Whatever He Says

"To the outside world, we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside a touch of time." - Clara Ortega. "We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws." - Rose Macaulay.  A set of photos was taken on a summer's day long ago. They always make me smile and feel sorry for being such a meanie. Rob  was having so much fun until I came along!    We had our share of sibling rivalry growing up, but now it is rare for more than a few days to go by without calling the other, even though we have lived on different continents for so many years.  We can talk for an hour about the most menial details of our li...

In the sunporch, I savour my first cup of morning coffee, wondering what magic there is in these first sips and why it never tastes quite as good later in the day. In the quiet, I am sensing the sacred, when my granddaughter Tori, and her dog, Kevin, come out of the house, she shuffling feet into outdoor shoes with her back turned to me when I gently say, “Hello." She turns, “Oh, I didn’t even know you were here,” she says. I ask where they are going, thinking of joining them if going for a walk, but Tori’s boyfriend, Dylan, and his twin sister, Jordan are coming over with Gonzo, one of their family’s dogs—in fact, they are arriving as we speak, Jordan in shorts, and a long plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up, her dark hair cut short and artsy. Dylan, also dark-haired, is tall and angular. Both of them have the most beautiful, kind eyes. I walk down the curving driveway  to say hello to them, and Tori cautions me about little Gonzo, “Be careful, he can be unfriendly to pe...

Dear Tiffany-Amber, I'm addressing you by your given name rather than nickname as doing so reminds me of your adulthood. I hope it doesn't sound too formal! Happy Canada Day! You've been in my thoughts ever since your mom left for home and we spent a few enjoyable hours together yesterday afternoon. Yesterday over supper at The Mandarin, you were so engaged in exploring ideas about politics, and at one point you looked at me and said, "What do you have to say, Omie? Any thoughts?" You should probably know that when someone says that to me, I usually feel like a failure, as though I've been handed the conversational ball, but dropped it. I know that you love a meaty debate and long for substantial conversations with people. I hope you meet people to fulfill that hunger and respond to the challenge of your thoughts better than I did. Don't think that I'm hard on myself because I had nothing really thoughtful to add; well, maybe when it comes to ...

We were young, that’s my excuse. I was 23 and Paul 26, but already we had done a lot of living in our time together--more than most youngsters of today would have done by then. We had been married for almost four years, had immigrated to a new country, over 6,000 km away from home and were parents to a 3 and 1-year-old. We owned our own house--or at least two mortgages on the house and had settled down, or so  I thought. Paul and I were barely scraping by, but we were making it on one salary, while I stayed home to care for our children. It is at such times; I have come to understand, now that I am much older, that we should prepare for an adventure, for one is surely coming.  Paul had a long drive to work, down a highway known for danger in the winter. He felt that we should explore moving closer to his place of work. I was happy in our home--had overcome two years of homesickness and loved our little village in the country. I was not in favour of the proposed mo...

Windsor Castle --the Royal Collection Trust states that it is the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world. Today it was on show in all of its beauty and glory, its walls witness to a love story that makes us believe in happy endings. Today Prince Harry and his beautiful beloved Meghan got married amid pomp and pageantry that felt like an elegant party rather than formal ceremony. It was worth every hour of lost sleep to watch with a breathless world as the first guests arrived, perfectly coifed and dressed, and imagine the feeling of really being there when even from afar we felt such anticipation and excitement.  As I watched the wedding from Canada, my brother, Rob, was doing the same in England and both of us were thinking of another time in the history of the castle, 70 years ago.  In 1947 my father, Chris Cater, was in the Grenadier Guards and stationed at  Caterham Barracks . One day when off duty, he met a 21-year-old Dutch girl, who woul...

Our son Pete usually calls to chat during his long commute to and from work in the city and it was during one of these conversations recently that I mentioned having the gift of mercy. He loves to tease me about what he describes as my "random mercy," and says that I'm always able to "ferret out" the good in people. A particularly flattering choice of metaphor, I thought .   He launched into his "axe murderer" routine, saying he imagines me saying, "Well, on the good side, he always cleans up after himself. And he keeps his tools nice and sharp." He muttered something about not many people wanting me on a parole board--getting carried away now--he was o n a roll--I was laughing so hard I could hardly catch my breath--the fuel to his fire. Pete may have been exaggerating for dramatic and comedic effect, but  when I told my granddaughter Tori about his teasing, she said, "Omie, remember that terrible dream I had a few ...

