Wednesday 13 December 2023

Isn't It Time?

 Geez, that was a banger of a song from The Babys.

Whenever I tell people that I hate Christmas, they're shocked and then tell me that I'm wrong for many, many reasons. Someone said everyone gets the holiday blues and I should think of the positives.

It's a long story, if you want to jump out now, I don't blame you....

My grandmother died in the fall of 1966; she was 48.

It changed my family in hundreds of ways. But this is the story of how 3 people  were torn apart by this one event.

A couple of years later, my mother went to Toronto to visit her father. And she had lunch one day with him and a work colleague.

The very next day, my mother started an affair with this man. It's a story she told my sister and I 50 years later, shortly after our stepfather died.

My mom was always self-centred; it's something that came across in the way her siblings treated her, and what they said to me - directly and indirectly - over the years.

But my papa ADORED her!

I'm pretty sure that my mother told my father at some time about the affair because his personality changed. He started drinking a lot and was sad and quiet.

It reached a head in 1971. My grandfather came to visit for the 50th anniversary of my home town with my later grandmother (the woman you have all come to know as my Nana - she was my mom's stepmother) and my youngest uncles. 

A few weeks later, my family - mom, dad, my sister and I - went to Toronto to visit our family. But the 4 of us didn't return home.

My mother's lies started here.

My father was staying behind in Toronto because we were going to move there the next year and "he was going to find a new job and a place for us to live". Mom, my sister and I returned to the north.

One night, the ringing of the phone woke me.

On the other end of the line was the ex-husband of my aunt Betty. He had decided he didn't want her after a short year of marriage and driven her to my grandparents' home and left her there. Now, several years later, the gist of the conversation with my mother is that he wanted her back.

At this point, you might want to dispute my memory of things, but I have had an odd memory since I was a young child. I think it's why I'm good at trivia.

But I digress....

During this conversation, my mom told Uncle George that she and dad were separated. It pierced me to the core. And I said nothing to anyone - ever - until now, writing this post.

A couple of months later, my grandfather and Nana and my uncles came for our last Christmas in my home town. I do remember that on Christmas morning, there were so many presents in our tiny living room that no one could get into the room. We all sat around the edges and in the dining room opening packages and packages.

I don't know if this next event happened on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but I went upstairs to my bedroom alone for some reason. I was looking out the window at the sunset glowing against the paper mill in my hometown. It was clear and the stars outside the window were bright even at 4:30 when the sun set at that time up north.

I could hear the sounds of a happy family below me - bubbling over with love and joy.

And it was almost like I could a voice say this out loud - this will never be yours, you will always be alone.

I was 11 years old.

********

On Christmas Day, late in the evening, my father arrived at home, completely by surprise. My sister and I were SO happy! 

I think he hoped to make one last grand gesture to get my mother back.

To say the attempt failed would be an understatement.

I remember my mother screaming at him to get out on the day after Christmas.

I didn't see him again until 1976.

*****************

Easter weekend 1972, a month before we moved to Toronto, my mother brought her boyfriend to our house to meet us. She told my sister and I that we had a new father. And a month later, we moved to a new city into an apartment with our "new father".

Mother tried to enrol us in school in Toronto using his name - legally not possible - and for years our father's parents weren't able to get in touch with us directly because she didn't trust them to not tell him where we were. Only after my grandmother died did we return to our hometown to visit our grandfather. The story of how we got to see Papa again is best left for another time.

***

My stepfather was almost 20 years older than my mother, he had a grown daughter who married in 1972 and I think he resented raising another man's children.

He treated us like dirt, calling us ungrateful, lazy, fat, ugly and stupid. And not only did mom never stop him, she soon joined in.

He stopped being a jerk when we left home.

But our mother continued to hurt us at every opportunity, even when she needed us at the end of her life. Was it guilt? Who knows? Her favourite line when she was angry with us was "you're just like your father". 

*****

My dad died in 2001 - he was only a year older than I am now. But he, too, found love again with someone much older than he was. And our stepmother treated my sister and I like treasures.

I had hoped the pain might start resolving first when my stepfather died in 2014 and then when mom died 3 years ago. It hasn't. It probably never will.

Several years ago, the American writer Molly Jong-Fast wrote about her contentious relationship with her own mother. She wrote something that could have been about me:

"You're supposed to be over your childhood. You're not supposed to be haunted by that loneliness you just can't quite shake."

