Here I am

I think the wee fan base is gone. But here I am.
I've been reading some other blogs lately - www.mattlogelin.com is quite a touching one. Matt lost his wife 27 hours after she delivered their baby.
Touching and kinda wrenching but gosh his little daughter is adorable.
Facebook.
A few cousins have found me on there - most recently, Carole. These are all cousins from my mother's side o the family, since I don't know any from my dad's side. That's almost entirely true - I have seen pics of the three of them and have met two of their wives when they visited Vancouver - but haven't actually met them. Seeing a picture of my father's brother choked me up - the resemblance is striking. And the three cousins - brothers and sons of the aforementioned (now dead) uncle - look strikingly Segalish and I see myself in them.
Weird. Orthodox Judaism has kept them away.
Anyway, Carole. I have lots of cousins - my mother was one of 14, 12 of whom made it into adulthood with only one nun amongst them. Carole is the daughter of the (now dead) Uncle Raymond (mom's brother) and Auntie Maria.
I haven't seen any of my cousins in years upon years and some I have never even met.
Weird.
A couple of my (still alive) uncles could walk up to me and yell in my face and I wouldn't know who the heck they were. Apparently, they look quite First Nations-ish. I remember when I was really tanned one summer back in my 20s, this guy said to me, "you a sister?' "No," I said. Well 1/64 but not really.
Anyway, Carole.
She is younger than me by 3 or 4? years. She's lived at home her whole life and was very close to her father.
He used to cut my hair when I was a child.
Auntie Maria has a really high pitched voice.
Turns out Carole suffers with depression/anxiety. This i figured out from her Facebook status updates. Mental health supporter/obsesser that I am, I suggested a wee bit o therapy to her. I waxed on, waxed off a bit about my great shrink (my great shrink who is going away for a month so tonight I gotta get a whole month's worth of advice).
Carole says no to therapy for now, then tells me a bit more about her life.
Turns out Auntie Maria has an irregular heartbeat and a type of colitis that hits her so hard she pales and passes out. Her lack of energy is frustrating for her, says Carole.
This hits me very hard and I feel so bad for Auntie Maria I can barely breathe (really). She's terrified of running out of money apparently, although that won't happen, Carole keeps encouraging her.
They live in a very very small house I remember.
I haven't visited my hometown of Winnipeg in 10 years - Sept. 1999 was the last time.
I've seen my folks since then of course - in Hawaii a couple of times and in Vancouver as well.
Later this year I'll be spending my holidays in Wales and Turkey.
Exciting.
And far away.
When Uncle Raymond died I read his obituary and it said something about his love of, gosh I don't remember, love of bowling, or something like that.
"I'm too hard on myself," Carole says, who won't post a picture on Facebook because she hates pictures of myself, "dad was like that too."
And I'm hit in that deep darkness again.
I think of Auntie Maria's life - she's bewildered, perhaps, terrified and holed up in her house, waiting for the irregular heartbeats, the passing out pain from the colitis.
She's very very thankful Carole lives at home still.
And Carole is quite worried about her when she (Carole) is at work all day.
Carole's been a secretary for ten years this August for Agriculture Canada, she tells me.
She writes in such a way that I see she has so much more there.
I see such a line of depression/anxiety through the family - Uncle Robert, Uncle Tony, my grandmother I think.
My mother.
My father, but he's on the other side of course.
The side with three cousins (brothers) who don't ever want to meet him.
I've always been so so ashamed and embarrassed by my own anxiety, my own anger-fueled depression (I'm not the kind of depressed person who stays in bed all day, I'd rather be with people actually, I get energy from that. I dig it. Instead, I'm angry, obsessive, some other things) and here I see it in the lineage.
I can't imagine the despair that Auntie Maria feels.
There was never ever any speaking of mental health - even after Uncle Robert hanged himself in his basement when he was 36. Sorry, a tiche depressing here.
36.
I was 19.
Thought 36 was young but didn't realize just how young
until I surpassed it.
For me, it is like a black hole - this denial of darkness. Generational I know and some other things.
Shame
fear
abandonment pops into my head.
French Canadians growing up in rural Manitoba on a farm in the 30s and 40s
didn't know for
what I get to talk about every week.
It's hard enough for me to get my head around.
And really, it's still not that around it.
I've always despised denial of any kind.
To the point where it has become a kind of denial of its own.
Myself
my pokey bits
poke at others.
"It's like you have your foot out on the bus," says my pal, Tracy. She grappled for this analogy but it turned out to be a not bad one.
"And you know your foot is there but you just can't seem to pull it back."
"Can you, you know, cut it off for me?"
"I don't think so," said she. She's gotten wise, that one has, from her own crap and her own wonderful weekly person. We're open about these things and I have permission to say that.
I poked too much at a 4-year friendship awhile back.
Resulting in its end.
Except we still work together.
So that's hard, I find.
Daily evidence of my poking.
And her poking back.
There are a remarkable number of pokey people at work.
Not so shiny, not so happy.
Work used to be - and my god I've been there almost 5 years - a record for me- more fun I'd say in the staff room.
Laughing, god sometimes laughing till I cried.
Then a few people left.
And some friendships died - to the point where we ignore each other even in passing.
And her friend at work, she ignores me in solidarity I think.
High school was a bit like this.
I took it too hard then too.
We even have lockers at work, for goodness sakes.
Turkey will be amazing. I'll be meeting up with Maggie, who I used to work with and who now lives in Ankarra with her great Turkish husband.
She's mellow that Maggie.
and beautiful.
Mellow and beautiful Maggie.
And Wales - a huge book festival. Bill Clinton called it the Woodstock of book festivals.
Two very different cultures - await me in May and June.
In 14 weeks and two days, I will go away for three weeks.
Plane, train and plane and bus and and
Shiny
happy
people