Anita and Christopher

Santiago

In June 1980, I went back to Santiago and decided to stay a while and spend some time with Anita before heading back home to Canada. Martin and Eugene offered me a room with them. I had one of the four rooms facing an inner courtyard garden. I saw Anita frequently and found her very intelligent, playful and creative. She was a great cook, liked nature, a great lover and we became best friends very quickly. It did not take very long before we fell in love. We did a lot of hiking, and the more we got to know each other, the more we wanted to stay together. We planned to save up some money and travel to India in a few years. lt was all like a dream come true. 

Anita had many friends and we were invited to many places. We hitch hiked and found ourselves exploring the rich area around Santiago. Nearby to the west is the Pacific with some of the nicest beaches I have ever seen. We visited Pablo Neruda's beach house which was all boarded up. Nearby to the east is the Andes with some of the nicest glacier covered peaks I have ever seen.

I always wanted to be a teacher, so I thought I would give it a try and worked a while for an English language institute. I moved into her small apartment that was more of a studio or garage than an apartment. It was decorated with handmade art that Anita and her patients made. She introduced me to her family and friends. She came from a broken up rich family.

 

Her wealthy mother had 13 Pekinese dogs and lived in a big house in a rich neighborhood.

Her poor father lived in a small apartment in the poor neighborhood selling stamps from a suitcase for a living. The neighbors complained that I should not be living there. The place was so small and we decided to look for a bigger apartment.

Home

In September I found an old one-bedroom apartment with a huge backyard with grapes, a pine tree and beautiful plants. It was two blocks from the Rio Talveras Metro station at the corner of a huge public park. The metro made me feel at home as it is the same as the one in Montreal, and Mexico City. As the Metro ran right thru the rich neighborhoods, it was an ideal location to give private English lessons. We were able to do whatever we wanted to the apartment as it was missing a proper kitchen and a proper bathroom with a shower. For Anita, the apartment was too primitive but I knew that I could put it in a shape that she could accept. So I moved in alone and went to work to renovate it.

Our water supply was very unreliable, so I built a sauna, and a fishpond to jump into. I fixed up the kitchen with shelves and sink and cut out a window to face the sunny courtyard. I was allowed to do anything I wanted so I tore out the adobe walls and put in a door opening our bedroom to the courtyard and the kitchen.

I covered our new bedroom door by a curtain made of a carpet that kept the cold out and the warmth in. I got to work with every material from wood to cement. I put in a sink and a shower with plastic garden hose for the plumbing. There was an extension of the roof into the garden leading to the kitchen and the bathroom. I covered the rough earth floor with carpets and floor mats out of flat pieces of wood which I connected by rope to form walkways that followed the contours of the ground. They also isolated the cold earth so we could walk bare feet to the bathroom. I built a table and benches, hung up my hammock, and made a nice semi indoor living room. I furnished the kitchen with shelves and a sink and ran plastic hoses to provide running water for the kitchen and the shower. And just as I was finishing, my visa expired and I had to leave Chile to renew it.

Brazil and Bolivia

Almost a year since traveling and meeting Anita, it was great to hit the road again. I packed up my backpack, and hitched a ride from a brand new Mercedes Benz all the way to Iguazu Falls, the Niagara Falls of South America, on the border of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

Although only 1/4 of the size of Niagara Falls, it is much more spread out, and much more impressive. It was overgrown with all different flowers and butterflies. I went to Rio de Jeniero, just to see the famous Sugarloaf Mountain with the Christ statue. I went up there and was very impressed. I was also impressed by the long beaches at Inpanema and Cocacabana with the beautiful ladies in bikinis.

I wanted to see the Bahia and went up the coast and flew to Brasilia. I had the feeling I was in Huxley's a Brave New World. With everyone living in identical blocks laid out in straight lines. I bought an electric shower head with a built-in water heating element that was not able in Chile. That in itself made the trip worth it, as we had no hot water in our house. 

I went to Cochabamba in Bolivia to try to visit the missionary church worker who took care of us in Austria when I was 7 years old. He was the one who taught me my very first song in English called “Kumbaya my Lord”. I had the address of his mission and was determined to give it my best to find him. He was away preaching in some remote village. I almost wanted to go after him, but I was missing Anita too much and I was anxious to finish our new home and try out the new electric hot water shower head I bought.

