As time goes by …

You guys, kids make me feel so old … Kids I babysat have reached their thirties. Most of them now have kids, themselves, and they’re looking for babysitters. Kids I am too old to have babysat because I was making real money by the time their parents were looking for a sitter are in their twenties, and embarking on relationships and careers and life. Kids in university look like … well, kids, to me. Kids I gave birth to (ok, that makes it sound like there are alot of them – there are actually only two) are slightly taller than me, have shot past my shoe size, and are raiding my closet and make-up stash on a daily basis. Having big kids is awesome – but, again. So. Old.

It never fails to annoy and amuse me, in equal parts, to hear a question that starts with “Mom, when you were young …”  It blows my daughters’ fresh, young minds that there was a time when a personal computer took up a whole room, when a household contained only one phone (and it was tethered to the wall), when if you missed a TV show, you missed it, because there was no way of delaying or even recording them. When many people didn’t have any typing experience because typists typed on typewriters and sold their services to those who needed something typed. When penmanship mattered. When you had to wait a while to see the pictures you took. When you kept those pictures in an album, and shared them only when someone asked to see them – rather than making them public property, and flashing them in the face of anyone even remotely connected with you. I could go on and on – but I think that will make me sound like a grizzled grouch, so I won’t.

While I am well aware of how things have changed since I was a child, the changes that have occurred during my adult life seem a little more sneaky. My father-in-law, a wise and lovely man in many ways, says that time moves faster the older you get, comparing age with speed. I often feel like my twenties and thirties have been fairly steady, but then I see a cube-shaped TV. Or a flip-phone. Or a butterfly tramp stamp. I also think I look just like I always did, and so do all the people around me. Then I flip through a ten-year-old photo album, and I’m shocked by the glossy young faces beaming at me. That glossy young thing is still in there somewhere, I swear, but perhaps deeper beneath the surface than I care to think.

One of those times-have-changed moments came to me recently in the form of a newspaper. Ryan and I celebrated our fifteenth anniversary this past summer. Fifteen years of marriage! It’s been lovely, for the most part (no marriage is perfect, and anyone who acts like theirs is – well, that person’s a dirty liar complete with pants on fire). Tying the knot was a leap of faith that has led to this beautiful life. Our anniversary celebrations are pretty simple. Dinner out, glasses raised and clinked, an exchange of cards.

This year, though, I did a little something extra – I dug out the Ottawa Citizen (another thing that wasn’t there when I first subscribed – the Ottawa Citizen online) from August 2, 2003 (our wedding day) out of our closet. Right away, I noticed the very different logo and font. They’ve changed so subtly over the years that I didn’t notice until now, seeing old and new side-by-side. The paper was so much thicker, too, since readers couldn’t be pawned off to the website for “additional content” – and there were far fewer ads. The newspaper didn’t have to sell itself to sell itself, if you will. I’ll try not to bore you (perhaps I already have, but if you’re still here, it can’t be that bad) – but here are a few tidbits from that yellowed, dusty, fifteen-year-old treasure:

Mars came closer to Earth than it had in 60,000 years. 55,760,000 km, to be exact. How this was determined, I have no idea. Now, we’re talking about living there!

A hadrosaur skeleton was found in northern Alberta. Until then, these duck-billed dinos were thought to live south of Edmonton only. This has not changed anyone’s life. But everyone loves dinosaurs, right?

The legalization of gay marriage was being debated. Now, it’s a fact of life in Canada.

Omar Khadr’s saga was just beginning. He was captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay to be tortured and rot in 2002. However, he was interviewed by RCMP and CSIS investigators in 2003. Since then, he’s been recognized as Canada’s child soldier, and therefore Canada’s responsibility – and, against all odds, seems to be doing well these days.

America was still seeking Saddam Hussein. By the end of the year, they would capture him in his “spider hole”. The next three years would see him charged with, tried for, found guilty of, and executed for crimes against humanity in general, and war crimes specifically.

An editorial extolled the virtues of the Yellow Pages. Remember them? I flipped through those highly organized grainy pages many times, in search of a roofer or a plumber or a piano tuner or a furniture store. They also made a good booster seat, and a fine prop for wobbly furniture.

Great buzz was being generated by a new product: the Biniki. This is a sort of bra for your ass. It promises to “lift and define the derriere, smooth out the backs of the thighs and, in general, beautify the backside.” It works like this: “Biniki consists of two leg loops that are attached at very specific points along the waist-hip band. The leg loops are designed to perfectly encircle the bottom. Once Biniki’s waist-hip bands are in place and the leg loops are self-adjusted to fit the individual, the skin on the backs of the thighs will lift up, the bottom will be raised and Biniki is guaranteed to stay in place.” Sounds so comfy! Can’t imagine why everyone’s not wearing one … Before, and after:

Men with saggy asses could wear a Maniki. I couldn’t find a picture, mercifully.

