Erin's Journals

Well, we’re back “home” in Palm Springs again, having taken our friend and my former radio partner Mike Cooper to McCarran International for his flight back to Toronto yesterday. All in all, it was a fun-filled and entertaining few days filled with laughs, hugs and even a few truly surprising moments. Let me take you back to Saturday, one of the most incredible angel-kissed days of my life.
 
Rob and I were at a place called Aliante, a casino hotel resort on the outskirts of Las Vegas. We don’t do the strip, as the pays are so meagre (we find) and there isn’t a wide enough variety of nickel and dime games. We don’t have the stomach to play quarters and dollars like some folks and that’s why I’ll never win enough to have to summon a casino employee to come over for a payout in cash, or what they call a hand pay. But I’m okay with that. I can’t stand the remorse, so I play within what I think are reasonable limits.
 
I sat down at a machine on Saturday and pulled a bill out of my little Beatles change purse, bought in Liverpool the year Mike and I went to London to cover the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. As I did so, a little pewter medallion fell out on to the floor. I carry it in my full-sized wallet at all times; a gift from Debbie Cooper when Lauren died, it means a lot to me.
 
As I was picking it up, I noticed a penny wedged under the machine. I wasn’t able to get it out, but felt that maybe Debbie was with me, just reminding me how glad she is that Mike was coming to be with us and have a lighter heart for a little bit.
 
I’ll skip to the best part: I hit a Royal Flush (worth $200 in nickels) a very short time later. Here it is!
 

 
When we were ready to move on, I asked Rob if he’d dig that penny out. He got on his hands and knees and, using a player’s card, retrieved that lucky penny. I tucked it into my bra. Within a few hours, I’d found another penny and even a quarter! Yes, I had quite a “treasure chest” going, if you will.
 

 
It seems to have worked: I proceeded to win another $400.
 

 
Rob had his share of aces and kept up his end of the bankroll, so we left feeling pretty satisfied. But wait – there’s more….
 
On our way to the car, a vehicle was following us and I said to Rob that we should deke through some parked cars so they didn’t think we were leading them to a spot. As we did, I looked down between two dark, empty cars and saw a little white ticket. I wasn’t too surprised; often people playing machines that pay them out one or two cents just throw them away rather than cash them in. So, with no expectations at all, I bent down and picked it up. Here’s what I got.
 

 
I couldn’t believe it. (And yes, it adds up to an 11, as significant a number in my life as 8’s are). We made sure no one was getting into a car nearby who might have dropped it, then walked – no, rushed – back into the casino to cash it in. I suppose we could have turned it in to security, but from what a man told us earlier in the day, they hold onto it for a year and then you can claim it. Um, no. 
 
And something that happened moments later confirmed that we were meant to find it: we got into the car, turned on the Beatles channel on the radio and what song do you think was playing? 
 
Guess….
 
….keep guessing….
  
….got anything….?
  
————- scroll down ————-
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
It was that kind of a “record” day. Hope yours is magical, too, and thanks for the visit – back with you here tomorrow.
 

Happy Tuesday! I’ve a story about angels, signs and just plain luck to share with you here tomorrow. But first, where we are today and just how much of a lift it’s giving three of us. Yes, three. 
 
A few days ago, Rob and I could feel a case of the blues pulling up over us like a big thick blanket. I came up with an idea of how to cure ours and maybe help someone we love who had had just a hellish Christmas season. We called Mike Cooper and he booked a flight right away. And so here we are…or there we were: we left Vegas today after our short visit and adventure together. 
 
After 90 minute delay leaving YYZ, Cooper arrived at McCarran at just about midnight on Saturday. Because we drove, we could be Mike’s personal chauffeurs for everything he might need. And like so many who’ve met us over the years on business trips, we made sure we didn’t quite spell Mike’s name right…
 

 
We went straight to his hotel so he could get checked in after hours, but the next two days were just good for the soul. Since we’re staying in a different, budget, dog-friendly hotel (which I’ll tell you about later in the week), we would get up and ready and meet him and have some fun, enjoy a few amazing dinners out (the barbecue joint Lucille’s in the Red Rock Hotel is one I’ve mentioned before and not to be missed) and mostly just reconnect through misty-eyed memories and discussions about moving forward, staying upright and feeling like things will never be the same. 
 