The trip back was very memorable - on a slow moving train packed with people, animals and luggage. The people were sprawled over their luggage on the floor, and I hung up my hammock above the people spread out below on the seats and floor. 

Back Home

I arrived back home to find Anita already moved in with a new kitty cat named Motta. Our first summer was well under way and I could hardly recognize the place, as our garden was green with new grown plants I never planted and the grapes were growing. I put in the electric shower and fixed up a reservoir tank on the roof as the water supply was very intermittent and with very low pressure. I had a huge covered plastic barrel that I put in all our composting waste. It eventually turned to a slushy mush that I buried in pits I dug. Within a year, the sludge I buried turned into a metallic smelling dark black earth teaming with all kinds of life. 

Our neighbors were an 80-year-old couple. They listened to a radio program playing Tango all day. Each Sunday they made empanadas and they had such a good reputation for their specialty that people from near and far lined up to buy them. I once saw him making it and it seemed like he was a sculptor forming each till they were perfect. They keep us informed of the latest gossips and they seem to like us very much. I was so much in love and so happy. The red and green grapes became ripe for eating and they were sweet and delicious. We had all kinds of plants. One grew 5 cm a day and climbed all the way up to the roof and had flowers that closed for the night.

David, the taxi driver who took me in to live with him a few years ago was able to finally go to Canada, and he left me with some very nice friends. One of them was Miguel who played the guitar very well and came over regularly and we played music together all night long. Jose, Anita's close friend, worked as a teacher in his father's private school for secretaries, and we became very good friends. We would spend hours talking and philosophizing about politics and religion. Cynthia was a Canadian girl married to a Chilean who came to Chile to get to know her husband better. She wanted to experience Chile, get to know his family, and learn the language and the way people think. Anita got to be very close to her and they were like sisters. She was staying with her in-laws nearby. She was not enjoying it there, so Anita invited her to stay with us. Jose and Cynthia were both convinced that they were going to save the world, and it was crazy times with lots of late night talks.

I hung a picture of Pinochet, the brutal Chilean dictator, on my adobe wall that shocked all of my friends at first. I felt that if any police or inspectors come for a visit, they might feel more at home. My friends laughed when I explained that the wall was teaming with lice and that it was the appropriate place for Pinochet. 

There were also a lot of house flies. One day a sales man knocked on the door and wanted to sell me a product that he proudly claimed killed house flies almost instantly. I told him that I had house cats as well as house flies and that I did not want to use any poison in the house. He told me that the product he was selling to kill flies was made from a mixture of herbs and that it was even safe to drink and not at all toxic for house pets. He showed me a bottle and filled a cup half full and gulped it down as if he had been doing it many times. Then he asked me for a plate and poured a bit of the liquid on it and set it on the table. The liquid attracted the houseflies like it was shit. Within less than a minute, the plate was covered by houseflies drinking from it. Shortly I started to see the flies flying around the plate dropping on the ground like they were airplane which had been shot down. I thought at first that they were drunk the way they flew around in a circle before crashing to the ground. He assured me again by taking another swig of the liquid that should my cats eat the fallen flies, they would not be poisoned.

One day Anita and I saw an animal in our neighborhood that shocked us. At first we did not know what it was. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a cat which had lost most of its fur. To make him look even stranger, he was just a bag of skin and bones. We inquired about it and it turned out that it was an abandoned cat whom everyone avoided because they were afraid it had some transmittable disease which would infect their own house cats, so we called her Biafra and I made a quarantine cage and hung it high so that it looked like it was a bird cage. We fed it the same food that we fed our cats - pieces of liver mixed in raw oatmeal soaked in liver blood. He also seemed to enjoy milk just like our cats did. We could hardly believe our eyes when we saw fresh fur starting to grow a few days later. Within a month, all his fur had grown back giving him one of the most beautiful and healthy looking coats I have ever seen on a cat. 

We had three cats that were the best of friends. Lucho, the black and white Latino was full of emotion and warmth. Motta was rusty and every other way opposite to Lucho. Biafra, an albino cat with one green and one blue eye. In the night, the blue one shined red. The 3 cats soon made best of friends.

