valeriesbookofme

It's once again Father's Day and once again I think about my dad, how although my mother was the BIG presence in my life when I was young, it was my dad that really formed (through disagreeing and agreeing) how I think and act. I miss him on Sundays, when he would call every week from Ottawa to Hamilton or Toronto to find out how I was doing. How he wrote to me when I lived in the UK (sadly I didn't keep that correspondence). I cringe now that I sometimes avoided those calls, didn't appreciate how hard he was trying to show that he loved me. We can't always find the words so we try by our actions but then those actions get misinterpreted.  Anyway, today is a day of reflection and, in that vein, I am responding to what is, I think, my last question on Storyworth. It's been a year since I started answering the Storyworth questions, my "book" has been published, around 196 pages. I didn't realize I had a few more questions still to answer before I pub...

 The word “live” is a word to play with. Obviously, in order to be physically alive I need air, water, food. To be emotionally alive is a trickier question—what do I need to feel emotionally alive? Having had several depressive episodes in my life, one quite bad one, the question comes into my head, “What was I lacking at that point/those points in my life where I felt emotionally dead?” It’s a very difficult question, one that I can only scratch the surface of. For both very bad episodes, someone close to me had died—my mother, my sister—at a time when they seemed so vibrantly “alive”, when both had so much to live for and they exuded that happiness with life. I think subconsciously, at least in the case of my sister’s death, I felt guilty for my being alive because I didn’t feel that same joy in life. I was working hard at an emotionally draining job. I was trying to parent a little girl on my own,  feeling when she cried that I was a crap parent, feeling when friends hurt h...

  https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/brenda-milner I am going to be sub teaching for my usual 4th grade students today and was trying to choose a  book I would read to them. Because I’m going to Alaska in a few weeks, I thought of a book of stories that I typed up for Dr. Melzack at McGill—he transcribed Eskimo folklore in his “spare time” from his Psych stuff. And I typed up one of his books, “Why the Man in the Moon is Happy”. Sadly, the book costs $44 on Amazon or I’d buy it. Actually Ron gave me a copy of the typescript when I typed it those many years ago but of course I don’t have it. As I don’t have books in my library I’ve chosen a book from Kindle so that’s sorted. And what does that have to do with Brenda Milner you ask? Well, the other prof I worked for was Peter Milner, Brenda’s ex-husband. When I worked in the office Brenda was still a formidable presence from time to time although she worked up at the Allen Institute. When she’d call Peter on the p...

When you’ve moved as much as I have—and moved LONG distances—it’s difficult to look at friendships and say, this person was my closest friend or that. In terms of longevity, I have two friends I have known for almost 50 years, Susan and Jean. And I have another friend, Jacqui, whom I met about 45 years ago when I worked at McGill University. Finally, I have a friend from my years in England in the mid 1970s, Sheila, who still lives in England. They’re actually the only friendships I still keep up with regularly that date from childhood/early university/England years. And even with them there have been times that we lost contact, times when I was moving too often to keep sending updates on where I was and what I was doing. We caught up later, sometimes years later. But we did catch up and because of that shared history, it wasn’t difficult to catch up, to re-establish the friendship. Only it was on different terms: where it might have been weekly or monthly get togethers, or pen and pap...

  Hmm, another difficult interview question. I have actually lived in multiple countries and it would take several books to catalogue all those changes. So I will just do a compare/contrast between where I lived growing up, in Montreal, and where I live now in Sierra Vista. Although Montreal is a much bigger city than Sierra Vista is, I lived in a smallish area of Montreal called Rosemount. Actually it was called Rosemount back then but it’s now called Rosemont-La Petite Patrie. Roughly 130,000 people now live in the area but when I was growing up, huge swathes of it were still unoccupied land and I vaguely remember cows not that far away. That was when we first moved there, when I was 2. The cows were gone by the time I went to school. We were living in a duplex, two up/two down, near Hochelaga, actually quite close to where the Olympic Park is. I have the address somewhere in my dad’s old papers; he put his address on his wartime C.V. But as he moved from being blue collar, ...

 I would thank so many people (in a kind of chronological order): My parents for providing a secure and loving home. My father for continuing that support after my mother died. For his supporting me financially in a way that taught me to acknowledge my mistakes and learn how to support myself as I grew older. I thank other family members; experiences with them and learning their stories (even if I never actually met them in the flesh) helped me to understand my heritage, helped me “see” how life sometimes works out, sometimes doesn’t and why. My teachers from first grade to high school graduation who taught me how to behave in society, who taught me how to write and spell, introduced me to wonderful literature, kept my nose to the books for the subjects I hated, like Math and Chemistry, and who were kind ears when my world seemed to be crashing around me. Some of my university professors, specifically a few History teachers in my undergraduate years and an Ethics professor in a gra...

 That’s another difficult question. I change my mind every other day, mostly  nowadays about small things. But about big things over the years? I really don’t know how to answer it because I see that a lot of my adult life has been not so much about changing my mind as dealing with the consequences of decisions I made or events that happened to me. And as I coped and dealt, that’s meant changing direction, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally/emotionally. For example, I’ve been stubborn sometimes, hanging on to relationships that I should have let go of, leaving places and people when perhaps it would have been better if I had stayed.  I think I valued, at least for the past many decades, having an “open mind” rather than sticking to decisions because I felt that people who are afraid to change their minds get stuck into lives and careers that they regretted later in life. In that kind of thinking I was influenced by seeing the people around me, by reading books about...