Lise Johnston has some of the most diverse interests of anyone I know. From bad dance movies to new wave French cinema, to baking, power tools, science fiction and Russian literature, she enjoys high brow and low brow indiscriminately and without shame. We have been friends for over a decade so I was curious what I would learn about her in this interview. I begin by asking what her parents do.

My father is a general practitioner, and my mom, I guess she’s an artist slash mom. I was deciding what I should say because what she always says is that she is singlehandedly saving the Anglican church. I don’t really know what that means but that’s what she says.

How is she saving it?

I don’t know! By attempting to teach students about the traditions of Anglicanism because they don’t care and my mom doesn’t like that because she likes the traditions of Anglicanism, like the Book of Common Prayer et cetera. Which is why she gives the book to anyone who shows the slightest interest in it at all.

We have this thing called like learner’s exchange and she did one. They get a speaker to talk about anything vaguely related to Christianity or Anglicanism.

What did she talk about?

Definitely the prayer book. It was like specifically a talk about why the prayer book is important. And what parts of it are, and why it’s good and shouldn’t just be thrown away because the language is from the 16th century.

How long has your dad been a GP?

I think that the first year my parents were married, which was 1980, he was doing his… I just know the American doctor show terminology, so I don’t know what it’s called in Canada, I guess it’s an internship… in Saskatoon. They didn’t have a honeymoon, cause my dad was in the middle of medical school so there was no time for a honeymoon. Then they spent a year in William’s Lake and he was the head of the emergency ward or something. My mom got pregnant with my brother and everyone in the entire town knew about it like 3 days later and my mom realized that being the wife of the doctor in a small town was … that everyone knew when they had sex apparently.

And then they moved to Vancouver in 1983. He was doing locum work, which is when you are a temporary replacement to another GP in family practice. Or whatever, it’s called a locum no matter what. They moved into our house then. They rented it and the week I was born they bought it. The people they bought it from are my dad’s patients and they gave them a deal on the house apparently. It was $500,000, which in 1987 was a shit load of money and my mom’s entire family thought she was insane. Apparently grandfather flipped out and did his usual ‘Jesus Christ Norah what the fuck are you doing? You’re going to bankrupt yourselves.” But we all showed them…Vancouver is on the up and up.

Has your relationship changed a lot in the last few years?

Well the entire time I was a teenager my brother was on meth. I was like a secondary concern which, completely, I’m not angry about but I felt like there was not a lot of time in their lives for me on a serious level. I hung out with my dad a lot. Maybe that’s why we’re friends more. But my mom was really depressed and she felt like she couldn’t leave the house because my brother would come home and steal anything.

I remember when I was like 12, Melissa, [the daughter of a family friend] took me to see some movie at Oakridge and it ended at 11:00. We missed the bus and we just decided to walk home. It was me and her and her cousin Diego. Meli was like 16 and Diego was 18 or something and it took us 2 hours to walk home. I was 12 and I got home at 1 o’clock, 1:30 in the morning. We stopped at a 24 hours grocery store for cotton candy. I remember there was no repercussions for that on me. My dad was mad at Meli and Diego obviously…but it was like, there was no time to be mad at me.

Like what did I do in high school? I did nothing, I never did anything wrong but I also never tried, at all, ever and no one really cared because my brother would disappear for days and that’s why I’m crying. So that’s yeah my relationship with my parents. They suddenly actually kind of care where I am, which is nice.

Are there any memories of your parents, together or separately that stand out?

My dad cut off three of his fingers with a dado blade on a table saw when I was like nine months old and he’s fallen off the roof twice. The third time he didn’t actually fall off the roof, he just slipped a little bit so that doesn’t count. And the first time he did it he wasn’t hurt. I was building a box, which I am fully capable of using a table saw correctly, since the first time I was allowed to use one by myself I was nine or ten years old, and last year I was cutting some plywood really unsafely and it kicked back and punched me in the stomach. I got really dizzy and then I phoned Dad and he said ‘Do you feel nauseous’ and I said ‘No’ and then he said ‘Ahh you’re probably fine.’ I’m sure that my complete disregard for my own safety when it comes to power tools: he definitely taught me that.

So just Dad almost killing himself – but the reasons he was doing that which is fixing things in ridiculous ways. They always end up looking really good when he’s done. It starts out looking terrible but then when it’s all finished it looks amazing and I think that’s exactly how I work. I start out and it’s like a bomb exploding and then at the end it’s, well not amazing but…

There’s just so much mess when he makes anything. The bathroom. He designed everything and he found all the stuff and it looked terrible. He had some guys come in and grind a pan for the shower out of the concrete floor and the entire house was covered in dust for like 6 weeks because it was so fine and it was settling. My mom wouldn’t vacuum because she knew there would still be more. Everything he does is a disaster at the beginning but then it looks cool.

My dad just taught me how to build stuff. And how to fix things. And how to hurt myself but I just brush it off and keep going. Dad taught me how to build everything and he started teaching me when I was like an infant.

The biggest way my mother has shaped my life is that she used to be really really obsessive compulsive about how clean the kitchen counters are. My brother and I would have to do it over and over and over again until she could run her finger over the counter and it would not come up with any crap. Now I’m also that way and I hate it but I can’t help myself. Dirty dishes are fine – but if the dishes are supposed to be clean they better be frickin’ the cleanest dishes you ever SAW.

Except now mom’s eyesight is going she doesn’t really care any more and it’s awesome.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

My parents are pretty cool.

Courtney Strimple is, at first glance, quiet, slight, and unimposing. Beneath her shy veneer is a calmly burning intelligence, a curiosity about the mechanisms of everyday life and history that make her immediately likeable once a conversation is struck. She has a thirst to learn more about everything she encounters, and goes about discovering answers with delicate determination.