I built a solar water heater on the roof. I used a black garden hose, a Styrofoam sheet and some plastic. I rolled the black hose flat above the 3 meter diameter Styrofoam sheet. A few months later some soldiers dressed in military uniforms visited me from the military base nearby to check it out. Smiling at the Pinochet picture I had hanging on my wall, they confided that my solar heater caused quite a stir. From the air it looked like a satellite dish.

We painted the bedroom white and red, depicting a panorama of the Canadian Rockies and the Chilean Andes on opposite walls. We made a big barbecue pit in our backyard. Anita and I collected plants and seeds from most of the places we went, and in our second summer, we had all kinds of strange and interesting plants growing in our garden.

Anita and I planned to work a while and travel as far as Japan. Then we planned to settle down and have a family. We planned to raise our children in the country. Anita wanted to set up a cafe or teashop where she could cook and sell German pastry. I wanted to teach English. I went to rich neighborhoods and got enough clients to offer private English language courses. 

English Classes

By March 1981, I had my first group of students, a family with 2 kids, and I enjoyed going to their house each week on my motorcycle. I started offering English classes to waiters and waitresses. I got a contract at one of the top brothels, called Maxim, and Anita decided to help me. She took the men waiters and I took the lady prostitutes. I taught the basic phrases to negotiate with their English speaking customers. I also taught them phrases that their customers would like to hear them say. Anita also enjoyed teaching the waiters basic English needed to describe the menu. It was great fun and we both enjoyed it. My courses increased and I had a wide variety of students from a 10-year-old boy, to a pilot, a doctor, a psychologist and her engineer husband.

I enjoyed my life very much, and was very happy. We planned to marry and return to Canada in a few years to save enough money to travel a while and then to buy a plot of land in the touristic south of Chile and build a small hotel for backpackers. Then we planned to raise a family.

We decided to get married. The wedding and the days and nights preparing for it were one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

Wedding

We invited 50 guests and planned to have our party outside in the country. But at the last moment, we had to make other arrangements. When I suggested having it at our one bedroom home, Anita thought I was crazy. Even Jose our crazy friend thought it was crazy to have our buffet not only in our bed room, but on our bed. It was too late to find anything else, and to my delight, Anita agreed to give it a try.

I made our big bed into the buffet table. 

Our entrance room served as our bar. 

I made benches along the walls in our two rooms in a snake like fashion following the walls, but could only fit 25. So I had to follow the outside walls, and I extended the bench right around our garden. I cut and varnished 50 large wooden breadboards for each guest as a lap table. With our young unconventional friends and Anita's very conventional family crowded in our very unconventional house. It was very interesting. Cynthia took care of the hosting, Jose took care of the barbecue and photography, and Miguel took care of the music. One of Anita's friends invited a magician to perform, and Miguel invited the band he plays with to play Chilean, Peruvian, and Bolivian music from the Andes.

We all had a really great time and many guests stayed till morning, especially the young ones.

By the start of 1982, my English lessons increased and I added more kids, a doctor, an economist, an artist, a teacher, a secretary, an audiologist and a telephone operator. I wanted to buy some cross-country skis, and I was not able to find any. I went to the hiking and climbing clubs to look for some and found that the sport was practically unknown in Chile. One of the clubs asked me to do a cross-country skiing course for the following winter, so I was very busy pursuing that. I bought a motorbike, and used it to go and give English lessons in rich neighborhoods. I would go door to door and present myself.

Then I nearly broke my toe and was left limping around. I got hepatitis that put me in bed for a month. I was able to relax and read and just do nothing. I had visitors come by and it was rather nice. One of my students was a chief gynecologist in the hospital, and she told me that there was a chronic outbreak of hepatitis in Santiago, as the city dumps its raw sewage including human waste into the river unprocessed to fertilize the lettuce farms down river. She also told me that in Santiago, a cesarean is standard procedure, and unless the mother requests for a natural birth, they just cut the baby out, for expedience.

