​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

​“Which would you rather have: cancer or polio?”  My older sister and I played this verbal game in the late 1940's.  Having no real knowledge of either disease, the words were meaningless.  Sure our parents understood fear, helplessness, had buried loved ones, but we, as our younger sister, were without any understanding of mortality and every illness we’d had we got better.
 
Polio seemed to be a summer situation, and going to the movies, before television, was part of a routine, especially on Saturdays when a continuation of a weekly cliff-hanger came on before the promoted film. And summer camp, sleep-away, out of city heat, was being with others my age, all the wonders of sports/ boat house dancing/ Color War/ the morning ritual at the flagpole.....  So parents couldn’t come and visit during the eight weeks I’d be in the mountains.  Was okay with me.  Disease that could paralyze?  Not going to happen.  Being young meant invincible.
 
“Well,” I prodded my older sister Carole, “why would you want one instead of the other?”  We spoke of an iron lung as if we had a clue to what it was, which we didn’t, and decided cancer death.  Of course death was abstract.  We were never going to die for real, ever. I thought of our childhood silliness when, indeed, she did die of stomach cancer many decades later.
 
After I married a medical student, I actually walked through a Polio Ward at the hospital on campus.  For real: iron lungs. Only a face and a mirror for the human totally encased in a metal cylinder for life was seen.  And rocking beds that I didn’t ask about.  I held my breath feeling scared but ‘safe’ as long as I didn’t breathe.  I felt a wave of sadness that for the only life each of those people were to have, it was one without movement, any of the opportunities I was given, and wondered ‘why me’ re ‘luck’ if luck exists.  I realized that Polio was not a temporary condition for these, and it had been years since summer camp and silly verbal games.
 
My brain went into girlhood mode when, pregnant with my first, my mate developed a dangerous staph infection and the doctor told me to not be in the double bed we shared.  I did not leave our bed.  He was so ill that eventually had to be hospitalized, yet I still assumed some magic bubble was protecting me, and it did. 
 
I tended to my three offspring with their strep throats, and illnesses prior to the common vaccines we now have available, and only took real precaution if my husband and I had to fly someplace and he and I took different planes.  No matter that we, together, could be harmed in an automobile, we felt some control on a road rather than above clouds.
 
Polio vaccine came out in my children’s lifetime.  Only the oral doses were then available.  Their physician said it would not be advisable for me to take such and hoped I’d had immunity from exposure when young.  I never did get that vaccine.  I was grateful this next generation would have no knowledge of iron lungs or polio syndrome that’s come on from some cases not severe but caused damage later in life.
 
Reading about the 1918 killer flu was similar to reading about log cabins, outhouses, horses attached to buggies for transportation, facilities with no heat or running water, one-room school houses.  History.  Didn’t seem real.  Gravestones seemed like billboards saying someone with the name etched is below ground.  If I hadn’t yet truly accepted that my own father was put in the red soil on Long Island when I was age 20 and he had only blown out 45 birthday candles, how could I comprehend pandemic!   
 
Swine flu vaccine had to be given at a health center; my daughter got so sick she vowed no flu vaccine would ever go into her again.  It was 2009: CDC Novel H1N1 flu.  To me, a novel is a book of fiction and not something associated with a sickness!  And now, 2020, I’m hearing the word ‘novel’ with the current Coronavirus.  Pandemic.  Age group with high mortality risk.  My husband and I touch hands realizing we are in that stage of life now.  While our offspring know where legal documents are, and so forth, dying is incomprehensible so we remind our executors where papers are but can’t quite process that if one/both contracts this new virus, death might no longer be abstract. 
 
Supermarket shelves depleted of goods are as eerie as photos of airports having no long lines of passengers.  No live theatre, no cruise ships exiting ports, no......  It seems surreal. “Which would you rather have?”  I hear my childhood game with older sister.  Now I’d only answer with my husband: life/health.
 

            Spring.  Buds are beginning, robins are returning, winter ground is getting soft.  But spring isn't new and the ordinary reminds me.
            "Look at the pink snowballs," my brain whispered to my eyes.  Aloud I questioned the price and name of the plant perched on an outdoor wooden table.
            "The hydrangea's on special.  So are those azaleas sitting next to the pansy boxes." The farm market salesman saw merely a possible customer.
            My fingers fumbled under protection of my side pocket; I freed my grip and allowed them to stroke the plant's petals.  Arthritis accepted the digits that had developed gnarls, but the tips thought it was girlhood:
 
            Our heavy pottery birdbath was securely surrounded by a perfect circle of dense planting; between the circumference and grass was a sharp indentation made with a weighty wooden-handled tool that sported a sharp half-moon blade.  Some old man, remnant of days quite finished, came to the suburbs selling his sharpening services.  Rusty cowbells clanging from his open truck annoyed proper house-dwellers; these were not tenements with fire escapes sharing their function with sleeping people on hot summer nights.
            A narrow but even concrete path enabled outside passage from the front to back of the house; "step on a crack, break your mother's back"...I walked with giant steps.  A painted-white wooden archway was laced with roses.  My mother called it a rose arbor.  I never wondered why or how roses climbed straight up and then knew when to turn horizontally.  It was a grand entrance to the back yard and a favorite place to be photographed during summer.
            Everything grew.  I squat each spring before tiny bells while singing `lily, lily of the valley' and looked, in Woolworth, for perfume by the same name.  Sometimes that store sold tiny flacons of fragrance; sometimes I had to buy an entire blue bottle of it.  No one in the family liked the smell but I imagined it had a delicate scent.
            Bulging blossoms of snowballs didn't diminish lilies of the valley.  I thought they got along rather well.
            A Chinese Maple dwarfed my height.  What made it Chinese?  Did I ever ask?
            The shrubs grew.  I never saw the work, feeding, watering, pruning, de-weeding...until war demanded Victory Gardens and food planting.  The circle was invaded, stripped of its dignity.  As a family, we planted onions, radishes, carrots, potatoes, and marked each with Good Humor popsicle sticks on which we scribbled the vegetable's name. Gentle leggy bushes beneath the kitchen window were uprooted and tomato plants eventually leaned against the brick.  It was ugly.  Hoeing was hard.  Small tools that looked like crooked fingers scratched tough, dry soil.  I preferred that job as I toiled same way during recess in the school's victory garden.  I would have rather continued playing dodge ball.
            Before the war effort, I'd take peas in a pod outdoors and sit near the arbor.  As I shelled them for dinner, I ate contents of one for every three placed in a pyrex bowl.  If my mother minded, she never said.  She didn't see that ends of bakery bread were missing each time I walked to get her a loaf of rye, so how would she know the pea count inside closed green shells?  Now I felt responsible for the puny size of my crops and angry when a hungry squirrel selected our yard for a restaurant.
            Flit cans with rusting plungers de-bugged tomatoes.  In a bathrobe and backless slippers that slapped against her naked feet, my mother nourished what she actually needed to satisfy growling stomachs.  No ration coupons were required.  I imagined the pre-war garden and still believed it just grew healthy and handsome by magic.
            War or not, we still had lilies, roses, snowballs.  Fortunately, the maple was Chinese and not Japanese!  My mother and I inserted a frail magnolia into the front lawn.  I could see it from my bedroom window even though my panes were framing silk stars showing passers-by that we had relatives overseas.
            Dodge ball resumed for my younger sister.  I was in high school and seemingly didn't see the circle return to foliage.  The tomato plants had become part of my mother's life and, decades later, I've snapshots of her, in robe and scuff slippers, showing my two year old son how to snip a swollen red ball, truly home-grown.  By then, the magnolia had become a tree, and I was aware the rose arbor sagged from years of standing.  Birds still cooled hot feathers in the birdbath but none heard me sing or saw me squat before bell-shaped spring flowers.  My son pointed to a huge clump of flower and I identified it "snowball".
 