Courtney was born and raised in Hamlin, New York, a small town of around 200 just outside the Rochester area. “Same house my whole life,” she says. “It’s a one-street town. It’s a farm town.” Her parents bought the land at the age of twenty-four, and slowly built their home over the years. “My dad built the house about forty years ago. They’ve been married forty-two years. He just built the basics starting off, you know: bedrooms, family room. My dad’s a very handy man, so afterwards he added on a garage, an extension to the kitchen, a sunroom. He’s redone all the flooring, walls, ceilings. It keeps my dad busy, he needs something to do, so he was constantly working on the house and making changes to it. My parents are building a new house now, a log cabin, three thousand square feet. My mom always wanted a log-cabin house. They’ve been working on it for four years.”

Her father is semi-retired building car engines for GM. “He worked on an assembly line, built car engines for twenty-nine years, and when they went bankrupt, they gave him the chance to do the early buy-out, and they were going to pay him money to do it. He ended up not getting the money they promised, they told him that there was a glitch in the system, and they weren’t going to be able to pay him. It happened with a few other people who took the early buy-out. So my dad had to go back to work. They said they didn’t realize so many people were going to take the early buy-out. He works on the fuel cell concept now. The electric car. They build them up and then they tear them down, to figure out what made it work, what made it not work. He enjoys it, he likes being part of something so high-tec and so new.”

“So how does he have time to build a house?”

“He doesn’t have that much free time, he goes to work at seven in the morning to five in the evening. He’ll come home, we’ll have dinner, and then he’ll go and work on the new house. He’ll stay until nine, ten at night, then he’ll come home, go to bed, and do it all again the next day.”

I ask about her mom.

“She’s retired. She worked on and off. My childhood she stayed home. She worked as a special needs aide in our school, then as a culinary assistant to a chef that taught classes. When my sister found out she was pregnant, my mom decided she needed to retire, and help take care of my nephew. She’s been retired for four years now. She loves it. She loves taking care of my nephews and being able to be home. She’s active in her church, so it’s not like she doesn’t have anything to do. She loves being a grandma.”

Courtney is the youngest of five children. “The two oldest were adopted. My mom was told she’d never be able to have children, ever. The doctor said there was no chance, so they decided to turn to adoption. They adopted my baby brother first, he was nine months old. About two, three years later, they adopted my sister. She was nine when they adopted her. They raised them. Then my mom wasn’t feeling well, so she went to the doctor’s, and they’re like ‘You’re pregnant.’ Then my parents decided to see if it could happen again. Then I was just ‘Hey…happenchance.’ My oldest sister was in the navy for two years by the time I was born, so there’s a big gap.”

I ask her what dinner at her house is like.

“My mom would want to know everything about you, about your family. She would want to know what you did, where you grew up, what school you attended, are you successful. She’s very curious, learning about people she’s never met before. My father, I jokingly say he’s like Silent Sam. He’s very quiet. When my dad says something, you know it’s going to be profound. If you’re in trouble, it’s always mom to punish, and then if dad were to punish you, you know you severely did something wrong, because he never raises his voice. So my dad would talk to you, he wouldn’t act like he’s that interested, but he’s listening to everything that you’re saying. He just doesn’t say too much.

“I’d have to say I’m a little bit closer with my mom. Growing up, my whole life, my mom was right in everything I was doing, whereas my dad was more in the background. I’m fully aware that he was involved in everything I was doing, but he kind of took the backseat. It’s easier to talk to her, but then, again, my dad is a man of very few words. To strike up a conversation with him is like pulling teeth. Even now, I’m gone and I’ve moved so far away, I talk to him online and I can’t have a conversation with my dad because I constantly have to ask questions or say things to provoke him to speak. With my mom I can just talk to her for hours. I always feel like I’m boring the poor man,” she laughs. “I love my dad, he’s a great man. It’s just hard to talk with him.”

I ask her if there are any memories of her parents that stick out for her.

“One memory I always think of, every time I see a bike, I remember when my dad tried to teach me to ride two-wheelers. I was petrified. I didn’t want to fall, I didn’t want to get hurt. We share our driveway with the house next to us. Our neighbours were even watching – they’re very active in our lives. My whole family was sitting on the driveway. I’m sitting on this bike, and they’re all cheering me on. I was so scared. And he goes ‘Ok so we’re gonna go down the driveway, I’m going to hold on to you, then we’re gonna come back and I’ll still be holding on to you.’ So we did that, trying to get my balance. The second time we did it he said ‘Ok, we’re gonna go down again and I’m gonna hold on to you.’ I remember going down, and I look back, and my dad’s just standing there. I’m riding by myself. And the smile he had on his face was just pure joy. You know the saying ‘Actions speak louder than words?’ My father’s actions definitely speak louder than words.

“For my mom, one memory that sticks out, as long as I could remember I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be an opera singer when I was five. My mom enrolled me in voice lessons at ten. We would drive all the way to Rochester, every Wednesday for half-hour voice lessons. My parents would pay twenty-five dollars, which is way too much money. She’d sit there for the entire lesson, listen to everything my teacher said. On the way home she’d drive me to dance class, and then take me home and help me with my homework. That was up until I was thirteen or fourteen, and then I stopped doing dance lessons, because it was either voice or dance. It got too expensive. But every Wednesday, she would take me into Rochester and take me to my voice lessons. That was definitely big, my mom always pushed me in. She always asks to hear me sing. That’s the one thing she misses, since us being away: my mom can’t hear me sing. I would sing in church on Sundays, so if I hadn’t sung during the week, she could hear me. That’s one of the big things: she pushed us to succeed.”

Nic Davidson is bouncing with positive energy. In some ways he reminds me of the squirrel in Ice Age who is constantly trying to get the acorn, except infused with a confident intelligence and resounding spiritual clarity. Nic is a youth pastor by profession, a convert to Catholicism, who will wait until someone brings up the faith before launching into his extensive knowledge of Catholic history and his deep love of God. He tries his best to respectfully contain his zeal around those who are not religious. He is warm, engaging, and knowledgeable, and there are few topics he seems uncomfortable discussing. Indeed, he is quite a talker.

