In a heartbeat, my small world turned upside-down. My little sister, age two, was gone, whisked away to the hospital with the impetigo that covered her with ugly itchy oozy sores. Nothing was the same.

I was six. I’d pined for a little sister, but she’d turned from a helpless baby into an adorable toddler. Karen, or Kebbie as we called her, had an impish grin. She was full of beans, always up to something mischievous. She was small and cute. I was bigger and not nearly as funny or cuddly or charming.

She had sleek chestnut braids hanging down her back. My hair was an untameable brillo pad. Everyone loved Kebbie: my mother, my father, my Bubby and Zaide. I hadn’t been a good big sister. I was mean. I teased her. I refused to play with her. But she still adored me. Looked up to me. And then she was gone.

We couldn’t visit because she was contagious. We could only stand on the lawn outside the hospital many floors below her room and wait for the nurse to bring her to the high-up window. The nurse would hold her up to the glass to see the tiny specks of us down below. We would crane our necks and wave. We’d put on brave smiles for her. She’d wave back with her tiny hand. We could hardly see her but we knew she was crying. I was crying too.

Our apartment got too quiet. I’d walk from one room to the next, looking for her. I’d pick up one of her books or toys or her soother and hold it, turning it over in my hand, breathing it in to find her smell. I’d open the dresser drawers in our bedroom to find her small T-shirts and overalls and socks and hold them. When I went to school I’d almost forget about her for a while, but when I came home it was too quiet again.

At supper, my parents would ask me about my day at school, what I had learned, who I had played with. They would talk abut their day and about what was happening in the world, but I know they were worrying about Karen because my mom had new lines on her forehead and my dad kept drumming his fingers on the table. “When is she coming home?” I implored.

It felt like forever. Now I understood how much I needed her, how lonely I was without her, how badly I wanted her to come home. I’d lie in bed at night clutching my blankie and think about how she was alone in the hospital covered with ugly itchy sores. She was too little to understand what was happening. She’d be wondering why we sent her away.

I promised myself that I’d be a better big sister when Karen came home. I’d be kind. I’d share. I’d hug her a lot. I’d let her snuggle with me in my bed.

After almost two weeks, we got the news that Kebbie was coming home. I tingled with excitement. I could hardly wait to see her.

I was over the moon when I found her sitting on the couch when I got home from school the next day. But she’d changed. She seemed smaller. Her sores were almost gone but her skin was sallow. Her bright eyes had dulled. She didn’t laugh. She wouldn’t eat. I didn’t know if she was glad to see me.

I knew what I had to do. If I was going to be the good big sister I’d promised to be, it was my job to make her better. I sat beside her on the couch and held her hand. I told her how much I’d missed her, how the apartment wasn’t the same without her. I sang her favourite songs, Jesse James and Kevin Barry. I “read” her Madeline because I knew it off by heart. I let her snuggle with me in my bed and hold my blankie. I had a bath with her and let her have the best toys.

Over the next few days, the colour in her cheeks slowly came back. She started to smile and talk a bit. She ate some peanut butter, her favourite food. Kebbie was becoming my sister again.

I wasn’t always a good sister after that. I was still mean sometimes. But I never forgot how much I’d missed her and how my world wasn’t the same without her there. And how powerful sister medicine can be.

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I’ve been undergoing a complete makeover.

You see, my stepson Kyle is getting married on Saturday. Hordes of relatives from far and wide are descending on Montreal in numbers equivalent to Grand Prix week. It all starts with a rehearsal dinner, followed Friday by a friends and out-of-towners dinner, then, of course, the wedding banquet itself, to be followed by dim sum Sunday morning.

After going through my closet of vintage clothing, all of it too big, it was clear I could not dress my part as eye-candy to the mother of the groom, who wants to show her ex she’s done better in the second round of the relationship game: she’s attracted a hunk. Only problem is, well, I am not a hunk by nature. But by nurture, there was hope.

“I’ll go to Moore’s,” I said. “I’m sure they have nice suits at a good price.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I was told. “We’re going to Harry Rosen,” Deborah said. “And I’m coming with you. You have no taste,” she explained.

I had no idea you had to dress semi-formally to go to Harry Rosen, but it seems you do. It is a cathedral of fashion, and you have to be respectful. I arrived in my customary khakis from Lands’ End, a cotton cardigan from the same place, a Brooks Brothers shirt, a little too big and with a certain amount of wear evident at the collar and cuffs, and shod in my trusty penny-loafers. My only piece of jewellery was my Apple watch.

As we rode the escalator to the second floor, Nancy, an impeccably dressed saleswoman of a certain age — who we learned was born to a Paris couturière — greeted us and asked if we needed any help. It was a rhetorical question. She surmised Deborah needed all the help she could get if she were to impress the ex, and the ex’s family on the day of the nuptials. A good salesperson just knows.

“I’m looking for a dark grey suit for a wedding,” I explained.

“Black,” Deborah said.

“Black it is, Nancy said.”

I never realized there are so many different colours of black suits. And so many designers at different but always expensive price points. We rule out Tom Ford, given my body dimensions and cost. We tried on some Armani and eventually settled on Canali. Nancy explained in detail how the suit was made, including the materials used on the inside between the suit itself and the silk lining. She explained in the fitting stage that the button holes on the sleeves would be made only later, and they would be with real button holes so I could leave the bottom ones open, indicating to all who knew about this feature that it was a good suit. Presumably, I could also roll up the sleeves if I wanted.

“You will need a white shirt,” Nancy explained.

“I have at least six white shirts,” I replied.

“I imagine then that they are all too big, and they just won’t do if you are wearing a Canali suit.”

Deborah nodded.

Nancy fetched a very white shirt, which turned out to be the idea of a shirt, not an actual finished shirt. “The cuffs will be adjusted afterwards, and the shirt will be adjusted by the tailor to fit. This is just the first try-on. It was an Eton shirt. Presumably named for the school, it must be a particularly attractive brand for members of the House of Lords, Conrad Black and the adult sons of deposed African dictators.

“Of course, you will need a tie,” Nancy explained.

“I have three or four Hermes ties,” I interjected. I bought them on various trips. It was a hobby of mine. I have an orange one with turtles, a blue one with monkeys raising barbells, a red one with fishes.”

“You need a black tie,” Nancy explained patiently.

Deborah nodded and rolled her eyes.

It turns out there are just as many colours of black ties as there are of black suits, but Deborah and Nancy chose one with a black-on-black motif, in stock in Calgary. It would be shipped.

Three fittings and three weeks later — where I actually chose what I would wear carefully and set out the clothes the night before like on the first day of school in the fall — I visited the store to get the altered suit, shirt and tie. They trusted me with the belt and the shoes.

I think in the end, Nancy is actually attracted to me and has been flirting a bit, touching me in ways that suggest the man she has made may be the man for her. I don’t have the heart to tell her it is not to be. Maybe I will on my next trip to the store, where we will be tackling business casual and leisure. It feels like a date.

In the meantime, new glasses have been bought so I will look good and see good too. Crest white strips every night are brightening my darkened teeth. A regimen of core and upper body exercises on Apple Fitness is toning my torso and making my biceps bulge. Coaching on what to say (and especially what not to say) is changing my small talk for the better. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, repeated daily several times, is helping with my elocution. I have cut onions and garlic from my diet and banned cruciferous vegetables to ensure I smell as good as I look.

I have negotiated to keep my gender and race as is, but it was touch and go there for a bit.

When I look in the mirror, I can barely recognize myself. Not quite a hunk, but closer.

My only fear is I will eclipse the bride on her wedding day, and all eyes will be on me.

I hope she forgives me.

This story originally appeared in A Considerable Age in 2023. During the summer months, I am reposting some of my favourite stories, along with new ones.

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At sixteen, my world revolved around several priorities: getting my driver's license on my actual birthday, going out with girls as often as possible, and practicing piano. Unlike driving and dating, I reached a level of keyboard proficiency after ten years of classical lessons where playing had become pleasurable for me and tolerable for others within earshot. Little did I know that a simple family errand that summer of my sixteenth year would plant the seed for a discovery that would unfold decades later.

The call came from Uncle Ted, the widower of my great-aunt Ellen Ballon, who had just died. My parents were asked to send me to New York to help pack up her apartment. To my teenage self, Aunt Ellen was just another elderly relative, her age and accomplishments a complete mystery to me. I would have guessed her age then at "I dunno, 90?" when in reality, she was in her 60s, younger than I am now.

Stepping into her New York apartment, with its elegant two-story picture window overlooking Central Park, I felt the first inkling that Aunt Ellen might have been more than just a regular great-aunt. The walls adorned with her portraits and the grand piano hinted at a life less ordinary. My curiosity was piqued further when Uncle Ted took me to Ellen's sprawling 100-acre Connecticut farm, complete with a tennis court, swimming pool and outdoor sculptures by Sir Jacob Epstein.

I began to listen to her recordings, and my father, sensing my growing interest, passed on old concert posters and letters. Yet, the full extent of Ellen's extraordinary life remained elusive, tucked away in the recesses of family history.

It wasn't until my retirement in 2022, after a long career as a psychiatrist and author, that I embarked on the journey to unravel the enigma of Ellen Ballon. As I delved into archives in England, Canada, the United States and Brazil, and as I perused yellowed newspaper clippings, a portrait emerged of a woman whose talent and tenacity had taken her from early 20^th century Montreal to the heights of classical music stardom.

I discovered a child prodigy who graduated from the McGill Conservatorium of Music at eight, performed for U.S. Presidents and British royalty, played with the great orchestras of North America and Europe, and commissioned Brazil's greatest composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, to write a concerto for her. Ellen's scrapbooks revealed sixty years of a career that spanned continents, her fame reaching far beyond the cities she visited.