            "Made up your mind, lady?" The clerk's voice startled me.  "Want the hydrangea?  Has to be planted soon."
            "Allergy," I responded, embarrassed about my watery eyes.  "Don't think so." It's 2020.  Why hasn't the mind a sense of time
 
 
 ©1988 Gannett Co.
Reprinted 2005 Clear Mountain
 

Let me give you a glimpse of my caring and compassionate daughter Sheryl.  I knew, as a pediatric oncology nurse before she became a stay-at-home mom, she showed her rare quality of intelligence and tenderness, efficiency and personal attention, always creating a ‘better world’.  And time, burdens of her own life, continued to prove she would always expend energy on others:
            “He nearly died once from the contrast dye.”  I’d told her about a medical diagnostic procedure where injected fluid allowed doctors to see a problem with my husband’s spine; he had a severe reaction to that dye and went into shock.  Because someone was in the room at that precise moment, and treatment initiated, my mate began to breathe again.
            Sheryl earned two university degrees, and became a Registered Nurse, since that incident.  Now she fully realized the situation she’d only once passively listened to me discuss.
            She and her family live 500 miles away, and had driven up for a brief vacation.  Having a major spine problem herself,  I knew the long drive back on Sunday was going to be difficult for her, but, instead, I joked about her two young children being considerate and never fighting on long car trips as she and her siblings had done.
            We hugged at the door, and the four of them got into their coupe for the tedious trip back to Cincinnati.  She caught an expression on her father’s face and correctly ‘read’ it as uncertainty.  She learned he was going to have an x-ray with contrast dye on Tuesday;  it wasn’t going to be the same dye used before, but he had a look as if he were beholding her for the last time.
            In her private pain, and tired from 500 miles in the car with only one stop for lunch, she telephoned to tell us they were safely home that Sunday but were all driving back on Monday so she could be at her dad’s hospital bedside on Tuesday; then they’d drive back on Wednesday.  It was a family decision, and her husband, Stan, already told his boss, and the children voted to spend another 500 miles next day and then another 500 miles home again.  She would not listen to me about the intense distress she’d have with so much sitting again, the probability of quicker damage to her own already damaged vertebrae.
            “He needs me.  I am a nurse and will find a way to be with him throughout the whole film.  But, more importantly, I will be able to care for him if he needs instant attention during those hours afterwards as the dye leaves his system.”
            Nothing could talk her out of it.
            The four of them returned to Rochester, New York, next day.  Sheryl was on her feet at the hospital most of Tuesday.  She telephoned me at home, where I was with her children and her husband, begged me to not tell her dad of her personal and excessive pain, which she wouldn’t mask with medicine;  I respected her wishes. 
            A nurse, who makes rounds on each patient every 30 minutes, checked in on my husband who seemed okay, then left the room.  During the next ten minutes, the color changed on his face.  Something small, perhaps, but Sheryl’s training taught her to recognize small signs.  He then passed out.  As she called for help, she knew to not wait as she lowered his head and initiated life-saving processes.  Life saving ...  in the totally real sense of that statement, for he would not have been able to depress the call button to signal for himself, and twenty minutes before the next nurse-check might have been too long.
            Sheryl brought him home that night.  He was stable, but she observed his pulse and other signs periodically for many hours.  She was satisfied that she’d been there, and, as she’d said, just because she selected to be a stay-at-home mother didn’t mean she forgotten her nursing skills.  And, she reminded, her dad provided for those skills and never made her feel his money at an Ivy League school, and earning two Summa Cum Laude parchments, was wasted when she pocketed the degrees for full-time motherhood.
            She, once again, actually kept life from leaving her dad. 
            Attempting to mask her spinal pain, and with not one sound from any in her family about the 500 mile trip once again, they drove back to Cincinnati Wednesday.
            How few would go through that kind of hard driving even under the best of circumstances and not in her small 2-door coupe when it wasn’t even as if her dad were having surgery?  What young children wouldn’t have complained or whined when hearing “I think that Grandpa needs me, and I’d like you to let me know how you feel about turning around tomorrow and driving another 500 miles only to repeat it Wednesday?”  And how many sons-in-law, since he’d have to do all the driving, would use up precious vacation days from work, and span those miles without even a whimper?
            My mother once said that a woman was the hub of the family wheel, and the members were the spokes.  Sheryl’s ‘hub’ is that of an unselfish hero... that everyday hero that quietly goes about the business of caring.
 
