Pee: The curse in the cure

As it turns out, my grade school bullies were right. I do eat worms and drink pee.

It's fair to suggest their twisted little minds planted the idea in my head. As a squeamish child, I'd never have come up with that on my own – not unless one of those stones they threw knocked me in the worms-and-pee section of my brain. It's possible.

To my credit, the acts didn't manifest quite as my bullies imagined. The worm was Mexican and travelled via souvenir mezcal to a Friday night in Montreal. The bottle housed only one worm, so, to my horror my friend Cathy sliced through its middle and offered me first choice of ends – a version of Heads-or-Tails impossible to win.

"Aaaaaaarghaaawwwaaawwwaaaaarrrrrrrgh!" I retched with the wrinkled grub in my mouth.

Though equal in size to two aspirin, it hadn't occurred to me not to grind its tiny leathery, jelly-filled body into a putrid alcoholic pulp before swallowing – not until I did just that. I feared I'd see that worm again.

It's a matter of perspective whether that's the most disgusting thing I've ever had in my mouth. I'd argue the virus (which has still has control of my sinuses) tops the list, but you might suggest pee as a fairly strong contender.

As I've explained to many a revolted family member and friend, I didn't actually drink pee – not intentionally – though a few drops inevitably escaped down my throat when I swallowed as reflex. It was the more palpable alternative to vomiting. The only way to avoid swallowing a little pee would be to not gargle it at all, which is what most have suggested.

Come to think of it, only two people have ever suggested otherwise, and neither was my friend. Still, they seemed to have my best interests in mind. Suffering the onset of strep throat while travelling solo through rural El Salvador, I was ill and desperate enough to try nearly anything – even pee.

"Do YOU gargle YOUR pee?" I croaked at my hostel-mate, an Austrian kiteboarder, from the nest I'd made in my hammock with all the blankets I could find. Over tea and sniffles, he'd spoken of pee's healing properties and I was positively scandalized.

"It really works," he answered, looking anywhere but back at me.

"Ewwwwwwwww!" I taunted. "You're a pee drinker!"

"It really works," he said again.

"Well, I could never do it," I announced, not realizing "never" would only last until the next morning, when I was sufficiently desperate.

I was still miserable in my hammock when a young Korean couple arrived later that night and, hearing me complain of an ever-worsening sore throat, suggested their grandparents' cure-all: gargling pee. No way, I thought and headed to bed, only to wake up, swallow some razor blades and think, Maybe way. Beside my bed was a plastic cup.

If I was going to do it, I intended to do it right, so I'd never have to do it again. The pee, as it was explained to me, should be the first of the day, so the vitamins and minerals it contains are as concentrated as possible. Knowing this, I procrastinated in bed for a long, long time that morning. When I could hold it no more, my decision was made: I would pee in the cup and think about it.

Battling three decades of cultural conditioning, social convention and a general aversion to pee in my mouth, I managed to rationalize the remedy, and cleared my head enough to bring the glass to my lips. Pretend it's tea, I told myself. It won't be so bad. But it was.

It was so bad, in fact, that sipping pee and vomiting in the sink seemed to happen in the very same moment. I don't think I expected it to be quite so hot, and it tasted nothing like tea at all. There was no turning back, though; I'd already crossed a line and there was plenty more pee for another try. And another. And another, until I finally managed to gargle.

"This better be worth it," I said to the new pee-mouth me in the mirror. I reloaded my toothbrush with minty-fresh paste a few times while I brushed and brushed and brushed and brushed, and pondered having lost my pee-ginity. Back in my hammock, I fell asleep to my newest mantra: "I am so hardcore."

Hours later, my throat was better. All better. "Shhhhhhhit!" I yelled, suddenly aware of the curse in the cure. Now the keeper of a terrible secret, with every instance of a sore throat, I'd forever be forced to consciously choose to suffer, or to gargle pee. The line of separation between the options is arguably blurry.

While I don't regret my decision to buck convention concerning pee remedies (and join the ranks of Madonna, Gandhi and British actress, Sarah Miles), at the end of the day, there's one convention I'd have been better of to heed. You know the saying: "What happens in *holiday destination* stays in *holiday destination*"? No longer are my grade school bullies teasing me about eating worms and drinking pee, but the torch is carried by my family and friends and others I've made the mistake of telling, which, as of now, is everyone.

Thankfully, half of you won't believe me.

Fewer things to kill me

If you believe everything my mother tells you, then you'll know she has no moral issue with endangering your life for the sake of 10 minutes of pleasure, or however long it takes to eat her spaghetti.

At the family table, it was everyone for their respective self. We didn't say grace, but my mother occasionally kicked off mealtime by announcing the possibility of death, advised us to be vigilant and, smiling, encouraged us to dig in and enjoy.

According to my mother, the bay leaf – a spice known for its distinctive fragrance and flavour – is both essential to any good spaghetti sauce and entirely capable of slicing your intestines with its razor sharp edges and causing internal bleeding.

Pigging out on Mom's meat sauce, I surmised as a child, could result in anything from indigestion to dying quietly in your sleep. This I believed, among other questionable, unquestioned quasi-truths:

Jesus is a white guy. Raw hot dogs will give me worms. Uncle So-and-So isn't gay. My face could get stuck like this. Bay leaves can kill me. Me, and everyone I love.

Having survived my childhood, I thought it best to avoid cooking with bay leaves altogether when I moved out on my own. I just couldn't bear the thought of my mother receiving news that, despite all her warnings, I'd gone and accidentally offed myself in that particularly unsavoury way. Not until I cooked with someone unaware of the risks of this common albeit deadly ingredient was I forced to, for the first time, express these thoughts out loud.

"Let's leave out the bay leaf," I suggested, explaining the risks.

"Who told you THAT?" my co-chef asked, scrunching up his face.

"My mother," I declared, considering her the authority on all things culinary.

"Doesn't she also think her house is haunted?"

"Well, yeah," I said, "but so do I."

He just looked at me. "Bay leaves can't kill you."

"Yes, they can," I said, steadfast.

Leaves in hand, locking his eyes with mine, he motioned toward his mouth.

"Don't do it!" I yelled, and tried to grab them away. The last thing I need is an accidental suicide in my house, I thought. "No!" I screamed when he shoved them into his mouth and began to chew.

"Why would your mother put something in your food she thought might kill you?" he asked. He was talking with his mouth full.

Because my mother takes cooking very seriously.

"If I die, you win," he taunted and swallowed.

Later on, when he didn't die, he didn't shut up about it for long enough that I kind of maybe sort of wished he had. Just a little bit.

Still, through the fog of my annoyance, I managed to glean that sometimes being wrong is best for everyone.

Photo: Mom and me on an evening walk, after another perilous meal.

Death, lies and dinner

When I was small, my parents lied to me all the time. "It's beef," they'd say, and drop a plate on the table. Sometimes, I'd refuse to eat, convinced I'd heard them slip a barely audible "just like" between the "it's" and "beef". It was inhumane, I thought, to hunt wild game and (at that age) equally inhumane to force me to eat vegetables as the alternative. My parents were cruel, and I was right not to trust them.

