In Honour of Father's Day: A Story About My Dad

Dad Cooks

“Jimmy, come quick, Dad’s cooking!”


“Dad’s cooking?” My brother knew something was up. Mom always did the cooking at our house.


“Yeah, come on, let’s watch him. He’s making french fries!”


We dashed into the house and sank down on the vinyl chairs around the arborite table. Dad stood in the middle of the kitchen, a tea towel tucked around his pants, like a chef. Holding a few potatoes in one hand, a paring knife in the other, he dropped them into the enamel sink and ran the cold water. After peeling them, he moved to a cutting board on the table and stood over the pile. Without saying a word, he began to slice the potatoes into layers and sliver them into long squared pieces, carefully dropping them into cold water as he worked. His rough fingers, plump like sausages, were more used to manual labour than food preparation. In the days before frozen supermarket fries, he amazed us by replicating what we’d only seen in restaurants.


In fact, Dad had worked as a short-order cook. In the 1930s, after riding the rails to New Brunswick and back to Manitoba, a sawmill foreman told him to “get a trade”, to make something of himself. When he first arrived in Toronto, he waitered occasionally at the Savarin Hotel while taking welding courses at night. One night, the owner of Hunt’s Restaurant offered him a training course and steady job at $7.00 a week. Dad accepted because welding jobs were still scarce. He worked for Hunt’s for 5 years, moving from a kitchen on Mount Pleasant Road, to another at St. Clair and Oakwood, and finally, to College and Dovercourt, increasing his pay by $1.00 a week with each move and advancing to manager. In those days, you could get Today’s Special, a complete meal, for 35 cents! In 1939, when wartime created industrial jobs, Dad moved on to welding and never looked back. Except for these odd moments of culinary inspiration.


Sometimes when preparing french fries Dad used the sunken burner and deep pot in the back left corner of the electric range. This time, he bent over the pot cupboard, pulled the deep-fryer from the back and poured in the oil. After bringing it to a boil, he carefully lowered the basket of raw potatoes into the yellow bubbles, his eyes fixed on the pot. Sometimes he would par-boil them and set the potatoes aside to be finished off to a golden brown at the last moment before eating. All four of us sat entranced with the entire process, nostrils filled with the heady smell of frying oil, our mouths open and watering, impatient to taste his masterpiece.


Mom remained in the background while Dad cooked, only emerging at the end to hand us the malt vinegar, salt and ketchup and slip in a vegetable and a few slices of meat to complete the meal.

Copyright © 2010, Ruth Zaryski Jackson

My Writing Group: Life Writers Ink

In the May/June issue of The Word Weaver - the newsletter for The Writers' Circle of Durham Region - is an article on page 3 by Mary McIntyre about our writing group, Life Writer's Ink. Please have a look.

The Road: To Milo

I struggled with the idea of writing something to read at Milo’s funeral. I had never been able to speak at a funeral, even my father’s. I always feared tears would overwhelm me and erase anything I might be trying to say. My husband’s urgings just served to make me more anxious. “I can’t write under pressure! I’m not a Hallmark writer. I work to an inner rhythm”.

I wanted to write something for her, for my step-daughter, my daughter, whom I came to love and admire after over 40 years. The step-daughter who was 5 years older than my first child and forced me to parent her before I was ready. When she hit puberty and needed guidance, I was still dealing with my son’s childhood issues, baseball, summer camp, and public school. Scrambling, I did buy her first bra, bought books explaining the ‘facts of life’ and tried to offer what help I could since she lived with her mother in Toronto and only spent alternate weekends and some holidays with us.

Over the five days in Edmonton I worked on a poem using random notes I had written on the plane. I didn’t know where I was going with it but I knew I wanted it to be a tribute to her strengths. By the night before the funeral, I wasn’t happy with the ending and felt unsure about reading it. Then I realized that was symbolic for all that had happened. I wasn’t happy with her life ending prematurely either. So I read it as is. Perhaps I will tweak it further. Perhaps not.

To Milo

Milo, named for an actress you never knew,
You trekked your bumpy way
Into our lives, our hearts.

