22 - Sunday, February 2, 1992 ~ North Shore News elcome words from a long-time friend HAD A letter from Betty at Christmastime, a real letter of year was from Jack Pot, Nevada. course, she’s not the sort to expect some card-artist to sat- isfy the exchange between friends. Nor would she ever be party to one of those ominous print-outs that some people rely on for one-write blanket coverage. They definitely put severe strain on the old Christmas spirit. No, this was a real Betty-inspired tu- three pages in the manner in which we were brought up. She and I were next-door neighbors 45 years ago, both with new babies, both trying to cope with war-time housekeeping. Both out of our element in the city, too, our backgrounds being the bush, hers the Chilcotin, mine Cariboo North. That gave a special dimension to our friendship. We didn’t have to explain a lot of things to each other. Also the city wasn’t quite so daunting when we could team up against it. We've not been in each other's ‘ company for at least a dozen years, now — Betty moved back to Alexis Creek long ago and ! was able to get in there only twice, once by bus and once in a mobile van thing we rented for the particularity of the journey. And Eleanor Not your traditional Christmas milieu, but you can bet your boots the unconventional purlieus don’t keep Betty from stringing tinsel and baking shortbread and trying a new Yankee turkey stuffing. Up there in Paul St. Pierre country they come stalwart, they stay that way. This letter was minus some of her usual ebullience, though. Some glitches in the buoyance made me sad. Her eyesight is fail- ing, she’s mentioned it before, and apparently it’s not the cus- # tomary reversible old-age cataract situation. She put in her letter, ‘‘I hope you can read this. I can’t’’ and it wasn’t a joke. Her writing never did take any prizes but it verges on ancient tombstone script, now. Hearing, too. Hers has steadily m worsened, she mourns, and is not & THE VINTAGE YEARS now she and her husband regular- ly flee the rigors to spend several months in the American desert, November to April. Her letter this MS Society launches lottery THE FIFTH Annual MS Society Van Lottery is now under way throughout B.C. The Van Lottery is one of the society’s largest fundraising activi- . ties, having raised over $181,000 in 1991, This year, with the help of the International Brotherhood of Operating Engineers, B.C. and Yukon Building Trades and hun- dreds of volunteers throughout the province, MS Society hopes to top the $200,000 mark. The grand prize in the lottery, to be drawn May 2, is Islander RV's supreme camper conversion on a 1992 Dodge Maxi Van. The prizes include $500 worth of Chevron gasoline, a weekend for two at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver and a weekend for two at the new Waterfront Centre Hotel in Vancouver. Tickets for the 1992 MS Van Lottery are available from Tues- day, Feb. 18 to Sunday, Feb. 23 at Park Royal Shopping Centre in West Vancouver, from Tuesday, Feb. 25 to Sunday, March 1 at Lynn Valley Centre in North Vancouver and from the MS Society by calling 437-3244 or 1- 800-268-7582. Foltowing the conclusion of our Close Out Sale, the remaining stocks at Ali Baba Oriental Carpets Ltd. must be liquidated at the fall of the gavel GIANT ONE DAY ONLY UNRESERVED PUBLIC AUCTION Hundreds of fine quality hand-knotted PERSIAN CARPETS #. Room size area rugs and runners of all sizes in wool and silk and wool blend, all must be liquidated. Confirmed origins from Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Turkey and Afghanistan. If you visited Ali Baba Oriental Carpets Ltd. in White Rock, | ‘BC. in the past and saw carpets you wished you could afford, now is the time to take advantage of the EXTRA SAVINGS available at this unreserved auction. Auction wilt be held at NORTH SHORE WINTER CLUB 1325 East Keith Road’ North Vancouver MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1992 At 7:00 pm sharp, viewing from 6:00 pm 10% freight, brokerage and warehousing charges to be added ers helped by the available devices. The specialists have no solutions for her condition. She’s always been a vigorous and busy and cheerful woman, and now she Says it's like fighting the fog — her surroundings are cloudy in both senses. She feels helpless and victimized and cranky and pathetic. What she wrote, ac- tually, was ‘‘I feel like an old car.” It’s such a truly pertinent meta- phor for us old folks, caught as we are in the warp of change since we started our lives. We just feel hopelessly out of date, sometimes, like a 1926 Franklin sitting out in the yard, weeds clogging its spokes. The manual might as well be written in a foreign language because nothing’s going to restore this baby to its former glory. Can’t even spin its wheels. There was a piece in the daily paper very lately, with the joyful news that now replacement knuckles are available for elderly arthritic joints. That sounds to me as though it would rate in com- plexity and thrilling application right up there with the Canada Arm, And a long-ago friend en- countered in the supermarket con- fided over the broccoli that she’d had both knees replaced! We’ve learned to be quite blase about transplants of kidneys and hearts and hair and hips. We could be persuaded to the very tentative view that we might be reassembled and rejigged and kepi in working order for years. How would you vote on that? It wouldn’t work for long, I’d guess. It would be very ungraceful of us to hang around, in fact, with our top-of-the-line knees and knuckles and our bottom- of-the-line values. Because no one’s offering easily-applied replacements of the way we view the world and how we handle what we look on as decaying standards. It wouldn’t be cricket, don’t you know, to accept propping up in order to lob mud pies at the world. Tactically clever, sure, but that’s not our role any more. True, a lot of the strictures that governed our behavior, and still do, were based on shallow credos. How the neighbors would react led us into hypocrisy; social clim- bing bred snobbery; shallow values were reflected in vanities on a considerable scale. But besides embracing the comforts of medi- ocrity and exploitation we did learn the values of sharing and helping and putting up with and trying hard to make the best of it all, Fossil philosophizing. If You Ordered a Luxury Car This Week, Lose The OF NORTASHORE 985-0339 1148 MARINE ORIVE., NORTH VANGOUVER See Why At a Special Previewing Of The APrau member of The Natshre[Kinguny Aut any} Newest Infiniti. J30.