Erin's Journals

Welcome to a brand new week – the final days of spring before summer’s arrival on Friday – and I hope that your Father’s Day was a pleasant one. Ours was quiet: Rob opened (and loved) a card that Colin filled out for him and then chatted briefly with his grandson later. We went to a movie with friends. As I say, a quiet day. Or just the opposite of what today is going to be in Toronto!
 
If you could go back in time, would you attend one of those two Blue Jays parades in 1992 and 1993? Maybe you did! I don’t recall going and now wish desperately I had. Like the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
 
Here we are over a quarter century later and at long last the city of Toronto is holding a huge victory parade once again, from Exhibition Place to City Hall. Rob tells me back in the heady days of Stanley Cup victories that Bay Street used to be the parade route. I asked him if there was a problem getting all of the horses and carriages to pull over and get out of the way. I don’t know why he puts up with me, to be honest.
 
(And, yes, I know there have been parades for Toronto FC and the Argos in recent years, but not on this scale: some estimates say as many as two million people could be witnessing today’s festivities.)
 
If you’re wondering whether to pull your children or grand kids out of school or to play hooky for an hour this morning to go and cheer on the NBA Champion Toronto Raptors, I ask you this: do you remember the last victory parade you attended? Do you recall when last Toronto celebrated something that was on this huge an international scale? And can you be absolutely sure you’ll live long enough to see another one?
 
If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” then I’d say GO. Make some memories. Scream like a teen at a BTS concert. (If you think that was a typo and I meant BTO, just Google the biggest boy band on the planet.) 
 
Anything. Could. Happen. As cockeyed optimistic sports fans, we like to think this is the beginning of a dynasty. But too often, dreams like this die nasty.
 
Players leave, lured by the challenge of a rebuild elsewhere (or more likely, way more Benjamins) and team owners get greedy and sell off superstars or promising players. Sure, we heard the team owner say this was the beginning of a long run, but we remember. As much as fans would love a repeat, a three-peat or an honest-to-goodness dynasty, we in Toronto have scars too deep and memories too long to forget the way things really roll in pro sports in this and almost every other town.
 
Please, please, please don’t take a moment of this for granted – and most people are not. Hockey fans whose Stanley Cup memories are primarily in black and white will tell you that unless you live in, say, Boston, a day like today, on which a championship parade is held, is something you see very few times in your life.
 
Go. Surround yourself with joy. For sports fans and all Torontonians, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter in every way – and you deserve this.
 
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Speaking of FUN…
 
Join Mike Cooper and me tomorrow at 7 pm EDT for a webinar with AMA Waterways and the guy who puts the Kool in cruising, Gerry Koolhof from New Wave Travel, as we fill you in on an all-Canadian river cruise that Mike & I are hosting in October 2020 at Thanksgiving. From Switzerland to The Netherlands, it promises to be huge fun. But you need to register ahead of time. Here’s the link and we’ll both talk to you tomorrow!
 

Are we home yet? Is the NBA championship “home” yet? I wrote almost all of this journal during our 90 minute ferry ride at the end of our journey from Kelowna on the mainland to our island home yesterday. Here we go.
 
I’ll tell you, last evening was the aural equivalent of having my eyes just slightly crossed to make sense of one of those 3D posters that used to be everywhere a few decades ago. Except, instead of trying not to focus so we could see, we were endeavouring not to hear so we could later learn a basketball score!
 
After a windy and windy (you’ll get it…) five-and-a-half hour drive through some of the most beautiful scenery you’ll ever encounter…like this…
 

 
…we arrived at Tsawwassen near Vancouver to board our ferry back to Vancouver Island at 4:00 pm.
 

 
While on the boat, we peered out the large dining room windows watching for whales and wondered if the Toronto Raptors were about to make NBA history and hand my former home city its first championship in this sport!
 
As our massive ferry pulled into Swartz Bay harbour, just a few kilometres from our home, we weren’t looking forward to watching the game just yet: we came back especially for our semi-monthly Rotary Club meeting at 7 pm.
 
Rob was to be official greeter and note-taker and I was to act as Sergeant-at-Arms for the first time. My duties would include “fining” members who had forgotten their Rotary pins, taking donations in the same happy piggy bank for people who want to donate “happy” dollars (ours would be for the St. Louis Blues’ Stanley Cup win and for being able to spend a few days with my dad and sisters).
 
Uh-oh. Who knew what time the meeting would end? There was a guest speaker who was very carefully showing pictures from a Guatemalan project that other Vancouver Island Rotarians had taken part in, bringing gas stoves to impoverished families.
 
