Choosing Hope Read online

  The finished basement had a recreation area and a mud room, and the front and back yards were perfect for a bunch of gamboling kids. In fall, we spent hours building forts in the leaves that fell from the oak trees lining the street. Out back, we would flood the yard in winter to create a skating rink.

  It was the perfect house for a gaggle of growing kids, and as we had so many times before, my sisters and brother and I settled in quickly. We started calling our aunt and uncle “Mom” and “Dad.” Because there were now two Robbies in the household, my brother became Ted in honour of our father, Edward. We didn’t talk much among ourselves or with the adults about losing our dad and then our mom. Nobody ever sat us down and tried to explain what it all meant. That was reflective of a time when kids were meant to be seen and not heard and when talking about such things was thought only to make them harder, especially for children.

  Even though I loved the new house and there was no hardship or lack of love in our lives, there was a part of me that felt like I didn’t belong in this new family. I was the misfit, the one in the middle. I even ran away from home a few times, though my mom and dad were smart enough to start channelling that energy into sports. Much of my spare time was spent at the local winter club, pursuing activities like speed swimming, squash, rowing, badminton, and skating. Cath liked sports, too, but she was far more interested in other diversions, like boys and listening to the Beatles and appearing on Teen Dance Party at a local television station.

  When Dad wasn’t away on business, he was a devoted Shriner, working in the local community. Mom’s time was spent raising us kids. Her spare hours were devoted to volunteer work with the junior league and the heart foundation and to her lively social life. She and Dad liked to party and were religious adherents to the daily 5 PM cocktail hour. The house was always filled with family and friends, with kids and noise and food, a steady stream of people coming in and out, whether they were neighbour children running wild around the yard or their parents toasting one another in the drawing room. Although Mom was affectionate, she clearly had her hands full. And a handful we were. Sometimes, when Mom and Dad were away, we were looked after by Betty Stefaniuk. Betty was a bit older than we were, with kids of her own, and she had worked for Grams since the age of sixteen. Betty did her best to stickhandle us, but when Cath and I threw wild parties at our house and the kids started lining up outside trying to get in, Betty would call one of Dad’s friends to come over for backup. I was usually the instigator, so when it came time for the lectures, I was always on the receiving end.

  I stayed at Balmoral Hall through Grade 6, leaving in Grade 7 to attend River Heights, a public school I hated. I was a fat, dumpy kid, and even though I had friends, they were cute and seemed to have it together. They had boyfriends, and I didn’t. I was a fish out of water. I went back to Balmoral Hall for Grade 8.

  Cath always did well at her studies, and she was popular, a real social butterfly who was never without a boyfriend. I was a terrible student, so much so that I was politely asked to leave Balmoral Hall after Grade 8 and ended up at Convent of the Sacred Heart. I wouldn’t last there, either, after my friends and I were caught smoking. Trying to avoid the cold outside, we had sneaked into the locker rooms, which turned out to be ventilated to the whole school. That did not amuse the five nuns who smelled smoke and opened the door to find us puffing away. It didn’t help that we had been caught another time playing catch with the plastic sponges used to sop up the holy water in the chapel. Mother Leonard phoned my dad and asked him to retrieve me, suggesting that Sacred Heart “wasn’t the right school for Virginia.”

  I didn’t fare much better at Kelvin High School, acting out and caring far more about my friends and partying than I did about hitting the books. I was a rebel, and so was Clare, who by now was going to nearby Tuxedo Park Secondary. One day as I was heading to the home of a friend after deciding to play hooky, trailing my somewhat reluctant sister Cath and carrying a case of beer we had lifted from our mother, Mom drove by and caught us in the act. She was furious.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of my real mom. At Christmas I was always convinced that she was going to walk through the front door, that she had just gone away for a while and was surely going to come back. I guess it was what I had to tell myself to survive. When I was twenty, I asked Dad, “Is my mom really dead?” He was shocked. When I pointed out that I didn’t even know where she was buried, he drove me over to the cemetery in the fog and showed me her gravestone: “In loving memory of Barbara J. Wood, died Feb. 9, 1962, age 38 years.” I finally got to say goodbye to my mom.