Nic was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. “It’s okay. It’s a good place. I got bitter towards the last five years, because I just got tired of the cold. Never liked the cold when I was younger. Great to be around my family, but I hate the cold.”

He moved out when he went to college in Minneapolis. “It was warmer. Two hours warmer.” He met his wife there, and they were married in 2001. “We met in an audition for a one-act, and then we got cast together. We played Rolf and Liesl from the Sound of Music. ‘I Am Sixteen Going On Seventeen.’ That’s the scene we had to do. I was the last choice. I don’t have a musical theatre voice, so to my buddy who cast her, I said, ‘Hey if you need a guy, I would love to be in a scene with this girl.’ He’s like ‘Yeah okay, if I can’t find anyone else on this earth then I’ll call you.’ He called me two weeks before because he couldn’t find anyone. I always joke that when she and I met, and we started rehearsing, she had a boyfriend, but not by the end of the rehearsal. But it was only timing, she was planning on breaking up with him. Our first picture together is of us doing that kiss on-stage during a performance.”

His parents were born in Duluth. “My mom had me when she was seventeen, with a guy, and he didn’t come from… he came from a really bad home. He was abusive to my mom and he was an alcoholic and stuff. My mom got pregnant, and the way my family found out was: my grandpa was told to stay away from this guy, and my grandpa showed up at this cabin they were at, grabbed her out of the cabin and was taking her to the car, and was like, ‘Stay away from my daughter.’ And he answered, ‘Alright well I’ll see you in about nine months.’ That’s how the family found out. They got a restraining order out on him, so I didn’t know him until I was eighteen. I met him just because of curiosity. When I was two my mom married Mike, he’s like my dad, my adopted dad. He was the only dad I knew, growing up. So they got married when she was nineteen, and I was two.

“When I was ten, I was looking at my baby book, and you know how they always have a family tree? One entire side of the family tree, each branch was scribbled out and rewritten with a new name. And at ten I was thinking ‘What the heck? She made a mistake on every branch on one side of the tree.’ I remember she was like, ‘Well, we’ll have a talk,’ and made it formal all of a sudden. She was really good about it because she never, she didn’t divulge until I asked, all through the years. At that point she just said, ‘Well because there used to be a bunch of names on that side, is all.’ For a ten-year-old, I was like, ‘Alright.’ Within a year I had thought about it more, and I asked, ‘Well why were there other names?’ She said, ‘Well the daddy you have now wasn’t the daddy you had before. He’s not in our life.’ And I was like ‘Okay that’s fine.’ Then as I got older I would ask more and more. Whenever it came up she would answer really honestly, but never forcing it on me, which was really nice because when I was fifteen, and going through all the angst, then I asked, and she told me most of everything, at that point. For me, she did the right thing. When I was curious, she was totally honest with me. And we were really close. It’s funny, I always say we grew up together because she was so young when she had me that we were really close, so she was comfortable being honest. She would say it wasn’t his fault all the way, but he wasn’t a nice guy, because his dad was highly abusive, like would slam his head against the walls and put him in the hospital. That was his upbringing.

“I was open about it with the dad that I did have. I told him when I was eighteen, ‘I want you to know I’m gonna meet Chuck, but it’s not cause I don’t love you, it’s just curiosity.’ I didn’t have one of those after-school special, ‘Oh I really need to meet him’ things. I just wanted to know more or less why. I had a solid home, my mom was great and my dad was really quiet…he wasn’t…he was a good man, he wasn’t a good husband.”

“You’re talking about Mike?”

“Yeah. They divorced when I was seventeen. It was never a bad home, he went to church with us every Sunday, he just never talked at all. He works long long hours, he comes from a family… I would say they’re lumberjacks. Five massive burly men, and they work hard, and they don’t communicate a lot. He didn’t communicate, so they’re divorced and they’re better friends now, our family is more calm. They fought all those seventeen years.

“That’s when I met Chuck, after the divorce. That was fun too, because I had never known him but we had the same mannerisms, we look a lot alike. Growing up my mom would accidentally call me him all the time, especially when she was mad: ‘Chuck! Nic! Just sit down!’ I was nervous, and he was so fidgety and nervous too. I’ll fidget with things, and so when I got done I had this pile of shredded napkin and I looked over and he had the same pile in front of him. He’s the same, in the nurture-nature thing, a lot of the nature’s the same, like we walk the same, but maybe more our moral fiber is different, as a result of upbringing.”

I ask him to describe his mother. He had earlier told me that despite going to a Bible college, he had considered himself an atheist for the better part of a year, and he built on that story to describe his mother.

“So my mom…so I told you about when I was atheist in Bible school, I always sum up my mom in that moment when at the church, I gave God the finger and I walked upstairs and I called her right away. She just said, ‘I love you, if you die an atheist I’ll always love you.’ That’s the way she was, she was really sacrificial, really giving, completely all-in. She was the perfect mom for me. She was always honest. One time I found, I don’t know what it’s called, dipping snuff, or chewing tobacco. I told her, ‘Mom I found this today,’ when I was seventeen. She’s like ‘Wanna try it? I’ve never tried it, let’s do it.’ Disgusting. That’s the way she was with me, very approachable, I never had a curfew.

He begins to tell me about his grandfather, Richard Anderson (“Same as MacGyver”, he says), whom he considers a father figure.

“My grandfather was solid. He’s the man, he’s a good good man. So I had a good male influence. We lived with him for a long time, until she got married when I was two. He was always there. When I was three days old, we came home from the hospital, he was driving home carrying me in the truck. I was always with grandpa. I know people have issues if they grow up without a father figure, but I didn’t have that. He wasn’t my dad, but he was the male that I needed, he gave me the: ‘Here’s what a guy is and does, and here’s how you treat people.’ I had a good upbringing, because of him.”

