Back in the ’80s I was warned about a dangerous condition called peninsula-itis. It’s something that can creep up on a person who has spent just a little too much wall-to-wall time on the Sechelt Peninsula. In its acute stage, sufferers report a vague sense of diminished mental horizons and stunted emotional responses. There is, however, a cure.
I broke loose in late July, crossed Howe Sound, and pointed my old Ford north and then northeast past Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet. It’s the long, slow and winding road to the Interior but the trade-off is getting to drive through some of the most mystic landscape in the province. There is also the added joy of completely bypassing Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, not to mention the Coquihalla.
It was almost suppertime when I finally made Kamloops. Around 1 a.m., my tank now filled with impossibly cheap gas, I pulled up in front of my eldest son’s house in Red Deer.
I had lived in and around Red Deer for about three years before moving back to the Coast when my dad took ill in 2012. The highlight of my Alberta experience was being close to my first grandchild – a little girl who answers to the name of Brooke.
There are some things that nothing in life can prepare us for – and becoming a grandparent is one of the biggies. Until it hits you, you just can’t know what it’s like. I would try to explain it to people by saying I could see my mother, my grandfather, my brother, my children and their mother in that little face, and there was something knowing in her eyes when she looked at me and smiled, as if she knew all the family secrets. Being around her was like getting a boost of a cosmic energy.
The night I arrived back in Red Deer, Mike and I sat for a while and then I crashed in the basement and slept like a log. The next morning I shuffled upstairs, and there she was, playing in the living room. Brooke is seven now; she had been three when I left and I had made it back only once for a visit. Though we often talked on the phone, I was afraid she had virtually forgotten me. Boy, was I wrong.
She remembered it all. Our special stair-ball game, where she threw the ball down the stairs and I flailed around at the bottom trying to catch it, to her merriment. Making applesauce together. Making music. She showed me the trinkets I’d picked up for her at Ten Thousand Villages and the gifts we’d sent her from B.C., including the seashells taken off the beach, which she kept close at hand.
By the end of the day she was confiding to me that I was her favourite.
Together the three of us rode bikes on Red Deer’s superb trail system, checked in on the animals at the zoo in Innisfail and visited the dinosaurs at Drumheller. And of course we went to the bookstore.
We only had a week together, but I noticed when I came back that I was cured of my peninsula-itis.
And yes, it was good to be home.
