MAY TEMPLEMAN
A Celebration of Her Life at the Montreal West Curling Club, March 26, 2010
Thank you very much for coming out this afternoon to help us celebrate May’s life. A wonderful woman has died but today we can look back and celebrate her rich life.
May Little Templeman.
Mother. Wife. Aunt. Grandmother. Great grandmother. Artist. Citizen. Curler. And friend.
An unabashed optimist. For May, her glass was always half-full. (scotch & water, no ice please) Despite two hip fractures and the loss of mobility in her final year, she never complained. Proud. Resilient. And until about year and a half ago, she would still enjoy a very short scotch and water late in the afternoon, around Happy Hour.
If the following tale I am going to share now seems like a bit of a meander, it is! And for good reason. How can 98 years fit into a few minutes? The best of a bunch of bad options would be to share some of her cherished stories. May loved a good story and was forever telling and re-telling her favorites.
During what follows now you will hear the occasional conflict between stolid English fact and wild Irish exaggeration. I should warn you that the Irish will win today, for I know May would say that hyperbole and metaphor always make for a better tale. Many of you here today will have known May as a curler, bridge player and member of this club. I hope today that we hear some of the stories and memories you have of her from that context. I’ll leave the curling stories to you. I’ll try to give you a sense of her life before, outside of and after her curling career.
THE BEGINNING
Let’s start at the very beginning. This was one of her favorite stories: Her parents’ courtship: In 1907 or 8, a lanky young Irishman, Charles William Little, was taking the sea air along the boardwalk in his hometown of Warrenpoint in County Down. He was an excellent swimmer and rower. When he arrived back home he announced that he had just seen the woman he was going to marry. When his mother asked, “Charlie, what is her name?” he replied, “I don’t know, but I saw her strolling along the boardwalk and she is visiting from England for a few days. She is staying at the a guest house with her chaperones.” He thereupon went back out, marched over to the guesthouse, asked to be introduced, met the young woman and asked if he could show her about town. Now a bit about this young woman:
Ann Mackenzie Millar was raised in Liverpool of genteel stock. The Booth family, original founders of the Salvation Army are somewhere in the loftier branches of her family tree. She was a relatively small woman, demure and uncharacteristically –for the English middle class of the day— coquettish. All her life she possessed an uncanny power over men. I remember how she could, well into her 70’s, convince labourers working on the re-paving of Westminster Avenue to come inside her apartment to change a light bulb or move a piece of furniture.
The Irishman, Charles William Little, squired his new flame about town for a few days, her chaperones in tow, presumably maiden aunts in whose care this young flower of England had been entrusted. Then Charlie did something most dashing. He invited Annie to accompany him into Belfast by train for a day’s visit. Even more risqué, Annie accepted. Remember, this torrid dalliance took place in the shadows of the Victorian era. So the two not-quite-yet lovers scooted off to Belfast –and here the story begins to get truly scandalous – Annie managed to get away for the day without her chaperones! Annie’s actions were nothing short outrageous for the time. All this flirtation and with an Irishman no less…far more outlandish than Brittany Spears clubbing in LA, sans culotte. Oh, and one more minor detail: Annie was, at the time of this romantic adventure, formally engaged to the son of a wealthy family back in Liverpool. Her chaperones chided her for removing her engagement ring for the Belfast jaunt.
Upon her return from Belfast, the distraught chaperones whisked Annie away from this lascivious bachelor on the next ferry. But the damage had been done. Her family back in Liverpool was outraged. Charlie immigrated to Canada and Ann’s family was temporarily relieved. However, the young couple secretly exchanged letters. A few months passed. One day Annie received a large shipping box from Charlie stuffed with crumpled newspaper. Inside this box was another box, again stuffed with newspaper. Like Russian dolls, the boxes became smaller and smaller, until at long last she came to a very tiny box. Inside was an engagement ring.
The rest is history. Annie ditched her forlorn English fiancée and came out to Canada accompanied only by one distant aunt. She and Charlie were soon married in Montreal with only one of her family present. May was born in March of 1911, her brother Jack in 1914 and her sister Nancy in 1921. Charlie had found work with other recent Irish immigrants in the furniture business. The young family found a house on Queen Mary Road in Hampstead. May remembered being taken on horse-drawn sleigh rides on her birthday, March 22.
Like shadows on a wall at sunset, perhaps now you can see intimations of the woman May would become by knowing a bit more about her mother and father.
