According to Wikipedia, that line was never actually spoken by Joe Friday on Dragnet. The closest lines were, “All we want are the facts, ma’am” and “All we know are the facts, ma’am”.

Of course, that Wiki entry will be altered now that I’ve pointed it out online. That’s because I have a handful of middle-aged male cyber hater-fans who spend much of their day trying to trip me up on the internet. Or, I should say used to. It’s been a while, I have to admit, since I’ve seen cyber hide nor hair of my hater-fans.

Ah, the ignominy of over 50 femaledom. Now I’m not even attracting (un)wanted attention in cyber space. Thank Carp I had children and cougared a young’un when I still could to jump my brittling bones once in a while.

There, that ought to frighten off any young people from reading my blog. Fuck off, young people, nobody likes you. Better yet, go join those French students striking against an increase in relatively low (using the British Philistine Standard) tuition fees so your publicly-funded police force can bash your spoiled brains in, too.

But that’s not what this entry is about, this entry is about information. So indulge me while I backtrack. The other day, I tweeted (on Twitter) this bon mot: “How parallel universe is it that the Public Safety Minister is an advocate of unregistered weapons?” It was my most popular tweet by far, so I followed it up with, “And how parallel universe is it that the Environment Minister is an advocate of tarsands development?” That one wasn’t as popular, but many of my followers are Liberals. And, as you may or may not have noticed, Liberals are hedging their bets on tarsands development. I suppose it’s a strategy. After all, tarsands development may not lead to the end of the world, leaving a chance for a Liberal comeback. And if Marc Garneau is leader the tarsands could come in handy to fuel our rockets so we can escape this dump and colonize the moon. You know, in real space, not cyber space.

Omigawd, a Liberal moon. Can you imagine? That would be enough to drive Stephen Harper so far around the bend he’d end up in China.

Oh yeah, grr, fuck off, Liberals, nobody STILL likes you. And we can’t afford Stephen Harper being any crazier’n he already is, thanks. He’s already at level II: “Crazier’n a Bag of Hammers”.

Information. That’s what this entry is about. Information and the importance of having reliable sources of it. I know, I know, “but you said you weren’t going to blog about politics anymore, Sooey”. Well that was before Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment, “informed” Canadians that we didn’t need publicly-funded non-partisan information-providers anymore. You know, on account of Al Gore invented the internet.

But did he? Invent the internet, I mean. Or is that a South Park joke. Because if it’s not true and is in fact a South Park joke, colour me red (for embarrassed, not Communist) for spreading a falsehood all over cyber space and misinforming tens of my hater-fans.

Now, personally, I think it’s a pretty scary development, much scarier than tarsands development, that the Minister of the Environment is an advocate of Canadians getting their information from the internet, as opposed to their government. But then I look at who Canadians elected to be our government and I see the former journalist’s point. (That the good Minister speaks as a former journalist is a little disconcerting, but still not as disconcerting as our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster, the CBC, seeing fit to plague us with a Popeye-esque jabbering Newfie pundit stereotype week after week, apparently to malign anyone who points out that tarsands development can lead to “Dutch Disease”, not to be confused with “Dutch elm disease”, although it probably leads to that, too.)

Sigh. And too bad we didn’t see that emerald ash borer coming. Ottawa is lousy with beautiful big old very dead ash trees casting a gloomy and ghoulish shadow over our tulip gardens, speaking of those friggin’ Dutch. Again. Forget tulips, Dutch people, send money and trees. We’re in a recession over here with nowhere to hang our hammocks.

Now, Stephen Harper is probably Canada’s most famous economist after John Kenneth Galbraith (who, according to Wikipedia, became an American citizen, which eventually killed him, albeit several decades later) so he would know all about “Dutch Disease”, which, according to Wikipedia, “is a concept that explains the apparent relationship between the increase in exploitation of natural resources and a decline in the manufacturing sector” (i.e. what we who live in the manufacturing sector of Ontario refer to as “Alberta Disease”).

So, putting aside the Tarsands Development Fan Club backlash against Thomas Mulcair, leader of the dangerous socialist party of Canada, the NDP/NPD (I can hardly wait until those (surviving) passionate striking French students graduate from university into high paying jobs and start flooding the NDP/NPD coffers with $$$s!) for diplomatically stating the obvious, that we have contracted Dutch Disease, perhaps it’s time someone thought to ask Stephen Harper about the cure.

Maybe he could even get our smart people working on a vaccination campaign so that we don’t contract Dutch Disease again. And again. Again.

Unfortunately, Dutch Disease seems to have other symptoms not yet documented on Wikipedia. For instance, Canadian Dutch Disease has resulted in the laying off of all the smart people – public sector scientists, auditors, statisticians, inspectors – all those fact finders and information gatherers governments ignore anyway but who at least produce reports that Wikipedia can refer to in its campaign from cyber space to educate the masses. (Although, apparently our government isn’t above a little nip and tuck of reports suggesting tarsands development causes Dutch Disease. Oh, and is destroying humanity’s collective climate, of course.)

But this brings me to my own personal information campaign, one that I hope that you will pick up on as well. As you may or may not know, I’m one of the so-called affected workers being laid off in the near future. Luckily, I’m not one of the aforementioned smart people but rather a run-of-the-mill office clerk. And unlike the many aforementioned smart people, I secretly welcome being laid off as I find myself no longer suited for run-of-the-mill office clerking. In fact, if Jason Kenney thinks he can scare me away from collecting employment insurance with threats of migrant work, I say, bring it on, fat boy.

