Mom, you could have told me

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago. 

I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises. 

But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father. 

Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery. 

People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful." 

Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, from start to finish and without question. That's a Dad.

As for expectations of monogamy, they've always struck me as just painfully in denial of human behaviour. Our great big family on my mom's side has some classic stories of profound human-beingness in our history, and I've always loved those stories the best. 

In my case, everybody is dead who might have more details on this DNA surprise, but at least an aunt remained who remembered the affair, though not nearly with the level of detail I would have liked. 

It turns out that getting your head around the fact that half of your genes are not what you thought is quite a big thing, at least in my experience. There are stories in my bones, but I don't know what they are. The stories that I had grown up believing were shaping my very being were not my stories. 

Some people I've talked with disapprove of me even getting my DNA done. They see it as me going looking for a secret that my mother clearly didn't want me to know. But does one person's wish to keep a secret outweigh another person's right to know who they are at their biological foundation? Not in my opinion. 

Too late now for such reflections anyway. Easily accessible DNA tests will be tossing many cats out of the bag from this point on. Mothers, if you have secrets, tell them now, so your children can start sooner to learn about who they are at their genetic core, and how it all turned out this way. (Oh, the fantasies I've had about Mom still being alive and the questions I'd ask...)

I'm just beginning to get to know the people who share my paternal DNA. Maybe one day I will call them family, but right now they are strangers - and in some cases, very wary ones. 

I'm hungry for the smallest of stories about the man I've only seen in a 1949 photo, but I'm working on trying to bide my time, not to scare them off with a thousand questions.

I get their suspicion. When a random woman calls from nowhere to declare herself your surprise half-sister, how can you not be weirded out and wary? Why should you suddenly answer all her deeply personal questions about this man that maybe you, too, have a lot of unanswered questions about? 

What's the protocol for approaching a "new" relative after a DNA test? I felt like a bit of a stalker for a while there, googling names on Facebook and writing messages to strangers who I thought might be a relative, or able to lead me to one. 

That tactic scared off at least one relative, who felt I was breaching their privacy. But some of them inched forward to take a closer look, and some of them have been very welcoming. We're talking on the phone now, and making plans to meet in person. 

They bring me stories, and I bring them news of their ancestors found in my prowls through paid databases: the mysterious grandmother who disappeared and then died in an asylum; the aunt who tried to cross the US border with a felon she'd met in a classified ad; the lawsuit that Uncle Joe brought against the government. We don't even know each other, yet these are our shared stories.

I'd done a DNA test in 2018 with a different company, but there was no one in my matches closely related enough to trigger any suspicion on my part. That test also didn't break down UK heritage by country, so all I saw was that I was 50 per cent UK, as expected.

Things went differently for my second test. For one thing, this time the UK heritage was parcelled by country and I turned out to be Irish, not Scottish, on my paternal side. That got my attention.

I also wasn't a match for my other cousins in the database on my dad's side. And then there was the matter of a first cousin in Toronto, with a name I'd never heard of even though I know ALL my first cousins. 

And away things went from there. Now, after a lifetime of believing that I had no biological siblings, I'm booking flights to go see my half-sister. 

I think my mom would like knowing that. I think we probably would have had a good laugh about this once we got through that first awkward conversation. I wish she was alive for me to tell her that none of this changes a thing about how I felt about her or my dad. 

***

Click for the article on my DNA discovery that ran on CTV National. Long story as to how I ended up going quite so public, but I had thought I was one anecdote in a much larger story of "people like me," only to realize later I was THE anecdote. 

How racist are our roots? So racist

My new hobby of diving into ancestry information brings me many treasurers, including these four 1924 Chinese Immigration Act documents of my uncles and aunt back when they were little kids. They all just showed up recently in my Ancestry.com "hints," so I'm guessing it was a release triggered by 100 years having passed.

My Romanian grandmother had married a Chinese man in 1910 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which must have been some kind of crazy act at the time. Their children were thus half-Chinese, and presumably had to be documented via these forms once the Act took effect in 1923.

