I once wrote a cook book.  This was pre-computer days and I typed it on a IBM Selectric typewriter and it was difficult to hide my corrections made with white out.  You might say that it was a pretty transparent work.  Next I had a small number of copies covered with a sheet of construction paper and “spined”.  The title and dedication were on the cover.  “I Cook, Therefore I Am”.  I thought that the title was absolutely brilliant! Even in those days with a repertoire of Jean Parre, and Best of Bridge recipes, cooking for my loved ones, defined me. 

Yes, I love to cook but I will admit this:  I especially love to cook for an appreciative audience.  I am blessed that D and our children and their significant others are my biggest fans. But back in those days, and I am speaking of a time thirty years ago, I was friends with a man who I dubbed a “Famous Eater” in this same dedication.  He didn’t just enjoy good food, he loved everything about the act of eating.  His appreciation oozed out of him as you watched him eat.  His Caribbean blue eyes glinted, his musician’s hands gestured and his voice, that famous voice-praised.  Not with phrases like “oh, this is good” but with accolades that indicated the he understood why you had prepared it just so.  He got food.

The gift of this cookbook was at a wedding shower that I was hosting.  This man was marrying one of my best friends.  She was (is) a beautiful, vivacious woman but I had a grave concern.  She could not cook in those days.  But oh how she tried.  She wanted to love her new husband with gifts of food and so I decided to help her along.  And so I compiled this cookbook of easy recipes that I knew would please.  I loved them both so much that I wanted her to be able to successfully love him with the offering of food.

The next line of the dedication was this “A Collection of Recipes given to Trish on the occasion of her marriage to David Mann-A Famous Eater”.  I so clearly remember that in Trish’s surprise and excitement, she unwrapped the cookbook and read the dedication like this: “I cook, therefore I am a collection of recipes”.  I recall that we all giggled at her error and yet, I think that her statement is absolutely true.

I was the only female attendant at their wedding-their “Matron of Honour” (matron not maid, because I was married to D).  Trish told me yesterday, that she loves to look at the picture in their home of us all together.  She told me this yesterday, at the memorial service for her husband David.  He had succumbed to cancer of the esophagus.  The irony of this does not sit lightly with me.  Not only was it his voice that was the reason for our becoming acquainted (he was the morning man at Q 94 and I was the Marketing Director for The Keg ‘n Cleaver Restaurant) but his esophagus delivered the food that he delighted in, to nourish his body.

David loved Keg Steaks, but also 529 (where he and his family celebrated birthdays) and Rae and Jerry’s.  Rae and Jerry’s catered the refreshments at his memorial service yesterday.  In fact, they cater every celebration of life service at the church that we attend.  There was a time when I loved their fancy sandwiches but recently I only ever eat them when I am very sad.

I introduced David and Trish to each other.  My D was living in Toronto finishing his degree in foodservice and hospitality at Ryerson.  Trish traveled a lot with her work with Estee Lauder.  David and I often found ourselves together by default.  He once called me to say he had been loaned a motorcycle and wanted to drive to Lockport for a Skinner’s hotdog but it wouldn’t be the same without someone on the back of the bike and Trish was not available.  I was afraid of motorcycles as I had lost two acquaintances in separate accidents but somehow David talked me into it.  He promised me he would drive slowly. Liar. David loved speed.  He loved the wind in his hair.  At that time his car was a Scirocco, so named for a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara and reaches hurricane speeds in North Africa and Southern Europe.  He was fond of quick acceleration times.  I chuckle when I think of this because Trish was the opposite.  As we raised our young children together, she would run alongside the toboggan as it slipped down the hill, for fear of injury to the kids.

D and I and David and Trish have not been close in recent years.  David was our financial planner and we decided that it would be best if we kept the relationship a professional one.  But it was also this:  I try to live my life without grudges but I allowed one to stand between me and Trish.  I believe that she has forgiven me.  I know that I have forgiven her.  David would have wanted this.  I have promised that I will contact her next week as she tries to get back to some normalcy in her life- a life without the father of her children, without the Famous Eater.

Kaths quote: All things ever after. -David Mann

Love-that is all.

I think a lot about my Dad on Father’s Day and what being a great Dad really means.

When I was 18 months old I contacted spinal meningitis and then shortly thereafter, the measles.  I understand that I spent weeks in the hospital on intravenous medications that I would attempt to pull out on my own, so the medical staff’s solution was to secure me into this handy little device that they borrowed from a different area of the hospital-a straight jacket.  Hospitals had different policies and approaches in those days, parents were restricted to the same visiting hours as everyone else and my parents were able to visit me for an hour in the afternoon and another hour in the evening.  They spent most of this time trying to coax me to eat as I was notoriously picky while a child (ironic).  I refused all hospital food and my parents would sneak up bologna and 7 up during their visits.  I have been told that there was some concern during this time, that I may die as other children had succumbed to the condition, while still others were left deaf or blind or with mobility issues.  I survived unscathed, with the exception of night terrors while I was growing up, a fear of men (ironic) and an exceptional close relationship with my Daddy.

