Rose's Cantina

I will be celebrating my mother's 93rd birthday today, outside in the back garden, watching the weirdos walk down St. Laurent Boulevard. We're having a barbeque in her honour, steak with all the fixins, washed down by a couple glasses of French wine. If she were alive today, she'd be out there with us in the freezing cold, smoking Rothmans, and drinking some sort of Labatt product. She loved to smoke. She loved to drink. She loved to laugh. I miss her, and always will. She left this Earth in September of 1992, and she was only 68 -- six years older than I am now. Man, she seemed like a dinosaur back then, and now that I look at myself, I wonder: is that what the young ones see when they look at me? Really, I don't care anymore. I am who I am. If you don't like me, or my wrinkles, or my cheap dye job, get stuffed. That's what she would say. She lived a tough life, raising three kids on her own, as I did, living on fumes, as I did for...

When you have your first grandchild, that's when it happens. You begin to see how fast time goes. Today, Skylar Angela became a old-year-old. I thought she was born just yesterday. On January 8 last year, I was there when her mom woke us up with water gushing. I lent her my pajamas, which, for obvious reasons, are now her pajamas. We lent the nice paramedics a shoe lace. We'll never get that shoelace back again. We were there at the hospital, too, when mommy had to explain how she hadn't managed to get a health card throughout her nine month pregnancy and myriad doctors' visits and when the nice hospital folks tried to get these broke and silly children to pay the hospital bill. I was there through the first few months, helping the kids adjust to parenthood. And then she was gone -- off to her other grandma's. Just as well. Gordie the pug hated her. Wanted to choke the life out of her. But now Skylar is back living with her parents in my basement once a...