“No hay mal que por bien no venga.”

While it sounds a lot better in Spanish if you translate it into English is makes sense anyway. Bad stuff happens for good reasons.

Three bad things happened yesterday Sunday. One of them began on Thursday when my Rosemary was recovering from a left knee replacement operation. The doctor found she was losing blood somewhere. After quite a few tests they discovered she has an ulcer in her lower oesophagus or stomach. The ulcer is due to the fact that Rosemary has an acid stomach and acid reflux. So they did not release to my care and her cat Casi-Casi until yesterday. That was the first good thing coming out of the discovery of the ulcer. Now she is going to be treated.

Parking at the UBC Hospital is easy but a tad expensive. I went down to park in the temporary 15 minute zone as the nurse upstairs was taking her time in releasing Rosemary. This was bad!

As I was inserting my credit card into the parking machine a man (no taller than I am) looking very fit and perhaps my age passed by. I stopped him with a question, "Do you play basketball?” His answer was, “I used to.” That answer confirmed my almost suspicion that the man was Doctor Pat McGeer. I asked him if he was visiting someone in the hospital of if he was not well. His answer was a resounding, “I work here.” And he went on to the detail of the cancer research that he is doing into stopping cancer cells from draining stuff from the body on people who are supposed to be terminal (and are not he asserted). He then asked me to guess his age. I am a gentleman (sometimes) so I never ask that question or answer it. His answer, “I am 90,” Floored me.

That was the second good thing to follow a bad thing.

The third situation was to go to my granddaughter’s violin recital. The first half of the program featured 27 (one hour and thirty minutes) soloists playing uncertain notes. But there are two good things. One my Lauren is learning to read music. That is good. The second good thing is that there was Cornelia Oberlander who is past 90 years with a head and brain that are all here. A couple of years ago in a reunion to celebrate the life of architect Abraham Rogatnick she told us some scary statements about global warming here.

Now there is a an axe to grind here (not too sharp) for one of the last two persons left at the Vancouver Sun that I know. One is IanMulgrew and the other (for whom I am sharpening the axe) is John Mackie. Mackie in a frequent page 2 column reminds us of personalities and events in our city and province’s past. This is very good.

My suggestion is that some of those people from our past , landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander and the Doctor of Everything, Pat McGeer have all kinds of relevant stuff right now that we should know about.