MY LOST

WEEKEND CANADA’S MAY 2022

IN STRATFORD, MOST-READ
ONT. MAGAZINE
PAGE 76

RESCUE
AT THE
BOTTOM OF
THE SEA
PAGE 40

How Your
Coffee
20 SYMPTOMS YOU Prevents
Dementia
SHOULD NEVER IGNORE PAGE 22
PAGE 28
Why My
Mom Believes
in Demons
PAGE 68

3 Steps
to a More
Positive You
PAGE 50

Mystery of the
Vanishing Boy
PAGE 84
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 reader’s digest

CONTENTS

Features

28
cover story
GET THAT CHECKED!
Our bodies are always surprising
us with new spots, bumps and
aches. Here are 20 symptoms
to never ignore.
BY ANNA-KAISA WALKER

40
drama in real life
Alone at the Bottom of the Sea
Chris Lemons was repairing oil
pipes 90 metres down when the
unthinkable happened.
BY SIMON HEMELRYK

50
life lesson
All Talk
THE SUN/NEWS LICENSING

40
How to quiet your
inner critics.
BY CHRISTINA PALASSIO

on the cover:
illustration by jason schneider

rd.ca 1
reader’s digest

56 64 68
environment heart society
Mother Nature “Got You, Mama!” Among Demons
Knows Best Important lessons I’ve Jehovah’s Witnesses
How one logging learned while playing believe that evil sur-
town is winning the board games with rounds us. What I
battle against the my kids. should have feared was
climate crisis BY ERIN PEPLER FROM SEND ME the religion itself.
INTO THE WOODS ALONE
BY ALANNA MITCHELL BY DANIEL ALLEN COX
FROM BROADVIEW FROM MAISONNEUVE

76
humour
The Trip
My group lesson in
pot potency.
BY CATHRIN BRADBURY

78
inspiration
Believe in Progress
In an excerpt from his
book Rationality, psy-
chologist Steven
Pinker explains why,
despite everything,
our future is bright.

84
editors’ choice
Little Boy Lost
When Dylan Ehler dis-

78
appeared, the Internet
turned on his parents.
BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW
DAN PAGE

FROM WIRED
 Departments
4 Editor’s Letter Humour
(PHOTO) BRIANNA ROYE; (ILLUSTRATION) MARLEY ALLEN-ASH

6 Contributors 15
Life’s Like That
7 Letters
18 Points to Ponder 39
Laughter, the Best
big idea Medicine
8 Picture This 49
Using arts Knock, Knock
education to end
54
homelessness. As Kids See It
BY ALI AMAD

good news
12 Five Reasons ask an expert
to Smile 16 Should I
BY FLANNERY DEAN Buy Bitcoin?
We quiz Henry

8
M. Kim, business
professor.
BY COURTNEY SHEA

health 20
20 The Problem
With BMI reader’s digest
book club
It’s effective, but 96 Stories I Might
not for everybody. Regret Telling You
BY TINA KNEZEVIC
Martha Wain-
22 News From the wright’s fiery
World of Medicine new memoir is a
BY MARK WITTEN family affair.
BY EMILY LANDAU
medical mystery
25 Dizzy Spells 98 Brainteasers
It took two 100 Trivia
decades to get a 101 Word Power
diagnosis for her
chronic fainting. 103 Sudoku
BY LUC RINALDI 104 Crossword

rd.ca 3
reader’s digest

EDITOR’S LETTER

Discovering
Reader’s Digest
I
t’s a special year for us. This fall we’ll mark the
75th anniversary of Reader’s Digest Canada and
our French-language sister publication, Sélec-
tion. We’ve lasted this long because we have read-
ers who care deeply about this magazine. They look
to RD as a close and trusted friend.
I have a favour to ask: I’d like to hear your
personal stories about the time you first discov-
ered RD—that moment when the magazine
became a part of your life. Maybe it was yesterday,
or maybe it was 75 years ago!
My RD discovery story goes like this. In March
1981, the magazine published an extraordinary
profile of Terry Fox, who had recently cut short his
cross-Canada fundraising marathon after cancer
spread to his lungs. To six-year-old me, Fox was a
bigger hero than Superman. I remember snug-
gling with my grandmother on her sofa as we
read the story together.
Please share your own RD story with me
at www.readersdigest.ca/discovering. We’ll
publish as many as we can fit into our
DANIEL EHRENWORTH

upcoming anniversary issue.

 P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E R E A D E R ’ S D I G E S T M A G A Z I N E S C A N A D A L I M I T E D, M O N T R E A L , C A N A D A

Christopher Dornan chairman of the board

James Anderson publisher and national sales director
Barbara Robins vice president and legal counsel
Mark Pupo editor-in-chief
deputy editor Lauren McKeon art director John Montgomery
executive editor, deputy art director Danielle Sayer
digital Brett Walther graphic designer Pierre Loranger
senior editor Micah Toub content operations
associate editor Erica Ngao manager Lisa Pigeon
contributing editors Rosie Long Decter, circulation director Edward Birkett
Samantha Rideout
contributors: Marley Allen-Ash, Ali Amad, Spencer
editorial intern David Warner
Ashley, Cindy Boyce, Cathrin Bradbury, Kayla Buium,
proofreader Jonathan Furze Daniel Allen Cox, Marcel Danesi, Flannery Dean, Daniel
senior researcher Lucy Uprichard Ehrenworth, Emily Goodman, Simon Hemelryk, Tina
researchers Martha Beach, Madeline Knezevic, Susan Camilleri Konar, Katherine Laidlaw, Emily
Lines, Angelina Mazza, Landau, Alanna Mitchell, Barb Olson, Nikki Ormerod, Dan
Dulcie Shoener, Lucy Page, Christina Palassio, Erin Pepler, Steven Pinker, Rose
Anne Prevec, Samantha Rideout, Darren Rigby, Luc Rinaldi,
Wildman Brianna Roye, Julie Saindon, Jason Schneider, Courtney
copy editors Chad Fraser, Amy Harkness, Shea, Beth Shillibeer, Fraser Simpson, Lauren Tamaki, Anna-
Richard Johnson Kaisa Walker, Jeff Widderich, Mark Witten, Victor Wong

THE READER’S DIGEST ASSOCIATION (CANADA) ULC

Corinne Hazan financial director
Mirella Liberatore product manager, magazine marketing

national account executives Steven DeMelo, Melissa Silverberg

director, research and insights lab Kelly Hobson
head of marketing solutions and new product development Melissa Williams
graphic designer, marketing solutions Kelly Stinziano
project manager, marketing solutions Angele Asube
production manager Lisa Snow

