What She Wrote

My mother married my dad when she was twenty-three. Instead of a white dress, she wore a smart skirt and jacket, corsage, white gloves, warm smile, her wavy hair carefully set. The wedding photo, shot at a long-gone studio, hangs on my bedroom wall. In it, my father is twenty-one. Handsome in a suit, with shiny shoes and skinny tie. The wedding was small because they didn’t have any money. It was 1952 in Miramichi, New Brunswick. That year, Princess Elizabeth acceded to the throne to become Queen of the Commonwealth realms. People watched I Love Lucy on black and white TVs. Everybody smoked and worried about nukes. Women made casseroles in Pyrex dishes and unforgivable jellied salads with shaved carrots and green olives. Fabric was stiff, bras were pointy under sweaters, hair was rigid with spray. Soon they would “rock around the clock” and get “all shook up.”

I turned twenty-three in 1989 and started the final year of my bachelor’s at the University of New...