Rose's Cantina

I saw an ad on CNN a few weeks ago in which a woman gushed about being related to George Washington. She found this out on Ancestry.com whilst compiling her family tree. I had no illusions that I was related to Sir John A. or anybody else famous. But I decided to join Ancestry.ca just to clear up a few family mysteries. Growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, I was surrounded by ancient relatives of various shapes and sizes who would arrive at dinner, or a funeral, and fill my head with all kinds of weird and wonderful stories. Unfortunately, they all died before I reached an age when I was capable of documenting the stories, or more importantly, verifying them. So I thought now, during the age of the Pandemic, would be a good time to grow a family tree. Boy did I get my money's worth. I had always thought that I was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) through and through. There were Crowns, MacPhersons, Bretts and Simpsons; t here was no inter-marriage that I knew. So I was...

One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting outside my Granny's farmhouse and squishing a bag of orange and white liquid together to make "margarine". It didn't occur to me at the time that I was making an edible oil product for the family to use to slather on sandwiches and toast. To me, it felt like some miraculous operation to make something out of nothing. I also loved sitting with my Grandpa Loyal and cleaning smelly old smelt that we had caught in the local crick. Or shelling peas on a sweltering July afternoon, and sucking up the tiny jewels with my extended tongue and feeling the burst as they popped in my mouth. I loved my grandparents, and my Uncle Vern, with whom we lived until they left this Earth over a six year period, exactly two years apart. Vern was a 50ish man-child whose dad had died in the Great War and was adopted by my grandfather, a widower who lost his first wife and one twin in childbirth. In the 20s and 30s, that was how blended ...

This is part of an ongoing series of articles and columns I wrote for Canadian newspapers. I am grateful to Postmedia and the Ottawa Citizen for permission to reprint this article which ran on March 18, 2002. By Rose Simpson I felt a lump in my throat recently when I heard police had found a 13-year-old Renfrew teenager who had gone missing. The boy was found safe at the Young Men's Shelter of the Salvation Army in the Byward Market. I thought about my own experience with a runaway teenager, an experience the rocked my world to its very foundation. And I wanted to share this story with you because it, too, has a happy ending, thanks to the people at the Salvation Army and the Youth Services Bureau. My son and I had been battling for some time over his penchant for skipping school, his smoking, his friends and his attitude. As the cliche goes, you could cut the tension in my house with a knife. And finally, it all came to a head one Sunday night when he arrived home thre...

I approached the white clapboard house and rang the doorbell, hoping to speak with the people who now live in the house where I grew up in the middle of a peach orchard. There was nobody home, so I didn't wander far. The place was smaller than I remembered, the house didn't look much different except the new owners had replaced the sparkly tarpaper my Grandfather had used to cover the exterior.  Next door, my uncle's tiny bungalow had been raised and in its place was a bigger house where someone else was building a family. Our football stadium-sized backyard, where my brothers played their sports, was now littered with toys and swings and a garish trampoline. In spite of these changes, much of small family farm was still intact, the outbuildings, the barn and the garage still looked exactly the same. The cherry trees were still there, the ones I scraped my knees  on trying to climb to the top. My scent was everywhere on this place, and the memories came floodin...

Renee (second row, third from left), Rose (front second from left).  When you meet someone from your past, a curious thing happens --they set "fresh eyes" on you. My friend Renee hadn't seen me in nearly 45 years when I took her to the lake. In high school, I was five foot six and weighed 130 pounds. Today, I weigh as much as my older brother who is six foot two. He likes to remind me of this fact on his regular phone call every ten years or so. Renee hasn't changed much at all. She's tiny with a big wallop of wavy hair. Because she strictly attends to her diet, and an exercise regime, she still reminds me of the girl who took the bus with me everyday so many years ago. The only wink to old age is her decision to let her hair go grey. She likes to sweep it back into a messy bun that gives her a slight bohemian vibe. In high school, I would rather go pantless than be caught without my lipstick and full make up which included an unfor...

