Last year, I bought two pairs of jeans in the States, of slightly different cuts. The most comfortable pair was both flattering and a lovely shade. I wore them on the plane from here to Montreal.

Half way across the country I noted sort of a burnt plastic smell. An odd smell, a complex smell for my over-inquisitive nose: a hint of burnt plastic, a little sulfur; a touch of garlic, cilantro, and a tang of ammonia. Sharp smells. I had Tate on my lap: was this a particularly alarming pee?

Arriving in Montreal, let into the heat, it became clear it was me. My jeans. I didn’t wear them again; the heat and humidity jacked the chemical stink and I didn’t like it. the “I’m wearing burnt plastic stink” paranoia gets to be a bit much.

So, when I came back I tried baking soda, multiple (20+) washes, soaking.

Nope.

Smelly smelly smelly.

I then learned this is a “known defect” in “random” jeans by that company. Pah! So, the other pair became my go-to jeans, but I don’t like them very much. The waist band hits in the wrong place and by the end of the day they’re not terribly comfortable.

So, now it’s a year later. ‘”Screw it,” thinks I, “I want a pair of jeans I am not afraid to wear and that look good and I want them now.”

So off I take my Whole Family on a Skytrain to The Mall.

And I put on a pair of jeans that challenges me. They’re those Capri Jeans (pedal pushers? clam diggers? floods? I have no idea. above the ankle) that I’ve been avoiding since I was 15 and read in Cosmo that if you’re 5′4″ and under you should avoid these like the plague.

However, I have recently learned (yes, recently), that things you read in Cosmo at 15 are not, actually, gospel bits of wisdom that you should carry around your whole life. I know, I know. The thing is, if you’re me, you forget you learned this in Cosmo. You think you learned it somewhere like… Uh… The Bible? You don’t really think about it.

But the woman SELLING me the jeans was a) shaped like me and b) my height, and they were great on her. And suddenly I was in love with the capri-flood-pedal pushing-clam digging jeans.

Since I loved them, I had to wear them right now. So I changed at the mall, and on the Skytrain home….

With Tate on my lap….

I began to wonder where the smell was coming from. The cilantro/garlic/sulfur/burning plastic smell. See? It’s HEAT activated. You can’t smell them in the store. Wear ‘em around awhile and then smell ‘em.

Oi vey.

I’m not making it back out to the mall anytime soon, note. Also, I’ve already lost the receipt, and also, *I WANT THESE JEANS*.

So I’ve tried Oxyclean, vinegar, and hand washing.

They still smell. (You gotta catch ‘em coming out of the dryer to know before wearing. This is what I’ve learned.)

If you search the internet for “stinky jeans”, you will learn that there are lots of brands of jeans out there suffering this stinky fate, but it appears a fairly new phenomenon.

Jean manufacturers - you’re biting my pie, here.

When I was in high school, based on the Coleridge poem, I named a cat Xanadu. Yes, it was a Drama-Nerd sort of a thing to do and sorta hysterical. But it was based on being a Nerd of a Coleridge reading sort, not of being a Nerd of the Olivia Newton John loving sort. (Nor was I a Rush Nerd. As far as I was concerned, I’d discovered the poem.)

I’d never heard of Xanadu, the MOVIE.

Most people in the world that I then encountered HAD heard of the movie, and not the, y’know, Coleridge poem. It was a constantly annoying explanation.

I had not seen that movie until tonight. Or rather - I saw a little bit of the movie. John has the remote and intelligently surfed away from the movie.

So, okay — Rollerblades, neon, and Greek Muses quoting opium hallucinated poems about a Mongol Emporer. Feathered hair! Short shorts! Whinging male leads whining about their art! O.N.J peering through her fingers as if she’s “acting“!

This is so kitch that maybe now I retroactively declare that cat named for the movie. Because that CAT was kitch, man. That cat was so CAT she was a caricature of a cat.

Where you’re having conversation with someone, and you forget what you’re going to say?

