I have an appointment on November 19 at 3:30 p.m. It says so right here — on the pad of paper I keep beside my laptop in my office. It is circled in red so I don’t forget to put it in my calendar. Well done me. Now if I could only remember who the appointment is with. I distinctly remember phoning someone and arranging this booking and being surprised that I couldn’t get in sooner.

It isn’t my doctor, nor my dentist (that’s today), not my editor, it’s too late in the day for lunch with a friend, and my hair stylist isn’t until November 26. Maybe it’s with the memory clinic. Hell if I can remember!

My mother is 103 and suffers from dementia. But we were told it was due to her coming down with COVID and it does not run in our family. So what’s my problem?

My husband thinks it might be a delayed reaction caused by us older babyboomers chasing the DDT fog trucks down the streets of Southern Ontario back in the 1950s, spewing their contents into our faces. Now wasn’t that a good idea! Playing in the murderous fog, filling our lungs with poison. I can’t remember if it was to kill the mosquitoes or the weeds. But it was certainly killing something since it’s now banned in Canada.

I’ve been on hiatus from Medium. I had, along with so many others, taken up arms against the filthiest opponent on earth. That piece of sh*t called cancer had come to tear our son apart.

When melanoma first attacked Alex’s healthy and athletic body, he was 38 years old. Single, starting a new career with a company he loved, and getting closer to owning that hobby farm he dreamed of. He would have to go out and buy a new pair of shades for that bright future!

Our family had been pacified into believing surgery and treatment had won the battle. Future check-ups proved that cancer had been stopped in its tracks, and we could stop holding our breath and get back to leading our lives. Cancer did not run in our family; therefore, it was merely a blip on Alex’s timeline.

But this turned out to be false. At the time, we didn’t know melanoma was incurable — it can only be lulled into behaving itself. Instead, it seemed cancer had merely been toying with Alex and had quietly been regrouping in a twisted game of death by inches. It wanted another go at him.

I think this blog post - which I wrote a couple of years ago - will give you a good overview of who I am and what you can expect to hear from me. This is just the beginning of our friendship.

As someone who has spent her entire life on the peripheral, I know all about being a square peg in a round hole. As a beauteous, shy young woman who desperately wanted to fit in, I would never have thought to say anything that ran contrary to popular opinion.

If I kept my mouth shut, faked ‘normal’, smiled alluringly, and just stood there being impartial, I would not be in danger of committing popular suicide. But in the back of my mind, I knew I was tilting oh so slightly on the normalcy scale. At the time, I just didn’t realize that was actually a gift and not an obstacle to overcome.

As time passed, my struggle with self-image continued into middle age and I sought out someone to emulate. If my life story were to be made into a movie, who would I want to play me? The elegant Jane Seymour or the quirky Ellen Barkin?

Mrs. Perfect in Every Way
You know who she is. The woman who always gets voted to chair the committee, the one most admired for her skills at — well, everything! Women clamor around her hoping her wonderfulness might rub off on them or, dare I say, be invited into her inner circle of BFFs.

You just know if you knocked on her door at 2 a.m., she would greet you as if expecting company: hair stylishly messy, designer housecoat with matching glass slippers, benevolent, honey-sweet words greeting you from her well-defined cupid’s bow lips.

She was Olivia de Havilland to my Bette Davis. Catch me at 2 a.m. and you would be greeted by a disheveled Marilyn Manson. She is the one everyone says, “She’s just so nice. Let’s make her our leader.” I hated her yet wanted to be just like her.​