Both my parents came of age in refugee camps in Denmark. It wasn't till a few years later, after they'd been repatriated to a Germany as foreign to them as Timbuktu, that they hooked up.
Not long after that they set sail for Canada. They arrived at Pier 21 owing the government of Canada their ship fare.
I remember our house beside the railroad tracks. Mr. Jackson was an occasional visitor. While I wouldn't have known it at the time Mr. Jackson was an old-school hobo who went wherever the train tracks took him. My folks would see this raggedy bag of shit wandering around and invite him in for a shave and a bath and a meal.
From time to time Mr. Jackson took them up on the offer.
Then there was Mr. Wiener. Word was he was a Jew. He played the piano when he came to our house. We had a piano because my mother (and I am 100% sure none of the impetus for the piano came from my father) always imagined herself playing one.
So Mr. Wiener, who played the piano in our house, and also played the piano in the church my folks dragged me to at the time, was presented as a Jew who had seen some sort of light.
I remember as a child of no more than five or six going to a Synagogue in Hamilton to attend his daughter's bat mitzva. Her daddy had embraced the tribe of Jesus?
In hindsight, I realize he's just a guy who enjoyed playing the piano. He did what he had to do.
But Mr. Wiener's piano playing led me into seven or eight years of piano lessons with John Goobie, who was also a frequent visitor in the house I grew up in.
John's eldest daughter Beth went on to make a name for herself as a writer of children's books. Virtually everything she has ever written embeds a brutal subtext of child abuse. For years and years I spent half an hour a week in a dimly lit room with her dad, who according to her was a satanic child abuser. All I remember is happy family outings with their family and mine, and the excruciating boredom of my piano lessons.
In the end I did manage to pass my Royal Conservatory grade eight piano exam. Today I am hard pressed to find middle "C".
As I was winding down piano lessons my father was going from factory hand to entrepreneur. One of his first hires was a gay guy prominent in the local hot-rodder community. That would not have been a place to "come out" at the time.
He was on the payroll till the day he died, of complications from Hep C/AIDS thirty years later. My parents treated him like family and spent lots of time at his bedside as he was going down for the last time.
By then there was a steady stream of Vietnamese refugees flowing through my family's home. They still flood my parents with gifts at every holiday season.
In my late thirties I had to briefly (probably not so "briefly" in my parent's view) take advantage of their second floor to take refuge with my children after a marital collapse and a house fire on the other side.
This was cut short by a new wave of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan. Ya, yours truly was kicked out of the family home to make room for towellers.
But it was time to move on, and those Afghan refugees got traction there and have gone on to make productive lives for themselves in both Canada and the US.
They too remind my parents of their gratitude at every holiday season.
Along the way there has been the love affair with the Chinese entrepreneur who used to run several restaurants in Ontario and has many pictures of herself posing with senior officials in the Communist regime in China, and the pictures of my parents at a Sikh wedding.
They are getting on in years, my folks, but once or twice a week you'll find them serving dinner at one of the homeless shelters in Guelph.
I could not be more proud.