  If I had a saviour during those wild teen years, it was Grams, with whom I had a special bond. She was tiny, full of warmth and earthy spirit. She was my guardian angel on Earth. And despite my struggles with fitting in, it was a good life, full of all the promise and adventure a teenager could imagine. You just never knew what was going to happen in that big house on Waterloo.

  Once, my grandfather won a pig in a contest and decided to give it to my dad. We kids called it Matilda, and the pig moved into the basement mud room. Robbie would walk Matilda up and down Waterloo to exercise her. When the pig got bigger, my dad decided she had to be housed in the garage. Finally, Dad decided that Matilda had outgrown the city and needed to go to our summer house, a spacious family farm on the Red River about thirty kilometres outside of Winnipeg. The property straddled the highway, with the three-thousand-acre Parrish dairy farm on one side and the twenty-six acres surrounding Linton Lodge, named after William Linton Parrish, on the other. The lodge was a sprawling log cabin where we spent most summers. When Dad chose me to transplant Matilda, I dutifully put newspapers down in the back of my red Volkswagen and stuffed in the unhappy porker, who kept jumping between the front and back seats. Once there, I convinced the farm manager to take Matilda off my hands. Not long afterward, we were having our big Easter dinner when my dad, finished with his plate, pushed himself away from the table and said: “Well, how did you like Matilda?”

  Summers at the cabin were heaven. It was a cavernous four-bedroom house with numerous outbuildings, including a bunkhouse and a guest cabin, along with a vegetable garden and an in-ground swimming pool we called “the cement pond.” There were horses to ride, canoes to paddle, and a boat that my dad would fill with us kids to cruise up and down the river. With Dad you never knew what was coming next: we might arrive at the cabin to find a Shriners’ motorcycle club using the property or a clutch of Arabian-style tents set up for the next big lawn party. Dad was funny and generous, the kind of man people were instantly attracted to. If we had to choose someone to raise us, we couldn’t have chosen better.

  Even though my school years had been tumultuous, I managed to graduate from a special Grades 11/12 collegiate program offered by the University of Winnipeg. Happy to be done with academics, I headed into the work force, taking a teller’s job at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. By then, my life had also taken another important turn.

  THAT I WOULD fall in love with Kerry Dennehy seemed inevitable. He was handsome and fun, and his sister Darcy was a friend of Cath’s. Being my older sister, Cath always had her radar tuned for dating possibilities for me. After all we had been through, nobody knew me better than she did, and nobody more devotedly had my best interests at heart.

  In the summer of 1969, Cath got a job at the Bending Lake Fishing Lodge in northern Ontario, where she began dating a boy named Billy. Kerry was Billy’s best buddy, and Cath knew the minute she met him that he was the one for me.

  Back home in Winnipeg, she told me: “Oh, Ginny, I found the perfect guy for you.” I was seventeen and in Grade 11. I had never had a boyfriend. I was still chubby and rebellious; I had guys for friends, but mostly I just hung out with the crowd. Dating wasn’t that important to me, so it took some convincing. But Cath worked on me, said Kerry was a great guy, that he was smart and hard working, and his family lived only a few blocks away from us. She insisted I meet him, and when I finally ag
reed, she arranged for the four of us to get together at the cabin.

  Cath and I were having a quick swim at the cabin when Billy and Kerry pulled into the driveway in Kerry’s Jeep. That meant the first sight my future husband would have of me was me hauling my ungainly self out of the pool while wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

  We hit it off instantly. He was so tall and good-looking. Cath was right: we talked and laughed and just seemed to click.

  Kerry and I started dating, going to parties and to the movies. When I met his family, with his four brothers and one sister, I was in awe. The Dennehys weren’t rich, but they were respected. The kids were cool, and I was proud to be part of the mix. They seemed to like me, too. Kerry was kind, and I felt safe with him and his family. I spent as much time at their house as I could.

  I was working full time at the bank by then, and Kerry was working for Richardson Securities, as a trader, in the same building. We saw each other every day. I couldn’t have been happier, but I also liked to keep Kerry guessing. One of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers who came into the bank kept asking me out on a date, so to tease Kerry I would say, “Kerry, do you think I should go out with him?” But I didn’t mean it. The truth was Kerry and I were attached at the hip.