CHILDHOOD
May bore witness to most of the tumultuous events of the 20th century. When she was 3, she remembered the day her father came home from work in the middle of the afternoon, a most unusual circumstance. She remembers her mother asked “Charlie, what’s wrong?” Charlie replied, “Nan, it’s come.” “What’s come?”, piped up May. “Oh, just some people fighting in Europe, dearie. Nothing for you to worry about.” It was August, 1914. May had just been told that World War One had started.
She remembered her first ride in an automobile, seeing the first airplane to fly over Montreal, hearing her first radio broadcast. All these inventions came to market during her childhood.
Charlie’s business necessitated frequent trips back to England and Ireland to buy antiques for re-sale in Montreal. On one of these trips in 1919 May and her brother Jack were taken to a beach near across the Mersey from Liverpool. May remembered coming across a group of young men in sky blue uniforms, convalescing British soldiers, many of them missing arms or legs. She remembers how these men were so impressed that these two children were Canadian, given Canada’s combat reputation from the trenches of the war.
Many of May’s favorite stories involved her passion for history, her sense of justice and her feelings of shame over injustice. On one of her childhood trips back to England and Ireland, she remembered being taken down to the docks in Liverpool by her grandfather. This elderly gentleman took his two grandchildren, May and her brother Jack, down into a cellar at the waterfront. Into one of the stonewalls there were solid iron rings attached with bolts and cement. “Children,” her grandfather said, “I want you to remember this. See those rings in the wall? This is where they chained African slaves on their way to America.”
When May was 11, the family moved back to Liverpool. The English school system didn’t know what to do with this Canadian girl. May remembered being head and shoulders taller than her English classmates, far better than them in French and far behind them in math. But it was art and drawing that appealed to her most of all.
MONTREAL
When she was 16, the family moved back to Montreal. May switched from high school to art school where she began to truly thrive. Soon after their return to Canada, the family moved to Montreal West and a house on Percival across from Elizabeth Ballantyne School.
Although May was raised with the manners and morals of the English-Irish middle class, given what you now know about her parents, you can perhaps understand the genesis of May’s amusement with the more bawdy sides of life. She enjoyed telling the following tale of her brief brush with Montreal’s underworld. All this happened when she was 18.
She was walking back to Windsor station along Peel or Metcalfe, right beside the Sun Life Building, her art portfolio under her arm, when a very modern sedan pulled up beside her and an elegantly attired middle-aged woman with heavy makeup beckoned her over to the curb. “My dear, what do you do for a living right now?” May replied with enthusiasm. “I’m going to be a fashion artist. I’m attending art school!” The woman listened with interest, asked a few more questions then said. “Well, I could help you earn a lot more money than you will ever earn at drawing. If you ever want to talk more, just give me a call.” May had no idea what the elegant woman was referring to. When she got home she explained her curbside inquisition to her father. “Congratulations!” Charlie roared with laughter, “You’ve just been paid a high compliment. You were just interviewed by one the city’s most famous madams!”
May met Art Templeman when she was 19 or 20 and married when she was 21. That was 1932. In a borrowed car the newlyweds made the then-obligatory honeymoon road trip to Niagara Falls. On this trip they stopped over in Peterborough, where Art had been born.
Growing up, Jim and I heard lots of stories about the Depression and how tough times were. Fortunately, May and Art both had work all through those hard years, although May did recall the time Art was finally given Saturdays off as well as Sundays. As boys we were admonished to clean our plates because we should remember the starving Armenians. Here May was harkening back to her own childhood during the Great War and the Armenian starvation of 1916. Not that either of us needed any prompting to eat….
MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN
May and Art were living in an apartment at 1933 Tupper Street near the Forum when Jim was born in 1936. An old Russian grocer across the street climbed 3 flights of stairs to deliver two cold bottles of Molson Ale wrapped in wet newspaper as a gift “in honour of the boy child”. The family moved back to Montreal West and a house at 208 Westminster in 1940. I was born in 1943. There was much cheering in the air when I arrived, as May had given birth in the Royal Victoria Hospital and a football game was in progress at McGill Stadium. May remembered seeing a clock on the wall, then two clocks, then three clocks, then 6 or 7, then passing out. She awoke the next day with a small bruise on her arm. Examining this bruise, a nurse remarked, “Oh, you must be one of Dr. McKeckney’s patients. He always gives his new mothers an injection of heroin to help relax.”