©2003 Panther Publishing
reprinted 2010 The Jewish Press
 
 

​My grades in “conduct” and “effort” were always Fs.    But, for the thousandth time, I would try to do better.  Clean slate.  I would begin again. I would try to “apply” myself.  And although everything else was more interesting to me than Religion, Reading, English, Spelling Arithmetic, History and Civics, Geography, Social Studies, Science, or Penmanship, if I worked hard and stayed out of trouble maybe I could do all right.   All my “academic” work came pretty easily to me, especially spelling and penmanship.  That’s where I could really shine, and without ever cracking a book.  I was the class champ in both spelling and penmanship, more than once.  But like I said, there was no effort involved, no study.  I could just do it.  It was easy.  It was conduct and effort that were the real challenges.
I’ve been looking at my old report cards and it’s incredible to me that year after year, quarter after quarter there are “Fs” in every box labeled “conduct” and “effort.”  It’s really unbelievable.  And when there wasn’t an “F” there was an “X,” which was even worse than an “F.”  An “X” meant your kid is failing in Conduct and Effort and “We request a meeting with the parent.”  Yeah, I had a bunch of “Xs”, too
And it wasn’t bad enough that I was getting all F’s in conduct and effort.  Sister had to up the ante after some earlier fiasco that caught us in the middle again. And she did.
“Mr. Stanizzi, you come up here right now,” she said, holding her fountain pen out toward me.  I remember I didn’t get it at first.  Why is she handing me her pen?  Then it dawned on me as I slowly made my way to the front of the class, why she was stabbing the air between us with her pen.  She was going to make me write the Fs on the report card.  And I was right. 
“You take this pen, Mister, and write an F in that box next to conduct.” 
Oh, you bitch!  You meanspirited bride of Jesus.  What the hell!  It was humiliating, making me do that.  It really was brutal.  In front of the whole class?!  What a mean, nasty, unnecessary way to treat a kid.  I remember grinning and pretending to laugh it off, but there was nothing funny about this nasty move.  I was terrified and, worse, embarrassed, but I couldn’t let the kids in the class know that.  What a mess.  And the really, really bad thing about all of this was that I actually believed I was a bad kid and that I was getting my “just desserts,” one of Sister Anthony Mary’s many quips that I didn’t understand at the time, but which annoyed the hell out of me anyway.  Another of her favorites was, “You’re trying.  Very trying.”  Apparently, I was “trying,” though I never really got that one either.  Not until much later.
Anyway, I wrote the Fs in the appropriate boxes, trying to make them look like Sister’s so my mother and father would not catch drift of this nightmare.  I didn’t have to worry about them finding out from Sister because, the truth is, the nuns could do whatever the hell they wanted to do, and without ever having even the slightest inkling about informing my mother and father.  They didn’t ever have to be held accountable to anyone.  Imagine that?  That’s how it was.  They were the law.  They answered to no one, except maybe to Father Shanley, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, right? 
So yeah.  Straight Fs in “conduct” and “effort” written with my own hand…with a pen, a RED pen,  not a pencil.  What an incredible mess.
And the truth is that I thought Sister was truly at the end of her rope with me.  I also thought that she might have run out of ideas, punishments devised to make me a better kid.  But she wasn’t.  She had more really nasty stunts to pull on me in the hopes that I’d finally learn how to behave.
When the next report cards came out I got called up in front of the class again to write the Fs on my report card.  Old news, I know.  But she was good, Sister Maria Richard, fat, bitch-faced Maria Richard.  She was good.  This time, she had a new tactic.  She was really going to teach me a lesson this time around.  She didn’t hand me her fancy-dancy, red-inked fountain pen.  Instead she handed me a regular looking pen that, as I got closer, I could see, by the color of the cap, was a RED pen.  I was shocked.  Talk about mean.  Unbelievable.  Another red pen!!  But what could I do?  Nothing.  I was trapped again.  My hand was shaking and my brain was all mixed up with anger and fear and sadness.  What I wanted to do was stab her with the pen a million times, or punch her in her big, idiotic, red face.  But I didn’t.  What I did was write the F, in red fucking ink, in the box marked “Conduct.”  And man, that F looked really, really bad on that manila report card.  It was the only thing you could see.  It looked permanent as hell.  A big bright red F!  It leapt out at you.  And  I was screwed.
When I got home no one was there.  There was never anyone there when I got home from school anyway.  They were both still at work. But I had to move fast.  I had to somehow get rid of the evidence of my irrepressible badness.  I grabbed a pencil and licked the eraser until it was good and wet and then I started to erase the F. But, to my absolute horror and shock, instead of making the F go away, all I did was wear a hole in my fucking report card where the F had been.  A big hole, bigger that the square where the F was.   And that was bad.  What the hell was I going to do now?  The hole in my report card made all my badness doubly bad.  Not only did I always get Fs in conduct, but then I proved I deserved the Fs by trying erase them and tearing a hole in the stupid report card.  And all the effort to remove the F wouldn’t have mattered anyway because Sister had called my mother at work and told her the whole ugly story, recapping the failures and screw ups of yet another semester in the sanctified hallways of St. Mary’s School. 
Most stuff that happened at school happened in secret.  What I mean is that the nuns would do things to me that I knew that they knew that they should never let my parents know.  They weren’t stupid.  They knew they shouldn’t have been doing some of the things they were doing to me, but they just kept quiet and tortured me in private.  It took me a long time to figure that out.  But I did figure it out, and it just made me hate them even more.  I mean, I figured if I went home and blamed the nuns of stuff that was happening in school, my parents would immediately take the side of the nuns, and assume it was as bad or worse than they said it was.
Anyway, my mother was gunning for me the very second she walked in.