I ask him if there are any memories of his parents that stick out for him.

“Yeah. From when I was a little kid, there was a time when, like I said, she and my dad always fought. They fought all the time. It was right from the beginning, and I remember I was five years old, and my dad had just stormed out, and my mom was sitting there crying. And I had, I don’t even know what they were, I had this stack of cards of some kind that had writing on them. It doesn’t matter, whatever they are. I remember I was playing with them because I liked them, they were mine, and my mom was crying. I remember I said, ‘It’s okay mom, it’ll be alright, we have this card.’ And it made her laugh, and I remember thinking ‘Oh wow I made her feel a little better.’ Then I realized how stupid it was, I critically thought, ‘Ok this actually helps in no way.’ But as I said it I thought, ‘This will help, if I tell her we have this card, this will help.’ I don’t know why that always stuck out, I think it’s because I saw my mom cry a lot, and I was able to make her laugh then. For whatever reason, I always remembered that one.

“I think my dad, the only, I guess it’s not the only good memory, I don’t have bad memories. The only memory that stands out is the day that he left, because of the divorce. We were still living at the house. Like I said, my dad never really talked a lot. He was packing up his stuff out of his crappy dresser, he was packing it and he was crying, and he hugged me. I remember, even as a kid, bawling – I always cry, I’m a crier – but I remember thinking at the time, ‘Okay this is one of those moments, this is one of the moments that you actually won’t forget, this is the movie moment.’ Because I was seventeen years old. It was tough on my dad, because my dad crapped it up for the first fourteen years of the marriage, and then toward the end when my mom was like, ‘I’m filing for divorce,’ it woke him up. It was too late for her. But he changed. That kind of hit him, and I remember that about him.

“My grandpa there’d be too many memories to stand out. He’s quiet, he’s soft-hearted. My grandpa he’s the farmer man, the ‘You don’t say a lot, but when you say it you mean it’ type. When he would talk it was it was always good and it was always loving. He’d do anything. I totaled my car when I was in North Carolina, and within a day he was there, he drove all the way with his truck. He’s driven all over the nation for me. I don’t have one good one. I should, there’s just too many.

“And Chuck. I guess that memory with the pile of napkin would be the closest thing to a good memory. He’s got good intentions, he’s a well-intentioned man.”

I ask him if there’s anything he wants to add.

“The only thing I would think of to add to the end, and I’m always hesitant to be that way, but I when I got into college, I found myself always wanting older male approval. I started to realize that I had formed my view of God based on the male examples in my life. I started to think that God was like my biological father, so God was just pissed and drunk and abusive, like he was just an angry…whatever. Or he was silent and he would leave. I had to work through that, that was the biggest stuff I had to work though, just, ‘Well these are the guys that were in my life, what is He like?’ If God’s a “he”, you know. Having taken from then, when I started asking all those questions, till now, to get to know Him, God, the one that they were supposed to be acting like, God the father, the idea we get from Scripture. Then taking the time to get to know Him and how He thinks of me and allowing Him that relationship, has really helped take all of the rest of them, not just in stride but to put them in their correct structure and framework. I always hesitate to bring God into stuff, but I think the only reason I am what I am, if there’s any good, is as a result of that relationship. Being able to, in my worst moments in marriage, my worst moments in relationships all through college, after going through all that to be able to turn to Him as a father, and actually having that father who’s the perfect father, to be the father they all should have been in a sense. Seeing the goodness that we’re made for, and seeing the goodness in Him, in my life, helped me to be what they weren’t. I would be remiss to not mention that, not to be overly religious. It’s always about His goodness, through all of that, when it all goes to crap, when they each fail you in some way, the fact is that He hasn’t.”

Steven Black is calm, patient, and mature. He is a man who absorbs all the things he encounters – he prides himself on being a media junkie – and filters them into his own unique perspective. He places deep value on work and his friendships. Having spent the last year in Amsterdam to complete his Master’s, he is now applying for PhD programs, hoping to end up in a university near his fiancée. He is deeply reflective, and constantly in search of ways to better his understanding of the world.

His parents, William and Barbara, live in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto, Ontario. Steven was born in Toronto. His sister, four years his senior, was also born in Toronto, and is currently living in Europe with her husband. I ask him if Brampton is still home.

“Yeah, that’s home. I was born and raised there. I’ve done a lot of traveling, but aside from Amsterdam and three months in California I haven’t lived anywhere else.”

I ask him about his parents’ careers.

“My dad used to be a jeweler, it was sort of the family business. After that he went into car sales. He was always good at retail, so a friend of his suggested he look into car sales, and it took for him. My mother used to be a bookkeeper and social worker before she had children, and then after… well, while she was having children, she didn’t work. Once we grew up, she got a job in sales: she was the manager of a retail store for ten years. Recently she went back to school for medical administrative work. She actually just finished in April. She’s sixty-two.”

“What made her go back to school?”

“Retail is a really exhausting job. You’re on your feet all day, and you tend to work for big corporations who don’t respect you as much as they should, so it just got to the point where she needed to change. She was getting older and acknowledged that she didn’t want to be on her feet all day. She was always interested in medical administration, and has a few friends that work in that field. So she’s looking for a job. The program she finished has a pretty high placement rate. It’s a really well-known program, so hopefully that’ll get her foot in the door.”

I ask him if he inherited any of his parents’ retailing skills.

