UAE National Day 2012 @ The Dubai Marina Mall

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The Act of Watching TV Goes Back to the Future

I got my wife the new iPad 2 for Christmas, and it quickly became the go to device for my kids for watching music videos and playing games. Recently, however, we started using it to watch TV shows.

Hooking it up to the TV was simple, we just had to buy a little adapter, and an HDMI cable, and voila! MP4s on the big screen. For some reason, our DVD player only supports Dvix/Xvid .AVI files, so MP4s were something we only saw on the computer.

But now we could watch them in their full compressed glory.

Only one hitch. Watching a show, pausing a show, or changing to another show requires someone (me) to ponderously leverage themselves off the couch, and stumble over to the TV table to hit the home button, unlock the screen, and hit the pause button.

It brought me right back to my childhood, back when this was how I had to change the channel when I was a child (only we turned a knob back then), back before there were remote controls.

But then, in back-twinge induced moment of insight, I realized something... Remote controls were never invented. No. They have always been with us, just changing forms, is all. Remotes today have two batteries, remotes back then had two legs.

I... did have a remote for the iPad! In fact, I had three just waiting to be called upon.

Now I need only mention "Oh I better pause the show..." and make to move in order to spur six little legs into motion, all competing to beat me to it.

As my parents had trained me, so I now pass that on to my children.

Until they make a remote for my iPad, you know, the kind with two batteries.

Or maybe I'll just stick with what I've got. For as long as I can, at least.

Mackenzie's Kindergarten Graduation

My oldest daughter graduated from Kindergarten yesterday. Yes, yes, it's a long ways away from getting her JD, but still... Something to celebrate!

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Kathleen's 4th Birthday

My second oldest daughter turned 4 recently. Time moves fast...

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Easter Egg Hunt 2012

My wife's old schoolmate has started up a business planning weekend events for kids. She is just in the beta testing phase right now, but the kids had fun nonetheless.

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Mackenzie's School Concert

My eldest daughter, at the wizened age of 5, is in higher kindergarten. One of the things I like about her school is their insistence on the arts and performance. This is a snippet of her 2012 concert.

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Often Angels

I am blessed with three daughters, and friends will often remark on how lucky I am to have three girls instead of three boys.

Yes, I reply, they are often angels, but...

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Dad vs. The Desert

My Dad came to Dubai recently. We hadn't seen him since 2007, but thanks to my sister getting him a ticket for Christmas, he was able to stop by.

 This is the first of a series of videos chronicling his visit.

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Boy Howdy

It's about time to get back on this thing and get some writing done. Some time about the end of the summer, and during the first bit of the school year, I felt a bit of a fugue come over me, some sort of lazy unwillingness to get back on the wagon again.

I think it was the poetry. Perhaps I'll have to be a bit more sporadic on that. I'll still try to keep it up, but my one a day goal is probably a mite unsustainable considering my current circumstances.

Which brings me to the good news. There's a new O'Hearn in the world, and I've officially become candidate for King Lear-ship. We've had three daughters in four years, which means they'll all be teenagers at the same time at some point, which also means that I'm going to have to move to a district that let's me own a shotgun, and doesn't get too fussy about me using on my own private property.

But enough of that. I had something to show you. A bit of joy to share.

Leah Melissa O'Hearn

Moments after birth...

Cleaned up, seeing the sun for the first time...

Back from Vacation

I fell off the wagon a bit. A little over two weeks ago I fell out of my regular blogging habit. Mostly it was due to being in the last week of school, and harried by too many things at once, and when my "vacation" started, it seemed as if a pent up demand for transportation and travel was released all of a sudden. That and I couldn't seem to wake up until noon each day. Then, we went on vacation.

You know, growing up, I went on vacation all the time. Vacation, as I knew it, meant tents, sleeping bags, and roasted marshmallows. We'd fight off mosquitoes, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, swim in various lakes, go hiking, and head off home. That's because our family was, if not poor, then definitely middle lower class. That means we had a roof over our heads, but breakfast was usually rice puffs and powdered milk, and clothes consisting of the best of the bin at K-Mart.

For countless other people, vacation usually means Mickey Mouse, mojitos on a Mediterranean island, or train-hopping around Europe. Oh, and let's not forget the traditional English "teaching"/drugs & sex tour of southeast Asia.

None of those are in the realm of my own experience, which is why I maintained a less than jaundiced eye as our family went on our first real, honest to God vacation - at the Ras Al Khaimah Hilton Resort & Spa.



At first I had no idea what to expect, sine I had never stayed at a resort, or even a decent hotel before. Even though by the simple fact that I am white, I appear to many in the UAE as upper class, I am most definitely not. Not too long ago, a Keralite colleague of mine was shocked to learn that not only could I not afford university without (a lot of) debt, but that I had no house or lands to my name. Indeed, she was barely able to comprehend the notion that she'd had a far, far more privileged upbringing than I, and that in terms of economic status, even though our salaries were on par, I would never be able to afford the life or amenities she took for granted where she was from.

I've always maintained a firmly lower class mentality. That is, when I'm being myself, and I make sure that I am not "myself" at work or in public, I've got more than a little trailer-chic going on. So when we arrived, I wasn't sure how things would go.

Thankfully luck was a lady for us.

After arrival, we learned that our room had been given free upgrade. We were now booked in a chalet. But before I could sign the dotted line, one of the attendants at the reception desk noticed that my wife was extremely pregnant. Moments later I was given a choice of other villas, one of which was mere feet away from a massive, shaded kids swimming pool.



Moments after stepping into our new temporary home, we knew that two nights was not going to be enough, so off I went to the front desk. Right then, even though they had a wave of guests heading in for the weekend, and the day I was looking to take was a Friday (Friday is the weekend here), and that our villa was booked, the reception attendant was able to swap things around, and we got our place for another day.

The kids couldn't have been happier.



From then on our weekend went without a hitch. Sure it was incredibly humid and hot, but the view was wonderful, the room service exceptional, and for the first time, I think since my wife and I were married, we really felt like we could relax. My littlest one, Kathleen, had no problem settling in.



For my older daughter, it was something else. You see, for some reason, over the past few months, every time we passed a body of water, she will yell "Water!" at the top of her lungs, and then tell us how she is going to go to the water, and jump in the water, and swim in the water! Were we were was like Nirvana to her.



