The Pool without John.

 

  The pool without John ain't what it used to be.  Sure, I know lots of good folks and am friendly with a few but that exceptional relationship only occurs a very few times in the life of lucky people.  
   His son phoned me a couple of weeks ago to say that the hospice where John died was having a memorial evening and reception in memory of those who had died recently.  He invited me to attend and I did.  I know all his five children and they marveled as do I at the closeness of our late-life friendship.  Not many people are fortunate enough to forge such a friendship at our advanced age.
"We all wondered how two such different guys could have such a close relationship?" his daughter said to me at the  reception.  It's true.  He was an observant Christian (though I was never able to find out to exactly what specific order).   I am an non-observant Jew, so we had some good religious discussions.  He used to say to me ,"If you are right I have nothing to lose, if I'm right you're in big trouble!"
  In politics he leaned left, I leaned right.  We discussed those topics too, occasionally generating more heat than light, but that didn't matter either.  We discussed other things too, that I'm not going to tell you about here and we were never, ever, Politically Correct.
  We had a lot of laughs.  He told me cop stories, I told him doc stories and we were old enough to laugh at our youthful mistakes and misadventures that had long since ceased to be sources of embarrassment.  When recounting stories of some of the things that didn't work out he would say, "failure, the second best lesson!"
   Most of those discussions took place in various inexpensive restaurants nearby wherever we had been swimming. (see above photo) For a while I took notes and when the waitress inquired what I was doing John would tell them, "my friend is a blog writer, he's probably going to write up your restaurant."  Needless to say, he didn't tell them that my blog only had a half-dozen followers!
   Given his talent for exaggerating a little in his story telling, John, whose surname was Dell, would maintain they were not exaggerations at all, they were just 'enDELLishments.  
   Sometimes when we were lunching out my daughter in Toronto would phone.  I would immediately lose the phone while they chatted away for a few minutes.  John and Rena never met, but when his son was playing in a production of 'Les Mis' in To, he presented Rena and Bill with tickets.
   In the last few months when he wasn't up to swimming we played a lot of pool.  He was quite a good pool player despite having very poor vision in one eye.  When he played a particularly brilliant shot, he would turn to face me and triumphantly announce,"Not bad for a blind man!"
   Despite multiple medical disorders, he never complained, (except to swear mildly when he couldn't do something he thought he should have been able to)  He continued planning and doing for as long as he could. 
   In true Churchillian fashion he never surrendered; he never gave up.
   
    






























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Pool Fools

We Pool Fools develop a strange, almost family-like relationship. We look out for each other and if someone doesn't show up for a while we ask anxiously:
"Have you seen X recently?"
We are not all old and not all hypochondriacal but we are mostly sufficiently 'with it' to recognize that a common reason for failing to show up is inability due to death or disease.
Now, don't get me wrong. We are not all living in fear of a visit of the Grim Reaper. Far from it. Most of us will do justice to our visit from him, when he catches up with us. No, we want to know that our erstwhile friends haven't found a better swimming pool or, (perish the thought), a more fascinating group of swimmers / bathers to immerse themselves in the water with.
As I stepped into the pool today I encountered a woman of about my own age who was a regular swimmer.
"How are you doing?" I asked.
"Oh not too bad," she answered. "It is getting a little harder to drag myself out of bed and get my joints moving. She laughed and added, "I think I'm going to try a little marijuana."  
She wasn't joking.
"Better be careful, " I said. "Some of it can be pretty strong nowadays".
"Oh my friends and I have researched it pretty well." she explained. "Some of them have tried it out already. The just use the mildest stuff. They seem to think it's quite good. I haven't tried it yet."