Several incarnations of Bambi's mother and his philandering father have joined us for dinner, as have Thumper, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh, Jaws and various anonymous guests, sometimes in a medley of murder my mother liked to call 'stew'. Children's stories, cartoons, movies and Teddy bears did not serve me well in a family of naturalists, hunters and fisherfolk.

Not until I fully understood the horrors of industrial farming, and tired of my diet of pasta and frozen chicken nuggets while studying at an out-of-province university, did my views on my parents' eating habits begin to soften. By then, I cared more about what food wasn't (pasta or mechanically separated meat), than what it was.

Not until I'd travelled throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America did I begin to actually appreciate my parents' choices. As it turns out, a lot more can be considered food than I'd initially thought, and the horrors of my mother's cooking weren't, comparatively, so terrifying. Travelling, I learned to find my happy place, which allowed me to politely choke down whatever lovingly slaughtered, hacked and salted ungodly creatures I'd been served. They won't eat me from the inside out, I consoled myself. Even if the heads are still on? asked my little voice.

While I maintain my belief that food should not be able to look back at you, I've learned to appreciate dead, cooked versions of creatures, so long as I have nothing to do with their death or any stage postmortem/pre-meal.

Among life's greatest motivators, however, (pain, necessity, a full bladder) is the desire to look tough in front of one's peers, and this is what got me to both kill and cook one of Earth's most hideous, head and all: a lobster.

I watch my parents do it every year on Christmas Eve, and, with the help of my happy place, I was pretty sure I could pull it off for my mostly urban, English, fruit-and-salad-loving boyfriend. On this, his first visit to Canada, my family had already introduced him to bear stew, moose sirloin, vampire-repelling dill and garlic pickles, pierogi and three batches of Mom's cookies, and it seemed a shame to have him leave Nova Scotia without eating something from the sea, especially since he'd never tried lobster.

My greatest realization, in cooking the beast, was that I truly am becoming more like my parents. Here I am, carrying on the tradition of lying to people who are reluctant to kill for dinner, while my boyfriend screams, "It's ALIVE! It's ALIVE! OH, EFF! It's still ALIVE!":

Pork and Poker, they did

My hometown on the east coast of Canada is the sort where everyone knows your name, like the small town version of the classic show, Cheers, but not as friendly and with more alcohol.

While I left nearly twelve years ago, my immediate family still lives there, and I'm very interested in whatever happens, because it probably involves someone I know. Thanks to at-home technology and self-publishing – and one woman's hobby that's inadvertently rendered the weekly paper redundant – I can follow everything that goes on via an independent online news source. I especially enjoy wedding announcements for couples sharing the same last name, before the ceremony. You'd think I'd be over that by now.

Yesterday, my sister sent me a quick email, telling me to check the site. I knew there'd be something good, and while it wasn't immediately obvious, I finally found it under the heading, Pork and Poker.

Pork and Poker. Say it out loud. What does that sound like to you?

On that page was a photo of my sister, accepting a cheque for hundreds of dollars. My sister participated in an event that can be summed up with the heading, Pork and Poker, and she got money for it.

The fact that it was a family-friendly contest involving a card game and community supper doesn't detract one bit from my enjoyment of this otherwise extremely perverted news.

Ghost in the latrine

"I think I have a poltergeist in my bathroom," I said over the phone to my best friend in London, and I was completely serious. It was the only explanation I could conjure on the spot, because what was happening just didn't make any easy sense, and the noise of it was distracting. Bang. Bang. Flop.

We were well overdue for catching up, and I wanted to give her my full attention. We'd pre-arranged this call (for Wednesday the 11th, two days before the only Friday the 13th in 2008), to circumvent the five-hour chasm between us. Last time, she cancelled due to a migraine, and a few times before that, I'd missed her call. And now, now there was a poltergeist in my bathroom.

What I was seeing was akin to special effects for low-to-no-budget films, something facilitated by someone's dad, and at par with footage from You Tube. And since I live alone in a multi-storey walk-up, on a middle floor, and my windows weren't open at the time, I was at a complete loss as to how someone's dad might've gotten in to arrange this.

I've played witness to strange happenings before, back home in Nova Scotia, so I didn't panic. My family's house there, according to local lore, is haunted. And if it's not, it certainly should be. Any old, wooden sea captain's house set in a fog belt on the windy Atlantic shore, near a cemetery with especially creepy grave markers (a number of which are inscribed with, "Lost at Sea") must have some restless spooks. Rot at least.

My old bedroom there was supposedly particularly haunted, and not by lovers. I was only sixteen for shit's sake. Anyway, one night, a school friend stayed over and while we chatted in the dark, a dim phosphorescent orb appeared near the ceiling in the corner of the room. I noticed it first, but I'd expected, for some reason, that it would disappear as soon as I mentioned it, or that she'd just suggest I had a cataract. But it didn't and she didn't and so we had to deal with it.

Not that it was doing anything disruptive (aside from showing up), but it's hard to relax with a glowing orb in the room. Incapable of conjuring an explanation of our own, we summoned my ever-rational, scientific-to-a-fault father to have a look. There we were, three of us in my bedroom, hands on hips, orb-observing. A minute passed before my dad, who always had an explanation, concluded, "Well, that's pretty weird."

It was the most unsatisfactory explanation he'd offered me as a child (of course, not including, "...because I said so."). I just couldn't let it go at that, and forced an explanation from him with a pout. He thought for a moment, and then decided that there was likely a phosphorescent fungus in the attic that permeated the ceiling in that one spot, causing the appearance of an orb - a yellowish, glowing, "pretty weird" orb. Or something. His explanation still lacked, but the orb didn't seem to be going anywhere, or doing anything, so my friend and I did all we could: We got over it, and went back to bed to talk about boys. By the next morning, it was gone, and it never reappeared. A crap explanation sufficed then, and I was sure, for my current situation, a crap explanation was all I needed now. Then, I could get on with my intercontinental conversation.

The loose ceiling tiles in the bathroom had been floating upward into the infrastructure of the building, and randomly slamming back into place, over and over. Bang. Bang. Flop. My brain did a quick scan for an explanation. Human error? That usually works. OK, me first: Was I nuts? Surely, but hallucinations aren't my style. Maybe, I thought, I have someone living in my ceiling like that guy in Japan who had a woman hiding in his closet for months. That's not so unrealistic, it happened. No, she could never move all those tiles at once. A fire. Must be a fire, I thought. Remember Backdraft? There was some vacuum action in that. Meh. That explanation requires evacuation, so ixnay. Next. Hmm. Perhaps the apartment upstairs blew away. No, now that's just ridiculous.

My friend waited patiently while I stuttered on the phone. "I don't know what's happening," I said. Then it came to me: "I think I have a poltergeist in my bathroom." There, that's perfect, I thought. There's nothing I can do about a poltergeist. Not my problem. And just as it happened after the incident with the orb in my bedroom all those years ago, we did what we could: We got over it, and went back to talking about boys. A natural transition really, because the appearance and behaviour of both still remain, to us, largely ill-explained.

