Do You Really Want to Know?

 

Christmas Eve

 

I’d often imagined that if ever the story of my life would be told it would be told by my children. Not that it would be such a great story that they would feel compelled to tell it, but that I’d always imagined my life itself would leave me unable to actually tell anything, that it would turn me into a broken paralyzed heap unable to walk to the washroom  let alone tell my own story. I’d imagined that a book would be written by one of my sons, and then made into a movie; the opening scene being in a Bangkok hospital room with me propped up in bed, tubes curling into my nose and monitors beeping, my five children hovering around my bed in quiet conversation and my youngest daughter asking innocently, “What happened to mom?”  Then one of the boys would inhale deeply and exhale exasperatedly and ask, ” Do you really want to know?” and they would begin to tell my story as they remember it. Then at that point the movie would go into flashback and the viewers would find themselves in a dismally faded stucco house on John Street, in an old town called Whitby, Ontario. That is where my very tired and thin parents lived, along with my two older sisters, and that is where the story of me began.