For my K ... and my J ...

Every character on SpongeBob SquarePants ever !

Check!

So much to do! I have made lists ... and then I've made lists of lists that I have to make ... and just when I manage to scratch an item off a list, I'll get a text or call from either Julia or K and have to add another item (or more!) to one list or another. Got a few things knocked out last week and several just this morning alone ... then I spoke to K ... and I'm back to adding to one of the lists again! Oh well, this has been in the plans for so long; if I could pack up a household and move an entire family to Europe in the span of 3 months, this should be a cakewalk!

... and I do so love cake!

Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice ...

The last time that Julia and I were on an airplane together was fourteen years ago. 9-11 had not yet occurred, so air travel was very different; Julia was 7 and obeyed me more often than not; and the excitement level was high - we were moving home and family from one continent to another ... to be home again and with family again. 

Things were a little different this time around. Airport security dictates that we allocate more time and effort to be screened, and Julia is now almost 21 and definitely has a mind of her own. The excitement level, however, was still high - this was a trip that she had been anticipating for quite some time now. The flight to LAX was fun - we watched a movie on the laptop, her cellphone got a workout from the pics and videos that she poured into Snapchat non-stop, and things must have gone well since we were still speaking to each other by the time we landed, both our sanities intact!

K met us at the airport and we headed to the new digs. Despite having shopped for condos online and having K sending me pics of the place, it was way nicer than what I had imagined. It's a gated community (something that was very important to both K and me), is walking distance to many things like the supermarket, the drugstore, the mall ... and (most importantly to K) Starbucks. A garage for my car, a parking stall for K, and a pool and hot tub for Julia. Two bedrooms (with lots of closet space), two washrooms, and a circular staircase that you take to go up to the loft. The condo also has three balconies: the front balcony (also accessible form the kitchen), the back balcony (accessible from both the living room and our bedroom), and one off of the loft (for those romantic evenings spent sipping wine and gazing at the stars). It immediately felt like home and having K stock the pantry with some of my favourites like Jif (only the best peanut butter in the US North America the world!) and oyster crackers from Trader Joe's (they should just call them oyster crack and be done with it!) didn't hurt. K even bought bed sheets in my favourite colour! The furniture that we had picked out was delivered and set up and while there are still things to get and personal touches to make, the place was just perfect. K cooked dinner for us that first night and we all had such a lovely evening. Julia really seemed to like the place and her new room; I don't think settling will be a problem for her. The cherry on the sundae? This gated community borders on Summit Park, a beautifully maintained enclosed park with tennis courts, a walking/jogging track, loads of space for Jack to explore ... and it opens to several trails to hike. BONUS!

I had a chance to meet one of our neighbours while I was there. Kate came by with her daughter in search of their cat. She welcomed us to the neighbourhood and we promised that we would keep an eye out for her stray. That night, while taking a walk after dinner, we came upon a cat who fit the description that we had been given. While K and Julia stayed there to keep an eye on the cat, I headed back to the condo to get Kate. On my way there, I ran into another cat who could just as easily have been the lost kitty. He seemed friendly so I coaxed him toward me and scooped him up, then raced back to the condo. Opening the door, Kate took a look at the cat in my arms, laughed and said, "Oh no, that's Bentley (or some other strange, non-catlike name). We found our cat!" I turned and went to place Bentley (or whoever he was) back where I'd found him, all the while feeling like the world's biggest cat napper!

Julia had a couple of goals that she wanted to fulfill on this trip - to work on her tan and to hit the beach. She managed to do both - she tanned every day and one afternoon, we drove down to Zuma Beach ... where she tanned some more. Another goal of the trip was to visit College of the Canyons, where Julia is planning to apply for the fall session. I had booked a tour before she and I left for the trip; the woman who took us around was gracious enough to spend a full two hours with us, walking us around the campus and explaining a plethora of things as she went along. Julia really enjoyed the visit; the campus is really beautiful, the college has a lot to offer its students, and it's extremely close to the condo. Julia and I hit the mall another afternoon, and she got to spend loads of time at the pool back at the condo. Then there was the day that we went to The Cheesecake Factory and were seated in a booth behind the booth where Brandy was having lunch. Yeah, all in all, it was a really gruelling trip for her!

Julia's first meeting with the Pacific - Zuma Beach

It wouldn't be a visit to Cali without a visit to In-N-Out

We celebrated our last night in California with an outing to the Salt Creek Grille. This place has THE best bruschetta EVER. We all gorged ourselves on steak (I've never seen my daughter inhale meat like that ... she is definitely her father's daughter!) and we barely had time for dessert. It was a lovely evening and we all had a wonderful time.