One day Jose told me that he was amazed to find answers to any question by randomly opening up and pointing to a place on the page of a very big dictionary he found. He told me that as he was playing with it and asking it questions, it reveled to him that he was the anti-Christ prophesied in the bible. He asked me to try it to see if it would work with me, and I was amazed that my questions were answered in a meaningful and relevant way just by randomly choosing a word in a dictionary. Gradually he got more and more into it and we saw him less and less. Then Cynthia had to return back to Canada, and it was suddenly all so quiet.

Long term plans

Anita got pregnant. We talked about it and decided to keep the baby. We had no phone as the phone lines cost the price of an expensive car, and there was a 2 year waiting list. Anita's family was very concerned and suggested that we move into the printing press that Anita's brother-in-law Mundi ran. Anita agreed with them, so I reluctantly and sadly left the little private paradise I had built for us. We moved into the printing press sharing the kitchen and bathroom facilities with Mundi and his 5 workers. One worker built wooden airplane models. He was in Hungary in the times of Allende, where they had an exchange program with Hungary under the communist banner. We had a big beautiful high ceiling room with huge windows that reminded me of a museum.

I spent time looking into the possibilities of implementing our dreams of opening a hostel with a tearoom. I went south to look for the ideal location. I found an ideal spot. It was on the road going up to a ski lift in one of the most popular places in Chile for tourists.

It was near Lake Villarica about 800km from Santiago at the start of the lake region in the south. The area is known worldwide for its beautiful lakes dotted with volcanoes. There is a 10km road from Lake Villarica to the entrance of the National Park surrounding the volcano, which stays snow-covered all year. There is nothing on the road except a few cabins. I got to speak with the Park wardens, and got all the visitor statistics. There were 20,000 visitors every year going to the park and to the ski lifts a few km inside the park. This was mostly during 3 months in winter and 3 months in summer. There was enough snow to cross country ski year round. If I started cross-country skiing, I would have been the first one in Chile. I felt like a pioneer with unlimited possibilities ahead. I envisioned a sauna and offering skiers a sauna with a nice meal and music.

I was surprised by how cheap the land was and bought a small token parcel 1km from the Park entrance large enough to put a Kiosk for selling film and coke for the tourists going up to the National Park. The scenery from my spot was breath taking, looking down to the Lake in one direction, and up to the volcano in the other. I fell in love with the place, its potentials and possibilities. I met a couple with a 9 months old daughter and got to be very good friends with them. They were planning to settle in the area and planned to introduce wind surfing to Chile. They already started and were very hopeful their business would grow. They invited me to stay with them and we decided to help each other in our projects.

It was a 10 hour drive from Santiago and I drove my motorbike up every week. I gathered the many chunks of volcanic rocks littering the area for building the foundation. There was an impressive 100 m deep 30m wide canyon nearby that I thought would be a great tourist attraction. I envisioned a suspension bridge for walking over and for bungee jumping. There was a power line and phone lines going up to the National Park. There were excellent hiking facilities. I imagined building a cheap clean and comfortable youth hostel for backpackers with facilities to buy and trade books, and to have an entertainment room with a good sound system and the tea room that Anita dreamt about.

There was a small ski rental shop at a ski hill. I envisioned introducing and renting cross-country skis and giving cross country skiing lessons. Many of the rich from Santiago had summer cottages down south and I envisioned setting up a language school for their kids. My imagination soared. I envisioned a honeymooners resort with water beds and cabins wired for entertainment and courses for the honeymooners. I was over flowing with ideas and dreams. I went to lumber yards for quotes. Before digging, I had to get a permit to build and construction plans signed by an architect. One of my English students was an architect, and he drew out and signed the necessary plans for a 12m by 12m house, and I was able to start to dig the foundations.

I planned to have an open house on Chile's national birthday, with music, dancing, and a big grill. I started looking for a bus service and was digging the foundations when Anita started complaining of having triple vision. I drove all night and returned to find Anita very sedated. We thought it was due to her pregnancy. When her symptoms worsened, we went to the hospital, and there they diagnosed her with a terminal brain cancer. The doctors gave her only a year or so to live and their main concern was to save the baby.