TRUSTED MEDIA BRANDS

Bonnie Kintzer president and chief executive officer

VOL. 200, NO. 1,189 Copyright © 2022 by Reader’s Digest Magazines
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reader’s digest
CONTRIBUTORS
TINA KNEZEVIC
Writer, Toronto
“The Problem
With BMI”
Knezevic is a science journalist who
focuses on health and the environ-
ment. Her work has appeared in This
Magazine, Healthy Debate and on
TVO.org. In 2017, she completed a
fellowship in global journalism at the
University of Toronto and was an edi-
torial fellow at The Walrus. Check out
her exploration of body mass index
on page 20.
CHRISTINA PALASSIO
Writer, Toronto
“All Talk”
Palassio is an editor
and communications professional.
Her writing has appeared in a variety
of publications including The Globe
and Mail, Chatelaine, Canadian
Cycling Magazine and The Philanthro-
pist Journal. She’s the co-editor of
several anthologies about Toronto in
the uTOpia series from Coach House
Books. Read her latest story, about
quieting your inner critic, on page 50.
6 may 2022
JASON SCHNEIDER
Illustrator, Toronto
“Get That Checked!”
Schneider is a self-
taught illustrator who has been con-
tributing to magazines for over 25
years. His work has appeared in Reu-
ters and ESPN The Magazine, and has
been recognized by the National Mag-
(KNEZEVIC) PHIL BEANS; (SCHNEIDER) BRIAN SUMMERS; (BOYCE) WILLIAM MARTEL-LAROCHE
azine Awards. Whether he’s illustrating
books or advertisements, he strives
to maintain an underlying sense of
humour and wit. Find his drawings for
this issue’s cover story on page 28.
CINDY BOYCE
Photographer, Montreal
“Among Demons”
Boyce is a lifestyle and
food photographer whose work has
appeared in Nouveau Projet, Dînette
and La Presse. Her solo exhibition,
Dans l’oeil de Cindy Boyce, captured
artists-in-residence at the Place des
Arts centre in Montreal. She focuses
on creating a personal connection
with her subjects for photos that are
imbued with intimacy and warmth.
See her work on page 68.
 LETTERS

RETHINKING THE RODEO

I care deeply about animals and
was disturbed by your article, “40
Incredible Things to Do in Calgary”
(rd.ca). It lists the controversial
Calgary Stampede, where over a
hundred animals have died in the
event’s 110-year history. Animal
abuse should not be listed as a
tourist attraction. I am embarrassed someone else to enjoy. They deserve
and horrified this goes on in my city. more respect than being dumped in
— TRACEY NYHOLT, Calgary the trash.
— KAREN BEAZLEY, Halifax
SECOND LIFE
I admired how Wendy Litner’s story THRIFTY TIP
“Mother’s Mink” (January/February I was appalled when I read that Wendy
2022) showed how complicated Litner planned to throw her mother’s
mother-daughter relationships can be. mink coat in the garbage when she
As a fellow animal lover, though, I do decided she no longer wanted to keep
PUBLISHED LETTERS ARE EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY

encourage Wendy and others to find a it. I suggest she donate it to a thrift
good home for their fur coat when the store so it will benefit others rather
time comes to part with it. Let the gift than adding to our overfilled landfills.
the animals gave of their fur live on for — MARGARET McEACHERN, Edmonton

CONTRIBUTE
Send us your funny jokes and anecdotes, and if we publish one in a print FOR SERVICE TO SUBSCRIBERS Pay your bill, view your account
edition of Reader’s Digest, we’ll send you $50. To submit, visit rd.ca/joke. online, change your address and browse our FAQs at rd.ca/contact.

Original contributions (text and photos) become the property of
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reader’s digest

BIG IDEA

Using arts education to end homelessness

Picture This
BY Ali Amad
photograph by brianna roye

P
HYLLIS NOVAK MOVED from
Wallaceburg, Ont., to Toronto in
1984 with dreams of becoming
an actor. When she wasn’t working in
theatre, she began volunteering at
Evergreen, a drop-in centre that sup-
ports homeless youth, doing street
outreach and helping run Evergreen’s
acting and art classes for young adults.
Soon working with youth became her
biggest role. In 1996, Novak and Sue
Cohen, a fellow artist, founded Sketch
Working Arts, a charity with a mission
to improve the lives of homeless and
marginalized youth through creativity.
Sketch’s programs help participants
tap into a power they didn’t know they
had. Novak believes the arts provide
skills to tackle homelessness, as well as
the economic and social oppression
that often come with it. “You need cre-
ativity to navigate these challenges,”
she says. “The arts give marginalized
youth that creativity and the confi-
dence required to survive, thrive and
lead in their communities.”
Minorities comprise a dispropor-
tionate number of the approximately
235,000 people who experience home-
lessness in Canada in any given year.
Despite representing only 4.3 per cent
of the population, Indigenous people
make up an estimated 34 per cent of
homeless Canadians, according to the
Centre for Equality Rights in Accom-
modation. This overrepresentation is

8 may 2022
 Phyllis
Novak at the
Sketch studio
reader’s digest
mirrored in Canada’s youth, who make
up 19 per cent of the country’s home-
less population. Nearly one in three
homeless youth identify as LGBTQ2S,
and about 28 per cent of youth in
homeless shelters are members of
racialized minorities.
“THE ARTS GIVE
MARGINALIZED YOUTH
THE CONFIDENCE
AND THE CREATIVITY
TO THRIVE.”
Sketch’s 9,000-square-foot space
offers free programs that fall into three
categories. Each is structured around
season-long semesters and offered to
anyone between the ages of 16 and 29
who is homeless or navigating poverty.
The arts-wellness branch provides basic
needs, like food, and offers a general
introduction to creating art. An arts-
production stream provides classes in
specific disciplines, such as visual arts
and music. Those interested in a full-
time arts career can choose arts leader-
ship, which offers mentorship and the
opportunity to work on community-
arts projects and education.
When Egyptian-born artist and musi-
cian Kut Throat Kleo first joined Sketch’s
programs as a participant in 2019, she
had a love for music and fashion but no
outlet to explore either. As a Muslim
10 may 2022
person of colour who identifies as
queer, she also dealt with prejudice and
intermittent stretches of homelessness.
At Sketch, she had free access to a
music studio and a silkscreen-printing
program where she could learn, exper-
iment and collaborate with others.
The 25-year-old now works at Sketch
as a facilitator. Using her silkscreening
skills, she also runs a clothing label
that sells apparel made from second-
hand clothes. She now earns enough
to secure stable housing in Toronto
and says she wouldn’t have the life she
has today without Sketch. “There’s a lot
of trust in the community,” she says,
“as well as freedom to express and exist
as who you are.”
When the pandemic hit, Novak kept
Sketch going with virtual offerings. In
2021, nearly 700 people participated
in Sketch’s virtual programs. Sketch
directed nearly $70,000, as well as free
cellphones and tablets, to support
young artists and keep them connected
during the isolation of lockdown.
This year, the organization is plan-
ning a block party for its 25th anniver-
sary. Novak is optimistic that Sketch
will fully reopen this spring, COVID
permitting. “I’ve missed the energy of
our studio,” she says. “I’d walk in and
be surrounded by young, diverse art-
ists busy at work, and the energy of
creation was so powerful, it was almost
visceral. Sketch is empty for now, but I
know that hope and creative energy
will return.”

