Aroma in the Gloamin'

Aroma in the Gloamin'

Here’s a thing. It’s very hard to know if you smell bad. 

 

But if you were God at 8:45 this morning and looked down from heaven, you would have seen me standing in a parking lot bending and twisting and waving my arms like one of those inflatable giant creatures that secondhand car dealers use to attract customers.

I was trying to see if I stank.

I could smell skunk alright; but I didn’t know if it was just “in the air” or coming from me. And you’re correct. I would not be writing this if answer was not door number two. (Door number two. That’s my senior-kindergarten-level pun about the aroma.)

Ten hours ago, I was about 50 minutes north of Winnipeg in the parking lot of the headquarters of Ducks Unlimited (DU), the conservation group my friend Nigel Simms is the National Manager of Communications and Marketing of.

I wasn’t there to go skunk hunting.

In addition to a lot of other things, Nigel and his team publish a lovely magazine called The Conservator, and they’re constantly trying to make things better. Because I’ve got some 30 years in publishing, Nigel reckoned I might have something to contribute. He invited me out for a look.

Nigel works in one of the neatest buildings ever. The spectacular Oak Hammock Marsh Interpretive Centre is one third-research lab, one-third eco-tourist attraction; and 33-percent corporate HQ. There’s a small restaurant and a big performance

GOOSE GOOSE DUCK!: The place is alive with crittters. 

theatre, and it all sits on a huge restored prairie marsh alive with all manner of wildlife: Ducks; herons, beavers, geese, muskrat, and, of course, skunks.

That is where I would be doing my thing as The Consultant. From Toronto.

Meantime, Nigel lives near the heart of Winnipeg. I stayed in the Norwood Hotel, near his place.

Tuesday and then again this morning, he picked me up at the hotel to come to work, and because they can, his part-rottweiler-part-shepherd mutts Quinn and Keikho came along to spend their days at the office.

Both days, before work began, we took the dogs for a walk around the DU swamp--dog Nirvana, really.

As they romped, Nigel and I walked, talked about publishing and slapped ourselves repeatedly, fighting off huge Manitoba mosquitoes and ticks. In vain.

MY EYE they don't bite. My cheek they did. 

First day, the only truly exciting part was when Quinn found and started playing with an old moose skull.

But second morning—today—when the walkabout was done, we smelled the smell. We hadn’t seen a skunk; but still.

I sniffed me. Nigel sniffed the dogs. Then Nigel sniffed me again.

This did not look good.  The Consultant from Toronto had a meeting in 15 minutes.

We decided the smell was not on us, it was just in the air.

We entered the lobby.

The first staff member we met pulled  the top part of her shirt up over the nose. Another just looked shocked. In a strange unprecedented sequence of events, the scent had followed the dogs, instead of vice versa.   

THREE LUCKY DUCKS at  play, from left, Nigel, Keikho and Quinn or the other way around.

We sniffed Kiekho and Quinn again. It was strong.  They’d obviously been sprayed. Not enough that little squiggly cartoon lines rose above them, but they were pretty putrid.

Nigel decided that no way could the dogs stay on the premises, and to keep them in his truck all day would be inhumane. He would get them home and he could work the rest of the day from there.

We walked out to the parking lot; he loaded the dogs, and headed to Winnipeg.

I re-entered the office. The two women at reception agreed it was too hard to tell if what they smelled was the leftover from the dog or me. I rounded a corner and met the affable (and honest) Conservator editor Leigh Patterson and staff writer Ashley Lewis.

They told me something or some one smelled really bad.

One of the big meetings I had flown to Winnipeg for was supposed to begin shortly. (I thought of canceling; if only because I could say I was pulling rank—get it?)  

But really, at that moment, running out the door and throwing myself into the swamp seemed like the most viable option.

Then appeared a Superhero: Bill Howard, the facilities staff member responsible for opening up the place every morning.  

“What we need is Aromx," he said, coolly.

