Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images "A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing is safe." -- Mary Gordon Over the years, I've tried to make sense of it, my father dying when I was just a baby. Losing a father, or mother, at an early age is like losing a limb. There are fixes, a re-marriage of the single parent perhaps, but step-parents are prosthetics, nothing more. The limb will always be missing, you will always feel that hand, and there will always be a constant ache, phantom pain, perhaps, that never goes away. Fatherless women, the sensitive ones at least, are often seen by other relatives as attention-seeking victims who act out in public and embarrass the family. That is what I was called last week by a relative who also called me "crazy". "You always have to be mad about something," he said when I railed against someone who had written erroneously in my Ancestry.ca Life Story that I was the love child of my fat...

A few days ago, my daughter Marissa set out a challenge for her white family and friends after the senseless lynching of George Floyd. WHITE PEOPLE, white friends, white family, I'm going to ta lk to you for a second. Your silence on the issues that people of colour face, your passiveness ("I'm not racist, I don't see colour, etc) also further systematic racism. If you don't look for information on the LIVED EXPERIENCES of people of colour, if you don't educate yourselves, if you don't push for change, ask how you can help - these things will never get better.  Funny, we never talked about it. Not even when Jeff came for dinner, moved in, and never left. He was just Jeff who lived in our basement, a quiet man with dreads, and glasses who didn't say very much.  He wasn't the only young man who lived under our roof. My boys had friends who came and stayed, mostly after getting kicked out of their parents' houses. But Jeff was the only ...

Today, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson pleaded with residents to stay home because tomorrow we're going to get a whopping 40 centimetres of snow. This news has already struck fear into the icy hearts of OC Transpo managers who are asking LRT operators to practise breaking in snow (news! The winter started months ago!). I will stay home, watching my puppies playing in the snow, because I am still unemployed after 10 months. This week, I applied for jobs as a communications adviser, a writer/editor, and a sales clerk at the grocery store. If I'm lucky I'll be packing fish on ice within a week. If I haven't heard from the grocery store by next week, I'm pulling out all the stops and applying at Costco and Home Depot. They pay an extra dollar an hour, or so I hear. It's been a very disturbing winter. I'm turning 64 in July, and I currently earn $400 from CPP. I will have to wait until next July so I can top up my earnings with the Old Age Pension rounding o...

What a holy mess. Our beautiful KitchenAid refrigerator blew up on us this weekend. The nice repairman said the compressor was gone and that meant the $2,200 investment I made seven years ago is nothing but a piece of junk. I wonder how many years seven is in refrigerator years. It was working fine on Friday. Then everything in the freezer melted. And that was that. We had to bring in a last-minute replacement, a second stringer, which looks very much like its on its last season, final play. The replacement doesn't even have a bottom crisper drawer, and it's too small for the space allotted it. Maybe it's so much worshipping of false idols, but I loved my false idol. It had a bottom drawer for the freezer where I kept all my frozen berries and meat now spoiled on the counters. It was big enough to hold a week's worth of groceries along with all the weird Thai and Chinese condiments that make cooking healthy worthwhile. It was beautiful on the outside...

Really, I don't give a hoot who becomes Pope. Black smoke, white smoke, no smoke, makes no difference to me. My children are all Catholic, but I'm sure if I polled them about the Pope, they would say, 'meh'. The church has never been relevant to their lives. Besides, I have a grudge against the Catholic Church and my own church for that matter. And everybody knows I can hold a grudge a long time. When I married to Mr. Big, I made the decision to raise my kids in his church, mainly because I didn't have a positive connection to my own church, the United Church. I've always wanted a spiritual connection. When I was a little girl, I begged my mom to dress me up all pretty and take me to Sunday school so I could participate in Sunday School and learn about My Lord. Mother was calloused about it all. She agreed to take me -- and dropped me off at the church door. Me, a six year old! I always felt sadness and raw nerves when going up the steps with my lit...

Everytime International Women's Day comes around, I get depressed. That's because when I was a girl, I wanted to have a successful career, to do something, to be somebody. Fifty years later, I'm broke and underemployed. That's because I decided to take a break from my career and have children. Then my husband left me, and the rest is history. Gloria Steinem would not be impressed. I fought back, but life as a single mother is a jail sentence. When I was married, I had a great house. When I became single, I couldn't get a mortgage because most of my income came from child support. I was still paying the mortgage on time but the bank didn't care -- it just wouldn't renew my mortgage. As a result, I went from being a homeowner to a renter. I had to work part-time because I had three young children to look after and an ex-husband who was too busy making millions to spend anytime with his kids. I lost everything just trying to keep heart and soul togethe...

Stephen Harper is considering raising the age Canadians can receive the Old Age Security benefit from 65 to 67. I have questions: Shouldn't he have mentioned this little detail in the Conservative platform during the election? Do you think this will play well with the traditional Conservative constituency that skews a tad old on the demographic scale? Has the Prime Minister developed a case of dementia? Has he paid his bodyguards? This is how our fearless leader thanks the millions of boomers who have worked hard and paid high taxes over the past forty years. This is how he repays Canadians who do not have pension plans. Canadians working in low income, back-breaking jobs that barely pay a living wage. Canadians who look forward to enjoying their senior years. Not to mention the many women who have stayed home to raise their children, or who worked part-time so they can care for aging relatives. Harper doesn't care about these Canadians. Heartless Harper on...