(Normally, I would never say “fat boy” but I despise Jason Kenney with every fibre of my being so what the hell – Fuck off, Jason Kenney, fat boy, nobody likes you.)

But before I suit up for apple season (cancelled in Ontario due to our new boil/freeze spring weather cycle, perhaps another symptom of Dutch Disease, although I don’t see anything about that on Wikipedia – yet) I plan to make sure as many good citizens of Ottawa know a couple of facts they may not be aware of due to a dearth of information emanating from their government.

1) I, along with thousands of other laid off public servants, am not included even in the lowball number of layoffs being claimed by the government, as I am not what is known as an indeterminate employee.

2) Non-indeterminate employees of the government number in the thousands and we’re all being laid off by way of our contracts not being renewed once they run out. We’re called casuals and terms and some of us have only ever been casuals or terms even though we’ve worked for years in the government.

3) We are in a recession and suffering from Dutch Disease and soon I will be hoarding every penny I am able to make picking apples. So if you own a business either hire me or downsize because my contribution, and the contribution of thousands of your co-citizens, to your bottom line is about to be substantially lowered.

However, lest my cyber hater-fans think that’s a bad thing, rest assured I shared a pint with a private sector friend just yesterday and she’s thinking of getting off the work treadmill, too. And the similarly-aged (to her, early 40s) hairdresser I talked to while he chopped (leaving me with more brown and less gray, oddly enough, given these stressful end times) said the same thing. “Why work my ass off saving for retirement when I could just take it easy and off myself when I get old instead? Who wants to be old if you’re just going to have to work anyways?”

So that’s my idea, that instead of relying on our government for information, which can be spotty and kind of unreliable now that politicians are in charge of providing all of it, we just start talking to each other about how we’re coping with Dutch Disease and Harperitis and brittle bones and what our plans for the future may or may not be.

Although, from what I’m hearing back so far, if I was professionally ambitious (I know, I know, I wouldn’t be blogging for a living) I might think of a future in retirement suicides.

So let’s all board the information train, co-citizens, and keep those real live facts chugging along so that we can keep Wikipedia in entries for my middle-aged male cyber hater-fans to alter. Information not provided by politicians – it’s a good thing. In fact, it may be the only thing worth living for pretty soon.

Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.

… Begins and ends with its most vulnerable members.

That’s mine, I believe, although I may have ripped it off from an annual report of the Public Health Agency of Canada. I once wrote a speech for the Chief Public Heath Officer (CPHO), who at the time was Dr. David Butler Jones (still?), and the annual report I based it on was Liberally peppered with such bon mots.

Ooh… “Liberally peppered” “bon mots” – I retain the speechifying touch. Sadly, the good doctor never delivered the speech, his appearance at the conference being cancelled due to one of the many contaminated food outbreaks that started happening once Stephen Harper became Prime Minister. It may or may not have been public news. The problem with the job of CPHO is that if he says anything the government doesn’t like it can fire him because the Liberals, when they created the position, made sure it didn’t come with any security.

Although, at least the Liberals didn’t also fire all the food inspectors and then legalize the sale of roadkill. That’s one thing Canadians could count on with the Liberals. They may have been crooks, but they always left enough for the next round.

But I’m not blogging about politics anymore so that’s not what this entry is about.

The other day on my commute to work a young man with Down’s Syndrome sat beside me. He’s often on my bus and usually looking somewhat irritated. It’s something I’ve come to notice about people with Down’s, as children they look happy, but as adults they look irritated.

“Am I late?” he asks, brow furrowed.

“Are you supposed to be at work for 9:00 or 9:10… ish?”

“<Sigh>”

“Well, you’re probably late, but not by much. I’m a little bit late today, too.”

I’m always curious as to how other people get by in this mean old world but even I could tell he wasn’t in the mood to chat, so instead of asking what he did or where he was going I just took note of his stop – a convenience store. I have no idea if he works there or just goes there for something to eat before going somewhere else to work.

That’s something else I’ve noticed about people with Down’s – they’re often snacking. Deliberately and with determination. Down’s people are very focused snackers.

Of course, maybe he’s not going to work at all, maybe he’s going to school. That’s another thing about people with Down’s, it’s really hard to tell how old they are. But maybe that’s a trick of nature, too, it’s hard to tell how old they are so it’s hard to pin down where they’re going, more importantly, what they’re up to.

Trust no one. Or trust everyone to be up to something, is my motto, now that I just thought of it.

Also, and not to put too sharp a point on it, but the extra chromosone that gives people with Down’s their own human race, also gives them a shorter life expectancy. I used to find this unfairly unfair, but the older I get the more I just accept it as is, that there is no measure for life, just society, regardless of British Prime Minister (PM) Maggie T’s assertion that there’s no such thing.

As society, I mean, not life. She knew there was such a thing as life – spent her entire tenure as PM trying to wring gold for the coffers from it.

When I was pregnant with my third child my new young male doctor questioned why I wanted the pretty much de rigeur these days test for Down’s Syndrome.

“Well, I had it for my other two.”

“So?”

“Well, I want to know if the fetus (okay, I would have said baby, it’s true) has Down’s Syndrome.”

“Why? What difference would it make?”