A SAFE HAVEN FOR RESCUED ANIMALS
morocco As a child in Tangier in the
late 1970s, Salima Kadaoui made it her
personal mission to save strays from
animal control. At eight years old, she
volunteered at an animal charity and
saw firsthand how the city’s lack of
vaccination, neutering and spaying
programs only exacerbated the chal-
lenging situation. “I would go home
and cry and say this is unacceptable,”
she says. “I promised myself that I
would change my country and that
promise stayed with me.”
In 2012, after raising her family in
the United Kingdom, she returned to
Morocco to care for an ailing parent. She
also made good on her childhood vow,
12 may 2022
GOOD NEWS
Five Reasons to smile
BY Flannery Dean
Kadaoui at
her animal
sanctuary
founding the Sanctuaire de la faune de
IGOR LASKI PHOTOGRAPHIE, COURTESY OF SFT ANIMAL SANCTUARY
Tanger. Located just outside Tangier,
it’s currently home to more than 450
dogs, 100 cats, 48 donkeys, two wild
boars, an ape, two storks and a mule,
among other small creatures. The sanc-
tuary, which receives its funding from
donations, is run by 14 employees, half
of whom were once homeless and now
live on site. They collect stray animals,
get them neutered and vaccinated, and
bring them back to the sanctuary.
Caring for dogs takes up much of
their time. There are an estimated three
million stray dogs in Morocco today.
In Kadaoui’s assessment, poverty and
cultural beliefs often set the country’s

stray animals and residents against one
another. To date, she and her team have
treated, neutered and vaccinated more
than 3,000 dogs.
During the pandemic, they also deliv-
ered food and essentials to both the
city’s homeless population and its starv-
ing strays. Kadaoui believes her work
has ultimately helped people feel more
sympathy for animals. “It connected
their plights,” she says. “And now more
people care.”
The Businessman
Who Donated an Island
canada There are few things rarer than
pristine wilderness. This is true in Can- the Philippine General Hospital in
ada, which according to Global Forest
Watch ranks third in the world for for-
est cover loss. It’s what makes the recent neonatal intensive care unit. Kathrina
donation of a forested island within a
freshwater glacial lake in Quebec so
worthy of celebration.
Quebec’s Molson Island
KEVSTAN/ WIKICOMMONS
reader’s digest
Last fall, Montreal businessman
Andrew Howick donated 26 hectares—
the equivalent of 24 soccer fields—of
richly forested Molson Island to the
Nature Conservancy of Canada. He first
began buying up parts of the island in
the 1990s as a way of protecting aquatic
birds and rare, diverse plant life. The
donation of the island—made possible
by tax incentives for such land dona-
tions—means it will escape develop-
ment and thrive for decades to come.
The Nurses Who Saved
35 Newborns From a Fire
philippines Last May, during a fire at
Manila, two nurses made sure no one
was left behind in their fourth floor
Bianca Macababbad was bathing one
of the unit’s babies just after midnight
when she heard that a fire had broken
out on the floor below. As the
flames raged, she and fellow
nurse Jomar Mallari made mul-
tiple trips in and out of the
building with their charges.
The biggest challenge was res-
cuing premature babies who
were intubated and dependent
on ventilators to breathe. Hold-
ing the babies in one arm while
manually ventilating them with
the other hand, the nurses man-
aged to get all 35 of their tiny
patients to safety.
rd.ca 13
reader’s digest
Restocking the Wardrobes
of Female Refugees
england Poverty brings with it many
challenges, not the least of which can be
the strain of sorting through clothing
donation bins, on a mission to find the
right-sized wardrobes for you and your
family. Believing that female refugees
deserve more than a bag of random
castoffs, Sol Escobar, a Cambridge edu-
cator and a volunteer at migrant refugee
ACTS OF KIND NESS
Fighting Hate With Art
The number of reported hate crimes
has steadily increased in Italy since
2014, fuelled by incendiary populist
politicians reacting to an influx of ref-
ugees and migrants. In Verona, Pier
Paolo Spinazze, a street artist who
goes by the name Cibo (Italian for
“food”), is being celebrated for
his creative countermea-
sures. “Verona is beautiful,”
says Spinazze, “but it has a
big problem with the far right.”
Whenever he encounters
swastikas and other racist graf-
fiti, he paints over them
with colourful depic-
tions of his favourite
foodstuffs, from
cupcakes to pizza.
His art has two
positive effects. The
extremists often
14 may 2022
camps, had a novel solution. In 2020,
she created Give Your Best, an online
“shopping” site that allows women to
choose from an array of donated cloth-
ing posted by volunteers. All of the
clothing is free and can be “shopped”
on the site’s Instagram page. Once
selected, the items are shipped for free
within the United Kingdom. Since its
launch, more than 700 women seeking
asylum or with precarious immigra-
tion status have claimed 7,500 items.
spray-paint over Spinazze’s cheerful
food pictures, but he simply re-paints
over their hateful messages again,
and they usually give up. The other
positive improvement: his paintings
are awakening Verona’s citizens to
the seriousness of the problem.
“Before I started this, people
were so used to seeing those
messages, they didn’t really
see them at all. Now people
start to see and understand.”
To Spinazze, food is a natu-
ral corrective to hate. It rep-
COURTESY OF PIER PAOLO SPINAZZE
resents a language that
connects people and
cultures. “Food is
about union and
sharing,” he says.
“We are all equal
around a table—
everybody eats.”