I felt like an awful person wondering just when we were going to get home. Our friends the Woodses were to be at a dinner last night and couldn’t text me back a simple YES or NO as to whether the game was over. Should we watch the waning minutes or roll back the PVR? Turns out we had no choice.
 
We got home and the dreaded message showed up on our screen: absolutely everything on our PVR, including the NBA game we had set the machine to record just a few hours earlier, had disappeared. Gone. Vanished. Vapourized.
 
We decided that we’d better stop looking for a way to make the PVR find the show, and just turn the game on. Talk about tense: there were some 36 seconds left on the clock!
 
As you now know, those final 36.7 seconds turned into quite a few minutes and in the end: victory. History. A new Heritage Minute in the making, thanks to a 114-110 victory.
 
Oh my, but it’s been a good bandwagon to be on: until a month ago, I thought Kawhi’s name was pronounced “cowwee” and that Pascal Siakam’s last name was “see-a-cam.” You see, I didn’t have to talk about it on the air anymore, so I simply didn’t pay attention.
 
But as the playoffs got longer and the Raptors were still in them, we sure did start watching. Something special was happening. And last night, a whole lot of dreams, decades in the making, came true.
 
Savour this moment, especially if you’re a long-time Raptors’ fan. You’ve earned it. This looks fantastic on Toronto and, yes, the entire country. Brought together over a game that was invented here. Welcome home, Basketball.
 
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Finally – as we switch lanes back to reality – there’s something that came into my inbox the other night that made me want to share it with you.
 
It’s not without a lot of careful consideration that I tell you stories of my Dad, as I did this week. I realize that a great many readers here don’t have their fathers anymore and this weekend can carry an awful lot of emotional weight. My heart goes out to you.
 
So I was grateful to see this piece from one of my very favourite blogs: WhatsYourGrief.com. Here’s a link to “Surviving Father’s Day Grief: When Sadness Meets Storytelling.” You may well find comfort in these words; I HIGHLY recommend this site, no matter who or what you miss in your life. 
 
And Happy Father’s Day. 
 

 
And it’s good-bye today to Kelowna, this city of 132,000 in the BC interior that counts among that number, two of my siblings and my dad. While the city itself is about 50% larger than Victoria, the Kelowna metropolitan area claims a population of around 200,000, making it the third-largest metro area in BC behind Vancouver and Victoria.
 
How lucky we were not to have the skies smudged with the smoke of forest fires! But it’s not summer yet. Those fires will happen – as they do every year, to our great sadness.
 
There was no sadness to be found over the last few days in our little family circle. During this celebratory visit we ate too much and laughed a lot; I was reminded of the rugged beauty (and, yes, traffic congestion) that this area holds.
 
Yesterday, before we started to pack up again for today’s journey, I was treated to more family time with my mom’s older sister. At 89, Auntie Panty (as I’ve teasingly called her for decades) is the last real link I have to my late mom, so I treasure my time with Arleen.
 
We chose a restaurant down in the Mission area of Kelowna, on the shores of Okanagan Lake. This place, the Manteo Resort, was the site of the worst public speaking nightmares I ever endured just one year ago. If you’d like to read about it again, here are links to parts one and two of the journal I wrote last May. 
 
Our lunch yesterday under umbrellas, a cloud-softened sky and amidst warm temperatures, was simply perfect. Bad memories have been relegated to that part of the brain that departs in waking life and wakes you up in a sweat in the middle of the night! But at least they have a nice backdrop in this case.
 
After the older folks had left to head back to their respective homes, Rob grabbed the shot above that you see: me in a frame that the Manteo Resort mounted out on the deck. 
 
And so, off we go. I love the Okanagan, but for Rob and me, it just has too much winter (snow) and too much summer (heat). We’re happy where we are on our island paradise, and that’s where we’re heading today.
 
I promise some dramatic pictures as we make our way through the Coquihalla and onto the afternoon ferry across to Sidney, BC. On the way over on Monday, Rob saw a whale show its tail twice. We can only hope to be treated to such a sight today. Fingers crossed and eyes peeled!
 
I want to thank you for sharing these travels with me. From the gently frenetic pace of book signings and speaking events in Ontario last week, to this week’s feting my dad on his 86th, it’s been a busy few weeks and I’m ready to wake up in my own bed, Molly by my side, tomorrow morning. But we’ll have a Friday journal for you and I hope you’ll join me then.
 
In the meantime, here’s a piece that I’ve written this week for Walmart with some great grilling ideas (that is, buying ’em, not using ’em) and accessory suggestions that you may find handy. Have a great day.
 

