Story Time

I have been having a wonderful time at home and at "the home." I am now at my best friend's house for the rest of my time at home. Much better . Much much better than staring at my future at "the home."


Dad is doing well there and that's a good thing. His grey cells are kinda shrinking and he doesn't have a great attention span but not to any great degree. It's hard having a real conversation with him because he doesn't read papers, or follow the news. He just doesn't pay attention or seem to follow what's going on. He's not very linear in his thinking. My mother clearly ran the show and dad let her. Even now he seems to need someone telling him what to do. He's a pretty basic kind of man.


Now some of the other characters I met at the home were something. First there was Ann. She was the 22nd of 24 children. seriously. She's the only one left of the bunch. She left Newfoundland because her boyfriend was a Baptist and she was Catholic. It was the Montagues and Capuletsin her little village. Both sides didn't want their kid involved with someone of the "wrong" faith, so the two of them left and got married and never went back.


Robert is Japanese by heritage - born in Canada. His family was interred during the second world war. They were forced to leave Vancouver and lived in some interment camp in Alberta for the duration of the war. They had to start over after the end of the war without any money since the government took all their goods and property.


Sam asked me to say grace when we sat his table for breakfast. He had story after story about his gazillion accidents in whatever job he had. The guy never stopped talking.


Then there was Jacob. He owned a hotel here in town which he sold to a lawyer who ran it into the ground. We met at the home's computer stations. He was logging in and trying to find his grand daughter's website. 'Vat's det koogle thing he vants me to find on dees comp-you-ter?"


Jacob was a Lithuanian Jew who worked with the partisans during the war. His entire village built caves under ground to hide from the Nazis. He told me how the partisans orders were to shoot to kill, or let the German soldiers run away. A bunch of soldiers came across Jacob in the forest with a couple of his buddies. He drew his gun to shoot them and the German begged him not to. He had a wife and five kids. So Jacob didn't shoot him because the soldier wasn't SS or Gestapo, he was reg force and conscripted. He just wanted to get out alive. He gave Jacob his address and told him if he ever landed in Munich after the war his wife would make him dinner to thank him for not killing him and leaving his children fatherless.


So didn't Jacob find himself traveling through Munich on his way to Canada after the war. He found soldier boy who did indeed remember him. The guy cried when he saw him because he remembered him well. The guy's wife cried and fed him and let him stay over night rather than go to a hotel.


What stories eh?