I’d never heard of it and asked him if it was like Dustbane, the mystery cleaning substance school janitors used to haul out every time a kid barfed.

“Yeah good old Dustbane,” he said. “Aromx’s really powerful. You have to mix it with water.”

“I think,” Bill said, “I know where there’s some.”

Me: “If not, we’ll need tomato juice.” Bill told me I’d have to go to the cafeteria for that. 

I followed him out to a storage room where there, in the second drawer he looked, stood a spray bottle of Aromx. Like a mom squirting sunblock on her senior-kindergarden son headed to the beach, Bill  proceeded to spray up one of my legs and then down the other. Then, for good measure, my shoes.

Aromx, turns out, is an industrial-strength odor-eater. Febreze on steroids.

I couldn’t smell skunk any more. Neither could my new bff  Bill.

I re-entered the office area. Approached the reception desk. Walked past once and no shirts were hoisted over noses.

I, literally, passed a sniff test. 


(P.S. Another critter I picked up at DU? An earworm. It's where the title of this blog comes from. And with that... I share.)

My Sisters. Oh Brother.

My four sisters Charlene, Norma, Mary, and Bertholde are wonderful generous adults, with professional designations and they all lead rich interesting lives. Charlene's in Little Current, Ontario, and the other three are in Sudbury, where we all grew up.

Mary has several university degrees in both official languages. Bertholde runs a successful counselling business. Charlene and Norma are retired from nursing and have three fantastic kids each.   

ACCORDING TO CHATELAINE MAGAZINE, I WAS RAISED IN
A HOUSE FULL OF BOTHERLY LOVE.

In other words, my sisters present as normal.

However.

All you have to know is, as my children were growing up, their nickname for their beloved aunt Mary Carter (BSc, M.Ed.) was “Auntie Dumb Bunny.”

For another example, a few years ago, after a long and selfless career as an RN, Charlene decided to take a break from helping the sick and landed a retail job in a gift shop near her home in Little Current, ON. It was called the “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

I remember phoning. 

This was her, answering: “Cuckoo’s Nest. Charlene speaking.”

I thought: “Took a while, but she’s made it home.”

I love my sisters with all my heart but, you know, sometimes……  

Take tomorrow for example.

Tomorrow, I’m going to interview one of my favourite writers—Linwood Barclay.  I was pretty pleased with myself when I texted Charlene about tomorrow’s meeting, and she got back to me with, “I love his books!”  

The interview is for InBetween Magazine, which is aimed at parents of teenagers, and when you read the next issue, you’ll see why Mr. Barclay is an apt subject for InBetween.

Meantime, right in the middle of the intersection where Mr. Barclay’s books meet my interests, there’s some really bizarre stuff going on and it somehow involves my grounded-seeming sisters.

Mr. Barclay writes thrillers. And in many thrillers, there’s a pattern. Regular life in a small town is interrupted when, say, a little kid goes missing, and soon dozens of citizens get caught in a growing swamp of troubles and 290 pages later, everything comes to a climax involving in a burning dynamite factory,  a boat chase or a shootout in an abandoned factory.  The End.

It’s not that thrillers are simple. Quite the opposite. A decent thriller, by Linwood Barclay, Michael Connelly, Dan Brown or Stephen King, is full of mysterious magnetism.  I wish I had an ounce of those guys' talent. To make a 21^st-century book reader want to turn a page to see what happens next borders on the miraculous. The fact that I—and my sisters—get addicted to these books is proof of that magic.

But back to the cuckoo’s nest.

WE'LL CALL THE CLINIC "THE LINWOOD."

Norma and Bertholde, both of whom have tons of admiration for Mr. Barclay, want me to ask him this: What about post-traumatic stress disorder?

All those fictional characters:  How are they expected to go back to their everyday lives after the book ends?

   

Out here in the real world, most of us have never seen a decent car crash. Really. Who gets to witness a murder?