None of us had seen Laura for months. She was well known to most of us. She was an exceptional swimmer with a lot of style who had put in forty laps of stylish and energetic swimming three days weekly. Not bad for a woman
with grown up grandchildren! Then I spotted her, but instead of cutting gracefully through the water as was her style, she was exercising carefully in the slow Lane and moving with great difficulty and discomfort.
"What happened to you," I asked. She looked awful.
"I was in an accident," she said. "I was nearly killed."
"What happened ?" I asked.
"We were going on a Trans Canada trip and I was riding on the back of his motorcycle," she said.
I gulped, (silently I hoped), at the prospect of this Grandma, no matter how young, riding pillion on a motorcycle on a cross Canada trip.
"We turned off the highway to check into a hotel, when the bike skidded out from under him and I flew off the back and that's all I remember. "
"You're lucky!" said I.
"Yes," said she, " I fractured vertebral bones in my neck. The doctor said I was really lucky that I didn't damage my spinal chord and become paraplegic! I'd rather have been killed outright than that."
"You were very lucky."
"Yes, I'm going to get a hundred per cent recovery no matter how hard I have to work!"
"Good," I said, noting that she had a long way to go . I moved on so she could carry on with her program.
I swam a few lengths and was just getting into my stride when Rick waved at me from two lanes to my right.. "Hey!" he yelled, "Haven't seen you for a while. Come over here and have a chat."
I sidled over two lanes. Rick likes to stay in the swimming lanes out of the line of vision of his athletic wife, pumping weights in the glass-walled exercise room upstairs from where she is able to keep an eye on him.
"She gets quite upset if she sees me just sitting chatting. She doesn't think I should stop swimming at all!"
Rick, probably in his early seventies now, went to University in the States on a football scholarship. He had done well but ended up with significant musculo-skeletal damage to his knees and ankles. He has difficulty walking but is quite comfortable pottering around in the water but is not committed to actually exercising. His wife keeps a strict eye on him to make sure he keeps moving, so he stays out of her line of sight as much as possible! I didn't keep him and just continued doing my laps.
 
Swimming laps can get boring at times so I have a few projects additional to elucidating the biographies of my fellow swimmers to keep me occupied while I complete my mandatory 'time'. I adhere to this quite obsessively, knowing full well that if I started wittling it down it would dwindle down to nothing in no time.
One of my favorite occupations is checking my cognitive prowess to reassure myself there is no significant deterioration setting in. I like to check my mathematical skills which were never great. As I watch the digital clock I do various calculations centering around how many seconds I have been swimming so far and how many more to go. Unfortunately the sequence sometimes breaks down mid-calculation and I have to start over again...... And again! When I succeed a couple of times I quit while I'm ahead and move on to something else, after congratulating myself appropriately.
I find learning a poem that I have been fond of particularly rewarding and useful. Firstly it is rewarding in and of itself, secondly, it is very much more impressive at Pen Club, when trying out someone's latest pen purchase to scribble a quatrain or two of Omar Khayyam rather than the traditional "The quick Brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
My other diversion is thinking about my next blog.   I have four or five regular readers who I would not want to disappoint.
  So, thinking about my next blog content, Marathon Man and Dutch Jane spring to mind. I haven't seen them for a while.
So, perhaps next week - or next month, I'll tell you about them!!
Be sure to come back!! Or not!

A WW2 Hero.

D - Day and other WW2 Heros.

   I remember in 1944 when I was nine years old, my mother's distress when she received the news that her first cousin Monty Rosenfield. had been killed in the battle of Anzio in Italy. Monty had already been wounded and awarded the M M, the highest award for bravery a non -commissioned office could get no matter how valiant his actions. A few months later, as soon as he recovered he volunteered to return to the front line, when he could easily and honorably have served his country in a safe environment.

   Monty was only nineteen when he left Manchester to join the International Brigade to try to save Spain from its fascist Church supported dictator, Francisco Franco. After resisting the British attempt to prevent him ('non intervention') he trekked over the Pyrenees to join the British Battalion. He was wounded while fighting to save Spain from a dictatorship that lasted for two generations.

   At the beginning of WW2 although volunteering for active service Monty, a corporal in the British Army was obstructed from serving overseas until the International Brigade protested this as discrimination.

 After his return to the front lines by his own insistence, this courageous man gave up his life for Britain, for Jews and for the 99 per cent in another act of bravery.

   I never met Monty but I remember hearing about him from  our mother when he was killed in action at Anzio in 1944.  He had been wounded previously and I remember hearing how he joined the International Brigade and went to Spain to fight the Fascists.

I remember his brother Arnold (known as 'Arkie) who was a newspaper reporter and subsequently editor of one of the English Daily newspapers.   He came to visit us when he was working on some story  in Dublin and I, about sixteen at the time, was fascinated having a real live reporter telling us entertaining stories behind the stories.  I also remember him tossing back a Scotch or two Dad poured him (just like they did in  the movies!)

