Erin's Journals

Three years.
 
Three years ago today was our daughter’s last day on this earth and it’s one for which we will forever be grateful: a day spent celebrating her first Mother’s Day with her sweet little son and her kind and loving husband.
 
Of course, so very much has changed since that day and, as I stressed in yesterday’s journal, our challenge – our life’s work now – is to find the positive in every day that we are given. This week, our tiny part of the universe helped to make that task just a little easier. Such beautiful timing!
 
I told you a few weeks back about the serene pond and park that are but a few minutes’ drive from our home. We’ll often park along the oceanside, Rob and I, and walk Molly down towards the town of Sidney by the Sea and stop at Iroquois Park. It’s a little spot that features a memorial and is named for the S.S. Iroquois, a ferry that sank nearby in April 1911, taking with her 21 men, women and children. It is a place of beauty and a place of remembering tragedy.
 
Part of what I love about the area, with its little pond, waterfall, ducks and trees, is that it reminds me of a special day, a special spot in France. It’s a place maintained so beautifully in the style that its resident Claude Monet loved so well and shared with the world through his paintings. We took a picture in the spring of 2005 of that very spot in Giverny. How lucky we were that it turned out this well!
 

 
As I told you here, recently we reached out via a phone call to inquire as to whether we could purchase or sponsor a bench in that little park. (Seeing as there is none, I thought it might make sense.) We received word a short time later that it wasn’t going to be possible; there were other areas that were earmarked for benches in the Sidney area before Iroquois Park. 
 
I was disappointed, as you can imagine, but I didn’t give up. Knowing full well what a long shot this would be, I wrote back and explained why the area meant so much to Rob and to me, and gave them a little background as to the significance of a bench in our daughter’s memory. Of course, I noted, every bench is dedicated in the memory of someone who has passed and who meant a lot to those who sponsored it; we get that. But, still, I thought it was worth a try.
 
And guess what? I’ve received a follow-up email saying that the folks at the Parks department had taken a closer look at the Iroquois Pond site and believe there are some spots that would be desirable for a bench. They asked us to note where we might like one, and get back to them!
 
Today, we’ll be dropping off our application, our cheque and our preferred spots, although, to be quite truthful, any place there would be just lovely and we are grateful. We pondered what to put on the plaque. I could write paragraphs, to be honest, but that might be uncomfortable for people’s backs! So I’ll settle for a book to tell our story, and a plaque to say these words, if they’ll allow: 

 
The last line refers to the song that I play when I go there (or go to any park) just to be with Lauren; it’s the old song made popular by The Mamas and The Papas that she sang with her high school band. We also played it at her memorials. 
 
The song is special for another reason: I learned it to sing with our band Generations when we did our first gig on a cruise. I was nervous, standing there with my bare-stockinged feet planted about two feet apart on the stage while the small ship pitched and rolled on rough seas. As we began the song, I realized I had blanked out on the lyrics. I just looked down to the front row of the theatre and there was seven-year-old Lauren, mouthing the words to help me. 
 
I suppose that’s what she’s doing still. As we navigate the choppy waters, she’s still there willing us onward, giving me the words, helping where she can.
 
Enjoy this day.
 

I’m going to call today’s journal Wednesday Wisdom, although truthfully these words – not mine, mind you – are Monday Motivation, Tuesday Truth, Saturday Sanity – you name it. 
 
They come from the Dalai Lama. And although these words hit home when I first read them Monday, they hit even harder yesterday. I’d just come out of the studio after recording two-plus hours for a series of children’s books. To say it went well was an understatement and I am just so excited about this project.
 
Then, as I sat with my celebratory coffee, looking out at passing boats on the ocean below us, I scrolled through Twitter and found my mood plummeting. I read that the US had pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, a move described by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour as “possibly the greatest deliberate act of self-harm and self-sabotage in geo-strategic politics in the modern era.” 
 
So there was that. 
 
Then – on a much lesser scale in world importance, but one that was sickening just the same – the news of Roberto Osuna facing a domestic assault charge. 
 
While the weight of these stories was sinking in, I reflected on these words from the Dalai Lama.
 

 
Sometimes it takes looking at the ocean or counting stars in a clear night sky to remind ourselves of how tiny we are, how small. I’ll walk past cemeteries – or through them, as I used to do when we lived near Mount Pleasant in Toronto – and remember just how fleeting this hour upon the stage, as Shakespeare put it, truly is. We all have our tragedies. We all face sadness and joy and, if we’re lucky, the latter outweighs the former. It’s just trying to remember moment to moment where to place the emphasis.
 
And in the end, 100 years – or even 20 years from now – will any of what we fixated upon or worried about today even matter? Of course, when we’re talking about nuclear armaments and escalated tension and danger, that’s something a little more than hurt feelings over what someone did or didn’t say or do to you. And if the orange dictator could get over what the president at the time said to hurt his feelings at a White House dinner all those years ago, we might not even be in this situation. But I digress. 
 
