True hero Rabbi Yisroel Bernath deserves your vote

I am doing something I rarely if ever do and submitting something for your consideration that I edited and augmented, but that did not originally come from me. This is my contribution to Rabbi Bernath’s campaign, which is rapidly winding down, and I hope it attracts your deserving attention!

If you are a student, you may have noticed Rabbi Bernath and his team of students roaming the halls of Concordia's West End campus or taking over the pages of Facebook. They are trying to get your votes to put Rabbi Bernath into the top 20 of the Jewish Community Heroes Competition. Voting ends on October 8, 2010, and the Rabbi’s chances are viable, remarkable considering that someone from Montreal, one of the smallest North American metropolises involved, is still in the running.

The exuberant Rabbi Yisroel Bernath, 28, runs a spiritual centre in the heart of the Monkland Village. Hundreds of students and young adults flock to his centre for guidance, education, spirituality and simply to have a good ol' time. "It's an incredible place," Christina Stanbridge said, as she passed around some goodies at a recent cocktail. "The energy, the people, a sincere love to be here... I truly enjoy volunteering here. It's more than home." Thirteen now-married or engaged young couples have met through the centre and there is an activity going on almost every day of the week.

Back in January, Rabbi Bernath started a campaign to encourage students and community members to log onto their Facebook pages and vote for the Michigan-based Friendship Circle's place in the Chase Community Challenge. Friendship Circle, which has a Montreal branch, is an organization servicing special needs children. The group was responsible for over 3000 of the approximately 50,000 votes received. "We really wanted to help them win," Jonathon Waysman, 25, said. "But there is a huge difference between getting someone to log onto Facebook and winning this competition. This contest works by IP address. The university has only one IP address, so we needed to convince everyone to vote at home. It has been a really difficult challenge!"

The winner of the Jewish Community Heroes competition gets a grant for their organization, according to the Jewish Federation of North America's website. “It's much more than that, though" explained Stanbridge, "It’s the recognition that a young rabbi from a smaller community can compete against the big cities and take home the gold. I am very optimistic. I really think we can do it!"

The group is asking you to log onto http://www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/nominees/profile/yisroel-bernath/ and vote for Rabbi Bernath. It's a vote for our community. Who knows? With faith as a motivator, anything is possible.

Back to school a joy when you're an adult

So, some 30 years after I last did this (to this extent... I took and passed a Canadian Red Cross Emergency Medical Responder course that involved some 130 hours of classes, spread over three months, a few years back), I am back to school with all the rest of the kids.

In my case, I started chef school last evening. The course, given by the St. Pius X Culinary Institute, will keep me busy five evenings a week until the fall of 2011, a total of 1,400 hours of study. It’s funny to me that I am back in school again... so funny I half expect late comic Rodney Dangerfield to appear and start taking jabs at me. When I was last a legitimate student, back in university, I wasn’t a particularly good one. I skipped classes, studied for exams and wrote papers the day before... in short, I was more of a failure at it than a success. My one joy was writing for Concordia University’s since-defunct Loyola News, which helped propel me into a long-lived career as an oft- published freelance writer, so I guess that was something.

But school? Never grabbed me.

So here I am, the ultimate poster boy for adult ed... and living proof that education is wasted on the young. As my brain ages, it yearns to suck up information like a sponge. Now THAT part I understand. I was always eager to learn in my youth, it was the constant battle to prove oneself via exams that I detested. I suppose the pressure was too overbearing for me, but leave me to my own devices and allow me to simply learn and I was great at that.

I discovered last evening that our leader, Chef Richard, would be testing us from time to time and that we had, horrors of horrors.... an oral presentation next week. We have to interview a local chef of our choosing and then report out findings back to the class. Oral presentations were once anathema to me. I would actually drop classes if I found out that there was one hidden away in the class curriculum, like a panther waiting to pounce. But as I get older, that doesn’t scare me anymore.

There are far worse things in life than oral presentations... like oral cancer! I jest here, but when you think about it, it’s true. When you are a teen, everything on the horizon looms so large and you take everything so seriously. After marriages, a plethora of bad bosses, daily life struggles... hey, an oral exam is a downright pleasure.

And you know what? So is school. Now, I take courses that will benefit me and that I WANT to take. Gone with the wind are peer and parental pressure, battling my fellow students for grades and all the various stresses that come with being young and uncertain. Now, I am subjecting myself to this heavy schedule of work during the day and classes till 10 every night, five days a week, quite willingly. It’s a chance for me to assume a new career once I graduate, a second chance, really.

