dbd33

((Piff Poff))

as they used to post to signify hugs, before emojis were invented.

Piff Poff

Thank you.

Jingsamichty

Best wishes to both of you. (hugs)

Jerseygirl

Very, very sorry to read this PP. Stay strong and remember BE’ers are always there for you if you need a shoulder.

(((HUGS)))

bats

This is positive news, his kidneys will feel better. Though I can imagine that the procedure will bring it all into focus. Thinking of you.

Piff Poff

Thank you everyone.

Gordon Barlow

It was none of his doing, but my son's first Turning Point was being born in England. Linda and I had been working in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific for three years, when she became pregnant. Determined not to let a baby kill our plan to buy a Kombi and drift around Europe for a while, we landed in London with two months to spare. UK nationality carries the right to live and work in Norway, where he now has three Norwegian children. His life there might not have been quite so easy with an Australian passport (which is all his parents had), or a Vanuatu one.

Have anybody else's children's lives been influenced by where they were born? Quite a lot, I expect!

Gordon Barlow

I guess most people have at least one really major turning-point in their lives. For BE members it is probably their decisions to emigrate. The decision to have a child is another. These days, it's an option. Women have an instinctive physical need - or so I've been told! But for men it may be more a social expectation - enforced by their wives' or girlfriends' persuasion. I say that from personal observation. What do you reckon?

I baulked when Linda "demanded" a child, after seven years of what seemed to me to be a perfect marriage. Our baby brought some unaccustomed stress into our lives. Only when he began talking, did I become fully reconciled to his presence; and by then we had abandoned our life "on the road". I recovered enough to volunteer to be a house-father for five years, when my local employment contract expired. And that housefathering (from age six to eleven) was far and away the best job I ever had, and we are still extraordinarily close.

Comments welcome!

Gordon Barlow

Not all Turning Points are obvious. Often, they aren't identified until long afterwards. I started this thread with my most obvious one - a moment of impatience in the US consulate in London. That put me on a path that 13 years later landed Linda, Ross & me on this tiny Caribbean island.

But it was a moment of sheer inattention in Spain in 1976 that led to Cayman, too. I ran a red light in Malaga. Well, when I say "red" I actually mean "pale pink". Spanish traffic lights were like that, in those days; maybe they still are. Distracted by the baby, I suddenly found myself five inches from death, as a huge truck (coming through on green, of course) screeched to a halt almost touching my door.

For the next six months I lived on a diet of valium tablets in a flat down on the coast - Fuengirola, for those who know the area. We took to the road again in April, but there was no more talk about our original target, the hippie community in the caves of Crete. We never made it that far.

Gordon Barlow

Choosing Canada instead of the US put me on a path to a life in island tax-havens, as explained in my post #1 of this thread. But for the first fifteen months of life in Toronto (1965-6), I was content to be there. I loved my auditing job, with occasional assignments in Windsor and New Brunswick. But then I came to another Turning Point...

The Touche Ross office in the Bahamas needed some help over the Xmas period, and I volunteered to be one of the three. Two weeks in Freeport (Grand Bahama) and one in Nassau was time enough to fall in love with the place. Linda did too, when she came down for the third week. So when I lined up a transfer to Touche's office in Jamaica a few months later (still on our way back to Australia!), we gave ourselves two weeks in Nassau to find jobs there first. We got lucky, and never paid income-tax ever again.

BEVS

I have wondered how you both ended up there.

Gordon Barlow

Every single BE member has at least one major Turning Point, and maybe five or six or fifty others! Even becoming an expat is one. This thread ought to be overwhelmed with examples. What made us all leave home?

I've said before that going overseas was not one of mine, because I'd been brainwashed as a child. But the brainwashing itself was a TP, and the brain-washer was my Grandpa Hancock - Mum's father. He was a keen stamp-collector, who introduced me to the world of foreign stamps, and the countries that issued them. Aged ten, I was persuaded to write to The Manager of a fish-cannery in Norway, at the address on a tin of tuna, asking if he had a son my age who would swap stamps with me. He didn't, but one of his employees did. Bjorn Borre Nilsen - I still remember the name these 73 years later! We exchanged letters and stamps for a few years before we lost interest, and we never met.

And earlier today I was on the phone sending Xmas greetings to my son and three grandchildren in Norway. There's no connection with Bjorn, but still... Go figure, eh?

Gordon Barlow

Hmmm. It seems I have a lot more Turning Points than most everybody here! Surely not...

Well, there have been a couple I could report, besides the ones already mentioned... Three years after we came to Cayman, I had sorted out the mess in the company I'd worked for, and was ready to move on to something else. Linda had done enough teaching for a lifetime, she reckoned, and turned to office work again - which she'd done in Nassau ten or eleven years before. That meant she wouldn't be at home when Ross got out of school every day. Neither of us liked the idea of a six-year-old coming back to an empty house, so I volunteered to become a house-father, and was home every afternoon when he walked back from his school a few hundred yards away. For the next five years I was "the parent of first resort", responsible for after-school activities of all kinds, and homework, and arranging overnight stays, reading him to sleep at night, and getting up for him when needed. Oh, and taking him to the hospital whenever that was needed, too.

He and I established a warm closeness that exists to this day. When he and I flew over to England and stayed with my Mum, that first year, she asked him who his best friend was in Cayman, and he said "my Dad, of course."

Gordon Barlow

A brief look at the life and times of this housefather... Home all day, it was I who rescued Ross every time he fell in the swimming pool at our condo - and (once) in the septic tank with the too-easily removable cover. I was one of the few men at the parent-teacher meetings of the private primary school and later the government high school. I was the family's representative in the neighbourhood baby-sitting club (one ticket for every hour before midnight, and for every half-hour after midnight).

I dealt with all the injuries - lacerated feet from broken beer-bottles beside the cricket-field, a bleeding thigh from a friend's pocket-knife while out in the scrub playing, a dislocated ankle from slipping on a concrete culvert... My terms of employment included hospital attendance, so it was I who took the ankle to be un-dislocated (re-located?) - and who discovered the traditional Caribbean remedy. After administering a local anaesthetic, the doctor said to me, "You might not want to watch this next bit". But of course I did watch - and only just stifled a yell when he knocked the bone back into place with a mighty thump with the heel of his hand. Cripes.

One Saturday morning I risked a lynching by walking into the Hospital's Waiting Room with a six-year-old boy whose face was puffed up to double its size - for all the world, a victim of brutal child-abuse. The chattering hushed immediately. You could have heard a pin drop. Hands raised to ward off the hostile glares, I faced the mob and said "maiden plum". Upon which, the room sighed with relief and resumed its conversations, leaving us to go about our business. "Maiden plum" is a wild plant with a very effective self-defence mechanism; the touch of a leaf brings pain and swelling. Think poison-ivy times twenty. Ross had been fooling around in the scrub behind our apartments with Jay again, had touched a leaf and then his face.

Somebody told me of a Jamaican bulldozer-driver who ran his machine into a whole patch of maiden plum. He saw the mist rising, and ran - left the machine in gear, left the field, left the job, left the Island for all anybody knew. Seerious ting, man!

bats

Just let the thread die. DNR it please