She wasn’t even in the door and she’s running her mouth.  “Where is that goddam report card you little son of a bitch?”  I walked – very slowly – to the kitchen table, picked it up, and gave it to her.  She opened it and of course the first thing – the only thing -- she noticed was the big hole.  “What the hell is this?!  What the HELL IS THIS?!  There’s a hole in this report card!  You tried to erase the F?!  Goddam you, you little good for nothing.  I’m gonna kill you!”   
That’s when she started swinging, and she managed to get in a few good shots, but I was quicker than she was, and I bolted out of the kitchen, into my room, and under my bed in about one second.  She thundered in behind me with a broom, which she started waving under the bed hoping to get a piece of me with the broom handle.  But I was way back in the corner where I usually went and where she couldn’t reach me.  Soon enough she called it quits and went out mumbling that crap about Wait until your father sees this.
Oh man…what a disaster.  I was bad in school.  I was bad at home.  I was a terror in the neighborhood.  And I was exhausted.
It was a vicious cycle.  I’d screw up, and if Sister thought she could make my life more miserable by calling home, that’s what she’d do.  My father would holler.  My mother would beat my ass.  And the next day it would all start again.  If my parents got wind of what was happening in school, I’d catch hell at home.  If the nuns knew what a bad kid I was at home they’d make life even more miserable for me in school, trying to make me behave more like Jesus.
I was trapped.
And this went on all the way through 8th grade.  I wasn’t “one” of the bad kids.  I was “the” bad kid.  And after a while, the nuns didn’t know what to do with me.  They tried isolating me.  They tried pairing me with a “good” kid to see if the goodness would rub off.  They tried taking me out of school all together and making me go to school at the Convent on Saturday mornings.  Oh man, how I hated that.  I mean I loved not going to school during the week.  That meant I got to stay with Sosie, and that was glorious and peaceful.  No nuns.  No parents.  No kids.  Just me and Sosie.  But then Saturday would roll around and my father would drop me off at the convent, where a nun would stand over me trying to frighten me into learning things that I just wasn’t going to learn, no matter what they did. 
The Saturday thing didn’t last long.  I want to say, I went to the convent on Saturday maybe three or four times.  I don’t know.  Somebody must have said something about how you can’t just take the kid out of school like that.  I don’t know.  The convent stuff just ended one day.  And I was glad, mostly.  I missed staying with Sosie, and I certainly didn’t miss going to the convent on Saturdays.
Anyway, when I got back into school nothing had changed.  I was still the bad kid and the nuns were at a loss to fix me.  Remember I said they tried isolating me?  Yeah.  Well.  Here’s how that played out.  Sister wrote the word “boycott,” along with its definition on a piece of paper.  Then she made stinky-blue mimeographed copies and gave one to every kid in the class, explaining that boycott was what they were to do to me.  Boycott me in the classroom, in the school yard, in the lavatory…everywhere.  No one was allowed to speak to me or they’d be punished.  And this was one of those perfect examples of how I couldn’t possibly tell my parents what was going on.  Imagine?  Hey, Mom and Dad, Sister told everyone in the whole school that I was so bad that they should all boycott me.  That would be a train wreck.  They’d think, My kid is so bad that the nuns don’t even want anyone speaking with him.  Then the hell I’d catch at home would be worse than the hell I was caught up in at school.   Imagine that.  Recess comes.  Everyone goes out to the playground, and they’re all in boycott mode, every kid in the class knowing that it is against the rules to be anywhere near me.  Incredible, huh?
It didn’t just feel bad, the not talking to me part.  It also felt bad because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.  I know.  You don’t think about that part right?  All the kids in the class know what they’re supposed to do.  They’re supposed to go about their playing just like always, only with one minor rule change – no talking to Johnnie Stanizzi.  Fine.  Easy enough.  But what about me?  What the hell was I supposed to do?  I could stand up against the anchor fence and try to be invisible while I watched them play kickball.  I could lean against the building or sit on one of the windowsills of the first floor and try to be invisible.  I could just walk all around the playground, trying not to look at anybody so they wouldn’t be nervous about getting caught looking at me.  Or I could do what I did.  The fire escape stairs were way off on the far side of the playground, facing away from the kids.  And that’s where I went.  I could walk close to the building and make my way over to the fire escape with no one even noticing me.  Then I could sit on the second or third step and stare at the backs of the gray apartment buildings that were next to the school, or I could close my eyes and daydream about the river.  Either way, I was far enough out of the way that I didn’t have to see any of the kids and they didn’t have to see me.
This went on for weeks.
Of course, eventually the school year would go by, painfully, terrifyingly slow.  But it would go by.  Then I’d be free.  My mother and father both worked, and so I got shipped off to Sosie’s house in Hartford.  It was so marvelous. Just perfect for me.  No one in the world except me and Sosie.  No one yelling and screaming at me, telling me how bad I was.  No one hitting me or making me do chores.  All I knew was that Sosie loved me so much.  I knew that.  I didn’t know that about anyone else in the world.  It was like our secret.  And it was so quiet there, too.  We didn’t talk much.  We didn’t have to.  There wasn’t much to say, and so we didn’t talk.  It wasn’t like the nuns or my mother, just blathering on and on and on about nothing anyone is interested in hearing.  Just Sosie and me all alone in the world.  All I did all day was play all by myself with my toys or help Sosie in the kitchen.  Pluck a chicken.  Make macaroni from scratch.  Cook soup.  Run wet clothes through the wringers of the washing machine.  Try to catch pigeons on the porch.  I truly do not know how it could have been any better.  Long slow days.  The windows open.  The traffic sounds and smells of the avenue wafting through the apartment.  At night the healing sound of the tick tick tick of the clock on top of the refrigerator.  It was like I was boycotting the world and that was perfectly OK with me.
 