Embed from Getty Images Ever since I was a wee kid, I dreaded Father's Day. When you're a fatherless daughter, you don't get to join in any of the fun, or make cards and homemade gifts. Thank goodness, Father's Day was never celebrated in my public school. We always made some sort of homemade gift for mom on her day, but dad never got a mention. I guess that's because fathers in the early Sixties weren't around very much. A lot of other people's dads were veterans who returned shell shocked and distant. They drank or sat and watched television instead of coaching Little League. I never knew this growing up. I'd always had the impression that most dads were kind of assholes not like the dude in Father Knows Best. In fact, if I am to be honest here, I can say that after watching other kids' dads, I was glad I didn't have one. Dads scared me. They were like clowns with balloons that popped. For a lot of kids, dads were alwa...

My granddaughter turned two weeks yesterday, on her original due date. She arrived early at the ball after the doctors decided to induce her mother to give her relief from gestational diabetes. Newborns are such strange creatures with their big "ready for their closeup" heads and their tiny bodies. Kennedy also has these long pink feet that don't really match. "She's got my feet," my daughter Marissa chuckled. On the day Kennedy was born, Marissa looked up at me and smiled. "I made that," she said with a self-satisfied grin. Yes, you did, I thought . It's the best thing you will ever do. When I had my first baby, I was a hot mess. I didn't know how to do anything. So my husband put my mom on a plane and brought her out to Regina where she showed me the ropes and minded Nicholas while I slept. Maybe it's because we have the Internet now, but Marissa doesn't need me. She's a natural mother, and s...

My granddaughters will never know their great grandpapa who died last month at the age of 95. Those who did know him would never forget him. If I'd written a Most Memorable Character for Reader's Digest , I would have written about the father of my children's father, Carlyle Gagnier. He truly was one of a kind. I wanted to get down a few memories for my grandkids in case they asked their parents about him one day. My kids were young the last time they saw him, only teenagers. They lost him to marital estrangement and it is a guilt I carry with me always. Here goes. Carlyle was born in February 24, 1921, the same day as my own sainted mother who passed away more than two decades ago. Carl was one of gaggle of Gagnier children including Patrick, Armand and Marquita. As the legend goes, his French Canadian father married his Irish mother who spoke no French whatsoever. Kathleen spent her life among the French not understanding anybody, including he...

Vern and his siblings When I was a little girl, not bigger than a bug, I had a playmate, a devoted playmate, who followed me around, hitched the Golden Retriever to my wagon, and sang songs with me on the front porch. He liked to dress up like Freddie the Freeloader, and take me door-to-door on Hallowe'en. My childhood friend was my Uncle Vern, and he was 50-year-old. Vern was the first born of my Grandmother Ina, the son of her first husband Herbert who had died in the Great War. Unlike the other grownups, Vern wasn't much bigger than me. I'd say, he was five foot with his shoes on, You might say he was as tall as he was round, and had a cherubic face that was always plugged with a roll-yer-own; it was a face that always lit up when I walked in the room. When he wasn't playing with me, Vern helped on the farm weeding the rows of strawberries, picking cherries and plums, or feeding a virtual Canary Row of odd animals: a banty rooster, a crow my G...

Embed from Getty Images Choose a size: A few weeks ago, I asked my very pregnant daughter Marissa how long she was going to take off work with her new baby, Kennedy Rose, who is expected to arrive in early April. "Three weeks," she said, matter-of-factly. "Three weeks? How are you going to manage that?" "Jeff's taking parental leave," she explained. "And I can work at home. It only makes sense because I make more money than he does." It's true. Jeff works in the not-for-profit sector in a job he loves. He is also a French hip hop recording artist, and for that he works nights. Marissa toils in the high powered world of consulting with blue chip clients; she's something called a "digital strategist". I smiled when I got off the phone. She didn't always take my advice, but she did listen one day when I told her to "be the man you want to marry." That's the advice I wish I could have g...

