When I was in elementary school, every year starting in Grade 4, kids had to write speeches on a topic of their choice. I loved the idea of writing the speech and always had at least twenty ideas for a topic. But the writing was only part of it. Once it was written we were supposed to deliver the speech in front of the entire class.

Terrifying. The very idea of standing in front of the class for five minutes by myself made my eight-year-old heart hammer so hard I could feel it in my ears. I could hardly sleep. I remember the first time I got up in front of my classmates to deliver my first speech (topic: catching mackerel on a fishing boat during a camping trip to P.E.I.), I must have torpedoed my way through it so fast that the teacher politely asked me to give it all over again, slower this time. I took a deep breath, which must be a natural instinct, and the second time actually went better. In fact, toward the end I was starting to enjoy myself. The kids were even laughing at the funny bits.

The next year I thought I’d conquer my nervousness by practicing my speech (topic: the imaginary friend I’d had when I was little) so many times that I knew it in my sleep. The obsessive practicing somehow worked and I won for my class. I won again the next year when my topic was the dysfunctional gymnastics camp I’d gone to.  At the finals, a girl my age also gave a speech on her camp. One of her lines was, “My camp was very beneficial.” At the question period, a judge asked her, “Can you please tell us what beneficial means?” The girl stammered in panic, trying desperately to read the lips of her mother, who was sitting in the front row, mouthing, “HELPFUL” over and over. It was obvious to the rest of us up on stage what the mother was mouthing, but for some reason, not the to the girl. “Um,” said the girl, “it means…ready?”

The girl won anyway. I remember my mother saying something about how that wasn’t setting a good example, rewarding cheating.

Now, my son is in Grade 4 and has just gone through the agony of speeches himself.  Topic: unicycling, his choice. But when it came time to write it, he didn’t seem to have a clue what to do or where to begin. I told him one good way to start might be right in the middle of the action, when he first learned to ride the unicycle, how exhilarating that felt, something like... “There I was flying down the driveway, not falling off after three seconds like I’d been doing all summer…” I got so carried away I started researching everything ever written about unicycles, then actually started writing the speech itself.

Meanwhile, Quinn was playing with Lego.

Good god. I’d become that mother, the one who’d stuck ‘beneficial’ into her kid’s speech. Now I understood her.

Right away I deleted what I’d written and told Quinn it was his speech and he had to write it. But I did suggest he keep my attention-grabbing opening.

Being a writer, I just couldn’t help myself.

Travel writers often neglect to write about their own back yards, the places they've chosen to live (and believe me, finding the ideal place to live in this world isn't easy. That's one of the themes of my last book, Kiss the Sunset Pig.)  I realized I was guilty of not writing about where I live recently when I noticed a Reader's Digest contest called Canada's Most Interesting Towns. In 300 words we're supposed to write about what makes our towns cool. I live in a little English-speaking village on a big river in Quebec, 25 minutes north of Ottawa. If I had one word to sum up Wakefield, it would be eccentric, which is why I love it. But other than my writing about it locally--usually letters about all its scary environmental issues--I'd never written much about it before. These are my 300 words below that I entered in the contest (in the "most community spirit" category).
My entry is here and you can even vote for me if you like, which would be fantastic! Or maybe you'd like to write about your own city, town, or rural haven. Writing about where you live makes you think about why you're there.

Village of 1000 Bursting with Community Spirit          

Everyone lines along on the river bank waiting for it to appear. Since it’s July 1, the sun is blinding as we gaze over the shimmering water, and making out a ramshackle pirate ship in the distance isn’t easy. But then some kid always shouts, “There it is!” and everyone squints harder. The kid is right. The Wakefield Raft, constructed new and more creatively every year by the village teens, is sailing down the Gatineau River toward us, just as the Canada Day Parade behind us is starting. Already we hear drumming and singing from the floats, and look, there’s the Village Poet leading the parade on his bike, adorned as usual with a tea cozy on his head. The Wakefield Granny float is next, filled with a dozen laughing grandmothers who started an international movement to support grandmothers in Africa. For years, the Wakefield Grannies have been enlightening Wakefielders on the plight of elderly African women who’ve lost their children to AIDS and now raising their grandchildren. The annual Granny Concert on Wakefield’s covered bridge, featuring jumping dancers from Burundi and 60-voice choirs, is just one of many Wakefield fundraisers to help African grandmothers buy food for their families. These Wakefield Grannies are feisty. They once posed in the Wakefield Nude Calendar, another fundraiser where notable townsfolk and the village’s most colourful eccentrics strip down to support the Wakefield Emergency Fund. And in the parade, here comes the SOS float where they’re shouting, “Save our Spring!” They’ve been trying to protect the town’s source of spring water and their marches, mock funerals, and benefits are wildly popular, almost as much as the Save Our River rallies to stop a septic sludge plant from polluting the river. Wakefielders won that fight. The Gatineau River is saved. And, right now, those teenagers from their pirate ship are plunging from the top deck straight into its chilly blue depths. We all cheer for the kids, for the river, for Wakefield.

I wasn’t expecting to fall in love that winter in Morocco, but there’s something about being in a foreign country that lets your guard down so more of the world can get inside.  It’s as if when you travel, layers of your skin peel back. You expose yourself to the world so it can expose itself to you. 


I first met Aziz in a small coastal village with a white sand beach, quiet walkways, old town ramparts, a palace, and one heck of a sexy bank teller.    

After six weeks travelling alone through Morocco, I returned to the bank where Aziz, the sexy bank teller, had served me weeks earlier. There he was again, still looking as if he’d walked out of a 1940s movie playing the swarthy mysterious foreigner. Even his white suit fit the part.