​I lived with my unilingual English-speaking parents and younger brother, til I was eleven or so, on the second floor of a Quebec City duplex, smack in the middle of a francophone community. Except for our occasional baby-sitter (who spoke only French to me), no other adults ever came into our home. I soaked up French quickly from neighbourhood children. At my English elementary school French lessons were frequent and wonderful. My best friend Suzanne, who was bilingual, came to my house to play often. I alone was comfortable in both languages. 


Our French landlord’s flat, downstairs, was covered in brick, our upper-storey with white stucco. My mother, who always seemed to be hugging an electric heating pad, swore the stucco was damp and caused her to suffer from “rheumatism”. It may have been her way of saying that she was unhappy because after we moved to a big house she didn’t mention her achey muscles again. Or maybe she was right, that the dampness was a problem. There were other signs of her discontent, however, like bursts of foot-stomping anger with me and my younger brother for reasons that eluded me. As she sat writing letters home to “Mummy and Daddy”, sometimes while weeping, I could sense, but not understand, her loneliness.


I remember little about the physical details of that flat wrapped in stucco. Little vignettes and small spaces swim in my memory surfacing now and then to nip at me. The kitchen was in the middle with the dining room and living room at one end and the bedrooms at the other. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen while my mother made jello studded with canned Delmonte fruit cocktail, smeared a meatloaf with tomato sauce, or heated up canned spaghetti and sliced weiners. The counter ran along one wall, then half of the next wall before it turned abruptly into the centre of the kitchen to form a divider in the middle of the room. I loved the shiny formica counter top. It’s yellow surface resembled scrambled eggs and looked buttery and delicious. Along the edge was a silver strip under which dirt would collect the way it does under a finger nail. My mother would give me a butter knife and ask me to dig out the sticky black substance, probably to keep me busy, a task I found satisfying. While I dug out the dirt I would admire the swirls of buttery yellow on the counter.


Eggs were a frequent meal. At breakfast my dad tapped the egg perched in the chicken-shaped egg cup with the side of his knife two or three times until it cracked, whacked through the shell and lifted off the cap. The yolks were runny and after the first bite he’d slip a big pat of soft butter into the hole left by the spoon. He’d dip a finger of crustless buttered toast into the egg. and shovel it into his mouth, catching the drips of butter from his chin with his tongue. I copied him. My mother reprimanded him for setting a poor example by eating too quickly, a habit which I have been unable to break to this day. My father, who came from a large, poor New Brunswick family, had had to learn to eat quickly if he was going to eat at all. 


My mother had impeccable and essential table manners, coming as she did from high-society Halifax. She insisted that I lay the table correctly and that we all, including my father, use her beloved Birks silverware in a defined manner. In addition to boiled eggs she served poached or scrambled eggs on buttered, crustless toast triangles, but her morning specialty was “bunny-in-the-hole”, more commonly known as egg-in-the-hole as I later learned. (Several decades later I taught my husband, whose cooking repertoire was limited to cereal, how to make “bunnies-in-the-hole” for which he became famous in the eyes of our children.) Eggs were even more delectable when, for birthday parties, they were made into crustless and quartered egg salad sandwiches accompanied by gherkins and a sprig of parsley, or paprika-sprinkled devilled eggs, both containing tiny, crunchy bits of celery, onion and radishes. Eggs became synonymous with care and affection despite my mother’s moodiness and unpredictable temper tantrums when Dad was at work and my brother and I made too much noise.


I grew up, graduated from university, and got married on the campus where I had met my future husband. The wedding has faded from my memory, which saddens me, but really it was my mother’s wedding more than mine. There was a strike that year in France where wedding lace was made and I remember feeling disappointed in the choice of wedding dresses available. My mother organized everything from a bridal shower (attended by the wives of my father’s work colleagues, none of whom I had ever met) to booking the wedding chapel and the hotel for the reception, to ordering the tea, mixed sandwiches (including egg salad of course) and wedding cake. She also hired the local town photographer. And she fired him, minutes before the wedding ceremony while I was putting on my dress. I have no idea why, but as a result we have no professional photos, only a few Kodak Brownie shots.


The day after our wedding my husband and I moved to Ghana, the first of several homes in West Africa. I was twenty and more than ready to leave family — especially my mother — and country behind to teach and to explore the world. 


That first year we lived in a tiny village with no electricity.  On the verandah I had a tiny charcoal burner made from a Nescafe coffee can where I would eventually learn to simmer a goat and pepper stew or fry a few plantain in palm oil, and in the kitchen a kerosene stove for the rare occasion when we could find kerosene. I had no cooking skills under my belt. My mother had never let me learn to cook. “You’ll have to do all that work soon enough some day when you are married. Don’t bother now.” I was off the hook, but looking back I wonder: did she fear that I would end up a dissatisfied housewife? Did she want her own personal space in the kitchen where she could dream of a better life? Was she simply tired of my endless questions and chatter? As an adult I learned the basics of cooking on my own, but it was challenging in a new country where most food items were foreign to me. I had one hand-produced cookbook with recipes for local dishes — spicy groundnut stew and pounded plantain and cassava — as well as recipes for so-called western food but made with so many substitutions that the traditional Ghanaian food became much more appealing. Without milk there would be no custard, but if I wanted to make an “apple pie” I could do so with green papaya, although ingredients for a crust were a hit and miss. 


But eggs — free-range chickens provided us with nutritious eggs. And even better, we discovered guinea fowl eggs with their luscious orange yolks. On those nights when too many fiery red peppers had burned their way through our intestines, those eggs were heavenly, healing gems. Over the years we travelled to many countries and partook of a variety of cuisines, some delicious and some downright scary, but always there were eggs, palatable comforting eggs.


After a decade away we returned to Canada to study and work and raise our three children in Halifax. My parents were living in Ontario by then. Slowly over the years I began to notice small things about myself that reminded me of my mother. I didn’t want to be like her and I made a conscious effort to change. While peeling vegetables at the kitchen counter one day I felt myself sinking my weight onto my right foot and tucking my left foot around the back of my right ankle. My posture slumped a little and an image of my mother, in the exact same posture, came to mind. I hastened to straighten, plant both feet on the floor and shift my weight into a balanced position.  Something about peeling vegetables in the same posture as my defeated mother made me both sad and angry. Angry that even at a distance she somehow tried to control me. My life was not about peeling vegetables.


Over the child-rearing/working years I slowly gained weight until one day I looked in the mirror and recognized my mother’s shape. My life was not her life, but I did not want this daily physical reminder of someone who had failed to live up to my image of “a good mother”. I struggled for a long time trying to lose the extra pounds in order to regain the figure of my youth but I lacked good nutritional sense and knowledge. On my seventieth birthday, and long after my mother had died by suicide at age 69, I began to make an earnest attempt to educate myself about food. By that time the Metabolic diet, the Paleo way of eating, and the Keto lifestyle were all popular. I studied all three and over the space of a year I went back to the healthy weight of my twenties. One day I opened my closet and looked at my wedding dress, fifty years old, moth-eaten and badly marked by big mildew stains. I slipped it on. Unable to do up the zipper I stood in front of the mirror and visualized being able to fit in comfortably. Another eight pounds and I would be into that dress. On the internet I found a discussion about how to stop a stalled weight loss. It could be done by eating only meat for a day or two, or — eggs! I don’t eat a lot of meat, but I love eggs. Every other day for two weeks I ate only eggs and the last few pounds fell off. I was now ready to do a kooky photoshoot in my dress. Now I would have photos my way.