Housing prices were soaring. The ever-present, always-consulted, generally vaguely-referenced “experts” were warning of a bust to follow the boom. You know what they say: the more things change, the more they stay the same …

I can’t stop time – and, mainly, I don’t want to stop progress. However, I can – and must – deliver on the implied promise of the title of this post. Sit back, close your eyes, and enjoy Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of this beautiful song …

Serendipity

I adore the Saturday paper …. It’s thick and wordy, filled with all sorts of things that could not be fully enjoyed squeezed into a Monday or Thursday – things that need to be savoured under a blanket on the couch, with a fresh cup of coffee and an unfrazzled mind. A weekend mind. Yesterday, there was an article about staged proposals, complete with hired photographer who tails the couple from a discreet distance and takes a picture of the event. The fellow featured in the article not only hired the photographer, he also hired a dog. A celebrity dog named Jiff, to be exact. For $600, Jiff made a custom video for the lady, walking on hind legs while wearing a tiny shirt that read “Lauren, Jiff thinks you should marry Jeff!” For $400 more, the photographer snapped the perfect shot – the now-fiancé on one knee, bling sparkling, Lauren reaching for the box. Their engagement cost more than the clothes worn by our entire wedding party, my dress and Ryan’s rented tux included.

It seems appropriate that this article appeared in the paper this weekend, as today marks twelve years since Ryan popped the question and I said yes. Ryan had been toying with asking me to marry him, though he hadn’t decided how or when. We went skiing. He had never been skiing before, and I tried to teach him how. I did it in my usual bossy, impatient manner. He took his first run having learned very little, but possibly having decided that he’d rather go hurtling at breakneck speed down a hill than listen to my well-intentioned harangue any longer. As I watched him go, it occurred to me that he was not going from side-to-side – he was going straight. He just might kill himself. I sped up to catch him, and we met at the bottom of the hill. We almost fell over, and we righted each other as other skiers whizzed past us. He babbled for a few seconds about how his first ski run was an amazing experience and he loved it – “and I want to marry you, will you marry me”. There may or may not have been a breath between sentences. Tears of surprise and delight freezing on my face, I said yes. We went back to the lodge to call our families. Because we hatched an idea of Ryan calling my mother and me calling his parents, their first thought was that he broke something (or, perhaps, his whole self) and that’s why it was the ski lodge’s number on their display and my voice on their phone …. Brilliant. Later, we went ring-shopping, and settled on a date about seven months down the road. There was alot of work to do in a short time, but we didn’t want to put off our big day any more than we had to. A waitress at Dunn’s took a picture of us at brunch the following Sunday, which was used in our engagement announcement in the Hamilton Spectator. A photo from a previous trip to Montréal was chosen for the one that went in the Nor’Wester. We framed the Camp Fortune ski passes.

It was the opposite of staged. And I’m glad it was …. Because if any great amount of thought had been put into it, it probably would have been scotched. For one thing, we were the first of our friends on either side to even consider marriage. Ryan was 24, and I was 22. The average age of marriage of people in our generation is somewhere in the late twenties, with children following in the early thirties. We had only been together a year and two months. That’s about the length of your average engagement these days. Ryan proposed during the second half of January, widely agreed to be the most depressing part of the year. Debt. Weight. Bad weather. The holidays too far in the rear-view mirror to cheer us up any longer. Weeks and weeks of winter still to go. Every year, somewhere between January and February, I turn into my own version of Mr. Hyde. He didn’t know that then, thankfully. Then, there are personal factors …. My father had died months earlier, and I had gone home to Newfoundland for Christmas. It was the worst Christmas before or since. The only way it could have been worse would have been if someone else had died during it. I returned heartbroken, bruised, bleeding – and ready to fight with a lamp post if it had looked at me the wrong way. We argued more than once in the days leading up to his proposal. If he had taken that information as any kind of indicator, he would have run in the opposite direction. He certainly would not have asked me to be his other half. But he did, and everything since then has been the rich harvest of that hopeful, ridiculous seed. Our road trips. All those laughs. All the times we’ve leaned on each other. Fiona and Bridget. This house. This life.

I don’t have an axe to grind, or even a point to prove – which makes this different from alot of other BethBlog posts. I just want to enjoy a moment of deep gratitude for the fact that heart was driving the bus on January 18, 2003, and head took a night off. For leaps of faith. For serendipity, whispering “do it – you won’t be sorry”. Here’s to taking chances!