From then on life consisted of swimming, watching cartoons, walking on the beach, ordering room service, and swimming some more.



My wife was able to finally rest her feet and look happy for the first time in a long time.



And the best part? All this activity had the awesome side effect of tuckering those little ones right out.



One thing is for sure - we're going back there in January.

From Hilton Resort & Spa in Ras Al Khaimah

Going Seperate Ways

In the past two days I have come across two stories of family breakdown and separation that have managed to seep past the granite shield I affectionately refer to as my skull, and affected me. The first is by the writer Sandra Tsing Loh, who often writes features for The Atlantic. In Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, Sandra outlines why she is ending her marriage, her actions, thoughts, and feelings behind embarking on her path. The second is the news that Jon and Kate Gosselin have filed for divorce.

Families fall apart all the time, for various reasons, an occurrence so frequent and common as to pass without comment. But when comment is made, and a lens is turned on to the reasons for a divorce, that's a different story.

In the case of Jon and Kate, assuming this is not some long term ratings gimmick, I can see how the pressures of celebrity, and conflicting personalities can conflict and lead to a less than perfect union. I can understand how two people can become disenchanted with each other, but what I have trouble comprehending is how any of that would matter when children are brought into the picture.

I am a child of divorce, and while the normal thought is that children who have lived through divorces will often find divorce to be socially acceptable, my experiences had just the opposite effect. Going through one divorce was bad enough, but witnessing my mother marry, and divorce twice only imbued a hard eyed view of divorce as a concept, and the behavior and attitudes that people will point to as reasons, or excuses, for their actions.

In the case of Sandra Tsing Loh, her reasons for divorce, which perhaps make sense to women like her, of her age and with the same outlook on life, don't appear similar for someone like myself. They appear frivolous and unforgivable. In her article, Sandra discusses her situation, and the situation of others she knows, others who all seems to have the same complaint - they want more excitement. Their husbands are to nice, too much "like women" for their tastes. And stable life, wonderful children, excellent living standard, nice house, beautiful things, and safety and security notwithstanding, they claim to be miserable. Even though for at least 99% of humanity the life they lead could only be the culmination of the wildest, most hopeless dream for the rest of humanity. Sandra and the women she describes are so blessed, so very lucky, that their complaints seem utterly incomprehensible.

In both cases, with the Gosselins and the Tsing Loh family, there are children in the picture. And like any children, they will accept what comes and adapt to their new life. But the reasons they had been put in that position are anything but legitimate. To escape violence, or an abusive situation, is one thing. But petty selfishness is another.

In Jon & Kate's case, we have a woman who has an obsessive need for control, and a man who resents being emasculated, but is too much of a coward to grow a pair and assert his prerogatives appropriately. They may be parents, and they may be adults, in a legal sense, but mentally and emotionally they come across as adolescents. Something which I think may be quite commonplace in North American society today.

In Sandra's case, there is a women, and men have often been guilty of the same thing, whose thoughts turn so inward, and become so self-centered that they espouse their selfishness as a virtue, by cloaking the baseness of their actions with lofty words and ideals. It's not selfishness, no, it's expressing a desire to "grow and change" and to "discover themselves."

On the NPR a few months ago, there was a story about Debra Gwartney, who decided to leave her husband, and take her two daughters with her, from Tuscon, Arizona, to Eugene, Oregon. While the plight of the father was mentioned briefly, how he became depressed, and desolate, the focus of the story was on how this woman was striking out on her own, discovering herself, pursuing her desire to change and grow, entirely oblivious to the fact that there were two other human beings for whom those motives were not theirs. She simply assumed that as she found her bliss, her children would follow her lead, grow up according to her plan, and act, think, and be as she intended.

But it didn't work. The daughters bitterly resented her, resented being torn away from their father, being cast into a new life, and for what? To the mother, it was the sensible quest to explore their personhood. To the children, it was an inexplicable act of selfishness. The rest of the story chronicled the dissolution of that family, of how the daughters grew ever more alienated, and how the mother, entirely unable to discipline or even influence her daughters, lost them entirely, to drugs, and to the world, for a good long time.

In the case of Debra Gwartney, the inability see past herself, to truly try to see the situation as her daughters might see it, led to this tragedy. As the story of the Gosselins and the Tsing Lohs progresses, the question will be whether their narratives will follow a similar track.

Father's Day

As I was driving to work this morning (or late last night on the other side of the world), my phone started ringing. I'd left it in a pocket of my bag, one of those many zippered, multi-pocketed Delsey affairs, so it took a minute for my blindly groping hand to find it. Though I'd half swerved into another lane, I was lucky only I only had to bear the honk of an outraged Nissan Sunny speeding past me. As I reached for the hands-free, I stopped, startled by the display.

Once in a blue moon, at this time, if the kids are extra energetic and have decided to drive their mother crazy at that early hour, I'll get a call from the wife informing me of this fact. So while a call from home at that time was not a regular occurrence, it was not unusual either. But It wasn't a call from home, or at least home as it exists for me here. It was a call from my other home, the one far away on the other side of the world. It was a call from my father.

Growing up, I'd had a tumultuous relationship with my father. When I was 9, he had moved from Vancouver to Toronto to find work, and a place for our family to move to since the economy on the west coast had collapsed, and we had needed to move. A few months later, my mother, sister and I had followed, only instead of going straight to Toronto, we went to Ottawa, to visit my grandparents. What I wasn't told then, nor would be for a few more months, was that this stop wasn't temporary. We weren't going to be joining my father later, because my mother had filed for divorce.

I never learned the reasons why, or I had learned "reasons," but those were fictions, created for the convenience of the moment, with the truth sacrificed on the altar of need. You see, while I did have a tumultuous relationship with my father while growing up, up until that point in my life, that wasn't the case. Sure my father could be stern, strict, and had a temper (all of which are present in myself in abundance), he was also an integral part of my life. Some fathers neglect their children, eternally unaware of what their kids might be doing, who their friends are, or what they wanted in life. Some fathers pay attention, but stand at a distance, encouraging their children, but otherwise going about their business in a hands-off manner. My father wasn't like that at all. He loved being a part of my life. He was a coach on my soccer team, and on the many t-ball and baseball teams I played with. He volunteered with the Beavers and Cubs I had joined, helping to lead camping expeditions, and was always ready to go outside to play catch, or to drag me and my sister off on a camping trip. But when I was 9, that all ended, and I would never have a chance to know that father again.