Unaccompanied women

"Where did she get that travel bug?" My parents still live in the small, fairly traditional community where they raised me and field the question all the time. What people are really asking is: Why hasn't she settled down yet? No husband? No boyfriend? No kids? No husband?! No boyfriend?! No kids?!

And what they're thinking is: We always knew she was a lesbian...[pause]...or a slut. It's OK, though, there was a time my mom thought that, too. Now she knows I'm not a lesbian, and for the other matter, she's settled on the more general term, "free spirit".

Mom's called me worse things, but with saccharine laughter in select foreign languages, and for most of my life I'd assumed they were Polish pet names, so it doesn't count. What I didn't know, didn't irk me. It was her privilege as a parent. Clever of her, really.

My dad spent his quintessential Canadian youth driving gravel roads from Quebec to the Yukon with my grandparents, and later hopping trains across Canada, working on grain farms to pay his way, and riding freighters through the Great Lakes, so he's more sympathetic to my transient lifestyle/travel addiction than my mom. Though her father was an adventurer, too, after making the long, uncertain trip from Poland to Quebec before WWII, my grandfather seemed content to stay put and generally so does she. Try to get her on a boat, I dare you. (Actually, I take that back. I'd hate to be liable for your safety.)

The women in my family, two and three generations ago, they were the real wild cards. Bucking convention, they each ventured out on their own for love, education or professional development - whichever they wanted most. I'm sure their neighbours in that era of marriage and motherhood had a lot of questions, too, BUT - judging by the facial expressions of my great-grandmother, great-aunt and their friend in this picture, waiting for a train in the Eastern Townships - they probably knew better than to ask.

My sister's big guns

My oldest sister, the light-eyed blonde of the family, has legs up to her neck. She's the only one of us to ever have abs (or boobs, really), and she can make you beg for mercy in a matter of seconds, regardless of your gender. That's the power of her honed-to-perfection one-handed, joint-crushing finger-squeeze.

Hate her with me: She's a tall, slender mother-of-one enjoying the simple life in a beautiful home on an unspoiled lake in Nova Scotia with her handsome husband and lovable 14-year-old son, with whom she makes regular trips to Mexico.

When I call from my modest apartment in Montreal to tell her I'll be squatting a slice of her waterfront property soon, she laughs at me. Either she doesn't know I'm serious, or she knows she can run me off with the threat of her one-handed, joint-crushing finger-squeeze. Or, her gun. Oh yeah. Her gun.

Mrs. Leggy-Blonde-Scrapbooking-Tupperware-Momma is a dead shot. She fly-fishes, hunts wildfowl and deer (and did so while pregnant), and once pulled her own tooth because it was more convenient than driving to Halifax for emergency dental surgery. "Besides," she said, "it was the weekend and they would've overcharged". Not only does my sister know how to save a buck, she swings an axe with grace, can pluck a duck, and does Mensa puzzles for fun. If you beat her at Boggle, she'll whip up some shortbread as your reward.

Are you a well-read survivalist thinking my sister might be the perfect woman? Well, let me confirm that for you: she also brews her own beer.

There you have it. Nature clearly trumps nurture. Perhaps the only thing we share in common (aside from our love of Mexico and wanting to live on her property) is our sense of humour, which is the only reason I think I can get away with writing about her here (Hi Ninner!). That, and the fact that I still totally look up to her.

My mother, my muse

Ever since my mom realized I was writing about her online, she's been tattling on my dad. She's trying to divert my attention, but the harder she tries, the more hilarious she is, and off I go to write about her some more. "Oh, pick on your father for once," she'll say, her last ditch effort.

Here she is, laughing hysterically:


My mother, fellow lover of ridiculousness and inappropriate behaviour, is a sensitive woman (and vulgar and loving and neurotic and wonderful and I could go on-and-on) and I want to be careful not to make her feel self-conscious, or overly exposed by what I'm telling the world about her, so for years, I've refused to give her the link to my blog. It was the only solution. What she doesn't know won't irk her.

There's no way I can stop writing about her, she's a major player in this little life of mine, I was her doing. Dad didn't want any more kids. He was busy with my older sisters and the neighbourhood boys they'd sneak in through the basement. Safeguarding two virginities was exhausting work for a father of two beautiful teenage girls in the Peace-and-Love era, and he wasn't sure he'd have energy to do it again.

While my father is truly the greatest, a wholly interesting and lovely man (who decided I was a good idea after all), my mother is the real antagonist, the character of the family. Dad's just not controversial, not outside the context of his marriage to my mother, in which his primary commitment, she says with a twinkle and a smirk, is to slowly and definitively drive her mad. I love them both dearly, and want them to know that everything I write, I write with love and respect, and I only occasionally write about sex.

When oddball, small-time writer and editor, Maxim Jakubowski, asked to include blurbs of this blog in an anthology of online journals (2005), I chose excerpts I could show my parents. How fun, I thought at the time, to read my stories to them from a book that is for sale, in real-live stores.

When I received two complementary copies in the mail, they weren't what I'd been expecting, and I realized what I'd gotten into. Published in New York under the title, Sex Diaries, and in London, Erotic Online Diaries, my sex-devoid contribution begins on page 208, inexplicably sandwiched between sodomy, masturbation, bondage and sadomasochism. You might think that's why I decided not to show my parents the end product.

They're not so squeamish, though, and I think they could have handled the graphic sex stuff, or at least leafed past it. It was me with the problem. The web address to this blog was on every published page, and I wasn't ready to expose myself to them. My parents don't need to know a lot of things, for their own good, and selfishly, I wanted to preserve my freedom of expression without fear of familial persecution or guilt. A growing readership means my parents will see my blog sooner than later, though, or worst case scenario, one of their friends will first.

Little-by-little, I've tried to prepare both parties. I've read select entries to them over the phone, and copied-and-pasted others with minor edits, like the story about how I tactlessly brought up oral sex to my mom (a regrettable incident): Me, Mom and Polish Sausage.

She laughed while I read to her, and chastised me again for sharing "too much information". Feeling like we really made progress, I later mentioned that I'd gotten some funny feedback on that story. She was shocked.

"You let people read that?" She reacted as though I'd peed in the kitchen sink.

"Yes, Mom, it's on my blog," I was confused by her reaction. "I told you that."

"And you show people your blog?" she asked, incredulous. I explained to her that my blog is available on the internet for all the world to see, for as long as there exist web archives, possibly outlasting civilization, even cockroaches. Realizing what this meant, she began shouting, "People know what you DO! People know what you DO! They know what you do with your man-friends!"

It was my turn to laugh, repeating the term "man-friend", over and over again, and finally catching my breath to say, "You know I'm going to write about that."

This Mother's Day, she requested two gifts: an ornamental shrub, and "too much information". Finally, somewhat reluctantly, and not without fair warning, I welcome her to my blog. It's really only fair.

World, meet my mom. She's here, right now, reading this, wondering if you know what I do with my "man-friends".

Mom, make yourself at home. These people already know you.

Your love is still unconditional, right?

My mother on a short leash

My mother's index finger has gone arthritic, and is crooked slightly to the side, making it look more like the witch finger she claims it is. It's one of those unfortunate health issues that's turned family joke, and I suspect she enjoys the additional power she wields when she points it at us. We recoil as though she's growled our full names: first, middle and last. It's that scary.