“Ah, Jean, bonjour.  You’ve come back!  I am surprised by this!”  I was surprised too.  He remembered my name—OK, my middle name, which he must have read on my passport six weeks earlier and taken for my first name, but what a memory. He pronounced it with a French accent.

Since I was leaving Morocco the next day and didn’t need any money, I invented a banking question. He replied by saying we should have dinner together.

When we met that evening, I discovered he’d studied philosophy in Paris where he’d been rained on for four years, had written a book on cross-cultural communication, had soft brown eyes and a large muscled frame. We were so taken with each other, we barely noticed when a crowd gathered around to watch us. Aziz came up with an idea.

“Jean (still in French accent), we go to Tangier tonight. Tangier is full of the life.”

Off to Tangier, full of the life, we raced too fast in his car along the coast, singing show tunes and watching the stars out the window as I contemplated whether or not I was, at 30, too old for this kind of thing.

When we arrived at Aziz’s home, Aziz disappeared while his mother, aunts and sisters, all lounging on sofas in a velvet-lined room, yanked me down onto some pillows and commenced grilling me for over an hour.

After the inquisition and lively discussion amongst themselves, they announced it: you can marry Aziz.

Luckily, Aziz reappeared just in time. “Come Jean, we go off into the night.”

He said that. He really did.

Tangier, full of secret corruptions, notorious for espionage and intrigue, once decadent city of hedonists, writers, freebooters, artists, Beat poets, exiles, spies and romance. I soaked it all in.

My night with Azia in Tangier was a whirlwind night of crazed dashing. We dashed all over the place, from night club to disco, to some look-out point over the city where Aziz gave me a massage and then kissed every inch of my back before saying we had to go to another night club. Finally, we ended up at a belly dance club.

The belly dance club reminded me of an underground cave with hidden chambers. I could hardly see through the darkness, the curling smoke of cigarettes, hashish, and incense.  Dimly-lit lanterns glowed on the skins of belly dancers. As if in a trance, they moved in time to the throaty voices of men on stage who brought their rhythms and drums to frantic climaxes. 

Aziz clapped and sang to the music from our table. I watched Aziz, so full of charisma and beauty, but I didn't like him anymore. When men came to our table, Aziz didn’t bother introducing me but began treating me as if I wasn’t even there, apparently embarrassed that he’d actually been having an intelligent conversation with a woman. He also did a lot of leering, which gave way to glaring. Finally, when he groped me in a dark corner and asked what we’d be doing that night in his bed, the whole escapade didn’t seem very romantic and intriguing anymore. Clearly, this was a B movie he was charming his way through and I was about to walk out of it. There in the belly dance joint, an abrupt desire to be away from Aziz seized me and I had to follow. So I slipped out the back, eventually finding my way to Aziz's house where his sisters let me sleep on a divan.

“Sister, you’re back!” they trilled, bursting to know what I thought of their brother. He's not for me, was all I could say across such a vast cultural chasm.

I wonder today what my answer would be, or should have been then. Would it have made a difference to have given them my opinion on sexism? To have told them that where I come from, women are viewed as equal to men? How I was a strong independent woman who would never in a million years live with someone so culturally backward? 

Whether it would have made a difference or not, I wish I’d told them all those things.          

My dad, Patrick Gough, died in August. I wrote this Lives Lived about him in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

Patrick Gough         
Geography professor, baseball lover, birdwatcher, hitchhiker, inventor of world’s most infamous expletive, grandfather. Born June 20, 1926, in Toronto. Died in Guelph, August 2, 2012, of a stroke, age 86.
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Patrick Gough stayed on daylight savings time all year, preferring not to change the clocks in the fall. “Why lose all that sunlight?” he’d say. He also loved espousing on his theory that everything affects everything. When he was 12, he was walking home from school one day when he was struck for the first time with the dreaded realization that one day he’d die. Struggling to make this inevitability more agreeable (he was an atheist) he realized that perhaps part of a person can go on after death. “If you’re always nice to people, that kindness will keep affecting others and live forever.”

From early on he loved baseball, playing the game with friends and knowing the game intimately. Anyone could ask him a random baseball question, such as, “Who played third base for Boston in 1949?” He’d always know. A star athlete at Runnymede Collegiate in track, basketball and football, Pat also once won the Toronto District Mile.

Patrick believed he invented the world's most widely-used expletive, or at least was responsible for combining its four-letter word with 'off'.

In 1942 at age 16, Pat had a summer job at the Toronto docks alongside tough older men who’d tease Pat for never swearing. He decided to do something about it. One night he turned all the swear words he knew over in his head. Finally the perfect phrase struck him. When he tried the expression out on the dockworkers the next morning, their jaws dropped. A year later he began hearing the expression around Toronto. Recently, an etymologist friend confirmed that the phrase started coming into usage in 1943, making Pat’s story stand. Ironically, I never heard Pat use the phrase except in telling this story. He was too nice for that.

Pat was a lover of maps and any road leading somewhere new. He spent years travelling abroad in the 50s, hitchhiking around North America, and canoe tripping in northern Ontario. Not surprisingly, after teaching high school math for six years, he decided to teach geography. He did graduate work in Madison, taught at Kent State, then at the University of Guelph until retirement. He was known to his students as the “Jimmy Stewart professor”. He looked like Jimmy Stewart and had the actor’s drawn-out friendly delivery.  

While teaching high school in Fort Frances, Pat met teacher Tena Kettles, a Manitoba farm girl with a lively sense of humor and keen intelligence. They married in 1959 and had two daughters, Linda and Laurie.

At age 58, Pat developed a heart condition and was told he had a year to live. He retired early and lived each day thrilled to be alive. He went on to live another 28 years, travelling, reading, writing, and outliving the doctor who’d given him the prognosis.

As for his childhood theory on kindness, he held onto that belief all his life. He was the nicest guy I ever knew.