But in a thriller? A small-town mayor who used to work for the phone company turns psycho, he offs a few locals, and ultimately gets torn to pieces by a high-powered blade in the darkness of an old sawmill milliseconds before the single mom’s baby gets saved by the handsome retired cop. And a bunch of locals are on hand to see it happen.

A character might start the story as an elementary school teacher but by the time the book ends, the teacher has had a front-row seat watching machine-gun-wielding FBI agents chase a malevolent piano-playing physician-turned murderer up a half-erected skyscraper until he falls to his death.  Right before the teacher’s eyes.

“Think of the PTSD!” argue my (whacked) sisters.

According to Bertholde and Norma, when I meet Linwood Barclay, I am to tell him that they are planning to open a PTSD clinic specifically for all those characters and bit-part-players from thriller novels who need counselling after the books end. 

They are planning a PTSD hospital for fictional characters. Ladies and gentlemen? My sisters.

Bertholde wants to be Executive Director and Norma the Clinical Director.  I think Charlene should be on reception. Mary can do it all in French.

Two more things. It was actually me who came up with the PTSD idea. The fact that Norma and Bertholde thought it was a good one is the scary part.

Which reminds me. Just the other day, I mentioned to my brother Tom that if he ever wondered why our father liked a little nip every now and then, just remember; Dad had a whack of sisters, too.

A Badly Kept Secret Formula For Excellent Luck

Counting the dead ones, I have 43 first cousins, 27 aunts and uncles (including spouses), 15 nephews and nieces, five sisters, four brothers, two daughters, one son, a grandchild, and wife.

While the vast majority of my relatives are around Ontario, I’ve got family in both Vancouver and Halifax.

Our family: There's at least one of everything.

Among us? There are teachers, nuns, doctors, nurses, full-time patients and part-time malingerers. We have university researchers, high-school dropouts, civil servants, retired miners and a few surprisingly successful business types. There's an undertaker, several social workers and a downtown-Toronto paramedic.

We’ve got labour as well as management. Trudeau supporters and anarchists.  Bankers. Social-welfare-cheque getters.

Many of my relatives are devout Catholics; quite a few others are atheists. I’m guessing most are somewhere in between.

We have artists like my sister Norma and people like me who, if a pistol-wielding crazy man came in here right this minute demanding I draw a stick man to save my life, this column would never get finished because I would be dead. 

Speaking of, some of my relatives hunt. Others we couldn’t let near a firearm because they would not know which end of the gun gets pointed away from you. 

There’s cat people and dog people.

Some members of my family have served time in the armed forces; others have just plain served time.

 Tom and Huena and Grandson number something: Rich with family indeed.

Quite a number of my relatives—especially on my mother’s side—play the guitar or piano or fiddle. My niece Patricia has one of the most beautiful singing voices you’ve ever heard.

Others have ears so tin you could use them to catch pike.

Some enjoy great marriages; others have not-so-write-home-aboutable relationships; lots knew better than to try.

Many of my relatives and I could name names sit around all day doing nothing at all.

We have calloused-handed farmers and lazy-bone writers.

We have smokers, drinkers, abstainers and more than a 2006 Dodge Caravan load of us are in denial.

As my late father Tom liked to point out, we can’t go around criticizing the neighbours because there aren’t many things—good or bad—that at least one person in our family hasn’t gotten up to.  

I’m pretty sure I would trust all of those people I’ve mentioned with my ATM card and PIN number even though  I have a feeling “PIN Number” is a tautology, like “NDP party” because the "P" in "NDP" stands for “party”. Does “Pin Number really mean “Personal Identification Number Number? Some of my relatives love talking about stuff like that; others have lives. But I’m getting off topic.    

I’m confident that if I ever need a place to stay or a few bucks to tide me over, any of the above folks would be good for it, at least for a day or two.

Lucky, huh?

When I was a kid, I remember asking my dad if we were rich. His stock-answer was, “We’re rich in family.” At the time, I believed it was his way of saying, “’Actually,’ Peter, ‘No.’”

I later learned he was telling the truth.