People who tell you to "just get over it" didn't have this life. Motherhood is held out as something sacred and precious. Mothers are supposed to do anything and everything possible to love and protect their children, right?

Some of us get the mother who cares only about herself.

I have spent a lifetime trying to find a way to prove that voice that I heard in my head at Christmas 1971 that it was wrong. That I would find love and a family of my own. But I have chosen wrong or blown my chances every single time.

And this is why I hate Christmas. And why I'm unable to love anyone, especially myself.



Sunday 11 June 2023

Remembrances of Nana - Dorothy Clarke Patchell Walsh January 31 1920 - November 14 2022

I have been blessed to have 5 grandparents. And Nana was in my life much longer than of those related to me by blood.

With all my heart, I wish that my younger cousins, especially my Patchell cousins, were able to know Nana the way Melanie and I did.

I first met her a couple of years after she began dating my grandfather – Ganggang, as Melanie and I called him, and we called her Aunt Dorothy then.

When we moved to Toronto after our parents split up, Nana, our grandfather, and our aunt Liz, were the constant reassuring presences in our lives. It didn't hurt that we had an aunt and several uncles who were close to us in age. We were more like children than grandchildren.

There were many weekends at the cottage, Sunday brunches when we all lived in proximity along the lake in Toronto, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, our tiny apartments crowded with people, laughter and food and music.

Some of those weekends at the cottage, my sister and I went with them alone, as mom and our stepfather went off on fishing trips. It was an ideal place to spend summers, especially for two transplants from northern Ontario.

My grandfather proposed marriage in 1976, and I had the unique pleasure of being a bridesmaid at my grandparents wedding along with Melanie and our cousin Christina. On that day, I christened her “NanaD”.

I'm not going to pretend that she was always a good influence; on a couple of occasions that I can recall, Nana, our mom and aunt took my sister and I to Woodbine to spend an afternoon watching the races. Don't worry – they placed our bets for us!

I consider myself to be the luckiest of all 19 grandchildren as I was able to go on the most epic girl's trip ever with my grandmother!

In 1990, I had a job as a personal assistant to someone running in the provincial election. The plan was that I would run their household – yes, it was someone fairly wealthy – after they went to Queen's Park. But they lost, and my services were not required. So I started working as an office temp again, in between rehearsing roles for small musical companies in Toronto.

At the time, Uncle Ger was doing his PhD in BC. He was going to fly to Toronto, drive to Florida with Nana, and head back to Vancouver. Nana decided that she would take me with her to Florida instead. We would make a vacation of the process.

I don't drive, never learned, this trip was going to take a few days!

We set out on a cold, sunny November morning and got from Toronto to Cincinnati the first night.

The next day, we went to the Kentucky Horse Park to see the exhibits about the history of horse racing and to pay our respects to Secretariat. It was a lovely, sunny, and now warm, day.

We hadn't made reservations at hotels along the way, thinking we would be okay since it was fairly early in the snowbird season. Not the best idea.

As we drove down I75, every exit we passed had large billboards for all the motel chains along the interstate system. And all of them had the words no vacancy flashing in red. An hour past the Kentucky-Tennessee state line, we came to an exit where the no vacancy lights weren't lit up and we pulled off the highway in deep twilight. But as we drew closer, we saw that all the major chain motels were full.

There was a sign pointing up a hill indicating there were more motels there, but all were full, except one near the top. It was a small, 5-storey mom & pop operation, and we were relieved to learn they had a double room available. Even better, our ridiculously low room rate included dinner AND breakfast in the rooftop restaurant. Nana and I head up to find a buffet that was a cliche of southern cooking – chicken fried steak, biscuits and gravy, even collard greens. We didn't care, we were tired and hungry!

We were at the top of the hill at this place – Caryville, Tennessee – and we could see the lights of the cars on the interstate and lights stretched along the banks of a lake below us.

When we returned in the morning we saw the mist rising from Cove Lake and could see the cottages and homes dotting the banks of the water. Breakfast was another southern masterpiece – bacon, sausage, pancakes, more biscuits and gravy!

As we left, we got the directions to head to Dollywood! Did y'all know that my Nana was a fan of Dolly Parton?

We headed out through Knoxville on our way to Sevierville and Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. We had lunch at a restaurant attached to a combination Christmas and model train store – first Christmas store I'd ever seen. Then we headed to Dollywood.