I have had this sort of dreamy state all day where I’m just listening; I have nothing to reply in my brain when the break comes in the conversation for me to say something now. Even though I was pretty sure, just a minute ago, I was thinking about what was being said and processing it in some way that might merit comment.

I think it’s being sort of tired. I’m not entirely awake today, which means everything is dreamy….

… If there’s a little girl in a family, and she’s the ONLY girl, and her family is featured in any story on television, what noun do you suppose fits in that blank? I’ve heard it 4 times this morning on TLC and it’s only 11 AM and I went for a workout so I started late.

I generally have some ‘noise’ on in the background while I’m working. It helps me if I’m ignoring something. I find CBC Radio too interesting for programming, and music will often convince me to stop and dance, so I sort of find chatty background stuff reminiscent of … being in an office?

I obviously need to work on my “ignore” function.

Do you think I should find out who it is?

I’m beginning to be curious as to what this ubiquitous Facebook ad is for. What can they be selling?

I imagine it’s like one:

buy our magazine and mebbe sometime edmcmahon will show up with a banner saying

“YOU HAVE ALREADY WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS!”

but the odds are one in ten ooblyboo bazillion which isn’t even a word so how likely do you think it is, hey, that you’re going to see any cash? we’ve been showing the same giveaway picture since 1978, people, that’s why the wide lapels and the feathered bangs and the high waisted pantaloons on the blonde cheque babes.

Only maybe it’s for a networking/dating thing. That would make sense:

if you subscribe to our dating service and become someone completely different, maybe someday someone who’s crushing on you huge-time will choose to tell us and we’ll send you and email that says

“SOMEONE IS IN LOVE WITH YOU! FIND OUT WHO!”

but don’t count on it unless you learn some basic hygiene. did you notice you only have 10 facebook friends and they’re all your cousins? you need to get out more. what is that you’re saying? that you find it unlikely that anyone you would know would share their feelings with a corporation in some sort of middle school do-you-like-me-check-this-box scheme? well… shows what you know. you’re so Web 0.5, and you wonder why you can’t get a date?

Today’s our 5 year anniversary; we’ve been together 10 and a bit years total.

I’d say something more, but I’m full of Shiraz and Schmancy Dinner. Here’s hoping the next 10 years are as good as the first 10, old man, but maybe they could pass a little more slowly, hey?

So exciting! It’s NOT a rejection! My short story “Small and Knowable Spaces” was accepted for publication in Storyteller magazine, and they’re even offering (gasp) payment.

I have 3 minor edits, and a bio to write: fingers crossed it all goes well… It’s not a guarantee until the ink hits the paper, right?

Sunday I was leaving midday, which was just in time. Inheritance in a dysfunctional family is going to be an issue, I think, and I finally understand how and why. It really is about the dispersal of love, and the stealing of love, and the access to love. I experienced a minor pang when I learned that the grandkids weren’t in the will - although I did not expect to be given real money, I realized I was hoping for a message from beyond the grave. “And to my granddaughter Arwen, this bugzapper. May her days never be itchy.” Or a token amount; dinner. That sort of thing. A blessing. 

That’s, of course, based on how I wrote MY will in the case that John and I both die - we have some insurance for the raising of our kids, but very little else in terms of real assets, so my own will is more about people and poetry than anything else. The shirt my sister liked, the novel to my mom, the painting that reminds me of a friend, please burn my highschool poetry. That sort of thing. Not wealth, but meaning. That my practical grandfather did not have a will of this sort is hardly surprising, and my pang passed quickly; but it did give me greater insight into how families get so messy around a death. And even my poetry could go awry, if the meaning were not clear. A bugzapper with no explanation could be an insult from beyond the grave. Rosebud…

I also had well meaning relatives attempt to help the “healing” between my father and I, which was fuel for the fire, if anything. A custody battle that has not been relevant since 1987 should no longer be an issue, for example: or if it is, then the lack of paid child support will continue to be an issue. And as to thinking that my youngest child was a girl named “Kate”, and being heart broken about the misunderstanding:  with my brother, grandfather, and aunt in regular contact, and with a little thing out there called a blog to which the world has access (and for many years was googleable on my quoted name, plus I’d given him the URL), if there were sufficient interest and motivation there was access to information. Which I pointed out, rather tersely. Of course, then I slapped my own forehead: he would unlikely come to lurk but rather to make controversial commentary, and making an invitation to that effect is, uh, stupid of me.