May enjoyed astoundingly good health all her life. As a testament of this fact, she, of course, had a story: In her 80’s she needed to have minor surgery; the year might have been 1995-6. As a nurse was preparing her for the operation and connecting electrodes to her chest and stomach for monitoring her vital signs, May asked, “What on earth are those things for?” The young nurse, surprised, asked, “Mrs. Templeman, when were you last in a hospital?” May paused, then said, “Why, for the birth of my boys!” That would be 1943, over 50 years earlier.
THE WAR YEARS
May was part of the generation that fought World War II. She held two contradictory beliefs about that war and all war. One was the senseless stupidity, the terrible destruction and waste of life that happens in war. At the opposite pole was her profound respect for those who served and those who suffered. She told us how she would read the Montreal Star every week to sift through the names of the Canadian killed and wounded. Every week. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of names. Occasionally she and Art would recognize a name from Montreal. Art tried to enlist twice. The first time he was diagnosed with a hernia and rejected. When he tried to enlist the second time he was told that his job had been frozen by the War Measure Act as he worked in an essential service, Montreal Light Heat and Power, the precursor to Hydro Quebec.
A few years ago I, when my own children were very young, I complained to May about the never-ending work that being a parent entails. Then I asked her what child rearing was like for her, especially during the war. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. But dear, it passes all too quickly. They grow up before you know it!” But I pressed her for more details and asked what conversations she had had with Arthur about his efforts to enlist. Surely she wouldn’t have wanted her husband to go off to war leaving her with two small children? What did they say to each other? She simply replied with a shrug, “It was what everybody did…”
Another echo of the war….We moved May to Peterborough in January of 2006. Up until then she would come up to Peterborough for visits a few times a year by train. Jim would put her on the Via train at Dorval and I would meet her at Cobourg, then drive her up to Peterborough. In 2003 or 2004 she came up for the July long weekend. I took her down to Peterborough’s Canada Day parade. We sat on deck chairs to watch the usual stream of small-town floats, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, antique cars and out-of-tune marching bands trudge by. Then a small contingent from the local legion shuffled by, struggling to stay in step, slightly disheveled older men in ill-fitting blazers, ties askew and rumbled gray flannels despite the hot weather, no longer in shape for serious marching. May alone broke into loud and sustained applause. She was the only one along the sidewalk clapping. Feeling a bit uneasy, I asked her why was she applauding. She broke into a monologue I will never forget: “Peter Williams, such a nice boy. Lived across the street from Mother and Daddy at 136 Westminster. 19 years old, a tail gunner. Shot down over the Bay of Biscayne. His mother came up to me soon afterwards and asked me if she come over and help bathe the baby. What could I say? I said yes.” The baby, I asked? Which baby? “Jim”. No, Jim was born in 36. It was me. 1943.
Another story: Nancy, May’s younger sister, served as Navy WREN during WW II. Nancy played a small role in the repatriation of Canadian POWs captured at Hong Kong. One of these emaciated men said to Nancy upon landing in the port of Vancouver “You are the Canadian first woman I’ve seen. May I kiss you?” Nancy politely refused. May never fully forgave her sister for that.
She told us about rationing and how she would trade ration coupons with Ethyl Pharoah. The Pharoahs needed more sugar and we ate more butter. She saved tinfoil and rubber bands for the war effort. And she knitted heavy socks for the Merchant Marine. But her patriotism was always tempered by a realistic sense of human folly. None were without blame. She told us about the voyage of the Ship of the Damned, the passenger liner carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 that was not allowed to dock in Canada. She told us about a letter sent by the Canadian government that explained this rejection to Jews in Montreal advocating on behalf of these refugees. A few years ago, I finally got to the Montreal Holocaust Centre and there, framed, is a copy of that letter.
May was a remarkable woman in so many ways. She had a sense of confrontation with history, of how we should not look away from that which all of us must accept. In late 1945, the Canadian government mounted a touring display of documentary photographs taken by allied troops of what they saw upon liberating the Nazi concentration camps. This display was set up on the ground floor of one of the department stores on Ste. Catherines Street. A number of friends avoided this display, not wanting to see what the horror looked like. May made a point, she said, of seeing the photos, “because I had to”.
There’s one song that May held dear from those war years. It was written in 1941 to lift spirits during the Blitz when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. This is Vera Lynn:
White Cliffs of Dover
If she held a deep ambivalence about war, it didn’t dampen her admiration for the British people and for Sir Winston Churchill. I still have her RCA Victor phonograph of Churchill’s famous wartime speeches. She played these speeches a number of times. In her view our own homegrown politicians paled by comparison, with the exception, of course, of Pierre Trudeau.