And even though I suspected he was probably coming from an “every sperm is sacred” perspective on life (and the possible aborting thereof by the mother-to-be vs baby-not-to-be) I also suspected he had a point. I mean, did I want a baby or not? And so I didn’t have the test.

The response relates to a story as told by Timothy Findley when he made a trip to the hardware store for a device to prevent pigeons from eating the bird seed he put out. The employee asks him, “Hey, do you like birds or not?” Findley, who was living in the country ostensibly because of his love of and respect for natural life found himself somewhat revealed by the question and vowed henceforth to do better.

I wonder what he would have thought of the current government’s opinion that, while natural life has a quantifiable hierarchy of worth based on how much cash profit it yields, work is work and public servants who find themselves laid off because of the incalculable cost of fighter jets should just don migrant worker smocks and get to apple picking.

Although I guess the apple crop fell victim to the summer/winter temperatures of spring this year.

Oops, I forgot – no more blogging about politics.

Still, I was relieved to give birth to a baby who didn’t have Down’s Syndrome, mostly because I would have had a hard time with the “Oh dear” look people have on their face when they meet a new baby with Down’s. It’s natural, of course, I guess, but I wonder why we have that reaction (which most of us try to mitigate with bigger smiles and wider eyes, our cheerleading no doubt the reason why adults with Down’s look so irritated). They’re probably asking themselves, “Why did everybody pretend life was a joyous happy fest when I was a baby? Cripes, a rocket scientist isn’t good enough to get a job even as leader of a third place political party in this mean old world. Meanwhile, strangers get to brooding about the relative shortness of my lifespan just because I’m running ten minutes late in the morning.”

Anyway, it’s ironic to me that what most medical professionals would term a risk, having a baby with Down’s, increases with the age of the mother. I mean, I don’t know this to be true, I can only imagine it, but with my acquired wisdom over the years (I’ve read more on my daily three year commute to the job I will soon lose than over my four years in university obtaining a degree in english and history) having a baby with Down’s would be its own unique reward.

Then again, it could be that having a government that quantifies the value of life based on how much cash profit can be sucked out of it, is responsible for my acquired perspective.

The lesson being, of course, that we benefit from all life, even if it’s Conservative.

The other day my boss one level up and I got into as we occasionally do. He likes getting into it because he’s a philosophy pedant who floats above the rest of us on a cerebral plane. I don’t like getting into it because I’m a kneejerk reactionary to philosophy pedants. Also, I turn into a frustrated 10 year old two sentences into the debate, which is always a variation on: Life was better back in the day when everyone accepted that father knows best because brawn was bigger than brain.

Except that my father died when I was four, and my experience with other fathers was that they were a) stupid, b) sleeping, c) perverted, d) psycho, e) all of the above. And the stupid and/or perverted ones always wanted to have the father knows best debate with me, too.

Indeed, thanks to other fathers, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member” was my standard with regard to boyfriends until I hit the bar scene at age 18 and my standard became “I gotta quit drinking”.

Louis CK, who I saw at Bluesfest a couple of years ago (if you ever want to freeze your face in an lol for two hours – go see Louise CK) does a bit about fathers and children that hurts, as in “the truth hurts”, but that totally vindicates the 10 year old girl in me. He talks about volunteering in his daughters’ school at lunchtime and how if there’s an emergency he’s supposed to help all the kids get out of the cafeteria. He thinks it’s funny that the lady mom principal would entrust him with this duty, since he’s a father, and as a father, he cares only about kids that spring from his loins. He doesn’t care about kids who spring from some other douchebag’s loins. He doesn’t care so much that after he rescues his kids from the cafeteria, he will take them for ice cream, leaving those other douchebags’ kids behind, screaming and on fire.

Well, I guess you have to be there with Louis CK telling it to fully appreciate the hilarity of the scene.

But I was lucky because my mom was such a “do NOT mess with me” bitch, that men, especially other fathers, were afraid of her. I knew this because every once in a while one would take a chance and diss her to me. The diss was always that she didn’t have a husband. They would never have had the nerve to say such a thing to her face, of course, so they said it to her 10 year old daughter instead. Then they’d pull rank to end the debate.

Which is why I turn into a 10 year old girl in a debate with my boss one level up. It’s not a debate, it’s a diss, followed by a pulling of rank. A double/double, as it were.

As a fatherless girl growing up in the tail end of the time of fathers I lived the debate, the diss, the pulling of rank. Louis CK would give me a double plus good for my insight, too. Men don’t care about kids, they care about their kids. So when they argue on behalf of what’s best for kids you can be pretty sure they’re really just arguing that women are bitches.

Unfortunately, although life was better for my widowed mother because she didn’t have a husband (and don’t get me wrong – she would have preferred that my father had lived) I grew up not knowing what it’s like to have a father, as in, a man who cares about you for no other reason than that you sprang from his loins. And while so many in society see catastrophe in separation and divorce, I see a lot of kids growing up knowing that their fathers will drive everyone to financial ruin in order to lay claim to them as theirs.

Hear me now, listen to me later, but that’s a good thing.

When I ended my marriage by moving out of the matrimonial home, so to speak, it was very difficult for me because I’d been a homemaker. But I didn’t have the heart (or the confidence or the money) for a custody battle, either. So the kids stayed living with their father and camped out in my apartment every weekend. What can I say? It was what it was and we sailed through the pre-teen/teen years in a one bedroom apartment, five of us and our dog, Kasey, and nobody died.

