January 19th, 2005

Right now I am pretty

So here is a letter to a friend that will have to serve as my Rant for the next couple of weeks:

Hiya, [friend who wishes to remain anonymous],

As you may know, I am leaving for Russia to get married--er--again! The ceremony is scheduled for January 25th, and my plane leaves tomorrow morning (early, ugh!) My wife already left for Russia on Saturday morning, but get a load of this:

She was told that she would not be allowed to pass through the US!

OK. Fine.

… So how for her to get to Moscow in time to meet her family at the airport (who were already on the train and quite unreachable)?

And what to do about that non-refundable ticket?

We asked what we could do, how we could somehow get her on a plane, and we kept hearing the same thing: “Everything is sold out for at least a week in advance!” I was even ready to put a 1st-class ticket on my credit card and worry about it later.

But, finally, the woman at the airline check-in booth took pity on us (and acting out of guilt about her paranoid country, perhaps), pulled some strings and did some wheeling and dealing on our behalf, and got United and KLM to “exchange” two seats with each other, meaning my wife could now fly KLM from Vancouver through Holland to Moscow. That American woman gets full marks--and some bonus ones--for her help finding a way for my wife to get to Moscow ... the US in general gets somewhat below a failing grade for refusing passage through their country to a quiet peaceful innocuous young Russian woman.

Forsooth.

(I wonder what the US will be like--and what it will be like to live with--in 10 or 20 years. And something struck me the other night while I was listening to the American national anthem at the hockey game--Seattle Thunderbirds came up and won 1-0 in a real snoozer. Even the lyrics to their anthem smack of paranoia: "... rocket's red glare ... bombs bursting in air ... gave proof ... [the] flag was still there ..." Those words are so "outpost" ... so paranoid ... so "they're all coming to get us" ...)

All the ticket-trouble happened between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning (her original flight was supposed to be for 7:00 AM) and her new flight left at 1:25 PM in the afternoon.

So when I got home exhausted about that time, I settled into my favourite chair and then the phone rang with news from my mother that my sister Carolyn was back in the hospital with another, more serious attack of MS, this one affecting her brain stem. Fucking hell!

I visited her yesterday and her speech was pretty much shot for now; she can’t talk at all right now and she is so dizzy that lifting her head fills her with terrible vertigo. The really serious problem is that her brain has “forgotten” how to swallow. She can stay on IV drips to keep her fed and hydrated, but I can't imagine that is a great long-term solution.

There just ain't no justice. Carolyn has never deserved this MS, but it seems particularly cruel that she just finished recovering from an attack in November and now she gets another one in January.

It has been especially hard to keep making my Russia plans, but I have to. Carolyn was adamant that I not lose the heart to go to Russia. She was perhaps uncharacteristically inarticulate about it, but I knew what she wanted: I must not change my plans to go to Russia, despite all that is going on with her.

Wouldn’t you know, by the way, that I woke up this morning with a head-cold? Probably picked it up at the hospital while visiting Carolyn. Last week I missed three days of work with stomach ‘flu (or perhaps food poisoning).

Never rains but it pours.

Talk to you when I get back in February.

Brian


Back to the Rant-o-Rama index.