Erin's Journals

I’ve been thinking a lot about a poor, very rich woman in New Hampshire. And, as always, I try to put myself in her shoes, which could be handmade by Christian Louboutin himself from now on, if she so chooses. In case you haven’t heard this woman’s story, here it is in a nutshell: Jane Doe (not her real name) won $560 million US in the recent giant Powerball lottery. And she’s fighting to remain anonymous, although that’s simply not allowed under lottery rules. Says right there in the fine print.
 
You see, there’s no point in having a multi-million dollar lottery if you can’t have photographers capturing its winner holding a giant fake cheque, while reporters take down details of this person’s former life and how they plan to spend said windfall. (Do you remember the smaller, subsidiary prize that Wintario gave away and called it a “winfall?” That’s messed with my head every time I want to say “windfall” instead ever since. Some 40 years later….)
 
Back to the Ballad of Jane Doe. She’s active in her New Hampshire community which, if it’s where the ticket was bought, is small with a population of 25,000. You know, one of those little places where most everyone knows everybody else – and their business.
 
If half of the town doesn’t already know she’s won, this woman’s a better secret keeper than most. But she’s afraid that now she’s signed her ticket (which is the first thing we’re all told to do) she has signed away her rights to anonymity. And unless she wins her bid to stay private, that is exactly the case. Lottery officials say that if they don’t publicize the winner, how do players know that there’s been one and that the whole thing’s legit? 
 
Some of the comments on her story have said, “She should have known this going in…” and I suppose that’s true. But does anyone ever read the fine print or think they’re actually going to win half a billion dollars and then do the mental steps that take them through how that’s going to ruin their lives? Because that is what this woman is afraid of. Her lawyers are even citing beautiful, bucolic New Hampshire’s opioid crisis as evidence that she could be targetted by criminals. 
 
They’re not making this up. More than one lottery winner has been murdered for money; one man, I want to say in Florida (I’ve been reading a lot of lottery stories this week), was shot dead in front of his wife and children by seven people who’d burst into his home. This, after he’d offered to give them his bank card.
 
And of course, it’s not just criminals. It’s the con artists. It’s the relatives who were “long lost” for a reason. It’s the people who play your guilty conscience like a violin and never let up. 
 
In a way, I feel for this woman, even though I never buy lottery tickets. For the longest time, I maintained that I’d already won the lottery, so why would I? I also had in mind the fact that if I won, everyone would know exactly where to find me and I’m an awfully easy touch when it comes to a sad story or even one of hope or love or…well, you get it. 
 
What would you do? You’ve won half a billion dollars and you’re about to be outed.
 
I think I’d buy several suites on that floating hotel cruise ship that I wrote about here when it visited Victoria last year. I’d pay for people I love to come and visit (“meet you in Singapore!”) and cruise with us. We’d have a nomadic life but a safe one – a good one. I’d write, I’d welcome family and friends to our floating paradise and start up a foundation to give away as much money as I pleased to the causes and people that mean the most to us.
 
I wish this woman luck. I mean, she’s already had more than her share; but has it been good luck, I wonder? Talk to you here tomorrow.
 

It used to be that if you wanted a clear path to a big movie award nomination, you should try to find a role in which you played a prostitute. “Play a Hooker, Win an Oscar,” as the New York Times put it back in the 1990s. For a while there, playing a nun would also be a very good career move. But now? Find yourself a really messed up mother role. Or at least, that’s the case this year.
 
In some kind of weird coincidence, the last three films Rob and I have gone to, in an effort to get caught up on the biggest nominees before the 90th Academy Awards on March 4th, have all featured the most bizarre sorts of mothers. I mean, most of us have mothers – or are mothers – with enough flaws to fill an hour on Dr. Phil. But these three characters are truly worthy of not just a couch, but a wing in a psychiatric facility. 
 
Here they are in order that we saw them: Frances McDormand’s tormented mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is profoundly angry and profanely expressive. Her daughter’s been murdered and mother is exasperated with the lack of progress in solving the case, but she has her own reasons to feel extremely guilty. For my money, Ms McDormand’s performance is out of this world. That’s the mean-but-means-well mom #1.
 
The second in this category is the character played by Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird. She berates her teenaged daughter mercilessly. Is it love? Is it nastiness? Is she trying to protect her daughter from a world that is going to break her heart? 
 
When I was about ten years old I told my mother I wanted to be a singer. I remember exactly where we were – on a bridge in Trenton, Ontario in a blue Plymouth Valiant – when she matter of factly said, “There are a million girls out there better than you.”
 