Well, except for Kasey, who keeled over in the parking lot at the start of a walk, Dog bless his mighty jerk of a soul.

It was only recently that I realized what a good thing it probably was for my kids to have had the primary father experience. Mothers care about their kids, but they care about kids, generally. (Even my mother qualifies for that statement because although she doesn’t care about kids until they’re old enough to drink martinis, then she cares about any kids, as long as they take her advice and go to teacher’s college. And Maude bless her, you’re never too old a kid for my mother to give up on her advice that you go to teacher’s college.)

I know that to be true because of how I feel about my kids, my nieces and nephews, friends’ kids, neighbours’ kids, my kids’ friends, kids in playgrounds, on the street, buses. When I volunteered at my kids’ school, it was to read to the grade ones, which I did almost until my youngest went to middle school.

Having been married with children, however, I know now that what I missed growing up (my older sister and brother who were 9 and 7 when my father died probably had a father long enough to lock in the experience) was the experience of a man caring about you just because you sprang from his loins, as opposed to men not caring about you just because you didn’t.

Luckily, I was born with a horseshoe up my ass and of a ball shriveling bitch of a mother (also very good looking, so men were triply handicapped around her) so that the best and the worst of my experiences with other fathers was pretty much limited to their complete and total lack of caring about me because I wasn’t theirs. The thing is, I didn’t really get that until Louis CK spelled it out for me in a comedy routine. So while my grown up face was frozen in an lol for two hours, my inside 10 year old was pounding her fists (with the thumb on the outside because nobody ever taught me how to make a proper fist) and railing at a society that lies, lies and lies some more about reality, so much so that fathers end up smelling like roses instead of mushrooms.

Father does not know best. Father doesn’t give a shit about you if you’re not his. But don’t take my word for it (talking the talk, as it were) – take Louis CK walking the walk away from a cafeteria full of screaming burning kids that aren’t his, to take kids that are for ice cream.

We had a sandbox in our backyard that as far as I know had the same sand in it for 20 years. My brother and I used to play army in it with those little green plastic soldiers boys had in those days. But I can remember once, before I went to school, Terry and I playing together and getting in some kind of argument. Terry picked up a stick and whacked me across the face with it, causing blood to splatter everywhere. I ran into the house, my hand over my face, blood pouring through my fingers, and Terry ran home. My Gram told me it was a nosebleed and made me pinch my nose and hold my head back.

Later in the day, or maybe it was the next day, I was playing in our gravel driveway when Terry’s mom, Enid, came marching down the street. She threw a teddy bear I’d left at Terry’s place at me and told me to leave Terry alone, that I was no longer welcome at her home. I was upset, but my older sister told me not to worry about it. Every once in a while my older sister was nice to me. She said Enid was kind of crazy but she’d get over it. She was one of those mothers who got involved in kid stuff and always took Terry’s side, even though Terry was always the cause of the trouble.

Terry was the middle child in the Foster family. Eddie was the oldest and when I was young he was known as a bully. As he got older, though, and after grade eight when he went to the tech school, he was known as a good guy, a nice young man who could be trusted to do the right thing. Ellen was the youngest. Once, Terry, who was the mastermind of the three siblings, had the idea to take all the labels off Enid’s cans. Then he and Eddie put Ellen in the pantry and propped a chair under the doorknob so she couldn’t get out. The idea was that Enid would think Ellen had done it. Enid and Frank, Terry’s dad, hit the roof when they got home, but later Enid would laugh about how she never knew what she was making for supper. My mom said Terry would have been living out on the street if he’d pulled a stunt like that on Gram.

It was my job to pick up Terry on the way to school. Enid would see us off, standing at the door in her fluffy mules, mock turtle neck and shorts, even though it was Sault Ste. Marie and always winter. She had a cigarette hanging off her lip and I swear I can remember hearing tinkling ice cubes. She was always laughing about something anyway.

“Hey, Terry!” “Yeah, ma?” “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees – look at these!” And she’d pull out her top. “Aw c’mon, ma!” “Hey, Terry – cigarette?” “No thanks, ma, I can live without it.”

It was their routine. Terry didn’t have a bedtime, either, and could stay up to watch Carol Burnett. He’d fill me in on the shows that came on after my bedtime, which was a strict 7:30, then 8:00. I was probably in grade seven or eight before I saw The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. But I knew his monologue for years before that because Terry would replay it for me on the walk to school. It was interesting, without being funny, because I didn’t get the punchlines. American culture was limited to the Beverly Hillbillies, Lost in Space and trips over to Sault, Michigan where we were allowed to buy little things that would fit into our shoes or pockets so we wouldn’t have to pay duty at customs.

I always did well at school and attributed it to my early bedtime and healthy diet, but Terry went to bed whenever and lived on sugary cereals and tv dinners and he did almost as well. Physically, he was kind of a wreck, which may have explained Enid’s over-protectiveness. He was born with a club foot and rickets. As life went on he developed asthma, boils, ecxema and psoriasis. Still, by grade six he was too cool for me and had a girlfriend, although he complained to me on the walk to school once that when he asked her to the movies she said she had to wash her hair.

