My mother was a woman with many hidden depths. She often came off as flighty or shallow, I think, because of her love of beautiful clothes or her fondness for acting, or her taste for perhaps a bit more wine than was really necessary, but she had a core of steel ( which she got from her mother Ruth), and that allowed her to take on challenges that would have scared off lesser mortals — including setting off for the Seychelles islands in her retirement years, to help my father beat back the jungle around a would-be BnB, where she learned how to cook fruit bat, among other things (which involves throwing them against the wall to tenderize them, apparently).
After growing up in Toronto in relative luxury on South Drive, with her younger sister Kathy and little brother John, doing all the up-and-coming Toronto society things like debutante balls and being raised largely by nuns, Linda fell in love with a young man she met as part of the theatre group at the University of Western Ontario — as she told the story, she would often go back to his apartment and do the dishes while he called his fiancee, who eventually fell by the wayside, defeated by the charms of this blonde bombshell with the big vocabulary and the cats-eye glasses.
Although her family might have preferred to see her marry a doctor or lawyer, Linda decided to marry a penniless farm boy from Saskatchewan who had just joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot. Despite — or perhaps because of — their differences, they became an inseparable team, he the director telling everyone where to stand and what to say (or which country and province to move to next) and she the young ingenue, playing the role of Air Force officer’s wife, party hostess, mother, and later grandmother, aunt, and walking encyclopedia.
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