Years later, I have married a man who has many qualities of my Dad and we have two beautiful children.  Daughter #1 is coming down with what we though was a flu so D and J1 head down to Minneapolis for a short vacation without us.  My Dad helps me nurse her back to health.  We were told to get any calories into her as we could because her violent vomiting seems to have subsided.  Dad comes over with fish sticks and freezies and suggests that he stays while she has a nap and I try to take a bath.  While I am in the tub, I hear her give a little cry from the couch in the family room.  I go to her to find that she is completely paralysed.  My Dad follows in his car while an ambulance whisks us to the hospital.  Daddy sits in the corner of the emergency room while murmurs of meningitis and brain tumors are being discussed with me by the doctors.  I remember him saying something which I could not make out.  When I asked what he said, he spoke up “Oh God, not again”.

After a day of various tests and a ct scan, D and J1 leave our car in Minneapolis and fly home.  My Mom and Dad are with me when he arrives and we get the news that there is no tumour on the brain.  Our beautiful, smart and perfectly healthy 5 year old has meningoencephalitis, a combination of swelling of the meninges (the tissue that surrounds the spinal column) and the brain.  They will not find out for a number of weeks what has caused the infection.  They set up a bed for me in the hospital room and indicate a chair for D.  That was the only night that I tried to sleep beside her.  I was pregnant with our youngest and our little 3 year old son was waiting for me at home.  D slept in a chair for a month by her bedside, would shower in the morning and then head to work for the day (we owned our own restaurant at the time) until one especially kind, family doctor encouraged D to go home with me and sleep in our bed.  He reassured D that they would be there every time Daughter #1 needed something through the night.  My Mom and Dad were there every day for afternoon visiting hours to bring little gifts of encouragement for our daughter and food for me.

I get really annoyed when I hear the phrase: “It is the thought that counts”.  My friends, it is not the “thought”, it is the act of being there every day; it is sleeping in a chair, it is “action”, not “thought”.  For me and for my children: action and devotion is what makes a great Dad.

How do I honour my husband on Father’s Day?  It is hard, no-impossible, for him to know what he means to me and our family, so I do what you all do.  I buy him a weed-eater and a nice pair of shorts and I fix him a dinner which he requests.  But then the next morning I am compelled to write something to share with the world.  He is the BEST Dad I know and I was loved by my own BEST Dad too.

Kath’s quote: “The father who would taste the essence of his fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road.” ~Angelo Patri

Love-that is all.

One day last September, our Mom took ill and had to make a visit to the hospital.  Little did we or she know that she would never return to the home where she had lived for 58 years.  At the onset of her illness, we were so focused upon ensuring that she got better, I for one never really thought about the house. Mom isn’t completely settled into a new place yet.  She went from the Concordia Hospital to Deer Lodge and is now at the Misrecordia Hospital waiting for a space to come open for her at Concordia Place.  But it was apparent, pretty much from the start, that Mom wouldn’t be able to return to her home.  So we’ve been busy over this past winter and spring getting the house ready to sell to another family.  Possession date is July 1 and we have been taking turns spit polishing it up for the new family.  This past week, I tackled washing the windows and had what might have been my final walk through.

This is the bathroom that 8 of us shared when my 5 siblings and my parents all lived together at the house.  This sometimes meant drawing the shower curtain if you were in the bathtub, so that someone else could use the toilet.  My fondest memory was of perching on the toilet to watch my Daddy shave in the morning.  He was a careful shaver and loved the ritual, mixing up a warm lather with his real horse hair brush and shaving so close that his skin looked blue to me.  I can recreate the feel of his wiskerless face against my cheek now, even though he has been in heaven for 17 years.

This was the room that my two oldest brothers shared until a new bedroom was built for them in the basement.  They had two single beds that each straddled a wall.  On Saturday mornings, my twin brother and sister and I used to wake them up and then climb under the covers with them.  We would have pirate ship fights with them and toss all our stuffed animals back and forth and take hostages of each other.  After the boys were moved into their new room downstairs, this became my very own room-quite a feat with 8 people living in a 4 bedroom house.  Perhaps this is the reason why my family always teases me that I was spoiled.  I will admit it, I felt spoiled (and deeply loved).  Somehow my Mom and Dad found ways to make us all feel this way.

This is the hallway from the bedrooms to the kitchen and living room.  Before I had my own room, the twins and I all slept together in a double bed.  I don’t remember there being an issue with space, but I do recall how it was so hard to fall asleep sometimes with two little monkeys in the bed with me.  We would giggle and have so much fun, until…….we would hear my Dad’s feet hit the hallway floor coming towards our room to tell us to hush up and go to sleep.  As soon as we heard that first foot fall, we would suppress our giggles and pretend we were sleeping, but we weren’t fooling our Dad.