There’s only one thing that could possibly happen that will take everything I wrote
above and toss it out a window. Chef Gordon Ramsay.

If HE shows up at some point as a chef/teacher-in-residence, all bets are off.

When the going gets tough...

This has been a very humbling period for me. Without going into the sordid details, it is likely the most challenging period of my life. Having led a more charmed life once upon a time – and having experienced moments where my youthful ego took the wheel of the sports car – I can honestly admit that I have come crashing down to earth.

Some people may have given up by now, thrown in the towel, slumped over in a vegetative state. I’ve had 53 pretty good years, right? Why fight it? We all need to go sometime.

I think it’s times like these that really teach you what you are made of. I’ve faced moments of hardship before, but there was always a safety net, someone to bail me out of my impulsive actions. There is no one of that calibre now. Yes, I have friends, loved ones, but no one who is going to write me a blank cheque and offer to bail me out. The onus to fish or cut bait is solely on me.

The biggest change is that I am learning to adapt, to do with less, to alter my wasteful ways. The problem with luxury – and that can be as small a diversion as a mobile phone plan that’s chock full of goodies – is that it’s toxic. It corrupts you, makes you lazy and spoiled. That’s where young people are NOT to be envied. They didn’t grow up during an era before home computers, Wii, or cell phones, for God’s sake.

I bought my parents our first colour TV in 1973, when I was a teen working at Eaton’s (yes, the apostrophe was not yet an official eyesore the separatists could squabble about). Till then we had an old black and white box, with vertical and horizontal controls and that Indian picture that faded to a small dot and then blinked out when you turned off the set. Remote control? I got my first remote, attached with a cord to a Phillips box that sat atop the TV, in 1978 or so. I figure people were not quite as fat yet, because they had to get up off the Chesterfield (a brand of couch for newbies) 20 times per night to change the channel.

So, we all went without a lot of what we take for granted today. I called Rogers this morning and told them I was going to stop paying my contract AND cease to be a Rogers client unless they broke my $100 per month Blackberry plan that went
till 2012.

The secret here, I learned, is using the code words “will stop being a Rogers client.” That gets you into the VIP customer service suite. I am now paying $40 per month for a modest plan that includes basic phone service – bye bye voice mail and Caller ID - email access and 500 texts per month... for $40 tax in. If you call and I don’t answer, try me at home, because I am likely busy. OR I am at chef school.

Chef school has been the one thing that has kept me going through trying times all summer long. In just 10 days, it is finally happening. I have my chef uniform and my tool kit, which I need to get engraved. I am ready. I watched Master Chef last night and had tears in my eyes when the wannabe winners were praised by Gordon Ramsay and the other judges, no easy task. I want to be that good. I guarantee that I WILL be that good by the time I am done in 14 months.

See, I may have challenges before me, but none of them are deadly and I can unlearn some of the spoiled patterns I have acquired. Not having caller ID will not end my life. Moving to a smaller apartment will still leave me with a bed to sleep in, a roof over my head and a bathroom with a modern toilet. I mean, they had outhouses once and, yeah, they survived.

Getting myself a $500 jalopy, which I plan to do soon... hey, as long as it gets me where I am going, am I worse off then you are in your gas-guzzling monster truck SUV, which seems to be as necessary as breathing to most of the people in my neighbourhood? You may THINK you’re better than me and if you do, I’m really sorry for you. It’s all inside that matters and, other than heartburn now and then, in THERE I am doing mighty fine.

See, we can all also use the spiritual connection and that’s a mantra that is also worth repeating when you find your life slipping in the other direction. It’s all in the attitude. Stay positive and good things will eventually happen, I promise.
Vaya con Dios, y’all.

Canadian taxpayers victims of another fighter aircraft misadventure

Imagine being the absolute best at something: sports, cooking, gambling, whatever. Then, on the verge of taking your superiority to the level where you achieve fabulous wealth and worldwide fame, you are forced by some ignorant functionary to scrap your plans and actually destroy all the evidence so that you could never reach that level again.

Well, in the 1950s, here in Canada, that’s exactly what happened with the Avro Arrow CF-105 fighter aircraft program. From the day the plans for the supersonic interceptor were submitted to the then-Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent in May 1953, till its abrupt cancellation on the verge of major production, on February 20, 1959 by the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker, the Arrow was the finest fighter aircraft in the world.