Most intriguing to me were the private, unpublished materials I uncovered— diaries and letters that painted a more nuanced portrait of this virtuosic and complex artist. I found a woman who lived life on her own terms, moving in circles that included famous writers, conductors, and political figures. Her unconventional personal life, quietly accepted but never discussed in our family, added layers to the aunt I thought I knew. Before she married, she lived in an intimate trio with a female sculptor and male poet, both successful artists in their own right, in London and then in New York. Her numerous affairs even included one with the obstetrician who delivered me.

Each discovery transported me back in time to an era when classical music performances garnered major newspaper coverage and a young woman from Montreal could captivate audiences worldwide. The glamorous, unorthodox life of Ellen Ballon stood in stark contrast to the elderly great-aunt I remembered from my youth.

As I pieced together her story, I realized that the seed planted during that teenage summer had finally blossomed. The boy who once sat beneath Aunt Ellen's portrait in her New York apartment, blissfully unaware of her legacy, had grown into the older man who wanted to tell her extraordinary tale. In uncovering her story, I found not just a subject for a book, but a bridge connecting my past to my present, my family history to a forgotten era of musical greatness. Finishing the manuscript completed an extraordinary journey for me through her life, her art, and her world—and gives me hope that she will be remembered.

David’s new book Finding Ellen can be preordered here.

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Disposing of possessions has become a favourite pastime of the privileged. The Marie Kondo phenomenon has us all questioning whether the things surrounding us are “sparking joy.”

I recently read that the average North American home contains an incredible 30,000 items. Staring at the collection of utensils in my kitchen drawers, the books on my shelves, the chaos in my sewing drawer, maybe it’s not so incredible. How, I wonder, do you count the items? Every individual spoon? How about pieces of paper? Toothpicks? Spools of thread? Or the little tokens in the Monopoly game? Maybe it’s closer to 300,000.

Everyone I know is sorting through stuff—that’s “Stuff” with a sneer and a capital S— disposing of the unnecessary before the kids are left with the mess. I know people who’ve moved way beyond de-cluttering, have divested themselves of everything but the essentials, putting minimalism to the test. The experience, they say, has been liberating, soul-enhancing, their new lives light and free. God knows, my soul could use enhancing.

I start with the bookshelves.

And there’s that book of children’s poems—the one with the blue cover that was a gift to my father from an old friend and has greetings penned inside the front cover. “To Warren, with thanks. Vincent, 1937.” Ninety years ago, someone gave my dad this book as a gift. Thanks for what? Who was Vincent? And what dog chewed its cover? I don’t know, and there’s no one left who does. I open it and remember Dad reading my favourite poem, the one about the glass boy. The book goes back on the shelf.

Three quilts are folded up in a wicker chest in the corner of the guest room. Two were made by one great-grandmother, the third by another. I didn’t know either woman. All three quilts are carefully crafted but largely disintegrated; I have no use for them. I’ve had them on a pile to go more than once. But as a sometimes-quilter myself, they remind me of these women’s existence, of their capable hands, and of their distant connection to me. I’m afraid they’ll still be here when I’m gone.

And what about the lace tablecloth my grandmother made, tiny round circles the colour of oatmeal? My mom used it for special family dinners. It’s stained so badly no one will ever use it again. I really should dispose of it. But when I unfold it, I see through the stain to Grammy Smith in her chair, her hands pulling delicate threads into intricate loops, her fingers growing stiffer and the threads growing heavier as she grew older and gradually lost her sight. When I place the tablecloth beside the heavy, black-and-yellow crocheted afghan she made in her nineties, I have a record of her aging as clear as any photograph.

Would it enhance my soul to be rid of this stuff? Or does it nourish my soul to keep it? Does it spark joy? Or nostalgia? And is one more valuable than the other? I wander through the house, stopping when I hear voices speaking to me from corners, cupboards, and drawers.

I pause in a corner of the living room at the revolving oak bookcase. It began its sojourn with our family at an auction, where Dad bought it more than seventy years ago. It’s been in my own home for almost half that time, but it still speaks in Dad’s voice, holds the books he wrote, and conjures up memories of his life—a life that is no more real or important to me because I have his bookcase, but which has a permanent presence in my living room.

From somewhere on my dresser top, among pieces of jewellery I rarely wear, the voice of my grandmother calls out to me, reminding me that I have the first diamond ring my pappy gave her in the 1920s—three diamonds so small they are barely visible. He replaced it with a larger one at some point in their marriage, and as the oldest granddaughter, I was the recipient of the original. It doesn’t fit me anymore. It’s not my style. But I remember her giving it to me, sitting beside me at her dining room table, telling me about her young and enduring love for Pappy.

George Eliot said, “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.” Maybe I will give the ring to my oldest granddaughter and bring her great-great-grandmother back to life for a moment.

There are many reasons to examine our relationship with stuff, the way we allow it to define us, measure us, entrap us. I am not an apologist for acquiring or hoarding goods. On the contrary, it’s clear that our acquisitiveness is threatening our very existence. Of course, I have more stuff than I need or, indeed, want. I, too, am sorting and tossing. But when things trigger memories and stories, I pause and remember. Often—perhaps too often—I put them back on the shelf.

Someday, I know, they will end up on an auction block or in a garage sale, their voices silenced. But in the meantime—what are we but the memories we hold and the stories we tell?

Paula’s book The Stuff of a Life is available here.

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She was determined. I wasn’t going to ruin her concert. But my seven-year-old brain didn’t understand.

My focus — to the extent that a seven-year-old could focus on anything — was on my gray flannel shorts, white shirt and red snap-on bow tie.

I was nervously excited by my presumptive holiday concert performance on the school stage before a live audience of parents and grandparents.

Ours was the Gorsebrook School Grade Two Rhythm Band. We were without real instruments. Our job was to accompany Mrs. Brown at the piano. I played sticks. Tap, tap, tap. And, in my mind, at least, I was managing satisfactorily.

We lined up, single file, ready to mount the steps to the stage. I was in the middle of the pack, shuffling my feet. Then we began to move and just before I reached the first of three steps to the stage, Mrs. Brown intercepted me. She took the stick from my left hand and said: “You just tap your hand, dear.”

I was shaken but didn’t immediately appreciate what had happened. As a more mature person, I would have asked WTF? But as a seven-year-old, it took me a while — perhaps days — to figure it out. Then it became clear. From that moment and thereafter, I understood. I had no musical talent.

Sixty-five years later, my wife and I made the crossing on Queen Mary 2 from New York to Southampton. Also on board, not coincidentally, were Anthony Inglis and the National Symphony Orchestra, who were to deliver a “Last Night at the Proms“ type concert, typically performed at Royal Albert Hall.

We were intrigued when Maestro Inglis asked for volunteers to sing with the orchestra. With some trepidation, we joined the choir and after three rehearsals we were on stage for the climactic final night performance, seated behind the National Symphony Orchestra, taking direction from Maestro Inglis.

The lights dimmed, Maestro Inglis appeared to polite applause and, after some dramatic stabbing of the baton into the bright stage lighting, we were suddenly into the Hallelujah Chorus.

In my preparation, I had counted. Ten hallelujahs to begin. I valiantly attempted to maintain my bass line, occasionally consulting the musical score in my hand that remained, to me, largely indecipherable. Almost before I knew it, we were finished with, not only Handel, but Rule Brittania, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory.

Audience members jumped to their feet. They cheered. They applauded. They waved Union Jacks. Maestro Inglis bowed to the audience and then turned and beamed at us. And then orchestra members, in their white dinner jackets, turned their backs to the audience and focused their applause on us, a group of star-struck amateurs.

I also beamed. Again I wore a bow tie, but the shorts had been replaced by a tuxedo. And, WTF had been replaced by a recognition that, 65 years after a purposefully-muted concert debut, I had delivered what, for me, was virtuosity, a performance of historic personal significance that defied the expectations of that small teacher.

As we left the stage, also in single file, I reflected momentarily on Gorsebrook School. And I said to myself: “Take that, Mrs. Brown.”

This story originally appeared in A Considerable Age in 2022. During the summer months, I am reposting some of my favourite stories, along with new ones.

Ian Thompson’s new book Nova Scotia’s Lost Century can be preordered here.

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The irony of being in Rome, the eternal city, on the eve of my 70th birthday, did not escape me.

I’d been here before. But the city felt different to me now. I was keenly aware of its ancientness, of how structures eroded by time were revered. At night, dramatically illuminated, sculptures and buildings pierced the darkness − their beauty and power transcending time. It was easy to believe this was the eternal city. And easy to envy its undiminished glory − a stark contrast to my heightened sense of mortality and fear of fading away, invisible, in a world with little reverence for aging women.

The first time I visited Rome, I reveled in its beauty. I never gave any thought to its nickname. Eighteen years old, endowed with an abundance of youthful hubris, I felt immortal, no less eternal than this ancient city, blissfully unaware that life came with a timeline. But now I knew that even with health and luck, 70 was closer to the end than the beginning.

On this trip, I was enjoying Rome’s beauty and food and wine, while morosely mourning my lost youth, unable to fathom how a lifetime had passed in the blink of an eye. And unable to banish the cloud hovering above me.

My husband, Marty, and I spent the day before my birthday in the labyrinth of restoration rooms below the Vatican Museum. Our guide was a senior member of the Vatican’s art restoration team, the mother of Marty’s student now working in Rome. Petite and elegant, she welcomed us warmly, playfully tugging at the lapels of her white lab coat – shorthand for the science and seriousness of what awaited us. She spoke little English and asked if French might work. We nodded, not confident the French we learned growing up in Montreal would suffice. Her son had joined us for the day and offered to translate when necessary.