When my mom Huena was old and near death, she used to brag that all the little old ladies on her street were jealous because she had so much family around.  

Then one day, I thought: “How could she know a thing like that? Did one of the little old ladies tell her?  Or maybe she overheard them whispering. Did she forget for the moment that she was almost doorknob deaf?”

The facts didn’t matter. If you knew Huena, you understood: So what if the women never actually said they were jealous?  Mom knew they should be.   

One last quirk:  Believe it or not, some of my relatives will knowingly walk under a ladder. Can you imagine? These non-superstitious types do not freak out if a bird flies into a house, even though that’s a sure sign that somebody’s going to die.

But I—and my sister Charlene, too, I think—inherited the superstition gene from mom.

My wife says I’m the most superstitious person she’s ever met. She also thinks I’m the luckiest guy on the planet.   

To her I say, “do the math.”

Know why they call handwriting cursive? It makes you swear.

The hand-written envelope arrived last Tuesday, in the regular mail, addressed to my wife Helena.

Demonic possession was something I could not rule out.

It was a smallish envelope, maybe 3x4 in., and up in the top right corner, a Canadian postage stamp.

The only other clue hinting at where the letter came from was the handwriting.

And it was mine.

My own messy personal scrawl, with funny little swirls and indecipherable strokes, stared at me from the middle of the envelope.

It was like seeing my own name appear on call display.

But I sure hadn't written no stinkin' letter to my wife.

Helena wasn’t home at the time but our friends Chrissie and her daughter Gwyn were visiting. Just to be sure I wasn't completely nuts,  I went to the kitchen, found some paper and a pen and wrote, as naturally as I could, Helena’s name and our address.

I showed Chrissie and Gwyn, asking, "would you say that the same person produced these two addresses?"

They both answered yes.

Here’s where my brain went next:

"I. Don't. Like. This. One. Little Bit."

I did a quick mental inventory of my family and close friends. None have handwriting like mine.

After that? The lamest grasp at the thinnest straw in the history of mystery solving.

I know a guy named Patrick Flynn who used to analyze handwriting professionally. He proved to me how people with similar penmanship share personality traits.

(Patrick was also a devout Catholic. I once asked him what Jesus’ handwriting would be like.  Pat said he could only guess but was pretty confident Jesus’s signature would start with a very big first initial, the  sign of a super-huge ego. My signature’s like that too: A big P followed by a long squiggle. But I digress.)

Here went my next theory: One of  Helena's closest buddies is named Louise Hamel. I don't recall ever seeing Louise's handwriting so it could be like mine. And I like Louise a lot and who wouldn't want to share some of her traits? She’s generous to a fault, creative, and well-travelled. She’s brilliant and funny and kind. And hey! We both like Helena.

Louise's son is getting married and I knew Louise was throwing a shower this weekend. And my phantom envelope was the kind you might send an RSVP in.  If my theory was right, maybe this envelope carried a little reminder from Louise. 

Told you it was lame.

Plus, Louise is extremely hard-working, focused when need be, well-organized, health-conscious and an excellent manager..

Ixnay on ouiseLay.

Finally, I was forced to move into what I'm calling my Stephen King-sized theory, a place I didn't really want to go.

What if, I asked myself,  I had actually written the letter to my wife? But forgot.

What if—in the middle of some dark night  that I’ve buried in the abyss of my subconscious—an evil Mr. Peter Hyde for some reason decided to jot down a few choice words aimed at, rather, meant for, the missus.

Who knows what a person might do in his sleep?

Or after, maybe having his drink spiked?

Did I mention that the envelope was sealed?  

My next question: "What would be the harm in the contents of this envelope never seeing the light of day? Heck all kinds of stuff goes missing around this house."

Before I made up my mind, Helena arrived home. We had agreed to attend a sort of concert and it was time to leave the house.

I slipped the nasty letter into my jacket pocket and we climbed aboard my motorbike for a quick ride downtown.

Our friend the professional violist  Douglas Perry had invited us to a dress rehearsal of the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan which is something neither of us had ever experienced. 