LIFE’S LIKE THAT
Truth in Advertising
My uncle wrote one of
the shortest wills ever:
“Being of sound mind,
I spent all the money.”
— SUSAN LEVY, Laconia, N.S.
“I couldn’t get into it.”
(Me, talking about a
show I didn’t pay any
PHOTO: COURTESY OF RICHARD GOTTFRIED
attention to because I
was on my phone the
entire time.)
— REDDIT.COM
Me: I am crushing this
workout class.
The instructor, seconds
after walking by me:
General reminder to
animals as she could in
one minute.
Her response:
“15 million elephants,
15 billion horses and
10 trillion cows.”
— KEVIN WOLKOWYCKI,
Edmonton
My mom thought LGBT
was slang for “Let’s get
breakfast together.”
— TUMBLR.COM
I once attended a wed-
ding on short notice.
My wife signed the card
for us, and because they
everyone to try to push were my friends, she
yourselves today. accidentally addressed
— @SAGGIESPLINTERS it to the bride and the
couple’s cat, because I
My husband walked in had talked about their
the room and asked, cat more than I had
“How’s my sleeping my friend.
beauty?” — @FREE_MATTRESS
I smiled and opened
my eyes just in time to Doing brain laundry:
see him pat my sleeping Separating my thoughts
puppy’s head. into lights and darks.
— @VISIONBORED1 — @JSUX
The Perfect Answer
Send us your original
My patient was getting jokes! You could earn $50
a cognitive test, and a and be featured in the
fellow nurse asked magazine. See page 7 or
her to name as many rd.ca/joke for details.
rd.ca 15
reader’s digest

ASK AN EXPERT

Should I Buy
Bitcoin?
We quiz Henry M. Kim,
business prof

BY Courtney Shea
illustration by lauren tamaki

First things first: what is Bitcoin and

why do I keep hearing about it?
Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency,
which is digital money that operates
outside of financial and banking sys-
tems. With traditional money, those
intermediaries verify transactions. (If
you buy something on your credit card,
a bank will confirm that you have the
funds, for instance.) With cryptocur-
rency that function is performed via an
encrypted digital ledger that is enabled
by database technology called block-
chain. Like other commodities, a cryp-
tocurrency gains value as more people
transact with it and believe that others
will transact with it in the future, and
buy it on that basis. Bitcoin gets so
much attention because it was the first
cryptocurrency, and it remains the most
widely adopted and most valuable.
Who invented Bitcoin and why?
The inventor is an anonymous person
(or very likely group of people) named
Satoshi Nakamoto, who issued the first-
ever Bitcoin in 2009. This was not very
long after the financial crisis of 2008,
which exposed flaws in the American
banking system, so the idea was to cre-
ate a more democratic financial sys-
tem that is not beholden to these pow-
erful intermediaries.
The value of Bitcoin is a lot more vol-
atile than regular money. Why?

16 may 2022
The value of traditional currency is
manipulated by governments using
interventions, such as lowering lend-
ing rates and allowing more money to
flow into the economy. Crypto, on the
other hand, has been free and unreg-
ulated—at least it was in its origins.
Some people are calling crypto the
future of money. What do you think?
I think it’s best to not believe the hype.
The vast majority of cryptocurrencies
(there are over 10,000 now) are junk,
with a fair number being outright
scams. The scams are created by peo-
ple looking to make money off of eager
speculative investors who don’t realize
that all they’re buying is hype. A good
comparison is the dot-com bubble in
the late ’90s, when there was so much
enthusiasm and investment, but ulti-
mately the bubble burst and almost all
of those companies folded.
So this may all disappear?
Bitcoin, along with some other crypto-
currencies, such as Ethereum, may
stay around and perhaps will have an
influence on future banking systems—
pushing them to lower costs and open
themselves up to more collaboration
with financial technology companies.
But overall, most standard currencies
backed by central banks are still stable
and aren’t going anywhere.
What can I buy with cryptocurrency?
There are more and more retailers that
are accepting Bitcoin—Expedia, for
instance—and I think some brands are
keen to send a message that they
are keeping up with the times. But it’s
not very convenient for the seller.
What happens when a customer
wants to make a return and the value
of Bitcoin has doubled in a week?
So what’s the point of owning it then?
The vast majority of people who own
cryptocurrency own it as a specula-
tive investment, in hopes that it will
become more valuable. One Bitcoin
was worth a little over a thousand dol-
lars in early 2017, and the value hit
almost $20,000 by the end of that year.
Last fall, the value of a Bitcoin hit a
record high of $68,000.
So should we all be running out and
investing in it?
It’s easy to be seduced by big gains, but
with them comes the potential for big
losses. This January, due to pandemic-
related declines in the stock market,
the value of Bitcoin dropped by 50 per
cent. If that was your retirement nest
egg, you could be in trouble. If you have
a longer investment horizon, crypto-
currency could be an option for a por-
tion of your investment portfolio. It
depends on what kind of risk you’re
comfortable with.
Henry M. Kim is a professor at the
Schulich School of Business at
York University.
rd.ca 17
 (PARROT) CHRIS WITWICKI/CANADA SNOWBOARD; (MCWILLIAMS) CHRIS PUTNAM/UNIV. OF SASKATCHEWAN; (PETKOV) ZUMA PRESS, INC./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
SOMETIMES THEY’RE
Exactly three PRETTY LONELY, AND
years ago, I was SINGING JUST
BRINGS THEM LIFE.
lying in a hospital bed. –P.E.I. piano player Postie
–Olympic gold medallist Max Parrot, Connolly, WHO UPLOADS KARAOKE
WHO WON THE MEN’S SNOWBOARD SLOPESTYLE VERSIONS OF HIS FAVOURITE SONGS
EVENT AFTER RECOVERING FROM CANCER FOR ISOLATED SENIORS

It’s unbelievable.
It’s very humbling.
–Scientist Kathryn McWilliams, AFTER THE ROYAL
ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY RECOGNIZED HER RESEARCH ON THE
AURORA BOREALIS WITH AN HONORARY FELLOWSHIP

My connection THEY CAN

to Canada HAVE ROGAN
is still in OR YOUNG,
my heart. NOT BOTH.
–Neil Young, DEMANDING THAT HIS
–Kiril Petkov, WHO RECENTLY MUSIC BE REMOVED FROM SPOTIFY,
GAVE UP HIS DUAL CITIZENSHIP CITING DANGEROUS VACCINE
WHEN HE WAS ELECTED PRIME MISINFORMATION SHARED BY THE JOE
MINISTER OF BULGARIA ROGAN EXPERIENCE

18 may 2022
 What a ride. What a
glorious ride that was!
–Cree author Harold R. Johnson,
REFLECTING ON HIS CAREER IN AN INTERVIEW
SHORTLY BEFORE HIS FEBRUARY 2022 DEATH