Canada had ended the Head Tax that year and replaced it with the Chinese Immigration Act, which would block virtually all immigrants from China from coming to Canada for the next 24 years. From the Canadian Museum of Immigration website:

The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 virtually restricted all Chinese immigration to Canada by narrowly defining the acceptable categories of Chinese immigrants. While the entrance duty requirement was repealed, admissible Chinese immigrants were limited to diplomats and government representatives, merchants, children born in Canada who had left for educational or other purposes, and students while attending university or college. Between 1923 and 1946, it is estimated that only 15 Chinese immigrants gained entry into Canada.

But hey, my people sure did make up for lost time. In the 2021 Canadian census, more than 1.7 million people reported being of Chinese origin. Take that, racists.

Grandmothers, I see you

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency.

Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival.

I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed.

I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth. 

I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves.

It’s still tough to be a woman, but it was brutal back in those years. Laws and processes weren’t just ineffective, they were actively discriminatory, with a particular emphasis on rendering women economically dependent and unable to prevent pregnancy. (Today, we call that “traditional values.”)

No woman coming from an impoverished background in those years had a remote expectation of a good, safe or predictable life. My grandmothers had baby after baby, and for the most part lived hard in the poor parts of town with difficult men who scratched out a living.

I see my young grandmothers emerging these days from the censuses and various documents that an Ancestry subscription can bring you – brief glimpses of people captured at a moment in time, with the amateur family sleuth's task to then knit those moments into something more substantial.

I’ve got a newspaper archive subscription, too, but people like my grandmothers don't tend to make the newspapers. Canada’s community newspaper archives are treasure troves of local history, but women generally show up only at their weddings, when they’re dead, attending occasional society teas if they're a wealthier sort, or hidden under their husband’s names (“Mrs. Richard Booth”). 

Grandmothers can also end up neglected on the family-tree side of things, I’m finding. A lot of people tend to do trees following out the male line – the surname – while the other half of the genetic and social equation goes wanting. The tradition of women taking the man’s surname when they marry adds mud to the water.

But the story takes shape as you follow out the threads, and the tiny bits weave into bigger bits. And slowly, the haze lifts and there they are: the grandmothers.

Mine emerge as children and young women, glimpsed in a moment of their regular life that was captured in the public record. Here they are living with their parents and siblings at this address or that; here they are being baptized, getting married, waiting at the border.

I see two of them getting on boats that will bring them to Canada, but am left to imagine how they ever got to that boat in the first place.

I see another one living what I can only hope was a sheltered, good life with her aging parents in Ontario, until one parent died and the other one moved away, and she was married off and moved to Saskatoon.

All of my grandmothers ended up widows. Having lived for most of their lives as “housewives” raising long lines of children, they faced even more poverty in their final years unless family members stepped up.

My one grandmother did fall in love again after her husband died, but she couldn’t marry a second time without losing the small veterans’ pension she received owing to her first husband's military service. Then her common-law husband died, too, and she was alone.

She and another grandmother frequently lived for extended periods of time at our house, staying at the houses of their various children on an ever-changing schedule, packed off here or there when somebody grew weary of their presence. If only I had thought to ask all the questions that burn in my mind these days. Grandmother, how did you endure?

My third grandmother had the saddest of endings, institutionalized and surrounded by people in her last days who knew so little of her that her birthplace and mother’s name are listed as “unknowns” on her death certificate. She was buried without headstone or marker in a pauper’s grave in Toronto.

(The search for her, so invisible and forgotten, has taught me that there are a lot of exciting ways to follow out an ancestral mystery these days. But be careful what you wish for.)

I thank my grandmothers for giving their lives to generations of women who they will never know. I hope that they’d be happy to see us now, earning money and no longer at the mercy of our sex lives, at least for the most part.

Men still rule the world, of course. But at least there’s public discourse now – and even an effective use of law from time to time - around women not being abused, exploited, underpaid, in harm’s way, alone, discriminated against, etc. There was none of that for my grandmothers.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been outraged on others’ behalf for all the grand unfairness in this world. I now see that my grandmothers have perhaps given me that fire. Their stories give me more energy for the fight.