The performance was mystical and unpredictable. It was also the perfect eerie background music for the mystery that played on in my brain. (Click here. Let the Gamelan provide the soundtrack for the rest of this story.)

After the show and back on the bike. I suddenly remembered that when she's riding,  Helena’s hands often find their way into my jacket pockets. (We’ve been married a long time. It’s for convenience and warmth.)

I pulled over, grabbed the envelope  and made a pre-emptive strike.

“Ha ha!” I laughed, adding, “This arrived for you today. Ha ha! Look how similar the handwriting is to mine. Isn't that silly?"

She agreed. And opened the letter.

What she said next is exactly what I hoped she would not say next.

“You did write this."

“It’s a thank-you card. From Glenda!”

It all came back to me. 

A few weeks earlier, I attended a surprise party in Sudbury for my cousin Glenda.

As a gift for Glenda, my sister Mary purchased a stack of thank-you cards, stamped envelopes, and asked each arriving guest, if they were leaving a gift, to write their names and addresses on an envelope, making it very easy for Glenda to send out thank yous.

I had forgotten all about Mary’s kind gesture. And I'm sure I'll remember it forever.

But I will go to my grave wondering if a version of the  following conversation didn't take place somewhere.

“Darling! Before you open that! I was high when I wrote it and didn’t mean a word of it! Please!  I'll just make it simple and go now."  

Or maybe it's just me.

She Coaxes the Blues Out of the Room, Mayme

"I’m ready to go, Pete,” my cousin Mayme Millar told me yesterday, just around suppertime. “I’m ready to see Mom and Dad and Grandma and Leona and everybody else.

 Mayme on a visit to San Fransisco's Pier 39:
Comments her big sister Nancy:
 "My sister is just too good and always has been.
 I wish I were like her." 

"In fact, I think I know more people on the other side.”

And then she laughed.

Mayme’s 64^th birthday is this coming Friday. Although she’d like to make it to her birthday, she might not.  But, she says, that would be okay, too.

About a decade ago, doctors told Mayme she had very serious cancer. Ever since, she says, she knew the end was just around the corner. This morning she told me that every day since her diagnosis has been a gift.

Mayme remains with her husband Grant at their home in Crystal Beach, just a few minutes west of downtown Ottawa. Their daughter Jessa, 28, lives in the capital and their 30-year-old chef son Peter was at home with his folks when I visited today.

Exactly two days ago we received a surprise email from Mayme’s sister Nancy.  Mayme was fading fast, Nancy wrote.  I hadn’t seen her in a few years, but in a family like ours, time doesn’t matter. “You have to go,” my wife Helena said.

I arrived in Crystal Beach mid-afternoon Monday and that’s when Mayme told me she’s ready to see her folks again.

Mayme’s mom, Inez, was my late father’s youngest sister. Get this: Inez died in 1965, on her 43^rd birthday.  Mayme was just 13. Nancy was 14. They had three younger brothers, Mike, Pat, and Joe, and another sister, Marjorie, my age.

Six kids under 15. That’s what their father Walter Scott was left to take care of.

I was eight. An eight-year-old wouldn’t have the foggiest how hard that life would have been.  All I knew was that whenever we visited the Scotts at their place in the country, I was guaranteed a good – and in many ways—educational—time.

Maybe because they were country cousins; or maybe because they had to grow up fast. But Mayme and her brothers and sisters always seemed to know stuff I was completely in the dark about. Cars, motors, animals, guns, girls, the works.

Once when we were little the three Scott boys and I were poking around an old pick-up truck on a property next to theirs. One of them told me to check under the truck so I’d see goslings. Not having any idea what I was supposed to be looking at, I commented “cool” and then reported the fact to my dad, later. The truck was no only blue and in good shape, it came with goslings. Whatever they were.

I thought "goslings" were part of the truck engine

Two years after their mom died, 16-year-old Mayme was in a near-fatal car accident.  I’m fairly certain she never completely recovered from the injuries.