What developed after that is a story familiar to many children who have gone through a divorce, whose custodial parent has decided that keeping their children hundreds of kilometers away from their other parent is "for the best." Visits with Dad became a strange, almost alien affair. At first he would drive up to pick up my sister and myself, take us to where he lived, then drive us back a day and a half later. As a kid, I never thought much of this, other than that we had to sit in the car a lot. But from where I am now, I can only see what a commitment that was. Toronto to Ottawa is six hours one way, which meant that my father would drive 12 hours on a Friday, losing a day of work, and 12 hours on a Sunday, just to see us for a single full day. And for a sub-contractor who gets paid by the hour, who only gets paid when working, this was hard to do. Especially since court ordered support payments don't take any of that into consideration.

As I grew older, seeing my father only a few times a year, when he was allowed visitation, I found myself drawn into a narrative that cast one side as a villain, and the other as the suffering victim. My father, I was told, was many things, and none of them positive. If I needed money for something for school, for some new shoes, or whatever, I would be handed a telephone receiver and told to ask my father for some money. I didn't like doing this, but didn't know what else to do. And as my father put it one time, "how come whenever you call me, it's only to ask for money?"

It was quite an indictment, and it hurt. I felt ashamed every time I had to ask, because I'd realize that the last time I had called, had also been to ask for something. When I would visit my father, at times he would be angry, which at that age seemed like anger directed towards me. From where I am today, I can see that anger wasn't directed towards me, but towards the whole situation.

Eventually my father couldn't afford to drive up to Ottawa any more, but since I was old enough, I would go with my sister on the Greyhound to see him. The visits were generally brief, and with each successive visit, I seemed to connect less and less with him. By the time I was in my mid teens, we had nothing in common at all, and could barely even speak to each other without getting into a fight.

I had read about this sort of alienation between parents and their children, especially between fathers and sons, and while the writers always approached the subject for the point of view that this was not a natural state of affairs, I couldn't see it that way. It seemed perfectly natural to me. He and I, my father and me, we were two different creatures, speaking a different language, entirely unable to comprehend the other. So it was, and so it went, until one day in my late twenties, when we had an all out, roof-raising argument.

Up until that point, for nearly two decades, I had been soaked in a narrative about my father, not as he was, but as I was meant to see him as. The facts of what had happened, the facts as I knew them, I learned, weren't facts at all. Just a version of events, grounded as much in truth as in fantasy. He was angry that he didn't know me, didn't really know me, that had not been allowed to be a part of my life, to get to know the man I would become.

As I sat with my daughters last night, talking with my wife, and thinking about our next child, due in a few months, and whether it would be a boy or a girl, the thought struck me. How hard must it have been for him? Every day I get home from work, and two sets of running feet start screaming my way, to welcome me home, to give me a hug, and to ask for a kiss. Every day, at some point, we'll wrestle or read or play. As they grow older, they will want to do other things, things that I know, absolutely, and without a doubt, that I will want to be a part of. I want to coach their soccer team, or help out at their dance troupe, or drive the van filled with their friends over to band practice. The want that I feel is so powerful, so pervasive, that I simply cannot imagine what it would be like were I suddenly, one day, prevented from doing so. The very thought that I would lose my girls, have then taken out of my life, fills me with terror.

Should that happen, I am sure I could go on living. But it wouldn't be a life I had chosen, or wanted. It wouldn't be a life I could face with equanimity. But it would be a life, I am quite sure, that I would feel undying anger and enmity at being forced into. The same life my father was forced into.

This morning, as I spoke to my father, I truly felt that I really knew him, because he was also me. We weren't really different at all. Beyond just being fathers, we share a similar character, a similar view of the world, and a similar sense of the importance of family, and of our own responsibilities for our families. And though we can never changed the gulf of years where this wasn't so, I can only hope that with my own children, and with my own family, I can use that experience, and ensure that history stays in the past, so that a new narrative can form.

Transitions

Last night was an interesting night, full of twists and turns and changes of plan. When I arrived at home, it was only to be informed that our eldest daughter was sick, or more accurately, still sick. She has had the same hacking cough, with the same fluid filled lung sound for about a week and a half, and although we had been to the doctor before, it appeared that the prescribed treatment was ineffective. Our daughter was still coughing like she had consumption, which was worrying, yet was still so full of energy that she appeared the perfect picture of health, which alleviated our worries somewhat.

So it was up to me to sit at home and watch the little one, daughter no. 2, Kathleen, as her sister Mackenzie was led out to see "The Dock-or" as she, in fact, made sure to tell Kathleen in person.

"I have to see the Dock-or, okay. I'm sick. I go see the Dock-or. You stay here."

It was odd and illuminating to see this little two and a half year old take on the airs of an adult, imperiously deliver her orders, then kiss her little sister goodbye before heading off. Apparently she imperiously told the other kids at the clinic that she was sick and going to see the "Dock-or." After the Doctor had seen her, so I am informed, Mackenzie made sure to remind her that she was owed a lollipop, like she'd been given the last time she had seen the "Dock-or."

Hearing my wife tell the tale, I had to laugh. Not only at what seemed my daughter's surprisingly prodigious memory, but at how she seems to have taken on airs of royalty, and commands all those around her. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. Colds are one thing, which don't cause me to bat an eye. They are common enough as it is, and incredibly common for children. But persistent colds that produce lungs full of fluid, such that at night it creates a symphony of rattling breath is another matter.

As an asthmatic, who has lived with the disease for twenty years, I'm well past the age were my breathing would grow shallower and shallower without my noticing it in some way. Asleep, half-asleep, or awake, I respond in the same manner. Get up, stumble over to a certain drawer, take two to three puffs from a certain inhaler, and go back to bed, breathing freely and easily. I've done this same routine awake, half awake, and even asleep, as far as I can gather from the few times I've awoken with an inhaler in my hand and no recollection of how it had gotten there.