How much better would their lives be if my grandmothers were coming of age now? Well, that’s an interesting question to reflect on.

Two of my grandmothers were from impoverished immigrant families desperate to find work in a strange new land. The other had an intellectual disability at a time when people like her either died on the street or were locked up.

A hundred years have gone by since then, and the changes in society have been extraordinary. But life is still far from good for people like my grandmothers.

Jan. 5, 1974: A wedding story

On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday.

What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t scared or sad – then and now, I’ve always been up for an adventure, and I’d been eager to get out of my parents’ house for at least a couple of years by that point. (They were good people, but I so desperately wanted independence.)

My memories of the weeks around the wedding are like snapshots more than anything. I remember a glimpse of this, a few seconds of that. It’s never big stuff I recall, just these quirky little bits that linger.

Me enjoying the fuss of all the big community bridal showers that a girl got when she married a Cumberland boy in those years. Cakes shaped and iced like a Barbie doll's ball gown. Me in the mirror for the first time in my wedding dress, appreciating its low cut. The purple everything in the honeymoon suite of the Port Augusta Motel.

Us splurging for two nights in the Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver for a honeymoon, strolling past the fur-coat stores and the fancy art and eating steak in Trader Vic’s. I’d never known such luxury. Me sitting topless at the little table in our oceanfront room, carefully colouring a new doodle art that my husband had gotten me.

I smoked back then, and if I’m being honest, one of the things that excited me most about getting married was that I would now be free to smoke whenever I wanted. It’s that kind of memory that brings home to me what a kid I was. Not one clue about the actual realities of being a wife - and soon enough, a mom. I was just thinking yay, now I get to smoke.

I suppose that marrying while still a child would seem like a hard start to adulthood to a lot of people. But was it? Looking back over the rich 50 years that I’ve had since then, what would I do differently? Who would I have been if I hadn’t been the girl making adult decisions at 17? How many of the amazing experiences that I’ve had were made possible because I was that girl?

I didn’t get to do that young-person-backpacking thing, and I admit that I probably would have loved that experience. I also have a very poignant memory of observing the teen scene in Penticton on one long-ago summer holiday with a baby on my hip, and feeling such longing to have had the chance to be the girl in the cool car cruising with all the boys, good tunes on the radio.

But 50 years on, I know that it all comes to you sooner or later anyway. Whatever you missed here, you’ll make up there. (OK, maybe not the Penticton teen scene. But you’ll get some version of being the cool, wild girl at some point in your life, if that’s what you want.)

Spoiler alert: The marriage won't work out for those children standing up together in Courtenay’s United Church on Jan. 5, 1974, Rev. Ray Brandon presiding. There will be no special anniversary cake, no gold mylar balloon in the shape of 50.

Though it’s not like divorce is the end of the story. We had children, and then they grew up and had children of their own. We are attached for a lifetime and beyond by those dear creatures who we both love without measure. My ex-husband is literally the only person in the world who loves my children with as much passion as I do. That is an unbreakable bond.

Tonight, 50 years ago. Did I have butterflies? Did I hang out with my besties, all of whom were in the wedding? Did I play 45s on the stereo in my room and celebrate my last night in the family home? If my mom were still alive, she’d recall every detail of it. “Oh, Jody, how can you not remember?” she’d scold.

Just two days ago, I remembered the sparkly blue dress that my mother wore to my wedding. Three years later, I’d wear it myself to a New Year’s Eve dance at the CRI Hall, when I was really pregnant. I danced so much that our daughter was born three weeks early.

Tomorrow, 50 years ago. The bridesmaids will wear royal blue, and the groomsmen will be in rented matching tuxes with that kind of flocked pattern that was popular in a wedding tux back then. There will be candles in the church, and my dad will have to work hard to hide his stricken look, though it shows up in some of the photos.

And just like that, I will be an adult. And it will all turn out OK.

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day...

When I was a kid and got too whiny about some little difficulty in my life, I'd get shaken back to reality by a parent or grandparent with a version of one of those Walked Five Miles to School in a Blizzard stories from their own childhoods. 