These days, knowing how much money they didn’t have and how many foundation-shaking problems can arise with a family of six teenagers crammed into a small house—never mind that one of them almost died in a car crash—I shake  my head in awe of their resilience.

People who make it through such times are my heroes.

Not only that, but Mayme’s entire family has always been super good to me.

When I travelled from Sudbury to attend Carleton University in Ottawa, Nancy and her husband Don, Mayme, Grant, Mike, Pat, Marj, Joe, their spouses and eventually their kids were my second family. They fed, watered, and entertained me. They kept secrets and helped me find my way out of trouble.

Their kitchens were always open or, if I needed a place to crash, they offered up a couch.  

I also really really love the fact that Mayme and Grant chose for their handsome son the elegant handle Peter. If you ever want to win a relative’s heart for life, dare to give one of your kids that person’s name.

Here’s an aside I’ll never forget. The second-last time I visited Mayme’s homestead in Fallowfield, it was for some other family gathering and I drove out to St. Patrick’s Church, which is just up the road from where the Scott kids were raised.  In Irish Catholic families like ours, the local parish is as much a part of the household as your kitchen. And among Walter’s parish jobs was tending the parish cemetery. Which is where he was when I arrived.

I drove to the graveyard, got out of the car, and saw two men standing among the tombstones. One was Walter, who introduced me as his nephew, from Toronto. 

“Toronto, huh?” the guy says, “We just buried a guy from there.”

I like people who take death in stride. As if it’s part of life.  

While I was visiting Mayme yesterday and today, she had a parade of visitors and phone calls, so much so that Grant now acts as her fulltime personal assistant. Between carefully feeding her ice water, adjusting the bed, offering food and  words of encouragement, he greets  and provides full detailed reports to the various health-care and personal-care aides who drop in to check on Mayme’s well-being.

Grant is also manning a carefully scripted calendar to keep Mayme from being overwhelmed by visitors.  And with such nonchalance!  It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where two devils in hell are standing over a guy shovelling coal and whistling. One devil says to the other: “You know we're just not reaching that guy.”

A little light reading
 at Grandma Carter's place

When I think about it, it was wasn’t only Mayme, Grant, Peter, Nancy and the rest of them made saying goodbye far easier than I expected.  All of us have grown up in a very specific culture that is just plain comfortable around the whole death thing.  

Religion helps to be sure, but so does that fact that Mayme and I were able to laugh—yes laugh, yesterday—about the fact that our Grandmother Carter had a book called  “Irish Wake Amusements" on her living room coffee table.

And after we finished laughing, I told her I had to head back to Toronto.

So we gave each other a rib-threatening hug and a kiss on the cheek. Our last conversation went as follows.

Me: “Mayme, you’ve always been a role model for me.”

Her: “You’ve been a role model for me, Pete. I love you.”

Me: “I love you too, Mayme. Sweet dreams.”

Us: “Goodbye.”

The Campaign Starts Here!

Saint Alexander Graham Bell.

It sounds like it’s already a thing, doesn’t’ it?

Saint Alexander Graham Bell. What a terrific name for a new Catholic Elementary School.

Saint Alexander Graham Bell, the Patron Saint of Social Media.

They could build the Saint Alexander Graham Bell Shrine on the shores of Cape Breton’s Bras d’Or Lake, where he died in 1922.  (Bras d’Or. Isn’t that the prettiest lake name ever?)  

An Alexander Graham Bell statue sure beats that “Mother Canada” monstrosity that was planned for just up the road. Plus guys like me, when they visited, could make the following Dad joke to their kids:  “Know why there’s a statue to the inventor of the telephone? Because the first thing lots of people say when they pick up the receiver is, ‘Stat you?’”

I should mention that Alexander Graham Bell is not really a saint. Yet.

We're just starting to work on it.

And though it's a terrific notion, I can't take credit. My late mom Huena said--with some regularity--that if the Vatican's looking for new saints, Bell would be a terrific first-round draft choice. (Not her words but her idea.)