Our first stop was a sun-drenched room where on a wooden table, silver tube-like pieces lay scattered around a large wooden crucifix. A youngish man hunched over the table looked up and explained that the cross needed to be strengthened, and then reclad in its metal casing.

He showed us a photo of a recent procession inside St. Peter’s. The silver cross was steps away from the Pope, held aloft by someone younger and stronger. The project was to be completed in less than three weeks. I felt only awe as I imagined it restored, returned to its grand service.

I am a Jewish woman with no innate reverence for crucifixes. I struggle with the notion of God. But as we wandered through treasure-filled rooms observing paintings and pottery and statuary in various stages of restoration, I imagined those entrusted with these glorious treasures were − forgive the cliché – doing God’s work. It wasn’t so different from what I felt in the presence of towering mountain peaks or listening to Beethoven’s symphonies − a humbling sense of the sublime, of something transcendent.

The day’s details were ephemeral. No photos were permitted. With three languages swirling about, note-taking was impossible. I stayed in the moment, focused on understanding what I saw. And hoping I would remember the sense of awe and sheer pleasure of it.

I asked about restoration objectives. Repair? Looking new? What was enough? Our guide seemed pleased by the question. Her long and animated reply – punctuated by her son’s translation − was a revelation. It turns out there’s a large body of academic literature on this subject. At the Vatican, there is a philosophy of restoration – a rigorous protocol that restorers are trained to understand and respect and adhere to in the work they do.

My comprehension wasn’t perfect. But I understood this: the objective is not to make the object new again – the way it was at its birth, when it left the artist’s hands complete. The restorer must respect its current state and not erase or mask the marks of time. Restoration is intended to strengthen, to slow inevitable deterioration, to extend the object’s presence in the world. The repair must not be hidden, the demarcation between old and new should remain obvious.

I listened mesmerized, then blurted out that my birthday was the next day. The idea of respecting and preserving, rather than fully reversing age, was the new lens through which I would view art − and my own place in the world on this birthday.

I thought, too, that if I ever considered cosmetic restoration, these Vatican principles would guide me. I would not attempt a return to my younger self. I had seen too many faces frozen by desperate, failed attempts to recapture youth. I would try to accept the passage of time as a gift. I would try to make peace with it, to slow it, perhaps. But I would not try to erase it.

The cloud that had hovered above me began to lift. As we walked into the blazing sunshine of the museum’s central courtyard, its darkness dissolved into the light.

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This story originally appeared in the Globe and Mail’s First Person in 2025.

The Steinway sat silent after my father-in-law died. The sheet music—a Gershwin piece—lay undisturbed on the music stand just as he had left it.

My mother-in-law, Sheila, couldn’t play a note or read music, so she covered the grand piano’s glossy black lid with the evidence of a life well lived. Silver frames crowded together: a granddaughter in a cap and gown, a wedding under a tent somewhere warm, Sheila herself at eighty, smiling with groups of people, many of them familiar to me, or people I’d met over the years. The piano her husband had played his entire life congregated everyone she loved.

When Sheila died four summers ago at the age of ninety-six, after a short descent into the hell of dementia, it struck me hard that my generation was next in line. To avoid this existential rumination, I immersed myself in all the practical matters I could help the family with. There was an accumulation of books, papers, letters, more photographs, and furniture—the things she loved and cherished reduced to silent objects—all to contend with.

First, I had to decide what to do with the piano, which nobody in the family wanted. Who has space for a grand? I knew it would be a challenge to find a good home for an instrument that’s almost a century old.

I contacted the Steinway dealer in Montreal, but they weren’t interested. Without seeing it, they said a piano that old would have to be rebuilt. They expressed interest in its ebony wood frame and made a lowball offer.

I reached out to a local piano store and restoration shop, and the owner promptly came over to examine the instrument. He confirmed that, like those of us who have reached a certain age, the piano had many old, stiff parts. Replacements were in order. He offered an equally lowball figure.

Next, I telephoned a man whose yellowed business card for piano-tuning services I discovered inside the piano. I assumed my father-in-law had used his services at one point. I reached him at his home in Joliette, a town about seventy-five kilometres northeast of Montreal. I explained I had found his card tucked inside the piano.

“Mrs. Goldberg,” he replied, with the barest hint of a French accent, “I have so much work in my shop here that I would not be interested in coming to Montreal to look at your piano. I restore pianos for museums and music conservatories, and my hands are full. Besides, you have to understand that the traffic driving into Montreal makes me angry, so I avoid it.” He gave me the name of someone in Montreal, called Spike, to get in touch with.

Within an hour, the piano man called back. “Mrs. Goldbloom,” he said — getting my name right this time — “I have been thinking.” He’d placed the piano. He knew it.

“I have tuned and replaced parts on that piano several times over many years. The first time was in the late 1980s, when I changed the felts on the hammers. I used alcohol to soften them, and I didn’t notice, but drops fell on your mother-in-law’s white wall-to-wall carpet, leaving burns.”

Sheila called him the moment she found the burns. She’d get the carpet fixed, she told him, and let him know what it cost. A few weeks later, the carpet was fixed.

“We all make mistakes. Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“I was so relieved because I had no money in those days to fix an expensive carpet. I’ve felt guilty about it ever since,” the piano man confided. “She was a very kind lady.”

He proceeded to give me more information about who might be interested in the piano and the types of interventions required. The piano would have to be rebuilt to attract the attention of a professional or classical pianist. It was a job that required a significant investment and over six hundred hours to change twelve thousand parts. It was the same information the others had relayed to me, delivered with a little more care and a lot more detail.

He said he would come to Montreal to tune the piano free of charge and maybe lubricate some parts because he had always felt bad about damaging the carpet.

“It’ll be easier to sell if it’s tuned,” he stated.

He had a great deal to say about pianos, and about Sheila, and, eventually, about a barn in Joliette. It took some doing to get off the phone — to thank him for his time and end the conversation.

“You needn’t feel guilty. You’ve repaid your debt with all the information,” I said as I hung up.

The next day, he contacted me again. “Alice, I have been thinking.”

We were on a first-name basis now. He wanted to buy the piano himself, rebuild it completely, and could be in Montreal the next day.

So the piano man braved the traffic he claimed to hate and drove to Montreal. And after examining the Steinway, he made a fair offer. He wanted to restore the grand dame to her full glory.

She will play again.

The piano man’s memories of Sheila had captured her exactly. She’d built a long career as a professor of social work and, after retiring, kept organizing her community as if she’d never stopped — well into her nineties, former students still called for her advice. She kept a full calendar: book club, film club, gym on weekday mornings, lunch and tea with a rotating cast of friends. She took the city bus everywhere rather than trouble anyone for a ride.

Then dementia took her mind, and something strange happened: she stayed herself. She grew distressed sometimes, but never at her caregivers — only at losing the independence she’d guarded her whole life. It upset her, too, when someone called for advice, and she no longer knew what to say. But she never once forgot a face. Anyone who walked into her room, she put down whatever she was doing, and her whole face opened into a smile, ready to talk.

I used to think I had a special relationship with her. It took me a while to understand that everyone who knew Sheila felt exactly the same way. At her funeral, her granddaughter said Sheila had a sixth sense — a superpower that enabled her to anticipate a person’s problem before they’d said a word of it.

Our family used to joke that she needed only fifteen minutes with someone before they were confiding their life story.

I was certain she knew the piano man’s.

A version of this story appeared in 2022 in A Considerable Age. It has always been one of my favourite stories. This year, over the summer months, I will be republishing stories from six years of A Considerable Age, along with some new ones. Happy Summer.

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I met my first love when I was eight.

It was early August, on the day we moved from our first house to what would be the home of my childhood.

I didn’t know that yet. What I knew was what we were leaving behind. The kitchen with the wall-mounted, twirly-corded phone that my mom would stretch to the porch so she could chat while ironing and still see my brother and me in the backyard, where we, with our unadulterated attention spans and no awareness that there could be anything much better to do, made mud pies for hours.

We were leaving behind a front yard covered in weeds—something considered unsolvable because the house was likely built on sand; something my parents talked about so much I wasn’t sure what they would talk about once this house with the face full of stubborn property acne was no longer ours.

We were leaving behind our across the street neighbors who had a large, Boston-suburb number of kids. Many of whom were teenagers, churning through the doors, making all kinds of noises and doing all kinds of things, as if we lived across from a wildlife habitat filled with unpredictable animals. One of them even had a motorcycle.

We were leaving behind the curious floor plan of a split level, where the entry confronted you with a choice, a choose-your-story. Up to eat or sleep, down to watch TV or check on the fish in the fish tank.

Now we were moving to a brand new, clear-faced home one town over. Now we were moving into a colonial, a term that sounded Fancy to my eight-year-old ears. Here there was a foyer and myriad rooms on the same level as the door. Beyond that door: a flat, green, living lawn. We had arrived.

As my parents dealt with boxes and movers, I sat on the front steps of our new house holding the person who’d forced this move, my two-month-old sister, another love of my life and watched as a mess of kids road bikes back and forth in front of us. Back and forth, back and forth, checking out me, something new and surprising in their ecosystem, staring, because of course kids have no use for discretion.

My aunt, sixteen at the time and ultra cool, sat beside me, nudging me. “Go say hi.”

I don’t remember handing her My baby or crossing the lawn to go do this, what I said or who, in the throng of kids, spoke first. I just know that within five minutes I was also on a bike, and for the next ten years I was rarely without these neighborhood kids. And most especially my best friend Nancy.