Hello from gorgeous Kelowna, BC, where Rob and I will stay another night before heading back to our island home. You know, it’s funny, just from conversations I had last week, how many people think that Vancouver and Vancouver Island are one and the same; Vancouver being that giant city on the mainland, while Vancouver Island is…well, you know, an island. And that’s the place we call home in the city of North Saanich (like sandwich without the D and W). But enough about home – let’s be here now!
 
Yesterday morning, Rob left the guest suite here at “Socks ‘n’ Sandals-wood” (what we call Dad’s residence, Sandalwood, in honour of his favourite foot attire) to hit up the beverage bar. There, Rob encountered Dad, who I suspect was lying in wait for us to rouse, and who had already been given a balloon and had had sung to him a lively rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
 

 
Usually it’s Dad and the choir here who do the singing on people’s birthdays, but this time it was the activities director who sang to him, and he was suitably thrilled. Balloon (and coffees) in hand, he and Rob came back to the suite and we sat and visited for well over an hour, a lively and laugh-filled talk interrupted only by phone calls from well-wishing family members. We took Dad and his lady friend Dawna out for lunch and then dropped them off for some quiet time.
 
Dad’s big day part two saw a gathering with two of my three sisters (the third being out of the country) and their partners. We had a dinner together, cake, and then took in one of Dad’s granddaughters’ school concerts. He couldn’t have been happier had it been Ben Heppner or a Glenn Miller tribute band!
 

 
A very special gift for Dad on his 86th was a bottle of unique scotch. Dad doesn’t drink much at all, but in this case, he might have a sip or two every now and then in honour of his roots. Dad was born in a tiny oil town called Turner Valley, Alberta. On a recent trip there with the Kenny Rogers tribute band with which she plays, my sister Heather picked up a bottle of Eau Claire Distillery single malt whisky (scotch) that is the province’s first hand-crafted single malt and – like Dad – is made entirely of Alberta ingredients.
 
He had a sip last night and declared it “perfect”: better than any he’d had from the peaty bogs of Scotland. I’m suspecting that its roots, and his, had a lot to do with the declaration. I’m not a scotch drinker, so I can’t tell you for sure. But Dad loved it – and the thought behind it – and that’s the important thing.
 

 
Lots more family things planned today for us…you have a lovely Wednesday and I’ll be back with you here tomorrow when we’ll be, as the song goes, on the road again.
 

After arriving safely, and just as the Raptors game ended (One point! Really?), in Kelowna last night, Rob and I were reunited after 10 days apart! That’s a long stretch for us. We bunked down in the guest suite at Dad’s seniors’ residence and look forward to two days here, departing on Thursday to make it back to the Sidney, BC area in time for our semi-monthly Rotary meeting.
 
This is a favourite picture of mine from about five years ago when Dad came to town to visit from Kelowna. As I recall, we had dinner at Baton Rouge at the foot of the CN Tower before hitting a Blue Jays game.
 

 
I loved learning that in the past few months Dad would spend time reading Mourning Has Broken to his lady friend, Dawna. (Can you think of a cuter pair than one named Don and Dawna?) I would like to believe that actually reading about my life, and my perceptions of how things unfolded, has probably helped him to understand me more than he ever has. That’s a nice place to be at this point in both our lives. 
 
Today we celebrate Dad’s 86th birthday. And it is indeed a happy one. After surgery for prostate cancer some 20 years ago, he’s been doing just great health-wise. He’s been an endless source of strength when it comes to watching him do the right thing – including picking up the pieces after his wife of 55 years, my mother, passed away 7 years ago – and he has led more by example than by decree. For that, I am grateful.
 
In a recent interview on David Letterman’s second season of his Netflix show, Ellen DeGeneres said something that made me nod in recognition: she said that her dad wasn’t big with praise or compliments. He’d say things like, “Oh, Mr. Smith said that he really likes your show” or “So-and-So says you’re doing very well…” (and I paraphrase) and that’s a lot of how Dad was with my career as he and Mom watched from Brighton, Ontario and friends would pass along clippings or tell him they’d seen me somewhere on TV. But in the past three months he’s giggled during our phone calls and been excited for the progress of my book, cheering me on. Perhaps part of that comes with Dawna’s added perspective?
 
As we spend this day together in BC’s beautiful interior, I’ll be grateful to have my dad with us in good health and spirits, of mostly sound mind and in the kind of physical shape that makes me grateful for all of the years he would diligently take his daily walk, listening to military marches on his iPod. On top of all of that, my three sisters and I have been lucky to have a father who’s adamant about taking care of his after-life arrangements, even to the point of having his headstone in his front hall closet (engraved with all but a final year)! 
 
Yep – that’s Dad. I love him dearly and am so grateful for all he is, all he’s been and all we get to celebrate today. Because that’s a lot.
 
Back with you here tomorrow.