My mother couldn’t stand Terry, of course, because he was a wiseacre and troublemaker, and she didn’t have anything to do with Enid, who she thought was ridiculous and hysterical. But I loved going to play at Terry’s house because they had smelts on toast with ketchup for lunch and Terry and I could play darts. Once, we were playing darts in the backyard while Frank was barbequing smelts and Terry positioned himself beside the dartboard. I threw the dart and of course it landed in Terry’s foot right in that vein that spurts blood straight up in the air. Frank blew a gasket and I got sent home but this time it was just to get rid of me so they could deal with Terry.

That’s when I knew that I was okay with Frank and Enid.

All this time Eddie was in the background, first as a scary kid to avoid, but then as a fail safe against whatever trouble Terry got us into. He wasn’t smart like Terry but he was good. The kind of kid who wants to fix car engines for people who don’t understand cars. He was streamed into the tech school and it was like he’d finally found his people. I remember him getting so frustrated hanging out with my brother, who he was older than. Once we were trying to teach him how to play “Careers” and he finally just grabbed the board and threw it.

My mother couldn’t remember Enid ever intervening with Eddie, though, just Terry.

Before she had Ellen, my older sister said Enid used to make all the neighbourhood girls beautiful clothes for their Barbies. She was famous for it, lace wedding gowns, fitted bathing suits, midi coats. Once I was over at her house, Terry was out fishing with Frank, and she showed me how to crochet. Then she said out of the blue, “I want you to know that your father was a lovely man, but he couldn’t hammer a nail into a board.” Then she hugged me. I think I remember her crying, but I might be imagining it.

There were lots of social divisions in the area between home and school, but there were social divisions even on our street. My father had been a lawyer and after he died my mother went back to being a teacher. Frank worked at a pulp and paper mill, I think, not as a labourer, but he didn’t make much money. Enid was at home. And although I was allowed to play with Terry and spend time at his house, I was never allowed to camping or fishing with him and Frank. I don’t know why that was, maybe my mother just didn’t want the aggravation she figured would go along with it.

Before the end of elementary school, the whole family packed up and moved down the line to run a fishing resort. Then one day the whole street was still with the news that Eddie had been killed on Highway 17. He’d been called out of bed in the middle of the night to help a friend stranded on the highway with a dead battery. While he was walking from his car to his friend’s car he was struck by a drunk driver and knocked several meters into the bush.

I remember my mother and I running into Enid and Ellen at the mall a couple of years later. I was home from university for Christmas. It was like someone had taken a pin and let all the fun out of her, but she was okay. She was talking about what a good kid Eddie was and how proud she was of him, that it made sense that he died helping out a friend. I was traumatized by it and in the car I said to my mother that I didn’t know how Enid could go on, that her kids were everything to her.

My mother, looking into the rear view mirror as she pulled out of the Sears parking lot just said, “Life is for the living.”

When I was four, maybe five, Gram came to live with us. I was down in the playroom, which would that day become my brother’s bedroom, and when I came upstairs, there she was, sitting on the edge of the couch, still wearing her hat and coat. I was introduced to her then and as she tells it, I immediately asked her if she could buy me a gun. (The gun I coveted was in the window of the pharmacy up the street where my mother’s friend, Edith, worked. One day, I would just take the gun, shouting back to Edith as I ran out of the store that she could put it on my mother’s tab. The gun was returned in short order and the concept of stealing versus running a tab explained to me very sternly by Mr. Grant, the pharmacist.) When Gram said that she didn’t have any money and couldn’t buy me anything, I told her it was okay, “I’ll just use my finger.”

She loved telling that story.

Meeting her in her hat and coat left me with the lifelong impression that she didn’t really want to be with us, but that she had nowhere else to be. And it was true, really, because my father had died, which meant that my mother was a widow with four young children (my younger sister was still in a crib), and Gram had just divorced my grandfather, who had run off with a younger woman. He would go on to have eight more children and live well into his eighties on social assistance of one kind or another. I didn’t meet him, or even know he existed, until a cousin got married and he came to the wedding. He’d lost his dashing good looks by then, but I was still flattered when he called me a “cute little trick”.

In fact, I never forgot it and took to coasting on my “cute little trick” looks, ever so discreetly enabled by my mother, who was much better looking but knew I needed to take advantage where I could.

My mother, who normally looked down on sexually improper behaviour, had a lot of respect nevertheless for her father, who had counseled both her and my aunt Marie, her older sister, to get their teaching certificates, so that they could be financially independent of men. My aunt, who lived in Saskatchewan along the transCanada highway, would lose her husband, a vet, within six months or so of my mother losing hers, a lawyer. I don’t know why we got my Gram, although in the coming years she would visit my aunt for months at a time, as she also visited a set of cousins whose parents were alcoholics who would often leave them to go off in search of grand money-making schemes, subsidized by my mother and my aunt Marie.

But for us it was part of our lives to have Gram at home, cooking, cleaning, while my mother worked her way up the teaching ladder to get out of the classroom and into the high school library. And when Gram wasn’t looking after cousins in other parts of the country, she was in our house, her only outing to get her hair done or go to lodge – both at the insistence of my mother. It was hard to say if she was agoraphobic or just saw no reason to go anywhere. One set of cousins, who lived in a town near us while my uncle ran the local grocery store, thought maybe she just didn’t like northern Ontario, but years later when she lived with a younger aunt in Peterborough, she didn’t go outside at all. My aunt’s husband at the time could convince her to get in the truck and go up with them to the lake where they had a trailer, but that was the extent of her forays out into the wider world.