It's been almost a week since we returned from Mishkeegogamang, a First Nation 2000 kilometers north of our home, and I feel as though I have a suitcase full of stories to unpack.  We went as a team of 23 diverse people, brought together by a common desire to bring encouragement, hope, practical help and spiritual support to the people of Mish. Ten of our team were teenagers, and this story is from Tippy, who was one of  them. It happened on our first full day there and is shared as she told it to me: Susan said that we needed to set up a buoy line, and I said, "Okay, I can do that," not thinking that the water was going to be as cold as it was. So me, Dylan, Tori, Jared and Max all went down to the water to set it up. We got everything ready and had anchored the two 50 foot sides and were taking out the 100 foot rope for the back of the buoy line. We anchored part of the 100 foot rope to one of the sides and were taking it across to the other side, when the...

It was 2004 and I had gone back to England for two weeks to help my brother Robert move Mum from the two story home she was living in, to a perfect little ground floor flat in the same village. Robert and I had a lifetime of gathered belongings to sort through and condense into a much smaller space, while Mum, blissfully unconcerned with all of this, patiently waited for the move. I persuaded Robert that it might be a good idea, even though Mum's final quota of belongings was small, to get help in the form of a moving company. We settled on movers called Mike and Al .  Their advertisement in the phone book sounded so promising. "No job too large or too small," it boasted. From the moment I made contact with "Mike" though, something in his voice gave a different impression to the enthusiastic advertisement. In fact, I wasn't sure that he really wanted to do this job, although he didn't come right out and say so. When I pressed him for a quote, s...

I have discovered that the road to high drama or comedy often starts out as an innocuous trail of breadcrumbs. Such was the case recently, when in the middle of cleaning her kitchen cupboards my friend Susan texted me with the wry declaration that she was married to a condiments hoarder. “Dozens and dozens of packets of soy-sauce, ketchup, and sundry containers of salad dressing, vinegar, etc.,” she wrote. She thanked God for small mercies--at least Ron didn’t save the packets of salt and pepper, but she said that she could not suggest throwing any of the collection out. Ron had said defensively that the last time the kids were over, he had given them all little ketchup packs to put on their French fries.  “At that rate,” wrote Susan, “there’s no way we will be able to use them up before the end of the next decade! Then there are all the other little packets…And every time he gets takeout…there are MORE!” “Oh, dear,” I texted back, adding that I had used up my ...

I had spent Wednesday upstairs, emptying, cleaning and organizing cupboards, while from the kitchen below the distant whine of an electric screwdriver drifted up--new cupboard doors were being attached to our still sturdy, old cupboard frames. The bathroom cupboards were next to be renewed once the kitchen was finished. Without thinking, I emptied the contents of a clear plastic jewelry organizer onto the bathroom counter-top, so that I could wash and dry it--and instantly the chains of four necklaces formed a pile that became tangled around each other and two red coral earrings. More haste, less speed, I thought, with a sigh. I  tried letting the chains loosely fall apart in my fingers, as much as they would without tugging. Mum had taught me how to do this when I was a child, and I remembered how n o matter how tight the knot in a thread, or how hopelessly knotted a chain was , somehow,  she was always able to undo it; just one of her special talents! I  managed to...

Words--they can be regretted; explained; justified; or apologized for, but never retrieved—and that’s the very thing we often long to do. Once careless, hurtful words are expressed, like homing missiles, they find their mark with terrifying precision and devastation.  And there is no tenderer landing place than a human heart or soul. A sure signal of the need for silence is anger. “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret,” wrote Ambrose Bierce, a 19 th century journalist, who ironically often stirred up a storm of hostile reaction through his writings. Perhaps he spoke from bitter experience. Unfortunately, anger is exactly when words tend to come--“fast and furious". Some of the words I regret the most were spoken to my father. They were true, and it’s not hard to justify them, but they caused him pain. Three months afterwards he died. I would give much to take them back. He was 81 and very deaf due to the effects of war and...