All that really matters is joy. Finding happiness in the moments you have with family and those you love – and who love you – as well as in nature. It’s spending time with whomever or whatever makes you smile.
 
It’s sharing and giving, and letting go of anger and grudges. 
 
Because, in the end, as the Dalai Lama says, life’s purpose is to be happy. It’s not in the having or acquiring or the buying or the hoarding. It’s in having an open heart, an open mind and a life that is open to joy. 
 
Here’s to finding happiness and holding onto it for dear life.
 
Talk to you here tomorrow.
 

We’re learning a new language these days, you and I, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it in the way you type your communications with people of another generation. We sure have. 
 
Let me try something out on you. Someone says, “Sorry, I made a mistake in that last email. I’ve corrected it and you should be okay to go ahead now with no more problems.”
 
You reply, “Thanks a lot.”
 
Now, how would you expect that person to read that response? Would it be, “Thanks for fixing it, bonehead – because of that mistake, I’ve been inconvenienced and I have to go back and try again?” 
 
Or would you read it as, “I appreciate you letting me know that it’s been fixed?”
 
The way you decipher that – what you read into the response – may be a generational thing. This isn’t scientific (although, if you can find me a government grant, I’ll happily do the research); it’s just a realization that I’ve had over the past few years while dealing with people of my own age, as well as of the next generation’s age (i.e. in their twenties).
 
The way I’d respond to someone in their twenties, for example, would be with an exclamation mark. Otherwise, they might infer that I was upset, as per the first response. I’ve had to school Rob gently in how to respond to producers – say, those of our daughter’s age – with whom we’re now doing freelance work. He’s been encouraged to add the occasional exclamation mark so that we can be read as being friendly and cooperative! And not surly and disgruntled.
 
There can only be one reason for this proliferation of cheery punctuation (and the need for it): social media. I remember a younger co-worker was posting on our radio station website and I (hopefully gently) reminded him that we didn’t need an exclamation mark after every sentence – we weren’t a comic book! (See, I added one there, so that I didn’t sound cranky, and I do hope I didn’t.)
 
But it’s everywhere now and this is the way we adapt or die in the darkness. At least, from where we sit. Because the last thing you want to do is be perceived (incorrectly, of course) as uncooperative or haughty. Unless somehow it was misspelled and they meant “hottie!” 
 
It’s all part of our ever-changing language. Not every change is for the best, but sometimes you just go with the flow and say things like…go with the flow. There’s something I hear all the time now and I mean ALL the time now, and it makes me a little crazy, but I’m trying to get over it. It’s the changing of the sound of the letter T. This happened long ago in England where “better” might sometimes sound more like “beh-ah” (try saying it aloud and you’ll get what I mean). But now the T is being dropped on this side of the pond and, darn it, it’s important. Not impor-ant, as we’re hearing more and more, but imporTant. 
 
A few weeks ago we were treated to a different broadcast team calling a Blue Jays game on Facebook. And the guy saying Russell Martin’s name was calling him Russell Mar-Inn. Again and again. When I tweeted about it, someone suggested he take that second T in ToronTOE that he was so determined to pronounce and put it back in Russell’s last name. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
 
Now, if I drop a T, you’ll understand why….
 

 
Have a great day and we’ll talk to you here tomorrow.
 

Here we go: the week that has our daughter’s death date on Friday and then Mother’s Day on Sunday. To say that May carries with it an extra heaviness is an understatement, but we will, to quote a song title from our favourite Beatles album (Abbey Road), “Carry That Weight.” 
 
Oh, by the way, we did hear from the town of Sidney: they have no plans to put a bench near those ponds at Iroquois Park, as there are other places that are higher up the list for benches. That’s all right. I’ve written back with a special plea, so we shall see. I visited “our” pond last Thursday and found this bench-shaped rock.
 

 
It’s a nice place to sit and listen to Lauren singing “Dream a Little Dream” on my phone. And that’s just what I do when I’m there with the ducks quacking quietly and the human-made waterfall flowing nearby.
 
We’ll find other ways and other places in which to spend time with our girl. It’s not as if she’s not with us every moment anyway. 
 
Thank you to Joanne for sending me a People.com article about Carol Burnett, who at the age of 85 is embarking on a new TV show on Netflix! She reflected on the 2002 death of her daughter Carrie at age 38 of cancer and how it threatened to take Carol out, too. She had to get out of bed, though, to complete a play she was writing and she said a prayer to Carrie to help her. Here’s how the rest of the story goes: 

Burnett says that at the time of the play, she suddenly felt Carrie’s presence all around her.
 