They told me that it was no point in telling her and that she would in short time be unable to dress and eat. Then sent us home. I was left in denial not believing them. Anita stayed at home and deteriorated daily. I gave her daily injections and she was very hopeful that everything would turn out OK. She was very thankful to have the baby and she made me promise to take care of it at times she could not herself. She showed more and more often phases of apathy and was sometimes like a vegetable. Then I realized why she was so lethargic a few months before, and I wish I’d had more patience and understanding then. My love for her suddenly increased and it was so nice to be able to take care of her all day.

Anita suffered a seizure just before she was expecting her labor pains. It was a hot summer day and I had only my underwear on. Mundi had his van and like an ambulance, we raced her to the hospital. When the doctors picked her up in a stretcher Mundi drove off leaving me there in my underwear. After the chaos subsided, I realized that I was in my underwear, and the nurses gave me a sheet to cover myself. It was decided that they would get the baby out later in the evening by cesarean. When it was time for me to go home to get my clothes, the taxi drivers refused to take me without doctor's authorization. They must have thought I was a psychiatric patient trying to escape the hospital. 

When I returned later that evening for the birth of our daughter Christina Stephanie we all had a very big surprise. Contrary to the many ultrasounds, the baby girl turned out to be a baby boy. So we called him Cristobal Estefan. He was born with reddish hair at birth with his hair randomly growing in every direction. He had an excellent appetite and food always made him happy. He could make a sucking sound louder than I could. Sometime he made them when he was asleep after a bottle and would startle himself awake.

The hospital set me up with a milk donor. I was happy to have a motor cycle so that I could drive to pick up Chris's milk each day. I stopped giving English lessons, and Anita came home a few weeks later. Poor Anita was taking so many drugs that she was drugged all the time. She was totally helpless and unaware of Christopher and me. Anita had a second seizure and died a few days later. The funeral was arranged by Anita's family. They picked me up and in the middle of the drive Christopher had a big shit. We were in the back and I remember changing him in the car as we were driving to the church. I had cloth diapers that were knitted to be very stretchable, absorbent, and easy to clean. 

In March of 1983, I received an unannounced visit from a social worker who showed me papers that gave her the right to take Christopher away if she thought that he was in danger by remaining with me. She informed me that Anita's mother was claiming custody rights to Christopher. The social worker was very sympathetic and honest with me. She advised that in her professional opinion if I wanted to keep Christopher I would have to leave the country. She convinced me that it would be a very unlikely precedence if I were allowed to keep Christopher in my situation and under the Chilean culture where widow fathers give their babies and young children to relatives. I had to face the court in one week.

To go back to Canada, I needed all my and Christopher's papers in order and our plane ticket. Unfortunately, all my Chilean papers were out dated including my Canadian passport. The next 5 days I was shuffled helplessly from office to office. I had Christopher slung in a baby carrying blanket like a necklace. It got me special attention and sympathy, but had I missed one bus, or had one of the tired secretaries asked me to come back the next day, then I would not have been able to fly back to Canada in time to avoid facing the courts. I felt the strong presence of good luck constantly over my shoulders. Before the week was up, I had my renewed residency that I needed for Christopher's papers and for Anita's death certificate, all of which I needed for my renewed Canadian passport, and Christopher's brand new passport. It was all very complicated and without the angels guiding me. I could not have done it. My mother sent me a money order when Christopher was born, and that turned out to cover exactly what the plane ticket cost.

My last evening when I was ready to go to the airport and wondering how to go out for a taxi without causing suspicion that I was fleeing the country with Christopher, a friend I have not seen or talked to for a year or more suddenly turned up to show me the car he just bought. When I told him that I was just about to call a taxi to take me to the airport, he offered to take me to the airport. Jose who I have not seen as well for a few months showed up at the same time.

I filled my backpack full and all of us headed to the airport, as if going out for a party. At the airport, we had our last bit of chat before I had to board. For a while the customs official refused to let us on the plane. He claimed Christopher needed authorization from the mother’s family. I was ready for this and had a backup plan if I couldn't fly out of the country. In that case I would take a bus up near the border of Argentina and walk across at night. He looked at us with pity, and as if bewitched, he waved us thru to board the plane. I of course got special attention during the flight, and everyone was so amazed at what a beautiful gentle baby I had. That evening I really felt the presence of my angels. 

