Rose's Cantina

I spent the better part of two years working in the hearing industry. As with nearly all the journeys I've taken for work, I knew nothing about hearing loss. Nothing. I don't believe I knew anybody who wore hearing aids. I saw a few around, those bananaramas sported by old folk when I worked in a nursing home for the summer. A lot of those folks still cupped their ears and yelled at people, mostly because the people in question also suffered from dementia and no one bothered to check their hearing aid batteries or clean the wax out. Sucks to be old, suffering from dementia AND have hearing loss. I once heard a funny story about Eddie Fisher who suffered both hearing loss and dementia in his latter years. His daughter Carrie had to keep replacing the aids because Eddie thought they were candy and kept eating them. That's pretty expensive candy, with the average pair of hearing aids costing more than $3,000. You can buy a lot of jujubes for that. Anyway, along my ...

We donated our old Subaru to charity yesterday. Whatever it brings will go to the Ottawa Humane Society, our cause of choice. I was thinking of putting Gordie in it to save the euthanasia fee, but he seems a bit better so we'll keep him. I arranged for my elderly friend Doris to drive us around yesterday to get some groceries and hooch and to buy Scott his very own Presto! pass. He works just up the street, too far to walk, but he only has to toddle a block up and catch the bus which will take him right to the door of the brand new Subaru store where he works. Ironic, isn't it? A car salesman with no car? It reminds me of Carol, a now-since-passed drinking buddy who was a manager in a local BMO. She gave people mortgages and loans all the time but couldn't get them herself because ex-husband had gambled away all their savings and ruined her credit. That's not really our problem. We don't have a lot of debt but we've been working poor for six years now. Th...

The kid's name was Nick Zselaniak. He was a classmate of mine at West Park Secondary School and he died trying to out run a train in my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario. The man's name was Steve. He was my neighbor growing up. His 18-wheeler stalled on the train tracks and he miraculously survived, though he spent a year in the hospital. I babysat his kids and held his wife's hand through the terrible ordeal. And then there was Donnie, the son of a good friend. He couldn't live with himself anymore and he walked in front of a train at the very place six people died yesterday in Ottawa in a horrific bus-train accident. I told Scott yesterday, if you live long enough you'll know somebody who died in an argument with a train. With the exception of the Lac Megantic tragedy, death by train is rarely the fault of the train. In the majority of cases, the incidents are caused by someone driving a vehicle or walking on the tracks. In the end, it really doesn't m...

  Princess Rose rides the bus. The words kept ringing in my ears today, as I set off to buy my first bus pass in two decades. It's not that I'm against the bus. It's that the bus has never seemed a friendly place to me. I suffer from agoraphobia, meaning I develop anxiety just leaving the house sometimes. I also have generalized anxiety disorder which often forces me off the bus with my heart racing and my head swirling. For years, I couldn't work because of GAD. When I finally did get a job, I spent my lunch hour for the first few weeks wandering around downtown in a daze looking for an ambulance -- or at least a paper bag. GAD is the real reason I don't work out of the house. In the past, I had to steel myself to get into a car just to get to an office. I found it impossible to concentrate. I get sick a lot and ended up on high blood pressure medication. So I quit six years ago and have managed to get my GAD and agoraphobia under control. Even the small...

Most girls ask for wine or flowers or a nice dinner on their birthday. This year, I asked for a bus pass. I live in one of the most beautiful cities in North America, but I haven't really even been downtown since 2006. Oh, sure, occasionally I've met people for dinner. Or I've had to attend an event. But mostly, I have spent the past seven years as a shut-in sitting here in my window looking out at St. Laurent Boulevard, making the daily trek to Loblaws and The Liquor Barn or getting in the car to take the hounds to the dog park. I live six minutes from the Rideau Canal but haven't looked in its murky water in nearly a decade. I am a stone's throw from the Byward Market but I buy produce shipped in from Mexico. I can practically see the Museum of Science -- if even that's what it's called -- but haven't taken my granddaughter there to watch her hair stand on end. Mostly, I am a shut in because I'm poor. The life of a freelance writer can be ...

There's something depressingly wrong in this city of ours, when the men in my household can't find decent employment. Time was that a high school education was a ticket for training of some sort. Not anymore. Our Nick has applied for every job under the sun. He got his Smart Serve and his G licence. Guess what? He can't even get a job that asks the question: "Do you want fries with that?" So he languishes in the basement, scouring the job boards, looking after his daughter while the rest of us shake our heads. Meanwhile in the upstairs, Scott was just been informed that he did not pass the interview for an OC Transpo bus job he applied for a year and a half ago. It's been six weeks since his interview and he was assured that he would still be in the running if he hadn't heard within two weeks. Finally, today, he tracked down the "human" resource guy who told him, "Meh, our bad. Somebody should have called you." Scott has a clean ...

There was yet another disturbing incident yesterday involving an OC Transpo bus driver and passengers. The bus was late, a passenger wanted to know why, the bus driver basically told him to mind his own business and abandoned the bus on a busy Ottawa street, leaving passengers in the lurch for a couple of hours. Welcome to Ottawa's bus wars, ladies and gentlemen. Bus drivers have had enough and they're not willing to take it anymore. They get spit at, they get sworn at, they are secretly photographed, they are disrespected, especially by the management of the transit services which just recently cut 100 bus routes to save money. As a result of management's ineptitude, bus drivers are having to explain to cranky customers why the buses are running 45 minutes late, or not at all. The public is hunting for bear, retaliating against the bus drivers who went on strike a couple of years back, leaving passengers stranded, having to hoof their way to work over the col...

There are many things I love about Ottawa. It's a beautiful, family-friendly city. It's clean and it's culturally vibrant. That said, I'm getting pretty sick of some of the behavior of late. People should stop trying to villify the city's bus drivers. That's right, I said it. Put your cell phones away, people! Bus drivers, like other drivers, are not perfect but in 80 percent of the time, they get you to your destination, they are helpful to riders who are having difficulties and they are friendly. Like the singing bus driver, who was told to stop singing because of bunch of snooty and entitled passengers didn't like his tune. They complained BY EMAIL to OC Transpo so the brass hauled the guy in and told him to stop being so cheerful. Now to the matter of the bus driver who yelled at the kid with autism. Nobody saw the entire encounter so that YouTube video was probably taken out of context. The kid admitted that he had been reciting a p...