The examples varied, perhaps invoking a time when there was nothing but shrivelled potatoes to eat, or comparing my comfy bedroom to the mattress on the floor that they remembered sharing with some ridiculous amount of siblings. 

But the moral was always the same: this parent/grandparent had known deprivation, and I should be so glad and eternally grateful for living in different times.

It struck me the other day that the Boomer generation that I'm part of just might be the first generation in Canada whose own stories will instead be of how good they had it compared to their grandkids. 

Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day we had houses for people. We didn't even have a word for homelessness, and you camped for fun, not because it was that or nothing. We burned through natural resources like there was no tomorrow. (Turns out that last part was true.) 

Back in my day, we made real money, and if we hit a bad spell, could fall back on employment insurance that actually covered most of a person's bills. We had doctors. Weather was just weather, not an ominous portent of end of days. 

Sounds a bit like a tall tale at this point, doesn't it? In fairness, not everything has gotten worse in my lifetime. 

Rights have improved significantly, at least on paper. We are woke, more or less, to the cruelties and inequities around race, gender, sexual preference and disability. We appear to be finally getting real about addressing the historic theft of Indigenous lands. 

Crime in Canada is half of what it was at its peak in the early 1990s, and the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has declined by more than a billion people since 1990.

But while rights, personal safety and a little less global poverty are vital components to a good life, so is purchasing power and hope for the future in a world that at times feels dangerously close to losing it.

 And on that front, my generation can only hang its head in shame.

I've told the story of my 17-year-old newlywed self many times, so apologies for dragging it out again for this post. But it's just so perfect for summing up what has happened over my lifetime when it comes to the growing social decay we see around us and the deepening struggle to achieve the basics of a good life.

In the late 1970s in Courtenay, I was a stay-at-home teenage mom teaching a little piano on the side and my then-husband worked at the Campbell River paper mill. He made around $28,000 a year, which the Bank of Canada inflation calculator tells me is equivalent to $105,000 in 2022. Pretty decent pay for a couple of kids starting a life.

We bought a cabin on the water at Royston for $10,000 when we got married in 1974. We had two cars, and regularly holidayed with the kids to the Okanagan and Disneyland. We moved on to a bigger house a couple of years later and had a small, manageable mortgage and no appreciable credit card debt, possibly because it was hellishly hard to get a credit card in those days.

When there was a five-month strike at the mill that really hurt, we caught and ate so much salmon that I couldn't eat it again for years. Because our seas were full of salmon.

Fast forward 50 years and it's an entirely different life for a young couple with kids anywhere on Vancouver Island or the Lower Mainland. 

Not only is the thought of ever being able to buy a home out of reach for many of them, they can't even count on staying put in a rental home if the property owner opts to "renovict." They certainly can't count on easily finding another place to rent at a price they can afford. 

The number of two-income families in Canada has doubled since the 1970s, during which time purchasing power has fallen far below what it once was. Forget the dream of a two-income family able to participate more fully in the economy. What has actually happened is a flat-lining in wages that now requires two people to work just to earn the same amount that one person once earned. 

The average hourly wage in Canada in 1975 was just over $10. Today, it's $20. Meanwhile, inflation has risen almost 470 per cent in the same period - which means that the hourly wage in 2022 ought to be $47 to have maintained the same purchasing power. 

The rich get richer and the not-rich lose ground. Canada's wealthiest 20 per cent of households now hold two-thirds of all assets in the country, while the least wealthy 20 per cent hold just 2.8 per cent. That top 20 per cent is the only quintile to have increased its share of national income over the years; all the others have seen a loss. 

It was my generation that inked the free-trade deals that have tied the world together so tightly for hungry global capitalists and consumers eager for cheap goods that now we're dependent on distant countries for everything. When a relentless drought grips California farms and the rivers get so dry in China that the freighters can't run, it's our store shelves that sit empty.