Only to find it closed!

It was between seasons at the park – they had closed after Halloween to prepare for the Great Smokey Mountain Christmas that would open 10 days later on American Thanksgiving. The person at the gate told us that we were free to walk around the grounds and that the gift shop was open.

Nana and I spent an hour walking around the park, taking in the sights including the replica cabin of Dolly Parton's childhood home. We stopped in the gift shop to buy a cassette tape of Dolly's greatest hits and drove through Great Smokey Mountains National Park, with the sun roof open, singing along – LOUDLY – to Dolly's greatest hits!

The next morning, we bypassed the traffic of Atlanta, going through Athens, Georgia on our way to Macon, where my guide book told me was a beautifully preserved antebellum mansion and a Victorian opera house. After touring Hay House and having lunch we headed to the Grand Opera House. They were closed too! I was going to give up and started turning away, but Nana said to the woman at the box office:

My granddaughter is an opera singer in Canada and I know she would really love to see your theatre.

The woman looked at me and I nodded my head vigorously! I really was missing rehearsals for productions with the Toronto City Opera.

The lady closed the box office and gave us a private tour of the facility. Lovingly restored in the 70s, it was as if a high-end European opera house had flown across the Atlantic and set down in Georgia. Elaborate gold work and 3 floors of private boxes flank the stage. A small orchestra pit, tiny dressing rooms, and wings not designed for modern theatre equipment are not usually seen by the public. As we left, I bought the t-shirt that I am wearing now!

Once in Florida, we spent a day at Busch Gardens seeing the wildlife, and went on a wild manatee hunt one day when the news said that a colony of them had been spotted near the Alafia River. So many people were there on Tampa Bay that the manatees had been scared off! Then we went to my aunt and uncle's house in Fort Lauderdale for American Thanksgiving – and I took my 2 native Floridian cousins ice-skating!

After our return to Largo, I flew back to Toronto.

Obviously, this trip has meant the the world to me as the years go by. And Nana and I would reminisce about some of the things we did over those 3 weeks.

More than anything, Nana was my champion.

When I moved out on my own, mom was angry with me and didn't speak to me for months. Nana was the first person in my family to come to my little bachelorette pad for dinner. Similarly, when I bought my house here in London, mom said it was the stupidest thing I had ever done. And Nana and Arthur, were the first members of my family to come and see my home. While on the Florida trip, she told me that she would run interference with my mom if I wanted to have a baby or adopt a child on my own.

Nana was not overly demonstrative, but you knew she loved you fiercely in her quiet way. The “I love you”s were more frequent in recent years.

She brought into my life 3 kind and loving men I am proud to call uncle. Her work ethic has been my inspiration and lead me to a new job at a time most people would consider retirement.

My life has been shaped and enriched by her love. All of us will never be the same without her.

In the timeless words of Dolly Parton:


Nana, I will always love you.


Saturday 18 December 2021

A Year in Review

Anyone who knows me knows that I had a horrid few years from 2018 to 2020! And that was aside from the pandemic that's given all of us almost two awful years!

2021 brought more loss to my family but my sister and I remain well and got to spend time with each other, which means everything these days.

My year is ending the way it began - updating the electronic scheduling program  for one of our court locations. But I want to say a public thanks to my interim manager Jessica for all the opportunities she's given to me this year. In addition to learning the ESP, she offered me the chance to become our Zoom trainer, become the regional backup person for the trust management system, act as support on new staff orientation, proctor all interviews and testing for all job openings in our region, learning how to use ICON - aka the criminal records database (never mind Santa, I can find out if you've been naughty!), and now working on the scheduling for all Small Claims Court matters in our region.

*Whew*

Most people expect you to be winding down your career when you turn 60 - I feel like I might be getting started again!

My Nana has been in the hospital a few times this year - not for anything related to Covid - but she is still with us and will be turning 102 next month.

It has been crushingly lonely being home alone almost the entire time (and I will now be working from home again for the next 3 months), and Twitter has kept me company when I wasn't on Zoom for work. I know I haven't met most of you, and it doesn't matter. My trivia families make me smile all the time - especially Eugene from the HQ Fam! He is exactly the same every day as he was in his appearance on the game - enthusiastic, upbeat, charming.

