Rose's Cantina

[rosalita54]

Tick, Tock

My husband Scott turned 59 last week.

As a Leap Baby, he insists he’s 14 3/4. Next year he will be 15 or 60 depending how you do the math.

Either way, he is the same age his Dad was when Warner passed away from cancer.

His Mom died in her mid-Sixties from ALS. Margaret was a nurse and she knew how to die; she taught her son how to push the little button that let the drugs flood her body and let…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Happy Birthday, To My Leap Year Baby!

Happy Birthday, Leap Year Baby!

My beloved husband turns 14 3/4 today. Or was it yesterday?

It’s so hard to judge when your husband is a Leap Year Baby. Officially, on his driver’s licence at least, he is 59, one step away from collecting his Canada Pension Plan. Five steps away from the Old Age Pension.

But in his mind, he’s still a teenager. And he acts like one.

I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday. He said…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Valentine's Day: The power of pugs

A love letter to lonely hearts

For years, I spent Valentine’s Day alone trying not to think about the fact I felt lonely and unloved.

I had lost the love of my life at the tender age of 35 and I was permanently  inconsolable. I told myself that I was unlovable, I mean who wants a woman who has three little kids and is  already a two-time loser in the marriage department?

Thirty-five is a terrible age to be single especially…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Modern medicine: Scare the patient, ask questions later

I got a text from my son, Nick, at 10 a.m. yesterday.

“Had to go to the hospital,” he wrote. “They found a lump. It doesn’t look good.”

This was terrifying news. Nick had been having problems, let’s just say with his plumbing, for weeks and had become a frequent flying in the Ottawa Hospital ER department. First, the doctors thought he had kidney stones, but a workup and ultrasound showed…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Sandie Bergen: Imagine Dragons

My childhood friend, Sandie Bergen, died two days ago, the victim of a drive-by set of brain tumors that she only learned she had three weeks ago.

The neurologist had concluded that she’d only recently developed three massive and horrible tumors in the days around Christmas. Those tumors plumped up her brain and caused her to forget things and to fall down, and that is the reason for her visit…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Attention Target Shoppers: Open your wallet and keep your trap closed

My son Nick came home yesterday after an exhausting day dealing with jerks and morons who are salivating over the deals they are expecting as Target Canada closes.

“I came up with a good line,” he said, whipping off the Target badge that will soon be memorabilia.

“Adults can only be served if accompanied by children.”

He and his girlfriend both work at Target. They lost their jobs a couple weeks…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Things we lost in the fire

Things we lost in the fire

When I was in my twenties, my rowhouse burned down with me in it — briefly. My husband and I had just returned from our weekly golf game and he had just lit the barbecue on the back deck. He came in to get the meat ready and noticed flames coming, not from the barbecue, but from the communal tenants’ garbage room to the right of the house. He screamed at me to get out of the house, but I felt the…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Gaslight

Gaslight http://wp.me/s5yrmD-gaslight

After four sessions and two boxes of Kleenex, the therapist looked across at her with big blue kind eyes.

“I have to ask you this,” he said. “And I know it’s not very professional. But I have to ask. What in God’s name did you see in that man?”

She drew a blank.

How could she explain it? How could Eve have explained her attraction to the serpent or the allure of the apple?

It was like explaining…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

I hate my skin. What's left of it.

I hate my skin. What’s left of it.

Over the past three years, I’ve lost nearly all the skin on my right ear. Look!

  For a time, the skin kept thinning, then bleeding. Then it got infected and the infection nearly ate my ear off. Well, I exaggerate but all that is left is cartilage and an unsightly bump.

The first doctor looked at it and jumped back. Then he signed a referral to a dermatologist, which I never got. (For my…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Wanda doesn't live here anymore

Wanda doesn’t live here anymore

I’m going to tell you a secret, something I’ve never told anyone.

I have a sister named Wanda. She would be about 45 years old by now.  I haven’t seen her for a decade but she was very much a part of my life years ago.

I picture her now as one of those middle-aged women sitting at the bar at the Chateau Laurier, wearing too much rouge and an inappropriately short skirt. She would be holding court…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

My daughter, Marissa, is getting married tomorrow in Cuba. She is 25 and it’s her second…

My daughter, Marissa, is getting married tomorrow in Cuba. She is 25 and it’s her second marriage.

That’s an inside joke. She got married last summer at City Hall in Ottawa for realz, in front of the rellies and close friends, the people she loves the most, the people who are too broke to go to Cuba to take part in her dream destination wedding.

We dropped off Marissa, her husband Jeff and her…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Thank you and adieu, Target Canada

Thank you and adieu, Target Canada

Amidst the screaming meanies, there are some of us who are grateful to Target for coming to Canada.

You see, my son Nick has had great difficulty getting employment even though he sent out hundreds of resumes over the past few years. He worked briefly at Walmart stocking shelves but had to leave that job because his girlfriend had post-partum depression and he had to care for his infant daughter.

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Escape from Pleasantville

I was thinking about Steven Truscott yesterday, that name etched in my memory, the story of a 14-year-old innocent boy who was sentenced to death for the murder of his 12-year-old classmate, Lynn Harper.

I read about Steven’s story back in 1965 in the Star Weekly magazine which was delivered every week to our old farmhouse. I was only nine at the time, but I read every word of this story, how…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Terror at the fitness centre

Terror at the fitness centre

  Have I mentioned I’m good in a crisis as long as it doesn’t involve my kids or my dogs?

It’s all that medical training I’ve received in my capacity as an editor for learned medical journals, as well as watching a constant diet of The Doctors and Dr. Phil.

Today, that training kicked into gear at the gymnasty. I was talking to my gym friend Penny about the feral bunch of cats that are living in…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Kinder Surprise As an Incontinence Tool: A Clarification

Kinder Surprise As an Incontinence Tool: A Clarification

In my previous post, Crone Disease, — read it, I’m not going to link it, it’s below — I wrote about the best advice I’ve given people in the recent past. I’d like to offer some clarification.

First, on the topic of the use of a Kinder Surprise egg as a tool to help women with their problem with incontinence, I was informed by a loyal reader that Kinder Surprise, the delicious chocolate covered…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Crone's Disease

Crone’s Disease

The baby Skylar paid a visit to the children’s emergency department on the weekend after she’d had a seizure, the second in her

nearly three-year-old life. While everyone, including what appears to be the entire Facebook community, threw out dire pronouncements, I sat quietly playing Candy Crush.

“Oh, you used to have those,” I told my son Nick the first time after Skylar’s mother reported her…

View On WordPress

[rosalita54]

Here come the widows

Here come the widows

  My social circle, of late, has become populated for the most part by widows.

There are the long-standing widows, like my friend Margaret who lost her husband Tim long ago. And there are the newly-minted widows who lost their husbands in 2014 — one suddenly, another after a lengthy illness.

I was there on the occasion of Roger’s death. Roger had been a really sick guy for more than  four years…

View On WordPress