It's that finger I imagine hovering over the keypad of my parents' phone right now, waiting to call me and say, "I told you so." She's the only person who can get away with saying this to me, and not just because I'm scared of her finger.

Of all the voices in my head, my mother's is the loudest. While she's given me some crap tidbits of advice in the past, she always delivers them with my best interests in mind. On occasion, I regret that my disgusted "I know" moans, have caused her to keep her opinions to herself when it most matters, leaving me completely vulnerable to her follow-up "I told you so," a phrase she's reluctant to surrender.

My parents outsmarted me several times when I was a kid, concerning my want for pets. When I asked for a rabbit, they said yes, but first, I'd have to endure child labour and toil for my opportunistic neighbours, to afford the rabbit and all its trimmings (the cage and food). The lesson taught me well. Now, I always set a rate in advance, and I know rabbits aren't worth the trouble, they are the trouble.

Still, when the opportunity arose to temporarily foster a puppy, bred to be docile and compliant, with a gorgeous fox-face, I fell into the same trap. The dog is destined to become an assistance dog for children with special needs, and all I have to do is give it love. Lots and lots of love, until it finds a semi-permanent foster home (in days, or weeks, or at most, a month). Oh, and there was something about training.

During these first few days of the experience, nearly everything's gone smoothly, all until the otherwise floppity, waggity, semi-comatose fluffball spies a larger dog in the park and barks uncontrollably. That's why, I suspect, my mother hasn't called yet, there's no need. She's channeling through the puppy: "I-wowowowow told-rrrrwarrrrwwrr you-bowowowow so-oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhh!" I'd know her voice anywhere.

Regardless of the readjustment and challenges ahead (missed debauchery, bike-ride hiatus, picking up feces), and all the whining I'll be doing because of it, I know that even my mother's witch finger, in all its cynical glory, would disappear in this puppy's fuzzity coat.

The pierogi cure for homesickness: At home in Latin America

Part of the thrill of travelling to far away lands for extended periods is that you get to have another normal. Anyone who's done it knows that travelling is no vacation, not in the colloquial sense. Speaking the language is not the same as speaking the culture or understanding its confusing subtleties.

Everything is a little more involved. First you need to get a handle on safety issues, like say, do cars yield to pedestrians? Are adolescent boys with assault rifles members of a street gang or national security? When a man with a gun comments on your ass is he a threat or a flirt? Don't worry, you'll master these distinctions in no time. Practice makes perfect.

Then, you learn to get around. Will the bus driver get impatient with you if you try to pay fare when you board? Or, if you wait until you're seated? Either way, you've probably overlooked something, and you'll likely piss him off. Don't take it personally, you can't help that you're ignorant.

Next, your relationship with stuff changes. You have only a few select artifacts from your life back at home, whatever you could carry – all the necessities and a few weighty luxuries you mistook for necessities, like your favourite shampoo, and speakers for your iPod.

Your favourite underwear will wear out, you'll lose the rest of your clothes among sheets in hostels and on beaches at night. You'll replace them with local fashions, and realize you're losing perspective. You'll be pretty sure sequins are alright in moderation; spandex as day-wear? You'll consider it.

Maybe you thought to bring photos of home to show people you meet, or to remind yourself of your other context. They'll become bent, cracked and water damaged within days of your arrival, and later, develop thick edges like playing cards, all faded and torn. Soon, looking at them will make you feel as though you're a hundred lives from when you started out.

Eventually, you'll develop comforting little routines, parallel to those you escaped from at home, whether by compulsion or aspiration to some sort of normalcy. Food is the first comfort. You may never eat fast-food back home, but you will on the road. You'll find some chain that looks familiar, buy the most basic, signature item on the menu, and then marvel at how not even that tastes as it should. The pizza sauce is sweeter, the cheese doesn't melt, the burger is greyer, and the fat in the fried chicken is bright yellow. Then, you'll realize that if food is truly to offer you comfort, you're going to have to make it yourself.

Yielding to traffic, watching for motorbikes, and wondering why your ass is so compelling, you'll make your way to the market to buy ingredients for your comfort dish, your pièce de résistance. The simple one that never fails, the one you make to impress dates. At the market, you'll find nothing you need.

I made pierogi in Buenos Aires, or a close approximation. There is no bacon in Argentina, just steak and prosciutto and slabs of what could be cut into bacon. The potatoes and onions are watery, completely different from the Canadian sort (which are likely already a compromise for my Polish relatives). The cream is sweet, not sour. I asked the deli guy to describe various types of cheese to me, and he asked for my cell number. I settled on one that looked like old cheddar. Black pepper, I had to hunt for it. Flour. I found flour. Pastries smothered in dulce de leche would have been a breeze, pierogi, no.

In my friend's apartment in Caballito, a working-class district of Buenos Aires, I chopped, sliced, grated, caramelized, mashed, rolled, stuffed, boiled and fried my comfort. I added a little vinegar to the cream, because my comfort comes sour.

My Argentine friend was fascinated by this strange production, tolerant of the mess I'd made in his kitchen, and worried that I'd put too much black pepper in the mix, because it might be "spicy". That perspective, I thought, is exactly why I am cooking for myself.

Fried in far too much butter, these greasy pockets of perfection were exquisitely familiar. Even the improvised sour cream seemed right. I was no longer in an apartment in the southern hemisphere, in a city or sea of 17 million, fumbling with Argentine Castellano. I wasn't "Cucurucho", my southern stand-in, an adaptation of myself. I was no one but my mother's daughter, in her kitchen, stealing mouth-searingly hot pierogi from the platter on the way to the family dinner table. I was transposed. I stayed there until I had my fill, and was ready for my handsome, and now overfed and bloated friend to summon me back to Buenos Aires with his comparison of pierogi to empanadas.

The difference, thought Sebastián, was that the Polish version incapacitates you, making you feel as though you might die of a butter and starch overdose, but he was confident yerba mate would save us. It always did. And, now that I am back in Canada, when I am missing Buenos Aires, it still does.

De los primeros mates, originally uploaded by juanpol.

Thanks for beating it out of me, really

I used to be scared of the dark, and heights and water, and planes and boats, and snakes and spiders, and death and God, and being alone. I can see how all these fears relate to mortality, which is quite typical, but my fear of death concerned other people's lives, not mine. My fear of God was rooted in the sense that I was a spiritual outsider and possibly subject to purgatory---that I wouldn't become a believer until it was too late and I'd have all eternity to regret it. My other phobias were pretty straight forward.

During the past few years, I've addressed most of them, and now they're manageable. It's not that I'm impervious to them, but they no longer make decisions for me. Exposure therapy, it does wonders.

I would like to thank the catalysts for my ongoing rehabilitation. I am now better able to enjoy the world and its unsettling little components.

Thank you, Dad, for your patience. Thanks for sitting with me on the front porch to point out, one-by-one, shadow monsters in the yard. Remember how you first asked me to describe them in horrible detail, and then to say what I thought they really were? A wheelbarrow? A bush? The neighbour's dog on the loose? You knew my eagerness to please you would outweigh the grim satisfaction I'd get from entertaining this common childhood fear. Instead of making me feel silly for being scared, you made me feel proud for being clever. Your good killed my evil.

