Lunch with the nonagenarian

So my friend Jean is a very special woman. Famous around these parts and beyond for being a feminist and social activist for decades before either of those terms were invented. Known for rabble-rousing and getting things done. The self-published author of an autobiography that drained her savings account but that she had printed because she had a story to tell about determination, suffering, grit, and survival, and was compelled to share it in print (this was at the age of 92 or so). Honorary degree holder from the University of the Fraser Valley.

We share the same birthday week. This week I turned "halfway to 90" and she's hitting 99 on Thursday. I got to know Jean when she was 89 because she phoned the university demanding to know what we were going to do to mark Person's Day, the day honoring when the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that women were persons under the law in the 1920s. Jean is so old that she actually met some of the Famous Five activists that brought the person's case forward (or at least she talks about them like she did). One of her proudest honours was receiving the federal Person's Day medal from the governor general in 1990 for her activist work.

So back in 2001 I was a busy working mum but I figured, "hey, I can invest some time in this friendship because Jean's pretty cool, and she's almost 90, and she won't likely be around much longer anyway, and I could learn a lot from her."

Ten years later, here we still are, meeting regularly for lunch, going as dates to university functions and the theatre. She's become a treasured elder in our family, and loves nothing more than being invited to share dinner around our table. (Did I mention she loves food in all forms and has a robust appetite?)

Our relationship has evolved so that I'll correct her when she's wrong or chide her for claiming to have reached a new age two or three months before her actual birthday.

I've watched her move from her own mobile home to an old folks home in Langley. She then used a Chilliwack newspaper I casually brought by to plot her "prison break" from that home and find herself an apartment back in Chilliwack again. (My apologies to her family: I had no idea she was going to use the Chilliwack Times that way!) I've then followed her to her current old folks home in Chilliwack, where she remains a rabble rouser, advocating for seniors' rights, better food, and more reasonable rates. She sometimes feels trapped in a corporate environment in this chain-owned living arrangement.

I was very proud to help her stage a reading of her autobiography in 2005, recruiting my seven- and 10-year-old daughters, and women of every age decade up to 70, to read parts in her voice. She flirts with my husband, engages my kids in lengthy and detailed conversations, and remembers the names of all my cats. We're both famous for our sharp memories, which makes our conversations all the more lively.

Anyway, with my busy work schedule and her busy social life we've been having a hard time getting together recently. I'll be working at the other campus, or unable to take breaks, and then call her when I'm available, but she'll be busy shopping, or going to the doctor, or off to another luncheon engagement.

This week was a key one to get together, but the only time I had free was 11 am this morning. I arranged to pick her up for a "lunchy brunch" and drove to the old folks home, a couple minutes late as usual, and was somewhat alarmed that she wasn't waiting at the door for me.

I buzzed her, but there was no answer. I went upstairs, found her door unlocked, and called in, but she didn't call back. I opened the door and went in, thinking things were probably okay, but what if they weren't? I held my concern at bay, because I don't tend to worry until there's actually something to worry about!

I turned the corner in her tiny apartment and found her busy in the kitchen.

"Oh, you're here! Sit down. Lunch is almost ready! Didn't you get my message? I'm cooking for you today! The baked potatoes are almost ready!"

Now Jean has cooked for me before, and loves to make her own soup, but I'd gotten past expecting such treatment now that she's one year shy of 100.

But since it was my birthday week as well as hers, she wanted to make today about me. She'd made her own soup again. "Almost vegetarian! Just a little bone in there with the most delicious marrow! Lots of spices too!"

And she insisted on opening a bottle of very good wine that someone had got her. Now a glass of wine at 11:20 am on a workday goes against just about all my rules, but who's going to argue with the nonagenarian?

We talked local news, provincial politics (she likes Adrian Dix, I'm more a Mike Farnworth fan), and she crowed a bit (as she is wont to) about the birthday letters she received from the governor general, the lieutenant governor, the premier, and an MP. I had the odd honour of bringing the letter signed by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper up to her room -- as an old socialist he's not her favourite politician!

Jean is almost blind and quite deaf, so things weren't quite perfect. She almost scooped the soup out onto my baked potato before I pointed out that we didn't have bowls. And I had to remind her that we needed knives and forks.

But I was touched beyond words that my old, old, old, friend had taken the time and effort to turn "our" birthday lunch into a special treat for me.

Happy birthday, Jean. It's been quite a decade knowing you!

A series of interesting coincidences

The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom
Movie review and musing



So those of you who know me well know that I was adopted and have a long and convoluted semi-reunion story that I can share parts of if you have the time and inclination to hear it.

As it's not my story alone to tell, I won't go into great detail here, except to note that April 9 was the 19th anniversary of me finding out key information about my birth family, including "who my mother was". (Those of you who know me well will also know that I have an uncanny knack for remembering and commemorating dates.)

Now I could go all technical and use phrases like birth mother, natural mother, adoptive parents, etc, but in my mind when I say mum and dad I mean the people who raised me from infancy with love and generosity of spirit, and when I say mother, at least in this little story, I mean the woman who grew me and birthed me and made the very hard decision to give me up. (Having had some experience with her, I know that this was a very difficult and very brave decision for her to make.)