I’VE ALWAYS SLEEP LIKE

THOUGHT OF WOMEN A BABY?
AS HUMAN BEINGS— NO, THANKS.
AND, AS SUCH, WE I WANT TO
HAVE COMPLEXITIES. SLEEP LIKE
–Heather O’Neill, AUTHOR OF
WHEN WE LOST OUR HEADS A TEENAGER.
THEY SLEEP
I am a late FOR 12 HOURS
AND STILL
bloomer, yes. TAKE A NAP.
( JOHNSON) CALVIN FEHR; (ALFA) COURTESY AISHA ALFA

–97-year-old B.C. resident –Comedian Aisha Alfa

Betty Brussel, WHO BEGAN COMPETITIVELY
SWIMMING AT AGE 68

We just want
accountability.
–Edith Erhirhie, AFTER YORK REGIONAL
POLICE SHOT HER BROTHER, MOSES ERHIRHIE,
OUTSIDE A SHOPPING CENTRE IN JANUARY 2022
reader’s digest

HEALTH
Why do we measure BMI?
Body mass index is a metric designed to
measure a person’s health status based
on their weight. Although widely used,
its usefulness has been increasingly
called into question.
Here’s how it works: you divide
your body weight (in kilograms) by the
square of your height (in metres). If
the number you get is between 18.5
and 25, you’re considered to be at a
healthy weight. Below this and you’re
underweight, while above means
you’re overweight or obese. BMI is
used in doctors’ offices because it has
no cost, is easy to calculate and can
help identify risks for conditions
affected by body weight, including
heart disease, high blood pressure or
cholesterol, sleep apnea and diabetes.

How is BMI problematic?

The Problem Although BMI cut-offs are accurate 80
per cent of the time across the world’s

With BMI
population, they’re most precise when
measuring white men. The Quetelet
Index, as BMI was first known, was
It’s effective, but not for formulated by Adolphe Quetelet, a
19th-century Belgian mathematician
everybody and astronomer. Quetelet used data
from mostly white European men to
BY Tina Knezevic determine what an “average man”
illustration by marley allen-ash looked like—he never intended it as an
assessment for individual health.

20 may 2022
 Dr. Sean Wharton, an internal-
medicine specialist in Toronto,
believes healthy BMI ranges should
be determined differently for different
demographics. As just one example, a
Stanford University study found that
Black women were at risk of diabetes
with a BMI of 33, whereas for white
women, the cut-off is 29.
SOMEONE WHO BUILDS
EXTRA MUSCLE AT THE
GYM MIGHT HAVE A
BMI THAT CLASSIFIES
THEM AS OVERWEIGHT.
The other issue with BMI—one that
touches every demographic—is that it
can’t distinguish between fat and
healthier sources of extra body weight.
According to Dr. Fahad Razak, an inter-
nist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto,
a person who builds extra muscle at the
gym might have a BMI that classifies
them as overweight, but they’re not
actually at risk of any weight-related
conditions. Similarly, as people age,
their bone density and muscle mass
can decrease, while fat tissue can
increase. They might stay at the same
BMI, but since their body composition
is changing, their risk may rise.
The inaccuracy of BMI doesn’t just
distort health assessments—it can also
have an adverse psychological impact.
Studies have shown that when BMI is
used to label a person as overweight,
it can lead to the kind of negative
body image that, rather than inspiring
healthier living, creates low self-esteem
and increases the risk of obesity.
What should we use instead?
There isn’t currently a solid alternative
to BMI. Body-fat scales you can buy
online purport to measure body-fat
percentage, but they aren’t very accu-
rate. They use bioelectric-impedance
analysis—a process that runs a low-
grade electric current through the body
and differentiates between muscle and
fat. While there’s evolving research on
this method, it isn’t considered an
accepted alternative to BMI, so it isn’t
widely used in physicians’ offices.
Razak believes the BMI metric can
still be useful as an indicator of most
people’s health status, but it shouldn’t
be the only one used—especially for
anyone who isn’t a white male. For
instance, he suggests looking at BMI in
combination with waist circumference
or waist-to-hip ratio, which can indi-
cate when someone is building up too
much fat in the midsection, disrupting
organs and metabolism. Of course,
even that measurement has to account
for individual differences—and family
history and lifestyle should always be
taken into consideration by a doctor.
“It’s not just a matter of looking at a
person,” adds Wharton. “It’s listening,
getting a fuller picture.”
rd.ca 21
reader’s digest

mRNA Added
to the Fight
Against Cancer
BY Mark Witten
Due to COVID-19,
the world has become
familiar with messen-
ger RNA technology,
which was utilized by
Pfizer and Moderna
to make vaccines—
specifically ones that
instruct the body to
make a protein that
triggers an immune
response against the
virus. Now, Mayo Clinic
researchers are using
mRNA technology to
help make immuno-
therapy—a type of
treatment that uses the
body’s immune system
to fight cancer—more
COFFEE AND TEA LOWER effective for patients
DEMENTIA RISK whose T-cells are too
weak for the task.
As well as helping you wake up in the morning, Immunotherapy has
moderate consumption of coffee and tea may also transformed cancer
lower your risk of cognitive decline. In fact, a study treatment and has had
ISTOCKPPHOTO.COM/MALERAPASO

of over 350,000 people living in the U.K. found that a great effect with cer-
those who drank two to three cups every day had a tain cancers, such as
32 per cent lower risk of stroke and a 28 per cent advanced melanoma,
lower risk of dementia compared to people who for which it has
drank none. If you’ve already suffered a stroke, tak- improved the five-year
ing up a caffeine habit now could lower the chances survival rate to over 50
of developing vascular dementia—common per cent today from
among stroke sufferers—by 40 per cent. one in 20 a decade ago.

22 may 2022
 Eye Drops That Why You
Replace Reading Should Nap Like
Glasses Thomas Edison

The U.S. Food and Drug When inventor Thomas

Administration recently Edison sought inspira-
approved the first pre- Exercise Boosts tion, he adopted a novel
scription eye drops to Your Body’s napping technique: fall-
treat age-related far- Natural Cannabis ing asleep while holding
sightedness—also Compounds a small object in his
known as presbyopia—a hand. When the object
promising development People who use canna- fell to the floor, he’d
that could potentially bis oil for pain relief often wake with a new
replace reading glasses from arthritis, neuropa- scientific solution in
for up to 1.8 billion peo- thy and other chronic mind. As it turns out,
(DROPPER) ISTOCKPPHOTO.COM/GIAMBRA; (WEIGHTLIFTER) ISTOCKPPHOTO.COM/4X6