Canada

Ellie picked us up at the airport. My mother had quit her job as Head Nurse in Montreal to move in with Ellie and Shah to take care of Adam. One positive side to her move was that she got rid of the migraine headaches she used to have. In Montreal, her stable diet was largely rye bread with cottage cheese and marmalade wich she ate daily when she came home at midnight from work. After she moved to Ellie, she stopped eating her rye bread. But because she loved it so much, she occasionally bought some for herself. It is then that she noticed that rye was causing her migraines. My mother and Shah did not get along very well and quietly ignored each other while loudly criticized each other to Ellie, who was stuck in the middle of all the resentment. My mother had a private room in the house but had to share the kitchen and the bathroom. I suggested that she move out to an apartment nearby which she eventually did. Adam ended up spending most of his time with my mother. 

I went to the welfare agency and was one of the first single fathers to get on single mother's allowance. It allowed me to stay at home and take care of Christopher. I called Dianne, a friend I kept in contact with from Carlton Place. She had separated from her husband Brian who remarried and was living near Killaloe. I went up to see the place and met Brian and his new wife Martha whom he affectionately called Mufffy. While she is very short, Brian is very tall, making them a funny looking pair, reminding me of the famous painting of the conservative American farmer couple holding a pitchfork.

Brian and Muffy had very high goals, planning to do organic farming, and setting up some kind of halfway home for rehabilitating prisoners just released from jail. I decided to stay, and bought a goat to have fresh goat milk for Christopher. I spent some time out in the garden helping Brian, but most of my time I spent with Christopher and helped Martha in the house. They had a young son Aaron and the atmosphere was very nice. It was a very big farmhouse and Dianne moved in soon after as well as another family with 2 children who stayed for a while. It was communal living and I enjoyed having people always around. Brian was very religious.

My mother came up for a few days and found him very fanatical. She was very much afraid of him. He was very suspicious of the local authorities and wanted me to get off the mother's allowance I was getting. I refused and it caused some tension. The church group gave me a social outlet and I met some very nice interesting people there. Many lived in back road remote areas nearby. I made many good friends thru the church group that I participated in. But I was physically very isolated. Going to the closest store in Killaloe was a 3-hour walk.

A few months later I moved into my very own sunny 3-bedroom apartment above a hair salon in Killaloe. Chris had a great time with the moving, going in and out of all the boxes and exploring the new house. I made beds and tables using the doors of the bedrooms. We had a fire-burning stove down in the basement, filled with cut wood needed for the cold winters. There was a huge backyard with a big high tree and even a chicken coup. It was right on the Canadian Shield, the bed of rock covering most of Canada. My backyard was an exposed part of it that made it a geologist’s paradise. The water was unfortunately very bad and I had to get all drinking water from a nearby well. I drank a lot of apple juice. I had fresh milk delivered to my door and made my own butter and cottage cheese and yogurt. I kept busy at home making tofu, sprouts and bread. I worked slowly a little each day and gradually me and Christopher found ourselves with 2 cats, and a very smooth life rhythm. We attended the church group of young families every Sunday.

Chris was beautiful and attracted lots of people as he smiled at everyone. I was very lonely and longed for adult companionship, but Christopher kept me very busy and very happy. Before he could walk, he used to crawl out of his bed in the morning to the side of my bed and walk towards me holding on to the bed. When I showed surprise at his accomplishment he would gleam with such delight and pride that he would losses his balance and fall. He just had his first upper teeth coming out and it didn't seem to bother him at all. He understands "NO", but doesn't know how long it should last. The winter was very cold and we stayed mostly indoors. To keep things from Christopher's curious hands, I made a shelf that snaked along the walls of the 4 rooms going in and out until it surrounded the entire apartment. 

In April 1984 Christopher said his first word by pointing to the bananas in the market and saying "NaNa". And soon after it was "Ba" for bottle. He refused to walk and giggled and made his legs limp whenever I tried to stand him up to walk. 