It's my generation that's sitting fat and happy on our investment portfolios, rooting for growth to continue unfettered every quarter so we can live in grand comfort. Those who come after us will live with the fallout - crashed pension plans, climate change, unattainable dreams of a home to call your own, weakening social benefits. "Populist" governments to come will worsen every crisis with their self-serving agendas, even while their meaningless rhetoric acts as a siren's call to the disaffected and disappointed.

Let me tell ya, kid, that is all so very wrong. Wish I could tell you that we're working on it, but I don't think we are. Think of it this way: You'll have some great stories of deprivation to tell your own grandkids.

I will remember

 

Clockwise from top left: My father David Paterson; my aunt Joan Hepburn, solo and with her mates; my grandmother's brother Jack Feica; my uncle George Chow and wife Fan from a newspaper clipping after George's dramatic escape from a Japanese internment camp; my uncle Bill Chow; my uncle Pete Chow; and my grandmother's brother Tom Feica.

***

The benefit of being one of the people in your big extended family who hoards photos is that when struck by the thought of whether you could pull together a quick photo collage for Remembrance Day of relatives who served our country, there they all are.

This little collection certainly doesn't represent all of my relatives who have served, just the ones I have photos for. But even this handful reminds me of their bravery and commitment to a better world, putting their lives on the line for democracy and freedom. 

For my mom's brothers in particular, serving in the Second World War couldn't have been an easy choice, what with Canada still rejecting Chinese-Canadians until things got so desperate that they had to shift racist policies. My mom and her siblings were mixed race - Romanian and Chinese - but that was not enough to shield them from brutally racist times. Chinese-Canadians didn't get the vote until after the war, and even then it was a fight.

A person can get weighed down by the headlines of today, when it feels like we spend far more time warring with our fellow citizens and savaging the political leaders of the day than we do standing up for what's good and right about Canada. 

I am awed by my relatives' belief in this country as worthy enough to lay their lives down for. May we come together for the good fight again now that the enemy most capable of wreaking havoc is the contentious issues that divide us. 

The story of my mom

Mom loved this 2015 photo from the Chow reunion, which miraculously
captured all but one of her kids, their spouses and children in one place.

My mother Helen Paterson was born in 1925 in Moose Jaw, the sixth of nine children in a hard-scrabble household of mixed-race kids back when nobody even knew that term. 

Her father, Charles Chow, was Chinese and ran a grocery store catering to the Chinese community, many of them labourers who had come to Canada to work on the railway, and for a time he managed the Canadian Pacific Railway dining room in Moose Jaw. Her mother, Mary Feica, was Romanian, married off at 17 by her equally hard-scrabble Prairie family; when she wed her Chinese boss at the CPR restaurant where she worked, it was considered scandalous.

Such family circumstance provided fertile ground for stories. My mother knew them all. She grew less and less reticent about sharing them as she aged, and we made good use of her as the historian of a larger-than-life Canadian family. Her stories stitch us together, the sprawling Chow-Feica clan that has grown to more than 100 and still keeps up family reunions started in the early 1970s.

The two stories that stand out for me happened around the same time in my mother’s life, the late 1940s, when she was finishing up training as a registered nurse at Saskatoon General Hospital. She met my father, David Paterson, around the same time at a dance in Saskatoon, where she swooned at his (admittedly dazzling) blue eyes. They were together from that moment on, until his death in 2002.

The first story involves a hot-headed Saskatoon surgeon who hurled some poor woman’s newly removed uterus at my mom in the operating room when she was in training and mistakenly handed him the wrong kind of scissors. I love that one for reminding me that while equality still eludes women, at least we have moved beyond a time when a man could throw a woman’s uterus at a student nurse and nobody who witnessed it would dare to complain.

Mom, standing second from left, with her siblings and parents.

The other story unfolded at Temple Gardens in Moose Jaw, at the time a cool place for young people to go dancing. The owner of the club tried to kick my mother out one night when she showed up with my dad, because only white people were allowed in. He reconsidered only when other patrons started making a fuss. 

That one snaps me back to reality on our country’s racist roots, as did Mom’s tales of delivering groceries as a kid to Moose Jaw’s old opium dens, where lonely Chinese men exploited for their labour eased the pain of living in a country that denied them even the basic happiness of having wives or family members in China join them in Canada.

