Rose's Cantina

I will be celebrating my mother's 93rd birthday today, outside in the back garden, watching the weirdos walk down St. Laurent Boulevard. We're having a barbeque in her honour, steak with all the fixins, washed down by a couple glasses of French wine. If she were alive today, she'd be out there with us in the freezing cold, smoking Rothmans, and drinking some sort of Labatt product. She loved to smoke. She loved to drink. She loved to laugh. I miss her, and always will. She left this Earth in September of 1992, and she was only 68 -- six years older than I am now. Man, she seemed like a dinosaur back then, and now that I look at myself, I wonder: is that what the young ones see when they look at me? Really, I don't care anymore. I am who I am. If you don't like me, or my wrinkles, or my cheap dye job, get stuffed. That's what she would say. She lived a tough life, raising three kids on her own, as I did, living on fumes, as I did for...

Cindy and John Simpson celebrated their wedding anniversary this weekend, even though they were both down with the flu. They played some cards, ate some cake, and remembered the good times, and the very bad times. Like most couples who've been married nearly three decades, they count the raising of their children into adulthood as their greatest success. Cindy and John have lots of them in their blended family, including a gaggle of grandkids. Most recently they welcomed their first grandchildren, the imp Cyris, who is killing everybody daily with his cuteness. The kids keep John and Cindy going through the tough times. And their times have been tougher than most. For the second Family Day in a row, the Simpsons will be missing a bit piece of their hearts. Their daughter Ashley still has not been found and John is hoping to take one more trip out to Salmon Arm to find her with the help of people in the local community who refuse to give up looking for Ashley and a num...

Every story has an ending, and we've come to it. The beautiful and bountiful sprays of flowers are now wilted, and will be going into the recycle today. The letters have all been written, and the cheques have all be cashed. Her carbon footprint, once larger than the woman herself, is now reduced to a small, cream coloured box filled with receipts, just in time for tax season. On Thursday, Jennette Katherine Lovie was interred in a brief ceremony involving putty and blowtorches, the plot salesman, Squishy, Scott and me.  Now it's time to say goodbye. She and Roger can now rest together under the watchful eyes of John and Sadie Smuck, featured in the photo above. It always seemed great that they would have a couple of Smucks with whom they could spend eternity. For me, it's time to move on.  This morning, I died my hair red because I could. This afternoon, we'll spend time with my eldest granddaughter, Skylar, eating bad food at Mickey D's. I...

Over the years when I looked after Jennette, there were times I wanted to walk out of her life. It was hard watching her self-destruct, difficult to walk into an apartment that was full of paper and ashes and soot. Her friend Lu couldn't believe it when I told her about the hoarding years, the decades Jennette made neat pathways to the bathroom and the bedroom in-between the untouched moving boxes, and the couches overflowing with her dead mother's clothes. "The Jan I knew had an apartment that was neat as a pin," Lu told me. "I just can't believe she lived that way." I knew Jennette for 25 years, and every place she rented looked the same. They were always full of clutter, neat in places, especially the bathroom. The rest of her apartment looked like a bombed out place in Aleppo. The first time it was a problem was when the paramedics came to get Roger who had collapsed on the bed. It took them nearly an hour to get him out of the apartme...

I was going through my late friend Jennette's paperwork today for her taxes, and I found a small folder which contained mail receipts. They were all addressed to a man in Africa named George Prince Gaskin who apparently was a lawyer for a man with whom Jennette became involved over Facebook. It had all been a scam, of course, played upon a vulnerable and lonely widow. She had fallen for an American soldier named Richard Birdsong whom she met on Messenger. This Birdsong fellow had told her that he was stationed in Afganistan, and he had a teenage son. Unbeknownst to everyone but Jennette, they had fallen in love, and Jennette was waiting for him to move to Canada so the three of them could be together. In another folder, I saw a passport application with a photo of Jennette. I suppose there had been plans for her to travel to the U.S. at some point, plans that were never fulfilled. I knew she had been scammed before I found these receipts. She called me one day to ask if ...

We held a memorial for Jennette yesterday, and by all accounts, it was a complete success. Well, not quite. Scott was in charge of the music, and he couldn't get it going. His tech skills appear to be rusty now that he's a retired CBC cameraman. Leonard Cohen was with us, sitting on the iPad, but the voices of his lovely singers couldn't seem to reach the speaker my husband held in his hand. Like the good emcee I was, I tapped danced for a few minutes. "Well, I guess we know why the CBC is in trouble," I quipped, giving my husband the stinkeye. Fortunately, we didn't have to endure a Don Mclean nightmare, another day the music died. Scott finally got it going, and we were saved. Today, I'm suffering from a funeral hangover. The feeling is familiar. I remember it from the myriad funerals I attended as a child who was blessed with lots of genetically compromised elderly relations whose arteries were altered by booze and cigarettes. The Blood...

Welcome guests, friends, relatives, to this memorial for Jennette, or Jan, or Jen. She went by many names over the years, and a lot of us knew her as a different Jennette or Jan or Jen. She was like a rainbow in many ways. We all saw different colours but we all felt the same way when we were with her. Warm and loved and cared for. She lived her life as if she were in a Maya Angelou poem. She tried to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Her mission in life was not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style. And as Gessie will tell you later, she embraced that style with gusto. Jennette or Jan or Jen, didn’t talk much. She surrounded herself with extroverts who sucked up all the air in the room. Fun people, smart people. She once told me she was first attracted to Roger because he introduced her to so many interesting people, at the press club, in bars and bistros. That’s what she missed abou...