Going Home

I've just had the most wonderful weekend. I'm tired this morning and should be getting ready to head to work but I'm still sitting here and trying to figure out how to get myself moved over to Vancouver Island. I really do love it over there and it would be as close to Loughborough as I could get.

My grandpa had a logging company in the late 30's and early 40's. He expanded and had 3 logging companies and somewhere along the way he went broke so in '44 he went to work for the Booth Logging Company up in Loughborough Inlet at Heydon Bay. My grandma went with him and my mom was a young teen and stayed one last year in Vancouver with relatives and then she also went up to Loughborough. She married my dad who was also working up there as the camp mechanic in 1949 and I was born in November of 1950. She came out to Vancouver and stayed with her cousin and had me at Vancouver General Hospital and then brought me back. The only way in then and now was by boat or float plane. Back in those days it was the Union Steam Ship and that is how she brought me home. In 1953 she did the same thing and brought home my brother.

This last weekend we went back. We chartered a water taxi out of Campbell River and had the most perfect man captain us up there. He was born (a week before me!) in Campbell River and lived all his life up there. He was a captain on the BC Ferries for 31 years until he retired last year and now he does this basically for fun and over the summer months. He is employed by the nice young fellow at WayWest Water Taxi's in Campbell River. (If given half a chance I could be very interested in this man! It at least showed me I could be interested in a man again) So he took us up there and it was a trip of a lifetime. He said we were doing something that most people talk about doing and never actually do, going back to where we came from.

As wonderful as it was to see it ourselves it was my Mom's face that really made it for me. It brought back so many memories for her, some really bad but lots really good. My grandpa's ashes were scattered there when he died in 1950. The Campbell River Indian Band now has the land and we had contacted them and asked permission to go up. The chief was very nice and he in turn contacted the fellow up there to tell him we were coming. As we pulled in this speed boat came screaming out to basically challenge us it seemed but when we explained who we were and the chief had given permission etc he said yes the chief was his cousin and had phoned to say we were coming but he was on his way into Campbell River but we could go on in and check things out. He said someone else had been up about 5 years earlier and had brought some pictures and they were on the wall of the cookhouse. We all hopped off and headed up the dock but the captain of our boat stayed back and chatted with the guy and showed him mom's pictures she had brought with us and he asked if mom could leave her phone number so he could contact her and hear some of the history of the place etc. We left our number and mom is going to get some of the pictures copied and enlarged and send them up to him.

We made our way up to the cookhouse and found the pictures on the wall and mom recognized the lady in the first picture and knew who the fellow was that had been there 5 years ago. My brother was moving down the line of pictures and pointed to another and said to Mom, "Do you know who she is?" and mom looked at it and goes. "That's me!" It was incredible and it felt so right to be there. I was 4 when we left and even though I didn't specifically remember the place I did feel like it was coming home. A weird feeling of it just being right. The captain was telling us he was reading this book and it was saying when and where we are born there is a specific magnetic pull and when you go back you sometimes can fee the rightness of where you are and really to me when I get on the ocean and see the mountains and the trees it is just right and it always feels like I'm where I should be.

I have pictures of me on the logging road in front of our house and by accident I stood in basically the same spot and took a picture down the road and the scenery is exactly the same. Amazing to see. Lots more to say but really do need to get moving today and head off to work. We rescued a couple of guys off a burning fishboat on the way back. That was also amazing. As they leaped from their burning boat onto ours the flames were burning through the open doorway of the cabin. All they got off with was the clothes on their backs and their survival suits clutched in their hands. I'll add more tonight but here's a couple of pictures. OK well blogger is not cooperating and will not allow me to upload any pictures so I'll have to try a different approach. Let me work on this ....................

Well in the mean time here is a picture of the where I came from and also a picture of the burning boat.

http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k207/Axazwrath/?action=view&current=4fd26fdb.jpg

I just realized it shows in an album on there and you can click through the pics so I will label them as I go and you can click through them all. It will probably take me a couple of days to get them all up.

Feeling great

I'm feeling so much better and so much stronger this week. Without realizing it I think my looming anniversary was really getting to me and I had a few bad weeks beforehand. But the day passed and I am fine.