But a little girl like Mackenzie hasn't developed the same responses, and at night over the past week, I can, at times, swear that her breath grows ever more shallow as the night progresses. And it worries me to the point of nightmares. I worry that she may have something worse than a cold, like pneumonia. But that's an acute problem, a doctor can solve in relatively short order. Which leads me to my greater worry, that she will be like me, an asthmatic.

I grew up in houses filled with second hand smoke. There was second hand smoke in the cars, in the houses of friends and relatives. I could never scape it. IN the car, I could alleviate the onslaught somewhat by rolling down the window and sticking my head and shoulders out the window as we barreled down the highway - which provoked no end of motherly screaming. But by issuing an ultimatum, I usually managed to convince the others in the car to put out their cigarettes, at least for the remainder of the ride. I wasn't an asthmatic at that time, but as I look back on it, maybe my body knew something was up, for on my 12th birthday, I had my first real asthmatic episode, strong enough that I ended up in the hospital, and left a day later with a bag full of medicines, and a diagnosis of chronic, life long condition.

Second hand smoke is what I blamed for my asthma. I had been healthy as a child, and only became an asthmatic after years of constant exposure to second hand smoke. But as I listen to my daughter's rattling breathing, I begin to wonder. Our household is smoke free, and always has been. Nobody, but nobody, friend, family, or important guest, is allowed to light up here. With the punishing heat of the summers here, I usually keep my daughter inside in the summers, and only outside when the weather is clear and relatively cool. This could mean that particulates in the air inside are the culprit, but my wife is fanatically clean. Dust, and particulates don't survive her housekeeping kung-fu, and even if a spot was missed, the wife insists on bringing in outside help one a week for extra special concentrated attack on whatever had missed her eye.

Which leaves my sitting confused and dispirited. I worry my daughter has inherited my condition, regardless of the lengths I and my wife have gone to ensure that our environment was clean, and entirely free of all those elements that I had always believed led to what happened to myself. I imagine my daughter, wanting to go run as fast as she can, and slowing down, drained of energy, like I was so many times, struggling to draw in shallow breaths. I can just see my reaction, at sometime or another, as I hear my daughter's breath get shallower and shallower, as the lung engages in a vicious cycle, that leads to ever more breathlessness.

When the same happened to me, my mother went to the pharmacy to get the medicine I had been prescribed that day. A kindly lady at my school had dropped me off at the hospital, in contravention of school policy (which, if followed, may have eventually resulted in my own tragic end), where I informed the doctors that I'd already had thirty or more puffs of my inhaler that day, which had my heart beating at a massively accelerated rate. They put me on a mask, but that meant only giving me more of the same medicine I had already overdosed on, but at least I had a prescription, even though I had no money to buy the medicine with. So ended up on the street, barley making it home by a combination of bus, taxi, and foot when I ran out of money for the taxi, and ended up on a couch at home.

The feeling of little to no energy, and even less will to get up and do anything about it scares me to this day. My inhaler had ceased to be effective in relieving my breathing for anything longer than five minutes, and by that point I had used an entire inhaler in one day, at least 40 times the limit inscribed on the side of the canister. When my mother got home after work, and saw me lying on the couch, she didn't seemed particularly worried, which is entirely reasonable, since she had no personal experience with asthma. She couldn't see how seriously wrong things were with me, and in my state, I didn't have the breath to tell her. I didn't have the energy to move, and was literally trapped in my body, unable to cry for help, or even help myself at that point.

From my mother's point of view, I am certain it appeared like I was having one of my frequent migraines. I'd been getting those since I was six or seven, frequently enough that seeing me in that state was nothing new. Luckily, however, I had my prescription in my hand, and my mother was perceptive enough to notice what it was, and left to get my medicine. When she finally returned, a bit more concerned at that point since she'd spoken with the pharmacist about the mountains of pills she had to give me, which went far beyond the normal puffer she would pick up, I was almost gone. With my breaths growing steadily shallower, and without the energy to scream, speak, or even whisper, I felt the world around me start to fade. Things became blurry and faded, and I began feeling that thread of thought, of who I am, where I was, and what was happening, slip away. And then, the next thing I remember was hands pulling me upward, putting a handful of pills in my mouth (12 of one kind, 4 of another) and pouring water in my mouth to wash them down.

The doctors called it "shock therapy." The basically shocked the lungs with steroids, to to stop my lung's asthmatic reaction, forcing the airway open. The pills continued for a few weeks, in addition to a new inhaler I had to take along with my old one, but I could breathe again. Eventually I was weaned off the pills, and well enough to be as active I was used to being. I was never sure if my mother realized just how close she had been to losing her son, as we never talked about that night. But the memory of coming so close to dying was permanently ingrained in me, to the point that, on at least three occasions later in life, when the very same vicious cycle kicked into gear, I knew enough about what to do, and had made sure I always had a reserve of cash just in case, that I was able to get the appropriate help in time.

Which brings me back to where I was last night, as I listened to my daughter's rattled breathing, overwhelmed by worries accrued through a lifetime of personal experience. I had no choice but to shelve my worry for the nonce, as by that point we were late for a Christening party my wife's old schoolmate was hosting. It was a big, fancy affair at a hotel, and we had to get going.

By the time the party was over, I felt I had less to worry about. Though my daughter still cough that rattling cough, she had spent almost the entire time at the party out there on the dance floor. She danced for two hours straight, then ran around playing hide and seek with a couple other girls almost up until it was time to leave. The few times my wife or I had ventured onto the dance floor to dance along side her, that imperator regina had surfaced, and Mackenzie quickly ordered us off the dance floor. At two and a half, she was already acting like a fifteen year old, mortified at the thought that mom and dad would get down and boogie in sight of her.

The crowd seemed happy to have her up there and dancing, and the Emcee even started mimicking her dance moves. My little one really got that party started as, one by one, a laughing adult came on to the dance floor, looking down at this little girls bopping away, and began dancing along side her. The hostess was o taken with the whole thing, that she brought out a big present and gave it to Mackenzie on the dance floor. Mackenzie only stopped dancing long enough to take the present, run over to me, and say "Dada, hold this," before returning to her place in the center of the gyrating mob.