Of course they won’t; I was able to share with Mike a quote from writer Anne Lamott that she graciously agreed could be included in my book. It is the truest metaphor for survival after loss that I’ve ever heard or read. Bless Anne for allowing us all to share in her wisdom. 

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

These last few days, we danced together, we three. We laughed (always at the most inappropriate things) and we just talked. And talked. It was so good to reconnect and, although playing at machines is probably one of the least sociable things a person can do, we did a few hours here and there and just let Mike have some mindless fun and win a bit of money while he was at it.
 

 
Mike’s back doing his Coop’s Classics show on CHFI, something that is as good for him to be doing as it is for you to listen to. Just having a purpose and a reason to put on makeup (oh wait – that was me, not him!) can be so helpful in getting through the early days and months of grieving. Once again, radio comes to the rescue. 
 
So our adventure together has come to an end. Rob laughed harder these past three days than he has in months, so it was wonderful for his soul, too. Me? To quote Carol Burnett’s theme song, “I’m so glad we had this time together.” We’re hoping to see Mike again in February when the book launch on the 26th brings us east, but we’re counting the weeks ’til the river cruise Mike and I (and Rob, of course) are hosting together in April. There’ll be laughs, there will be tears and there will be a whole lotta hugging – guaranteed.
 
Talk to you here tomorrow with the most amazing things that happened of an angelic nature in Vegas. They were incredible, but they really did happen.
 

Welcome back – and if you weren’t here last week because of holidays, there were fresh journals Wednesday through Friday, so take a peek – and I hope you had a great restful few days. We didn’t, but that was in the best way possible and I’ll tell you about it here tomorrow!
 
We haven’t seen any tangible evidence of the federal government shutdown here in the USA, with the exception of any plans to visit Joshua Tree National Park having been scuppered by the fact that people have vandalized and littered to such an extent that authorities have had to close it down. We’re lucky to have been so peripherally affected; when Rob’s sister Sue was with us over the holidays we’d already decided a drive and walk through gorgeous Thousand Palms in the Coachella Valley would be enough desert scenery for this trip.
 

 
Changing lanes, if you will, I have spotted a couple of vehicles whose messages are loud and clear. Like the one on this pickup truck for example.
 

 
I guess it’s obvious how the driver feels about the current administration. (Seriously? Threatening to declare a national emergency so that he can get funding from American taxpayers for a wall that he swore up and down, over and over, that Mexico would pay for?)
 
And then there’s this one. You know what the bumper sticker used to say. But look at what someone with a little creativity and a sharp knife made his or her sticker say.
 

 
We’ve puzzled over just what this person is wanting to say with the sticker. Like, “Improve my life, would you please, Mr. Trump?” or “Trump wants America to make HIM great (again)” or “I’m heavily into self-improvement?” Clearly, Rob and I have given this too much thought!
 
Please feel free to share your interpretation at my Facebook page – I’d love to know what you think they meant. Or maybe they just couldn’t peel the darned thing off and made the most of it. Perhaps – perhaps – they even had a change of heart after putting it on to start with!
 
Speaking of which, I haven’t seen one red MAGA hat yet. You know, the ones Trumpsters have been wearing to show their support? I had a little fantasy the other day about walking up to a guy wearing it and saying, “You are just the sexiest man I’ve ever seen!” and when he reacted I’d say, “Well, clearly you love being lied to, so I just thought I’d give it a try!”
 
Tongue in cheek, of course. I know people have guns! 
 
You take care, have a great day and I’ll share some pretty amazing adventures here tomorrow. Hint: they involve a certain: 
 

Well, here we are, at the end of the first (partial) week of 2019. I don’t know when I’ll get used to saying that new number, but at least I’m not finding myself filling in the 19– part of a cheque book, page after page. I would always do that anytime the new calendar changed in January.
 
There’s another tradition I kept up nightly from the age of 12 until about age 50: keeping a diary. Every five years I’d ask for – and receive – a diary. Early on, I’d record mostly the minutiae of teenaged day to day life: what I ate, what someone at school said that day, what boy I had my eye on.
 
Eventually someone had his eye on me, too, but having learned from an awful experience where my mother discovered a diary, read and confronted one of my two older sisters about a boy that she’d been hooking up with, I vowed if I was doing anything Mom wouldn’t like, there was no way I was going to rat on myself! So what did I do? I learned something called “briefhand.” I wish I had a diary with me so I could shoot a page of it. It’s rather akin to something you might see on the wall of an Egyptian temple. 
 
