November 2010

Shut in the closet

November 17, 2010

My sister is six and I am three. She wakes up on the floor of the bathroom as my father arrives home from a trip. The way she tells me the story later in life gives me the impression he had been flying a long distance and had been gone for days. She wakes because [...]

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Disease

November 16, 2010

In the first few months of 1953, my mother learned she had Type I diabetes when she was in an advanced state of pregnancy with me. Her doctor had broken this news to her and then suggested she not tell her friends because they would be uncomfortable. This seems such cold, cruel advice and she [...]

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My father’s life

November 15, 2010

My father was born in 1909 to a family of free settlers in New Zealand. He grew up during the Depression and, when conditions there became too impoverished, moved to Australia with his parents and two sisters in 1928 when he was 19 years old. My father led a very different life before he met [...]

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Boarding school

November 15, 2010

When my mother was ten years old, my grandmother sent her to Abbotsleigh, a boarding school in the well-to-do northern suburbs of Sydney, hundreds of miles from the home where she was born. Their relationship is captured in sharp detail in a photo of the two of them walking along a busy city street. My [...]

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In the beginning

November 15, 2010

When my grandmother gave birth to my mother on February 25, 1923, she was almost fifty. My mother said angrily on more than one occasion, “I was a mistake. I hated mother for being so old because I was too embarrassed to bring my friends home. Mother looked like my grandmother.”  I stand in front [...]

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An Ordinary Tragedy

November 13, 2010

I am looking at a photo of two little girls. I am the baby, about nine months old. I have been playing with a ribbon on the dress I am wearing and someone has called my name to get my attention so I will look at the camera. I am still holding the ribbon, my [...]

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Discarding the shackles of convention

November 12, 2010

At the end of the year in 1969, I am invited to a party at the house of one of my classmates from St. Catherines, my old high school. She comes from a very wealthy family who live in a huge house near the school and the party is held there for her sixteenth birthday. [...]

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Beethoven…really?

November 11, 2010

When I was 12, my father decided to sell our old upright piano. My sister and I had learned to play the basics when we were at that age when kids have piano lessons, but now, we had lost interest and it sat silently against the wall, mostly in the dark by itself, in our [...]

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His touch

November 9, 2010

He touched me And something happened He saw something and touched it Something deep inside He touched it and It hurt So much It was an old, old wound And when he leaned in and touched it It bled But it never rains It pours It poured Out of my pores Out of everywhere Out [...]

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