exhilaration you kind of get addicted to – and it’s most definitely not about looking good or trying to impress anyone or comparing this one to that.

It’s about stopping to appreciate what’s all around you.  The feeling you get when you really see where you are among the mountains, the vista, the fresh air.

But she was already so far ahead of me that she didn’t hear, and I felt compelled to move on and catch up far sooner than I wanted to.

We met up at the top of a black run down to the left.  The ridge traverse led to a blue run – a much easier way down – which we could see in the distance further on and down to the left.

“So which one do you want to take?” she asks me.  ”The blue or the black?”

“The black, for sure.”

OK!

We flew off beside one another down the wide, flat expanse.  There was no other skier near us.  The first few turns felt really good as they had both days, and I was thinking about which lift we might take first to get us closer to the Swiss border and home, and what we’d be making for dinner, when suddenly it felt like my right thigh burst out of its skin, and I was down.  I squirm and cringe just writing this, a feeling I get when I rehearse to myself in German what I’m going to tell the doctor.  The pain doesn’t come back, but it’s this feeling of helplessness and incomprehension, because I still don’t know how it happened.

In an instant I knew from the pain that something serious had gone wrong and that this would be my last time on skis for a very long while.  I was just beginning to bounce head first down the hill on my back as that thought flashed, but by the time I’d stopped and rotated so I could use the good leg to get up to a standing position, I thought: this isn’t so bad.  I don’t feel anything at all anymore.

Two women stopped and asked if I was OK, as they’d seen the fall and heard me screaming.  They asked if they should tell the ski patrol at the bottom of the lift.

“I think I’m going to be OK,” I said, the red-haired girl standing beside me.  ”I’m going to try to make it down by myself.”

No chance of that.  My first attempt at moving the leg was instant agony, and somehow I was on my ass again, sliding down a few metres further, my daughter scrambling behind to grab and stop me.

Refusing help was denial of that first thought that this was a serious injury.  This can’t be happening.  It’s never happened before.  It’s only the start of our ski vacation.  I’m healthy, I can ski well, I’ve got the rest of my life to enjoy this and I’m going to prove it.

Another pair of skiers stopped to ask the same thing, but this time we were pretty emphatic.

“I’m really injured,” I told them.  ”I’m going to need to be taken off the hill.”

Is it legal in Germany to shower nude in front of the window for all to see?

I’ve nothing against nudity.  I’m nude quite a lot, especially in the German sauna, sharing space with genders masculine, feminine, and neuter

But there’s a time and space for everything, and this morning, I said to myself, enough’s enough.  Why do we have to avoid our front window every morning because we don’t want to suffer the sight once again of some asscrack who lives in an apartment across the courtyard on the same level as ours drying off his package?

If he were schlendering around the sauna landscape looking for his flip-flops while he flipped and flopped around, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.

But the window is as a thin layer that separates little from the public space and the private, especially when it’s dark out and you’re standing in a room with all the lights on.

So if it’s normally not legal to be walking around nude in public, is it legal to do so in your own space for all to see?

Do we have to put up with this?  I don’t engage my German-resident readers enough even when I’m blogging regularly, but I’m asking you now: what do you know about cases like this?  Can we do or say anything or is he free to carry on as he pleases?

Grinding it out with a grain mill

One of the first things I noticed about my wife K’s kitchen in Hong Kong was this big, blocky wooden thing in the corner near the back door leading out to the terrace.

“What’s THIS?” I asked, flipping a globular wooden knob back and forth.

“It’s a grain mill,” she said.  ”A friend brought it from Germany for me.”

That really floored me.  Her flat was actually quite spacious by the cramped standards of Hong Kong, but the kitchen was little more than a narrow corridor wedged between an oversized living room and the tiny, windowless room we stored stuff in, but was designed as the maid’s bedroom.  We may have been cooking with gas, but you had to be really organised or you’d quickly run out of counter room.  You could stretch your arms across and touch both walls it was so small, so this glorified hunk of wood seems like the last thing you’d need.

But she swore by the results she got by grinding her own whole wheat flour, and I couldn’t much argue after she served up some Kaffee und Küchen for the first time. 

In Hamburg we have a much bigger kitchen, so the mill seems to take up a lot less room on our counters, and after 22 years it still gets used a lot, especially the last couple of years or so that I’ve been baking bread regularly.