My Jeopardy Family continues to grow - and they make me grow. These wonderfully diverse people talk about their wonderfully diverse interests and have introduced me all kinds of books, music, movies, TV, and hobbies that I never would have known about if not for them. And they are gracious and accepting of wannabes like me.

A few of my Tweeps are facing health challenges with grace and good humour (as much as they possibly can given the circumstances) and I would like to send love and strength to Jen, Jeniene, and Sam.

Two of my Tweeps have started amazing new chapters in their lives in 2021, and I wish Brandi and Rowan much joy in the coming years.

For my friends in Ontario and London, we have elections coming up in 2022 and I think the pandemic has shown us who we cannot trust to have our best interests at heart. Let's vote accordingly!

Vote Cedric!

My friend "Kevin" amazes me on a regular basis - he's walked through a few fires in his lifetime and has upended his world in order to support his family. We should all be so lucky to have someone like him in our life.

Here's to finding our way out of the darkness in 2022 - wear a mask, wash your hands, keep your distance and get the damn vaccine!



Tuesday 5 October 2021

A Christmas Play Story

I grew up in a very small town in northern Ontario that had a dominantly Francophone population. While there were several French Catholic grade schools, there was only the one small English Catholic school.  And a few people ended up in classes being taught by a parent.

Such was the case for Michael Kuiack, who was in my class for all the years I spent at St. Patrick's School from grades one through six. Michael's mom, Rita, was our teacher in grade five.

Today is Teacher's Day, and I wanted to write this story down for a couple of reasons, chief of them being the fact that Michael died late last year, and I wanted to share this remembrance of my childhood friend with his family. And I want to highlight the impact that teachers have on our lives - it's 51 years later and I still remember this vividly.

Our small school had an annual Christmas pageant held in our gymnasium, the whole school attended and parents were invited. Each class prepared something to present, and in 1970, the grade 5 class would present a short skit.

Four students were required for the skit:  3 girls and 1 boy.

It was Michael's misfortune that his mother cast him in the only male role!

The skit was about a young widower whose wife died at Christmas and he had lost his faith and will to live. The story was told by the couple's maid to her friend (Miss Anybody). Susie Kosowan played the wife, Cathy Torok was the maid, I was the friend.

The play was about how the young man got over his wife's death and found his joy for life again. It ended with him arriving home to find his maid chatting with her friend. 

I still remember exactly what was supposed to happen; Michael was supposed to say to me "Too bad that isn't mistletoe, isn't it, Miss Anybody? Oh, well... " And he was to kiss me on the cheek.

We were 10 - Michael was refusing to cooperate. "I'm not kissing any girl" he declared during rehearsals.

Mrs. Kuiack wasn't having it. "Oh, he'll be fine during the performance," she said to me, "that's why I picked him; I'm his mother, he has to do as I say."

Come the day of the performance, a packed auditorium settled in to watch their children and classmates.

Our little skit went well, with Cathy and I doing most of the dialogue, and then Michael's character bursts through the door at the end. "Too bad that isn't mistletoe, isn't it, Miss Anybody?", he said, and then proceeded to shake hands with me vigorously, instead of kissing me on the cheek.

The girl cooties were thus successfully avoided!

😊

I remember Michael with a shock of blond hair, a shy, crooked smile, and kind brown eyes. The photographs that his sister Denise shared online following his passing indicate that he kept that smile.

This little play lit an acting bug in me that I spent years pursuing as an adult performing in musical theatre in Toronto in the late 80s and early 90s. You never know how a teacher will shape your life.

And I hope this reminiscence brings a smile to the faces of the Kuiack Family.



Monday 4 November 2019

Ahead by a century....

In 2108, when I was still president of my community association, I had the incredible honour of presiding over a ceremony to rededicate a World War I monument in my neighbourhood. With the help of my uncle, retired Captain R.T. Walsh of the Royal Canadian Regiment, my MPP, Terence Kernaghan, and my then-incoming councillor, Arielle Kayabaga, members of the community gathered on a rainy Saturday to pay tribute to the students of the long-since-gone Simcoe Street School who perished in The Great War.

These are the remarks I gave at the close of the event. I am proud of them and wanted them to be out here for others to read.


They called it “the war to end all wars”. How naïve that seems today.

But 100 years ago, people around the world probably felt that HG Wells was right in calling it that. Surely humanity had learned from the carnage, and bloodshed, and self-destructive tendencies that had brought us to such a place.

