A Parade of the Dispossed

Post date: Jan 23, 2011 5:54:45 PM

Sophia believed in non-violence. In the Reverend Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, the Quakers. Civil disobedience. Spent each Mother's Day at the Muddy Water memorial to the Great War in a candlelight vigil. Believed in peace, freedom, sleeping in late, kindness, poetry, escape, existentialism, laughter, dignity, loose dresses, democratic socialism, Nice'n'Easy number 106 until it turned her hair purple, opera, feminism and a drink before dinner.

Lady Bountiful, satirized on the editorial page of the Muddy Water Free Press for lobbying to increase welfare payments. For increasing payments to a man who lived m a wood shack without electricity, to a mother of four who wanted her children to have boots for school. Travelling the province to hear the appeals of those denied sustenance in the country with the fifth-highest per capita income in the world. Gavel in hand, appointment secured by the election of her political party. In Pukatawagen, Picwitonei, Swan River, Churchill, Thompson and Dauphin, in Minnedosa, East Braintree, Cranberry Portage, Cormorant, Binscarth and Russell. In town halls and restaurants. Legion halls and commandeered taverns, Sophia listened and saw.

A parade of the dispossessed.

Poverty.

Lived in wealth.

Cradled the gavel, empowered and constricted by law, looked for cracks

in the gold dome of power.

The golden boys.

They pushed on the cracks.

Abandoned the logic.

Abandoned girdles and Phil, Thursdays at the hairdresser, the neighbourhood of the Citizen's Committee of One Thousand, a wardrobe of knits, satin and furs, the cool cedar closet with a rack filled with hats, three grown children, the battlefield dining table she bought cheap at an auction, the Waterford crystal she brought when she came. The twenty-six years when she honed her vocation.

When her party lost power Sophia saw the axe looming, denounced the firings, and left before hers.

On a plane, with one suitcase.

Owen sent her half the proceeds from the sale of the house(69-71).

Ann Decter.

Paper, Scissors, Rock.

Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers (Now McGilligan Books), 1992. ISBN: 0889740402