It’s a German product, dependable and built to last out of solid beech, but you have to take it apart once in a while to give it a thorough cleaning or it starts to look a little ratty.

On the inside you’ll find a powerful motor and millstones made of a hardened ceramic.  The first time I turned loose all the bolts and separated the parts to clean was after it hadn’t been used in a few months.

There were a few bug skins clinging to the walls of the flour chute and around the grinding face, which was a bit of a YUCK moment, but once it was scrubbed clean, put back together and burnished with linseed oil, it looked good as new.

For grain I head to the organic food store.  I’ve ground a variety of grains over the years, but usually stick to wheat because that’s what the bread recipes I use call for.  The only thing I’ve not tried is corn, because I’ve never found corn kernels that specially say they’re for making corn flour, but what I’d love to do is grind some corn to see if I can make some whole grain polenta from it.

The manufacturer’s website has a variety of mills to choose from, and I like the fact they still make the exact model we own.  Their website gives you a bit of sticker shock, though.  Our model will set you back €454, but they’re guaranteed for 10 years.  Like I said, they’re built to last, so you should have it at least as long as we have with regular care.

If you want to see it running in this video, turn your sound down!  It is a bit of a noisy thing:

Two weeks in a tower in Tuscany

This might sound cliché and trite, but why did we wait so long to visit Tuscany?  Fifteen years living just up the road and we’d never made it?  It’s just a hop down the road and beyond the big hills!  If you like good food and wine, wandering around beautiful countryside, interesting cities, museums and historical sites, it’s got to be among the best places in Europe.

We arrived in Tuscany after a three-day drive from Hamburg.  That was one of our many firsts for this trip.  We’d taken our ol’ Swedish Tank on long road trips before, but this was the longest, and our first time driving in Italy.  The drivers weren’t as bad as they’re reputed to be, but one caution: if you don’t like being squeezed onto narrow roads with some guy less than six feet behind you all the time no matter what your speed, don’t get behind the wheel there.

Our second night on the road – and first in Italy – was still far from our Tuscany tower, but if we could have stayed longer, we would have.  Arriving late afternoon we managed to scrape out a room in Torno, a little town tucked into a nook on the shores of Lake Como way up north close to the border with Switzerland.

It’s just 20km or so up the road from the city of Como, which makes it sound close, but it was a narrow, twisting trail cut into the side of the mountain, and full of Sunday afternoon traffic, so the going was very slow.  I thought we weren’t going to be able to squeeze our Swedish Tank through a couple of the tighter spots.  Finding a parking spot for the beast was another trial, but we wedged into a space for the night up the hill and schlepped out gear down to the harbour once we found the room.

As we settled onto the terrace surrounded mostly by locals having an evening drink and meal in the fast-fading evening light looking out over the tiny harbour, the breeze from the placid lake like a warm bath, we felt lucky to be there, like we’d pointed a finger at the map and said: this is where it’ll be perfect, if only for one night.

Another first was the number in our party: Our red-haired girl is no longer little, and getting choosy about which trips she’s going to take with the rents, so it was also the first time in 15 years we’d been on a holiday as a couple for more than four days at a stretch.  Just the two of us, nobody else.

That was OK with us, because we knew we’d booked a place to ourselves, and were looking forward to getting up the morning and not having to deal with anyone or anything but deciding on what to do that day.

Just how much space we’d have around us became apparent as we approached the tower, driving through rows and rows of grapevines past the last house and then further up a small incline to the top of a hill.

The booking.com reviews warned that it was small, and that there was no heating, but we thought: who cares?  There’s a fireplace!  And, as it turned out: a gas stove, a decent fridge, a wide, comfy bed upstairs along with bathroom and shower.  Fully self-contained, and stocked with wine made from the thousands of vines stretching out from our doorstep.  We just let them know at the end how much we’d drunk, and they added it to the bill.

On one of our first outings a few miles away we found some firewood stacked along the side of the road and thought, naw, we can’t take it, what the locals saw us loading up on it?  German plates and all…  We like to be good neighbours.  But a few hours later we came across the same spot and said, screw it, let’s just take a few chunks, so we took a few armfuls and threw them in the back of the Tank.  No regrets, because late into the evenings and on the cooler mornings that fire was the best thing about the place.  We bought a couple of bags of good kindling in a store down the road so even though our logs weren’t quite dry, they fired up right away.

