My dad, having no father to speak of, was raised by his mother and maiden aunts, who gave him drive enough to work his way through McGill in the 1920s and become a combustion engineer, and the good manners and formal anxieties of his class and time. He was a handsome young man when Montréal’s Ritz-Carleton was a rising young hotel. He later worked for big oil in western Canada.
“It was the same wind as the wind of my boyhood, still careless in the prairie grass.” – W.O. Mitchell