One summer, my brother, who Gram referred to as “the boy”, would leave a baseball on the shelf going down to the basement. It rolled off the shelf and onto the stairs and Gram, who was carrying a watermelon down to the basement slipped on it and broke her leg but saved the watermelon. As punishment, my mother got her a little bell while she lay up in her room, in traction, all summer long, and we were responsible for tending to her. My mother, who would lash out at any inconvenience, was surprisingly low key about the accident, even though Gram had lain on the basement floor for three hours before my older sister got home from school to find her there. She would joke to me in later years that Gram was famous for her passive aggression, but my mother was also famous for being partial to my brother.

Every once in a blue moon my mother would insist that Gram go to Mrs. Scot’s to get her hair done. Mrs. Scot lived one street over and my older sister took me to her after school one day when I wanted to get my pigtails cut off. I had long hair, which had something to do with my father, but I don’t know what. I was a tomboy and hated my pigtails and for some reason it was sacrilege to cut them off. My mother was upset, but the next day at school my grade two teacher, Miss Russell, took me from class to class showing off my pixie cut. Gram was in trouble, though, because she’d failed to prevent it.

This was a recurring theme, Gram would be in trouble with my mother for failing to prevent all kinds of indiscretions, including a time when I ran off to Toronto over the Christmas holidays. I took the bus to meet up with my older sister who was flying back to Toronto later in the evening, but, of course, we failed to connect. A man who was accompanying a hockey team finally got me to the Windsor Arms where my mother was staying (in separate rooms) with my bachelor uncle, my father’s youngest brother.

Maybe because we were all in trouble with my mother for not living up to expectations Gram just felt like one of the crowd. Or maybe she got even in her passive aggressive way by coming home from Mrs. Scot’s her hair freshly permed, to brush it out with such violence that she looked no different than before she’d gone, wiry grey hair standing out from her head like a collection of used brillo pads.

For years, too, Gram would wear either her brown paisley house dress or her blue paisley house dress. Eventually, my mom was able to get her into a pair of pants, and she took to them, although she always wore her apron over top. She was a large woman, totally unlike my mother in every way, severe looking and unemotional, a simple person who, if you came upon her sitting in the kitchen and asked her what she was thinking would respond, “Nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.” Occasionally she’d make fun of herself for a dream the night before, “I dreamed about people who’ve been dead for years.” I constantly badgered her about death, wasn’t she afraid of dying? “Not a bit, I’ve had a good life and one day I’ll be dead.”

At the same time, she would admonish me for wanting to be older and not living in Sault Ste. Marie. “Stop wishing your life away, you’ll be dead soon enough.”

I don’t know much about her background except that she was a good twenty years younger than any of her siblings who were all dead by the time she came to live with us. It’s hard for me to believe she’s my mother’s mother. Not only did she not have any financial independence, but she never owned anything. She came to us with a trunk, which, when she stayed too long at my aunt’s one visit, my mother phoned me up at university to ask if I thought she should just send it to her. I said, no, but that Gram wouldn’t be coming back because we were all gone and she had no reason to anymore. My mother laughed at that and said she’d send the trunk anyway, that winter was coming and she might want her coat. But she never did and Gram never asked for it.

When I was living in Toronto my mother would make the odd trek to Peterborough to visit Gram where she was living with my aunt Sandra. My ex and I would go and I had lots of fun with my Uncle Mac who would also come down from Kingston. He’d tell my Gram that he needed money to get pizza and chicken for the crowd (no booze because my aunt and another uncle were in AA). Gram, who was collecting old age security and who loved this uncle best (everybody did because he was a great guy, fun, generous, handsome) would ask him how much he needed. He’d quote her an outrageous sum and wink at me. Then we’d go get the haul and he’d pocket the change to go to the race track with my other uncle, the one who was in AA. He thought it a great joke, but Gram knew the ruse, she never minded being the butt of a joke. Years later, after she died, my mom discovered her urn rolling around on the floor of our farm, which was really just an old homestead in northern Ontario from the other side of the family where Gram took to spending the summer when we were kids. My uncle had been in charge of it. My mother and I laughed – as in life…

It’s hard for someone like me to know what it must have been like to own nothing, to have no financial independence, to be dependent on your children for a place to live. When she was 95, she had lost her oldest, my Aunt Marie, and her son-in-law, Fred, my aunt Sandra’s partner. (He was Catholic and I don’t think they were married, although they might have been.) My younger sister made regular visits to her in hospital, while my uncle in AA tried to get her to sign off on some papers so she could live in a nursing home. But she didn’t want to live in a nursing home and so she died instead, leaving nothing of herself behind, not even her baking recipes, which were all in her head. Over the years, we’ve all tried to replicate her pastry, which I seem to recall involved a big tin of Crisco, but, of course, it never turns out the way it did when she made it.

I went to kindergarten in the afternoon, which meant an early morning of Captain Kangaroo, followed by Mr. Dressup, Friendly Giant, and Chez Helene (which should have come before Mr. Dressup, not after him, CBC, so kids would have something to look forward to after Friendly Giant).

If I recall correctly, that brought the morning up to 10:00 a.m. at which point there would be three hours of dread before I made the half hour trek to school.

Mr. Mikkelson must not have been driving about in the afternoon because it wasn’t until grade one that he would slow down his car and offer me a ride. I think he may even have offered candy along with the favour. He also had his zipper undone and his penis hanging out of his pants, not that I would have taken the ride anyway, as it had been hammered into my head to never take a ride from a stranger.