  

“In order to be a saint you have to perform miracles,” Huena used to say, adding "Show me something more miraculous than the telephone.”

Huena died in 2005. On Valentine’s Day.

But this past Wednesday evening, I was at a meeting of the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors and talking to my fellow editors Allan Britnell and D.B. Scott.  I mentioned how much better the world is because of things like Facebook and added that my mom always felt Bell should be made a saint.

D.B. just sort of lit up at the thought.

“So the campaign to canonize Alexander Graham Bell starts now!” he said, and we toasted the notion.   

And because it was my mom who thought of it, Mother’s Day is the ideal time to get the wheels moving. I’m not sure how to start, it’ll probably involve contacting the Vatican.  

You can bet when I do get the Holy See’s attention, I’ll be like: “BTW Pope Francis?  I think you should know Huena’s second name was Frances. My Dad was Thomas Francis. My daughter is Ev Frances. I’m Peter Frances. I used to have the 'is' version until the passport office saw that my passport and birth certificate had two different spellings so I had to go one way or the other. Just thought you should know. We're big on Francis'”)  

If anybody has any ideas how to proceed, please send them my way.

But back to Huena and Alexander Graham.

First let's agree. The telephone has of late indeed morphed into a computer. So when I'm talking "phones" I'm talking Skype and everything else. At heart, it’s all still a phone.  And it’s still miraculous.

Phones reunite families. They keep parents from freaking out when the kids are late coming home. Or travelling in, like, Cambodia.  Phones warn you when bad weather’s coming.  Or when a half-drunk uncle is on his way over to visit.  

Excellent jokes get phoned around.  News of really great sales gets passed along. New babies arriving and cousins being sprung from jail. Phones make it possible to phone in sick. 

I would argue that phones help avert war.  (They’ve certainly provided great material for Bob Newhart.)

You get the picture.

If a saint needs a mortal champion—or earthly cheerleader type—I nominate my mom. She excelled at phone.

If you could have visited her in the later stages of her life, you would have seen what I’m talking about.

Huena had nine brothers and sisters, 10 kids, a heck of a lot of grand and great grandchildren and she stayed in touch with old friends. Even though she was pretty much housebound in the last few years, she never once stopped being a mom, aunt, sister, friend, grandma, nurse, social worker or alibi provider.  

I wish somebody had video’d Huena when she was doing her phone thing.  From morning until bedtime, she sat in her rocking chair and played the phone like one of those switchboard operators in an old Charlie Chaplin movie.

She’d get word about an ailing cousin in Halifax and somehow pass the message to all the relatives who needed to know in Niagara Falls. Then she’d hear about a son’s rent increase in Toronto and after making sure he still had enough to get by she’d pass the news along to a daughter in Little Current, who told her about a five-year-old hockey-playing grandson’s first ever two-minute penalty.  If, say, an FLQ bomb went off in downtown Montreal, Huena would know in moments whether her sister’s son Bert was anywhere near the scene and when she found out he was safe she would tell her world about it. 

We  didn’t need CNN we had Huena.

If she were still alive she would be on Facebook 24/7. She’d burn up Twitter. InstaGram would be a great Twitter handle for her. Get it? Gram? Never mind.

Huena also had a way of sculpting every single story so as to elicit the most joy or least distress to the listener, depending on their needs or her intention. Everything I know about magazine editing I learned from Huena.

Thanks to the phone, Huena never missed a thing.  And she loathed missing out. She was, after all, a card-carrying party animal. It said so right in the newspaper. “Huena loved parties and God,” her obituary read.

I bet she hates being dead.

I sure wish she weren’t.

Meantime, I’m starting my Saint Alexander Graham Bell campaign. 

And it just occured to me. If the Pope Francis is going to be handing out sainthoods, I might as nominate Huena Frances while I'm at it. What the hell.

I’ll keep you posted.

A Passover Story, as Told By Pete The Clown

The more I think about it, the bigger this coincidence gets.