Caramel Apple Cheesecake. Trust me, it looked more appetizing on the plate!

The next afternoon, it was time to leave out home-away-from-home and head back north. And now, the wait begins ... waiting to hear back from the college and waiting for out next trip back. In the meantime, I'll be sending K links and following the ones that he sends me ... who knew that long-distance furniture shopping could be this much fun?!?


"Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else."
- Cormac McCarthy, No Place for Old Men

∞ ∞ ∞  ¡ ! ¡   * * *  UPDATE * * *    ¡ ! ¡  ∞ ∞ ∞

Julia has been accepted at COC for the fall semester! We are Cali bound, baby!!!

In hot pursuit ...

Out running errands with Julia today. Driving down to Iberville, I suddenly notice lights in my rear view mirror. Really up close. Muttering an expletive under my breath, I pull over to the curb, at which point a fire van races by me. Glad to still be in possession of my points, I continue on. Later, in the car with Julia again, I'm driving up to the 40 and I suddenly hear the short burst of a siren. I look into the rear view mirror and see flashing lights again. Muttering the same expletive under my breath again, I pull over to yet another curb. This time, a cop car shoots by me.

I swear, if I were a cat, I'd be down by two today!

Oh, and I think driving around with Julia brings me bad luck ...

Nom nom nom ...

Now that the kids are all out of the house, cooking has become ... well ... meh. It's hard to be inspired when you're only making dinner for one, not to mention, I was schooled in the eastern European tradition of making enough food to feed an army and any unexpected dropby's ... and then still having leftovers. In the meantime though, I come across recipes that I either a) want to try or b) think the kids might like. This latest one fit the bill on both counts. I made plans to make dinner for Jordan, Julia and Erika on an evening when they would all be home, only to find out the day of that Erika had to work. No worries ... and full steam ahead. This was an easy enough recipe to make, especially when I took a shortcut and bought a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket instead of roasting one myself. (Not laziness, I was busy on a project for K.) It was quick, with the sauce taking the longest to make and even that wasn't too long. But it was goooood. And with the temps outside dipping into the minus high teens (celsius, no less!) this is the comfort food that I was craving. I got the approval of both the kids, and the satisfaction that moms get when they know they've made a nutritious meal for their kids from scratch (yeah yeah, apart from that rotisserie chicken, I know!) Later, I curled up on Jordan's couch with a child on each side. Julia plopped her hand in my lap; her signal for a hand massage. Within a few minutes, Jordan positioned a pillow against me and lay down, requesting that I "play in his hair". So there I sat, doing the things to the kids that I've done to them since they were little. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes. It was a great evening and sure warmed this mom's heart.

Oh yeah, you can find the recipe for the evening's meal, Chicken and Spinach Pasta Bake (pictured below) by following this link. Bon appétit!

Agnes Bimbi-Kovacs, MD

Dr Kovacs. It's a name that I have known all my life, a name that has been respected and revered in my family for as far back as my memory takes me. Dr Kovacs wasn't just the family doctor, she was as close to actual family as any person could be. The story is that after my older sister's birth, my mother was given a list of paediatricians and chose a woman, thinking of the comfort level for her daughter. Dr Kovacs has known me my whole life, apart for the 20 minutes that it took for her to reach the hospital nursery after my birth. Visits to Dr Kovacs' office were always a high point, no matter the reason for the visit or how sick we may have been. The wait was long - I don't mean long in the sense that you might expect a wait in a doctor's office may be - these waits were looong. I can remember times when we sat for 3 hours or more before being called into one of her offices, where we would sit and wait while she finished examining the patient in the adjoining office. There was the odd parent who might have voiced a complaint in the waiting room, but the vast majority of parents just sat ... and waited. Everyone knew the time spent was worth it. No other doctor doled out the attention that Dr Kovacs did and once you entered her office, your appointment wasn't over until every question had been answered, every ailment addressed and every concern alleviated. Dr Kovacs could easily spend 30-45 minutes on every child who walked through her office door, despite the ticking clock, despite the crying children in the waiting room, despite the odd exasperated parent. Our appointments always ended the same way - a hug, a kiss, and an exchange of "I love you's". Then, she would open the drawer beneath the examining table where she stored the Laura Secord lollipops, of which she insisted you take 2-3 before leaving. 

It was normal to see moms and dads waiting with their kids to be seen but often, you would see a grandmother subbing for the dad, who probably had to work and couldn't be there. I seem to have a vague memory of one of my grandmothers coming along for a visit or two, but years later, my mom explained to me once that Dr Kovacs had uttered the f-word in my grandmother's presence and that my grandmother swore that she would never return there again. But that's Dr Kovacs. If she thought you were full of shit, she would tell you that you were full of shit. And she never made any kind of apology about it either. 