One thing about asthma is that it robs you of energy. You cannot draw enough oxygen into your lungs because your lungs secrete a certain fluid that actually forces the lungs to close. So the wet, rattling breath of an asthmatic means that the lung walls are collapsing. It is a serious, and dangerous sign. But for a non-asthmatic, the rattling sound of fluid in the lungs is not a sign of superb health, but it also is not attended by the same loss of energy, and downward spiral into further and further breathlessness.

Watching my daughter there, using up more energy than a CANDU reactor can put out, I didn't feel so worried any more, at least about the possibility of asthma. I'm sure if she keeps this love of the dance floor going forward, I'll have entirely more prosaic concerns, especially when she hit her teens and starts chatting about the last cool club she'd heard about. But that's a problem for a different time, and a different me. For now, I can only be thankful, that a little music, and a little dancing has allowed me cease worrying so much, to smile, and to gain a precious memory that I can bore friends and family with for the rest of my days.

The Hundred Kisses

When my youngest daughter was about 10 months old, she got into this strange habit. You would lift her onto the bed, and she would crawl over and proceed to give kisses. She would kiss my hand, or my wife's hand, or, if either of us happened to be lying down, and she was able to crawl on up to face level, would give us a kiss on the nose or the cheek. But it wouldn't be just one kiss, it would be many. Too many to count. Every night our littlest went through this ritual, her way of saying goodnight, and every night the ritual would last about as long as it would take to say the rosary.

We called it "The Hundred Kisses."

At times I would be reading before sleep, and the little one would come on over, tug on my book or sheaf of papers insistently, until I put it aside, and would embark on the hundred kisses. Mostly, this made us smile. For whatever reason, our little one had turned out to be the most loving little thing we'd ever seen. But sometimes, being tired, I had little patience for it, and would shoo my little one off, or get off the bed and get a drink of water. At times my wife, depending on her mood, would also have little patience for it as well. But still, our determined little one would soldier on with her nightly ritual.

The other day, walking through a store, it hit my wife that the little one hadn't given us the hundred kisses in quite some time. We'd been so busy running around recently, with the ups and downs and daily tumult of married life, that we'd forgotten about the whole thing. At some point our little one had stopped giving us the hundred kisses, and the tragedy was not that she had stopped, but that we hadn't even noticed. This strange, sweet, odd gift, had slipped from our notice, and had disappeared.

That night, we picked up the little one, holding her close, asking her to give us a kiss, and she did, but only once. After that, she was eager to be off, to her toys, to her sister, or to the grandparents always waiting with arms wide open, just down the hall. As we watched her toddle off, it was a moment marked with sadness, that through our inattention, we'd lost something we'd only belatedly come to see as so very precious, and beyond value.

Was this a lesson, something to keep in mind as later children arrive and grow? Or was it an indictment of us, as parents, a portent of years to come, when some other sweet, strange, odd gift would appear, and we, too busy with what we thought was important, would again let it slip away?

The Long Night

I've been a Catholic for years now, but I had never really known God. The truth is, to me religion was something you did, like going to the supermarket, or showing up at a family reunion. My baptismal certificate says that I was baptized in the United Church. Once a powerful force in Canada, it's been expelled from the Anglican Communion for its permissiveness, and liberality. I never really knew much about the United Church, though, because my first memory of sitting in a pew and praying to God was as a Pentecostal. Everyone was all red faced and sweaty, swaying about yelling "Lord Oh Lord!" and talking in tongues. At that age it all seemed exciting, but though I went to Christian camps summer after summer, somehow never really got what was going on.

Later in life I decided to become an Anglican. Not for any pious reason really, but because there was this girl, you see. It seemed like a good enough reason at the time. Sunday after Sunday I got a ride from her parents, holding that secret hope, that full blown crush, deep within. Only one day that little secret, those hidden feelings, slipped. Red faces, and uncomfortable expressions all made it clear that I had better find God somewhere else.

Through high school, there was a prayer group in the mornings. Sometimes they would invite me to church, but their fierce predilection towards hellfire and brimstone, and fervent stories of three-day pray-a-thons in crowded stadiums, transported by holy bliss all had me heading on, elsewhere. I distrusted that sort of fervency, preferring the safety of my books, my thousand page epics which never failed to reassure me, calm me, and transport me. I believe that the moment I knew I had to move on was when a member of that prayer group told me, in all seriousness, "just tell me your schedule, and I will find you. Wherever you are, any time, day or night, and we will pray together." I'm sure he was quite earnest in his way, but his earnestness and my willingness to have my life taken over by that earnestness were far different things. So I left.

Later, I became a Catholic. No Saul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus conversion for me. Just an Italian girl who told me in no uncertain terms that to marry her, I was going to have to convert. Being in a Catholic high school at the time, it made sense. So every week for a year I went to a meeting with my sponsor, a teacher and mentor from my school, a man who was helping me into the faith, and a man who would later briefly introduce me to the world of Amway, and stadiums filled with the faithful preaching of commerce, God, and family, in that order.

While the Amway bit just wasn’t for me, I stuck with the program, the Roman Cathloic Initiation of Adults, and when Easter arrived, standing in a church full of well wishers and worshipers, I accepted the Catholic faith. The next year I went to university, and a year later that Italian girl and I parted ways.

As my time in university wound to a close, I eventually met the girl I would marry. It turned out she was a Catholic, and would only marry a Catholic to boot. Which, in a way, seemed like nothing more than pure providence. As far as I knew, my membership in the church was still valid, so we went to mass together on Sundays, and I never failed to annoy her with my inability to remember any of the creeds, even though I could sit, kneel, and stand with the best of them.

They say that the young and the old are the most religious because they are the closest to God. There seemed truth in that to me, and being neither very young, nor very old, I couldn't say as I felt close to God at all. Until there came that dark night of the soul that changed it all.

When we had been married for about six months, we learned that our fist child was on the way. But at that time, due to visa restrictions, my wife couldn't work, and the hours at my job had been cut in half, and eliminated entirely a month later. I was scrambling for work, jumping at anything that paid, but it never was enough. We kept falling behind on everything, barley making our rent, just scraping by until the end of the line arrived. It was the 28th of the month, in the dead of winter, January, as I lay unsleeping at night, enduring a level of stress I had never experienced before in my life.