“A little bit. I used to work in retail, but I didn’t really enjoy doing it. I’d say most of the skills that have been passed on in terms of retail experience is negotiating, and trying not to get screwed over – what to look for. I found that incredibly useful. I remember with my dad, I really wanted a Discman. They had just come out, and everybody had a Discman. We go into the store, and he says, ‘I’m going to buy you a Discman for your birthday.’ I’m like, ‘Oh that’s amazing.’ I’m so excited. ‘But you gotta pretend like you’re not excited and I’m not gonna buy it for you.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

“So we go to a Magnavox, which I don’t think even exists anymore, and he’s talking to the guy about the Discman and starts negotiating a price. I’m thinking to myself, as a kid, you know, ‘This is a retail store. They have set prices. You can’t just walk into a retail store and negotiate price.’ So the guy, he’s talking to him for like ten, fifteen minutes, then he says, ‘Okay, if you’re not gonna do any better for me then I’m gonna leave.’ So I look at him, really upset because I thought I was gonna get it for my birthday present, and he looked at me kind of like, ‘Remember what I said before?’ I think, ‘Oh yeah.’ So as we’re walking towards the door, the salesman at the Magnavox conceded to what my dad had offered. They were expensive at the time, they were like three hundred bucks, and he knocked off a hundred, so it was two hundred in the end. I remember thinking what an impossible thing it would be to talk someone down at a retail store in a place where you wouldn’t commonly negotiate a price, but there you go he did it. He’s a likeable guy. Good retail person.”

“Did he do that a lot?”

“Just in situations where he felt like it was overpriced, or maybe he was being taken advantage of.”

I ask him to describe what dinner with his parents would be like.

“My dad’s really laid back. It takes a lot to get him riled up. My mom’s very hands-on, she’ll make sure, ‘Did you have enough to eat? Let me get you another drink.’ She wants to take care of people. They kind of balance each other out. We’d be eating dinner and my mom would be like, ‘Do you want more of this, do you want more of that?’ And my dad would say, ‘He’ll tell you when he wants more.’”

I ask him if the way he sees his parents has changed as he gets older.

“Absolutely. I think my perception of them has changed and their perception of me has changed. They were always caring parents, especially when I was young, and then as a teenager I had the rebellious phase, and they would view me as rebellious, so sometimes when I would say something that didn’t make sense they were just like, ‘Oh, you’re just being rebellious.’ I think as a child I respected, I mean I still respect them a lot, as a child, everyone looks up to their parents and wants to do right by them, and I saw them as knowing the right answer for everything. When I got to high school, that’s probably when I started questioning some things. Maybe what’s best for them isn’t what’s best for me. I saw them as very intelligent people who know a lot and give really great advice, but who sometimes might not know exactly what I’m going through, so I might need to do what’s right for me.

“I think now there’s a huge turning point where they’ve realized that they don’t always know what’s best for me, so they make a point to give advice and say, ‘We’re sure you’ll do what’s right for you.’ But there were a few times, when I finished high school and when I finished undergraduate university, I was still living at home for a few years. I was out of that rebellious phase, so if I was saying something, I would say it because it made sense to me. And then a lot of the times they would be like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re saying this but you’re not gonna do it,’ and I’d have to tell them, ‘Listen, I’m not sixteen anymore. I can understand how, I finished high school and undergrad, it feels like I’m still your little boy, but that’s not really the case anymore.’ So sometimes I have to remind them that I do know what’s best for me. I know what I’m talking about. So I guess that’s how I’ve changed. I always looked to them for the answers, and in high school I looked elsewhere and they thought I was being rebellious, and then now they also acknowledge that they don’t always know what’s best for me.”

I ask him if there are any memories of his parents that stand out for him.

“Yeah. In the beginning of 2009, I had taken a job with a major telecommunication company. I became really upset and depressed with the job, it did not turn out the way I thought it was going to be. I really didn’t like what I was doing, and I felt stuck, because there was a recession and people were looking for jobs, so it wasn’t a good time to quit, and it wasn’t an easy time to find something else to do. So I felt stuck in a job that I really didn’t like. Most of the people I worked with were older than me, they were like, ‘You know, this is not for you, maybe you should do something about it before you become like me and get stuck here and it’s five, six years down the road.’ I really wanted to do something about it. If I’m unhappy I want to make myself happy, not just sit there and hope everything will get better. I told my parents that I’m quitting my job. Immediately their reaction was, ‘Obviously you need to do what’s right for you.’ We had reached that point I had mentioned earlier where they don’t know exactly what’s best for me, but they’re still giving advice. So they were saying, ‘I don’t really think it’s a good time for you to quit your job right now because it’s a recession. A lot of people are unhappy with what they do, but they have responsibilities and they have to suck it up sometimes.’ I said to them, ‘If this is five, six years down the road, and I have kids, then sure, suck it up, if I have mortgage payments, car payments,’ but at the time I didn’t really have any financial responsibility other than to not be a liability to my family and friends.

“That argument didn’t really stick with me, because if I go out, and I try to do something that I’m really happy doing, then in the end, because of kids, car payments, mortgage, and I don’t get all the way there, I have to settle for something that I’m really not thrilled with but I have responsibilities, that’s fine. But if I’m not even gonna try because I’m afraid of a recession and I’m afraid of what might happen, then I’m going to regret it. That was a really hard divide for us, because they were being really practical, and I understand that they were looking out for what’s best for me, but they couldn’t be in my head and see how unhappy I was. I’d like to think that if they could, they would have also told me to quit my job and find something else. So I ended up formulating this idea that I would apply to a bunch of Master’s programs and apply to a bunch of jobs. In the end, I worked teaching swimming part-time, and tour-guiding from January to September, and then September I went to Amsterdam to work on my Master’s. When I got accepted, my mom was immediately like, ‘Oh I don’t think you should go.’ Not because she didn’t think it would be a good experience, but it would be really hard for her – my sister had already moved out. My father said ‘I think that’s a great idea, you can go and get a Master’s in a year, whereas most of the programs in Canada were for two years, and you can get a lot of experience on your own two feet.’ They were supportive when I got accepted but they were still kind of worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a job.