For many years the only TV in the house was in the living room and I remember watching Bugs Bunny cartoons at lunch time and Bonanza and the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.  I also recall “reserving” the TV to tune into my favourites of the Paddy Duke Show and then the Flying Nun.  Christmas morning was so exciting in this room with heaps of presents everywhere and Christmas cards hung on strings adorning the walls.

Neil Campbell School was a half block down this back lane and from grade one on, we all made the trek on our own.  I remember being instructed to run as fast as I could (for me that was never fast at all-bottom heavy, you know) down this lane during the Bay of Pigs crisis. It seemed like only days later that we saw the announcement on TV of the assassination of President Kennedy while home for lunch hour.  A day or so after that our naughty dog Pepita, who liked to chase cars, was run over by a truck in front of our house while I was across the street borrowing a cup of sugar at the Dyer’s.  So there was sadness too.

And last but not least, this was the kitchen, the heart and soul of our home.  Mom always had a pot of soup or stew on the go and I learned how to make cinnamon buns and pinch perogy edges, standing at the kitchen table.  Sometimes dinner was pancakes or spaghetti with tomato soup poured on top.  Other times though, supper was steaks pan-fried in butter, thick and juicy pork chops and more corn on the cob than you can dream of eating.  Mom would spend all day making doughnuts to feed the paper boys of the neighbourhood because the bin where they collected their papers had been placed on our back drive.  My Dad loved to cook too and made amazing baked ham and pizza with “thin crust” before anyone ever thought about thin crust pizza.

If the walls could talk, they would speak of constant cooking and consuming, TV shows and record playing, people coming and going after school and hockey games and drumming gigs and theatre school, of reading books and naps on the couch and my Dad who always watched TV by lying right in front of it on the floor.  The walls soaked up all of our giggles and laughter but also the tears of heart-breaking sorrows and losses.  It was a good house.  It was our house.

Kath’s quote:  “Love grows in small spaces”.  Quoted from some country song I heard long ago.

Love that is all.

A friend of The Frenchman lives with us.  They worked on archeology projects together and he is an archivist and conservator.  His stories around the supper table about his latest projects are always fascinating.  He also replicates antique coins as a hobby.  Check out his website at www.awestruckworkshop.com.  He recently asked the Frenchman for gift hints for my birthday and the reply was “hearts” so he did some researching.  Here’s an excerpt from the site: http://www.sedwickcoins.com/articles/hearts.htm

The Hearts of Potosí were minted in five denominations: ½, 1, 2, 4, and 8 reales (though half-real Hearts are so rare that only a handful of pieces have been confirmed), and apparently only from the very late 1600s (the reign of Charles II) to the mid-1700s (the reign of Philip V). The outline of a corazón can vary significantly, but it is basically Valentine-style yet with a wide, tall stem and a long, tapering tail. Predictably, almost every confirmed Heart has been holed at the top of the stem. Unlike most holes in cobs, these may have been mint-produced holes.

We don’t know for sure why cobs were cut into heart shapes at the Potosí mint, but given their scarcity, their usually careful execution, and their tendency to be holed, they were most likely produced for special use as religious pendants known as “ex votos.” The prevailing theory is that they were intended to be used by church officials, as the heart was known to be a sacred symbol of the Roman Catholic Church. It is also believed that women sewed these images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ into their blouses, a custom which is still observed in remote Andean villages today.

[Note: The Catholic Sacred Heart symbol, as demonstrated in ex votos and other manifestations, is in fact a flaming heart, usually with a long, curved tail. This matches the Potosí Heart cobs precisely, their prominent stems at top apparently representing flames.]

This birthday note was affixed to the gift: “I know you really like hearts and all things turquoise-though not turquoise, it is a South American Spanish heart to remind you of those Azul waters of the Caribbean!”

The coin is two-sided and looks gorgeous when worn as a single pendant.

Kath’s quote: “Lord into your Sacred Heart I place my heart united to all my needs and desires, I present humbly my petitions, please deign to listen to my plea, embrace me with your love, respond to my soul, look at me your child who comes attracted by your love.”-Unknown

Love-that is all.

As a result of last night’s election results, I was happy and reflective this morning.  Here’s why (in no particular order):

1. D and I honeymooned in Quebec City and cannot wait to have a reason to visit again.

2. Our girls LOVE Quebec.  Daughter #1 studied French with the Explore program at Universite Laval and Daughter #2 in Montreal.

3. Our very own “Frenchman” who will officially be a part of our family when he weds our youngest this fall, was born and raised in Quebec and we adore him!

4. Poutine-my favourite indulgence!

5. Pesto Maison-my go-to brand of upscale pestos.

6. Cheese of every description.  I still remember the hot and goey baked parmesan that we ate at a sidewalk café in Quebec City.

7.  Chefs “just get it done” Chuck Hughes and dreamy Ricardo Larrivee.

8. Montreal smoked beef sandwiches.

9. Bagels.

10. Add your own….

Kath’s quote: “I am proud that my fellow Quebecers have chosen unity and acceptance as we move forward together.”– Justin Trudeau

Love-that is all.