As I slithered into that old stained and chewed-up dress my mind went back fifty years to that day when my maid of honour, Heather, was helping me dress. She giggled as she said “your mother asked me to tell you something.”
 
“Why didn’t she tell me herself?”


“I think she thought you’d be cross. She said to tell you to use face powder so your face wouldn’t be shiny.”


According to the bridal magazines a dewy complexion was in vogue and I loved my Marcelle moisturizer. There was no way my mother was going to control my wedding face.


Now, seventeen years after my mother’s death, my daughter is doing a fun photoshoot with me in my old dress in my friend’s garden. My mother would have gotten a kick out of watching her grand-daughter direct me as I posed. It was a day of uproarious laughter and delight, a day that I wished could have happened fifty years ago. Had my mother been there this time around I might have even put on a bit of face powder. 

​We were packed into a crowded minibus somewhere on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, heading in the direction of Lake Kuriftu and the city of Debre Zeyit, which hugs its shoreline.  The lake was promoted as an idyllic retreat within day-trip distance from the polluted and overcrowded capital.  I was sharing the back seat with Yikeber, a young man I’d met standing in the line waiting to board at the “station”—a dusty windblown lot on the edge of the city.  Yikeber was one of Ethiopia’s emerging young professionals, a civil engineer who had found work in Addis, as Ethiopia’s capital is locally known, but still commuted from his family home in Debre Zeyit to avoid the high rents in the city.  A gracious host, he paid my $4 fare and also assumed the role of tour guide, pointing out the sights of Addis’s outskirts along the way.
            “That’s a textile factory,” he said, pointing to a red-and-white prefabricated shed on the left.  “It’s owned by the Chinese but employs local workers.  They don’t need much skill for the job.  They can learn it in few days.”
            A little further up the road he pointed to a blue-and-white office complex: “That’s a pharmaceutical plant.  Most of the employees are Europeans but the products go to the local market.”
            Yikeber was clearly proud of these sights, as proud as any licensed tour guide waxing rhapsodic over Ethiopia’s ancient churches and historic ruins.  But this was Ethiopia’s present and future being touted, propelled by a torrent of foreign investment, a fact of life equally deserving of national pride.  It represented global confidence in the “New Africa,” and Yikeber was a fitting representative of this “New Ethiopia,” having worked on development projects all over the country.
            “We build just about anything,” he told me, “schools, health clinics, office buildings, residential.  That’s a garment factory,” he said, pointing to another industrial complex halfway up a hill on the right.
            Also lining the road were wood and steel skeletons that would eventually become houses and apartment buildings for young professionals like himself.  They would work for foreign bosses at the pharmaceutical plants and textile factories, but in so doing attain the previously unimaginable comforts of suburban life—Western style.   For Yikeber and others of his generation, it would mean an end to bunking with parents well into adulthood or cramming into overcrowded apartments in the city, the fate of many young professionals in the West.
            It was becoming clear: the road our minibus was trundling along wasn’t just the highway to Debre Zeyit but the path to Ethiopia’s future.  What we had left behind were remnants of the country’s difficult past and the morass of its present.  Off Meskali Square, the Museum of the Red Terror documented the horrific oppression under fiery communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose savage rule ran from 1974 to 1987.  Inside, several walls were covered with black-and-white photos of young Ethiopians, student age, who were executed or tortured to death by his regime.  At rallies Mengistu was fond of brandishing a glass jar filled with a red liquid he claimed was the blood of his enemies.  At night, throughout the Piazza district young prostitutes offered “quick marriages” to strolling tourists outside cheap bars that blasted African pop into dimly lit streets.  And then there were the vast slums in the surrounding hills and pockmarking neighborhoods, chock-a-block shanties of corrugated metal in narrow lanes that became rivers of waste during the seasonal rains.
            But Addis also showed signs of promise.  A sparkling Sheraton Hotel stood in the center of a neatly manicured concourse.  The Bole Road, leading to the international airport, was lined with half-finished construction projects, due to become upmarket housing and retail space for the city’s well-heeled expatriates and growing middle class.  For three years major thoroughfares had been torn up to lay track and build stations for a metro system, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, funded by the Export-Import Bank of China and contracted to the China Railway Group.  The city could also boast a thriving contemporary art scene, with many galleries and exhibition spaces for the growing number of talented painters and sculptors.  And for all its blemishes, Addis was reasonably safe as African capitals go, petty theft and pickpocketing the most common nuisances.  Even foreign women could walk the streets at night in all but the sketchiest neighborhoods.  A hundred meters from my hotel one night I spotted a European woman walking in the same direction.
            “That’s something you don’t see very often,” I said, “a single woman walking alone.”
            “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she replied in a soft Irish trill.
            But hyper development almost inevitably carries a dark side.  All around the city, slum dwellers were being cleared out of their shanties to be relocated to subsidized housing projects far from the center—and far from their livelihoods, schools, and health care facilities.
            All things Addis were now behind us.  We had arrived at Debre Zeyit’s main street, a dusty, traffic-clogged thoroughfare lined with shops, market stalls, and kiosks selling mobile phones and cheap clothing and electronic goods, in other words, the commercial traffic common in much of Africa and backbone of barebones economies everywhere.
We hopped out of the bus and were about to part when Yikeber offered to be my guide for the afternoon.  It was Saturday and he had the rest of the day free, he said, and it would give him great pleasure.  How could I refuse?  We climbed into the back of a bajaj, the three-wheeled taxi that passes for public transport in much of Ethiopia, and headed in the direction of Lake Kuriftu, just beyond the center of town.
            Debre Zeyit may be the gateway to Lake Kuriftu but it is also a military town, home to a large air base where Yikeber told me his father had served as a colonel.  The decades-long war with Eretria provided a steady flow of military personnel through the city, which provided a steady flow of cash to keep its economy afloat, but in recent years tourism had emerged as a growth industry.  A string of resort hotels had sprung up along Lake Kuriftu, and more were being built.
