valeriesbookofme

  A s I write this on October 1, 2024, I imagine you reading this October 1, 2034. I hope that you are well and happy. I hope that some things haven’t changed for you, and I hope some things have. I hope that, as you read this, you’ll remember some of the things I am describing, that your memory is still as strong and vital as mine is. I hope that in the ten years that separate us you have remained as healthy as I am today. I am currently a little overweight, I hope that in the intervening ten years you’ve been able to keep that in check. Maybe you’ve conquered the “stress eating” that has dogged me so much of my life. I’m doing a lot of things right currently to help that happen, such as watching that I eat less, daily exercise, getting to the root of my recurring depressions, being kind to myself. I hope you have seen the benefits of this. I also hope, though, that you can still enjoy some of the treats that make me feel better. In moderation of course. If I had to pick my favorite t

September 1968. My mother hasn’t been well all summer. She’s been tired. Even while on holiday and visiting friends she’s excused herself midday to have a nap. I hear whispers from the adults that she’s drinking too much. My father has taken to measuring the bottles of sherry and port wine in our liquor cabinet.  Worry over my mother’s health in those September days was an escalation of the fear I’d felt since I was 13, three years previously. When she came home from the doctor’s and she and my father sat me down and explained she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. That she could die if she overexerted herself. I immediately volunteered to take over the vacuuming and the ironing. Anything. Anything so she wouldn’t die.  I knew though in my teenaged heart that mothers die. It was a theme that ran through my books: fairytales, even young adult series. Disney movies. I didn’t want MY mother to die at the same time as I grappled with fear that she would.  So for three years I held a

After my rather "political" post last week, I decided this week I would return to my usual style of memoir writing. Today's post is about my childhood, no deep psychological ruminations, just memories. Enjoy! When I moved there in the early 1950s, Rosemount was a very new suburb of Montreal East. Carved out of small plots of farmland in response to the influx of new immigrants from post Iron Curtain Europe and newly middle class factory workers, returning soldiers and the Baby Boom, post-war housing sprang up. These consisted mainly of smallish row houses and duplexes that hardly held the members of some large Catholic families. For example, my friend Brenda, with her eleven siblings, springs to mind. My friend Danielle, who because she was the only girl among five brothers, never had her own room and slept on the living room couch, keeping her clothes in the hall closet. But our bungalow had been built in a smaller section of the area. All of the bungalows in the neat av

1971. I was 19 years old and still caught between wanting to embrace the new women's liberation movement and also wanting desperately to be loved. So I chose to be dependent on a boy/man who smirked at my going to a women's lib meeting at my university. I never went again.  But that song kept ringing in my years through the years. And there were lyrics that I repeated to myself when I was told that I couldn't do certain things. When I was promised things--by men--and then disappointed. Lyrics such as "You can bend but never break me, for it only serves to make me, more determined to achieve my final goal." And, later, the more poignant, "Yes I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained." Meanwhile, on the public stage I saw women making steps forward and steps back. In Canada, we had Kim Campbell as our first female Prime Minister for five months in 1993. In Canada you can become the Prime Minister by taking the helm of the governing party

 Our car trip from Sierra Vista to Tucson was uneventful. Richard was relaxed thanks to the anti-anxiety meds. Traffic was light on the I-10. As we turned onto the road leading to our hotel, which was meant to be a Holiday Inn, we were confused by the “Holiday Inn” sign having disappeared from where we knew the Holiday Inn used to be. There was a sign for another hotel, one whose name we didn’t recognize at all. We parked in front and went into the lobby. The lobby smelled dreadfully stale, the chairs looked dirty and stained. It looked like the Holiday Inn we had stayed at in the past but it also looked as if it had been left to molder. There was a line in front of the rather unkempt-looking hotel clerk. He wore a baseball cap advertising some mechanic shop and an old t-shirt. As I took my place in the line, I heard snippets of conversations from various would-be guests— ‘I’ve looked at the room, it isn’t made up.’ ‘Here’s a photo of the bug that was on the sheets.’ The clerk peered a

Back in November during the Black Friday sales, Richard and I decided to book a cruise to Alaska. This was despite the fact that we had traveled to Alaska in May of last year with Holland America with somewhat mixed results: I had twice been locked into bathroom stalls with faulty locks on the ship, necessitating an alarm call from the stall. We were allocated a cabin that seemed to be directly above the ship’s engine room; so noisy and vibrating was it that we couldn’t sleep at night. And finally, on the second to last day of the cruise, my husband tripped on the last step of a staircase on the ship and sprained his ankle. He was wheeled off the ship in a wheelchair, a mixed blessing because that meant we were allocated priority loading at the taxi rank and in the airport. It took him two months before he could walk normally.  With all that having happened, you might wonder why we chose to do another Alaska cruise this year. Well, we actually loved the cruise itself. Alaska was beauti