Suspicions and good news (!!!)

I just got off the phone with Mrs. R, the little old lady who befriended me when I first moved to Lovely City almost 12 years ago. In 1996 I was 21 year old single mom with a 3-month old baby, sharing a crappy basement suite with my 19 year old sister. We went to church on Sundays because it provided some sense of familiarity in what was otherwise a very big scary city for us small town kids.

The church wasn't that great. It was pretty awful, actually. More than a few times I sat cringing through a sermon that seemed to be a pointed attack on the tragic immorality of young single moms like me. Eventually I stopped attending altogether, but not before Mrs. R, a widowed and childless deaconess in her 70s, had securely tucked me under her old churchy lady's wing. She was the only one out of that congregation of some 100-odd who bothered.

At first, my sister and Moon Boy and I would go over to her house for lunch once in a while. Then my sister moved away, and it was just Moon Boy and I. As a toddler, he would sit at her big old piano in the living room after lunch and plunk the keys both methodically and randomly (no pounding for that boy -- his was an abstract but very deliberate kind of music). I wasn't the only one Mrs. R "looked after" -- over the years she has had a whole string of younger women that she's invited into her home and nurtured. She is a lovely, lovely person. And because she is so lovely and loving, she's become increasingly vulnerable as she's aged.

First, after I moved away from Lovely City during my two-year long ill-fated marriage, Mrs. R fell and broke her hip. Without family (except for some step children living across the country), and not wanting to move into a retirement home, Mrs. R decided to move in with a family who she'd befriended. They were new to Canada, and in need of the nurturing that Mrs. R is designed to provide. Except what happened is that she sold her house to buy one that would house all of them, and then after two years when she was not getting the care she needed or wanted, they refused to sell. This was a problem because they'd convinced her to put the house in their name.

Essentially, this lovely little old lady was swindled out of her life's savings. She moved out (actually, I moved her out) into a nice little apartment. The evil swindlers sold the house and bought another, refusing to return Mrs. R's investment. Finally lawyers got involved and many years later Mrs. R got a fraction of her money returned. Then what did she do? Repeated the whole fiasco with her step-granddaughter, who moved across the country to "look after" Mrs. R. Turns out she was a pathological liar and substance abuser.

Anyway, I've grown more than a little suspicious and protective when it comes to Mrs. R. She finally got into a decent retirement home (which I'd been trying to get her to do for years). She's happy there -- she has lots of little old lady friends and all the medical attention she needs (which is a lot, seeing as though she's going blind). Of course, she's still crusading around and befriending young people, like the taxi driver she's been talking to me about for the past six months. So this is our conversation this afternoon:

Ring, ring. I answer the phone.

Mrs. R (in her shaky little old lady voice): Hell-llo [some random name - she almost never gets it right any more]...
Me: Oh, hi Mrs. R. How are you doing?
Mrs. R: Well dear, I'm just so sad.
Me: Oh no. What's wrong?
Mrs. R: Well, I just got off the phone with [random name], a friend of [taxi driver], and she has a young daughter about 10 years old who has leukemia.
Me: Oh, that's so sad.
Mrs. R: Well, yes it is. And she had leukemia as a child and now she's just found out that her leukemia is back.
Me: The mom also has leukemia?
Mrs. R: Yes. And, oh dear. She is just so worried and upset.
Me: No kidding. That's awful.

So am I a terrible person for being immediately suspicious at this point? I mean, random person met through the taxi driver, who has a daughter with leukemia and has just found out that she also has leukemia. And why the hell is she sobbing on the phone to a little old lady like Mrs. R? Apparently this girl's mother lives in town, and they are coming to visit Mrs. R tomorrow. I'll be watching this one closely.

In other news: Tab A got his thesis done!!!!!!! (This warrants at least fifty million exclamation points). He just got back from dropping of the fully completed draft and it is completely miraculous that it is finally done after weeks and weeks of the misery and anguish of intellectual labour (for him, not me -- I just edited and gave back rubs). We are going to drink some celebratory beers right this second. Don't expect to hear from me for a while.