MIDDLE AGE
While May was too shrewd to be caught up in Trudeau mania, she nonetheless shared in the widespread enthusiasm for the man. A lifelong Liberal, she made a point of voting at every election. She said she had to do this to cancel out Art’s vote, who was a lifelong Progressive Conservative. The family dinner table was frequently the scene of heated debates about politics and the news of the day, with Art and May taking opposing sides. Talk and banter was a constant at the dinner table. When I got to the stage of bringing girls I was dating home to meet the family – it only happened a few times—these young women would invariably say, “Your family doesn’t listen to each other!” Exactly. Listening was overrated. Steven Covey got it wrong. Seek first to rant. Try to understand others only while you are catching your breath. The main thing was to keep talking, to keep ranting and we did.
After the war May continued with her drawing career, often earning more than Art. In that sense she was ahead of the times. As a non-feminist feminist she often said that she felt more comfortable among male friends. “You can trust men to say what they think. Women can be cruel”. I should add that May made those particular declarations years before she became involved in curling or President of the Ladies Branch of the MWCC. Her one enduring regret was that she did not have 4 sons. However, she did manage to have 4 granddaughters –Susan, Jennifer, Emily and Hannah -- and 2 great grandsons – Alex and Ryan. These children were her joy.
May was a freelancer all her life, but most of her work in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s was for Morgan’s, Eatons, and Holt Renfrew. I recall coming home from school and being told to make sure I locked the door if I went back out as she was drawing a leopard skin coat worth many thousands. In her drawing she seemed to enter another world, a world where she could concentrate on interpreting the jewelry, fine clothing and accessories as she saw them. She would draw in the morning and all afternoon while the light was right, with her beloved CBC radio playing quietly in the background. Once or twice a week she would take the streetcar into town to drop off drawings at Holt Renfrew’s head office on Mountain Street. The world of high fashion must have been a welcome change from the constant work of raising two boys, to say nothing of coping with an avid curler for a husband.
CURLING
Art’s devotion to the Montreal West Curling Club was legendary. From earliest childhood the standing joke in our house on Westminster was that, once the ice was in and the curling season was on, if dad was at home in the evenings it surely must have meant that the club had burned down. Then one night in 64, it did! During the 40’s and 50’s it was Art who curled while May stayed home, often to read or listen to the radio. Of course she enjoyed coming down to the club with Art for social events and cribbage, but the curling bug had not yet taken her. Then one season she joined Art in playing mixed teams. She never looked back. Jim and I became true curling orphans.
Her affection for this Club was profound. In 1972 Art and May moved from 208 Westminster to 13 Wolseley South, right around the corner. Every morning May could look out her kitchen window and see the club. Putting her drawing skills to work she made endless posters, signs, banners and even the club crest. She eventually became a skip and would have long inscrutable conversations –inscrutable at least to a non-curler -- with Art about the lean, bend and bead of the ice. She served as President of the Ladies Branch and in later years became involved with the SLICCs (Senior Ladies International Curling Club for those of you who do not speak Curling).
After she moved to Peterborough in January of 2006, I anticipated that she would want to come back to the Club to visit. Linda English and others kindly sent her invitations to club events. May was an Honorary Life Member. In the spring of 06 I offered to drive her down for the closing lunch of the Ladies Branch. “Mom, we could drive down, you could go to the lunch, we could stay over on the west island and come back the next day.” Her reply was classic May. She knew her heart and had the wisdom to live by it. “No dear, it would be too hard.” In Peterborough she still enjoyed watching the Tournament of Hearts and the Briar on TV. On more than one occasion she became so wrapped up in watching a game that the staff had to remind her to come to dinner.
FAMILY LIFE
Some of you might be forgiven for wondering how this refined, classy woman who appreciated high fashion, the arts, reading and theatre managed to cope with a houseful of large, sports-obsessed men. If you are one of these, then I would suggest that you have the order of your question wrong. The correct question is how these 3 ordinary guys managed to survive this very indomitable woman, who broached no foolishness and could stand her ground with gusto. Art may have had the heavy artillery, but May won all the wars.