Our bajaji dropped us off at the Kuriftu Hotel and Resort, Debre Zeyit’s top-end “bed away from Addis.”  Curious what a room in a luxury getaway in Ethiopia went for, I coaxed Yikeber into the lobby and up to the check-in desk.  The concierge was as snappily dressed as any on Park Avenue, and greeted us with the same practiced cheer and deference.  He then produced a rate sheet that listed the cheapest single room at $136 per night.  I didn’t know whether or not to be surprised.  The charge was moderate by Western standards, but a whopping sum far beyond the wildest imaginings of all but the thinnest strata of the Ethiopia’s upper crust.  However, the concierge informed us, we could enjoy all the facilities—the pool, sauna, and restaurants, café, beach, gym, and massage room (massage not included)—for a daily rate of $25.
            Acting as gracious host, Yikeber asked if I was itching to indulge.  I was a Westerner after all, and weren’t Westerners flush with cash and forever treating themselves to creature comforts, especially on vacation?  But I wasn’t interested in a workout or a plunge in the pool, so we left the polished lobby to stroll along a trail that led beyond the grounds of the Kuriftu, and returned to the everyday world of rural Ethiopia.  Broad, flat fields stretched on to a row of hills that lined the horizon, and a pair of little boys tended a herd of cows that had gathered around a giant eucalyptus tree, whacking their hind quarters with rickety sticks whenever they got out of line, or whenever the boys wanted to assert a sense of purpose, and importance, in a role that was otherwise meaningless, except for the sense of purpose and importance it gave them.
            Since leaving the hotel I’d been nursing a delicate question, and thought it’s time had come.  I asked Yikeber if there were there enough Ethiopians in the entire country to fill hotel rooms that cost almost half a year’s average wage?
            “No,” Yikeber admitted.  “Most people only come for the day, to get out of the city on the weekend.  The rooms are mainly for foreigners.”
            A little beyond the Kuriftu, also fronting the lake, another resort hotel was being built and appeared almost ready for business.  The façade had been completed, the glass balcony doors installed, and workers were putting finishing touches on the exterior trim.  Like the Kuriftu, it had a dock to tie up rowboats and Jet-Skis that could be rented by the hour.  Whether they stayed a day or a week, for weekenders from Addis a day trip to Lake Kuriftu wasn’t merely an opportunity for a little fun in the sun.  It was a peek into the future, of a country that was struggling to carve off the barnacles of its past, but there wasn’t a lot of headwind to propel the ship of state forward, the crew had little navigational experience, and choppy waters always lay ahead.
            Nevertheless, Yikeber was an unabashed, unapologetic optimist.  He had great faith in the emerging Ethiopia, and as one of the country’s newly minted professionals he had every reason to be, even if his wages still far fell short of his hopes.  The Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam, almost 10 years in the making, would reduce the annual flooding of the Blue Nile and deliver hydroelectric power to a nation of 100 million—even if it rankled downstream countries like Egypt, which also depended on the river for the same.  In 2019, the country’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in bringing Ethiopia’s decades-long conflict with neighboring Eritrea to a virtual halt.  Anywhere else such a distinction would have sent national pride soaring, but in Ethiopia protests erupted, with accusations that Ali had turned authoritarian, stirring dark memories of former leaders, and fallen short in delivering benefits to all Ethiopians.  In a fit of pique, Egypt even threatened war if its needs were not met.
            “The main thing we have to do is bring up the level of education,” he continued as we strolled under a burning sun.  “The government knows this.  It has set a goal of attaining one hundred percent enrollment in seven years.”
            This sounded impressive, and not mere delusion.  In the remotest parts of the countryside it wasn’t unusual to see young children lugging firewood and five-liter plastic water jugs, but spotting a foreigner they would squeal, “Pen!  Pen!  Pen!” hoping to dash off with a prize more precious than a piece of penny candy or ragged bank note.
            “We now have half a million students in universities,” Yikeber continued, “and that’s only in the state universities.  If you add in the private universities you have another hundred thousand.”
            I didn’t want to burst Yikeber’s bubble, since he was intent on getting as much mileage out of the education promise as possible, and his vision was much more than a pipedream.   In the central village of Lalibela I had the opportunity to tour a high school, guided by two students I had met in the center of town.  The classrooms were overcrowded and ramshackle, but the eyes of the students were fixed on a teacher lecturing before a well-worn chalkboard. 
Back in Addis one afternoon I wandered into the courtyard of the state university while searching for the entrance to Ethiopia’s national museum.  Students were lolling about between classes like students would at any institution of higher learning, but others were immersed in textbooks to catch up on required reading.  Ethiopia had 15 universities, and its national university had set up satellite campuses in several cities to make higher education more accessible.  Still, a sober question remained: were there jobs for all of the graduates?  And could the country keep them?  Many of Ethiopia’s best and brightest were being siphoned off by European companies offering dazzling salaries—by Ethiopian standards—and their weak bargaining power made them much easier pickings than the choosier native born.
One night at the Yenshi Coffee Shop in the Piazza district of Addis I met three young professionals working in Germany.  Stuttgart, Munich, and Hamburg were equally represented.  All of the young men were back for their annual holiday visit.  All would be returning when the month was over.  None were planning to ever return to Ethiopia.
            I tried to look at the glass half full: with all the building going on in the city, weren’t there plenty of jobs for engineers, architects, construction firms?  A new rail line connecting Addis to the ports in Djibouti had been completed, reducing the travel time to ship goods for export from two to three days to 10 hours.  Previously state-owned industries like energy, communications, and aviation had been turned over to private interests.  In a country of 100 million, wasn’t this only the beginning?
            Now even perennially optimistic Yikeber was a little downbeat: “The problem is investment.  Projects start and stop, and then sometimes the money, well—it disappears.  A few years ago the finance minister was caught with a million dollars in cash in his house—the finance minister!”
            We were now back at the hotel, and Yikeber phoned our bajaj driver for a pickup.   We waited in the shade of the driveway trees, and Yikeber assured me there was no question he would come back: we hadn’t paid him, a guaranteed five-dollar fare was well worth the 10-minute drive from the center of town.
