Happy bird-day to you Dianne
I have been weepy today. An e-mail from a friend about canning set me off. The tears don’t trickle anymore, they just flow.
I have been thinking about Mom a lot today too. How much I miss being able to call her on the phone and yak. I miss good old Gladys telling me that “all politicians are crooks.” I miss her telling me “oh, Lar, don’t be so hard on yourself.” Just missing Mom makes me weep.
Late this afternoon, I looked at the calendar. Today is Dianne Olsen’s birthday. She would have turned 50 today. Happy bird-day to you, happy bird-day to you and dis dat dese and dose and another happy bird-day to you. This was our annual birthday refrain to each other. Where it came from is just too stupid to say.
Dianne called me “Big Daddy Liar.” At first, she called me “Big Daddy Lar.” Then the two official titles became inter-changeable.
Truthfully, I don’t know where she dreamed up the phrase but she always said them with great affection. Dianne thought I knew everything. I always corrected her and said I didn’t know everything, I just knew a lot of stuff about everything and little about nothing.
I could string Dianne along so far before she even knew how big my nose was growing minute by minute. As I kept stringing her along, Dianne’s eyes would get bigger and bigger and she would say, “no, no, you don’t say!” Then I’d finally say something totally outrageous about whatever I was pontificating upon. She’d catch herself, wrinkle her nose and snort at me, “Big Daddy Lie-Errrr” and turn on her heel as she harrumphed and refused to look at me.
The problem with being “Big Daddy Liar” was that Dianne often forgot what opinion or fact I had just given to her. She would then go out and proclaim to the nether world she often traveled in that “Big Daddy Lar” had told her so. My factoid would be a complete truth to her in her re-telling of my probable lie.
Here’s an example. For years, Dianne thought I was the head of security at Canada Place. She boldly told who knows how many people in Nanaimo, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal.
This nonsensical position was burned on Dianne’s brain from one of her fly-in visits from Ottawa in 1987. During our ritual drunken evening together when she came to town, I told her about the tight security for the Commonwealth Conference that was held in Vancouver that year.
I was working as the Vancouver Board of Trade’s Communications Director then. The Board’s offices are in Canada Place. We had to get top level security clearance just to go to work. And there was the obvious history re-write for Dianne.
All the while she called me “Big Daddy Liar”, she lied to me about her age casting herself about three years younger than she actually was.
For all the emotional upheaval Dianne and I weathered together, it’s so hard for me to believe that she is dead. That Dianne died in late February this year. That she was found alone in her apartment sometime after she died. That she died of a stroke. That she wasn’t even 50 yet. That she had lied to me too.
Even after all we endured in our friendship, I miss you Dianne.
So I weep again. This time for you my liar friend.