Yet there was such a fine balance in how she coped with our youthful shenanigans. She told and re-told the following two chestnuts, with me as the butt of both stories. The first occurred when I was about 10 or 11. I went out the night before Halloween with my friends to soap windows, hide doormats and commit other acts of minor delinquency. It had been raining all day and we came across a bin full of furnace ashes outside an address on Wolseley just north of Curzon. We lugged this ash can up the front steps of this address, leaned it against the front door, rang the doorbell and ran. A plainclothes police officer in an unmarked car saw our entire escapade. He pulled up, ordered us inside, and took us to the station on Westminster. I felt that I was doomed. The chief grilled each one of us in turn. “Templeman,” he said, “I am really surprised. What would your grandfather say?” George Earl Templeman had served as Councilor for the Town of Montreal West in the 20’s and 30’s. At that point if the earth had opened I would have gladly leaped in to be done with it. I wanted this great shame to end.
We were driven home, and May sent me to bed. Art was, of course, down at the Club. May phoned him, told him that he had a very frightened boy brought home by the police and that he should come home. A few minutes later, my father looked in the bedroom and told me to go to sleep. I cowered in bed, hoping to be taken away from this veil of tears. My darkest hour. Then a stroke of divine intervention.
Art had been down at the curling club alright, but he hadn’t come home alone. He had brought another curler with him, John Whitman. John, or Uncle John, as we called him, was like a second father to us. A huge strong bear of a man, an American who came north from Boston to enlist when the war broke out, a wrestler in college with the cauliflower ears to prove it, and a combat veteran of 5 years in the Black Watch Regiment with shrapnel scars from Italy to prove that as well. I heard heavy steps on the stairs. My bedroom door opened a crack. “Congratulations Willy”, Uncle John whispered. “We never accept any one into the Watch who hasn’t spent at least one night in jail!” Salvation, as May said in the morning. May saw to it the next day that I went over to that unfortunate address on Wolseley to help clean up. There ended my career in crime.
Another time May and Art were invited away to the Townships for a weekend. I was about 16 and was left at home as I much preferred. Home alone. But not for long. With parents safely gone, my friends and I proceeded to indulge in that most over-rated of teenaged rituals of debauchery, the open house. We rolled back the rugs, moved furniture, and bought lots of cigarettes and cigars then ordered many cases of Dow Ale and Molson Golden from Broadway Grocery. Free delivery. We aspired to inviting girls, but alas, this weekend turned out to be a stag affair; you could call it an adolescent male smoker. No great damage was done, until early Sunday afternoon, when May and Art returned from their getaway 4 hours early. My putative friends deserted the sinking ship like rats. They dove out the back door as May and Art came in the front. Again I wanted the earth to open and to be swallowed up whole. I expected the worst. Instead, Art said, “Good Lord, you drink more than we do!” May announced, “Time to clean up!” And that was the last thing either of them ever said about it. Nothing. Not a word. It worked.
At home we had an ancient refrigerator that required constant defrosting. So at meal times May’s hands were frequently ice cold. She would get us out of bed or off to school if we were late by quietly walking up behind one of us then sticking an icy hand down our necks. Very effective. I remember one day when Jim was in high school he teased May about something she had cooked. Jim was sitting with his back to the kitchen and he thought he knew what was going to happen. May tip-toed out of the kitchen and Jim felt what he thought to be icy fingers thrust down the back of his shirt. He said, wincing, “On Mother, your hand is as cold as ice!” There was May, grinning from ear to ear, a twinkle in her mischievous eye as she thrust a huge chunk of ice from the defrosting refrigerator down her son’s neck, relishing the moment to the hilt.
MONTREAL
May loved Montreal, oh how she loved Montreal. The city spoke to her in ways that made her a Montrealer to the core. After she stopped driving, she would love to be driven up to Mount Royal, or through the old parts of the city, Verdun, the Point, the old parts of the West Island, the east end. She loved being downtown – Sherbrooke, Mountain Street, McGill College, Old Montreal and the docks. In her later years May and Coe Hall would drive down to Old Montreal for lunch and just to soak up the ambiance.
She was thrilled by Expo. Another classic story of hers was the day a sizeable fleet from the French Navy docked in the port of Montreal on a state visit to Expo. Suddenly 3000 white uniformed young French sailors with their red pompoms took over the sidewalks and cafes, frequently with young Quebecoise on their arms. What was May’s response (at age 56) to this influx of Gallic hormones when she returned from a trip downtown? “Harumpph!” she snorted in disdain. “I could have been picked up today downtown!”
May was embarrassed by her lack of skill in French. She tried to speak it, but was afraid of making mistakes. Art, by comparison, was fully bilingual, having worked for 37 years with Hydro Quebec. So whenever a situation required French, Art was there. After Art died in 1980 May went on several elder hostel trips to Europe. On one occasion she was at a table of westerners ordering breakfast in France. One rather arrogant member of these unfortunates happened to wonder out loud, upon learning that May was from Montreal, if Quebecers still considered themselves to be Canadian. She snapped back, “To the contrary, we are the truest Canadians!” She followed this by ordering her breakfast in her best French, to the chagrin of her flummoxed tablemates, who could only point to menu items and hope for the best.