Nancy was the youngest of nine kids, a span of siblings so great that her oldest brother and sister were her godparents. Whereas our family had a start-up feel, three kids under eight, newly in our newly built house, my parents barely over thirty, Nancy’s family was a corporation, children being raised for years and years in a house that felt deeply established, as if grown from the ground to specifically house their multitudes.

And I joined that corporation like an eager new hire, a tenth kid, always around. Their house would be as much my childhood home as my own. My parents will readily tell you that I did more yard work at Nancy’s than I ever did at ours.

My memories of those years are visceral and tactile, just the way first friendships are. Because before you’re emotionally close, well before you can exchange every secret or deep thought, before your brain matures enough to even have secrets or deep thoughts of note, you are physically close. Nancy and I were right beside each other most waking hours. Attached at the hip, our moms would say, wondering at our fusion. It was romantic, in the truest origin sense—back when romance referred not to love affairs, but to imaginative adventures.

Since boredom is the mother of invention, Nancy and I invented a lot. That’s what I remember—all the things we did. I wish I could know what, for the thousands of hours we were together, we talked about. But though I kept a journal for many of those years, I wrote “NO COMMENT” for most entries. Of course, I’d go on to have so many comments, but back then, I was too tired for documenting at the end of the day. Because the girl at my hip had big ideas and loved industry.

Multiple new houses were being built on our street that first year. Nancy and I would gather lumber scraps from the sites, haul them into one of our backyards, find trees that were reasonable distances apart and start nailing the wood to the trees in something approaching a rectangle. We believed early in outsourcing, so at some point we made three-years-older neighborhood boys into our supers. We couldn’t waste time on our headquarters. We had ribbon barrettes to make, sales numbers to hit, worlds to take.

The best fort we ever built stood for 24 hours. We’d found the perfect layout of trees just beyond a rock wall in Nancy’s backyard. We’d experienced a boon of big sheets of plywood. The result: exquisite.

We barely wanted to leave our new building that first night, but we were both chicken, so once it got dark, we went inside for a sleepover and further planning. Obviously, the place needed window boxes, possibly a roof deck.

In the morning, we raced out to our future, but there was a note posted beside the opening that was the door. Not of congratulations or praise, but of demolition. The rock wall was a property line and the neighbors behind, who were not of our street and therefore not of our world, did not want a surprise structure in their yard. We’d made an honest mistake—the East Coast was just one big backyard back then. People fenced in pools for safety, but not the grass and the trees. Our impression, like so many discoverers before us, was that the land we saw was ours for the taking.

So we found this unjust, to have to tear down such a perfect structure. We judged those non-neighbor people to lack imagination, an understanding of both beauty and childhood. Also to be just pretty picky and mean.

We had the super boys dismantle our building and reassemble it on the right side of the rock wall. It was less perfect—of course it was, perfect things being impossible to hold onto. But it was ours and would do as we scaled our business.

Nancy and I both loved money and the making of it. Not necessarily for its idea or purchasing power. We loved the object of money, the crinkled bills we’d iron against our thighs to coerce into stacks, the distinct odor—it was only paper so I guess the smell was from all the many oily hands that had handled it. Before understanding this was gross, I loved that smell and the sheer pile of it, stashed in my closet beside Halloween candy I could make last until April.

We met so young—I don’t know if Nancy and I both innately felt this way about dollars or we nurtured the idea into each other. But by the time we were ten, we had a mutual checking account, business cards and multiple corporate sales clients. Nancy was the one with the self-start and the drive. She was a fearless networker, calling information—the original internet—to get the number for department store buyers. She secured our first meeting with Bloomingdales. She also phone-treed her way to the Goody Products wholesale department such that we could bulk order the 2-slatted barrettes we’d weave ribbon through. Smaller businesses, especially those run by children, might’ve bought their supplies at CVS. But we were aiming big. We were an Enterprise.

Of course, we commissioned a two-years-younger neighborhood girl for direct sales. We suggested she put her hair in two braids before going door-to-door because we already knew one thing: cute sells! Since the street was a dead end, her sales territory was limited and, at some point, our neighbors did develop a fatigue of our entrepreneurship. I believe our little salesperson usually just had her grandfather buy whatever necessary to make her quotas. I now wonder what a man in his seventies did with so many ribbon barrettes.

In Olympic years, we played Olympics—swim and running races in the summer, speed skating in socks on linoleum in the winter. I can’t remember if we did podium ceremonies, but it seems like something we would’ve. In non-Olympic years, we focused on prepping for the Presidential Fitness test that fall would bring. We’d mark out start and finish lines and time each other. We’d hold each other’s feet to practice sit ups, hoping we could do enough of them in a minute to impress Ronald Reagan, I guess.

On snow days, layered in mattress-thick snowsuits and mittens with idiot strings, we’d sled down the middle of the road, from the top bulb of the cul-de-sac to just beyond Nancy’s.

On summer nights, the whole neighborhood would play capture the flag on opposing lawns of our choosing and not necessarily the lawns of any kid in the group.

I’m not sure what I’d do if twenty kids just showed up and started playing in our yard. I hope I’d find it joyful. But I’d probably also really wonder how long they might stay.

A few years ago, I looked out the window and saw an older woman sitting on a bench by our front lawn. She appeared super happy and content, face turned up to the sun, eyes closed. I went out to ask her what she was doing and though English wasn’t her first language, she was able to tell me she was super happy and content and that she was there to turn her face up to the sun and close her eyes.

She’d found a right place.

There’s no luck quite like it.

I know all about this—I was lucky early.

In place and love.

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My boss resigned. He was 20 years my junior. I valued his experience in the sector, I relied on his mojo to jolt me into action, I enjoyed our work partnership.

He named an interim successor, a further 10 years my junior — a cumulative 30-plus years younger than me. He works hard, delivers. Reporting to him is akin to my current boss reporting to a 10-year-old.

Age polarizes us. He is younger to my older, single to my married with adult children and grandchild, starting out to my longer marathon. But he is the future — as Robert Frost wrote in What Fifty Said: “Now when I am old my teachers are the young, what can't be molded must be cracked and sprung."

I get it. I am the oldest employee. I’ve told myself I stay young working with young people. I’ve wondered sometimes how my co-workers feel working with someone their mother’s age. I remember, in my 30s, making time for Bob — the oldest employee, who would shuffle into my office wearing a three-piece suit or trench coat and a signature cheap fedora covering thinning cotton-white tufts of hair. He would take a seat, coffee in hand, and give me no escape from a long-winded chat about the insurance business or something he’d read in the Lancet. To my mid-30s self, he might have been 80, but he was likely mid-60s, poor health and lack of exercise giving his avuncular persona a wizened lacquering. His wife had passed away. He had time on his hands. I made time for him because that’s what you did.

When I was 30, climbing the corporate ladder, I was fierce. I took on the President role of a volunteer organization, gave birth to my daughter, and swiftly returned to work after four months to show my bold career stripes. I hired older women. I remember one — an accomplished writer, tasked with our investor newsletter. To my 30, she might have been in her 60s, but was likely mid-40s. I let her go in favour of a younger, full-time hire. I regretted it quickly. He was playing the organization — freelancing while on my payroll. Over the years I’d occasionally see his byline and shake my head. I had wanted the filly, not the mare. I was wrong.

I have never wanted to believe my age would signal ready for pasture, just as I never wanted to believe being a woman meant a glass ceiling. I went back to school in my early 40s for an MBA. I extended my shelf life. I became a proud mare, mentoring younger foals I’ve watched go on to flourish.

And yet.

The other afternoon, I said something at work — I don’t even remember what — and a colleague responded without missing a beat: Oh, my father says that all the time. Her eyes didn’t bulge in malice. It was reflex. Casual. The kind of thing you say about someone who exists in a different category, someone you’re fond of but don’t quite see as a peer.

I smiled. I might have laughed it off. I don’t know what else I did. But when I return to that moment, I realize it’s likely one of many. Because that’s the thing about aging in the workplace — it doesn’t announce itself with a memo. It arrives in a colleague’s offhand remark, in the slight recalibration of how someone looks at you, in the growing awareness that your departure simply becomes an opportunity.

Have I become Bob? Not his fedora or his shuffling gait. But his role — the elder in the room that younger people make time for out of decency, while quietly planning around?

I stay because I still have things to say. I stay because a blank canvas terrifies me now in a way it never did at 30. I stay because I’m not ready to turn the page and stare at emptiness I’d have to fill on my own terms. What I’m less sure of is whether staying is an act of indecision or an act of fear — and when I’ll accept my next act.

Frost concluded, “I go to school to youth to learn the future.” I know that there is no pathway to youth from my sixties—not from school, not from work, not from poetry. I am not sure I will ever make peace with aging. It is its own job and one I am learning to navigate every single day.

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When my mother was dying, we were given our own room on the hospice ward. The window looked out over an unremarkable street, cars passing, occasionally halting for a pedestrian to cross. It was an ordinary view. The sun didn’t strike the glass directly; we had the morning light, but by afternoon, the room was cast in shadow.

On the sill were flowers, a bouquet my daughter had brought. Purple roses, the smaller kind, with white dahlias. A modest bouquet that would suit a country cottage window overlooking gardens and fields.

Next to our room was a small family kitchen. Coffee, peanut butter, white bread sat on the counter. The fridge held a few strawberry yogurts, milk and soy milk for people’s tea or coffee.