ple around the world. conditions should know there’s a scientific basis
The eye drops, which that exercise may be for the method: a
go by the brand name able to produce the French study in Science
Vuity, work by reducing same results. Our bodies Advances suggests brain
your pupil size and naturally produce endo- activity in that twilight
expanding your depth cannabinoids—com- zone between sleep and
of focus so you can see pounds that are similar wakefulness—called N1
close-up objects more to but distinct from CBD or hypnagogia—lends
clearly. The drug is (the main component itself to connecting
intended to be used in cannabis oil) and spontaneous, dream-
once a day, but not if that modulate pain and like perceptual experi-
you have to go driving at have a calming effect. ences with recent events
night, as shrinking your A recent study reported while awake. In the
pupils impairs low-light that people who com- study, nearly 83 per cent
vision. The eye drops pleted 15 minutes of of participants who
may be best suited for muscle-strengthening napped for 10 minutes
people in their 40s and exercises every day for were successful at solv-
50s, since they are less six weeks increased ing a math problem pre-
effective for those with their level of endocan- sented earlier, compared
advanced presbyopia. nabinoids, partly by to 30 per cent of subjects
aiding in the produc- who stayed awake and
tion of the gut microbes 14 per cent of those who
that make them. fell into a deeper sleep.

rd.ca 23
reader’s digest

Chilling Out Slows

Biological Aging Clock
A Dollop of
Scientists have begun tracking changes in DNA as Yogourt Lowers
people get older and have found that this measure- Blood Pressure
ment of “biological age” can predict a person’s
health and lifespan better than simply knowing how A University of Maine
many candles were on their last birthday cake. Yale study found that people
University researchers recently used such a tool— with elevated blood
which they call, amusingly, GrimAge—to investi- pressure (greater than or
gate whether chronic stress accelerates aging and equal to 140/90 mmHg)
to determine if there are ways to slow it down. who regularly consumed
The study found that cumulative stress does a serving size of yogourt
indeed make a healthy person’s biological clock lowered their readings
accelerate—and even tick at a faster rate than other by nearly seven points.
aging risk factors, such as being overweight. Yogourt may have this
Removing stress from one’s life is easier said than heart-healthy effect
done, so it’s helpful that these researchers looked at because it contains bac-
ways to mitigate it rather than assume one can be teria that promote the
done with it. And, as it turns out, stress did not affect release of proteins that

(YOGOURT) ISTOCKPPHOTO.COM/OKEA; (WOMAN) ISTOCKPPHOTO.COM/STEEX

everyone’s biological age to the same degree. Peo- lower blood pressure.
ple who experienced prolonged stress but scored
high in emotional regulation and self-control were Take Vitamin D
much more resilient to stress’s negative effects. for Your Heart
Thankfully, this emotional resilience can be
learned. Psychological interventions, such as According to an Austra-
mindfulness meditation lian study, people with
and cognitive behavioural low levels of vitamin D
therapy, can help people had more than double
learn to modulate their the risk of developing
emotions and control their heart disease than
response to stress triggers. those with an adequate
Using these techniques amount of the nutrient.
will make things easier in It’s yet another reason
the moment—and to get a checkup and
add months or ask your doctor
years to your life if you need a
at the same time. supplement.

24 may 2022
 MEDICAL MYSTERY
Dizzy Spells
It took two decades to
get a diagnosis for her
chronic fainting
BY Luc Rinaldi
illustration by victor wong
T
HE FIRST TIME Kim Ryberg fainted,
she was 13 years old. It was the
early 2000s and she was in front
of her classroom in rural Montana,
delivering a presentation to her peers.
She suddenly felt light-headed, then
collapsed. When she woke up several
minutes later, she went to the school
nurse, who wasn’t sure why it had hap-
pened. Perhaps it was just nerves, she
said. Ryberg went home for the day and
hoped it wouldn’t happen again.
She wasn’t so lucky. Throughout
high school, Ryberg fainted once or
twice a month—in class, during choir
recitals, at the grocery store. “It was
like Russian roulette,” she says. Every
morning she would wonder, “Am I
going to faint today?”
Worse, Ryberg started experiencing
other alarming symptoms: a racing
heartbeat, vomiting and bouts of brain
fog that made it hard to concentrate.
One moment, she’d be sweating pro-
fusely; the next, she was freezing cold.
At first, Ryberg’s parents wondered
whether she was just being dramatic,
but when the issues continued, they
took her to their family doctor. The GP
was stumped—she’d never seen any-
thing like it. Ryberg’s parents con-
sulted more physicians, who diagnosed
her as stressed or suffering from anxi-
ety. Some said she was faking it to get
rd.ca 25
reader’s digest
attention. “Look at me and you’d think
I was the healthiest person on planet
earth,” she says. “That was part of the
problem. I didn’t look sick.”
Nonetheless, Ryberg’s mysterious
illness shaped her life. She frequently
missed school because of health prob-
lems and medical appointments. She
chose not to drive—what if she fainted
behind the wheel? “As if high school
isn’t hard enough for the average per-
son, I had all of this going on,” she says.
In her 20s, Ryberg moved to Los
Angeles to pursue a career as a singer-
songwriter. There she met her future
husband, Or, a level-headed partner
who lovingly helped Ryberg manage
her symptoms. Meanwhile, she saw
more than a hundred doctors, nurses,
naturopaths and other medical pro-
fessionals in her search for an answer.
While some specialists tried to treat
particular symptoms, no one could
explain them all.
In her late 20s, Ryberg was no longer
eligible for affordable health insurance
in the U.S. For four years, she stopped
seeing doctors entirely and began exer-
cising regularly, hoping to improve her
health on her own. Instead, her condi-
tion worsened. Simply sitting up could
make her light-headed, and she vom-
ited every week or two. Starting in Octo-
ber 2017, she was bedridden for roughly
18 months, relying on her husband and
parents to feed, clothe and wash her.
As her condition deteriorated,
Ryberg’s friends and family urged her
26 may 2022
to seek medical help again. But instead
of going to a doctor, she went to Goo-
gle. She’d searched her combination of
ailments before but had never found
any breakthroughs. This time, however,
her online sleuthing led her to Face-
book groups where people reported
experiencing symptoms similar to hers.
If it was indeed what she had, there
was a name for it: postural orthostatic
tachycardia syndrome, or POTS.
HER CONDITION
ONLY GOT WORSE.
SIMPLY SITTING
UP LEFT HER
LIGHT HEADED.
POTS is a blood-circulation disorder.
Those who have it experience irregular
blood pressure and an abnormal heart
rate, which means their blood doesn’t
circulate properly, particularly when
they make sudden movements or stay
sedentary for prolonged periods. As a
result, they sometimes faint when they
try to stand up. Ryberg happened to fit
the most common profile of a POTS
patient: a white woman between 13
and 50. “Once I read about it, I started
to cry,” she says. She felt she’d finally
figured it out.
Ryberg’s research also revealed a spe-
cialist who could help her: Dr. Peng-
Sheng Chen, a cardiologist at nearby
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los
Angeles. Ryberg was able to book an
appointment with him in October 2020.
From the moment she arrived, Chen
reassured Ryberg that her illness was
real. “Just to have that validation
was incredible,” she says.
For Chen, Ryberg’s situation was all
too familiar. Though as many as 700,000
Americans have POTS, it is not well
known among physicians. As one of
the few doctors who focuses on the
condition, Chen frequently sees peo-
ple who have gone years without a
correct diagnosis. Like Ryberg, many
of them suffered from several broad
symptoms that no one specialist was
equipped to diagnose or treat.
While its ultimate cause is unknown,
POTS may occur in patients after they
suffer other illnesses, injuries or infec-
tions. Chen helped Ryberg discover that
hers was linked to a genetic illness
called mast cell activation syndrome, or
MCAS, which is common among POTS
patients. Everyone has mast cells; they
produce a chemical called histamine,
which helps our bodies fight allergens
and, in the process, causes reactions
like a runny nose and itchy eyes. But
people with MCAS produce more his-
tamine than normal, which creates
problems all over the body.
What Waves Know
The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.
DIONNE BRAND, FROM A MAP TO THE DOOR OF NO RETURN
Chen says it’s possible to detect these
genetic abnormalities when patients
are young, provided a doctor knows to
look for them. In some cases, however,
people go decades without answers,
continuing to experience symptoms
and risking anaphylactic shocks that
can be fatal.
Though neither POTS nor MCAS is
curable, both are relatively easy to man-
age. Chen prescribed Ryberg an anti-
inflammatory enzyme for her digestive
issues, as well as an antihistamine. He
also recommended that Ryberg wear
compression clothing to keep blood
flowing to her head, exercise lying
down, and stay hydrated with electro-
lytes and salt pills.
When Ryberg began observing that
regimen, her symptoms got better
almost instantly. She still has occasional
flare-ups, but her health has dramati-
cally improved; she hardly ever faints
anymore. She’s now back on her feet
and dreams of starting a family—some-
thing that seemed impossible before
she started following Chen’s medical
advice. “Managing this type of condi-
tion comes down to your own will-
power and wanting to get better,” she
says. “Now that I know what healthy
feels like, I will do literally anything to
stay that way.”
rd.ca 27
 COVER STORY