So when I was dropped off at the airport in South Bend it was with a bit of a sigh of relief. I didn’t mind learning, even, that my flight out was cancelled; I decided to take the bus. Which I did. 3 and a half hours later, when I got to O’Hare, I found out my re-scheduled flight to Vancouver was ALSO cancelled, but if I ran, I could get the last seat on a previous flight.

I managed to get through security and run run run O’Hare again in 45 minutes. It was like out of a movie: I got there as the last person on the flight, just as they were beginning to shut the gate down.

When I got home to Vancouver, I almost kissed the border guard.

And hey: that new International Terminal at YVR is six kinds of sweet. Good looking, sizable, nice lighting, gorgeous artwork, organized, clearly marked. Do we have an Olympics coming, or something?

What didn’t I mention, in yesterday’s post? I didn’t talk about seeing my family, especially given my Dad was there and we are, as they say, estranged. I couldn’t really see them, was the thing: a haze of fatigue, grief, shock at being in Goshen in Grandpa’s house with no Grandpa, all repressed by a thick layer of “he’s just misplaced, not dead” denial, meant that seeing the Clan was sort of like being in a dream. I gave my Dad a hug, while hugging people hello, and then I sat down.

I asked for the ladybug nail-clippers, if no one else wanted them. I stared at the Vermeer Print that had gone up sometime in the 60s - “The Milkmaid” - which to me is the symbol and essence of my grandpa’s house. Grandpa’s version is a lot more yellow and green due to sun fading, and it will go in the garbage, which lead me to a brief moment of panic that it wasn’t actually Vermeer and I’d never figure out what that painting was. Not that I want one hanging in my home; I’m not a milkmaids in the Netherlands sort of a decorator. I still wanted to know what it was so that I could look at it sometimes.

I remember coming to Grandpa’s sometime in the 80s, when I was a teenager, and he had some new-fangled painting of a canoe in a natural lake scene. I was deeply offended at the new-fangledness of it when compared to the Dutch painters he had. Not just Vermeer, but paintings of windmills done with palette knife, and still life with tulip in varying ways. All shared the same sort of yellow-green-grey domesticity and linearity I associated with my grandfather; impressionistic cool greens and blues were mess and modernity in comparison. The fact that my grandfather encompassed mess and modernity was irrelevant to my teenage conservatism.

After midnight my aunt and uncle drove me to the hotel we were (mainly) all staying at. I stumbled into my room to find two queen sized beds, and I was so exhausted I wanted to drag sleep out of both at once. First I needed to bathe, and I needed to drink a litre or three of water, and I needed to brush my teeth and write to John to let him know I was okay. My cousins had invited me to drop by their room and have a drink with them, but I didn’t have it in me. I set 3 different alarms and fell into dreamless sleep.

The morning came quickly. We had breakfast in the hotel as a group and then went to the funeral home. It turned out that the casket was still open, and I was invited to go view Grandpa. I had thought, when missing the viewing while on a bus, that maybe that was okay. He wasn’t going to be in the casket. It’d be a dead person I’d be looking at, a body. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see my grandfather as a body.

I’m glad I did, though. It keenly pierced through my haze of denial, because the last time I saw that body, my Grandpa was in it. I finally understood emotionally that I wasn’t going to find him asleep somewhere and misplaced: he was dead, now, and this was the proof. I began to cry, then, and it was good to cry: my Faux Pa had sent me in armed with the idea that I should not repress grief lest it eat at me, so I let myself be right in the middle of my feelings, even in that room of American Mennonites whose culture is more stiff-lipped. (Not that I was wailing and breast beating, or anything: just crying.)