The ward itself was hushed, the silence broken only by the faint sounds seeping through the doors from the next ward. My mother couldn’t hear them. By then, her body, so slight, was cradled gently between pillows. Nurses came in quietly every few hours: to turn her, check her vitals. Kindly, unhurried.

She was wearing her white cotton nightdress, the one with the tiny violets printed on it. Soft from many washes. I smoothed it over her knees, careful not to disturb her. It seemed too thin against her fragile skin.

There was a chair in the room that folded out into a narrow bed. I slept there, beside her. Close enough to take her hand when she stirred, to notice the rasp of her breath, a sign her next dose of medication was due. “To keep her comfortable,” they said. “To keep her peaceful.”

But peace had never truly belonged to my mother. Her life had been marked by restlessness, by an endless searching, by a kind of persistent energy that made stillness rare. One did not feel peaceful in her presence. One had to muster strength simply to be near her. She drew from you, just by being close.

Still, there was her hand. Small now, nearly translucent, the bones pronounced, but a hand recognizably hers. The hand that brushed my hair. Held her morning teacup. Gripped the steering wheel. Planted impatiens in the garden.

Sounds she made were not words, but the timbre of her voice was unmistakable. The voice that told me to put the kettle on, to walk the dog, to mind the time.

I knew our time together was short. But in that room, the days stretched into a long, heavy moment. I brought a portable speaker and hooked it on the light behind her bed. I played the music she had loved. Just the beautiful songs, the ones she’d dance to. Perhaps, in her sedated dreams, the music drifted through. Between those songs, I played Max Richter’s Sleep. The gentle cadence of it seemed right for drifting, for fading.

In those final days, I felt so tender towards her. I was allowed, at last, to show her the love that I felt. Because she was going. And surely everyone deserves a loving farewell.

And then the moment came. It was night. I knew, I woke, and I felt it. Something had shifted. Whatever was tugging at her had become too insistent to resist. I don’t know whether she could hear me, but I spoke words to her anyway. That she had been a good mother. That she was appreciated. Words of reassurance. Maybe the words reached her. Or maybe just the feelings behind them did.

I was lying beside her, my hand in her hand. Her breath slowed. Paused. Began again. Stilled. She reached toward me, tentative, as if uncertain whether to remain.

And then, she was gone.

B. E. Rybak publishes A Letter from a Maritimer, one of the most thoughtful newsletters on Substack offering clear, independent writing on Canadian politics, technology, and public life. Grounded in the East Coast and focused on what actually matters.

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Mr. Paulini’s English Literature class was the reason I stayed in school. Fifty-three years on, I still remember my first impression of him. He was tall and thick-chested with massive shoulders and biceps that bulged through his pullover sleeves. He looked intimidating except for his face. This bear of a man had the cutest chipmunk cheeks that only inflated more when he flashed a large, toothy grin.

He looked like an oversized baby you would not want to provoke. His demeanour proved to be as gentle as his face. I was immediately smitten by this manly person who recited poetry with all the exuberance of a Shakespearean thespian.

The fifty minutes I spent in his class were the highlight of my day, actually of my whole high school experience. Here was a man, so secure with himself, that he showed each of his students the utmost dignity and respect. I had had some good teachers, but none who treated me as an equal partner in learning.

Mr. Paulini invited us into a world of literature that he found exciting and evocative. I never hesitated to raise my hand, to express an opinion or offer to read. In other classes, I was afraid to speak up, fearing ridicule. No one dared snicker, not because they were afraid of him, but because he inspired respect. He appreciated and encouraged inquisitive minds, and even managed to make studying Macbeth an entertaining endeavour.

Mr. Paulini made every poem, play and novel we studied that year relevant to the burgeoning minds of adolescents. Every piece of literature became accessible and taught us about integrity and the value of honesty and compassion. Authors became friends and allies, with something valuable to share, to offer each of us a vital lesson we could apply to our lives both present and future. Literature for me became even more magical and meaningful. That year with Mr. Paulini inspired me to study literature in university, and to write for the sheer joy of it. I knew he would be cheering me on.

Almost thirty years passed before I was devastated to hear that my beloved Mr. Paulini had died of a heart attack. I searched for the little notebook he had signed on the last day I saw him. He had written, “I shall miss you,” a quote by Thomas More to his devout servant Matthew from Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, which we had studied in class. Those words meant so much to me. I had read the part of Matthew while Mr. Paulini read Thomas More.

A year later, as I was perusing the newspaper’s obituary section, I was surprised to see a photo of Mr. Paulini, his signature toothy grin lighting up the small black-and-white photo of him. It had been a year since his death, and his wife had placed a tribute to him in the memorial section. They were tender words of love; she referred to him as the ballast on their ship, how it had at times been a stormy sea, but a gallant voyage nonetheless.

Here was a person who had loved Mr. Paulini for forty years or more...it only confirmed his genuine humanity, that he was a gentleman for all seasons. I began to look at the obituary page every year on the anniversary of his death and every year his wife published that beautiful picture of a younger Mr. Paulini, his eyes smiling as brightly as his grin. Every year she published a different tribute. Sometimes it was a quote from a writer, sometimes I assumed it was composed by her. It also became clear that they shared a love for the written word. Theirs was a tragic story of true love. He had a sudden, untimely passing.

In one tribute, she remarked that death had been kind to him but had left behind cruel suffering. I wanted to reach out and tell her that he really was all those things she described. One year, I signed the guest book accompanying the tribute in the memorial section of the newspaper and wrote to tell her about the wonderful year I spent in his English literature class and how inspiring he had been. I hope she saw it. But I will never know.

A few years ago the annual tribute stopped. By pure happenstance, I learned that Mrs. Paulini was gone as well. It left both sadness and joy. The end of those tributes meant she and her dear Rick were together at last, or so I intend to believe. I am left to write one more tribute for both. Maybe it was no accident that I married a giant of a man who recites poetry, too.

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My grandfather was the first Robert Carl Thoreson, born April 12, 1898, and always known as Carl. I was very close to my grandfather and was called Carl’s shadow. My grandmother often remarked, Carl always said you should have been a boy.

He was a great man who could fix anything and shared his love of hunting and fishing. I also learned to whistle piercingly loud, as well as to walk silently through the woods. As a youngster in my brand-new blue snowsuit and my brother’s black galoshes with their big buckles, I followed Carl everywhere on the farm I grew up on.

One day I slipped, tripped and landed with an ugly splash in the cow gutter. Completely soaked in manure, Carl tried to return me to my mom at the back door, but she insisted that Carl hose me off in the milk house first. Eventually, I was allowed back into the house, in sopping wet but not smelly condition. We laughed about my early swimming lesson in the barn.

His son — Robert Carl Thoreson Jr — came along on May 15, 1921, and was my dad. He was always called Bob. Except when his mother would call for him and he was in trouble. Then it was Robert. ROBERT!!! I may have some experience with this. MARY GERARD THORESON, YOU BETTER GET IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT NOW!! AND TAKE OFF THOSE FILTHY BOOTS!!!!

My dad didn’t read much fiction, more of a history guy. But he loved John Steinbeck. Steinbeck wrote about people my dad knew. Hard-working people who were always just a slip from disaster, crop failure, floods, or the manufacturing plant shutting down for good.

Of Mice and Men is a tale of two men, a small smart guy, George and his friend and obligation, Lennie. Lennie is a huge man who can work three men into the ground each day, but has the mind of a child. He also has a weakness for soft things. My dad is a big guy, 6’4” in his prime. And he worked hard most of his life. Certain lines from the book became part of our regular conversations.

Can I pet the rabbits, George?

I like ketchup in my beans, George.

Live off the fat of the land, George.

We still trade those lines.

So, as a young adult, I teased my dad and always called him George. He was no longer anything but George. This did irritate my mom, definitely a bonus as far as I was concerned. Everyone knew and loved my dad, George.

My dad and I share a lot — humor chief among them. And my son, Daniel has it as well. We agree the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and it’s a very small orchard. The three of us together are pure laughter. My family has often been told, you all think you’re so damned funny. And we do believe it.

My mom slipped away into the never-ending fog of Alzheimer’s. Dad said it was like losing her a little bit each day. And they were such a love match. Married for 62 years — WOW! And very happily. Holding hands and giggling together is one of my most common memories of them together. My mom or dad looking at the other in a rapt and adoring fashion as they told the same stories over and over. I come from a family of storytellers.

My dad’s 90th birthday party was a great event. We all wore tie dye, and of course, there was cake!! It said HAPPY BIRTHDAY GEORGE.

My mom spent a lot of time asking, Who’s George? I cried that day. And laughed. And ate cake. Mom finished the party asleep on the couch with a happy ring of chocolate frosting on her mouth.

Mom died in 2013 and my dad found a way to go on without her. He lived with us for some years until he needed more care than we could provide. He managed to keep his gratitude for life and all the small things he enjoyed, reading, politics — so proud that he never voted for a Republican, his grandson, playing bridge, and eating cookies. He never ate a cookie he didn’t like but he kept looking.

Our last visits in hospice care were sad and difficult, with an occasional smile as we shared the many memories of a life just weeks short of a century. He asked to come home. He asked for a beer. Can I pet the rabbits, George? Robert Carl Thoreson Jr, died February 23, 2021.

Last night I dreamed George came home, hung up his coat and sat at the kitchen table eating cookies. Welcome home, George, welcome home.

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Late last summer, I happened to catch sight of a familiar maroon box tucked away on a bookshelf. Blowing off the dust, I brought it back to the kitchen table and asked, tentatively, if anyone felt like a game. My Mom’s face lit up as she responded with an enthusiastic yes and, from that day onward, Scrabble became a regular family activity again.