I remember my mother’s exact words when I told her about Mr. Mikkelson: “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t get in the car – what the hell is wrong with you? I told you – don’t take rides from strangers.”

She was a teacher.

Every morning I’d try to convince my grandmother, who came to live with us in the Sault after my father died, and she had divorced my fornicating grandfather (who had eight more kids with another woman after the six he’d had with my grandmother – and who knows how many more with the remaining women of Peterborough), that I was sick and shouldn’t have to go to school. I think the fact that I graduated kindergarten with perfect attendance may have determined the course of my future work life, good and bad, for what either is worth.

I was a daydreamer, though, and took my time on the walk to school. This meant that I always arrived just in time to join the end of the line, which was outside the school, just as it was disappearing into the kindergarten classroom.

One afternoon, I arrived to school and there was no line yet. I was elated because that meant I must be early. I can’t remember what the reward was for being first in line, but there was a reward of some kind. Maybe it was being allowed to play the triangle instead of the sticks in daily band practice. And so I waited at the front of the line, excited, for a while, then a while longer, then a while longer still, my excitement evolving into anxiety. It was winter and I was in my snowsuit (adding an extra half hour at least to the half hour walk to school) which wasn’t so much warm as it was cumbersome and heavy, when I suddenly sensed movement behind the frosted glass windows of the kindergarten classroom.

Instead of being early, I was so late that everyone had long since gone inside. I forget what the punishment was for that, maybe there wasn’t one because I remember when my boots were pulled off I couldn’t feel my feet and fell over, hitting my temple on the corner of a chair, resulting in a gush of blood all over the floor. Somebody started crying and threw up after that and Mr. Rathbone came up from his little room in the basement to throw sawdust on it and sweep it up.

I was vomit-phobic so it was a real trial to have to sit on the floor for sing song knowing there had been vomit there just minutes ago.

Another kindergarten transgression didn’t find me so lucky. One afternoon, at leaving time, we were lined up and another little girl and I were holding hands for some reason, still in single file, but holding hands nevertheless. The teacher, who was pretty and young, Miss Ansley, slapped our hands with a ruler. It was very traumatic for me because I thought of myself as a good girl and now I had a blot on my permanent record (I’d been warned many times by my older brother and sister about protecting my permanent record). But it also tweaked my sense of righteous indignation at the arbitrariness of authority and I didn’t cry until I blurted out the incident to my mother at dinner.

Of course, her immediate response was annoyance, “For Christ’s sake, what the hell are you crying about now?” But because I was hers there was also sudden shift from indifference to Miss Ansley to recognition of her as a bitch.

I knew, though, that the other little girl didn’t have that back-up at home, or I thought I knew that, and it stayed with me, too, the injustice of parentage.

I dreamed last night that you were all missing my tweets. Feel free to lift any, National Post. They’re mostly political tweets because I’m trying to get the politics out of my system on Twitter instead of my blog but I can’t stand leaving my dear reader(s) out of my loop of brilliance, either.

Although, I must say, it is a bit of a letdown to realize that I could have been saying in 140 characters what it used to take me a 1000 word blog entry to say.

Yesterday, while my beau was playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends (yes, he has obtained the legal age of consent, Vic Toews!) I was at a cocktail party with some strangers from the internet.

Listen up, all you kids out there, strangers from the internet are not created equal. Always meet future cocktail party companions at a pub first, preferably one with a back exit near the washrooms well out of the line of sight of patrons.

And no, it was not a cyber cocktail party, Sooey Says hater(s), it was a real life cocktail party. Although the cocktails were actually strong beers complemented with pates and mousses (mices?) and cheeses from the Charlevoix Region. I almost never eat such decadent fare because I’m really quite disgusted by decadence (scottish presbyterian) and yet I found myself wanting to slap the hands of the other guests every time they reached for a pate knife so there’d be more for me.  And the beers were to die for. Seriously. I brought one home for my beau and I have every reason to believe that he will love it so much he will want to marry it.

Although he’ll have to wait until Prime Minister Thomas Mulcair legalizes man/beer marriage. (And yes, social conservatives, a New Democrat government will legalize man/beer marriage. If you don’t believe me, just check the policy book. It’s right there in red beside NATIONALIZE EVERYTHING!!)

Anyway, we talked about various and sundry and, of course, politics and how much we all despise the current federal government which is not really a government so much as a oil and gas industry coup as you know, dear Sooey Says reader(s) hater(s). And I talked about a recent town hall I attended starring a couple of zero merit political hacks addressing a room full of knowledge workers they’d just fired and how it reminded me of something one might have encountered back in the day (or now, I guess) on the battlefield, British officers who’d only just left off being buggered at expensive boarding schools explaining warfare to the Canadian soldiers who actually went out and killed other human beings to save us all from Hitler.

Speaking of which, as soon as the Wildrose Party of Alberta (i.e. the Conservative Party of Canada) wins and Danielle Smith is CEO/Premier, she and Stephen Harper, CEO/Prime Minister, will work together to transfer the Alberta government’s regulatory power (i.e. what makes government government) to a third party (i.e. the oil and gas industry). So head’s up, you heard it here first on Sooey Says, fellow democrats new and old. Oh, and Liberals, you good for nothing spoiler third wheel pimplewarts.