Thank you adrenaline, rash decisions and mob mentality. If it wasn't for you guys, I'd never have felt pressured to tackle suspension bridges, then zip-lines, then three-storey jumps and Tarzan swings, or to rappel 50 metres straight down into a waterfall from a trap door in a swinging bridge. Actually, thank you Costa Rica for providing your irresistible playground. My hysterics are worth enduring, for all your gorgeous challenges. Thank you also for letting me survive it all. My knee healed quite nicely.

Thank you Pacific Ocean for your tough love. Pummeling me with your raging surf, and holding me under like any bullish sibling would do---until I realized worse things could happen than breathing salt water---well, it worked. With a little mutual respect, I think we can really develop our relationship. I'd appreciate it if you could try a little harder to leave my bikini on, though. Thanks.

Thank you foreign lands, perfect weather and serendipity. Without your cooperation, I wouldn't have been moved to tears while flying over the Andes at sunset, nor would I have seen the rugged Alaskan ice-scape, or the notorious Darién Gap. I'd have no concept of Mexico's vast deserts, or the endless sea of light that is Buenos Aires at night. You might want to work on the sludge seeping out of Manila's port into the turquoise Philippine Sea, though, and the silver layer of smog over Montreal.

As for boats, I'd like to thank you for never capsizing or completely sinking---or subjecting me to the folly of drunken captains and their useless waterlogged life jackets---off Southeast Asian shores, into shark-inhabited Central American waters, or along Canada's homicidally frigid Atlantic Coast.

Thank you to Earth's less attractive creatures for showing me you usually mean no harm. To the rest of you, just take my blood and your poison and fcuk off.

Anyway, thanks to you, the unlikely American couple I met in El Salvador, for inviting me to join you snake-hunting at night in Parque El Imposible, and for your contagious enthusiasm. When you handed me the coffee snake you'd found, I didn't want to hand him back. A big thank you also goes out to the giant rock-dwelling spiders for scattering when I jumped from boulder to boulder up the river, while we searched for boa constrictors. Thanks to the batteries in my head lamp, too. I don't know what I would have done without you.

As for death, I suppose you, the random Honduran gunman, had a lot to do with my understanding what it feels like to be in mortal danger. So, thanks, I guess. You really freaked out my companions, but you helped me realize that either bad things happen, or they don't. I'll not waste time worrying about the plethora of what-ifs. It's so much more fun to celebrate the that-was-crazy-holy-shits.

And, as for being alone? Thanks Bolivia for hosting me in a moment when no one in the world knew where I was, not a single worried relative, not even me. Thanks to my apartment, filled with my stuff, and to my bed with room to spare. At the end of the day, you're always here to hold me. Thank you to the men I have dated in the past for stepping in, and stepping out again, with either grace or grit. Thanks to my friends, family and lucky encounters, and all that awaits me, because I have never really been alone, and know I never will be.

The annoying itch of true love

Her birthday is exactly a week after mine, and during the week between them sits Valentine's Day---a day I might have ruined for her thirty years ago, with the aftershocks of childbirth, if my father were any kind of romantic, but he's not. He's more practical than that. He's so practical, he's impractical---a problem rooted in the question: "Why have someone else do it if I can do it myself?"

Mom can think of a lot of answers, including "because you won't" and "because other people do it faster" or "because it is dangerous", but she usually just answers by growling his name. Dad's a doer, a practical man, and he knows by now that it is impractical to try to justify his ideas to her, so he just goes to the garage and gets started.

She is, by contrast, a disgruntled romantic, a quasi-religious, cigarette-smoking, big-picture pessimist so accustomed to her own morbid world-view, that she doesn't consider it depressing, after watching a black-and-white movie, to comment not on the classic charm of the old film, but rather on the probability that the actors are all dead by now. My father, of course, only watches TV when it is already on, from the doorway, so as not to be outed as a time-waster. He's got a lot to do after all.

Sometimes, I wonder how my parents stayed together, despite their love. Perhaps they've driven each other to the same insanity, and are content in that they finally have something in common.

For their honeymoon, he drove her two provinces eastward to visit his parents. Thirty-odd years later, she's still waiting for her real honeymoon, she says, but is willing to accept a new sofa in its place. It was an ineffective bargaining chip, though, and five years since she first played it, she's still waiting for the sofa. The old brown velour sofa, still in perfectly good condition according to Dad, I suspect will soon come to a brutal end at the hands of my mother and perhaps some lighter fluid.

My father claims he'd be more than happy to get her a new one, it's just that he has no idea what she wants, and suspects that neither does she. While he has a point, my mother's interest drifts back to the Silver Screen before he can get to it, so it's moot.

He's tried buying her things before. It never works out for him. When microwaves were first on the market, he bought her one for Christmas. She plugged it in, pressed some buttons and it caught on fire. He returned it the next day. When she was pregnant with me, and at risk of miscarrying, he bought her a TV, the same one she watched until I was already living on my own. She called one day to tell me it had caught on fire, too, and, more importantly, that she could finally get a new one. For their anniversary one year, he got her a sewing machine. She hates sewing even more than she hated him that day.

Ever practical, my father put it to good use, taught himself to sew and custom-designed coveralls to wear while working on his many projects, and a few wide-brimmed hats for good measure. Scrutinized by my mother, she concluded that not only were they ugly, but they would last forever. That's when Mom unofficially changed Dad's name to "Your Father", and resigned from trying to influence his actions any further.

I've been around for most of their marriage and during that time my father, according to my mother, has messed up quite a bit, especially on anniversaries. For her birthday this year, though, he got it right with jewelery. When I called to wish her a happy day, she specified that he'd clearly not wrapped the gift himself, and the earrings could have been a little bigger, but they're beautiful. With my mother, that's as good as getting it right.

Me, Mom & Polish Sausage

There are some things you should never tell your mother.

I've learned this lesson late in life. I am not talking about the obvious stuff. Generally, I avoid telling her anything that might cause her to worry more than she already does. Why would I want to make more work for myself? As it is, she panics when I get a headache, something about tumours and microwaves.

Last summer, for instance, when I was injured by a bicycle-ramming pervert in a city park, I just didn't mention it to her. Though I was tempted to tell her -- particularly when I mused that the remaining scar on my knee is a perfectly shaped "p" for "pervert"-- I resisted. She wouldn't understand how I could make light of the incident. She would want to think that was the worst thing that's ever happened to me, and it would bother her that apparently it's not.

The year before, some drunk opened fire in my direction during Easter weekend celebrations in Honduras. I knew immediately it would be one travel tale she would never hear. It remains a favourite of mine, primarily because I didn't die, but I know my mother, and she would stop listening before I even got to the part about life mimicking TV, when my friend yelled, "Hit the ground!"

No. These stories are kept in the same box that I keep my how-I-accidentally-lost-my-virginity account. Now that I have been an adult for nearly twelve years, everything else is fair game. I've really opened up to her about my dating and sex life, likely for no greater reason than to see her squirm, and she has become a true, albeit reluctant, confidante.