My mother had always been the family’s word person. I can still see her seated at our white formica kitchen table, eagerly tackling the Saturday Globe and Mail crossword, armed with her ever-sharp Number 2 pencil and trusty pink Pearl eraser. If she left the room, I would make a beeline for the puzzle — but looking was all I did. Grabbing a pencil and jumping in would have been the same as dipping a spoon into someone’s dessert before being invited to. I eventually realized that any time she asked me to lend a hand with the last clue, it wasn’t because she needed reinforcements: it was to give me the thrill of finishing it.

The maroon box had earned its rest. Scrabble had always figured prominently in our family life, alongside Boggle, where you raced against time; Spill and Spell, with its trademark bright orange plastic shaker cup; the esoteric Royalty, which dangled the faint hope of a standing ovation if you managed to spell out the word itself; and Balderdash, from which several notable made-up words entered the family vernacular permanently.

But once my brother, sister and I had graduated from high school and left for university, Scrabble became the stalwart — the one game that endured as a holiday ritual, brought down from the shelf after tea and homemade treats, set up on the lazy susan donated to the cause. Then we would pass around the velvety purple Seagram's Crown Royal whisky bag, swirling it for luck and listening to the familiar click of the wooden tiles as we chose our first seven, plotting our opening gambits.

As the family grew and holiday time was given over to the logistics of entertaining, feeding, bathing and bedding down energetic grandchildren, the game was shelved for quite a few years. And then, about three years ago, it stayed shelved — this time for a harder reason. Our Dad had died unexpectedly, and we were painfully aware of the hole his absence left at the table.

That hole is why I asked tentatively.

My sister’s steady hand now keeps score and, as per family tradition, deposits each record of the game in the now-jam-packed maroon box, holding onto a family Scrabble history that stretches back over fifty years. My daughter joins in whenever she visits, channelling the same spirit of fun and creativity her grandfather always brought to the game.

Our mother remains a formidable player, amazing us with frequent bingos as she plays all her tiles in a single turn. Although my sister and I pretend to beg for mercy and jokingly bemoan every loss, there is nothing more wonderful than having our 92-year-old Mom beat the pants off us both on a regular basis. Each of her victories is a gift — for us all. Long may her reign as Scrabble Queen continue.

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On a Saturday afternoon in early March, when hills of dirty snow line the roads, but everyone is happy because we can feel the possibility of spring in the air, we arrived at the storage depot not far from downtown Ottawa. Clearly, this was a popular day for visiting one’s stored stuff, moving things around and adding more items to fill the space.

As the two-storey garage doors banged open, a pristine, clean indoor parking lot was revealed. Drivers jockeyed for a space, their tires squealing on the painted floors. People grabbed trolleys and disappeared into the hive of shiny stainless steel corridors. The identical laneways, each labelled with a number, letter and elegant street name, were just wide enough for carts piled high to manoeuvre. Rows of storage lockers were fronted by metal doors which folded up or down with a shrieking sound and a thump. They were locked to the floors with identical locks. These cubicles come in various sizes and shapes, each with a not inconsequential cost per square foot. I was struck by how surreal it all seemed.

The off-site storage phenomenon began in earnest only in the past few decades — essentially for my generation. Everyone started to accumulate way more of everything than they needed for an entire lifetime. Now that my generation is downsizing and, for the most part, our children don’t want the treasures that we have amassed over our lifetimes, we have to either liberate or store them. A cheeky young friend mused that her generation will have lockers filled with recyclable cloth bags and IKEA furniture.

We had rented our first and hopefully last storage units during COVID when there were strict rules: one person per elevator unless from the same household, masks to be worn at all times and mandatory sanitizing of all surfaces touched. This was to store my mother’s furnishings for transfer to family and to a studio in a seniors’ residence. We were preparing to sell the house which my parents had bought in a new suburban development in 1966. The transition took over a year and cost over two thousand dollars in storage fees.

On this Saturday afternoon, when Covid was no longer an everyday threat, we were permitted to crowd large trolleys and complete strangers into one elevator. During the COVID days, I half expected to find a person with a comfortable chair and reading light ensconced in his or her locker, safely sequestered from the germs out in the real world. On this day, there was an air of relaxed festivity as people moved around without fear.

My husband and I were at the depot to assist our friend who had cleared out the estate of her deceased friend. The latter had already downsized but still had valuable antique furniture, carpets and paintings from his long career representing Canada overseas. These were being kept for eventual dispersal according to his will. My friend was also storing household goods from her own chalet, which she had sold after half a century of careful curating, as well as some items from her overflowing condominium.

Our job was to consolidate two lockers into a third. Not only does downsizing save a hefty monthly charge but my friend had negotiated two months free rent by moving from one floor to another. We loaded up trolleys and the cavalcade made its way to a second floor locker to add more goods and close it out, then again through the maze of metal and down the elevator to the final locker.

Opening up a storage bay door is exciting. What treasures will meet our eyes? Will they be organized or jumbled together?

Most lockers are filled with the accumulations of several generations and are visited by the owners either to marvel, to honour or to cringe. Every item, in every lockup, in all of the storage facilities around the world, was bought by, given to or gifted from someone. The quilt made by someone’s great aunt makes her smile. The driftwood lamp tells a story of cottage summers for a family. The dresser, painted over and over, once held someone’s clothes. The handmade ceramic salad bowl from Ravello, Italy, was cherished by its owner for decades. The photos, papers and other paraphernalia of lifetimes lived are stored in boxes. It is so difficult to let these treasures go.

Open the locker door and out flood memories. Is this why we store them? We visit these old friends briefly, usually on evenings and weekends. They are not part of our present daily existence but we cannot let them go. Who would we be without them?

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The last time I saw Aunt Edna, she was sitting in a hospital bed with an iron frame, the kind you see in infirmary scenes in old movies. I was 12, and my parents thought my visiting Edna would cheer her up. I wasn’t told what was wrong with her, but she was in her seventies, and it didn’t seem abnormal for an old person to be sick.

I led the way to her room. But as soon as she saw me, she burst into tears. “ Oh,” she said, “You look so lovely.” My parents whisked me out to the hall, where I stood by myself, horrified that I hadn’t helped, but instead made her cry. Somehow, I knew her weeping held a hopelessness, a separation from the good things of this world.

A separation she would soon make complete.

Edna and her husband Bob had no children, so, as her great-niece, I was left her engagement ring, her bone china, and a hope chest that stands in the bay window of my bedroom. What I was not given was any real knowledge of her, who she was, what she was like. There were no stories told about Edna, as there usually are in a family. Which is surprising, as my father’s parents had died young, and Edna and Bob had raised him from the time he was a small boy. This made them like grandparents, and they would come to our house for Sunday and holiday dinners, and we would go to their tiny place with a big property and a cherry tree I loved to climb.

There were trips to Niagara Falls and our cottage. I study the photos of these occasions to see if there are stories there. In the earliest picture, I am a two-year-old at Edna’s feet and she has her head thrown back in abandoned laughter. I also have a memory from when I was very young of being with Edna in her kitchen, watching, mesmerized, as she peeled an apple. She went from top to bottom around the fruit with a knife, in one fluid motion creating a single intact curlicue of peel. Finishing, she had a “ta-da!” look on her face; she was delighted at my delight at what she’d done.

I am grateful for that memory and laughing image because in later photos, Edna is looking straight at the camera, lips thinly drawn. Is she trying to smile, or is that drawing back all she can manage? What caused the laugh, and when her abandon turned to strain, are just some of the many unknowns.

What I did eventually learn was how she died, not long after that visit to the hospital. Because I was young, it was some years later that I was told Edna had been hospitalized for depression, had electric shock treatment, been released, went home, took enough pills to kill herself. When she was released, she told her husband, “I know what I’m going to do when I get home.” He and my parents hadn’t understood what she meant.

Now, at almost the same age as Edna was at her death, 74, I feel a loss I didn’t feel at that time. Then, I felt almost nothing. Today, there is sadness and regret for not having any real sense of her. My father told many stories about Uncle Bob from his childhood. He read every book in the library. Gave up his job during the Depression for someone who needed it more. All I remember him saying about Edna was his conjecture that she had not had children because of fear. Her sister, my father’s mother, died after a stillbirth. And that he hated her porridge.

That’s it. Maybe Dad disliked her, but didn’t want to say? Maybe her depression made her hard to know, difficult? I’m surprised that I, normally curious, asked no questions about her. Again, I can’t say for sure why – certainly, it was the way of my parents’ generation not to talk about matters considered shameful or unpleasant. Or perhaps I had absorbed a feeling that Edna was simply not important.

So, I don’t know why she ended up on the scrapheap of people without stories. But now I, and I assume others my age, ask: what do we want? After we are gone? What would Edna have wanted? Surely, to be able to be remembered. Somehow. In some caring way. For more than the way she died.

In my den, I have photos of people who came to me through family channels, including from Bob and Edna’s house. I don’t know who they are. But they must have been people close to those who were close to me. To them and to Edna, I am saying, I do not know about your lives. But I honour them. You mattered.

And to everyone else, I say this: ask for the stories and tell them.

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Mornings at Algonquin Elementary began with “God Save the Queen.” We stood at attention in our neat navy tunics, or trousers, knit ties, and white shirts, straight as the Union Jack, singing full-throated and proud. A portrait of the Queen hung behind the teacher’s desk. This is what it means to be Canadian.

Mrs. True had a comforting steadiness about her. Tall, gaunt and graying, her appearance belied a kind heart. She paid attention to each one of us, even Michael Wharton, a scrawny boy with auburn hair and matching freckles. His striped vest twirled along with him, like a pinwheel, as he laughed and shrieked, unable to stop.