Oh, and could somebody please get Danielle Smith on record (not that it will make any difference in a few months when she does whatever anyway, but still, the Constitution demands, I’m sure) as not planning to raise her own Royal Armed Forces when she’s Premier of Alberta? Thanks.

It was super fantabulous and I re-iterated my pledge to not blog about politics anymore because everybody’s doing it and also it’s more fun (hard, too, just like math) to distill a political blog entry down to 140 characters and tweet it. (I know, I know, Neil McDonald and Charlie Angus do not agree. But where are they now, I ask you, now that they’re aren’t on Twitter? Nowhere on Twitter, that’s where. Losers.)

Also, I’ve taken to compiling my tweets and posting them on my blog for my fan(s) who aren’t on Twitter. But, of course, I don’t need to tell you that do I, Sooey Says reader(s). And thank Carp for you dear people(person) who don’t tweet. Twitter is lousy with egomaniacs (minus Neil McDonald and Charlie Angus). Follow my counsel and stay away from Twitter and I’ll make sure you can read all my tweets right here on Sooey Says.

But that’s not what this blog entry is about because I’m not blogging about politics anymore. After I left the cocktail party, I headed over to Rideau (the party was at a downtown Ottawa locale) to catch the bus. Now, I don’t have a car, but I am over 50 and although I soon will be unemployed, I’m currently working and making decent money and have been known to take a taxi home after an evening event. But that’s almost always when my beau is with me, too, because he doesn’t have a bus pass and I figure the convenience ties in a little closer to the economics and we opt for a taxi. Also, when you don’t have a car you really do need to treat yourself to the odd taxi ride or you start to feel hard done by and I already feel hard done by because I have to work for a living.

Aside: Once I’m unemployed, I will be much less likely to take a taxi. I’ll also be cancelling basic cable (suck it, Rogers) and telling those scumbag bottomfeeder Harrisites (wow – rhymes with parasites), Direct Energy, to pick up their rusty old water heater that they’re attempting to negative option on renters, for no reason other than, “Screw you, private sector!”

Because I’m tired of the private sector. The private sector in Canada sucks and blows. And corporate practices in this country are corrupt. The two companies I’ve mentioned in the preceding paragraph are no different than aggressive and litigious pick pockets. Also, I’m so tired of Kevin O’Leary barking and whining on CBC about being an investor, without any apparent awareness that we’re ALL investors – we just don’t ALL have a gig on a public-funded network to talk up our hedge funds or whatever the hell he’s doing night after night at my expense – that I’m starting a boycott of the corporate private sector.

That’s right, get ready Ottawa, because Sooey is getting a lock for her purse. I have never budgeted in my life before and I’m about to start, just to spite you, corporate private sector. Sure, I’ll still go out for dinner and drinks (no chains, local only), travel a bit, and take in the cultural scene, but I’m watching where my money goes now, boyo, you’d better believe it.

Corporate boycott – here I come.

(By the way, since Kevin O’Leary loves China so much, I suggest we ALL pitch in and buy him a one way ticket. He likes Air Canada. Meanwhile, since I need cable to watch CBC Newsworld – sayonara suckers.)

Oops, I wasn’t going to blog about politics, was I. Anyway, the bus. Well, if you’re ever feeling like you’re too good for this world (and I’m almost never not these days) take a Friday or Saturday night ride home from downtown on the bus. Seriously, it will not only confirm you in that belief, but it will explain why we have the government we do in Ottawa, with or without the electoral fraud.

On the other hand, it also keeps you real. There’s no hiding from humanity on the bus. Especially when you engage with your fellow riders. (I engage taxi drivers, too, because you never know which one will end up getting his Canadian medical license and saving your life in a hospital emergency room.) Last night was no exception as I counseled some young people on the perils of mixed drinks on an empty stomach (been there – last week, too) and the upcoming assembly of the nation’s pot smokers on Parliament Hill on April 20th.

“What? You can smoke pot on Parliament Hill?”

“Well yes. But only on April 20th.”

“You smoke pot?”

“Of course. All parents smoke pot.”

“You’re a parent?”

“Hey, don’t get smart with me. All parents smoke pot, they just lie about it. Go home and check under the sink. I guarantee you will find a coffee container full of pot there.”

Just kidding. I told them to check everywhere in the house because, as my kids told me recently, that’s the first place teenagers look. And the thing is, unlike in my day when we’d water down the liquor ({{shudder}}) – practically sending my poor mother into delerium tremors at happy hour because she wasn’t getting her fair share – today’s teenagers are savvy enough to just take that little bit that the old lady or old man (their dad keeps his in the rafters down the basement if you’re wondering) won’t miss.

That’s because most pot smokers are just like most happy hour imbibers. And pot smokers who aren’t moderate in their usage, well, you know what? Smoke a little, smoke a lot, as every pot smoker knows, the worst that can happen is you smoke too much and get too sleepy to tweet.

See y’all on Parliament Hill 4/20. Sorry for narking everybody out, eh.

Convince your kissin’ cousins in Ottawa to drop out of the F-35 deal, use the saved $$$s to buy back our share of the tarsands from China, and pay Albertans dividends to NOT develop them!

Win/win!

Then we could start a boycott against Brazil for developing the rain forest and ruining the planet for everybody else!

Because the shitheads are always dropping them on us from higher ground.