OUR BODIES ARE

ALWAYS SURPRISING
US WITH NEW SPOTS,
BUMPS AND ACHES.
THE QUESTION IS:
HOW MUCH SHOULD
YOU WORRY?

HERE ARE 20 SYMPTOMS

TO NEVER IGNORE
BY Anna-Kaisa Walker
illustrations by jason schneider

28 may 2022
reader’s digest
reader’s digest
WHITE RING AROUND
YOUR CORNEA
don’t worry: If you’ve noticed a ghostly
pale ring around your cornea—the
clear layer of protective tissue that
covers your iris and pupil—it may just
be a normal part of aging. As we get
older, the edge between the cornea
and the white of the eye becomes more
porous, allowing fatty deposits from
the bloodstream to leak in. Arcus seni-
lis, as it’s called, doesn’t impair vision
or require treatment.
do worry: If you’re under 40, the
white ring might be your first sign of
high cholesterol—so better have your
doctor run a blood lipid profile, which
measures levels of cholesterol, tri-
glycerides and other fats.
RED SPOT IN YOUR EYE
don’t worry: Seemingly out of nowhere,
30 may 2022
there’s a dot of blood on the white of
your eye. Luckily, this alarming symp-
tom most often signals something
harmless. A broken blood vessel—called
a subconjunctival hemorrhage—can
happen from coughing, sneezing or
even straining too hard on the porce-
lain throne. Also, taking medications
such as blood thinners can predispose
you to it. Blood can then pool under
the clear protective layer sitting over the
white of your eye, and even spread all
the way around. It usually resolves on
its own after about two weeks.
do worry: If you have a red spot, keep
an eye out (no pun intended) for other
symptoms. If it occurs on a regular
basis, or if you’re having spontaneous
bruising elsewhere, it could be a sign
of something more serious—like a
clotting disorder or diabetes.
TWITCHING EYELID
don’t worry: You’re going about your
day and suddenly your eyelid starts
involuntarily twitching as if it’s danc-
ing to its own beat. Not to worry—this
condition is called eyelid myokymia,
and it affects almost all of us at some
point. It’s thought to be caused by a
misfiring of the nerves that drive the
muscles that open and close your eyes,
and it usually stops in a few seconds.
“You can feel your eyelid twitching,
but it’s so slight, another person can’t
see it,” explains Dr. Colin Mann, presi-
dent of the Canadian Ophthalmological
Society. Common causes include too Also, your health care provider should
much caffeine or alcohol, and ongoing examine you for signs of stroke, can-
stress. So rest up and take it easy on cer or brain injury, such as weakness
the coffee and booze. on one side, unequal pupil sizes, and
do worry: If the twitching episodes cognitive changes like confusion or
persist beyond a few weeks, or if they memory loss.
involve stronger contractions that vis-
ibly close your lid, see your doctor. It
could be a sign of Bell’s palsy, a tem-
HAIR FALLING OUT
porary form of facial paralysis that don’t worry: Each day, the average
affects one in 60 people, or an even person loses 50 to 100 hairs from their
rarer neurological disorder called scalp. Compared to the more than
benign essential blepharospasm, which 100,000 hairs on your head, that isn’t
can impair your vision and require much. But when you suddenly notice
medication or surgery. clumps in the shower drain, it’s con-
sidered abnormal and could have a
CONSTANT HEADACHES number of mostly benign causes—
including illness, surgery, stress, a high
don’t worry: A headache is chronic if fever, a crash diet or hormonal shifts
it occurs more than 15 days a month, like childbirth and menopause.
for a minimum of three months—but
it doesn’t take that long for them to
become, well, a headache. Common
triggers are dehydration, sleep depri-
vation, vision problems, sinus conges-
tion, poor posture while working at a
desk and hangovers—all of which have
straightforward solutions.
do worry: If you’ve ruled out all of the
above, it’s worth a call to your doctor
for more investigation, especially if you
find yourself taking over-the-counter
pain relievers more than twice a week.
Ultimately, you may not discover the
cause—this is true for many people
who suffer from headaches—but med-
ication, dietary changes and certain
supplements can help.