If you are an aircraft buff, as I am, this is an incredibly painful part of aviation history to think about. The Arrow had no peers, set international flight records, and would still be competitive today. A delta-winged interceptor conceived to prevent advanced Russian high-speed, high-altitude atomic bombers from flying into Canada over the North Pole, where there was no radar at that time, the Malton, Ontario-built Arrow was quickly the darling of the media and the envy of governments worldwide. The Arrow project also required the development of powerful new engines to give the plane the thrust required to reach its unheard-of Mach 2.5 speeds and 50,000 feet altitudes, so the Iroquois engine was designed and manufactured. France had an order in for 200 of these engines, an order that was cancelled when the news of the Arrow’s cancellation was leaked.

By the 1959 cancellation date, since known as Black Friday, several Arrows, including a “Mark 2” version using the Iroquois engine, had been flight tested – the first one by the late test pilot Janusz (Jan) Zurakowski on March 25, 1958, with performances that were both successful and astounding. Five Mark 1 aircraft were manufactured in all, numbered as RL 201 – RL 205, with RL 206, the solitary Mark 2, the final Arrow to come off the line. Then, it was all gone. The Conservatives ordered the destruction of everything, including all the aircraft, smaller models, blueprints... though there are rumours that one complete aircraft had been hidden away and is still around somewhere. Surviving blueprints have permitted the creation of a full-sized, static model of the Arrow that was rolled out in 2008 at the former CFB Downsview military base in Toronto, Ontario. Ottawa’s Canadian Aviation and Space Museum also has a surviving nose section and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has an original Arrow nose cone and ejector seat.

The Conservative government has never come forward with the real reason for the cancellation, but conspiracy theories abound. They used cost as a reason and, indeed, it was prohibitive, with a projected $1.1 billion earmarked for Arrow had it gone through as planned. But that was hardly unreasonable for a plane that would have created an entire new industry for Canada, one which likely would have positioned us as a world aviation power today. As it was, $33 million had to be paid out in cancellation fees. And the ensuing CIM-10 BOMARC missile program, which the Americans had convinced the Canadians to join (justified by claims that missiles were replacing fighter aircraft as nuclear deterrents) on behalf of NATO, ultimately cost Canadians hundreds of millions of dollars by the time it was phased out by the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971.

So, considering its role in the destruction of the successful development of the stellar Arrow fighter, it is most disconcerting that it is a Conservative government that is today embarking on yet another fighter jet misadventure. Unless you have been in a coma, you have likely heard that Canada has placed an order worth $9 BILLION for a fleet of 65 advanced, single-engine F-35 jet fighters. Canada has already advanced $160 million in the development of the F-35 and $350 million worth of contracts have gone out to Canadian suppliers for the various parts.

Yet, there is much anger afoot. The contracts were not put out to tender, a cardinal contravention of rules in free, Western societies, and there seems to be the same “sucking-up-to-the-Americans” methodology involved here as was the case with the Arrow and other military projects (“Star Wars” missile defence shield, anyone?).

What concerns me most is that bureaucrats are involved, in this case Canadian defence minister Peter McKay. A lawyer of criminal and family law by trade, I’d like to know what McKay’s credentials are that gives him the knowledge to plan the defence of our entire population.

Yes, I have no doubt that Mr. McKay is a very bright man and he is certainly proving that by giving us terrific retorts while he is being resoundly criticized for the manner in which his government is handling this controversy. I’d be a lot happier if a military man, someone of unquestioned brilliance and battlefield ethics, like a Romeo Dallaire, was Minister of National Defence. But inexperienced bureaucrats heading up major portfolios make me extremely nervous.

Case in point: While touring the Northwest Territories with the Giant Colon last year (you can Google it and read the rave reviews), I was in Yellowknife exhibiting on March 21, 2009 and we held a press conference attended by the Honourable Sandy Lee, NWT’s health minister. She spoke and then I said a few words to the media and answered a few questions. I mentioned that what was learned via the Giant Colon’s visits country-wide would hopefully help prevent deaths from colorectal cancer by finding potential cancers before they metastasized. You know that word, right? Everyone does... it means before cancerous cells spread to other parts of the body. It is a VERY basic term.