When I told the gang at the Press Club I was pregnant, they just looked at me like I had two heads. "You're having a baby?" Ok, I guess I didn't measure up back then as motherhood material. In fact, if I am to be perfectly honest, I didn't ever think I'd be a mother. I didn't really like kids that much. So me being pregnant came as much a surprise to me as anybody else. The pregnancy was a bi-product of a relationship I was having with Mr. Big. I actually wanted to have Mr. Big's baby, and so there I was, nearing 30, unemployed thanks to Brian Mulroney's trashing of all us good Liberals, drifting. A baby seemed like an ok thing to do until I found something else. And so it was I began the three decade journey to where I am today. Startlingly, I am a mother of three and grandmother to one and a half children. (The second one, the Baby Flo will be hatched sometime in April.) Tomorrow marks the birth date of my first spawn, Nichola...

Hello CBC friends: I know you are CBC Radio friends because I check my stats every day and more than 600 people have visited this blog in the past three days. That's thanks to my repeat performance on http://www.cbc.ca/radio/dnto Maybe you're wondering what happened to me after my husband left me at the airport to take a trip to Bermuda to go fetch his new wife. Well, a lot of bad stuff happened, and a lot of good stuff. I raised my three kids in near poverty while he climbed up the corporate ladder. Today, he is a multimillionaire with a six figure pension. He's still a big shot. I've moved on. I beat the odds and married my third husband 12 years ago, and we are going strong. It hasn't always been easy, but it's been interesting. You will find my blogs about my life, a well examined life, in these pages. I wrote this blog for four years and it helped me heal, and it helped me learn about myself. Along the way, I made some great friends. I don...

#485221623 / gettyimages.com One of the toughest parts of being Little Orphan Rosie is that there are so many questions left unanswered.  What's worse is that the only reference points I have, come from long ago, as a child. I once had to bath my ailing granny and noticed she only had one breast. Clearly, she'd had a mastectomy, so she'd had breast cancer. I was too young, too timid, too shy to ask my mom at the time and now that she's been out of my life nearly as long as she was in it, that ship has sailed. I knew the medical history of my mother's side of the family, having lived with them. Most died of old age, of heart, of stroke, due to bad social habits. My granddad had everything but the kitchen sink: heart issues, diabetes that gave him "spells" and my mom died of a bowel blockage, though she also had undiagnosed emphysema. Until recently, I had no clue about the health history of my dad's clan. He died when I was small an...

#125911633 / gettyimages.com The bailing on my Canada Day party began in earnest in the morning, with the first phone call and rumbling of thunder signaling that trouble was coming. Brenda had a stomach bug. No worries, totally understandable, nobody wants to scarf Adam's hot sausages and have to re-examine them on the way up. Then Ray called to say he didn't like the weather reports much, and quoted Environment Canada, that ace predictor of the climes, which warned that we in Southern Ontario were on a tornado watch. What the? Since when is Constance Bay hugging the banks of the Niagara River? Then my daughter called to say her bestie boy was stricken by flu-like symptoms, leaving me wondering if she and Brenda were just trying to get their stories straight. Rapidly, it became clear that we would be eating slaw til my next Canada Day celebration. Imagine Canadians who are afraid of a little rain. It's certainly not the image projected by CanLit or th...

As I sat in the radio sound booth in downtown Ottawa, it was just me, alone with my thoughts. I was about tell a national CBC audience on DNTO about the time my husband took me on a flight to London as a farewell present before he left me standing in the Toronto airport while he boarded a flight to Bermuda to be with another women, who later became his wife and step-mother to my children. The episode runs today. Anna, the producer from Winnipeg, got on the line and we went over my story. She asked me a couple of questions. I felt slightly uncomfortable. "What?" I asked. "You don't believe me?" "It's not that we don't believe you. We just can't believe this could happen." I smiled to myself and thought, "you don't know the half of it sister." And then I began to tell the tale of the flight from Toronto to London that ruined my life more than 22 years ago, the flight that took all my hopes and dreams with it and lef...