When a new guy I was dating avoided having sex with me, I called my mom. She suggested that perhaps he was just a little old fashioned and was taking it slow, that he was probably very sweet and respectful. She also said that any nice woman should take at least six months to get to know a man before jumping into bed with him. When I was done laughing, I mocked her until she hung up. Since then, she's redefined her idea of a "slut" because she doesn't want me to be one. You can imagine the pleasure I took in informing her that it wasn't that the guy was taking his time, it was that the anti-anxiety medication he was on had triggered some sort of erectile dysfunction. She muttered something about cows and free milk, and I said something about how practice makes perfect, and she let it go.

Still, she has become quite comfortable with the idea that, if not the degree to which, I am a sexually active woman. Perhaps I overestimated her level of comfort, but I definitely took it too far this Christmas. Mom, I am sorry.

We had a few last-minute groceries to pick up before settling in for the holidays, and as we pulled into the carpark, I recalled how much I used to hate shopping with her there. It had little to do with her, aside from her love of kielbasa, and everything to do with the deli counter staff. When I was sixteen, he was in college, and I had already nurtured a two-year crush on him. When I was in college, he became the deli guy, and every time I came home to visit, my mom would take me to the grocery store and have me stand in front of him and talk about Polish sausage. I would blush, he would smirk, and my mom was never the wiser.

He has since moved on, perhaps to bigger and better deli counters, and so I thought I might finally be able to tell my mom my story. I began gently, and tested the waters.

"Mom, you are comfortable with the concept that your daughter has sex, right?"

"Pfft!" she said. "By now? I'd certainly say so."

"OK, well I have a funny story about the deli guy who used to work here."

She tried to remember him.

"You know how you always bought his sausage? Well, he was the first guy I ever gave a blowjob, and so, in a way, he gave both of us sausage. Ha!"

That was my punchline. What was I thinking!? It's not even funny. She'd had been less disturbed had I defecated in the aisle. It threw me off my game, and I regretted bringing up fellatio. It was too much for my sixty-year-old mother.

"I thought you were comfortable with me having sex," I said, cringing.

"I said I was comfortable with you having SEX!" she yelled through her teeth, "but not..."

At first she couldn't bring herself to say it, and eventually she hissed and spit the words, "...not ORAL sex with the sausage guy!"

Her delivery was perfect and, momentarily, I forgot that I regretted telling her the story. Then, with a cruelty of which only mothers are capable, to punish me, her next sentence began with, "You know, your father and I..."

I didn't stick around for the verb. Even as I escaped down another aisle, I could hear her cackling in victory. There are some things you should never tell your mother and, likewise, your kids.

The "cosmic" power of suggestion

Long ago in Gotham, during an experimental personal-growth period, I arranged to visit a new-age healer---a well-off, middle-aged transient who would be in the city for only a few weeks, but would find time to help cleanse New Yorkers' muddy auras.

Hours before the meeting, I'd intended to call and cancel our session. I, of course, had no idea what a "session" involved, and for $300 USD I was willing to invest in the concept of time healing all wounds instead. She beat me to the phone and trumped my card. Apparently, she is a "seer" as well as a "healer".

She called my sublet home, located on the charming, but dirty edge of Williamsburg, and said in her charming yet authoritative voice: "What are you afraid of? Aren't you ready to face your future? Can't you deal with your issues?"

It wasn't that I really had any pressing issues to manage. I was happy. I was having an adventure in the city that never sleeps, except on the subway. My real issue was that I could think of more fruitful functions for my green American moolah. She gambled on my personality, and challenged me. It was a dare - and I fell for it. She pulled me in with her cosmic mind powers of manipulation. I was no match for her.

In my own defense, I thought this woman was legendary. I thought her mysterious Swiss abilities were known everywhere the L-train rumbled. A documentary was to be made of this woman's incredible will to survive and overcome all obstacles! This was a woman who ousted malignant tumours from her own abdomen with cosmic mindpower! Don't tell me you wouldn't find that inspiring!

Just don't. Please.

Surely, $300 USD would seem insignificant once I'd been healed! Or, maybe I would just walk away with an empty wallet and a tepid tale. I do believe in mind over matter, though. I admit it because I am not the first to admit it.

When my grandfather passed away, I inherited a leaning, dog-eared tower of his book collection. Among titles like: Geometry and Nature, and Natural Dyes and Edible Plants of the Northeast, two other texts mingled with the arts and sciences: Cosmic Mind Power Explained and, even more intriguing: Secrets of Cosmic Mind Power. All, of course, published in the Seventies.

I arrived for my appointment with an open mind and fat wallet. She welcomed me, explained the process and brought me into the bedroom where a massage table awaited my damaged aura.

Without touching me, she began examining fluctuations in my energies. Her hands hovered barely above my fully-clothed body. Her talent was not limited to seeing auras, but also to decode them. She would blurt out random words, and interpret my ethereal reaction. I was fascinated.

Although I was laying face down, with my eyes closed, I could sense the location of her hands at all times. My skin rose toward her in goosebumps. I was enjoying the cosmic voyage. I casually drifted into a space that allowed me to believe that this was something other than a hoax. She blurted out that I was a writer. I would write six books. To accomplish this, I would have to oust the word, "want" from my mind, like she ousted tumours from from her belly.

You either do it or you don't. Regardless of what "it" is, she had a point. Saying that you will do anything in the future is a waste of breath. Who knows if you'll do it? Who knows if you'll be hit by an SUV instead. You are or your aren't. You do or you don't. This cozy in between place where we like to dwell is the quicksand for progress and achievement. Stop talking. Start doing. It was quite a lecture, really.

She doesn't believe in predicting the future. She looks at your path, and then tells you what you are capable of doing if you get off your fat ass and scrub your dirty aura free of cosmic scum. My mom could have done the same. But, I don't trust her. She told me I was pretty when I was ten. I've seen the pictures. That woman is capable of deceit.

Any of my friends could have advised me as well. But, there is something intrinsic in the exchange of $300 that makes you want to believe you're getting your money's worth. I really wanted to believe - but, it was struggle. Then, she found my pain.

A combination of poor posture and computer work had resulted in a jabbing discomfort in my back. It had been there for months and it was affecting my life, and my moods. She found it. That was where I had been storing my negativity, and without physically touching me, she located it and repaired it - by drawing the cosmic goo of stress and doubt from me. I was going to have to have a shower when I got home, she explained, to wash all that crap off my aura. I was exhausted. I was dehydrated. I was spooked. I followed her instructions, drank some water and fell asleep.

For the first time in months, my back wasn't throbbing. I was amazed! Astounded! I was healed! I felt it was my cosmic responsibility to begin writing for a broader audience than my diary. I had to take this cosmic gospel and fly with it. Why the heck not?

So, if any more of you have some writing opportunities for this eager, penny-pinching wordsmith - bring 'em on!

Barren

My freckles will conceal my liver spots. I’ll worry less about a flat stomach, and more about my knees. I’ll have a nest egg and struggle to keep my teeth. I’ll have laugh lines.