We were broke. Completely and absolutely broke. For myself, being broke was not something new. I'd begun living on my own when I was sixteen, and knew what it was to have little or nothing from week to week, or month to month. Alone, the stress of my situation would not have bothered me much, but I wasn't alone anymore, I had a wife, and a child on the way. I had responsibilities, and I was entirley failing to take care of them. As I lay there, in the dark, I found myself completely debilitated by worry. I had no idea where the next rent payment was going to come from. In fact, we had so little money left, that earlier that day I had to shamefacedly admit to my wife that I didn't even know if we could even afford bread the next day. And that night I could see it all - the car would be taken away, we'd lose everything, and probably end up on the street.

That night I couldn't sleep, feeling overwhelmed, and for the furst time in my life, completely at a loss for what to do. My wife, who had never been in that situation her whole life, whose parents had always taken care of things, even shouldering the full cost of her years at university, was in tears. Her parents were half a world away, in financial straights themselves at that moment, while my parents were either unable or unwilling to lend a hand.

It was just us, alone, and the raging winter winds outside our window.

As flimsy as this sounds, as Hallmark movie-of-the-week as it seems, I swear I found God that night. I began to pray, but as I prayed, I felt like a charlatan, a fake, a fraud. There were so many things, good, bad, and indifferent that I had done in my life, but what haunted my mind most was not what I expected.

When I was five years old, wanting to impress friends, I'd taken my mother's old nickels, coins from around the world that she had collected in her years at the bank. I buried them in the ground in the woods near my home, and drew a "treasure map" and made it look old. I then told my friends I'd found a map to buried treasure. We dug up the "treasure chest," and I tried to act like one of those kids from the Goonies, amazed at what I was seeing. I could sense they didn't believe a word of it, that they thought the whole thing was a pathetic scam. So I took them to the store and used my "treasure" to buy them some chocolate bars.

I remembered my time as a Sea Cadet, in an elite summer program known as PL, or Practical Leadership. Crawling under wire, through the mud, I decided to be a funny guy and make a joke about my commanding officer, standing near by. He heard and asked me what I had said. Mutely I tried to pretend I hadn't heard him. When he told me he'd heard, and just wanted me to admit it, my heart sank. In his eyes there was nothing so pathetic. All I needed to do was admit what I'd done, and he would have judged me a man. But I hadn't, and I wasn't.

Scene after scene of things petty and small, the tiny infractions that one shrugs off as beneath notice, came to me. In that dark night, wife finally asleep, winds unabated outside, those old memories of many failings loomed large before me. The guilt for things so petty almost subsumed me. I saw clearly who I was, and it was someone that I hadn't really known. I'd thought of myself as the kind of guy who tool care of things, was a stand up, straight up guy, but the evidence being paraded before me in the court of my own mind said otherwise.

Shame is what I felt. I wanted to stop praying, feeling a fool for my temerity. But hearing my wife's now steady breath as she slept, and knowing that I had no answers, no plans, no ideas left that could help us, I prayed anyway.

And he answered, or at least I like to think he did. The next day, they very next day, Revenue Canada had deposited my GST rebate in my bank account. It was a sizeable amount, more than enough to solve our immediate problems. Three months later I learned that they they had made a mistake, but we had passed out point of crisis. By then I had four jobs I was juggling, and while we we're still only treading water, we were no longer drowning.

Today, almost three and half years later, living well with a good job, two wonderful children, a third on the way, and a wife who calls me at work every day to tell me all the stories about the sorts of mischief our little ones are getting into, I realized something. I'd been a Catholic for years, but I had never really believed in God.

Now, I think I do.

Flying Home

Closing in on three years ago, faced with a stark financial situation, I packed my wife and newborn onto a plane and sent them halfway across the world to Dubai, to be with my wife parents while I wound down our affairs in Canada, and scrounged up enough coin to join them. It took three months, working seven days a week on 12 hour shifts as a security guard in a Toronto hospital, before I could join them.

Stepping on that plane, I was elated. As with any parent, husband, or wife, separated from their family, I simply could not wait to be with them. Every minute was a minute too long. Perhaps it was that hyper-awareness of not wanting to be going, but to already be there. I'm not sure. But whatever it was, whatever power in the universe, or jesting deity it may have been, something was tapping on my shoulder, telling me to focus a little more on the here and now.

That, or they were just having a little fun.

My wife always told me to fly KLM. "They're the best," she always said. There was always this mix of satisfied contentment, of revisiting a pleasant memory whenever she spoke of flying with them. So it made sesne, for one born and raised on the "luxury" of Air Canada, to try a real airline for once.

At first, everything went swimmingly. I checked my luggage, bought a book or two, got some coffee, and waited for boarding. When the call came, I passed on into the plane without a single problem. Then I sat down.

When I sank into my chair, armrests pinching my rear like a vise, I found that I was very foolish to be born so tall, as my knees were instantly crushed into the hard and painfully scratchy fabric of the chair in front of me. To add further indignity to this state of affairs, it seems that the chair pocket was designed such that the wire that holds the pocket would be placed right where my kneecap joints pressed most firmly into the fabric, resulting in painful spasms from time to time, as my knees registered the sensation of a knife cutting into cartilage.

In any event, I felt sorry for the guy next to me. When I sat down he had this look of terror on his face that was like Jonah just before he was swallowed by the whale. Not that I was going to swallow him, but by his obviously European standards, he probably envisioned a tidal wave of flesh spilling over the armrests, smothering him in a long, slow death.

His relief was palpable as I seemed to squeeze in without causing an explosion or sudden seat breakdown. Even I breathed a little easier, though little being the operative word since I felt a strange constriction in my chest, which I later gathered may have been some of the softer, more movable organs pushing up into my lungs.

The seat belt sign flashed, and I tried valiantly to put it on, but my flailing was to no avail. It was just too small. That's when the flight attendant came over to me, and in her loud Dutch accented voice, said "Pleeze put yuur seetbet on, saar."

A bit embarrassed, I whispered "It doesn't fit."

"What do you say?" She replied, of course.

"It doesn't fit," I said a little louder.