“Sure, there are pessimists,” Yikeber went on.  “They say it will always be this way.  People who have opportunities outside the country will leave.  Half the money that comes in will keep going into people’s pockets.  They don’t think things can change.”
            In the driveway of the Lake Kuriftu Hotel and Resort there was evidence to back up Yikeber’s claims.  Few of the cars were owned by middle-class weekenders out spending their newfound “wealth.”  Two bore blue-and-white U.N. license plates, while others were part of the diplomatic fleets from several of the capital’s foreign embassies.  It was a simple survey, and a random one, but the results were far from promising: few of the benefits of any trickle-down theory had reached the Kuriftu Hotel and Resort.
            “There is another way,” Yikeber went on.  “The pessimists are right in this respect—the top-down approach doesn’t work.  Too much money disappears into people’s pockets.  Wealth has to be generated from the bottom up.”
            “You sound like a policy wonk from the World Bank.”
            “Wonky or not, it’s true.”
            “You mean—?”
            “Microfinancing.”
            On cue, our bajaj driver swung into the driveway.  But the Pandora’s box our conversation had opened couldn’t be closed.  In Ethiopia and other parts of the third world, “microfinancing” had become more than a buzzword.  It was the beacon that would light up hamstrung economies, and Yikeber was intent on showing me the wonky term in action.  He led me up the main thoroughfare to a Ping-Pong table set up under a thicket of trees.  Young men were whacking the white plastic ball across the tiny net, as they had been doing for hours on a listless Saturday afternoon.  It looked like a scene of weekend idleness, but no, Yikeber assured me, this was grass-roots entrepreneurship, Ethiopian style.
            “Someone owns the table,” he explained.  “They rent it out and the players pay to use it, a fixed price per game.”
            How much prosperity could be generated from pickup Ping-Pong matches on weekend afternoons was dubious to say the least, but in Ethiopia’s grass roots economy the soil was not very fertile and yielded what it could.  This was an ironic contrast to the countryside, which was green and lush and glowed with promise—but in both cases the roots ran deep.
            I told Yikeber about my flight from Dubai: that perhaps 90 percent of the passengers were women, and almost all of the men were foreign tourists.  In the departure lounge it was clear that virtually all of the women were working in the Gulf as housemaids and in other forms of domestic servitude.  Even though Ethiopia is less than half Muslim the majority of the women were wearing Islamic headscarves, because Muslim housemaids were preferred by Gulf employers.  What was most striking was amount of luggage many had pushed toward the check-in desk—trolleys piled with five and six extra-large bags, each one cavernous enough to ship gifts and goods for an entire family. 
            “Before they return they shop for all of their family and friends,” Yikeber explained, “and with the money they earn many of them come back and start small businesses.  They partner with family members or friends, or invest it.  Very few of them are uneducated girls from the countryside.  They have educations, but they can earn more working as maids in the Gulf than anything they can do here, so they go for a few years, save their money and come back.”
            Now we were sitting on the second-floor terrace of one of Debre Zeyit’s fancier hotels, drinking Bedele beers and watching the action on the street below.  Another sign of Ethiopia’s new economy was in view all around us: several customers were making use of the hotel’s wi-fi to surf the Internet on laptop computers worth an average year’s salary.  But the scene raised questions of the trickle-down theory’s effectiveness: only the middle class could gather on a hotel terrace to sip beer and surf the Internet.
            Our drinks finished, Yikeber walked me up the street to the spot where I could catch a minibus back to Addis.  On the way we stopped at a local market.   I wanted to pick up something to snack on for the hour-and-a-half ride, but also see what was for sale in this semi-prosperous city.  The shelves were disappointing.  Almost everything was bundled in large bulk packaging, wrapped in simple plastic with minimal labeling, and in the distinctive Ethiopian alphabet.  There were tubes of Colgate toothpaste, small boxes of laundry detergent, and plastic bottles of dish soap, but everything else had come directly from wholesalers to the shop, bypassing the middlemen who would have only driven up costs.  Individual packages of nuts or potato chips, especially of an imported brand, were beyond the reach of the average Ethiopian, even in Debre Zeyit.
            My stomach rumbled a bit on the way back to the city, but a far better dinner awaited me than most Ethiopians would enjoy that night.  I had been to many poor countries, in Africa and elsewhere, and there were always small corner kiosks where the locals could buy cheap snacks, candy bars, and cigarettes.  The products were rarely international brands, yet they offered locals the simple luxury of a snack in the middle of the day, and a local label, rather than an international brand, glowed as a symbol of national pride, even on a bag of potato chips.  In Addis, the absence of these simple treats indicated a far deeper level of poverty.  Call it poverty squared.  It was like the trash, or absence of it, all over the city, and Debre Zeyit was no exception.  There was very little trash because nothing was thrown away, because nothing could afford to be thrown away.  It was as simple as that, yet it yielded a dark irony: the poorer the country, the cleaner the streets.
            When we reached the edge of the city four young women got onboard, chicly made up for a night on the town, no doubt on an Ethiopian budget—the price of the entire night the same as that of a single drink in a Soho nightclub.  As we lurched through the traffic they immersed themselves in their mobile phones, texting and chatting with abandon, just like club-hoppers in London’s Soho.  For the “New Ethiopia” this was the Soho lifestyle brought home, or at least an imaginary substitute.
            The next day Ethiopia faced off against African powerhouse Nigeria in a World Cup qualifying match.  Outside the stadium near Meskali Square fans had gathered shortly after sunrise for a chance at a steeply priced $4 ticket.  Hours before the coin toss, the stadium parking lot was still crammed with young men hankering for a ticket.  I watched on the terrace of my hotel, within a thicket of guests and locals gathered in front of a wide-screen TV.  Ethiopia “scored” the first goal, sending the terrace fans into a frenzy—but it was denied by a referee who ruled that the ball had not crossed the goal line before it was batted away by a defender.  Replays from several angles, however, showed otherwise.  Nigeria would score twice as the match progressed, and Ethiopia lost, 2–1.
            The defeat was sadly emblematic of the Ethiopian condition: “victory” was ever palpable, but the route to it was littered with miscues of fate that could deny it at any moment.  The world was not level playing field, and never would be.