As a patient of Dr Kovacs’, you learned never to make an appointment on a Monday morning. If, for some reason, you forgot and did, you were sure to wait, most probably until well after the noon hour. You see, any mom who had a child come down with something over the weekend would call the office first thing on Monday morning when they opened at 9. And Dr Kovacs being the paediatrician that she was, would tell them to come straight in. I’m sure some didn’t even call and just showed up, knowing that they would not be sent home without a thorough going over. But that was just Dr Kovacs’ way. She turned no one away, even taking on new patients as recently as last year when I asked Cathy, one of her daughters who served as Dr Kovacs' receptionist/secretary and constant teapot refiller. A doctor in Quebec who is taking on new patients - what an anomaly! And on top of that, this doctor was seeing patients every day of the week, from 9am sharp until 7pm some evenings, Cathy told me. Imagine! Approaching her mid-80’s and still a full-time doctor. It’s almost unheard of these days!

Walking into Dr Kovacs’ examination room was a surreal experience. In all my years of frequenting her office, I’m still unable to tell you what colour her walls were. From the tops of any piece of furniture in her office to the ceiling, her walls were plastered with pictures of her patients or with drawings that her patients had drawn for her ... one overlapping the other and all held up with bits of Scotch Tape. Every time I was in either of those two rooms, I would see familiar faces; children who were complete strangers to me but whose faces I recognized from years of seeing them looking down on me from the walls. Eventually, my own children’s pictures were taped up as well and every visit, we would make a game of trying to find those pictures. Hundreds of pictures of hundreds of children … if Dr Spock had ever done acid, this is the vision I think he might have had.

Dr Kovacs shared her office space with her husband, whose patients were, for the most part, elderly. The waiting room always had both ends of the spectrum – babies and toddlers playing on the floor and geriatric patients sitting and smiling as they watched them play. I don’t ever remember having a conversation with Dr Kovacs, the husband (he would smile and say hello whenever he passed us in the waiting room), but from what I was able to observe, his patients were as loyal to him as my Dr Kovacs’ patients were to her.

I have a distinct memory of Dr Kovacs coming to my home when I was a child. I was very sick, apparently too sick to get downtown to her office, and suddenly, there she was by my bedside. I’m sure I was in awe at the time … I mean, Dr Kovacs was in MY home! It was the same kind of feeling one gets when they encounter their teacher outside of school. You just don’t expect that they ever venture out from the space from which you know them! And Dr Kovacs actually showed up with a dark doctor’s bag, like doctors have in the movies! She ministered to me that way she always did and left a prescription for the cough medicine that tasted like what I imagine Mary Poppins doled out to the Banks children when they were ill. It was grape and simply delicious! But I digress. The point being that Dr Kovacs didn’t confine her caring for children to the four walls of her office. She came to my house, she came to the hospital when I had a tonsillectomy, she came to see Kevin when he underwent eye surgery, and she came to see Julia when she had back surgery. Dr Kovacs was our doctor and she came when we weren’t well, no matter where that was.

When I was 15, I developed migraines. After seeing me in such pain, my father suddenly decided he was taking me to see a doctor. He meant well and not wanting to wait, he hustled me off to the neighbourhood clinic. There I saw a doctor, whose French was terrible and English was non-existent; unfortunately, my Spanish was also non-existent, so upon seeing my hands shake, he immediately prescribed Valium for me and sent me away. For the next few weeks, I can remember feeling as though I was floating through the halls of Rosemount High, up near the ceiling and above all my classmates. Friends would tell me that they had spoken to me but I had no recollection of those encounters. It seemed that just when I would be coming down from one high, it was time to pop another lil pill and start floating again. When Dr Kovacs eventually heard about the drugs I had been given, she became angry. “Fucking GP’s!”, I remember her muttering. “Who gives a 15 year old baby Valium?!?” I learned from that day forward to consult with her before allowing an unknown doctor to prescribe medication for me!

I continued to be followed by Dr Kovacs long after a time when I could have been going to see an "adult" doctor. I once asked her when I would have to stop seeing her. She smiled gently, cupped my cheek and in her slight Hungarian accent replied, "When you're no longer comfortable coming to see me, darling." That day never came but I did finally make the cross over after seeing Dr Kovacs for the last time as her patient when I was 22 or 23. I would still pop my head into her waiting room when I was in the vicinity; I'd catch up with Cathy, and if I was lucky, I would get waved in between patients to grab a quick hug and kiss and quickly fill the doctor in on my family's news.