  Then a friend convinced me to go on a ski vacation to Banff with her for a week. I fell in love with the place and its freewheeling ski-bum culture, and when I got back to Winnipeg, I told Kerry I was quitting my job and moving. He was hurt and confused. He didn’t understand what was going on, and I’m not sure I did either. But two weeks later I was back in Banff, living in a room at the YWCA with no job and no Kerry.

  It was an impulsive adventure, and that’s all I could see. I was skiing every day and having wild experiences with a like-minded group of amazing young people. I had only been there about a week when the glow began to dim. I phoned home and talked to my mom, hoping she would hear the catch in my voice and ask me to come to my senses and head back to Winnipeg. But she didn’t. I stayed there for nearly three years, working as a cocktail waitress in a local bar and as the first female lift operator at Sunshine Village, about forty minutes out of Banff. One of the houses that I rented in town with a dozen or more friends was so crowded that one of my roomies—Leaping Larry, who ran the Wawa T-bar lift—slept in the bathtub.

  I dated a bit when I was in Banff and at one point lived in a garage with a boyfriend. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Kerry, who had quit his job and moved to Calgary, where he was working as a supervisor in a juvenile detention centre. I knew that I had broken his heart, but we stayed in touch. We had an on-again, off-again relationship for the next few years, seeing each other in Winnipeg on special occasions and writing letters back and forth.

  And then one day I had finally gotten Banff out of my system. I turned down a job offer in the Bugaboos and decided that it was time to make something of myself. I applied to the University of British Columbia nursing school in 1973, though I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. I liked helping people, and Kerry’s mother had always said I would make a great nurse. It wasn’t that hard to get into university in those days, and I had done a bit of night school to upgrade my marks, so nursing it was.

  In Vancouver I shared an apartment with Cath’s friend Sharon, who was doing an internship as a dietitian. My parents were paying for my tuition, so I didn’t have any money worries. I was soon “rushed” by a sorority and became a Gamma Phi Beta, which was great for my social life in a city of strangers. But I hated nursing. I wasn’t cut out for a life as Florence Nightingale. When I fainted during a circumcision demonstration at St. Paul’s Hospital, I realized it wasn’t the career for me. I decided to go into physical education for my second year, majoring in physiology and minoring in nutrition. It helped that I had been something of a jock. I assisted the professors with fitness testing and eventually became director of the women’s intramural program. To earn extra spending money, I taught fitness classes and worked at the Keg. I had four or five jobs during my time at university and needed a car to get to them, so my dad came and bought me a new orange 1973 Beetle. When the salesman asked if it needed a radio, my dad said: “She needs a radio more than she needs the engine.”

  Kerry was still living in the Prairies, working as a salesman for a company called Atco Structures. He and I continued to date other people, but we still got together occasionally. It was as if we couldn’t be together yet didn’t know how to be apart. At one point, Kerry was engaged to a law student—he had contemplated becoming a lawyer himself. I fell in love with another man for a brief time, though my relationships never seemed to go anywhere.

  Cath had married Billy in 1971, and when that didn’t work out, she joined Sharon and me in the apartment in Vancouver, enrolling at UBC and working toward a degree in theatre. But when I graduated in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, I wasn’t sure what to do, so I returned to my roots: I went home, rented an apartment near downtown Winnipeg, and got a job as a fitness trainer at a physical rehabilitation centre. All my friends, including Clare, had married right out of school and were having children, and here I was in my late twenties and unattached. By then Kerry was living in Edmonton. I’d heard through the grapevine that he was getting serious about someone else, and something clicked. I called him and said I wanted to be with him. In what seemed like a heartbeat, I had moved to Edmonton and into Kerry’s townhouse, and we were together again. I sold running shoes at Eaton’s before landing a position in guest services at the Four Seasons Hotel.

  Kerry maintains to this day that I proposed to him, but the truth is I don’t remember. I just know that a year later, on June 21, 1980, Kerry and I exchanged vows in front of our family and friends at the cabin on the Red River where we had first met. He was truly the love of my life, and I didn’t want to spend another day without him.

