Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images We can talk around the subject of whether Canada needs a Governor-General anymore, but there is no question that the current G-G has to go. Julie Payette might be a world leading voice in science, medicine, space travel and so on, but she obviously sucks at human relations. According to a CBC report , Payette spends her days plucking the wings off her employees, and reduces them to puddles in the parking lot.  Nothing these employees do matters. None of them are worthy, their work is shoe-pucky, and only she is able to fulfill all the duties of the Office of the Governor-General. So she tears up their stuff, berates them for hours on planes where they are held captive for hours, and gives them a twenty-question quiz on space. Word, Your Excellency! The Governor-General has no jurisdiction in space. The job of the Governor-General is to smile, wave and make nice with Canadians, pin medals on their chests, eat over-priced food made specifically to ...

Grandpa Crown and my mother Vera In the spring of 1919, Bertie Crown discovered she was pregnant with her second child. It must have been a wonderful time for the Crowns. The world had survived a devastating war, which killed nearly 67,000 Canadians, and they had also battled through the Spanish flu which killed 50,000. As they looked towards expanding their family, they hoped by the time Bertie gave birth, it would be smooth sailing ahead. On February 28, 1920, Bertie went into labour. A few hours later, her baby was dead and she was bleeding out. Three days later, the former Bertie Becken died leaving her husband, Loyal Crown, a 28-year-old widower, with a three-year-old child. She and her infant daughter are buried in Victoria Lawn Cemetery in St. Catharines.  A few years earlier, Mary Ina O'Neill received the terrible news that her husband  Herbert had been killed in Etapes, France in an enemy raid on the hospital where he was recuperating from gunshot woun...

I saw an ad on CNN a few weeks ago in which a woman gushed about being related to George Washington. She found this out on Ancestry.com whilst compiling her family tree. I had no illusions that I was related to Sir John A. or anybody else famous. But I decided to join Ancestry.ca just to clear up a few family mysteries. Growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, I was surrounded by ancient relatives of various shapes and sizes who would arrive at dinner, or a funeral, and fill my head with all kinds of weird and wonderful stories. Unfortunately, they all died before I reached an age when I was capable of documenting the stories, or more importantly, verifying them. So I thought now, during the age of the Pandemic, would be a good time to grow a family tree. Boy did I get my money's worth. I had always thought that I was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) through and through. There were Crowns, MacPhersons, Bretts and Simpsons; t here was no inter-marriage that I knew. So I was...

Embed from Getty Images "A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing is safe." -- Mary Gordon Over the years, I've tried to make sense of it, my father dying when I was just a baby. Losing a father, or mother, at an early age is like losing a limb. There are fixes, a re-marriage of the single parent perhaps, but step-parents are prosthetics, nothing more. The limb will always be missing, you will always feel that hand, and there will always be a constant ache, phantom pain, perhaps, that never goes away. Fatherless women, the sensitive ones at least, are often seen by other relatives as attention-seeking victims who act out in public and embarrass the family. That is what I was called last week by a relative who also called me "crazy". "You always have to be mad about something," he said when I railed against someone who had written erroneously in my Ancestry.ca Life Story that I was the love child of my fat...

I was excited to finally get Ancestry.ca in hopes of tracking down information about my father, Russ, who died back in 1957. It's part of a book/audio project I'm working on, and I wanted to make sure the information I was referencing was accurate. I didn't know dear old dad since he died when I was a baby. I thought I might get some insight into the man whose name is on my birth certificate by looking him up on the popular website. Imagine my surprise to see the above information. "He married Vera Crown and they had two children together. He also had one daughter from a previous relationship," the post read. Huh. So my mom lied, and I am the bastard child of some other woman? How did this happen? Did some floosy simply drop off her bundle of joy on my mom's doorstep when dad was busy fighting bad guys in Europe during the war? When exactly did he have time to father a child in-between trips back and forth on army leave? No wonder my mom had a ...

One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting outside my Granny's farmhouse and squishing a bag of orange and white liquid together to make "margarine". It didn't occur to me at the time that I was making an edible oil product for the family to use to slather on sandwiches and toast. To me, it felt like some miraculous operation to make something out of nothing. I also loved sitting with my Grandpa Loyal and cleaning smelly old smelt that we had caught in the local crick. Or shelling peas on a sweltering July afternoon, and sucking up the tiny jewels with my extended tongue and feeling the burst as they popped in my mouth. I loved my grandparents, and my Uncle Vern, with whom we lived until they left this Earth over a six year period, exactly two years apart. Vern was a 50ish man-child whose dad had died in the Great War and was adopted by my grandfather, a widower who lost his first wife and one twin in childbirth. In the 20s and 30s, that was how blended ...

Like most older folks, Scott and I have had our share of eye troubles. I had cataract surgery in my early 50s, which is quite young for the operation. When I arrived at the Riverside, I was surrounded by people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who thought I'd come to pick up my mother. Cataract surgery changed my life. At the time of my operation, I was doing an event for the Canadian Fallen Firefighters and I was amazed two days later to see the entire vista of Parliament Hill, and I would see every detail and colour on the dress uniforms of the Governor-General's Guards as they marched and played in memory of the fallen. It gave me good bumps. Best of all, I didn't have to wear distance glasses for the past ten years. Until now. Last week, I went to Lenscrafters and purchased FOUR pairs of glasses: distance glasses and suns as well as specs to read and specs to see the computer. Thank God for COVID pricing. I was able to get all four pairs for less than one of my usual pai...

Yesterday, I celebrated my birthday on a patio with my son, Stefan, and his girlfriend. I was incognito with sunglasses and a Globe and Mail baseball cap. Normally, I would have put some effort into my appearance, but the pandemic has stripped me of my vanity, and I am left hiding in plain sight. All the makeup in the world doesn't matter when you have pandemic hair. For years, I coloured my own hair until what my former hairdresser used to call "the nasty blondes" took over my pate. There is literally no way I can hide the undergrowth of steel strands which have taken over like dandelions in a perfectly manicured yard. So I became a devotee of professional hairstyling sucking it up a couple times a year for a full colour and lights, and another couple of times for attention to my roots. But the pandemic robbed most of us of this option. So we were left to our own devices to try to manage our colour until the doors of the salons opened once again. Thankfully, ...