"Eet does not feet?," she then yelled in response, loudly enough so that every passenger in a five seat radius was suddenly turning and looking at me.

Happily further comment ceased, and she walked away to get me a seat belt extender. Unhappily, she brought it down the aisle, holding it aloft for all to see, and proceeded to pantomime, for all and sundry, how one worked one of these magical devices, making sure to stretch out the belt as a far as possible while doing so.

This lady and I? It was love at first sight.

Later, the stewardess was serving coffee. She picked up a cup for the guy in the chair opposite me, but her pouring arm was only inches from my face. As she poured, she seemed completely oblivious to the GIANT HOLE in the bottom of the cup. It was like watching a Nescafe machine start to pour you a steaming hot cup of mediocre hot chocolate, only your crotch is the cup.

The boiling water splashed across my shorts, running across my legs, and over my knees like a dark Niagara Falls. Making a valiant attempt to stem the flow with the forearm, I learned that the thin flesh of the arm feels the pain of burn most intensely.

Coffee splatter illumined my face, and adorned my glasses, yet this lovely lady in blue was still twittering away at the numbskull opposite me, while I frantically tried to shift in my tiny, itchy fabric covered prison. I tried to speak, shout, say, or do something, but all I could do was stare silently horrified, in terrible pain.

When the stewardess got to the point where she would normally stop pouring, she looked at the cup with a confused look, not quite understanding where all the coffee went. Thankfully two other stewardesses had seen my head thrashing strangely, and rushed over and came to give me some cold "hot towels" to wipe myself off with.

By the time the pain had subsided enough that the scalding burn was a not-quite-incandescent red, and the coffee soaked into my shorts had chilled significantly, it was dinner time.

At dinner, I got the chicken. It was a tad, I guess 'boiled' was the word. Accompanied by an inedible couscous salad, and some rubber "it's supposed to be chocolate" dessert, dinner did not fail to disappoint. But silly me, I was sure that lack of texture or taste was the only indignity I would suffer from that meal. I was wrong.

It was not merely nausea, I felt. In fact, I felt my whole being was being ripped apart from the inside as my innards fought over the half boiled chicken, battling it out with salmonella and other pathogens for supremacy in the gastric tract. Needless to say a trip to the loo was in order, and when I finally squeezed my way into the two foot, by two foot confines, I entered a whole now realm of adventure.

I have this hypothesis, and it is that a) Europeans have tiny rears, and b) the men are all eunuchs. Why do I say this? Well, because I could variously sit down and aim my maker at the proper target, with my boys hanging over the porcelain edge and clanging on it's clammy surface, or I could shift to do the other job, but at the expense of my other the tender bits being pinched by the curiously knife sharp lid edge at the back of the toilet.

When the business was done, and it came time to wipe, I must admit a few minutes of panic when I realized I couldn't. Because the pot was so small, I could do the usual reach-under-and-bend wipe, but had to try some sort of reach around that only 10th level Guru Yoga masters might have been able to pull off.

In that terror filled fifteen minutes, I had numerous knocks at the door, inquiries into my well being, as I variously banged into every wall in that benighted wee cubicle. Contemplating hours of sitting with nasty wee dark bits adorning my boxers until I arrived in Dubai, terror led to creativity, and I thought like
a South Asian - I stood on the toilet. Well, actually, I placed one foot on the lid and got enough leverage to carry out a good proper cleaning. Saved by the tilt, as it were.

But alas, the struggle was not at an end. In order to get the foot up, I had to take off the shorts. Suddenly the bangs on the door were more insistent, and the bangs in my head from the rapidly growing migraine were worse. Somehow, someway, I got my boxers and shorts back on, washed my hands, downed two tiny cups of water, and a handful of Advil, and was out of there.

I got to my seat, soaked in a sheen of cold sweat. My hands, and head twitched from the migraine and the nausea. I decided to sleep, and did sleep through the two terrible movies (Step Up, and Mr. Bean), and awoke partly better. Luckily breakfast was coming around, and when I got it, it was much better than dinner had been. The yogurt container was a bit tricky, but eventually I jerked off the tin covering, and quickly wiped off the spatters that landed all over my shirt, face, glasses and arms. Then I ate the nature bar, and drank the 4ml cup of orange juice. Contemplating the thimble-ish nature of the orange juice, when the juice cart came around, I requested a bit more.

It was a simple request, that instead of coffee or tea, I wanted juice. But no, that lovely lady, she of the coffee and seat belt extender, stared at me, her eyes boring into my skull as she said "You ave ad de joos in de breekfest."

There was simply no arguing, so I meekly requested water. Thankfully she gave me some, but as she moved on, she gave her cart a mighty jerk, strong enough that an open water bottle on it tipped over, pouring it's contents into my lap.

Mercifully it was time to land, and I got off the plane as expeditiously as I could.

One half of the journey finally over.

It Could Have Been Worse

One thing that is very different about working here in Dubai, compared with Canada or the United States, is the provision that employers have to provide "ticket money" to all employees. That is, once a year your employer has to give you enough extra money, on top of your normal pay, to buy you an airplane ticket to your home country. Two tickets if you are married. Out here it is just a regular part of the pay package, and for most, it's an annual ritual to calculate the amount you are going to get before hand, and work it into your family budget. But for myself, it still feels like a Christmas gift, albeit one in April. And with the distance between Dubai and Canada being what it is, it's not an insubstantial gift either.

As a thoroughly domesticated and entirely boring family, we don't go in for all of that exciting stuff. None of that Osbournes stuff for us. Trips to Rome? Nah. Nice? In our dreams, maybe. But a trip to the supermarket? You bet! So this little April gift usually represents something other than seats on a flight out of town. Something usually very boring and entirely uninspiring, and this year was no exception. Upon hearing that the ticket money had come through, my wife let me know in no uncertain terms that we'd be heading down to Carrefour right quick to get ourselves a really nice washer/dryer combo.

You know, it's a pretty bad sign, as a fella, to actually get excited about a new washer and a new dryer. Were I to pass by the Spike TV offices, I think the doors would automatically lock on the off chance I'd try to come through. My membership in the man club officially revoked. Yes, excitement over a buying a washer and dryer is probably the most undeniable symptom of rampant domesticity. At that stage the domesticity has metastasized, spreading throughout the masculinity, becoming inoperable and terminal.