“So I had been there from the end of August to the middle of October, and my parents came to visit. My fiancée and I were there together, and I had made a lot of friends, I was doing well in school, getting good grades. I was significantly happier, you could see it in my attitude and behaviour. Things were going really well. For me, it was the right move. Towards the end of the trip, my parents took me aside. They were just like, ‘Listen, we know that when you quit your job and told us that you were going back to school we gave you a hard time about it. When you came here, we weren’t huge fans about it. Now looking back on it, seeing what you’ve done with your time,’ they said, you know ‘we were wrong, you obviously knew what was the right thing for you to do, but we want you to know that for you, we’re really proud of you to see that you know what’s right for you.’ I told them that at no time did I think they didn’t have my best interest, but it’s just something they couldn’t have understood, because it was my happiness, and that’s something that’s hard to explain. In the end, to hear that was a really great memory for me, because that was the very definition of, we really respected each other. Of course I’ll always be their baby boy and they’ll always be my mom and dad, but I felt great at that point because I can talk to them about serious stuff. We can really converse as adults with mutual respect. It was a really nice feeling.”

Phillip Walker leads a rich life, and makes sure to enjoy every minute of it. On the one hand, he is outgoing, energetic, and extroverted. He lives a fast-paced lifestyle, exercising constantly in any way he can, socializing and teasing his colleagues during the day, and bringing life to whatever party he decides to attend at night. On the other hand, he is deeply reflective. Certain subjects, like family, education, religion, or politics, will make him slow his environment down, as he calmly debates his philosophies. He is constantly reevaluating and renewing his perspective on life.

Phillip was born in New Orleans and raised in Georgia. His mother passed away five years ago, and his father is currently unemployed.

“He did construction for maybe twenty years, and then when he stopped that he started working at Wal-Mart, because he’s always been kind of mechanic-ish person. He did that for thirteen years, and then stopped working.”

“How long has he been unemployed?”

“I guess almost three years. Four years maybe. Shoot, I don’t know, long time it seems like. He did something at work. He’s always told different stories: he got in trouble, he got laid off. At first he was getting unemployment insurance, but then I don’t know exactly why he didn’t get it, if he wasn’t doing the proper protocol. You have to be pursuing a job, and I’d have to assume that he wasn’t doing that. I know, to some extent, he wouldn’t take a urine test or failed it, but it had something to do with that. I had someone tell me who worked with him.”

“So he doesn’t have any income coming in right now?”

“No, he does not, to my knowledge. We don’t talk too often, but I know he doesn’t have a job.”

Phillip has two older brothers, and two younger sisters. His oldest brother is seven years older than him, and was from his father’s previous marriage. Phillip keeps in contact with him, as well as his two children. “They’re really good kids, seem to be well-behaved, especially the oldest boy. Real respectful, and caters to his sister and his mom.” His second brother is twenty-eight years old, and is often incarcerated. “He’s been in and out of jail for the last twelve to thirteen years, he’s just kind of built a habit around it. Most of the time, not really big crimes like murder, molestation, or anything like that, just shoplifting, possession of drugs, theft. Seems to be addicted to that lifestyle.”

His younger sister is twenty-one years old. She dropped out of college and is living with her boyfriend. He’s disappointed that she didn’t continue her education, but he thinks she’s happy, which is what is important to him. His youngest sister is fifteen. “She currently lives with a family of a friend hers, which at first I wasn’t crazy about, but my dad’s not able to take care of her, because he’s not financially, emotionally, physically quite up to par. At first I hated it, but I think God’s shown me that it’s a lot better of a situation than I first gave credit for. Family seems to be really stable, it has guidelines, procedures they follow, mother seems to be invested in all the kids. It’s a lot of stability, so I like it. It’s definitely been a blessing.”

Phillip is closest with his sisters. “We’re not as close now as we used to be when I was there. With our family being so severed, we don’t have a common place to go to for family things. I pretty much played like a parent to both of them, but mostly the youngest ones. I’ve never really gotten to be the big brother to them. Even now I still feel like it’s…they still need a father figure, and the father’s not there, so I feel close to them, but like a love, a kind of connection, not as far as a brother would be close to their siblings. They wouldn’t call me and want to talk about sex, or things like that, they would call me like a dad, and be like ‘What college should I go to?’ or ‘Could you help me, could I borrow this?’ Stuff like that is more the way they see me, and it’s kind of the way I see them. I like it and I hate it. I would like to be the brother that comes home at Christmas and buys them a Playstation, but all my life I’ve been the brother that’s had to evaluate what they need, and try to give them what they want. I’ve got a little bit of anger towards my father because of that, because I want to be a brother, I don’t want to be a dad. That’s the way I perceive it.”

I ask him how his mother died.

“She had cirrhosis of the liver. Hepatitis C. She wasn’t a drug user or alcoholic or anything like that, because that’s what most people relate it to. She worked in the medical profession, in a doctor’s office doing secretary stuff, cleaning, basic stuff. She stuck herself a few times, and that’s the only thing they can log it back where she could have gotten Hepatitis C. She was never tested for it, so it just kind of damaged her slowly. Once it started to show signs, she was pretty damaged. She did things to help it. Her death was still kind of sudden. We kind of knew it might come sooner than it should, but we definitely didn’t expect it to come that soon. This April was five years.”

“How has the family dealt with that?”

“I wouldn’t say we don’t talk about it, we talk about it when it’s relevant, or it comes up. But it’s hard. She was definitely the rock, she was the safety net that caught everything. She lived a hard life to make sure she kept her family together, which I’m sure she thought was best, but probably wasn’t, long-term, the best thing for her health or any of our own. But I think she took pride in that. She stayed married, and she stayed committed, and she just hoped that things would get better. I feel bad for my younger sisters because they lost their mother when they were ten and sixteen. That I don’t wish upon no one. I’m glad, I was lucky to get twenty-one years. I remember her very fondly, and I know they have vague memories of things, which bothers me a lot, because she was such an impact in my life. I have a lot of sympathy for them, and I used to shelter them from things, but now I realize it’s best to let them cope.”