Just moments ago, I was talking on Facebook with a young woman who I met in person just once before in my life—more than 30 years have passed. And the circumstances of that last meeting are so close to the situation we're in this minute, it's almost mystical. This story begs to be told.

Her name? Adrienne Ziegler-Shulman.

I met her back in the last century, when I was in university, after a sunny mid-April Friday afternoon like today at her family home in Thornhill, ON., when I showed up by surprise, with her older brother Stuart.

Stuart was one of my housemates in Ottawa, and earlier that Friday, I was taking in the Spring sun on the front porch when he emerged carrying a small satchel. He was, he told me, heading home for Passover.

I’d known Stuart mostly as a quiet very funny smart guy and one of the reasons I thought he was so cool was that his soft-spoken nature  cloaked a surprising anarchistic streak; something that said “I’m up for anything, at least once.” Seconds after he told me where he was going, he added, “Wanna come?”

Passover. That was sure something I had absolutely zero experience with.

I said “yeah!” And not packing much more than maybe a pair of socks, we headed to the Greyhound Station for a long’s evening ride to North York, just outside Toronto. 

From there, we went to what I thought was an extremely swanky family home in Thornhill and a mom--who despite neither having met me nor been warned of my arrival--greeted me like a loving aunt; with open arms and a late-night snack.  I immediately felt at home. 

The next 24 hours was life-changing and I am not exaggerating.

Up to that point in my life, I knew precious little about The Holocaust. Or Jewish history.  True fact.

But after Passover at Stuart’s? Phew!

We arrived late Friday and woke up early Saturday. And all day long, it seemed people kept showing up from who knew where. The house got very noisy.  Uncles –I remember one gentle man who ran a souvenir shop in Niagara Falls—aunts, and cousins seemed to invade and they each of them talked to me as if I were a welcome in-law or something.

Several of the older folks bore concentration-camp tattoos. And despite having to catch up with relatives and help with chores, each took time to patiently explain to me how lives had been devastated by the war; about how other people suffered, and—this part is key-- how families, faith and strength helped them through.

Years earlier, I had read Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning”, a holocaust-based story about the triumph of the human spirit under horrifying adversity, but until my weekend at Stuart's it remained pretty academic. 

At the Ziegler home, I could put real human faces to such heroism.

I once heard a management consultant –or maybe it was a Facebook Post—that was like, “People might forget what you say to them but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

The Ziegler family made me feel like I was a visiting dignitary. I left their home stronger; with even more faith in the human spirit.     

And while it’s not my job to share the Ziegler family stories, you can read one of them here. It’s an amazing story about Stu and Adrienne's mom Miriam’s historic return to Auschwitz on the 70^th anniversary of liberation.  

Also very important to this blog: I recall laughing as much as not laughing that weekend.  

The Zieglers clearly believe laughter is as essential for life as water.

 Also, I’d come from Ottawa in jeans and a t-shirt. Passover Seder is something you dress up for.

So the morning of the feast, I went downtown to borrow dress clothes off some hippie friends and I wound up in a yellowish plaid suit belonging  to a guy who, although generous, was shorter and wider than me. I looked like a cartoonist’s version of a used-car-selling clown.  Plus I had long greasy hair and the kippah (the little hat) kept slipping off.

Adrienne just told me via Facebook, that she remembers the suit, too. But she was raised polite. She said, “you felt a bit awkward.”

 “You were also,” she reminded me, “a bit blown away at how many leftovers my mom insisted on sending you back to Ottawa with.”

Of course there was lots of food. That's why they call it a feast.  And most of it consisted of delights I’d never eaten before, like gefilte fish and little sandwiches full of horseradish.

Finally, Adrienne informed me today, as I type this blog, her heroic (my adjective) mom Miriam is “cooking up a storm and her food is still delicious.”

My thoughts will be with them as they sit down for Passover this weekend.

Being in that family’s presence was a privilege I’ll boast about until I’m too old to blog.