Resilient, smiling, resolute,
You navigated two worlds,
Careful never to misstep
The line between country and city.

From school to school, then college.
On to parenthood before we knew it.
Dark years left behind
Out shadowed by baby light,
Travel, another child,
The petite daughter to complete your family,
Submerged in happy domesticity.

More years of turmoil:
You made choices to survive,
Protect your chicks,
Rise above sorrow, grief,
Your mother’s passing.

Seven years in South Dakota brightened life,
College beckoned.
Happiness broke through in snatches.
Back to Alberta, familiar ground
Where you lost and found love.

All the while a mother,
The finest of mothers.

We grieve now with your children,
Almost grown.
Raised and ready
To catch that cold north wind,
Change it into honeyed breezes.

With thoughts of you:
Whispering, directing,
Guiding, giggling,
Quizzing, questioning,
Always loving.

We grieve with the love that appeared,
The one who slipped in,
Grabbed you unawares,
Not knowing you had so little time.

We grieve as parents,
Our daughter lost,
Not meant to outlive our children.

Copyright © 2010, Ruth Zaryski Jackson

The Scent of Lilacs

I was meeting a friend for lunch at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton on May 6th, 2010 when my husband called to tell me Milo had died. I kept saying “who?” “who died?”. The facts just wouldn’t sink in. “Not Milo!” In a daze I wandered into the foyer to find Marilyn who hadn’t arrived yet. I kept pacing back and forth from one end to the other looking for her. She finally appeared. I waited until we sat down to lunch before blurting out the news. She cried while I robotically repeated the words. We ordered and talked then she asked me if I wanted to go back home. “No,” I said. “I want to see the lilacs. Let’s walk.”

The Lilac Festival was the following weekend and the bushes were in their glory. Purples, mauves, pinks and whites of all species. The flowers never smelled so fragrant to me or looked so glorious. I savoured every inhalation and every vista. We walked slowly and I took many photographs. I thought of Milo and how she would never have this chance again. I thought about how fragile life is and how lucky I was to be able to experience the scent of lilac for another season. We walked and talked. I’m glad I took that time. After a few hours I was ready to drive home, call the airline and fly to Edmonton to face reality.

Losing a Daughter

Losing a daughter is like losing a piece of yourself, a part of your heart or your soul. This is true even when she was your step-daughter.

During the past weeks our family has been rocked by the sudden death of our daughter, Milo Jackson, at the age of 43. She had not been ill but suffered a fatal pulmonary embollism in her sleep on May 6, 2010. She was there in the evening and gone by morning. Twenty days later it seems like a bad dream. I still hope to wake up and find it was a mistake. It didn't really happen. But it did.

I met Milo when she was two years old, a smiling happy toddler. She spent every other weekend with us and holidays too. She was an active part of our family activities, rituals and celebrations. In this favourite photograph of her at about age four or five, she's holding her rabbit which we kept at the farm, and sitting at the piano. She loved playing the piano with Nonie, my husband's mother, whenever we were together.

While I was in Edmonton for the funeral I wrote a poem for Milo which I read during the service. I will be publishing it here as I write about this experience over the next few weeks. Thanks for being there and listening.

Anne Michaels Reads From THE WINTER VAULT

Anne Michaels steps to the microphone and I am enchanted by her mass of dark curly hair. Her voice draws me in with the weightiness and scope of her subject matter. This is no ordinary author reading. She’s not talking about a simple plotline and a quick read. This is a book to be savoured slowly and tenderly with each well-chosen word. The sensual images draw the reader in and bathe you in a dreamy cloud of emotion that lingers long after the book is closed.

I feel badly that I haven’t yet finished THE WINTER VAULT, but I find many others at the reading who also haven’t finished it. It’s a slow read, one that raises many emotional, moral and philosophical questions. It takes time to digest, to ruminate and figure out where we stand. The author tackles these tough issues head-on, but with intimate gentle language that engages the reader.


THE WINTER VAULT is a personal story, a love story, set in a larger historical context in three different settings, Ontario, Egypt and Poland. The historical contexts are the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s, the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s and the rebuilding of Warsaw after the Second World War.