The very first computers for consumers that was not a kit to assemble but ready to use became available. It was called Timex Sinclair 1000 and cost under 100 $. It was the size of a book with a miniature key board and it was ready to use from the box. I bought a printer that printed from a roll of heat sensitive paper. An ordinary TV was used as a monitor and a cassette player was used for the memory. I entered nutritional data from a book I had and wrote a programs that calculated the amount of nutrients in a meal. Then I wrote a program to print out the data in a bar graph form. What took me days to do before, I was able to do in a matter of a few hours. But writing the programs to do that took me a few months of working all night long. 

I bought a bike and we both enjoyed exploring the beautiful surroundings. We biked to the nearby beaches of the nearby lakes, and up thru the Indian Reserve to Jenifer's book store which was always left open.

I started an ambitious garden. I slowly met some people from the area. My mother knew a polish family that had a son named Jerzy who lived in the family summer cottage nearby. Jersy`s father was a renowned geographer who discovered and mapped the early Indian settlements in Canada. Jerzy was an archaeologist who claimed to have discovered artifacts in Arizona that proved Nefertiti, the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh, was once there. Jersy had a reputation to be a dirty old man constantly going after younger women.

It was amazing to watch Christopher grow. Soon he started to eat with a spoon and understand and remember most of what I told him. His curly hair with streaks of every color from platinum to red attracted many people who would take a second look and comment on it. He was very stubborn and independent, and for luck he was very good and dependable. We lived very close to the river where we took our inflatable raft and float 3 hours down to the lake. 

I hung a big truck tire up on a 10 meter high branch. It was so high and had such a wide and high swing that kids around the neighborhood all used it. I made a climbing structure for Chris in the closet of one of the rooms. That attracted more kids as well and Christopher had many friends to play with. By September, Chris was saying things like "shoe", "car" and "light". And soon after he learned how to use a chair to climb up to finally reach all those unreachable things on the shelves winding around the walls. One of the things he grabbed onto and liked to tug and play with were my ears. Every chance he had, he would tug at them. He soon began to call me “ears”.

By February 1985, Chris was putting on his own pants. He enjoyed his books and asked me to read to him every day. He spoke but did not finish his words, especially those that ended in "T". I got a sleigh and we skied down the river almost every day. My mother and sister invited us to join them on their holidays. Once when we went to Florida's Disney World, my sister arranged a rental car that I drove, and she navigated right from the airport to the parking lot for the thousands of cars. We had a great day at Disney World. When we wanted to return to our car, none of us knew where we parked it, nor what color and make it was. We were walking around the parking lot totally helplessly until Christopher recognized our rented car.

On our drive back, my mother kept on insisting that we fill up the car with gasoline, and I kept on postponing thinking the gas tank was not sufficiently empty enough. We ran out of gas but we were lucky to have some people stop to help. They drove me to a gas station and drove me back to our car with a can of gas enough to get us to a gas station. 

I got to know Peter and Marilyn's family who lived nearby and drove Christopher and me to their church gathering every Sunday. They agreed to be Christopher's godparents. Peter and Marilyn left South Africa because of the apartheid, and after being in South America doing church work, they came to settle down and start their family and life in Canada. 

I bought a motorcycle and made a foam child seat for Christopher. It was a covered roll of foam securely tied to the bike in the in the front. Christopher was tightly sandwiched between me and the foam. Suddenly we were mobile and made many visits to friends and excursions to Algonquin Park nearby. One day a policeman stopped me to check it out. The child carrier was not legally approved for use as it was missing the required feet supports for the passenger. Fortunately the kind and understanding policeman let me continue to use it. We had a great time visiting people, going to parties and visiting the Killaloe Music Festival. My mother was horrified that I was riding around on the motorcycle with Chris, so she bought me a small car with a proper child seat.

One day my mother told me she met a girl named Zanonia on the bus who was interested in meeting me. She lived near my mother and so I packed and went off to meet her. We went out and had a nice long evening. When I came back, in the middle of the night, I found Christopher waiting for me asleep like a puppy by the front door. We would meet whenever I went to visit my mother. 