Happily, my mother and her siblings were blessed with exotic physical beauty and unstoppable personalities, so the racism they all endured was buffered by a magnetism that drew everyone to them. My mother was cooking lunches and dinners for great batches of friends and family at least four times a week right up until her death, and never tired of elderly men from her past telling her of the mad crushes they had on her back in the day. One such man attended her celebration of life in Victoria, her home of many years, just to tell me that his first glimpse of her at a party when he was 15 took his breath away. He’d never seen her again.

She was a crackerjack. At 91, she was still acing the New York Times Sunday crossword, bossing all of us around, and preparing perfectly rare roast beef after Googling how to do it. May we all live a life as full-on and courageous as hers.   

To all the dogs I've loved

 

I can’t imagine what the dogs that run into Paul and I must think of us these days, trailing what must be bits of the scent of a dozen or more dogs on us at this point. Our itinerant way of life this past year has brought us many animal companions for periods of intimate living, and I’m sure it doesn’t all come out in the wash.
    It’s been quite the animal-companion year since returning to the Island last May: standard poodle; Chinese crested hairless; Australian shepherd; Chihuahua; pug mix; poodle mix; shepherd mix; fluffy-dog mix; Schnauzer mix. Cats that live indoors. Cats that live outside. Alpacas, a llama and 28 chickens. We’ve gotten to know so many animals in the intimacy of their own homes.
    You definitely end up sharing a lot of experiences with animals when you look after other people’s pets. I’ve slept with dogs I barely knew. All of us learn each other’s food quirks, poo quirks, good and bad habits and lines in the sand in very short order. It’s a bit like a longish fling, where both of you know it’s not going to last and so just plunge in head-long.

    As you might expect, people’s pets are often quite unsettled initially to find you moving into their home. Imagine how any of us would feel if a stranger announced herself at our door and set about doing things differently. Meanwhile, your own beloved pack members have inexplicably flown the coop. Any animal would be weirded out by that turn of events. 
    But here’s the glorious secret about dogs and cats: As long as you start right in consistently feeding them, petting them, treating them kindly and taking them for fun walks, you’re going to be their good pal in about two days. They still love their owners the most, of course, but you will be a fondly regarded substitute, like a favourite relative who can be counted on to sneak you a raw marrow bone once in a while, throw in an extra scoop of kibble, take you on a ramble up Mount Doug.

(The one glaring exception is our friend Kim and Adrian’s cat Joe, who we have yet to see in any of our stays and know only for his waste in the litter box and gradually emptying kibble dish. I accused Kim of making Joe up, but other housesitters then posted Facebook pictures of the elusive cat happily receiving their cuddles. Knife in the heart, Joe.)
    I’ve always loved all dogs, but it was our two-plus years in Copan Ruinas, Honduras, that got me thinking about them in a completely different way.
    The small gated courtyard at our house there turned out to be a refuge for medium-sized, skinny stray dogs - usually nursing females– of a size that could squeeze through the bars and take a break from the scene in the cool of our patio. Naturally, we set out food and water, which brought even more, although almost everyone initially turned up their nose at dog kibble. (I used to make chicken gizzard toppings to lure our fussy visitors into eating dog food.)

With nobody but themselves to govern their lives, the dogs socialized themselves. They knew which streets to walk on, which dogs and humans to give a wide berth to.  They’d figured out that battling over nothing was a tremendous waste of energy in a town that never had enough for a dog to eat, and so fought with each other on only the rarest of occasions.
    As for humans, virtually all of the dogs categorized people as beings that were best mistrusted but at the same time coveted, because they had the food. So once a Copan street dog trusted you enough to let you touch it, the dog was yours, a realization that brought me all kinds of guilt when we came back to Canada and could bring only one dog back.
    I also saw that many of the dogs loved the freedom of street life, some even more than they loved the certainty of a comfortable home. A domesticated dog in a pet-loving society like ours gets a longer, safer and more consistent life out of the deal, but that’s not to deny the appeal of a life of genuine freedom and all the food-laden garbage cans a dog can toss in a night.
    A Canadian dog lives a life far removed from that of a Copan street dog, which on top of going hungry also exists in a culture that doesn’t do dog worship. But Adored Pet status does mean giving up freedom. My favourite times with other people’s dogs are when the dogs and I go off on a mild adventure to someplace where they can sniff, dig, and look completely excited to be alive while enjoying the illusion that nobody's the boss of them.
 