  (2)

  Growing Up

  Dennehy

  KERRY AND I were thrilled to be starting our life together as newlyweds. We laughed about how long it had taken us to get there, but now all that mattered was the future ahead of us. We knew it would be wonderful, that we would have the family we had always wanted. No matter what, we would be happy and grow old together.

  Kerry was still working for Atco in Edmonton, carving out a successful career selling construction trailers. I enjoyed working on the front desk at the Four Seasons. There’s something about the hospitality industry that appeals to me. Most people look forward to staying in hotels, whether it’s for vacation or business. There’s a certain freedom in locking that hotel room door behind you and heading out for an adventure in a different city. I’ve always thought that’s why there’s such an air of exuberance and even mystery in the bustle of a hotel lobby.

  Both of us settled into our new routines quickly, and things were going great. And then we started to get itchy feet. I had fallen in love with Vancouver while going to UBC and Kerry was equally enamored with the city. The West Coast beckoned.

  Kerry asked his Atco bosses for a transfer to their Vancouver operation, and they readily obliged. I talked one of my former UBC professors into giving me a contract job conducting fitness testing around the province, something I had done during my university years. I was good at it, and it was an easy transition for them. So just like that, we were on our way.

  Vancouver house prices have always been among the highest in the country, and in the early 1980s mortgage rates were spiking. But we were determined to live in the city. My mother had left me some Parrish and Heimbecker company shares when she died, and I knew that selling a few would give us the financial kick-start we needed. Some of my relatives felt I was selling off the family assets, the legacy left by my great-grandfather William Parrish. But it made sense to me. Wasn’t that what money was for? Wasn’t that why the shares had been left to me, to help me on my life’s path? My popularity in the family didn’t improve when my decision caused a small domino effect, prompting other family members, like my
sister Cath, to sell some of their shares, too.

  Kerry and I used the money for a down payment on a charming little three-bedroom house on Yew Street in Kitsilano, a neighbourhood that in the post-hippie era was still a counterculture haven. The house, one of the original buildings on the old Molson’s brewery site, was listed at $145,000. It wasn’t much to look at, but the location was great, and it felt like home. We knew we could do something with it, so we kept a bit of the money aside for renovations.

  My dad, who had come out from Winnipeg to help us in the house hunt, couldn’t believe we were handing over nearly $150,000 for a nondescript house on a postage-stamp-sized city lot. In Winnipeg, that kind of money would buy you a mini-mansion with a big yard. But we loved it. We redid the kitchen, installed skylights to brighten up the small dark rooms, and updated everything that our budget allowed. It was a big job, and it ate up months of our time and much of our energy. Looking back, it was crazy to think we had gotten married, moved to another city, bought a house, and started taking down walls all within a year.

  As it turned out, the year would be a rough one for another reason. My beloved Grams had not been well, and when I got a call from my mother in February 1981 telling me that Grams had died, I was overwhelmed. Mom and the rest of the family assured me that because I had just been back to Winnipeg to see her, I didn’t really need to go back for Grams’s funeral. The decision haunts me to this day. In a way, I never really got to say a proper goodbye or to express my gratitude and love for Grams, one of the most important people in my life.

  And then Kerry threw another wrench into the works.

  Just before we moved to Vancouver, he and some Edmonton friends had started a little real estate company, Concept 111 Realty. His friends wanted him to go back and help out with the new business, and he thought that was a good idea. I didn’t question it, but I was worried about our finances while he was involved with a fledgling start-up. If we were moving back to Edmonton, I needed to find a real job, with a good salary, benefits, and the promise of future advancement. The only companies I could think of that offered that kind of security were Xerox and IBM. I didn’t have any business or technological experience, but I did a little research on both companies, contacted their human resources departments and, amazingly, landed interviews with both firms. Both ended up offering me a job. I chose IBM because when they flew me to Edmonton for a second interview, I immediately connected with the branch manager, Bill Cranston. He was a wonderful man, and I knew I could learn a lot working for him. It was one of the best calls I have ever made.