Not to be confused with shorthand, it’s a form of abbreviation that was once (and may still be) used in some secretarial circles. Since one of my sisters was studying to become a legal secretary and still living under the same roof as I was, I had at my disposal her briefhand books.
 
I enjoyed teaching myself different ways of shortening words and replacing letters, a skill that I used to great advantage when I became a reporter just a few years later. Best of all, I was the only one who could decipher the swirls and dots – a great thing when you’re writing a secret, coded diary. (I suppose my sister could have figured it out, but why would she care what I was up to?) 
 
Or was it such a great thing? Now that I’m old enough to know that I should’t have been doing things I wanted to write in code anyway (!) I don’t think – if I had a gun to my head – that I could be forced to decipher what I was writing about my activities at that time. Now, before your mind goes too far into sketchy areas, I was as close to an altar girl as you could get (not that there were any then, mind you) and I really wasn’t up to much.
 
I’d love to sit and just try to figure out the language and meaning of some of the stuff I scrawled out in those last years of high school, but what would be the point? Maybe one day I’d have translated it all and shared some of it with Lauren, but to be honest, the time to even try to do that would have been when Lauren was the same age. And I doubt she’d have cared much, busy as she was leading her own life. 
 
Later, as I went back to writing in English, my diary would become a sort of homemade ancestry.com. When Mom wanted to know what date or year so-and-so died, or when we travelled here or there, I just had to look it up. They did come in handy after all, and that’s why I still have them.
 
So, somewhere sits a pile of little, differently-coloured five-year diaries, some of them with silly tarnished locks along the side (that were easily breached by a curious/furious mother or a mere snip of scissors, I’m sure). This year, after having dropped writing in a diary years ago (thinking, with this journal, just how much can one pen about their own non-royal life, anyway?) I’ve picked up a daily planner.
 
I figure with so many things happening (especially in the first few months of the year) it’ll be good not only to have records in our iPhones and on our shared computers, Rob’s and mine, but a bit of an actual journal. A real, old-fashioned diary. Because I want to remember every good minute of this year. 
 
Have a lovely weekend as the world prepares to ramp up into full GO mode on Monday – and I’ll be back with you then. Next week, more book stop details as they unfold!
 

So early in the year and already I have a confession to make. I am not crazy about one of the biggest, buzziest films of the 2018/19 season. It’s taking a lot of courage on my part to stand up and say this, being the “people pleaser” I try to be on so many fronts (Trumpsters being the main exception), and acknowledging the fact that so many people who are far, far more knowledgeable and accomplished in film criticiquing than I am are running out of superlatives to praise it. But here goes.
 
I didn’t love Roma.
 

 
Set in 1970s Mexico and shot in meticulous digital black and white by the film’s director and writer himself, famed Gravity creator Alfonso Cuarón, it’s the story – loosely – of a young housekeeper (in a home much like that in which Cuarón grew up) who finds herself in times of personal turmoil while the city around her, Mexico City, is also surging with range and change. The film’s climax (one of two, perhaps, if that’s possible) is one that brings together both the young woman and the politics around her in one tense and heartrending series of moments. And yet…and yet….
 
It wasn’t the fact there were subtitles (not a challenge for us), nor was it that our bedazzled brains got to settle back and enjoy the nuances of black and white for a change. I did find a character or two for whom I could root and sigh. But did I care deeply enough to connect and take this film with me for a few days to savour, ponder, reflect upon and truly appreciate more as time went by? Nope. 
 
Far more touching to me was the brutally honest, heartwrenching and touching standup special Nanette with Hannah Gadsby. I swear to you at times it was like watching the most famous breakdown point of the acclaimed film Network. In a Twitter-sized summary, Hannah, who’s openly lesbian, declares she may no longer be able to do comedy because she needs to address the pain that surrounds it for her – and the changes that have to be made.
 
I couldn’t quite believe what I was watching and I want to take her bravery and determination with me as I decide the tone of public speaking I take on in the future. The right mixture of laughter, honesty, tears, frustration and searching – always searching – for hope. 
 

 
Those were the moments I’ll remember among the bingeing and the sampling over the Christmas holidays. The delicious all-you-can-eat buffet of delights that is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the multiple espresso-fueled jolt I felt over watching Nanette, and the curious chef’s special that was Roma. How fortunate we are that the choices are so varied and that there are plenty for all.
 
Have a great day – and we’ll have more here tomorrow.