The only snag was during a bad thunderstorm the second week.  We’d shut all the windows, but the driving rain seeped through the framing around them, the water running down the walls in thin rivulets onto the upper-floor tile.  Luckily our host had come by the night before with fresh sheets and towels, so we used the old ones to mop up as the storm wore on.  A good thing, too, that we’d decided to stay home that day, or we’d have come home to a real mess.

Small-game hunters were our only visitors, but we caught only glimpses of them as they lurked off in the bushes while their dogs sniffed their way around the vineyard.  Their guns would go pop-pop-pop off in the distance, so we knew they were around, but they kept well away from the tower.

Tucked away as it was about half-way between Pisa and Florence, we did get around for a bit of exploring.  More on that coming up in a while.

 

Such an awesome lunch we had at the Squamish White Spot

Seriously awesome.

A friendly staff member showed us to our table and as we settled down to look at the menu, our early twenty-something waiter came by.

“Hi, can I get you anything to drink to start?”

“We’ll all have coffee,” my brother Bruce said, “and my younger brother here will have some water.  He’ll have his coffee after, because he told us the other day that having coffee before a meal other than breakfasts is SO American.”

“Awesome,” said our waiter.  ”I’ll be right back.”

By the time their coffee and my water came, we were ready to order.

“So, can I take your order now?

“Sure,” said Bruce. “I’ll have the Fat-free Triple-O Leanburger with lettuce and tomato, no mayo, please.”

“Awesome.  And for you, Sir?”

“I’ll have the baked potato,” I said.

“Awesome.”

And so it went.  For every statement resulting in the slightest need for a response, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Awesome.”

By the time he was so awesomely fetching our bill I started to imagine what tired, overused, meaningless bit of oral fluff he would be coming out with had we been suddenly slung back to the late sixties, when the land upon which the clean, bright White Spot stood - and in which we were now able to enjoy such an awesome lunch - would still for another 20 years be nothing more than a poorly drained swamp.

“Hi, can I take your order?”

“I’ll have the Triple-O Fatburger with extra cheese, bacon and mayonnaise and a side order fries with gravy, please.”

“Groovy, man!  And for you, ma’am?”

The thing is, I’d always thought Awesome was already passé, flung onto the heap along with the rest of the Neats, the Keens, the Cools, the Far-out-solid-right-on Hippie-dippie Weatherman stuff that so dates the user, even the worst offender avoids the aforementioned and please-just-let-it-stay-dead forever Groovy.

Apparently not.  You have to plunge right back into your home country to find out what people are talking about and how they’re saying it, so that’s what I did.  I vowed from then on to keep my ears open and listen to every waiter, bank teller, kiosk vendor, fast-food order-taker and clerk, taking note of every Awesome I heard in the short two weeks I’d be there.  I thought it might be fun to do a final tally, plotting the utterances onto an Awesomes per Hour chart.

But it was like going on a car ride as a kid back in the day before backseat Blu-Ray players, Playstations and Smartphones, when passing the time meant counting the cars coming the other direction.  After a few hundred or so, you just got tired of it.

The Queen was right about my home town

I couldn’t agree more:

Edinburgh: finally seeing the home town of a grandfather I never knew

Sometime back before the turn of the century we had the vague idea of visiting Scotland to see where a chunk of my family’s history played out.  I’m a Canadian with Scottish roots on both sides of the family.  My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a fishmonger in Edinburgh before he emigrated to Canada with his children, my grandfather among them.  He died not long after the photo with me on his lap was taken.

Then when we were mulling over the idea of visiting back then a distant cousin, whose hobby was geneology, sent me a hand-written letter full  of details about my great-grandfather and his times back in the late 1800s in Edinburgh.  She had visited Scotland in the early 1970s and had tracked down many details of our Scottish roots going back a few generations.

One thing interrupted another as life happened to us in the meantime while we were making other plans, so we never did make it to Scotland.

I’d bought a guidebook we never used, but because we’re now definitely going to be there in one month, the other day took it off the shelf where it’s been sitting for the past dozen years.  I was thinking there must be some interesting stuff about Scottish history in it even if the practical information must be hopelessly out of date.