But, in the meantime, I have to decide what to do with my womb.

You’re young. There is still time, say my parents.

I am nearing thirty, I remind them.

What is your plan? Where is your security? ask my parents-in-law.

What is my plan?

Mourning for the world, weighed down with a responsibility beyond choosing UNICEF greeting cards and buying fair trade coffee, I reasoned it would be irresponsible to procreate.

How, I asked myself, can I introduce another soul to the world in a time when the neighbouring superpower detains people without trial, when my own country is rumoured to do the same? How can I intentionally subject another child to global warming? As infants develop bed sores in group homes, how can I consciously decide to not choose one of them? How, when hordes of parentless children are placed in foster care, only to be subjected to further abuse, can I give my maternity to someone who doesn’t yet exist?

Besides, I might be infertile.

I have two sisters. The eldest once declared she'd never marry, and never have children. Her son came as a bit of a planned surprise, and is now a beautiful and agreeable eleven-year-old. The junior sister by one year, demonstrated far greater interest in reproduction: a degree in early childhood development, tolerance of me (the littlest sister by thirteen years) as her shadow, and a declared desire for several children. She had one, now also eleven. Two, if you count the amount of time she babysat me, now twenty-seven. Three, if you count her ex-husband, now forty. Today she battles, via lawyers, to do what she believes best for her daughter.

Where is her security?

If I were to have a child now, it would be a bastard. I would have no maternity or insurance benefits. It might bear my imperfections. But, I don’t think I am supposed to think about that.

I shortlist names. I don’t think my spouse likes any of them, but I’m not ready to compromise. I suppose with children I would learn. I suppose, if I did carry full-term, I would celebrate that 1970s medications administered to my mother to prevent miscarrying the foetus destined to be me, don't apply their now-known side effects to my particular reproductive organs.

But, first thing’s first.

On a strategic path to a career with maternity leave, keeping my options open, I sit on several committees with a particularly strong-minded, socially-conscious childless professional. Occasionally, she asks personal questions that can’t be answered without careful consideration.

What do you want? she asked.

Feeling particularly vulnerable, made sensitive by my in-laws’ prodding, I justified my decision to probably not have children by recounting the ongoing collapse of civilization and environmental ruin. She listened, entirely unconvinced.

When I was your age, she began (as many advice-givers do), I felt the same way. Her hand was nestled in her grey curls, absently scratching at her head.

Vietnam. Pol Pot. Agent Orange. Thalidomide. The Cold War. I was convinced, she said, as many were, that the world was ending; that it would be unfair to bring children into the world as it was. Thirty years later, and we are no better or worse off, but now I’m fifty. Had I known, my choices would have been different. Happiness for me now, is being a really good aunt.

I thought of my sisters’ children. And, of how we live a thousand kilometres apart. And, that there will always be drought in the Kalahari.

Migration patterns of Canadian youth

I landed in this city unannounced. Nothing was remarkable about my arrival, and no one awaited me---a singular party caught in a mass departure---a wayward bird caught in a hurricane, and just as prepared. Children of small towns are economic migrants, even in Canada.

Reared in a rural coastal village, I threw myself from the nest with wet feathers. Maladjusted and armed only with certificates of insignificance, I bought my ticket out of all I knew well, for the uncertain unknown, for the urban existence of rape and murder, for narcotics and homosexuality. For fear-after-dark and beasts less recognizable than the chubby and misunderstood man up the street. I traded in the rattle of sea stones, the night sky, feral eyes in bushes, and sadly, my family. I traded the loneliness of a socially awkward adolescent in a small hamlet, for awe. And, here I am, still awed.

Surrounded by mechanisms barely understood, I very slowly created a new personal culture, within which I developed new belief systems, new approaches to supply and demand, new ideas about cause and effect. Several years later, I developed comfortable patterns. I learned to function effectively in my new urban environment as an entirely new species.

No longer can people can see sand on my scalp, or in my shoes. I regularly return to my loosely laid roots by the sea. This is my new migration. I am no longer unwittingly blown off-course, but still maladjusted.

When I return to my home by the sea and in the woods, I dust off the silt of the urban landscape. The local species recognize me as a fraud, an impostor. They ask me how I like living in the city, but they are really asking: "What are you and what are you doing here?" Locals have always been suspicious of my intentions. As I have come of age, so have presumptions about my nature. First, I was a "lesbian", now, I am a foreigner. I capitalize on the nature of my hometown. The handicrafts are cheap. I know the good beaches. The seafood is fresh and can be purchased straight from the boat. The people will at least pretend to like you, at first.

I can't explain to them why I return so often. I miss my family. I love tasting the ocean in the air, and smelling the beached, decaying seaweed. And, sometimes I miss the gangly child I used to be, who greets me there with a horse-toothed grin. That, is how I know I am home.

Unearthed

The clipping was yellowed, naturally. Fifty years had passed since it was first published, but the ink hadn't faded. Surely this clipping was, somewhere, preserved on microfilm and will outlast all those it mentions. It will outlast me.

My mother showed it to me, my grandmother's obituary. Her cousin had found it in his own late mother's scrapbook, my great-aunt, the sister of the victim. He brought this clipping and two bottles of white wine for dinner. My mother, who is turning sixty next year, laid her own mother to rest five decades ago.

The deceased was a stylish young mother of three, sister to several, wife to one and lover to another. She expired in a car accident with a man she may have loved, not my grandfather. The obituary said the driver of the car was unharmed, and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

I thought about my mother as a child, hearing adults debate her own mother's death, and all their questions and suspicions. I think about my grandmother's life on public record. Her marriage, the birth of her children and her death, all dates without detail. And, I wonder why my mother's cousin brought the clipping. Is it because my mother had so little opportunity to share my grandmother's life that she must resort to preserving her death?

The driver who killed my grandmother, whether by accident or intention, is likely to still, every so often, think of her. I am sure he's thought of her, his young mistress. The mandolin player. The beauty. If he is guilty, I wonder if his failing memory has offered him peace in his final days.

I've heard he still drinks tea in the town we have all since left, the town with the public records of my family's births and deaths. The same files that have, or will, inevitably record his own.

And all was well with the world...

As I know I have mentioned before, games play major bonding and educational roles in my family. And, as I have also already mentioned, so does gambling. These activities are equally important to my family’s culture - and so intertwined, so symbiotic, so complementary, that it’s hard to convince my family to do one that doesn’t involve the other.

In fact, currently all the rage in my parents’ homestead is: Horse Race. A homemade game that not only involves horses, but cards, dice and a money pot, as well. Combine that with the opportunity to lose the contents of your change purse in 30 minutes flat, and you’ve got a winner!

Anyway…

It took nearly a week of subtle hinting, and finally guilt-tripping to get these people to play my newest non-betting board game. It covers all the bases: charades, celebrity impersonations, drawing, sculpting, trivia and puzzles - oh, and sufficient opportunity for heckling between teams. We gathered around the table - my sisters, their two children, my mother and I. Players ranged in age from 10 to 58, one child per team.

