Old home week

The Spray Lakes pool here in Cochrane is closed for a month for maintenance, so I have returned to my old haunt, the Crowfoot Y, for my daily swim and wow, what a homecoming it has been!  Everywhere I turn, someone is yelling, "Nancy!  Where have you been?"  I guess I didn't tell all my swim-lane buddies I was moving to Cochrane a year ago, so now they know.

"We thought something had happened to you," said Anna, the young Chinese women I taught to swim and do a flip turn.  Now she's way better than I at both!   

It's actually hard to get my complete swim set in because of all the yakking I'm doing.  "It's still referred to as your locker, you know," said Rosemary.  "But if someone is in mine, I just say, 'I guess I'll use Nancy's'."  So, I am using my old locker and feeling right at home.  Not that we had lockers, but we always used the same one -- which was one way I knew who was in the pool before I got to the deck.  If someone's locker was being used, I knew so-and-so was there.    

"Gee, everyone seems to know you here," said a new lifeguard this morning.  "Well, I swam here for 11 years, so a few people do."  So, I got hugs from Jacques, Paul, Leslie-Anne, Karen, Anna, Randy, Rosemary and a few others.  Even Chris, one of the lifeguards who was still there, said, "Whoa!  Where have you been?!"

Frankly, it felt really good and if it weren't for the half-hour drive to and from, I'd go back.

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Disappointing to see how ignorant Canadians are about the Queen and our Constitution.  Polls are full of people saying they wanted to get rid of the Monarchy.  This is because schools no longer teach Civics, History and Geography, so no one has a clue about our Head of State.  

I also think it's a disgrace that not all provinces have declared the day of her funeral a civic holiday.  But, with Trudeau in charge and Singh propping him up, this is no surprise.  He had to declare it a day of mourning because the Monarch is still our Head of State, but if he had his druthers, he would not have.  This is not going to change because that would require opening up the Constitution -- something that will not be happening because it is so fraught.  

It's all wrong and sad.