   Monty was awarded the MM (Military Medal for bravery) and I believe another medal posthumously.
   I became interested in the environment in which  he grew up and found:

www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/54568103/FULL_TEXT.PDF

           A PhD research thesis on  Manchester Jewry, which I found very interesting and gave some acute insights as to what it was like to be a young Jew growing up in  Manchester at the time

• BTW, Another WW2 hero in  the Family was Arthur Cowan, RAF  pilot who died in an air crash AFTER the war.  He's buried in Dolphin's Barn Cemetery in Dublin.  

  

Conscience & Medicine.

Here is an email I received just last week:

Dear ,

How would you like it if the government forced you to act against your conscience?

In the past, we could have this argument in an abstract way, likening that kind of behaviour by the state to totalitarian regimes that are distant to us in both geography and history. Today, however, this kind of tyranny is being forced upon the health-care workers of Ontario thanks to the highest court in the province.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled on May 15th that doctors have to give referrals for euthanasia and abortion even if it goes against their deeply held religious or moral beliefs.

We pray that this diabolical ruling gets appealed and defeated at a higher court, but if it stays in force, it means that doctors across the province will need to refer their patients for abortions and euthanasia, thereby (in a very real way) taking part in these heinous acts.

TAKE ACTION: DEMAND CONSCIENCE PROTECTION LEGISLATION

We need to demand that the lawmakers in the House of Commons, our members of parliament, take this decision out of the hands of activist, left-wing judges, at least partially, and pass legislation to protect doctors from being forced to violate their consciences

Campaign Life Coalition recently launched an Action Alert Email campaign in support of MP David Anderson’s private member’s bill, C-418. This law will make it a criminal act, punishable by incarceration, for employers to coerce health-care workers into participating in euthanasia, including by forcing them to refer patients to another doctor who is willing to kill the patient.

You can visit our website, and, in under a minute, write your MP to ask that they support The Protection of Freedom of Conscience Act. This much-needed bill is expected to be debated around May 29th.

There are many great health-care professionals across the country who are deeply opposed to abortion or euthanasia for religious and ideological reasons. Unfortunately, because of this latest court decision, these good folks will have to find work in other professions in order to live with a clean conscience.

Conscience rights matter and so does your voice. Click here to send your email now.

For life,

Jeff_Gunnarson_sig_275px.jpg

Jeff Gunnarson
National President
Campaign Life Coalition
www.campaignlifecoalition.com



Campaign Life Coalition · Canada
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   Well, how would you like it if the Government asked YOU -  no forced you, to act against your conscience?  Perhaps, like many, you wouldn't care.   But you better realize that once your Doctor is no longer allowed to exercise his conscience, you are not going to like it at all.   Conscience is what keeps people, including physicians on the straight and narrow.  It is what makes people undertake responsibilities that they might otherwise avoid.  It is the judge that sits on our shoulder and adjudicates whether what we do is right or wrong.  It is a cruel mistress and regardless of what the man-made laws of the land dictates it will punish relentlessly those who do not take it into account.  Most, but not all of us, can discriminate between right and wrong.  When the mob wants something, whether it is marijuana, freely available late-term abortion or physician dispensed death (and that's just the beginning!) they will do everything in their power to get what they want.  When people of conscience stand in their way, they will do anything to undermine them.  Not satisfied with physicians whose morals prohibit them from  being a part of this movement, the rulers and the legal system wants to coerce physicians to submit or to get out of the profession.  (an arbitrator actually said that.)
   The  Government and the administridiots who serve them are determined to suppress anything that might undermine their nefarious plans in the interests of cost cutting and votes.  They will be quite happy to humiliate and expel from the profession  anyone who dares to stand up to them, particularly when principal and ethics are the motivators.  The Health Care system has been turned away from  its humanitarian 'raison d'etre' into a political vote gathering game.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled on May 15th that doctors have to give referrals for euthanasia and abortion even if it goes against their deeply held religious or moral beliefs.


From the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Guidelines for withdrawal of life sustaining measures and Medical Assistance in Dying.

This is just the beginning. Amazingly, most folks don't seem to care until it involves them or their family. Comment if you have an opinion. Don't say I didn't warn you !!