Later, while talking to Ms. Lee and the media while walking through the Giant Colon, the minister took me aside and said, and I quote, “While you were speaking, there was a word you used that I did not understand.” I asked her which one and she tried to repeat it... “metas.... mat....,” to which I asked, “Metastasized?” With a perfectly straight face (and really, a serious rubberized Jim Carry imitation was what my face wanted to do), I explained what it meant to the HEALTH minister of the NWT, which has some of the highest cancer rates in the country.

Very scary. And here we are, entrusting the defence of our country to another bureaucrat and another Conservative government with a sorry and intentionally clandestine record on the subject to begin with. This aircraft situation appears to be Arrow all over again and we have a right to ask questions and demand answers before it is too late.

Visiting your old high school haunt has you coming of age all over again

Yesterday I did something seemingly benign, yet something that dredged up a lot more emotion than I thought I had lying dormant inside me. I walked through my old high school and took pictures. Now, this institution was not just any high school. Wagar High, which opened in the Montreal suburb/municipality of Cote Saint-Luc in 1963 or so, owns a bit of a legendary spot in the annals of secondary education in this city.

From its opening until its closure about four years ago, Wagar was, in its heyday, one of the hotbeds of intellectual activity in Montreal. Until its final years, Wagar’s students perennially placed at or near the top rungs of the academic ladder among English-speaking institutions in the province of Quebec. And while not known for its sporting skills, Wagar teams always competed ably in sports such as basketball and, for a time until the early 1970s, high school football.

While a secular school, Wagar was comprised primarily of Jewish teens from the surrounding cities of Cote Saint-Luc, Hampstead and Montreal West, as well as from the Montreal suburb of Notre Dame de Grace (NDG), where I lived. During the years I attended, 1970 – 1974, enrolment was not open to students outside these geographic parts of town. Yet, my graduating Grade 11 (Secondary V) class of 1974 had something like 300 students, the school thriving, vibrant and packed with students spanning grades 8 – 11. In our time, junior high – Grade 7 - did not yet exist at the secondary level.

I was admittedly not a huge fan of Wagar while a student. Then again, I wasn’t much of a student period. I enjoyed the learning component of school, but not the rules and regulations that went along with the process. Today there are schools for people like me, for kids who don’t fit into traditional academia but, when left to their own (supervised) devices, are able to be successful, creative and move on to meaningful careers. I also didn’t really “fit in” back then, hailing from an outside area, NDG, when most of my peers knew one another from their elementary school years in Cote Saint-Luc. I was an outsider, a state-of-mind that was further complicated by my extreme shyness. It was hard for me to make friends back then, even harder to realize the normal rites of passage, like dating girls. But I succeeded on both counts.

So, here I was, back to scene of the crime. And as I walked through the school, my footsteps echoing through the now empty halls, I had an emotional reaction. My eyes filled with tears, the result of mourning for my lost youth, I presume. In the auditorium, I remembered sitting proudly, watching my Grade 10 girlfriend Marla Tobin dancing as a chorus member of the musical South Pacific. I still have the programme. I recalled hanging in the halls and the cafeteria with my buddies Joel, Joey, Richard and Stanley, a group of guys with whom I am only friends with Joel to this day. I couldn’t remember where my locker was, but I think it was on the third floor, where the old banks of grey lockers still stand like silent sentinels, tired-looking but somehow still relevant. Funny how a mere school locker – which in effect is your own private office - can be meaningful so many years later.

Then there is the gymnasium, which surprised me because it is so much larger than I remembered it. I bumped into the school janitor yesterday, a man who started working there in 1981, seven years after I departed. He told me that the gym floors had been damaged, so they had set down new ones. Still, the sounds of the floor hockey “doughnuts” hitting my extended appendages as I tended goal came back to me, as did massive, former semi-pro football player and gym teacher Judd Porter’s menacing Texan drawl.

Of all the interesting sensations, however, those that I felt walking into the modest library were the strongest. The principal for the school’s main current tenant, Marymount Adult Centre (the other tenant is John Grant High School, for special needs students, that offers them an incredible, cutting-edge job program), had informed me that Wagar had simply left their original library books behind when the school was closed. And to me that meant only one thing: the library cards inside had been signed out by the people I went to school with. I spent one solid hour rifling through one book after another, looking for names I knew. And I found quite a few, including one for a book on rookie NHL goalie Gerry Desjardins taken out on May 11, 1973 by my old friend Lenny Litwin. Lenny lived on Prince of Wales, a few houses down the street from me, and was like my younger brother. We both loved hockey goalies growing up and seeing his name on the card sent a thrill through me. We lost touch over 30 years ago, so, for me, this was totally a sentimental “lost youth” moment.