Did it break my heart? Sure it did, at the time. Was she right? Absolutely. In her “take no prisoners” kind of way, my mother was saving me from going out there and failing. And maybe I have her to thank for me getting into radio instead, although she did ask, “Why would you want to do that?” Remembering that discussion makes me give Lady Bird’s mom a bit of slack. But just a bit. I do think she meant well.
 
Then there’s Tonya Harding’s mother in I, Tonya. There is only one scene in the movie where it appears LaVona Golden (played to perfection by Allison Janney) might have a heart somewhere in her smoke-filled chest and it turns out she was just trying to get something. LaVona Golden used not just her sharp tongue, but her hands (and even a knife) to make her points with her skating-crazy daughter. And there is absolutely no room for mercy in judging her, although the mother claimed that Tonya only responded to negative reinforcement.
 
There you have it: three very different characters, three films well worth seeing. We’ve put Three Billboards at the top of our ranking (although we’re seeing Shape of Water this week) for Best Picture. Of course, if Dunkirk could take all of the awards, I’d just have Christopher Nolan’s name on everything. That doesn’t seem to be the way things are leaning this year. Perhaps Winston Churchill needed a meaner mother.
 
I’ll be back with you here tomorrow.
 

Nothing like thoughts of baseball to brighten a February day and Rob and I have been hoping to fit in a Jays game when we visit Ontario in April. We might just be able to sit in the friendly confines of the Rogers Centre and watch our favourite team in the early days of a (hopefully) promising new season. But one player we won’t be seeing this year in a Jays uniform is veteran infielder Darwin Barney, who has been signed to a minor league deal with the Texas Rangers. The news came down yesterday.
 
I was reminded of a close encounter with Darwin’s family last June when Rob, his sister and my aunt and uncle and I had the time of our lives on a road trip to see the Jays visit the Mariners. I thought I might relive a few moments of that brush with Barney here today.
 
We were seated in the back row of our field level section on the Sunday of the three-day stand, which was the best we could buy the day the tickets went on sale in March. Two ladies ahead of us were standing and chatting. One of them had a Jays t-shirt on and I was trying to figure out if we were surrounded by Toronto fans or if we’d have to pipe down a bit this game out of respect for Mariners’ fans. To the woman in the red shirt I said, “I hope you’re a Jays fan, too,” and she responded, “My son plays second base for the Blue Jays.”
 
I stammered, “Barney?” and she said yes. I don’t know what came over me, but I just reached into the row ahead of us and gave her a big hug. “That’s some good parenting, right there!” I laughed.
 
With a bit of Googling, I was able to determine that her name was Doreen Barney (or Mama Dee or DeeDee as she’s known). Darwin had been born in Portland, Oregon, a three-hour drive from Seattle, and soon Doreen was joined by Darwin’s beautiful wife and three sweet daughters who still live in Portland. Several other family members were seated with them, including the Barney children’s other grandparents and a lady we think may have been Darwin’s sister. (Sometimes a lull in the game lets you try to put two and two together; I think most of my math was correct.)
 
As the game went on, Doreen told me that she wasn’t wearing a Jays jersey, not because her son wouldn’t give her one – I’d jokingly asked if that was the case – but because it was bad luck! Here’s a shot of the stadium that I took that includes “Mama Dee”; she has the flower in her hair.
 

 
What a nice moment I had, getting to hug a Jay’s mom. I know it’s silly, but you just never know who’s nearby, do you?
 
We wish Darwin and his family well and hope that he manages to get a regular spot in the infield. If he does, he’ll face his old teammates April 6th when the Jays visit the Rangers. And on we go.
 

Another week, another earthquake out our way it seems – and it wasn’t caused by Don Cherry’s suit Saturday night (or his ridiculousness equating weather with climate on Coach’s Cuckaloo Corner). A 3.2 magnitude (intially reported to be 2.8, but later upgraded) quake hit a place called Friday Harbor, which is just as idyllic and sweet as its name implies (although it does sound a bit like a saloon) just before 11 on Saturday night.
 
We had turned off the TV, having watched the east coast feed of Saturday Night Live (which may never be better this season than last weekend’s Will Ferrell outing). After a fun night at my aunt and uncle’s enjoying some seafood chowder and a lot of laughter, we had come home to a happy pup, some comedy on the PVR and then…BOOM.
 
The TV was off and we were both standing, but we felt none of what others around our part of the island did. We simply heard the boom: something like a transformer blowing. (Rob thought he heard two thumps.) I looked towards Victoria International Airport, of which our house has a clear view from on high and saw, fortunately, no signs of problems there.
 