Sadly, it was not to be so. And in the century that has followed, hundreds of thousands of more young men – for it is still mostly young men – have gone to wars around the world, and not returned, just as these young men did not return.

The footprints imprinted in this concrete remind us that they left the schoolyard where they once played, the neighbourhood where they grew up, their city, and province, to fight for King and country, only to lose their lives on battlefields in France or Belgium or in hospitals in England.

Today, we honour their memory, and the memories of the millions of others who fell, as they hoped to bring order, peace and prosperity to a world of rapid changes. Even a century later, our lives have been shaped by the sacrifice of these men. I am reminded of the words engraved on the Soldiers’ Tower at Hart House at the University of Toronto. Every time I walked beneath the arch, I stopped to read these words of Pericles great funeral oration:

Their story is graven, not only on stone over their native earth, but lives on, far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other mens’ lives.

Thank you for your time today.



Monday 4 June 2018

"I dream things that never were...."

After years of planning and saving, our big adventure was upon us on June 5, 1968 - we were going to Ireland with our mom, to visit the country of her birth, and meet our great-grandmother!

I'd like to tell you that the trip went well, but I suffered from incredible motion sickness as a child (well into adulthood, to be honest), and I had a major freak-out at the sight of the plane that was taking us from Toronto to London (England). The small airport in my northern home town could only accept propeller planes, and I was terrified of this jet with no visible means of lifting us into the air. I suspect that I cried and threw up for at least the first couple of hours of the overnight flight, much to the distress of those around me.

The Aer Lingus flight from London to Dublin was much easier for me as the plane had propellers. It was also packed with Irish Americans heading home for visits with family, just as we were. The sky was blue, the sun shone, it was a perfect morning, and we had just cleared the British coast when the pilot made an announcement.

Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

The happy conversations turned instantly to sobs, grownups around me, women and men alike, were crying uncontrollably.

Even the 7-year-old me was aware of who Bobby Kennedy was. He was, after all, on the news nearly every night of the week, and usually on the cover of The Toronto Star, too! Yes, I did read the paper. No, my parents never stopped me. They had a subscription and it was delivered to the magazine shop in town late every afternoon, where dad would pick it up on his way home. I've mentioned in previous blog posts how I credit this habit with my success at trivia.

I've talked about this in a previous post:

http://labellatestarossa.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-do-you-make-sense-of-senseless.html

and to this day, I remain inspired by the Kennedys and their vision for the world.

"Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not?"
     Senator Ted Kennedy's eulogy for his brother

Wednesday 14 March 2018

Eulogy

My aunt, Elizabeth Walsh, died on Tuesday, March 6, 2018, leaving behind a large grieving family headed by her daughter, Cindy, and husband Roger Scott. Our family will not be the same without her.

Here is the eulogy I presented at her celebration of life service:


My aunt was one of those people with a rare gift - she could walk into any room and turn it into an instant party just by her presence. Her personality was as big as her smile and bright as her hair and it makes us feel her loss that much more keenly.

After my sister and I moved to Toronto, my aunt became a second mother to us. The best time was our birthday weekend, as our birthdays are less than a week apart. Aunt Liz treated us to lunch, and the restaurants got increasingly fancier as we got older. For my 18th birthday, she took me to the old Silver Rail on Yonge Street for my first grown-up drink.

Having worked as a cocktail waitress for years, she was unfailingly polite and kind to servers and taught us to be the same way. To this day, Melanie and I can go out and have wait staff tell us how we made their day by being their best customers.

Many years later, I was able to repay the favour; I somehow got tickets to see Swan Lake by the National Ballet on Aunt Liz's birthday and there was no question I would be taking her. We went out for Mexican and margaritas and then across the street to see the timeless story of the swan queen. We both loved it! Several years later, she was my date to a Placido Domingo concert - and we both adored that!

It's a rare and precious thing to have a second chance at love - but Aunt Liz and Uncle Roger are proof of the saying that love is lovelier the second time around. Their devotion to each other was tested in recent years due to illness, but it held fast. Uncle Roger, I said this to you on the weekend, but I'll repeat it now with a room full of witnesses - you're stuck with us.

My Wild Irish Clan has lost the brightest star in the constellation, but she will always be a part of us.

I then read the poem "Song of the Star" by the American writer Suzy Kassem.