Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

What’s old is new again, every day.

Friday, Oct. 2, 2009
3:25 p.m.
I just put the phone down after talking to my mother for the second time this afternoon. The first time she called asking me where I was.

Me: I’m at home.

She: In Toronto?

Me: No, Mummy. I live in Sh’brooke, Qu’bec.

She: Well then forget it, you can’t help me.

Me: What’s the problem? What do you need help with?

She: I wanted someone to bring over some food. There’s no food in my place.

Me: Mummy, you live in a retirement residence with a dining room where you eat three meals a day. You don’t need food.

She: Since when?

Me: For over a year now.

Following this, I gave her detailed instructions how to get there.

She: What would I do without you?

Me: You would surely starve.

She called me back a half-hour later.

She: You told me where I could get food, but I’ve forgotten.

Me: In the dining room.

She: What dining room?

Me: In the place where you live.

She: I’ve never been in a dining room.

Me: Mummy, you have been eating three meals a day, every day, in that dining room since you moved into the retirement residence over a year ago.

She: No, you’re wrong. I’ve never been there before.

Me: *sighs* No Mummy, I’m not wrong. You just don’t remember.

I followed this by again giving her detailed instructions on where to find the dining room, followed by assurances that she would know what it was when she found it.

In between these two phone conversations I had a lovely chat with a friend, the accordionist who performed Hubby’s music at the music festival we were at recently. He told me how heartbreaking it was watching his mother deteriorate from Alzheimer’s disease, and it was nice to talk to a sensitive and sympathetic soul. He told me that it’s difficult to talk about these things with people who have not experienced them themselves.

Hubby and I were in L0ngueuil last night where an orchestra composition of his was played by the symphony, the conductor being an old friend of ours who used to direct the orchestra here. Beethoven’s seventh was on the programme, as well as the Bruch violin concerto, and it was a delightful evening, even considering the hour and 45 minutes we had to drive each way. We reconnected with old friends, and on the way home, stopped at a Dead Tim’s for some vegetable soup and encountered a van-load of people from our town, including the father of Little Princess’ BF, coming back from a concert in the same town we had just left. It turned out they had gone to see some Christian inspirational performer (my husband erroneously thought they were coming from Van M0rris0n), and I realized that the thing these people all had in common was the church they attended.

I’ve started extracting the wind parts from the most recent orchestra piece. This is going to take a while.


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