Mrs. True understood that he could not help himself and devised a curious technique: she assigned another boy to “Michael duty.” When he began to hop from desk to desk like a mad hare, the other boy gave chase, wrangling Michael back into his own seat. For his trouble, the boy received a shiny silver dollar while the rest of us looked on, wide-eyed.

In the 1960s, Canada was a melting pot except in French-speaking Quebec. Although my parents wanted us to be educated in French, all non-Catholic immigrants to the province were tossed into the English Protestant public school system. The Catholic Church had decreed that only Catholics were permitted to attend French public schools.

It is thus that generations of immigrants — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, some, like us, already French-speaking — were shut out of French Quebec society for decades to come. The English-speaking community appeared less concerned about religious purity than the French Québécois, long-suffering folk who had spent centuries squeezed between the boot of English economic power and the chokehold of the Catholic Church.

Among my school friends, there were fifth-generation Jews whose ancestors had escaped Cossack massacres in the Russian Empire. Others, like me, had recently arrived from North Africa and the Middle East, where Jews were no longer welcome.

The most unfortunate, however, were survivors of the Holocaust and their children. One day my friend Malka Cohen and I skipped home from school, careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. She leaned over, her blonde curls tickling my ear, and whispered, “My father says we shouldn’t tell anyone we’re Jewish because they’ll kill us,” and then she hummed softly, a mournful Yiddish melody. The tune floated between us for a moment, thin and unnameable. We kept walking, careful not to step on the cracks.

In 1963 the English Protestant schools were still imbued with the music and values of the British Empire. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was my favourite hymn. The music swelled as did my heart when I imagined those stalwart soldiers marching off to war. In later years, we Jewish kids slyly changed the lyrics to “with the star of David going on before,” singing quietly of the exploits of biblical soldiers led by the legendary King David.

The approach of winter meant Christmas would soon be upon us. It signalled the start of the carolling season. We embraced the festive mood and sang carols door to door with our Christian friends to raise money for those less fortunate. I felt bad because my family couldn’t celebrate the holiday. No strings of lights and tinsel glittering on a tree. No gauze-draped angels, shiny ornaments and presents piled high beneath the tree. In those days, Chanukah was not a Christmas-adjacent gift-giving holiday. Strictly dreidels, prayers, songs and chocolate gelt.

Other musical and cultural traditions were inculcated in me at Hebrew day school, where we were taught the popular Israeli song “Jerusalem of Gold” and “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of the fifteen-year-old state of Israel. The teachers made a valiant effort to teach as much Hebrew as our brains could absorb in a few hours a week.

Arabic was woven into the fabric of my home life where the music of Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian songstress, crackled on the record player. My father had hurriedly packed that scratched 78 just prior to our expulsion from Egypt. It elicited fond memories of his Egyptian friends, some Muslim, some Christian, who remained in the old country. Sworn enemies after 1948, Israel and Egypt were intertwined in our everyday, in the food, the culture, and in the Arabic that was spoken so that little ears could not understand conversations reserved for adults.

French was the language spoken at home. Educated at the Lycée Français in Cairo, a legacy of Napoleon’s colonial ambitions, my parents imparted their love of French poetry, the plays of Molière and the music of Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour.

In keeping with his family tradition of learning to play an instrument at a young age, my father had bought a gleaming upright piano, which was hauled up the stairs of our duplex for me, the eldest. Piano did not come easily and became a study in laziness on my part and ear-shattering pain for my teachers. Mr. Baranovsky, a Russian émigré, his fingers and nail beds stained a dark amber, trailed his misery into our house along with the unwelcome stink of his Marlboros. He was succeeded by Soeur Marie-Thérèse, she of the stark habit and stiff ruler, at L’École de Musique Vincent d’Indy. Fortunately, the good sister slapped the piano, not our fingers, the repeated blows taking the shine off the upright.

What did all that music make me? I carry it still, those layered, unruly chords. It is the sound of belonging everywhere and nowhere. It is the sound of Montreal in 1963. It is the sound of me.

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Every Sunday morning my mother baked muffins. Bran, blueberry, cranberry, orange — the variety changed with the season and her mood. But there was always one extra-large muffin, and it was always mine. She never made a ceremony of it. She simply set it apart.

My mother was not a woman who said “I love you” easily.

Mum was stoic by nature. She had opinions in abundance — politics, hockey, fashion — and she’d share them without much invitation or room for debate. But emotions were another matter. I felt loved, certainly. I just rarely heard it said. Mum’s love language was food.

Our meals were good, nutritious, down-to-earth. Nothing fancy or adventurous — comfort food at its best. Meatloaf, mac and cheese, homemade soups and stews, pancakes and French toast.

Mum had the touch. I have most of her recipes, but I’ve never been able to reproduce the exact taste or texture. Her pie pastry was light and flaky — nothing like the cardboard crusts of store-bought pies. Her lemon pie was a particular favourite of my brother’s, with its tart filling and cloud of meringue. She made jam tarts for him often, and it gave her immense pleasure to watch him enjoy them.

I would come home from school to find bread dough rising under a blanket, cookies cooling on racks. At Christmas she baked for days — shortbread, butter tarts, mincemeat, cherry pound cake. Her shortbread was buttery perfection.

The years passed the way they do. We grew up, moved out, started our own lives. The family home in Quebec remained the fixed point — the place we returned to at Christmas, at Easter, at Thanksgiving, always to the smell of something in the oven. It was impossible to imagine my parents anywhere else.

Two years after we moved across the country from Quebec to British Columbia, my parents followed. They struggled with leaving the family home — forty years, a lifetime of meals and Sunday mornings. I worried their new condo would never feel quite right to me.

I shouldn’t have worried. The first time I visited after they’d settled in, I smelled it the moment I stepped off the elevator. Something familiar, something sweet. The closer I got to their door, the stronger it became. I opened the door and walked into the smell of fresh baking.

Home.

Six years before she died, Mum suffered a massive stroke. After that, there was no more baking. The last years of her life the kitchen was silent.

This year marks ten years since she passed. I still miss her every day. Mother’s Day arrives each spring and I think of all the women whose love language their children didn’t fully understand until it was gone. And sometimes, when I catch the smell of something sweet coming from a neighbour’s kitchen, I think of a Sunday morning, and a muffin set aside — just for me.

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A family walks along the sidewalk of a city street: mother, father, daughter and son. It is a summer day and they are happy, dressed for the season, all smiling except for Papa. Maybe something he saw in the newspaper that morning was on his mind.

There were things to worry about. A few years later, the city – Warsaw – would be in ruins, and the parents would be dead.

Tracing what happened to the sunny family became a quest for Alice Switocz Goldbloom, who was to be the daughter of the young man in the photo. For many years her mother, Maria, and father, Edward, left unspoken what had happened when they were growing up in Poland and confronted with the cataclysm that was World War II.

Her parents’ silence was a way of protecting the three Switocz sisters. Raised in Sarnia, Ont., Alice Switocz’s concern was to fit in with other young people who led ordinary Canadian lives, in fact, to distance herself from the accents and foreign ways of her parents and their fervent Catholicism.

She was smart, energetic and ambitious, eager to break away from home. University was an escape route. Good jobs followed. She was assistant to a Liberal cabinet minister in Ottawa, and she started her own communications business in Montreal. She hired a man she would later marry, Jonathan Goldbloom, son of Victor Goldbloom, patriarch of the prominent Montreal Jewish family. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted two from Poland, the homeland her parents had fled.

All was going as Switocz Goldbloom wished. But the past, even a hidden one, has a habit of creeping out in unexpected ways. Her mother died in 2005, taking her memories with her, but in his final years, what her father recalled began spilling into Switocz Goldbloom’s consciousness.

Edward Switocz was by then an old man living in a Toronto care home where his daughter went often to visit. One day, to escape the tedium of the place, she asked him, “Do you remember the day the Germans bombed Warsaw?” “You should have asked me when my memory was sharper,” he replied.

But age does not dim such memories. Over the next months all that happened came tumbling out: the bombing of Warsaw in 1939, which left 10,000 dead, the uprising and subsequent liquidation of the Jewish ghetto, its population hauled off to death camps, life for Poles as “untermenschen” – sub-humans – under Nazi rule. Edward Switocz joined the Polish Home Army, which in 1944 rose up in resistance to the occupiers. Outgunned, it was defeated as the Soviet Red Army stood by across the Vistula River, waiting for the bid for freedom to be dashed. Two hundred thousand Poles died in the Warsaw Uprising.

Switocz became a prisoner of the Germans while his parents were sent to concentration camps, where they perished (his sister escaped to the countryside). As the Red Army rolled across Poland, the camps were evacuated – Jews, Roma, PoWs and other prisoners sent westward in tens of thousands on death marches. Switocz watched as most of the men he was with died while they trudged more than 800 kilometres into Germany, of fatigue and cold, shot by their captors when they could no longer walk. He had one keepsake with him, the picture of his family on that summer day in Warsaw.

After her father died, Switocz Goldbloom looked for her mother’s story. It was more of a sleuthing job. In archives and other sources, she traced Maria’s wartime days as a forced labourer, sent to Germany where she endured inhuman conditions, some particular to women that that would mark them for life. Her parents met in the Netherlands after the war, following stays in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany, and immigrated to Canada in 1951. Small wonder that in this country, they would want to shield their children from what they knew.

What Alice Switocz Goldbloom has learned about her parents compelled her to record their lives in the just-published book Family Secrets. The stories it contains are both revelatory and timely.

While the drama of the war and its trauma draw the reader’s attention, the book is also the story a woman’s journey, about how finding the missing pieces of a life were critical to the author’s understanding of herself.