The 19 years since the pivotal day when suddenly I had all this information about my family of origin (and found my mother in the pages of a magazine in the UFV library, of all things -- long story but what a way for a media person to get such info) have involved may peaks and valleys in terms of trying to come to know the people to whom I am linked by blood. I am blessed to have met my half-brother and sister several times, and to be in "e-contact" today. My mother and I have not met, but I am still very grateful for her willingness to share some information and tolerate, and even indirectly encourage, her children meeting one another.

But what I want to write about today is how I just "happened" to read the movie pages of the Vancouver Sun carefully on Friday, and became intrigued by the review of a brand new Canadian indie film entitled The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom. Once I read that it was about an 11-year-old girl growing up in the '70s who finds out she's adopted, decides Dolly Parton is her mother, and sets off on a cross-border bicycle quest, I knew that I "had" to see this movie, but it's not the type of movie that makes its way to Chilliwack in any hurry.

Then I realized that I would be going to Vancouver that day for an overnighter, taking Molly and her friends in for a birthday treat. I figured the timing wouldn't work out, but then I saw that there was a 4:15 show, and only five minutes walk from the condo where we would be staying. Now ever since two of my kids have acquired chronic health problems they don't deserve, I've had a really hard time with any concept of fate or destiny, but something seemed to be making the universe align for me on this one.

The teens and I had a nice few hours eating and shopping on Commercial Drive, and arrived downtown "just in time" for me to catch the movie (no way was I going to try to talk them out of Robson Street shopping to see it with me).

I walked into the darkened theatre and within minutes was taken back to a very '70s milieu: macrame on the walls, avocado appliances, a mother with a fear of new-fangled digital clocks, and a girl with a banana-seat bicycle.

Unlike my parents, who were honest from day one about where I came from, the protagonist in the movie (Elizabeth) uncovers what has been a dark secret, as her mother has been telling her a false "birth story" (labour and all) for 11 years.

How she comes to decide that Dolly Parton is her mother is a tad convoluted, but what the movie really captures is her determination to KNOW that which has been withheld, but which she senses. Also, the Berlin Wall-sized barrier erected between adoptees and their birth families.

As they were for many special-interest groups (civil rights, feminism, gay rights) the seventies were a time of nascent activism for adoptees. The wall didn't crumble without a lot of effort, agitation, story-sharing, letter-writing, petition-generating, campaigning, lobbying, and paradigm-shifting.

These days we have open adoptions, mechanisms for reunions when the child comes of age, birth mothers choosing their baby's famiy, and TV reunion shows. In those days we had sealed records, new birth certificates "erasing" original ones, and the promise from government that those records would "never" be opened. Part of me even respects that approach, as the deal that both sets of parents made upon adoption is that it would be permanent, and that the child would be re-cast "as if" born to the adoptive family.

But we humans are a curious bunch. Adoptees (not all, but many) feel a strong need to know where they came from and who they look like (I had never met a birth relative until I had Molly). Birth mothers yearn for the child they left in the hospital and want to know what became of them. Even adoptive parents wonder about the quirks of the little human who was handed to them and where they got those characteristics so unlike their own. And when the adoptee has children of his or her own, they hand on the genes of the birth family: there's no fooling nature!

And the adoptees do fantasize. I never pegged Dolly Parton as my mother, but in my teens I did wonder if Jim Morrison passed through my birth mother's town in the sixties (have you seen my hair?). And I thought Joni Mitchell would be a pretty cool mum too (little did I know that she was keeping her own secret of giving away a baby) but we look nothing alike. We wonder if our parents were poets, or writers, or artists, and assume they must have been way cooler than the ones we got.

For the first half of my life I thought I would never know anything about my birth family. Those doors were CLOSED by society and government. But all that seventies-style agitation and lobbying paid off, and very slowly, the doors started to open. The BC provincial government decided to open the records in 1992, and I was among the first in line.

For all the complications and joys that have arisen from knowing who my birth family was for 19 years ("to the day" on the day I watched the movie April 9), and the realization that we can't completely "know" one another, I realize I've now internalized, even slightly taken for granted, that I "know" who they are. And I'm grateful for that, and the generosity they've shown in letting me into their lives to varying degrees.

Watching The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom brought me back to a time when it seemed like we would never know one another -- adoptees and birth families. Before there was email or Facebook, and the 'Information Wanted' section of the newspaper (title sounds quaint now) would carry little ads on the adoptees' birthdays, from birth mothers and adoptees, searching for their "other".

And the concluding scene, where little Elizabeth stands up before a crowd at an adoptee rally, proudly wearing her "bastards are beautiful" t-shirt with her parents cheering her on, made me thankful that some people (including myself) did choose to make a fuss back then. And that others (including my mum and dad) chose to support them.

April is a big month for me: I was born on the 17th, placed with my family on the 29th, my husband was born on the 30th (the very next day after I was placed with my family), I 'found' my mother on the 9th, and gave birth to my first daughter on the 6th. In the midst of all these milestones, it was nice to sit in a darkened theatre and ruminate on the meaning of it all, thanks to a little gem of a movie.

Look out Chilliwack! Here comes the Rockers' Soccer League!

That looks painful! Did I do that?, originally uploaded by Rosedale Annie.

(Actually, she was fine.)

Back for its fourth season! Expanding to 12 teams this year! Over-30 women of Chilliwack out for soccer fun!

http://www.bclocalnews.com/fraser_valley/hopestandard/sports/118674694.html