Still, I got to looking forward to it, and my wife as well. Which may explain our uncharacteristic impatience today, as a chain of events unfolded that had my wife dissolving in tears, and left me having a little laugh at the perverse irony of chance and fate.

You see, before we moved out here, we set ourselves up with a certain very large, very international bank because they offered a very useful service. Through their online setup, we could instantly transfer funds from here to back home. A very useful feature when it comes to keeping up student loan and credit card payments. But once in a blue moon this service abruptly, and for no reason that customer support ever seems to know about, stops working. The last time this happened, and after we figured out how to send money the old fashioned way, we ended up with more than a few late payment fines to cover, and we vowed we wouldn't let that happen again. Today, upon discovering that the online transfer service was down, plan B kicked into action. Only there was a hitch.

Excited about that washer/dryer combo, we decided it would be better to head off to Carrefour straight after work tomorrow. Instead of heading down to our bank, standing in line, and wasting precious time tomorrow, we'd just withdraw what we needed to send and go on over to the remittance place downstairs right away. After speaking with the exchange folks, it seemed that their rates were actually better than what our big international bank offered us, including a far better exchange rate.

What then followed made all those cliche expressions "penny wise and pound foolish," "haste makes waste," "patience is a virtue," etc, all come alive, illustrating for us just why those expressions have stuck around for as long as they have. What happened was the wife went downstairs to make a withdrawal from the ATM. Card went in, number punched, amount selected, then....nothing. Nothing for a while, then the card comes out, and the screen says "thank you." No cash, no receipt, nothing. Figuring there was a problem with this particular ATM, the wife headed off to another one, which informed her that she had reached her daily withdrawal limit.

Come again?

Confused, and more than a little worried, she went to yet another ATM, this time being successful in getting a little money out, only to find, on the receipt, a great gaping hole in what we should have had, but apparently no longer did. She immediately came upstairs, and told me what had happened. But, instead of listening and understanding what happened, I put on my Ned Flanders cape and headed downstairs, two and a half year old in tow, to see about the bank machines. My wife, I figured, probably had gone to the one machine and given up (A thought which, in retrospect, may be a sign of resurgent masculine tendencies). Boy, I had a surprise waiting for me.

Upon seeing that great, gaping hole in the account, I felt pain in places where pain is a really bad sign. I felt light headedness and dizziness. Was I the victim of some scam? Did some Russian hacker have my bank info? I'd checked the account online not a half hour earlier and it was all there. But it all most certainly was not there now. Maybe it wasn't some Russian dude in a basement. What if it was a Chinese hacker, or one of those Nigerian schemes? Had I returned some exiled Prince's email while sleep-surfing? Was my account being drained of funds this very moment?

I made my way as fast as thought, and an annoyed two and a half year old would allow. At home, online, looking at that gaping hole in the account, and talking to a rep on the phone, going over every step of what happened, it hit us.

It wasn't some Russian hacker. Nor a Chinese one, or a Nigerian scam artist. It was a mechanical error. It was the machine itself. An ATM we had used almost daily for years, which operated perfectly virtually all the time, had had a statistical hiccup. Card had gone in, amount for withdrawal entered, amount debited from our account, and then...nothing.

Perhaps the incident is recorded on the machine's error log. Hopefully the video will show my wife standing there, looking, looking, and looking, with nothing coming out? Whatever the case may be, we have to hope there is some way the bank will be able to check our story. As the nice rep on the phone told us, we had to submit an ATM indemnity form. It would take up to fifteen days for the resolution of our issue, and we have to submit the form tomorrow. And that was it.

I'd been so sure our loss was as a result of some human agency, and in the end it was, but not the usual sort. In the end, while the machine was to blame, we could also find fault with the whole sequence of events. So used to depending on the infallibility of the machines we use every day, it never occurred to us that this would happen. When our first remittance option failed, we decided to take a shortcut. Instead of taking the hour or two tomorrow to go to our bank and make a manual transfer, we decided to withdraw the cash and do it right then and there. Instead of walking a few blocks down the way to our own bank's machine, we used the third party machine in our building, just like we always had. As mad as we might be at that hunk of metal, what would be the point? All our friends, our family, we've now learned, have all had something like this happen to them at one point or another. We all had perfect trust and faith in these machines, and while that faith and trust was almost always rewarded, there is always that one time.

In Dubai it will take fifteen days to see about resolving the situation. Back home it takes up to six months, so there is that silver lining. But fifteen days? What would we do? My wife was entirely out of sorts.

Looking over the numbers, I realized, that in all our hyperventilating, we'd missed a salient fact. That big, gaping hole? It was just the ticket money, and not even all of it. We weren't going to suffer this month, not in the least. From my wife's perspective, we had lost a large amount of money, money I had worked for and earned. The sort of money whose loss, when she was growing up, would have been ruinous. For us, even two years ago, we would have been firmly s-o-l. But right here, right now, that wasn't the case.

From my perspective, it was like free money had fallen out of my pocket. Like when an uncle gives you a twenty on your birthday, and it gets stolen, but you don't really care, not that much, because it had been a surprise, a gift. Easy come, easy go. For my wife, it was something terrible, and she blamed herself, for being impatient, incautious, thinking "if only...if only...".

But it wasn't her fault. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't even our fault. It was capricious chance. Sure we could have gone to our own bank's machine, but whose to say it wouldn't have malfunctioned? Everything else at that bank seems to. And even if we had gone the next day to our bank to do the remittance, who is to say the teller wouldn't type an account number wrong? It could happen. It could all happen. What happened to us, may or may not have been preventable, because no matter what, there is always the chance that something else could have happened. In our case, the chance that something much, much worse could have happened.

So, as I sit here and type this now, I am profoundly thankful. I'm giving thanks in prayer. To God, to the universe. We had a little scare. It wasn't so much as scares go, but it could have been. Which is why I'm smiling right now. My wife isn't, yet. But in two weeks time, if...when this situation is resolved, one way or another, I think she'll start to see it my way. She'll start to smile, she'll see the irony too.

We didn't have to go anywhere for some excitement. We just had to stay right here