12-05 Taking Charge

There are talkers and there are doers, and our mother was a doer. Through all my childhood, mother was giving of herself in some way, either working at the Christie Street Hospital, Lambert Lodge, or the Children’s Aid Society. Not to mention working in the family business and raising four sons. She was a bundle of energy. So much of her can be seen in her children and grandchildren. But her secret passion was writing. And a lot of her descendants had the same desire.
As a young child before she was old enough to attend school, mother was always writing some form of gibberish, stories which she thought at the time were quite wonderful. No shortage of self-confidence there. The photo shows mother starring in a school musical performance.
At age nine she wrote and conducted a school play. Everything was her own initiative, such as taking action when the school announced a special performance opportunity where students could sing or dance or play an instrument. Mother secretly used a storeroom full of cleaning supplies to practice with her cast of six. What is so much fun, was discovering that she kept a record of the poem which they all recited at the end of her play:
“Today is the day when we all should be gay. And be good to our friend who our faults try to mend."
Can you just imagine the teachers trying to keep a straight face. We all have memories of things our kids have said and done when they were young.
When I was eight years of age in 1941 and living on Bowie Avenue in Toronto, I remember mother putting on her gym outfit and heading off to lead a gym class under the auspices of the Women's Land Army. It was about women having to do farm work, normally done by men. What I found out later in life was that she initiated the effort herself. The secret of her success was one hour of exercise and an hour of chatting and serving tea.
Later in life, during the 1970s, mother taught English to new Canadians, and that occupied at least two days a week. She told me that this was how she would have made her living if she was better educated. And she proudly kept a letter of commendation from the Minister of Culture and Recreation, Reuben C. Baetz.
She also edited publications issued by the Baptist Church, and I was continuously amazed, how good a vocabulary she developed over time. I hated playing scrabble with her.
When she was studying at Atkinson College, she wrote a story for an English professor, who told her she needed to add sex and curse words to sell her work. She never got over that experience.
All the family know the story of mother editing Ian’s novel with the whole text on a computer file. She automatically removed all mention of the word “beer” and substituted the word, “tea”. So one line read, “Our hero then drifted into a bar and quaffed a jug of tea.”