As I took it off the shelf it opened to the page where I’d stuffed a letter my cousin had written me so long ago, and quickly forgotten.  It’s better than any guidebook is going to be.  It’s got a little wander all laid out for us.   Here’s an excerpt:

Your great-great grandparents John and Isabella lived on Leith Street near Register House.  Your great-great grandfather John was a lithographer.  Your great-grandfather was a fishmonger and had three fish shops before coming to Canada.  Your grandfather James was a bank manager in Saskatchewan.  Your grandparents were married in the Tron Kirk, High Street and South Bridges.  (hmmm. they must have gone back to get married?  Must check this.)

Your Granddad and my mother lived as children in a house on Warrender Place (or Park) Edinburgh near Marchmont Road.  She and your grandfather were pals.  Most of her childhood memories were with him.  It is a lovely street, wish I had known the address.  Your great-granddad James (their father) had a fish shop on the corner of Warrender and Marchmont.  Mother and your grand-dad played on the Meadows nearby, and spoke of the huge jawbone they played under.  I found it, not so huge, must be a whale bone, would appear very big to a child.

Your grand-dad and my mother walked the Royal Mile every day because James had two other fish shops. They used to ride under Canongate Tollbooth, driver had to pay.  They lived in Duddingston for a while and attended school.  I have since been told that the school might have group pictures with them in it.  My mother always wondered what she looked like as a child.

Suggest you walk the Royal Mile.  Your great grand-dad sang in choir at St. Giles Cathedral.  It is beautiful.  Sundays the Pipers are there for church service.

(…) My mother’s memories of her fourteen years in Scotland made my visit to the homeland memorable.  I felt as though I belonged.

Another family detail gleaned from a photocopied Scottish newspaper clipping was their war record.  My grandfather had six brothers.   All seven of them fought in France during World War I.  They each fought in a different unit and never met the other during the whole conflict.  Astoundingly, all seven survived that most murderous of wars, which the clipping mentions must be a record for the whole country.

A clipping of my great-grandfather’s obituary was also among the papers stuffed in that guidebook.  Apparently I have another place to pore through: Carisbrooke cemetery.  Would the gravestone still be there?  It will take a visit to the Isle of Wight to find out for sure.

Notes on two weeks in the mountains

Long-suffering readers of this space will know that I’m nuts about an essentially pointless sport – much like golf – where the object of the game is to survive with a smile the pain of strapping a pair of heavy, plastic bricks around your ankles, attaching them to planks and pointing yourself downhill.  And, like golf, there’s the renting equipment, paying for your right to be on the course, dressing for the day, and following certain modes of etiquette.

It’s an addiction that makes no sense, but it got its claws into me before I was shaving and now I can’t shake it.

In Canada, I used to satisfy it in small doses.  How’s the weather look tomorrow?  Looks great for skiing – let’s go!

Living in Britannia Beach less than an hour from a former Olympic venue, you can do that.  In Hamburg, you have to plan your trip ahead of time because unless you fly, it takes the whole day to get down to the Alps.  We started planning for our recent week in St. Anton, Austria more than six months ago by booking a place in Pettneu, a small village 5 minutes from the main village of St Anton but quieter, friendlier, and much cheaper for overnight stays.

Then after a very dry Autumn, the snows hit the Alps this winter with a sudden force that knocked out roads and forced many people to prolong their vacations.  Such massive dumps I’d not seen in 15 years of living here, so I thought hmmmm… Six metres at the top?  Why go for only one week when there’s so much snow?  So I booked another week at Ischgl, a resort we’d never been to though it’s in a valley very close to St Anton.

Ischgl turned out to be a great discovery for us.  With its huge variety of runs laid out in such a way that you’re never far from another part of the area even though it’s spread out quite far – even taking in a tiny portion of Switzerland – it beats St Anton in a lot of ways.

Another discovery was the best part of Arlberg – the region where you’ll find St Anton – is Zürs, a smaller area with some amazing terrain and great scenery only 20km or so from St. Anton.  You can ski there on the same ticket, but for some reason we’d always only gone to nearby Lech if we ever ventured out of St. Anton.  It turned out to have the best skiing of any place we went to this time.

Another new experience was skiing with my daughter all day, every day.  We’d made a deal before leaving that, for the first time, she wouldn’t have to take lessons.  Three years ago – the last time we went as a family – she was in lessons and she’d been on a school ski trip last year, but it had been so long since I’d seen her on the boards, I was unsure whether she’d be able to keep up to me.