She crossed the Arctic Circle before I did and she beat me south of the equator. She brought back treasures from all these jaunts; everything from African fertility charms to an Arabian robe. May was the ultimate collector. Among her treasures is an envelope stamped “Salvaged from the sea”. This letter was recovered from a torpedoed convoy ship by the Royal Navy and returned to sender.
THANK YOU
There are more stories, many more stories, but there are many, many people to thank.
First of all, thanks to all the many, many friends, present and past, who cared so much for May. John and Florence Whitman, Coe and Kenny Hall, Ethyl and Bert Pharoh, Wilma and Jack Ireland, Fred and Dixie Clark, Margaret Clark,Dorothy McKay, Barbara Ross, thanks to the Ferrys, the Kuhns, the Wilsons, Ernie and Muriel Prosser, the Craigs and this list could on and my apologies are not enough for those I have not named. Thank you for your friendship, loyalty and kindness in good times and in lean times. And thanks to that loyal gang of friends, many named above, who used to come over to our house at 208 Westminster each Christmas Day for eggnog.
And thanks to more recent friends: Thanks to you for continuing to care about May and staying in touch even after she moved from Montreal West to the Wellesley Residence in Pointe Claire and eventually to a nursing home in Peterborough. May told me that while she was living in the Wellesley out in Pointe Claire that someone, perhaps someone here today would regularly drive her in for social events at this club. This meant so much to her. This more recent crowd would include Linda English who regularly send cards to May, right up to end, Anne Desmarais, Fred and Virginia Flynn and so many more. Again, I must offer my apologies for not thanking all of you by name. Thank you so much, all of you, for giving her laughter, warm memories and your affection.
Thanks to her kind neighbours on Wolseley South who checked up on her during the Ice Storm in 98.
Thanks to the staff at the Wellesley where she lived after moving from Montreal West until she broke her hip late in 2005.
Thanks to the nurses and doctors at the Lindsay Rehabilitation Centre in Montreal where May recuperated from her first fractured hip in late 2005. She was up and walking in 3 months.
Thanks also to the wonderful staff at the Princess Gardens Residence in Peterborough, where May stayed for the last 4 years of her life.
In her 80’s May began to need more help with the routine chores of daily life. I was living in Ontario and starting my own family; I only saw May a few times a year until we moved her to Peterborough in 2006. My deep thanks to my brother Jim, granddaughters Susan and Jennifer and their mother May (yes, another May), and Sue’s husband Paul and to great grandsons Alexander and Ryan for all the countless errands, visits and caring for May. And my thanks to Gail Neylan, daughter of May’s brother Jack, who stayed in touch and visited May in Peterborough.
Thanks to my own family –my wife Trudi, and daughters Emily and Hannah and to Trudi’s mother, Beth--for their kindness towards May when she moved to Peterborough. There was much to do and keep up with, but you gave me the support to do what had to be done. And a special thanks to Emily, at age 11, for suggesting to me “Grandma needs guinea pigs!” May kept a pair of pet guinea pigs in her room who now live with us.
Lastly, thanks to all of you and to the members past and present of this great club. You collectively have a piece of May’s heart. And she carried this place in her heart. Perhaps happiness has a memory after all.
In preparing the photo display for this event, I had to rummage through much of May’s treasures; the things she held on to right to the end. May was a pack rat. If you ever sent May a card, then I have it, at least for the last 10 years. If you ever gave May a photo, then I have it. But she did winnow down her stock and thrown a lot of junk out. You can tell quite a bit about someone from examining what they choose to hang on to. In the end she saved:
· Photos of friends and family
· Photos of children and animals
· Bridge score sheets
· Curling Club notices
· Cards and letters from friends
May thought the world of so many people. I am moved to see that so many people still think a lot of May. She was my mother. She taught me so much, lessons that I only now am beginning to understand – her zest for life, her optimism in the face of adversity and her love.
May traveled well. She drained her glass to the last drop. And she took a lot of prisoners en route. Those would be us.
As May would say with a broad smile, a wink and a glass raised, “Cheers!”
May's Obituary is posted below as a comment and at the following link: http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/Deaths.20100123.93220491/BDAStory/BDA/deaths