This Saturday I am going to try and make it up to an old friends house. We went to school together and actually met sitting in the counsellors office in grade 8. We were both in trouble of course and waiting to be yelled at. We bonded lol

She had her twin boys 6 months before I had my first son and they were buddies when little. She had 4 kids, the twin boys, another boy and finally a little girl. We stayed in touch up until about 10 years ago and have reconnected in the last 6 months. One of the twins who now lives in Japan is here with his wife and Linda is having an family get together on Saturday and wants me to bring Lacey and come. I am going to try my best to get up there and see the kids.

I think tonight Ryan and I are going to go and see a movie and then next weekend is my weekend on the island with my brother and his wife and my mom. That is going to be a lot of fun too. Lacey is coming of course. Oh yeah..............last Friday was D-Day for the animals and both headed off to the vet to be fixed. Poor babies and poor me. I was a nervous wreck and was sure something bad was going to happen to at least one of them if not both. But they were both fine and the challenge this week has been to keep Lacey clean and not let her jump into the pond or dig and roll in the dirt at work and then last night I was in the bath and she suddenly leaped up and over and into the tub with me. Shocked us both I think. I don't know what she thought I was doing in there but I don't think she suspected it had to do with a tub full of water. In any rate I caught her before she sunk and managed to get her out pretty quick but then she was half wet and running all over the bathroom. But oh well, she was happy and she made me laugh and the bathroom was easy to clean :)

I'm thinking of taking some kind of night course this winter and am just waiting for all the lists of classes to come out. I've also started knitting again basically because I want to make Lacey a few sweaters and of course Lily (Jude's dog) will need a few as well. It is pretty cold at work over the winter with cement floors and all. Lacey has a bed at work of course as does Lily but still they are down there and it is darn cold so a few nice warm work sweaters will be good. Then of course if that works out they will need a couple of nice sweaters for when they go out when they aren't at work.................yes yes I know but who the hell cares!! If I want to knit sweaters for my dog I'll knit sweaters for my dog and she will be very well dressed too!

Well it's off to work for me. After I get back from the island I'm going to make a doctor's appointment and get my liver function tests and see where I'm at there and then I guess I'll make an appointment with the liver specialist and see if he has any drug trial's looming and keep my name in there. As to treatment well we'll see how it all plays out with work and everything else.

August 10, 1977

Today is my 29th wedding anniversary. This morning on my way to work I was trying to remember how I felt on that day 29 years ago. It's funny but I don't remember any overwhelming feelings of love or passion. My friend took the kids the night before and we got up in the morning and got dressed and headed out with our witnesses to the office of the marriage registrar in New Westminster and were married in about 5 minutes flat. We then went to the beach for the day just across the border in the US and bought some bottles of cheap wine.....way too much cheap wine. I remember waking up pretty hung over the next day and don't exactly remember coming home the night before. Then we picked up the kids and life went on just as it had in the weeks and months before, the only difference was we were legal.

It's strange to think I also brought Hep C along with 2 kids into the marriage. For 13 years I didn't know it but it was there lurking and waiting and quietly doing it's damage, sapping my energy and making me a different person than I would be today if it hadn't come along for the ride.

What did Al bring to the marriage? Well he was 22 years old and had just been released from a federal prison. We met in a bar just down the street from his half-way house 5 months before we got married. He says now that he doesn't think he ever loved me and we probably wouldn't have got married if I hadn't had the kids already. His parents died in a car accident that he and his sister were also hurt in, on their way to Disneyland when he was 9 years old. They got hit by a drunk driver. He layed in emergency with broken arms and legs and watched them pronounce them dead. He lived with older brothers that didn't really want him until he became a runaway at 16. He got into trouble after trouble until he turned 19 and then he robbed a bank and got sent away to a federal prison. I met him when he was on his way out. We were both so young and so fucked up. Both of us from bad places before we met each other. He says that he thinks I was a mother figure to him and that he desperately wanted a built in family so he married me.

I really don't think when he says these things he realizes or intentionally sets out to hurt me the way he does, I think he is not thinking about me at all, just the pain he finds himself in. 29 years. Gone and wasted. We do have a wonderful son from the union. He did help me raise the boys. I've grown and learned. Maybe we both served a purpose in each others lives. I don't know. I do know that I never would have left him or the marriage. Not because I loved him too much but because I never could have hurt him that way. So what does that say. Did I love him or was I wanting to fix him and give him a stable life with a family? I don't know anymore. Maybe some day it will all be clear to me what my feelings and motivations were. I thought I loved him and I thought he loved me.