It had been a while since I had seen either Dr Kovacs or Cathy but as chance would have it, I bumped into them both as they were leaving their building and I was heading down the street to the metro. They both stopped and she beamed at my tummy swollen with my first child. Patting it gently, she smiled and said, "Call me as soon as the baby is born", before hugging me and walking away. Up until that moment, I had not yet made a decision about a paediatrician but suddenly, it was obvious. When I told the children's dad that Dr Kovacs would be looking after our child, he reminded me of how far downtown was from where we were living. I countered with the fact that I was comfortable with and trusted Dr Kovacs over any other paediatrician. I gave Dr Kovacs' name when I was admitted for my delivery and shortly after they whisked Kevin away to the nursery, she came into my room. Handing me the tape measure where she had noted his length, she assured me that he was well and healthy and "simply beautiful!" Kevin's birth was followed by Jordan's birth 21 months later. Although she marvelled at how relaxed we were as first-time parents, she could see the stress that Jordan's colic was causing as soon she entered her examination room a month after Jordan was born. I told her how we were at wit's end, how we had tried everything and how he cried incessantly nonetheless. Taking him from my arms, she proceeded to try to calm him. After 40 minutes of attempting different things, she handed him back and told me that this was one of THE worst cases of colic that she had ever seen. I was somehow comforted, knowing that her career to that point was rather extensive and that it wasn't something that I was doing wrong. Julia was born 2 years after that but it being August, Dr Kovacs wasn't able to make it to the hospital, since August was always spent at the cottage with her family. I showed up a month later for Julia's first inoculation and as Dr Kovacs looked down at my squirming daughter on the exam table, the doctor wrapped her arm around my shoulder. "I hope that it doesn't upset you, my saying so, but she looks exactly like your mother!" "Why would that upset me? My mother was beautiful! You couldn't give me a higher compliment about my daughter!" We looked up at each other and smiled, both of us teary eyed at the thought of my mom, who had not lived long enough to see her beautiful grandchildren. 

My children grew older, past the point where I would accompany them into the exam room, but I was always allowed in after the appointment was over to claim my hug and kiss and bring the doctor up to speed on my father and my sisters. The kids always knew they could have gone to see another doctor, an "adult" doctor, yet even though they were old enough to schedule their own appointments for their own reasons, they always went back to see Dr Kovacs when they were all in their 20's. I have often told people that it speaks volumes when two grown men are still willing to go see a female paediatrician. And we were far from being the only second generation family amongst her patients. Many a time, I would learn that one of the other moms in the waiting room was also an ex-patient who was now bringing her own kids to be seen by Dr Kovacs.

Within days of my father’s passing a couple of years ago, I received two messages on my answering machine. First, a lovely call from Cathy, who expressed sympathies on behalf of the Kovacs family. The next message on the machine was one from Dr Kovacs. The message went on for over 3 minutes, and left me in tears. I have never known of a doctor who took the time to make such a personal gesture and I was truly touched.

This past fall, Julia texted me from work and asked me to make her an appointment with Dr Kovacs. After playing catch up with Cathy, I was informed that her mom was finally going to retire. It was a bittersweet moment; I was happy for Dr Kovacs - she deserved to retire after such a long career, yet it made me sad - it was truly an end of an era. Cathy assured me that she will call me from time to time to update me on her mom, although she did say that she could not be entirely sure that the retirement would occur. I immediately called the kids and told them the news and they all shared my bittersweet sentiment. On the day of Julia's appointment, I waited outside in the waiting room and bided my time with Cathy. When I was finally called in, Dr Kovacs motioned me to sit down. She asked about my health, my love life, the boys, and as always, asked if I was happy. When we were done talking, this tiny, formidable woman rose up from behind her massive desk and opened her arms. It is a strange feeling when you know you are saying goodbye to someone for the last time. We hugged, we kissed, we exchanged "I love you's" ... the same way we have been doing for 51 years. And then, I walked out of her office for the very last time. 

I dialled a number that I know by heart a month after that visit, wondering if Dr Kovacs had followed through with her idea of retiring. The answering machine picked up and instead of Cathy's voice, I heard a recording of Dr Kovacs' soft accent announcing her retirement. I listened the whole way through the message to this woman who has known me longer than any other living person, this woman who loved me and took care of my health and then did the same for my own children ... and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other children.

Thank you, Dr Kovacs. May your well-deserved retirement be a long and very happy one.

Julia and Dr Kovacs - 28/02/2012