Then we went to bed, I went online and began reading accounts of people’s experiences: a rolling feeling, rattling windows, the sound and sense of a dump truck emptying its load on the front lawn. I know exactly what the latter sounds like, having lived on Bloor Street downtown where dump and other kinds of trucks would bang every time they hit a bump or metal plate on the road during construction (which seemed to be regularly and at all hours).
 
We’re about 20 kilometres from Friday Harbor as the crow flies (although it takes the ferry an hour-and-a-half to get there, as we found out en route to the Jays/Mariners weekend in Seattle last summer). Part of our house is on stilts and perhaps that’s some of the reason we felt so little of the quake: we’re up high enough that ours is the neighbourhood to which people fleeing in the event of a tsunami warning come and park. And we’ll put the coffee on if they’re near our place!
 
Once again, like the tsunami warning that hit the island after the big Alaska quake a few weeks back, the little shaker reminded Rob and me that we still haven’t put together a “go bag” to prepare us for the eventual Big One, for which we pay fully half of our homeowners’ insurance. It’s not like we’ll need to seek higher ground (there isn’t any) but we do need to have supplies to take, in the event we have to bug out. After all, there were three quakes in the 4+ range just north of Vancouver Island three weeks ago and another 1.9 last week in nearby Sooke. I guess this is a regular thing, is what they’re telling us? 
 
It’s a tough notion to get your head around – the idea of evacuating. I mean, we did look at properties right on the ocean shore and I’d be sleeping a lot more lightly if that was the address we’d chosen. But still, even if we made a list, is there time to gather the items on it? An urn? A ponytail? Some jewellery and our passports? My purse, laptop and Molly and her stuff? That’s a lot to think of in a few short seconds, especially when half of those seconds are spent wondering just who the heck is dumping stuff in your front yard right now!
 
Last word from vicnews.com: “Vicki Walker had a different reaction. ‘Thought it was my husband snoring so I elbowed him,’ she said. ‘Poor guy.'”
 
Have a great Monday and we’ll be back with you here tomorrow.
 

Welcome to Friday – and Groundhog Day at that. I’ll try not to repeat myself. And I’ll also try not to repeat myself. By the way, some cities have the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day in theatres this weekend. Check it out if you’re looking for anything to watch this Sunday besides football. Of course, there IS the Puppy Bowl, with half-time kittens (which is also a great band name). 
 
February 2nd. 02-02. Dates and numbers are funny things. For example, eights show up a lot in my life and so I tend to notice them. Or maybe that’s why they keep showing up? I also keep track of dates and those elevens that occur so often for us, having lost Lauren on the 11th of May, her son’s birthday falling also on an 11th, my parents and grandparents marrying on the 11th, Dad being born on the 11th – things like that. 
 
And so, a few months back and thanks to an online game called Draw Something, I was made aware that a significant date was coming: the number of days since we’d last played our game together on our iPhones, Lauren and I. Somehow, three years later our match has just been erased – as well as those with two other friends – so I have had to let it go. I don’t know if I ever would have, otherwise, but that decision wasn’t left to me.
 
But here’s what Draw Something helped me to figure out. With the help of a calendar and a little math, I came up with the fact that this Sunday, she will have been gone for 1,000 days.
 
One thousand days. Feels like a moment; feels like a lifetime.
 
1,000 days alone would be a marker worth noting in my heart as well as on the calendar, except that it’s also significant in that it would also have been my mother’s 85th birthday. This February 4th – 1000 days since Lauren’s death is the date of my own mother’s birth in 1933. Isn’t that…interesting?
 

 
Mom left us six years ago this week; on February 1st, she suffered a catastrophic brain aneurysm while sitting happily having dinner on a TV table watching M*A*S*H reruns with my dad after what can only be described as a great day of laughter, cocktails with my sister and warm California sunshine. February 2nd, I flew out to be at her side and on the 3rd, Dad, my sisters and I turned off her life support.
 
The next day, February 4th (also a Super Bowl Sunday that year), was Mom’s birthday. We would wait until the eve of Lauren’s wedding the next year, in June of 2013, to hold what we called our “Momorial” for family and friends at the same little church in Jackson’s Point where Lauren was to walk down the aisle the very next day.
 
I love to think that Lauren’s and Mom’s spirits are together making music and laughing and watching over us all as we continue on as best we can without them. Have a gentle weekend. I’ll be looking for dimes.
 

 
This is how many I’ve found since 2015, minus one I gave to a homeless man who saw me pick it up. I bought this little dish in Seattle.