I took some more pictures and placed the whole slew of them on Facebook for many of the old Wagar alum to peruse, knowing that these images would rekindle some feelings in them, as well. For those of you who didn’t attend Wagar, it’s no loss... if you want to remember, sometimes achingly so, take a walk through your old high school if it’s still around, but wait at least three decades. If you left five years ago or less, you probably think it’s the last place you’d ever want to see again, just like I did.

At my age, however, I challenge you to experience this and not be extremely moved. As we turn the corner onto the final stretch of our mortal lives, the years that most helped define us become more precious all the time. As I endure some of the fiercest struggles of my life today, my years at Wagar were likely among the finest I have ever lived.

If only I knew so back then. Man, ain’t that the truth.

New life: Boon or disaster?

Of all the bad award shows I have ever seen, the most moronic and irrelevant one is playing behind me as I write this: The AVN Awards, organized by Adult Video News. It’s the ultimate homage to the adult film industry, the denizens of which may be artificially beautiful to look at but are brain-dead, for the most part. Case in point – up now is the Male Performer of the Year Award, which is basically a reward for being endowed with, or subsequently bestowed, supersized genitalia. Manuel Ferreira was the winner from a list of about 20 freaks with enhanced organs and thankfully I can change the channel now that the suspense has dissipated.

Bare with me before you close this window, because this is not a dissertation on porn... I am simply using it as background because it turned up on my TMN channel as I was surfing the Web. I just changed the channel for what may as well be an Oscar-winning film, in comparison: Halloween IV.

But seriously, this adult film awards sham is the ideal tool for illustrating how far we have fallen as a race - when this is what has an audience giving an individual a standing ovation, it’s time to smite Sodom and Gomorrah once again. So, all of this hoopla, for essentially nothing of any consequence, got me pondering even more deeply the hottest news in history, pretty much... the first act of Creation since God did it, what, 20 billion years ago? Now it’s a group of American laboratory gods who are responsible, although I suppose God had a hand in a ‘various degrees of separation” sort of way.

If you haven’t heard yet, a team of scientists in Maryland, led by veteran geneticist Craig Venter, has managed to create artificial cells in their lab and then splice human DNA into them. In the words of Venter, who has purportedly been trying to create synthetic life for 15 years now, “we ended up with the world’s first synthetic cell powered and controlled totally by a synthetic chromosome made from four bottles of chemicals.” It’s amazing... and also somewhat ominous.

They have actually CREATED life, the way Dr. Frankenstein did on screen in the 1931 movie that features the good doctor, played by British actor Colin Clive, shouting “It’s alive” over and over again. I don’t know about you, but this is such staggering news that I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. This is NOT science-fiction, or a cloned sheep that didn’t live up to expectations, at least I don’t think so. It’s not the absurdist Raelians proclaiming that they have created a baby from alien DNA, or some Scientology ridiculousness dreamt up by late sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, in my opinion THE biggest religious scam in history. And there have been a lot of them.

This is human life, artificial though it may be, with the potential to be used in untold ways, some useful and benevolent and others horrifically nightmarish. The scenarios are endless. Mind you, if what makes us human involves the belief that an omnipotent Creator wielded the paint-brush of universal life, this is nothing but science. If life on Earth is, however, the result of alien spores being tossed earthbound from a nearby planet like Mars, however, this is simply life being created in a lab rather than originating from Martian soil.

Still, it’s life and with life comes potential, for both good and evil. I suppose it all depends on who takes those cells and manipulates them... the medical field, or the industrial-military complex, perhaps? We can all hope that this becomes a boon for humankind and doesn’t ultimately wind up destroying us all. Personally, however, when I look around at what this world has turned into during MY brief lifetime, any new life can’t be a bad thing.

Congratulations to the New Creators. Please don’t let us down.

Two birthdays - Enough to make even Sherlock crazy

I recently celebrated my 53rd birthday, on April 26. I was born in 1957. As many people reading this may know, I am adopted. The way my parents told me about my beginnings, I was two days old when I was brought to them, my biological parents having been killed in a car accident while my mother was pregnant, after I was saved from her dying womb. Very romantic, I agree, and a story oft-related to adoptees of that era. Lie number one was augmented by the fable that I was born at the Jewish General Hospital here in Montreal, whereas I discovered much later on that it had been the Royal Victoria Hospital.