First run down I knew that I’d have to give her a few tips to work on, but as for whether she could keep up – hah!  That was often my problem.  On several runs she never stopped from top to bottom.  How could I have forgotten what I heard one woman say on the slopes five years ago: See that girl down there? She’s like a madwoman!

Along the way over the two weeks this year, her skiing improved.  Compare the video here with the one below it.

In this first clip – she’s the one in white in the background at the start – you can see how by swinging her arms and rotating her shoulders in the direction of her turn so much, she’s not only got a lot of unnecessary movement, she’s making the preparation for her turn much more difficult for herself.  So I had her think about getting her upper body as quiet as possible throughout the turn, keeping the shoulders square to the hill and the hands still out in front, with just a touch when planting the pole before the turn.

In this clip, taken on the second-to-last day, you can see she wasn’t doing any of those things nearly as much:

We froze our butts off a couple of days, skied by Braille in fog and flat light on another, but were rewarded on most days with a perfect combination of fresh snow and brilliant sunshine.  For all the snow and the luck we had with the weather, this trip is going to be the one we compare all the others to for a long time to come.

For the love of a dog in a cold city

I’m not a dog-lover.  I avoid them whenever possible, a strategy developed over a late childhood spent delivering the Vancouver Sun newspaper six days a week.  The oversized canvas bag I used to stuff with about 28 papers every day had SUN in huge, black letters written on the side.  Dogs in my hometown read it as: BITE ME.

Eleven times in five years they sunk their fangs into my flesh by the time I turned 13 and passed the paper route on to a 10-year-old kid eager to be a moving canine chomping post in exchange for pocket money.

I was thinking of my attitude to dogs while strolling through the bitterly cold streets of Paris with my friend.  Paris is notorious for its dogs and the tonnes of crap they dump every day.  As he scraped a freshly laden smear off his heel one afternoon, I consoled my friend by telling him a visit to Paris wouldn’t be complete without glitching at least once through a fragrant pile of crotte de chien.

Then on our last day of serious walking my friend and I came across a white sheet of paper thumb-tacked to a tree.  We stopped and read the first few lines, and, because we realised how much of an honest cry from the heart we’d randomly stumbled upon, we read it to the very end.

The lines on that anonymously posted sheet of paper recall classic themes, and they won’t turn me into a dog-lover, but I think I’ll never forget how I came across them, and know I’ll look on dog owners in a different light from now on.

A dog creates bonds – hommage to Lumie and to dog-owners.

Lumie died at the age of 6, brutally ending a close, three-year relationship with the author of these lines.  Three years during which the novice I was in the subject discovered the special friendship which can bond a man to a dog.  Three years that allowed me to get to know other dog-owners, strollers of all ages with whom contact forms with an astounding spontaneity in a city such as Paris where a general distrust of strangers prevails.

I also often came across former dog owners who would not hesitate to crouch down and tell of their sorrow when their companion had left them – a great sadness that, quite often, they still felt a long time after.  Some had not yet “grieved” as the saying goes. They had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their vanished animal, especially if it resembled mine.

There was a time when everyone made fun of “these grannies and their little doggies.”  But in talking to those holding a leash you come to realise the irreplaceable role of a companion a dog can be to isolated men and women.   One day a woman said to me, “she’s my baby” when speaking of Pim, a beautiful German Shepherd that was said to have once been in a police squad sniffing out narcotics.

Often the owner would talk in glowing terms of the absolute loyalty their dog afforded them that a human companion would be incapable of showing.  They’ll also talk of their intelligence and ability to understand so many things without aid of a translator.  A lot is said through a certain look, by their impressive capacity to interpret the most trivial of your movements and gestures.

All this I was able to find in Loulou, a little white Pomeranian born five years ago in Pennsylvania and brought home from New York with my luggage in 2008.  His first owner, a Taiwanese lady who was learning French, had named him Loumi, a nickname from the French word for light: lumière.  My daughter wrote He’ll be an angel dog on learning of his death from an incurable disease.

These personal revelations might seem quite laughable at a time when the Syrian regime pursues its massacre of an insurgent populace fed up with decades of tyranny, where Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest Beijing’s colonial brutality, where Europe’s destitute are dying every day of cold and the people of Greece slowly sink into poverty.  You might tell me it’s a lot of sorrow for such a little dog, a silly little thing.  There are surely greater sorrows.  Nevertheless, they don’t erase this one.

1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.