“I got on a plane and said a little prayer to Carrie, and said, ‘I’ve got to do this alone. Don’t leave me alone. Give me a sign that you’re with me.’” 

When Burnett got off the plane and checked into her hotel, she saw there was a beautiful bouquet of birds of paradise flowers waiting for her. 

“That was Carrie’s favorite flower,” she says. “She had one tattooed on her right shoulder. Then at dinner the maître d’ gave us a bottle of Champagne, and the label said ‘Louise.’ That was Carrie’s middle name. Then it rained on opening night. Carrie and I were nuts for the rain.”

I love reading these affirmations of signs from those we love. When I told you a few weeks back about the tearful walk I took and then the flower and the Beatles song that I heard a snippet of during that sad time, I left off one detail that I thought was just too much to believe.
 
As Rob and I got closer to the house, we were about to turn into the driveway when I could hear, wafting from a house a few doors down (or perhaps it was a crew working on a nearby site, but I somehow doubt it), the final few lines of one of the biggest movie themes of all time. It was Whitney Houston’s voice singing and the song was “I Will Always Love You.” Even with hearing aids made necessary by years of headphones and high volume editing, Rob didn’t hear the love song’s strains, so I didn’t point them out to him. But I carried it with me inside the house.
 
We have all the proof we need that our loved ones are around us and if they’re not what we want – an actual conversation, kiss or embrace – we still have to find some way to be grateful. A few lines of a song played over a store’s PA, a dime on the ground or a special bird (in Rob’s case, an eagle) flying over as friends sing “Happy Birthday,” they’re all just little nudges or “Godwinks,” as one reader calls them, to remind us that those we love are as close as our heartbeat and as constant as our breath. Have a gentle Monday.
 

Ah, yes, Star Wars Day. “May the Fourth Be With You,” and all of that. I confess to having fallen into that little hammock of wordplay: March 10 is “Mario Day” (MAR10)…July 10th is “Julio Day” and so on. I just like dates and numbers and silliness like that. I always said, too, that March Fourth was the only day of the year to tell you what to do, although, to be fair, March First might well have fit that narrative, too. The point is, I’m a word geek.
 
So it took me by surprise to learn that something I’ve heard since I was a kid turns out to be, not only corny in a harmless kind of way, but downright offensive. There are a lot of words and terms that fit this bill: for example, “gypped.” How often have you heard someone say that, in the context of having been cheated or swindled? Guess what? It’s racist against the Roma people, or gypsies. I had no idea until someone phoned the studio to tell us that, about two decades ago.
 
Or to “welsh” on a bet. You guessed it, it’s putting Welsh people (like my Davis, David and Davidson ancestors) in a bad light. Apparently those good folks didn’t pay up? That would certainly be the inference.
 
Then we have “paddy wagons” which we now recognize as having been coined as a slur against the Irish who were rounded up and taken to jail. It’s not as though the revelation of that term’s origins was instant and painless: we got to the point where we didn’t say that anymore after hearing from listeners who gently corrected us. Of course, some broadcasters would hang up and then say “get a life” (or even do it into the phone before hanging up – I witnessed that, too), but me? I always valued the opportunity to learn something, especially if it meant no longer causing someone upset. What’s the point, really?
 
And so it was, through the recent suspension of a basketball play-by-play guy, that I learned how offensive another term is that was ubiquitous when we were growing up. How many times did Yosemite Sam use the term “cotton-pickin’?” To put it in context, something like, “I’ll blow your cotton pickin’ head clean off..!” You probably recall it yourself. 
 
Last month, one man with a microphone used the term while calling Oklahoma City Thunder player Russell Westbrook “out of his cotton-pickin’ mind.” Westbrook, it might be important to note, is African American. And who did most of America’s cotton picking? Slaves, of course. That’s the connection between that adjective and Brian Davis’ suspension for one game at the broadcast table. It was deemed offensive and inappropriate.
 
Ricky Gervais has a saying that, just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right and I usually agree with him. But I’m going to go ahead and say that if members of the African American community find that term offensive, then why would anyone ever say it again? Davis himself – no relative that I know of – was mortified at what he called an unintentional lapse in judgment and expressed great remorse and humility. You can bet your OKC jersey he’ll never ever use that term again. 
 
But it made me wonder: how many other things are we saying that are, not only outdated, but are downright wrongheaded? 
 
I’ve no doubt that some reading this will say, “Oh, this is political correctness run amok!” and I’ve already said here that calling things out as too PC is often just another way of saying, “I don’t care about your feelings and I don’t want to change.” I’m just glad that it was Brian Davis and not Erin Davis who got caught saying something that some consider, well, deplorable. 
 
The way I see it, there are enough words out there that are honed to hurt and designed to denigrate. Why not scratch a few off the list if we know that’s what they do? Have a great weekend and I’ll be back with you here on Monday.