Even as her parents kept the past from her, so too was occluded part of the story of what happened in Poland during the war. The massacre of the Jewish community has been recorded and is well-known, but the suffering of Polish Christians – 2.7 million died during Nazi rule – is a story that has been pushed into the shadows. This was the result of Poland’s new overlords, the Russians, supressing it. Moscow left no room for mention of what happened to Poles during the years a free nation was turned into a German slave state or, for that matter, one dominated by the Soviet Union.

There was also the contoversial tag of antisemitism and complicity borne by Poles for what happened to the country’s Jewish citizens. Only in recent years has this wound begun to heal in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Canada, too, has fostered healing. That Alice Switocz married into a Jewish family is central to the story. Having had to navigate between competing narratives of the past has led her to the kind of reconciliation between communities this country can offer.

Full disclosure: Alice and I became friends when she introduced me to Substack a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, I asked her what becoming a Goldbloom meant in the writing of Family Secrets. “I couldn’t have written the book without that happening,” she said.

The book’s timeliness comes from the understanding that we are once more in a moment when grievance and the hatred it promotes have infected societies that seemed immune from them. The price of immunity is commitment to the tolerance that protects the happiness of families like the one in the picture at the top of this post.

Family Secrets

By Alice Switocz Goldbloom

Pottersfield Press, 164 pp

This review of Family Secrets was originally published on Bryan’s Substack Life Sentences on May 1, 2025. You can find where to buy the book here.

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I have been avoiding heavy objects for a while. Struggling to open jars. Undeniably weakening. Those who know say that lifting weights is essential to keeping bones and muscles strong as one ages — advice I had not yet taken seriously. I was intimidated by the machinery in gyms, afraid of hurting myself, and shy about asking for help. I told myself that gardening, swimming and my general state of activity were enough. They weren’t. Time to take action!

To support my New Year’s resolution to get stronger, I joined a sportsplex. Huge weights, attached to steel bars, were hoisted, mostly by men, to the tune of much groaning, and then dropped to the ground with a crash. It was terrifying! I used the pool and the gym’s circuit equipment, but didn’t give the weights more than a glance.

About this time, a series of 10 sessions at a studio dedicated to weightlifting for women came up at a charity auction. I bid and won. But after peeking in the window and seeing high stacks of weights, rows of black steel racks and other scary equipment, I tried to give away the passes to my daughter — she wasn’t having it. Finally, I decided to risk a visit.

The door opened directly from the snow-packed street into the cozy studio. Discordant music blared, and a perky young woman greeted me. She set up my account and noted that I just needed to add a particular app to my phone, and I would be able to choose from 50 classes a week. Nothing to it! For her, obviously— not so self-evident for me. I got her to add the app and sign me up.

At the first group class, women of various ages and body types were warming up. All were at least two decades younger. We paired up to share stations and spot each other. We were instructed to lift ever-increasing amounts of weight while lying on our backs, bending forward, or hoisting them up from our shoulders. Really? A few classes later, one participant hoisted 200 pounds. Astonishing! I was relieved to learn that she is a competitive weightlifter — thankfully not on my New Year’s resolution list. I managed to lift 65 pounds.

The next morning, I couldn’t turn my head either left or right. At the next class, I dropped down to 55 pounds. “You are supposed to add weight at each class,” chirped the instructor. “Not if I want to move the next day,” I countered. Notwithstanding my lack of progress, I left each class feeling terrific.

Last week, the regular trainer — the one with the prominent lateral muscles, tight buttocks, and long painted fingernails — was ill. How those fingernails don’t impede lifting weights remains a mystery. An enthusiastic and energetic young man replaced her. “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees blasted out from the speakers. Decades separated the trainer from me, but we were immediately aligned by the beat. Like me, he also loved “I Feel Good,” the 1964 hit by James Brown.

I couldn’t keep my feet still. While the others followed instructions, I bopped around the gym holding 20-pound weights in each hand. This, albeit at a more sedate pace, had been the final exercise from the previous week — possibly another one which had stiffened my neck. This time it was effortless.

The trainer laughed and undertook a few of his own dance moves. My fellow weightlifters indulged me with smiles but did not join in. They had not danced their nights away under mirrored disco balls. The music of their eras wasn’t as much fun, I thought. Or perhaps I just didn’t recognize it — I had been too busy working and raising a family.

Although professional weightlifting isn’t in my future, I am no longer intimidated. Thanks to the trainers and welcoming women at the studio, I know I can lift without hurting myself. I load up “Staying Alive” and other dance music onto my playlist and join the muscled men at the sportsplex.

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Bahrain – March 2026. The port is in flames. The U.S. embassy has been struck. A drone has hit a desalination plant — the source of clean drinking water for thousands.

I turn off the news and close my eyes.

And then, unexpectedly, I smile. My memories of Bahrain are of pearls, porpoises, and cormorants.

It was October 1981. Despite Ian’s rosy promises, he had brought me to a 13-bedroom ramshackle house in the ancient village of Diraiyah — which we shared with a very opinionated and haughty Syrian man by the name of Safwan.

I needed an exit visa to leave, and this required the permission of my husband — who as I discovered had lost his job. No income, no home of our own, and now no trust. I do not recall ever before feeling such despair.

And yet – I found within me reserves of strength I didn’t know I possessed. Within a few months I had landed a job teaching French at the British School in Riyadh, much-needed camaraderie. In the staff room, talk centered on where the teachers were heading for the half-term holiday: Cyprus, Spain or Malta. But Ian and I were short on funds.

Then came an unexpected invitation: to house-sit for one of Ian’s friends in Bahrain, a very affordable holiday.

The house, rented to an American lawyer who travelled monthly to New York, offered more luxury than we were used to. My weekly letters home, carefully preserved by my parents, now make me smile. “All was very lavish, complete with video, washing machine and iron.” Such was my notion, then, of the epitome of modern convenience!

My letters to my parents do not reveal my anger and disappointment with Ian. My role in the family had always been to avoid causing my mother further anxiety. By October, I already had thoughts of returning to Canada at Christmas — for good.

Our only house-sitting responsibility was walking Tom’s dog, Monty, by the sea in the morning and evening. The name Bahrain means two seas, and I inhaled the scent of them: salt and drying fish, mingled with coffee, cardamom, and frankincense.

The island felt relaxed — a relief after the oppressive austerity of Riyadh, with its wandering matawaiin, or religious police, thwacking at women’s exposed calves. In Bahrain, I could breathe again and linger in the inviting cafes where women could sit anywhere and not be herded into the “family sections.”

One person we met proved the most memorable. Angela was an archaeologist writing a book on the islands of Bahrain. She invited us to accompany her for the day on a final pre-publication tour of the archaeological sites.

And so we spent a single glorious day bouncing on empty roads as Angela introduced us to the ruins of the ancient civilization of Dilmun, from 5,000 years ago.

“Many think it was the site of the garden of Eden,” claimed Angela.

“Hard to believe,” I said, studying the arid monochrome desert, and swatting away a fly.

“This was once lush and fertile,” she answered, laughing.

We explored the burial mounds or tulums of the Dilmun, an ancient Portuguese fort, and vast flint sites, scattered in abundance on the desert ground.

It was there I began to see Ian differently. In his old cords and blue shirt, he knelt easily in those arid places, brushing, sorting and identifying the prehistoric flints. His fluent Arabic opened doors. He spoke with ease to those we met, moving through this world with a confidence I had not seen. I watched as he focused his Nikon lenses to shoot photographs that would later appear in Angela’s book, The Islands of Bahrain.

I remembered then why I had given up my apartment, my job, my life in Ottawa — to follow this man to the Middle East.

We ended the week with a visit to the Manama Souq, in search of a memento. The lanes narrowed, gold glistened, Ian pointed to some Arabic script and pulled me into a small plain shop. Tea was offered, accepted and poured into tiny clear glass cups. The vendor pulled out shallow trays with small envelopes. The owner tipped out several pale, almost pinkish, luminous forms. Ian leaned in, asked questions, nodded. “Natural… from here,” said the vendor, pointing in the direction of the sea. We left with a tiny white envelope containing my own small, perfect pearls.

Our flight home coincided with the end of the Hajj holiday. The airport was overwhelmed — clogged with returning vacationers. The airline had overbooked.

With no seats available, Ian and I took a traditional dhow from Bahrain to Al Khobar, across the Persian Gulf — known locally as the Arabian Gulf. It was a wooden boat of the kind long used for pearl diving. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the deck, along with about sixty passengers dressed in slim long white thobes and red and white checked ghutras; we were the only non-locals. We were surrounded by Saudi women — unveiled though in black abayas — their hands and feet patterned with henna; the air permeated with cardamom. Cheerful and generous, they offered us items from their picnic: labneh, flatbread, and slices of sweet melon.

Porpoises surfaced and disappeared alongside us. We took turns spotting cormorants perched on the mast.

About an hour into the two-and-a-half-hour journey, the diesel engine spluttered, faltered and died.

The captain launched into rapid Arabic, his hand and arm gestures wild and emphatic. A lively and excited debate broke out among the passengers. Ian explained that the captain was taking a vote as to whether to head back to Bahrain or press on to Al Khobar, using the backup triangular sail. Ill-informed though I was, I laughed and raised my hand to vote to press on.

Looking back, I see my trip to Bahrain as a turning point. The moment I raised my hand on the dhow was, in its small way, the moment I chose to press on — with my marriage, and with the life I found myself in, now seeing more clearly the man I married.

I did not return to Canada that Christmas. For a time, that was the right decision.

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