December 31st...a day to look back before looking ahead; at where I didn't do as well as hoped, and where I have changed for the better (in my experience, with God's help.)  I opened the small pink patterned note book in which I chronicled this year's challenges and victories, its pages secured by a knot, promising confidences kept. I found on the fly-leaf, a conversation I recorded because it encouraged me, and I share it here because it is perfect for this day above all: It was September, and our granddaughter Tippy was living out her dream--an art student at  Sheridan College . She and her class-mates were instructed to draw a picture that represented themselves. Then, anonymously, the drawings were made into a slideshow for the class to view and analyse.  When Tippy's drawing came up, some of the students commented on the strokes, saying that they indicated that the artist was confident and strong. As Tippy recounted this to our daughter Brenda later, sh...

I read the story over lunch a few days before Christmas, and laughed out loud alone in my kitchen, as it brought to colourful life in my imagination, the hilarious scenario played out on the page in black on white. A day or so later, I was talking to my son, and I said, "Pete, I have a gift I'd love from you this Christmas." "Oh?" he said, surprised, I suppose, at my unusual boldness in asking. "What is it?" "It's a story," I said, "And the gift would be that you would read it for me and the rest of the family, when we all get together for Christmas."  He agreed. asking only if he might get the story ahead of time to practice. In the end, with all of the busyness before Christmas, he never did pick up the story to ahead of time, but on Boxing Day, when we all assembled to celebrate what was for some family members, "Christmas Version # 3," the bright-yellow-covered book with its coffee-stained pages was near ...

Our second baby wasn't due until the middle of June, but in the first week of that month in 1972  I was seized by the a strong compulsion to clean the house--no matter that it was hot  and humid and we had no air conditioning--everything had to be clean. For some time I had wanted my body back. I kept misjudging the proximity of doorways and bumping into furniture. I navigated space feeling like a huge, ungainly, ocean-going-liner.  Paul was working in a facility for people with developmental disabilities, and the upcoming weekend would be a long one off for him. When he told me that he was bringing home a guest for four days--one of the people who lived there--I thought ungracious thoughts. With a toddler who had just turned two at the end of May, and our second baby due in just over a week,  the thought of an extra person staying for four days was exhausting.   But when our guest Philip came home with Paul after his shift on Thursday, seeing how excited...

The night before last I had a scary dream. It had the feel of a  Ray Bradbury  story, the ones I loved and devoured as quickly as I could, as a teenager.  The dream had the same creepy menace and foreboding that I found so deliciously scary then, but it didn't feel so delicious showing up in my dream now. In the dream I was in bed, in a room whose walls held windows that were open to the dark outside, like a sun porch, only the windows were all around and a breeze rustled through them, an invader from outside. I wasn't alone in the room. To my right there was another bed, a little further forward than mine. A young girl, with dark, bobbed hair, sat up in it, with her back to me. Because it was further ahead than mine I couldn't see her face. I did what anyone would do--I called out, "Mum!" And I heard her sweet, unmistakable voice say, "I'm here darling," and she put up her hand from the mattress on the floor where she was sleeping be...

As small children we adore our mothers, think them the fairest in the land, and when we are old enough, present them with gifts bought lovingly with hoarded coins passed over shop counters by chubby hands. Among my childhood gifts to Mum were  Soir de Paris  perfume in its  bottle of blue glass topped with a domed silver cap--and   Californian Poppy   with its jaunty red lid and cheery poppies on its label. Inside they had little white rubber stoppers, and Mum would tip the bottled and then touch the tiny stopper behind each ear, to each wrist and to her throat, a ritual I studied, and later imitated. Both perfume bottles had in common their miniscule size, but somehow that just made them seem more extremely precious. They were the only perfumes I remember her using. The rest of her life was far from glamourous. Recently I thought about the hard physical work she did every week just to get the laundry done. The sturdy white cotton twill bed sheets...