Once I was with Zanonia at her house. We were helping to build a great big puzzle in the basement. There was one blue piece missing from the sky, and we looked and looked for it all over the room and all over Chris but could not find it. We left for our 5 hour long drive back home, Half way, when Christopher was asleep, I needed to pee and stopped on the side of the road. As I was peeing, the pee uncovered a puzzle in the sand with the color side down. To my amazement when I turned it around, it was blue. I kept the piece as a good luck charm in the car on the dash board. and just as mysteriously as it appeared, it disappeared. Zanonia came up to Killaloe,for a visit, and when she heard of my unbelievable story of the mysterious puzzle piece, She didn't believe me and she as well soon disappeared and I never saw her again.

By January 1986 Christopher was helping me around the house putting on his own boots and following me wherever I went. He even got rags to wipe his own spills on occasion. He made a lot of the same funny sounds and faces that Anita used to make. 

The car my mother bought me made a big difference in our lives and we ended driving to her and Ellie regularly about every 3 months. I drove up to Algonquin Park more often, and explored a bit of Gatineau Park in Quebec. The drive between the 2 parks was so scenic for me, that I envisioned how nice it would be to have a shuttle bus service from the airport in Ottawa to the two beautiful parks. I fantasized setting up a bus route from the airport and bus station in Ottawa to the campgrounds in Gatineau Park and Algonquin Park. I envisioned to give the tourists a memorable experience, just like the bus rides in Central America were for me.

I bought some gardening equipment and was able to quickly find some part time work as a gardener. The work increased and I bought a small trailer frame and made a yellow wooden box on for my gardening tools. I liked the work very much, the flexibility, and being outside making something nice. Christopher liked the change of being with other people. A young Swiss family living nearby took care of Christopher while I worked. Marlise became an instant millionaire when her family land was used to expand the airport next to their family farm. She was married to a musician who had a store selling musical equipment. They had three young children and decided to immigrate to Canada. 

They had a friend in Switzerland, Susanne, a single mother with two boys Christopher's age. They thought that we would make a good pair and they introduced us to each other. I wrote Susanne, invited her over and 3 months later, she arrived from Switzerland with Stefan and Florian.

I drove to New York to pick them up for their month long stay with us. We drove back to Killaloe camping along the way. On our first stop Florian threw all of Susanne's money into the Atlantic. We spent the rest of the day trying to find the bills washed on the beach. Unfortunately the current seemed to be going out to sea and it got dark and we had to give up and forget about recovering the money. We camped by a truck stop, and in the morning had a breakfast of all the pancakes and maple syrup you could eat. We ended up emptying the big maple syrup dispenser. 

We all got along like one big family. I spoke English with Susanne and the children were somehow able to communicate and played like they were brothers. Susanne was very loving and calm with the children. She sang them separate lullabies at bedtime. She bought $400 worth of second hand jewelry that she later was able to sell for $4,000. We lived and played like a family. I went to work as usual whenever I got jobs to do gardening. I was hired to cut the grass for the Killaloe Fair. We had such a great time together that it was sad to say goodbye We decided that we wanted to make a go of staying together. We planned that Christopher and I visit Switzerland for Christmas with the hopes of staying. 

Driving Susanne, Stefan and Florian back to the airport in New York, we took a wrong turn and almost missed the plane. We followed the sun instead of the highway, and when the south going highway turned momentarily north, we dutifully turned around, convinced that we were going the wrong way. By the time we corrected our mistake we were running out off time and out of gas. Susanne had to go very badly to the washroom, and poor little Stefan was car sick. Fortunately they ended up on the flight just in time.

Over the next months, Susanne and I wrote many letters to each other. I was so determined to be positive and make it work, I sold the little I had, packed as much as I could take with me and flew to Switzerland. Jersy found corners for the many of my belongings that suddenly found themselves homeless. After I visited my friends in Killaloe for the "last" time, Jersy drove us to New York. We drove all-night and got to the airport on time. I arrived like a bag lady, having most my things over flowing in a metal shopping cart. My skis, my books, even my popcorn machine that you could not buy in Switzerland. And before I knew it I was experiencing the nicest welcome in my life. Susanne picked me up at the train station. She drove us thru Bern. It was wonderful. When I saw the community garden huts, they reminded me of the houses in South America and I thought they were where the poor people in Switzerland were living.
NEXT: Susanne
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