The long off-leash foray through the forest. Bounding along a rocky shore. The chance to check out other dogs without your human getting overly involved. The pleasure of a dog treat from a stranger’s coat pocket. A taste of the wild life.
    And then home shortly after to a warm bed, good food and maybe even a free lap. Who’s going to argue with that?

A random list of gratitudes, in no particular order

     Having never been one for goal-setting, the end of the year appeals to me more as a time for reflecting on where my life is at than as a start point for setting goals that may or may not be achievable in the next 12 months. As John Lennon so eloquently noted, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. (In the spirit of goal-setting, perhaps I should pick 2016 as the year that I finally get that truth tattooed on me. I've been talking about it for long enough.)

     So I got to reflecting this morning. And I guess it’s not surprising that my thoughts turned to all the things I’m grateful for, given that I’m currently sitting here in my comfy home in the Managua heat, still in love after 19 years, practically giddy to have recovered from two herniated discs in my neck this past spring, and fresh off a terrific two weeks of travelling Nicaragua with a couple of our grandkids.

     Herewith, a list of personal gratitudes to herald the end of one year and the start of another. It’s by no means a complete list – just the things that popped into my head today. I wish for all of you that you find gratitude in the things that have gone well, and the resilience to get through the things that haven’t. Today, I’m grateful…

·         For having been a teenage mother, because what that translates into at the age of 59 is the chance to hang out in Nicaragua with two teenage grandsons when I am still fit and healthy enough to do adventurous things with them like hiking up volcanoes. Not to mention the great joy of having had more than 41 years of being a mother, and a ton of quality grandchild time for almost 17 years now.

·         For having been born and raised in a country with a high-quality, accessible education system, decent salaries, and publicly funded health care, because growing up in a country like that is a lifelong gift that gives you a giant leg up in this world no matter what happens after that.

·         But at the same time I'm also grateful for the opportunity to experience life in countries with none of that, where I have seen that even downsides can have upsides, and that countries where people have no choice but to figure out their own survival are capable of great innovation, adaptation, resilience and compassion.

·         To be part of a vast extended family that definitely gets fed up with each other from time to time but fundamentally understands that family is forever.

·         For whatever mysterious forces drove me to leave my really great private-sector job as a journalist back in 2004 and venture into non-profit work, where people’s stories still make up the bulk of my work but in ways that make me feel much more connected to meaningful change.

·         I am grateful that a lot of people are scared to live in Honduras, because that meant that the first Cuso International post I tried for back in 2011 had sat vacant for the two years prior to that, which in turn meant that my basic tourist-level Spanish passed muster and I got the post. And a whole other world opened up to me.

·         For a four-month strike in 2002 at the Times Colonist that at the time almost gave me a nervous breakdown, but ultimately revealed to me that I could easily live on half my wages. That revelation set me free.

·         For all the people who have opened up their homes, pets and possessions to Paul and I since we become “homeless” in 2012, welcoming us to care for their stuff while they are vacationing and making it possible for us to live as gypsies. (Well, except for our 2002 PT Cruiser. Come on, even a gypsy needs a caravan.)

·         Grateful to my parents and my piano teacher Kaye Wilson for hammering discipline into me at a young age, because I have put that to use in so many ways over the years, most recently to be able to learn Spanish as well as a new instrument (the accordion) that’s small enough to accompany me in my wandering.

·         For being a sickly kid who experienced being teased and judged, because that has made me into someone who never takes her health for granted and feels a kinship with anyone who has experienced being an outsider. And there’s a lot of us.