I have spent my adult years dealing with my adoption, often having a difficult time with it. Don’t get me wrong: I loved my parents and they loved me, to the point of ridiculousness. I was their world. So, I have no doubt that any fibs they told me were intended to keep me “safe” from some horrid fate. Don’t ask me what that could have been. If my mother had been a 16-year old whore, so be it. If she was a demon, okay, when do I start collecting souls? Whatever the reason, however, they took this secret with them to their respective graves in 1981 and 1984, as did my mother’s sister, my aunt, in 2007.

I have gotten to the point in MY life where I can accept the fact I will never know who gave birth to me. I don’t like it, but what’s the point of sabotaging my life over it? I have caused myself and others who loved me extreme pain due to the way these feelings made me act. As has been suggested to me by people who care, I should get over it, already, and I am trying my best.

But there are certain things that have come to light in recent years that are hard to wrap my head around. The first was the fact that, while I was raised a Jew, by a Holocaust survivor mother, no less, I was likely not born to a Jewish mother. It is the circumstances surrounding those early days that has caused me to write this blog entry. Like most Jewish males, I was circumcised. The ritual is supposed to take place eight days after birth. My late mother kept a diary about “The bundle of joy,” which is what she entitled it. And in that diary she wrote details about my “Brit Milah”... on MAY 24!

Now, I have always assumed that my bris was almost a month late because of some tie-up, perhaps related to health reasons. I mean, maybe there was simply TOO MUCH to cut off? But I digress...

For you Holmes-loving (Sherlock, not John...) amateur sleuths, I will add another important detail. When I was a child, my parents always threw a birthday party for me on May 18. I never really questioned that date, but I was told by my mother that I was always sick in the springtime, so May 18’s warmer weather made a party more logical at that time. Two birthdays... Can you confuse a kid more than that?

I will do the math for you. Born May 18, my bris would have been held on May 26, if the eight day rule is followed. But the diary page for my bris held six days later, on May 24, contained the names of three holy men: the mohel, or circumciser, a major religious figure of the day named Cantor Nathan Mendelson, the main circumciser of male Jewish babies of that era in Montreal; our family rabbi, A. Bernard Leffell, and; Gedalia Schacter, a good friend of my parents who was religious. These three men were there in order to form a Beit Din, or Rabbinical Court, for the purpose of ritual conversion. At my bris, I was ritually converted to Judaism, because I was either not born to a Jewish mother, in fact, or they were not certain who the mother was.

The latter is highly unlikely, as I discovered the record of a cheque written out to Royal Victoria Anaesthesiologists on April 25, 1957, the day before the birthday that is listed on my birth certificate. I have always assumed this was proof that I was born on April 26th, the cheque written by my father to cover the cost of the anaesthesiologist who participated in my birth. Now, all I think it proves is that I was born at the Vic. The cheque could have been written in advance of the birthing procedure 23 days later.

I suppose that, since this Rabbinical Court had certain members who were not Orthodox Jews, it was not a purely legally-binding entity according to Jewish law, or Halacha, so what difference did it make if the bris was held two days early? The first cut was the deepest and that was the main point, I guess, damn the legalities.

It is really easy to tell me to ignore this, to move on, to get over it. Most of you, however, know the bare-bone facts about your conception and much more. You certainly know your correct birthday, what religion you are and whether your adoptive father was your biological father, after all. See, that’s another suspicion I have. As I age, my father and I look a LOT alike. My theory is that, because my mother came out of the Holocaust damaged and likely could not have children, she allowed by father to have sex with and impregnate a young woman so that they could have a child. Remember that in 1957, “in vitro” was a Latin term and nothing more. No test tube babies or cloned sheep in those days, people. So, the fun, fabulous and carnal act of fornication was a necessary thing. Go figure.

I am very limited as to what I can do to uncover the truth about my birth. Since the Quebec government absolutely drags its heels on opening biological files in this province – and on this matter it doesn’t matter who is in power, the radical, independence-mongering Parti Quebecois or the current governing, federalist-leaning Parti Liberal du Quebec – I cannot get to the paperwork that might at least give me my actual date of birth. .. and perhaps answer some other questions, as well.

So, next week, on May 18, I intend to go out for dinner once more, to celebrate my birth with some close friends. It may not actually BE my birthday, but until I have some actual proof on the matter, the facts speak for themselves. All I can say is “No shit, Sherlock” this is one hell of a mystery.

It all results in my having a really bad day now and then. Can you blame me?