We Don't Need No Stinking Sidney Crosby Collector Cards

The Palinode and I went to Shoppers Drug Mart two nights ago on our way home from supper so we could pick up a loaf of bread and, apparently, also to have one of those long and meandering conversations in the oral hygiene aisle about what brand of toothpaste we liked and what flavour we should get and did we really need our toothpaste to do five different things, and then we checked each other's teeth for whiteness like we were in one of those tooth whitening ads, only our teeth weren't already emanating their own light. Don't let anyone tell you that marriage doesn't get sexier and sexier at least up to and including the eleventh year, people.

That first sentence is one terrible sentence. I apologize for that. It's staying, though, because I'm too lazy and too tired to strip that mother down and rebuild it. Also, have you read that thing? Would you want to take the time to edit and rewrite a run-on sentence about buying bread and toothpaste? No? I didn't think so.

Strangely, though, it seemed like a good idea to write an entire paragraph about how I was too lazy and disinterested to edit the preceding paragraph.

Anyway, when the child cashier ran our bread over the scanner — seriously, I swear they've dropped the employment age to nine — she asked us if we knew that there was cardboard in our bread bag. I looked, and, lo and behold, there was a cardboard insert in our bag of bread.

"That's weird. The piece of cardboard says Sidney Crosby on it," I said. "Is this thing a trading card? In our bread bag?"

"I don't think any kid's going to beg for ancient grains bread to get a Sidney Crosby collector card," the cashier said. "Remember when they used to put prizes in cereal boxes?"

"That was awesome," I said.

"I used to get video games on CDs," she said. "I miss that."

And then, because I must have been feeling particularly driven to prove how old I am, I said, "When I was a kid, we used to get toys you filled with baking soda and vinegar and threw in water."

She just looked at me, and I panicked. My burgeoning old-lady-ness does a number on me when it jumps up out of the blue like that.

"They got all frothy and propelled themselves with science. We didn't have computers. It was like an educational experiment in your kitchen."

She just looked at me some more.

"They were fun," the Palinode offered.

"No, that sounds really cool. I wish we had that," she said.

That's right. She wished she could put baking soda and vinegar in plastic tubes. The old lady who probably had to walk uphill both ways to school needed reassuring that 1970s baking soda toys stacked up to her magic future world run by robots and lasers.

Anyway, now we have a Sidney Crosby trading card, and it's not fun or cool or run by lasers. It's just a crappy trading card with a five-year-old quote on it. It's like they gave up on cool and decided that 2007 was good enough.



Do Cracker Jacks still exist? And do they still have prizes inside? Because I feel like I need to repair this really bad food prize situation. One of those crappy lenticular stickers might fill the void, because even old ladies need better prizes with their bread loaves than irrelevant collector cards with outdated quotations on them.

Playing It Old School

I overheard a radio station at the mall today saying that they were "playing it old school", and then they put on Deee-Lite's Groove Is In the Heart.

This song threw me back into remembering the short period of time that I worked at the now long-defunct A&B Records & Tapes, where I played the Deee-Lite album most afternoons that I worked.



Did you catch that? The place I worked at was called A&B RECORDS AND TAPES, as in BEFORE LASERS, as in When I was young, missy, our music was recorded as a series of bumps pressed into plastic that was deciphered by needles. And the music I listened to at that job is now considered OLDIES. Deee-Lite's Lady Miss Kier turned 48 in August.

When my 18-year-old co-worker asked me why I was suddenly so quiet, I turned to her and said, "I am really very old." When she looked confused, I added, "and, when I was a kid, I had to walk uphill to school both ways."

Please pass the Ben-Gay. Also, do you happen to have any Anacin?

Dementia And Acceptance Of What Is

On the way up to Waskesiu on Sunday, my parents and I stopped off at the care home where both my grandparents are now living since their dementia has become more pronounced.



I had not seen them since when they still remembered who I was, and that was not that long ago. It was only last Christmas when I held my grandfather's hand while he told me how hard it was to be on the outside looking in at what seemed like chaos. That day, my grandmother was the well one, the one who tied his shoelaces for him and made sure he took his medication.

When I saw them on Sunday, my grandmother was no longer quite sure who I was. She has small strokes now and has gone blind in her left eye. It was strange to see her slowly lifting food to her mouth. There was a piece of cheese stuck to her shirt.

She visibly brightened and laughed with us, though, once we took her upstairs to see my grandfather. My grandfather, on the other hand, sat in a stupor. He's just been started on anti-psychotics to deal with some aggressive behaviour. He shifted in his chair and looked off into the middle distance.

It's easy to fall into eeyore-ish, woe-is-me thinking, to think So, this is what I have coming to me, then, like right now doesn't matter if we only forget it all in the end.

In clearer moments, though, my grandfather hooks his arm through my grandmother's and tells people that she is his sweetheart. What the mind forgets, the heart remembers.

In a rather different turn of events, one of my great aunts is 104 years old, and she's fallen in love with a man. She didn't know that this could still happen to her, but it did.

She was born in the first decade of the last century. That astounds me. She has been around through two world wars and several more, and almost everyone in her peer group was already dead twenty years ago. The world could have worn her out by now, but it hasn't. There's still romance in it for her.

It doesn't seem right that some get to keep both their minds and their hearts, while others must have the aggression drugged out of them. When I saw my grandparents, I had to let go of the part of me that wanted to make sense of why my great aunt and not them. There is no balance of justice in the universe. There's just is.

This happened to them. That happened her. Neither situation is fair. They just are.

I'm still a five-year-old who wants things to be fair. I still want to be rewarded for doing good work, for completing the course, for sticking out the tough stuff. I want to discover riches of the world and of the spirit, not adult diapers and a healthy dose of Respirdol.

Acceptance of what is is the hardest lesson, especially when what is for my grandfather is a sweatshirt that velcroes up the back and a bib at mealtimes.

I just want things to be fair, dammit.