The moral and philosophical questions she raises are enormous: science vs. emotion, engineering vs. culture and humanity, the personal history of many vs. the legacy of an important person, authentic vs. recreated landscapes, replicas of cultural heritage vs. sites of heritage significance left ‘in situ’, true memory vs. rewritten tourist ‘history’, progress vs. stagnation, home vs. transience. And more.

I feel a personal connection to her questions from my work as a Historical Planner with the Ministry of Transportation in the 1980s-90s. The ‘mitigation’ solution for heritage resources never felt ‘right’ to me though it was the engineering solution to inconveniently located archaeological, natural or built heritage sites. Many years earlier in 1964, a visiting anthropology professor I met at a party invited me to come to Egypt and join a physical anthropology project. As the Nubian people were being displaced from their home for the building of the Aswan Dam, anthropologists were seizing the opportunity to take physical measurements of them. I felt squeamish and never went. Last year I wrote a poem about it.

Aswan: A Road Not Taken

The theme of The Winter Vault
reminds me of a night.
Was it ’64? maybe ’65.

A house party on Davenport.
Along the curve
towards Avenue Road.

Anthropologists.
Drinking too much.
Hopping over rooftops
Across the abyss, not noticing.

Some visiting professor
tries to persuade me to
come to Egypt.

The Aswan Dam is coming.
Nubians being relocated
-displaced actually-
A chance to measure
skulls and bodies.
For science.
No ethics approval required.

I apologize, stuttering something about
Grad school in the fall.
And wonder these years later:
what if I’d gone?

Copyright © 2010, Ruth Zaryski Jackson

Moving From Memoir to Novel: Jane Boruszewski's Story ESCAPE FROM RUSSIA

“Your father was lucky to be living now in Canada, and you are lucky too” Janina wrote in one of her comments to me in a writing workshop. She knew all about luck: both the bad luck of being born in Poland in 1926, and the good luck of being a survivor. She was 13 when Stalin’s cruel regime deported her family and over a million and a half Poles from their homes to northern Kazakhstan, Siberia. On the way or during the first winters, many died of starvation including her father, an aunt, her sister, Helcia and a baby brother. She managed to survive the harsh life until the amnesty in 1942 when she left by train with her family to find the Polish Army. When she and her brother and sister contracted typhoid fever they were hospitalized in Bukhara (Uzbekistan) and were separated from the family. Again she survived, and was helped by the Polish Army to escape from Russia through the Caspian Sea to Persia (Iran) and ultimately to a Polish community in Tengeru, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), East Africa where she spent seven years completing high school. After the war ended, she signed up to work at a textile mill in England, where she met her future husband Walter, and later immigrated to America.

I’ve never forgotten Janina because she woke me up to the power of personal story telling to convey larger stories of human history. Janina or Jane Boruszewski was one of several aspiring writers who signed up for an on-line advanced memoir writing workshop with Allyson Latta in the fall of 2008. Jane was writing her memoir, in English, her second language. She had taken other courses and was fluent enough in English to begin writing her stories, seven of which were published in Oasis Journal. Compelled by a need to tell her life story, she continued writing until her death in August 2009, at the age of 82.


Jane’s personality was shaped by her extraordinary experiences. Her writing is important because it gives a human scale to the horrors and suffering of deportation and a life that most of us can’t imagine and have never experienced. She engages the reader by focusing on universal themes of family, love, hate, sickness and death. Then she slows down the narrative so that we can visualize a young couple in the glade in the taiga, and adds just enough context, that the dangers of their encounter are apparent. Too much context would lose the reader. Jane shows the reader what the characters are like with a skillful use of powerful verbs, subtle mention of small gestures or body language and terse bits of dialogue.

After Jane’s death, her husband, Walter Boruszewski, worked with Leila Joiner, editor of Oasis Journal and publisher of Imago Press and Pennywyse Press, to publish a novel based on Jane’s memoirs called ESCAPE FROM RUSSIA. The book is available from Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Don’t miss it.

Copyright © 2010, Ruth Zaryski Jackson