I ask him if everyone in his family has recovered from that.

“No. Definitely not. I think because our family was already so broken, and now is even shattered, that it’s almost unrecoverable. Emotionally, I’ve dealt with it, there’s no anger towards God, not even towards my dad so much, I just wish he would have allowed my mother to live a happier life. You’re always going to long for it, I mean I would give any amount of money, if I could spend one minute with anybody on this earth it would always be her.”

I ask him about his father’s relationship with his mother.

“He was very abusive, physically and emotionally. Any type of abuse you could think of he pretty much did. I don’t know when it first started, if it started before she had kids, but he used to just beat the hell out of her and would be, verbally, just completely degrading. When me and my brother got old enough to defend our mother, we would physically defend her, by all means necessary. If we had to hit our dad, or pick up something, we were quick to do it, we didn’t really care. I mean we probably cared, you never want to hit your father, but when he’s drunk and belligerent and hitting your mother, when you’re old enough to realize that you can defend her. We would sometimes get our ass whipped by him, because we were young enough to defend her but not old enough to hold up a fight. When we got old enough to really defend her, I was like eighteen, even seventeen, where my dad’s not much bigger than me, I’m a little taller than him and little bulkier, that I could literally whip his ass. He didn’t step over that threshold, but then he would get verbally abusive, so my mom got to the point where she would get physically abusive. I mean I have the same thing she has in her, when I’m pushed to the threshold of that, I want to get physical, which I don’t like, but I know that about me. When the anger gets so much, I want to hurt somebody. I want to physically get the aggression out. She has the same thing in her.”

I ask him if there are any memories of either of his parents that stand out for him.

“I can remember being, I don’t even remember how old I was, and sitting on the roof of a car. My dad was drunk one night, I’m sure he was drunk. If I had to guess, I would say I was third or fourth grade. He asked me, on the car, he said ‘Do you want your mom to leave me? Do you want us to get divorced?’ I can’t remember how he asked it. I remember saying with just the biggest thrill, and I think even then I thought ‘He’s asking me and he’ll do it.’ I don’t know. I remember saying ‘Yes! Yes, I would love you and mom to separate! I would love for you to be gone!’ You know, I’m sure I’ll still love my dad to some extent, but I wanted him gone. I remember that snippet of that.

“All in all, I know my mother knows that she was my life. I remember the day I graduated college with my bachelors, I’m the first person in our family, both sides, any generation to ever have a college degree, which to me is huge. Because something in me has always hungered for education. I love it. I love education. I love learning. I’ve never felt smart, so I felt that at least if I have that sheet of paper it shows that dammit I may not remember it all, but I busted my ass to get it. So I remember the day I graduated was one of the happiest days of my life, but was also one of the worst, because the day I graduated was the day I knew I would be financially stable to have a job that paid adequate enough. Coming from a family whose annual income was probably no more than thirty thousand a year collectively, we didn’t really have, Christmas was okay, but really tax time was the best because we knew we would get tons of money back, from two parents making nothing and four kids. Graduation day was just depressing, because that was the day I could tell her ‘You don’t have to live with him anymore. It’s done, this whole hell that you’ve lived for twenty something years is over. You’re moving down with me, I’m gonna get a job down here, making thirty, forty thousand dollars a year, there’s no reason we can’t live off of that. You can get a job if you want, you don’t have to get a job, I don’t give a damn, I’m tired of seeing you live like that. You know, the girls can come down, more than likely they would, they want to follow their mother, and we’ll just start a life down here.’ And I didn’t get to do that. She died a year and a half before I got my bachelors. That honestly was the main goal. So I remember that day.

“The good thing is that God’s given me the mental capacity to take the negative and convert it to positive. So I’m very blessed. I don’t think my older brothers, as men, were able to do that. And then to take the positive things and just amplify them. If I was a bad parent, I feel like I would be disrespecting my mother, and that I’ll never do. My mother no longer lives, and she lives through her kids, and I will let her name carry some power through me. One of the main reasons I want to be State Superintendent, or work with our future President on education reform, is because when somebody says ‘What has driven you to want to do that?’ I can always give credit to my mother and God.”

Stephanie Tetreault is inherently sweet. When I speak with her, she holds eye contact the entire time, letting me know that I have her full attention. She has a warm smile, and exudes an innocence that is contradicted by her ability to keep up with any topic, no matter how abrasive or crude. She is sharp, maternalistic, and has an intelligent humour. Delightfully, she speaks with a thick Boston accent.

Stephanie was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, but grew up in Quincy. Her mother now lives in a neighbouring town. Her father died almost ten years to the date of our interview. She has two older brothers, Mark and Michael, close to her in age.

“So you’re the youngest?” I ask.

“Yes I am. Baby and the only girl.”

“Was that easy?”

“Actually, it was kind of not as easy, just because my brothers beat up on me a lot. They kind of treated me like the younger brother. Hence the tomboy. Well I guess I was more of a tomboy when I was little.”

Her mother is a tax collector for City Hall. I ask if she likes her job.

“She’s actually moving her job. She’s not going to be a tax collector anymore, ‘cause she doesn’t like the interaction with the customers, they kind of make fun of her. She’s moving into payroll, instead of taking their money. It’ll be more rewarding, I think. She gets more money for it, too.”

Stephanie explains why people make fun of her mother. “She’s physically weak because she was in a car accident when she was eighteen. She has paralysis. She was on the side of the road, and there was a bus, a public transportation bus, and they told her ‘It’s cool, go across the street’, so she went to cross the street, but somebody had come up, you know how people don’t like to wait behind busses, they like to go on the side. It was a pickup truck, and it hit her, and her friend. Apparently it was going fast because they flew like fifty feet, and she was in a coma for a month. She has permanent laryngitis, that’s what it sounds like. It paralyzed one of her vocal chords. When she talks it sounds like she’s whispering, which is why it was hard to deal with customer service, because they would make fun of her voice. It actually happened once when I was standing right there. I almost flipped out, like I almost started hitting the guy. She’s tough.”