My cousins, who’d been stoic and dry-eyed, also all began to break down. And suddenly, we were a family come to mourn, a group of people deliniated by grief. We hugged each other and held each other’s hands and listened to the Pastor. I did not touch Grandpa’s body when I went by. The body was wearing a lot of makeup and was wearing Grandpa’s face incorrectly. He wasn’t in there, anymore, holding the structure of his flesh properly. (Writing about this, I am irrationally mad at his body for being there when he’s not; but I wasn’t angry at the time. So are the stages of grief, I suppose.) Someone had put an old watch on his pillow. These are stories I don’t know about him; someone else’s Vermeer understanding of him.

We went and sat in the car. My aunt’s car was immediately behind the hearse, and I was with her family. One of the funeral directors had put little flags on the roofs of our vehicles while we were inside: we were now a procession. All the men in our immediate family acted as pall-bearers and brought the coffin out to the hearse - children, spouses, grandchildren - and I watched them and worried. They were not an elite and coordinated coffin moving team, looking a little tipsy, and they were bringing him down stairs. I wondered how we do these things with no preparation or rehearsal, how we learn these new roles in grief; and then the coffin was in the hearse, with the flowers atop, and we were driving to the gravesite. Grandma’s been there for 14 years, and the headstone with Grandpa’s name on it was waiting for him with his death date yet to fill in.

It was exactly like in the movies. Normally, things aren’t. Like in the movies, I mean. But there we were: and they said “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”, and they said “in the midst of life we are in death”, and there was astroturf and a lowering machine and people lined up crying into their hankerchiefs. Although no one with a hat and veil.

I put an iris into his grave. My aunts put a model canoe into his grave, too. He loved to canoe.

Then there was more cousin hugging and crying, and I learned it was to be 4 of the cousins speaking at the service (with me reading both my eulogy and my brother’s), plus a best friend of Grandpa’s and his nephew - who is a Mennonite of Note in Goshen, at the college. Getting to Grandpa’s church I was less weepy, feeling sort of washed out by grief. My cousins and I did a bit of visiting, and I found out that my cousin N. is in the exact same place that I am regarding career. He’s a guy who’d be a friend even if he weren’t family, and it was good to talk to him.

The service was beautiful. I’ve spoken of the singing of Mennonites before and there it was again: soaring 4 part harmony. I didn’t know the first two hymns, but I picked a soprano behind me and followed her as best I could - all apologies to my family around me. They also had a song to the tune of Danny Boy - possibly the only tune I knew, but one that would make me cry anyway and brought with it all the fear of losing Yaya last year, so I would sing a line and then swallow for awhile. We got up and read our eulogies in a knot of grandkids, and it was obvious that whatever else he was, Grandpa made an effort and connection with his grandchildren.

Then Grandpa’s best friend stood up. This was so wonderful to hear, a deep and bonded connection outside the family. D. told us of how they would go camping and canoeing together, and how they were brothers more than friends. I was glad to know that this gentle, smiling man was a support to Grandpa the way the rest of us - his kids and grandkids - could not be, being invested in him as a father figure as well as his own man. D. and the Pastor both talked about Grandpa’s love of the water, of camping, of hiking, of movement, and I was again glad that Grandpa never spent time in the nursing home.

After the ceremony there was a potluck lunch, and people standing up and telling their memories. Grandpa’s living siblings were there, and I was over and over approached with people telling me how happy Grandpa was that we’d come to visit two years back, and how much they loved what I’d said, and how glad they were that all the grandkids loved Grandpa so much. One of the pastors at the church read a poem Grandpa had given her when they did a workshop on death and dying. In it, there was the prayer: “Let me make it home before nightfall” - let death come before disintegration. And so Grandpa’s prayer was answered.

In the afternoon, I went with my Goshen-living uncle to his house. He was feeling really vulnerable and a little freaked out by the combination of grief and guilt and relief: he’d been with Grandpa as he went downhill, and making medical decisions without a medical degree is a scary business. What if you made the wrong call? But I promised him that I believed it was all fine, and he’d done just right: Grandpa didn’t want to be in the nursing home, and if anyone had magically known to send Grandpa to the hospital on June the 9th, he wouldn’t have come home again. As it was, he died where he lived, and was active until the end; the most that could have happened was a few more months of deteriorating mind and personality in a hospital on machines. Grandpa didn’t want that.

