I never knew my maternal grandfather, since he died when my mother was only sixteen years of age. From my mother's accounts, which, as noted, are not always reliable, he had some odd relation to Scottish nobility. Mother always insisted that he had made two fortunes, and lost both, and was on his way to making a third when he died. It was true that he left my grandmother well enough provided for that she was able to live in reasonably comfortable circumstances, and to leave my mother and aunt some money after her death.
My maternal grandfather came from Scotland: the only one of my grandparents not born in Vancouver. He was, apparently, an iron worker as a tradesman. But, if even part of what my mother said about him is true, he eventually became a developer. At one point, possibly when I was in my twenties, my mother identified a fire escape and assorted railings as being the actual work of my grandfather. Somehow she obtained this material from a building that was being torn down, and we had it lying around our backyard, beside the house, for a number of years. Mother intended to build a fence with this material. None of the fence ever got built, although three brick pillars were constructed, standing unconnected to each other, for a number of years before that house was eventually sold and torn down. I have no idea what ever happened to the iron work.
Mother was a bit of a social climber. That might be understating the case. Mother was a bit of a social mountaineer. She seemed to regard her lack of social standing, and the lack of a personal family fortune, as a bit of a personal insult. She was, therefore, always on the lookout for some way to increase her social standing. In later years I had the very strong impression that we, as children, were primarily there as props to give mother greater standing as a Supermom. Mother was famous for her hospitality. This hospitality that Mom provided always seemed to come at someone else's expense. For example, we, as children, were often subjected to the fact that our family celebrations, such as Christmas, would sometimes be added to with strangers being invited to our house. Mother became famous for her dinner parties. All during my teen years I was deputed to make hors d'oeuvres for these dinner parties. I wasn't given very much, either in the way of materials, or directions, to make these hors d'oeuvres. I was just expected to make them. Mother also got a reputation for being a tireless Church worker. She was able to do an awful lot of this church work because I was left to babysit my younger siblings. I did an awful lot of babysitting during my teen years, almost all for my younger siblings, and all of it unpaid.
Maybe it's genetic. All of my siblings, all of my brothers and sisters, and myself, are conceited. Not self-confident: that's a different thing. We have an inflated sense of our own importance and abilities. I have had to fight against this all my life.
It was Gloria who really identified this to me. It was a very painful realization. It's not something that's a particularly attractive quality, and it's something that's very hard to fight. I have to remind myself that I am world famous - amongst a vanishingly small and select population.
I don't know where this conceit comes from. It's not as if we were showered with praise as kids. In fact, the night before my first real, full time, job, my parents sat me down, and provided me with an extensive list of all of my failings as a person. (They did this from the best of all possible motives of course: so that I could, in the few remaining hours before I started work the next morning, rectify all these myriad faults.) I suppose that it is due more to nurture than to nature, since my two surviving sisters, both adopted, both carry the trait. It may be that we, in reaction to a lack of praise as children, went overboard in trying to build ourselves some small piece of self-esteem.
Mother's reputation for giving dinners was all the stranger given our experience, as children, at the dinner table. Food in our house was provided, plated. You didn't take what you wanted. Not during regular meals anyways. This may explain why all of us in the family have difficulty in buffet style situations. We didn't encounter them in the course of normal family dinners. Mother served up the plates: you ate what was put in front of you. I don't recall ever going into the cupboards to get food for myself while I was growing up. I don't know why I didn't: I certainly knew where everything was, because I had to help out either preparing regular meals, or definitely helping out when it came to mother's lavish dinner parties, but it just never occurred to me that I would be allowed to go into a cupboard or the fridge, and get something to eat for myself. This inferred injunction was still in effect even after I was babysitting for my siblings and preparing and feeding them dinner.
Mother's lavish and complex dinner parties were all the stranger given one of the meals that I recall, least fondly, from my childhood: leftovers. Leftovers were taken out of the fridge, and piled into a frying pan, in separate clumps, which nonetheless ran together somewhat along the edges, and heated up. And then plated and served up. Yes, it is as unappetizing as it sounds. This was my experience of my mother's fame as a cook. It was somewhat at odds with her reputation with everyone else outside the family.
Mother's reputation for hospitality at the church, or in other related situations, also relied heavily on help from other people. A number of other people were involved in the dinners that my mother got credit for. Most of them over and over again at the same dinners that my mother was involved in. Somehow, my mother always got the credit for these dinners.
Dad was a teacher, and later an administrator. Mom was a teacher, for a brief time before I was born. I did not want to be a teacher, when I was growing up. I think this is possibly because, while both Mom and Dad were teachers, they weren't very good at it, and certainly didn't love it. I remember my father giving me some career advice at one point, and suggesting that I become a teacher because you could put in your thirty years and then retire. I found this rather questionable as career advice.
Mom and Dad certainly weren't intellectuals. My home is full of books. I love books. I love reading. I love libraries. I love learning new things. I love the Internet. Initially I loved the Internet because it allowed you to communicate with all kinds of people, in all kinds of specialties, all around the world, but laterally, since the advent of the World Wide Web and search engines, I love the Internet because you can find out anything about anything from the comfort of your desk, or even your phone.
Growing up our home was not full of books. There weren't bookshelves. Or, sometimes there were bookshelves, but they held knick knacks rather than books. My parents did not seem particularly interested in learning anything. My parents were not particularly interested in reading. They didn't have books. They didn't read books. Other than to us, as children, and that was more because you were supposed to read to your children for some reason. Once I learned to read, and could read to my siblings, that became part of my job and taking care of my siblings. But I really enjoyed reading to my brothers and sisters, because I enjoyed reading. Not that, even at that point, I had many books. My collection of books didn't really start until I left home. The books that I read while I was still in my parents' home came from the library. The library at school in many cases, and later, once I discovered them, from public libraries. Which, as I noted, I dearly love.
I suppose that I am saying unkind things about my parents. I do not want to leave any impression that we were mistreated as children. We always had a roof over our heads. We always had food to eat. We always had clothes to wear. The food might sometimes have been unappetizing, and the clothes were very often unfashionable, but we were provided for. We weren't abused. But, possibly oddly for people who are supposed to be teachers, very little teaching went on. Dad loves to fish during the summer. We were taken out, occasionally, on fishing trips. But Dad had very little patience at teaching us what we needed to know in order to learn how to fish the same way that he did. Dad spent an awful lot of time in his workshop in the basement. Dad spent some time tinkering with the car. But Dad couldn't be bothered teaching us what to do in the workshop, or teaching us how to change the oil in the car. As noted, I helped Mom in the kitchen. I did pick up some things from helping Mom over the years, but I can't say that Mom really taught me anything in that regard. Like Dad she didn't seem to have much patience with the activity of teaching. No, we were not abused, and I can't say that we had an unhappy childhood, but when I think back on my childhood, we children were kind of treated with a sort of benign neglect. Mom and Dad had other things to do that were more interesting than we were.
Eventually I became a teacher. It was almost an accident. However, once I became a teacher I discovered two things: the first was that I had been doing teaching for a significant number of years. It just hadn't been called that. The second was that I absolutely loved teaching.
As I said, despite the death of my sister, and the other deaths in my family, and the almost complete lack of support that I got from the church while trying to process my own faith, I did maintain my faith. I still believe in God. This makes me a rather a rarity in the modern world. It makes me even more of a rarity in my chosen field. In information technology, and in the rarified higher forms of it, and particularly in the field of information security, atheists tend to predominate for some reason. Many of my closest colleagues in the field are not simply atheists, but very militantly so! They must find my faith not only annoying, but proof of my intellectual unfitness to work in this highly demanding and rigorous field.
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