We decided which tasks were “kid-worthy” and which weren’t, and assigned turns accordingly. For example, my mother, the eldest player, was required to hum Rod Stewart’s song “Do ya think I’m sexy?” While this game task was clearly inappropriate for the younger members of the team, after watching my mother act it out (even though that’s against the rules), well, it was clearly inappropriate for her as well.

The children got tired of us filtering their turns, though, and lobbied for us to allow them to read their own clue for the next set of charades. We told them that as long as they understood the word, they would have to act it out. If they had any trouble, however, they could consult our older uncle for help, since he saw no point in playing a non-betting game and opted to sit this one out.

Surely enough, the kids read the card and said they didn’t know what to do.

“Well”, said my niece, “I know what the word is, but, ummmmmm…”

And, since the golden rule of games in is “no mercy for persons over the age of five” - we all yelled in unison: “If you know the word, you have to act it out!”

“But…but…but,” stalled the children, their eyes widening in embarrassment already.

Our elderly uncle took the children to the adjacent room to confer. When they emerged, it was revealed that he didn’t know how to do it either.

“Just give it a try”, my sister told the children encouragingly, “It’s just a game.” And so, we turned the timer over and waited.

The children stood, their arms straight by their sides, staring ahead blankly - frozen.

“A statue?” I guessed. No, that wasn’t it.
“A Mountie?” my mother guessed. No, that wasn’t it.
“A tree?” my sister guessed. No, not it either.

“Why aren’t either of you moving?” we asked. “We can’t guess if you don’t act it out! Come on guys. Move around or something! Give us a hint!”

The children shifted nervously. Arms hanging straight, looking slightly terrified and very confused. Time was running out.

“Come on guys!”

At this point, the children were getting frustrated. My nephew’s eyes began rolling into the back of his head. His jaw was slack and I was certain my first guess - zombie - must have been right. He probably just didn’t hear me. I yelled it again.

“Zombie!”

The kids shook their heads “no”.

My mother and my sisters and I looked at each other, squinting, thoroughly confused as to what the kids were “acting out”. They were so unusually awkward. Standing more still than we even thought was possible at their age.

Much to the relief of the ten-year-olds, the last grain of sand dropped to the bottom of the timer - their eyes fixed on it - knowing that this would let them off the hook.

“What the heck was it?” we all yelled.

The kids - both of them - looked at us, the adults, as if we were stupid, and yelled:

“We were FLIRTING!!”

“Duuuuh!”

We - all the adults - laughed until we cried. We laughed because children are exposed to so much questionable media content - so much sex and violence and American Idol; because of the things they are exposed to at school - like sex and violence and underfunded education systems and junk food - and because of our fear that our children are just growing up too fast for anyone’s good. We laughed because we were relieved.

My niece and nephew are right at the stage ten-going-on-eleven-year-olds should be: Absolutely freakin’ clueless about dating.

Memoir of a son who wasn't ours

Having recently taken a CPR refresher course, my father diagnosed him with epilepsy. Junie claimed he had insulin 'fits', but it soon became clear that his condition was far more complicated than that. The whole of his simple life, spent in a plywood shack, was complicated.

Everyone called him Junie. Junie was short for Les Junior. He carried the namesake of his hardened relation, a man rumoured to be rough with his wife and kids. Junie lived alone with Charlie Pride, a kitten named after a man he respected, in a house barely large enough for its litter box. The plywood walls and floors were permeated with years of pipe puffing, and the fog inside the house was nearly as thick as the misty brine which blew in from the ocean.

In my memory, Junie wears the same outfit daily - and I did see him daily - in a white sleeveless undershirt and blue standard-issue workpants. I was almost eleven when he died, but I remember his suspenders as clearly as I remember the shape of his face - a small pumpkin carved into a smiling caricature of itself. His underarms are stained yellow and his hair shines with pomade, combed just so, deceiving me into thinking it was always freshly washed.

Jesus Christ, he would say. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, God damn!

Usually my mother would request that people avoid cursing in my presence, but we all knew it was just his Tourette's talking. He jerked his head to the side with every proclamation. He always said it with a smile anyway.

Junie made people uncomfortable. You never knew when he would have a seizure, and they were always quite violent. Though they lasted less than a minute, he risked falling, breaking glassware and scaring the children. None of this discouraged my parents. They understood the signs, and would pry mugs of hot coffee, or his pipe from his hand to ensure he wouldn't hurt himself, or any of us. And, then we'd wait. Junie would eventually ask what had happened and my mother would get him a glass of water, knowing the fit was over. My parents also understood that what Junie needed was for people to cope with him, to gladly endure. Although my parents were only a decade his senoir, Junior began to call them "Mom" and "Dad".

Lacking any sort of formal education - probably due to his multiple conditions in an era, and in a region, that didn't lend itself to tolerance - this self-designated brother of mine read fewer words than I.

He rigged a bicycle with bells and horns and rode 1km every evening to my family's home.
Every. Single. Night.
We could always hear him coming before we could see him.

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, God damn! Hee! Hee!

When the doctor told him he had gangrene, Junie's regular cursing lost its lilt. He returned from the hospital without his leg - I remember him crying. I remember when the doctor told him the other leg would have to go, too. He was in mourning, and my eyes alternately peered over the top of the table to observe his sadness, and peeked underneath to marvel at his stumps.

It was many months before we'd hear him round the bend again. He exchanged his bicycle for a 4-wheeled electric chariot. Instead of bells and horns, we'd hear the whir of chair's motor maxed out, and the comfortingly familiar: God damn! Hee! Hee! as he neared the driveway and rumbled over the lawn. He'd hop out of his wheelchair and walk on his hands to the front door, let himself in, climb onto his usual perch at the kitchen table and say, God damn! with a broad toothless smile.

Junie complained that he couldn't do anything in the absense of his legs, so my father taught him to carve wood. This is far more complicated than it sounds, because first, my father had to teach himself. In the early stages, Junie's crude carvings looked astoundingly similar to the original chunks of wood my father gave him for practice. Soon though - and no doubt because he had so much free time - he became a master. His likenesses of loons, mallards and piping plovers became so popular among locals and tourists that he had to take orders. He barely had any time for us anymore. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, God damn! Hee! Hee!

Junie whittled away - physically smaller than when I'd first met him, but full to the brim with joyful profanities. Junie had found a family that suited him and realized his talent, which allowed for his independence. And he never stopped yelping, God damn! Hee! Hee!

Until, one day, suddenly, in his early thirties, he did.

But, God damn! still rings joyfully in our ears.

Little Man Syndrome is OK when you're little

My nephew is turning 10 today. I remember the day my sister arrived at my front door to tell me she was pregnant. She was totally freaked out. She was married and settled with a house on the lake already, but she was worried about the huge lifestyle change that would be necessary. She began calculating the cost-per-year of his life/development and subtracted that amount from the Vacations-in-Mexico fund.

A decade later, there is this cool little man destroying her house and her yard, providing hours of entertainment and frustration daily. We love him to bits, and they've manage to bring him to Mexico twice already.

I just hope, that in the next 10-15 years, he doesn't somehow become the type of guy that is here in Montreal for the Grand Prix.

God, if I promise to believe in you, will you PLEASE make sure that doesn't happen?