We had dinner at a diner and then went back to the house, where we had a Wake more appropriate to my Irish-Catholic side (although I must say, I’ve never heard of my maternal family doing such a thing). We drank scads of wine, argued politics, and sang and danced to The White Album. My father sang a song called “SuperChicken”, which was quite funny. We sang “Me and Bobby McGee”. We looked at pictures of my aunts and uncles and dad as children. The tension that runs between us all - the estrangements and hurts and distrusts and pain, which run several directions, not just between my dad and I - was, for the evening, mostly put down. We even promised to have reunions, to see each other again: my cousins and I, specifically, who’d lost our connector.

At 2:30 am, I stumbled back into my hotel room and set all three alarms again. Up at 8, for the journey home.

I’m back, and have just slept with extreme persuasion for 12 hours. It was quite a trip.

Friday, I was up, dressed, in the cab, and to the airport in time — and very proud of myself for doing so. It helped that the sun was already providing watery, indirect morning light and the birds were singing. My phone rang at 4:45 to tell me, in the voice of The Automated Woman, ”Your cab… has arrived” and that was good - the cabbie had pulled up at the church a block away, and I couldn’t see him from my window. I ran out and got him, and having convinced him to pull back, ran back to lock the door. This is what they call ”foreshadowing” in the narrative biz. 

The flight was only 2/3 full which meant there were no people in the centre seat. A guy from Kentucky, in town on construction related business, was on the aisle and I was on the window. We both stretched out a bit and did the sleeping head nod of the upright traveler. I managed another 45 minutes; he slept for 2.5 hours, and then woke up chatty and gregarious. He was ‘pleased as punch’ to learn that I had a friend from Kentucky, (although I totally blanked on where from, getting a deer in headlights look, and only remembering after we’d seperated), and when he heard I was going to a funeral asked God to watch over me and mine. He had 4 kids and didn’t like traveling away from his family, but he did like to learn how real Chinese food was different than Kentucky Chinese food. He was incredibly friendly with such a strong ack-sent that I started thinking about how the People Of Kentucky Were A Friendly Sort, but then I remembered my sister was the same way, only not with the ack-sent, so quit stereotyping already.

Then in Chicago O’Hare, listening to an Oprah-accented automated woman over the loudspeakers telling me to keep my gels to 3 ounces, I realized that I do treat travel into the states as ‘incredibly foreign travel’, because of the different use of language. “Wow!”, I think, “Check out my American Experiences! In America! With Americans! What are THESE people like?”  Given no prior exposure and on American soil I bet I would meet my Faux Pa, my father-in-law, my own father, and some of my favorite bloggers and friends with this aw-shucks exoticism. I reminded myself not to be a naive putz.

O’Hare was breathtakingly busy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airport that full. It was like sidewalks in downtown Tokyo. O’Hare also appears to have been designed by the same 50s architects that laid down the template for the average High School, only since then it’s had a million students a day going through it at speed. It felt worn out: although I’d say it was very clean and well maintained, it felt used up it created the illusion of dirt and disrepair. The fact that it was designed in shades of grey and florescent didn’t help; curved grey and white tempered glass panelling along the gates and lack of natural light desaturated all the colours.

I found my gate, checked that we were departing on schedule, and went to have some lunch at Chilli’s where the waitress called me sweetie and got overtipped for her kindness. Gosh, the People of Chicago are Nice. (Whoops!)