Stephanie is very close with her brothers and her mother. Before entering medical school, she used to talk to them all the time. “They know it’s really tough, so they understand that I don’t call them all that often. When my dad died, we all got really close, just because it was hard, obviously. We all kind of leaned on each other.”

“So what happened with your dad?”

“He had cancer. Esophageal. What we’re learning about in class right now,” she snorts. “I was really young, when I found out. I was in my summer going into seventh grade. So I didn’t really understand it. I knew it wasn’t good, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention. He died the next year, before I left eighth grade.”

“How did your family respond to that?”

“My brothers were really angry, especially Mark. He’s still kind of angry about it. I think I was the one that everyone was worried about, because I didn’t go through the grieving process, and they were worried about me for that, because they didn’t think it was healthy. But I was trying to be strong, I guess, for my mom, for her sake. She was devastated. For her it was the hardest.”

“Do you think she’s recovered now?”

“I think so. She has a good, stable job now, this new one she’s going into, and all of her kids are all grown up. Her worst thing was just making sure we all made it through high school, college, and we all did that. That was her goal.”

Stephanie’s relationship with her brothers changed after the death of her father.

“Me and Michael used to fight a lot because we had clashing tempers. I don’t know, I didn’t have too much of a temper, but I would get angry at him when he was just in a mood. We used to scream at each other, and I’ve never screamed at him since my dad died. We’ve been pretty close since then. We’ll talk about pretty much anything. Mark’s kind of like…I mean I don’t want to say he’s like a second dad, but he does everything for me. I appreciate him as though he were a second dad. I know I could go to either of them for anything. They were always very protective of me.”

“In what way?”

“Boys, basically,” she laughs. “In general, if they saw me with guys, they would be tough, like ‘Stay away from my sister’. In particular with one guy that I dated in middle school. This was in eighth grade, after the fact. And they didn’t like him. I don’t know why they didn’t like him, but he wasn’t the best guy. I was in a stage. They didn’t like him, and I think they let him know about it, so we didn’t last very long.”

“They took him aside and talked to him?”

“I never found out,” she smiled.

I ask her what her father was like when he was alive.

“He was very relaxed. The only thing that bothered him was he had really bad road rage. He was a country boy. He was born in Maine, and his family’s from Canada. When he was a teenager they moved to Massachusetts, but he lived in the woodsy part of Massachusetts, so he liked camping, hunting, stuff like that. We loved going camping, we used to always go when we were in Maine. He worked on cars a lot, and air conditioning. That’s what he did, he was HVAC. He was good with his hands, very mechanical-savvy. He was very smart.”

“What were your parents like together?”

“They were cute. They were definitely in love. Even now she says that she can never find anyone else. She hasn’t been with anyone in ten years. She’s had offers, but she’s like ‘I’m not interested, I had the love of my life, I’m done.’”

I ask her if there are any memories of her parents that stick out for her.

“Most of the ones involving my dad are kind of morbid, I guess. I think the strongest memory I have is of the day that I found out, like the sudden realization that he was going to die. That was…awful. But that’s the strongest one I have. I was in my room, and it just hit me. I was really upset, and I went downstairs, and he was with a friend, but his friend – cause I was just bawling – he just walked away and let me and my dad be together. He said he was sorry. He said ‘It’s coming to get me.’” She speaks quietly, with difficulty. “I was twelve. It sucked.”

I asked her what his frame of mind was like during the entire process.

“I have no idea. I think I was too young to understand it. I guess too young to have insight.”

After a silence, she moves on to her mother.

“My mom, I have happy memories of her. For some reason, the thing that comes to mind is, one time we were shopping, and…she has this weird temper. I was using one of those gift cards that’s a credit card, and it didn’t work. The lady behind us was this old, sweet, eighty-something year-old lady, and she was like ‘Oh, I hate those things, they never work.’ She was just giving us support, I think. My mom says ‘Yeah, thanks for your support, bitch,’” Stephanie laughs. “To this eighty-something year-old lady! I was like ‘Mom, what is wrong with you?’ But she says ‘She didn’t hear me, don’t worry about it.’ She was just in a mood. It’s funny. Oh, I actually have a funny one of my dad. Me and a friend of mine, my friend Kate were going to another friend of ours, and we needed a ride. He was driving us, and this after he got sick but not long after. He was driving us, we were in the middle of the street, in the middle of this random road, and all of a sudden he just starts screaming. We were like ‘Oh my god, what’s wrong?’ And he was just ‘I thought it was too quiet.’ Apparently we weren’t talking enough.

I ask her if there is anything else she wants to add. She hesitates, then begins to tell me about her grandmother Camille.

“She is a badass Italian. She’s my mom’s mom. She’s a badass Italian. She was very helpful, with my mom, with me. I’m pretty close with my grandma. She has like thirty-something grandkids, but the three of us are her favourites. I feel bad about saying that, but we’re the only people that talk to her, we’re the only people that visit her. She’s been pretty amazing to us. Basically, after he died, my grandma was really helpful to my mom, because she was having a really tough time with it. She just needed her mom. She was, every step of the way, she stayed at our house for awhile, and helped my mom through most of the grief. For me, that’s when I grew up a little bit, in terms of, I really started to respect her.”

“Your mom or your grandma?”

“My grandma, even more, just because she was so much help. I’m really grateful to have her, because I couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have been there for my mom the way that she was. That was a clicking point for me.

“The biggest thing is that my mom, she’d do anything for me. I completely appreciate that. She’s the reason that I do half the things I do, because I’d like to make her proud. She’s always been there. She’s had a rough life. I think that’s it. My mom, she’s a crazy lady, but I couldn’t ask for anything more.”