My Mom loved to tell stories. Sometimes we would beg her to tell us tales of her childhood, we loved those even if we’d heard them a hundred times before.
And sometimes she would tell others stories about us.
The anecdotes about my brother Steve mostly consisted of the trouble he got into as a small boy. My personal favourite being the time a neighbour carelessly left a pair of garden shears lying around and Steve found them. He proceeded to walk from house to house cutting the heads off of every single flower he found in our neighbour’s gardens. When he was done, he pitched the garden shears into Lake Ontario. We lived right on the edge of it; there was a fence, and then a drop into the Lake. Basically, my brother Steve pitched anything that wasn’t nailed down into the lake.
The stories my Mom told about me often involved animals. As a kid I was always rescuing something. There was the bunny I found in our yard with an injured foot; the baby birds who were abandoned by their mother when their nest fell out of the tree in a storm (they didn’t even have their pin feathers yet); five baby raccoons who showed up hungry one day (we assumed their mother probably got hit by a car since there was never any sign of her), and the list continues.
Figuring out what to feed these creatures was sometimes a challenge. The bunny was pretty easy, as were various dogs. We had to call someone about the baby birds, and ended up feeding them hard boiled egg mashed up with warm milk through an eyedropper. My Dad was ready to send me packing with them at one point – they liked to start chirping for their breakfast around four a.m. But even he was impressed when they flew for the first time. Even after they finally left the nest (or in their case, shoebox), they would come back every spring and sit on our fence.
The baby raccoons also liked eggs. We would crack them slightly and hide them around the yard so they learned to hunt for their food. Eventually they were released on my cousin’s farm.
My Mom also liked to tell people about the time I fed the bear in Algonquin Park. I know, lots of people feed bears in Algonquin, even though you’re not supposed to. On this particular occasion we were on our way home. I was four and my Mom was pregnant with Steve. We were in a car and space was at a premium, so I was in the backseat with the cooler and pillows. Just before we reached the Park gate, all the cars came to a stop, as there was a large black bear up ahead at the side of the road. Everyone was craning their necks to see it, including my parents. The bear wandered off and my Mom turned to me to make sure I saw it. She almost had a heart attack. There was her baby; cooler wide open, window rolled down, and feeding bacon to a second bear that had sidled up to our car. When my Mother could finally talk, she asked me what on earth I was thinking? I told her he looked hungry.
When I was six we moved to Burlington on Lakeshore Road. My school was several blocks away up a side street that ran perpendicular to Lakeshore. On the corner where I crossed was a service station and I walked by it twice a day going to and from school. Tied up in back was a very scraggly German Sheppard, and all the kids were scared of it. It barked and growled and strained against its chain whenever someone went by and my Mother made me swear I would never get close to it. Most days I walked to school with my friend Launa but if she was sick or something I’d be on my own. On one such day I crossed at the corner with the light and started off when I heard this dog carrying on as usual. There was no one around. I got as close as I dared and opening up my lunch, threw him half my sandwich which he ate in one gulp. The next couple of mornings I did the same thing. Then one day I stopped on my way home. I had one of those Halloween bags of chips left so I slowly walked up to him and fed him a chip. They were Salt & Vinegar, and he liked them!
And that is where my mother found me some time later. I was late so she had started off to see if she could see me coming. What she saw was me sitting on a curb with my arm around this mangy German Sheppard sharing a bag of chips!
After she’d sent me to wash my hands she sat me down in our kitchen and said, “that dog is vicious. What were you thinking?”
I told her he wasn’t vicious, he was just hungry.
Naturally, my mother loved to tell my husband stories about me as a kid, so I say he has no one to blame but himself – he married me anyway! Once our own kids were in school I decided to go back to work full time and found a great job working for a growing biotech company that recruited computer engineers and scientists from all over the world. A lot of the new employees were single and came to Canada not knowing a soul. One day my husband came home from work and noticed an extra place setting on the table. He asked who was coming for dinner? I mentioned a hard to pronounce name with lots of letters in it. “He’s a new programmer”, I explained. “He looks hungry, I don’t think he eats right”.
Without another word my husband went and picked up the phone. He called my Mother.
“Just thought you’d like to know, she’s still feeding strays, except now they’re people”.
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