There was a lot of weather this weekend. Cedar Rapids flooded. Rain and thunder all over. Everywhere I went the weather was relatively nice, but everywhere the planes came from it wasn’t. My small gate for the O’Hare to South Bend puddle jumper ran four flights from it; over the 5 hours I was at O’Hare, ALL of them were cancelled. Mine kept getting delayed and delayed - but we didn’t see it at the airport. For hours, our flight was being announced as “on time” on the screens, which made all of us nervous to leave the gate. Some of my fellow travelers had signed up for automatic telephone system. That was notifying us of changes, but it was buzzing every 15 minutes with completely new information: leaving at 3:30, leaving at 2:30, leaving at 4:45, leaving at 4:50, leaving at 8:00, leaving at 5:25. One woman, before the end, said she’d had 15 updates. 

Our plane was coming from somewhere in Virginia and had been delayed due to weather, but once it was in the air and we were waiting for it to get to us we thought our eventual departure was inevitable. So we made the best of it - although it was hot and we all had events to get to, we sat and traded stories. There were four people flying in for weddings. The man who looked liked he could be Robert Deniro’s cousin had just become a grandpa. Another woman was coming home for a reunion. It was a reminder to me that in the midst of death we’re still in life.

I kept trying to let my aunt know not to send anyone for me, yet; but by the time I connected my uncle was already waiting for me. Reception was poor, but we crackled back and forth at each other with periodic updates. His screens were updating the way mine weren’t. If I got in before 7:00, I’d still have time to go to the viewing.

There was also what looked like a classic rock band on waiting on the gate. I played “guess the musician”. I think the bandanna-and-suit jacket over concert t-shirt was the guitar player. The sunglasses-wearing frizzy-feathered Rod Stewart lookalike was the singer, and the Big Guy with the ripped jeans was the bassist. The drummer looked like a nice construction worker from Kentucky - could have been a manager, but he kept drumming on his knees. Why into South Bend?

Then the plane landed and we were all gearing up to go, standing in line. It was 2 and a half hours later than the last time we’d geared up to board. That’s when the 2 airline folks lead our pilot off.

Yep, lead. The way were doing it, it seemed caretaking. Perhaps he was sick, or got some bad news. “Nevermind”, said the gate attendant, “we’ll get you a pilot. He’s coming in at 5:30.” 

Nevermind, gate attendant.

At 5:00, we learned we weren’t getting that pilot.

“Your flight’s been cancelled,” said the gate attendant. “That’s the last out tonight, too.” One of the gate crew who’d come up said, “Get to the bus, quick.” So one of the women with whom I’d particularly bonded and I took off at a run.

Run run run.

Run run run.

God, O’Hare is big.

We got to the bus first of all our gate friends. We decided we should be in the reality show, the amazing race, together; $36 for tickets, the bus is leaving soon. We (and most of the other folks from our cancelled flight) went to grab something to eat and drink, since the ride was going to be 3 hours and we’d all been stuck at the gate due to the confusion of yes and no — and we didn’t find something to eat, but we got a drink. When we got back (in time for the bus), was when we realized we weren’t guaranteed seats by purchasing a ticket.

Which is why we were standing for 2.5 of those three hours. But still, everyone kept good humour. I was rather proud of us all; the bridesmaids who’d lost their luggage, me who’d miss the viewing, my friend who was missing her nieces. People made jokes that we just need to make a booze run and we’d have a party. Most of us smelled bad and were sweaty and rumpled, all of us were tired, all of us hungry. I passed out my caramels, and someone pulled out a little bag of chips. There was a blond woman from the deep south who kept drawling comfort at us in a whisky and cigarette voice and I thought of how Blond Women from The Deep South are Colourful Characters.

When getting on the bus my new friend whose reunion was happening said she was going to Goshen and offered to give me a ride, so I sent my uncle home. After sizing each other’s family histories up, I have little doubt that our families are in some way connected, through church affiliation or otherwise - how many liberal Mennonite families with connections to MCC are in Goshen, anyway? - and she really did save the day for me. She dropped me off at Grandpa’s front door, where my family waited with wine, but first she hauled me through a drive through, so that I could “get a calorie into my face”. This helped immensely. I pulled into Grandpa’s, then, at 10:30 Friday night, and although that only represented 7:30 Vancouver time, it felt like midnight. Jet lag? No.