·         For all the times I failed, felt my heart break, stumbled, erred. Failure has taught me how to get back up again, and freed me from the nameless dread that gets in your way out of fear that you might fail.

·         I’m grateful that even before I knew that the man of my dreams needed to be someone who could help my youngest daughter with math, embrace cheap travel and a life of uncertainty, and be a kind and patient grandfather to my then-unborn grandchildren, I found my way to just such a man. Here’s to many more years together, Paul.

·         For whatever it is in my genetics that led me to be a person who can’t hold onto resentments and disappointments for very long. Life’s too short to be bitter. Happy 2016, everyone.

Wish I'd seized the moment to know my grandmother better

My mother didn’t give me much choice about attending family reunions when I was younger, and there were times in years past when I wasn’t too happy about that. I love my family, but long summer treks to Saskatchewan weren’t necessarily my idea of a good time.
But somewhere along the line, I got hooked. I can’t remember the exact reunion when it all clicked in, but I recall looking around at my many cousins as we made merry and thinking how incredible it was that we barely knew each other, had grown up thousands of miles away, and yet all had stories in common of our quirky grandmother.
That connection is very much on my mind this week, because the aunts and the uncles and the cousins are all in town at this very moment for a family reunion in Victoria. Chances are I’m swapping Grandma Chow stories with some of them even as you’re reading this.
Mary Feica was a Romanian teenager who married Chinese immigrant Charles Chow in 1910 in Moose Jaw, Sask. They’d met when my grandmother got a job working at the restaurant my grandfather managed.
The circumstances of that marriage alone, at a time when few things could have been more scandalous, have made for many happy hours of chatty speculation for me and my cousins. But there’s much more than that to the life of Mary and Charles Chow and their nine very interesting children, so we’re never short of things to talk about.
I have no memory of my grandfather, as he died the year I was born. But Grandma Chow lived until 1979 and was a regular visitor to our house during my childhood. She was a traveller without a home base in the years when I have the clearest memories of her, moving from one relative’s house to another for extended periods.
Oh, the things I wish I’d asked her during the times when she stayed with us. She was a woman who lived against the tenets of her time on a number of fronts, and if she was here before me now I’d have a million questions for her about what that was like. (Every now and then, the cousins get to talking about how we’ll write a book about our grandparents.)
But wouldn’t you know, I wasn’t interested in Grandma Chow’s stories in the years when she was visiting. I was a kid, and then a self-absorbed teenager, and then off on my own adventures. My memories of her are only of an elderly woman with a heavy accent and thick eyeglasses, humming tuneless melodies as she moved around our kitchen making something strange to eat.
Such a lost opportunity. I’m thankful that one of my cousins is trying to fill in some of the gaps in our family knowledge by interviewing the three surviving Chow children - my mother Helen, her sister Joan, and baby brother Eddie. But I wish I’d had the foresight to be more curious with Grandma Chow herself when I had the chance, as I’m sadly certain that she would have been happy to have been asked.
It’s not so much the geography of her life that interests me - lived here or there, worked at this job or that. I’d like to know those details too, of course, but what I really want to know is what it was like to be her.
Nine children, a language barrier with her own husband, the death of a young son, years of poverty during the Depression - Mary, how did you endure it? She made choices throughout her life that would have brought tremendous judgment down on her at the time(sorry - you’ll have to wait for the book for more details), and yet she just kept putting one foot ahead of the other and carrying on.
I see her legacy in all of us Chow cousins. There’s no shortage of skeletons in the closet when it comes to our family, but we’re a tough-minded, passionate, independent bunch who know how to carry on. I’m proud to be the descendent of a strong, resilient woman who lived a life in full.
The good thing about regular family reunions is that the people who attend eventually develop their own shared history just from being at all those reunions. Grandma Chow remains a favourite subject, but now we’ve got our own tangled lives and crazy stories from previous reunions to add to the mix.
A big thanks to my Auntie Joan and cousins Tracy and Toni for making this weekend’s reunion happen. Chow family, party on.

Epilogue on July 7: Family reunion was a blast! Next reunion: Summer of 2012 in Three Hills, Alta.