rd.ca 31
reader’s digest
For all of the above, time is the only
cure, and it can take four to seven
months to begin regaining your nor-
mal hair density.
do worry: Hypothyroidism, or an
underactive thyroid gland, can cause
hair to become brittle and thin as the
disease slows your metabolism, inter-
rupting your hair’s growth cycle. If left
untreated, hypothyroidism can cause
complications like heart disease, so
it’s important to get help managing it
with medication.
RINGING IN YOUR EARS
don’t worry: What’s that annoying
sound? Is that high-pitched droning,
buzzing or whooshing noise coming
from outside, or is it something inside
your own head? Tinnitus is surprisingly
common—43 per cent of Canadians
have experienced it at some point. It
most often lasts a few minutes, hours or
32 may 2022
days, but sometimes it lasts forever. The
most common cause is hearing loss,
whether temporary—from a loud noise,
for example—or permanent, as with
aging (three-quarters of people over 70
have hearing loss to some degree).
Although it’s not a medical emer-
gency, tinnitus can affect quality of life
in the long term—Ludwig van Beetho-
ven had it so bad in his 30s, he con-
templated suicide. “It’s not a very well-
understood phenomenon,” says Dr.
Vance Tran, a family physician in Pick-
ering, Ont., “but we think it has some-
thing to do with how we experience
transmissions from a damaged audi-
tory nervous system as sound.”
Have your primary care provider look
inside your ears, as tinnitus can some-
times be caused by an obstruction, like
wax buildup. If the cause is age-related
hearing loss, the good news is that it
can be treated with a hearing aid.
do worry: If the noise is rhythmic or
pulsing, see your doctor right away.
That can be a sign of narrowing in the
carotid artery near your temple, which
puts you at risk for stroke. Surgery may
be needed to clear any blockages.
ACHE IN YOUR EAR
don’t worry: As any new parent can
tell you, ear infections are the bane of
early childhood. But an earache in an
adult warrants closer investigation,
since run-of-the-mill infections are
less common. In fact, the culprit may
not even be in your ears at all. Tem-
poromandibular joint (TMJ) disorder,
which causes inflammation or disloca-
tion in the jaw joint, is often called a
“great impostor” for the way it can
mimic other health conditions—and
more than 70 per cent of people who
suffer from it report ear symptoms,
according to a 2019 Swedish study. If
you have pain in one or both ears but
don’t have a fever, discharge or other
signs of infection, have a dentist check
for signs of tooth wear or any popping
or clicking in your jaw. A mouth guard,
Botox injections to relax the jaw mus-
cles, or physiotherapy may help.
do worry: More rarely, a complication
from shingles called Ramsay Hunt syn- Ont. Also, an overgrowth of yeast, called
drome can affect the facial nerve near candidiasis or thrush, can happen when
one ear, causing painful blisters inside antibiotics, chemotherapy or diabe-
the ear canal, hearing loss and even tes kill off the healthy bacteria in your
facial paralysis. It’s diagnosed from a mouth—and can be treated with anti-
characteristic red rash on the affected fungal medication.
side of the face, and treated with anti- do worry: Leukoplakia, characterized
viral medications. by thick white patches that can’t be
scraped off, might be an early sign of
WHITE STUFF oral cancer. Frank suggests seeing your
ON YOUR TONGUE dentist if any unusual spot sticks around
for more than a couple of weeks.
don’t worry: An icky-looking white
coating on your tongue is most likely a METALLIC TASTE
sign of poor oral hygiene—it’s actually
a mixture of bacteria, food debris and
IN YOUR MOUTH
dead skin cells trapped between the don’t worry: That rusty flavour is
little bumps on the tongue. “The sim- called dysgeusia, and it could be caused
ple solution is to brush your tongue by taking lithium, certain blood pres-
daily or use a tongue scraper,” says Dr. sure medications, cancer drugs or iron
Charles Frank, a dentist in Windsor, supplements. It’s not serious, but it can

rd.ca 33
reader’s digest
be unpleasant. If switching medica-
tions isn’t an option, over-the-counter
mouthwash or gum can mask the taste.
do worry: According to Frank, in very
rare cases a mild electrical current
can occur if you’ve had fillings, crowns
or implants done with more than one
type of metal. Called oral galvanism,
it’s not dangerous—but if it doesn’t go
away it could be costly, as you’ll need
to have your fillings changed.
BLEEDING GUMS
don’t worry: At some point in their
lives, seven out of 10 Canadians will
have gingivitis, which results from the
buildup of plaque and tartar above
the gumline. And even in mild cases
it can cause occasional bleeding. Metic-
ulous brushing—for two minutes twice
a day—plus daily flossing and regular
dental cleaning appointments can
keep it at bay.
do worry: If you don’t take care of
your gingivitis, it turns into periodon-
titis, or gum disease, which can lead
to tooth loss.
JAW PAIN
don’t worry: Aching in your jaw, pain
while chewing, and a locking or pop-
ping sensation when you open your
mouth wide can be signs of temporo-
mandibular joint (TMJ) disorder, which
can dislocate your jaw joint and inflame
the muscles and ligaments that control
34 may 2022
its movement. Bruxism, or grinding
of the teeth, is a common cause, and
many people aren’t aware that they
clench or grind their teeth at night.
“Waking up with a headache is a tell-
tale sign of bruxism,” says Frank. “A
dentist can prescribe a splint that cov-
ers the surface of your teeth, so you’re
punishing the plastic instead of wear-
ing down your tooth surface.”
do worry: More rarely, jaw pain on
one side can result from a cyst or a
tumour, which your dentist can see on
an X-ray. If the pain is only on the left
side and radiates up your neck to your
jaw, go to the ER right away—it could
be an uncommon sign of a heart attack.
LUMP NEAR YOUR NECK
don’t worry: Spread out in a network,
your lymph nodes are bean-shaped
glands that play an important role in
your immune system. When bacteria,
viruses or other foreign substances
invade your body, your lymph nodes normally as they age, but if you notice
can feel swollen and hard with all the new stripes or a change in their thick-
white blood cells piling in to fight off the ness, it warrants further investigation
assault. Once you’re done battling what- for melanoma.
ever it was, they will go back to normal.
do worry: If you feel the lump in the
hollow above either collarbone—where
COLD HANDS
your supraclavicular lymph nodes are— don’t worry: Genetics can be the reason
these can be important sentinels for your hands always feel like icicles, even
disease in your abdomen. If it hap- in summer—research shows it runs in
pens on your left side specifically, it’s families. The elderly, who tend to have
called Troisier’s sign, and it’s consid- slower circulation, as well as very thin
ered an indication of cancer in the people without much insulation, can
stomach or other organs, even if you also feel more sensitive to cold, espe-
have no other symptoms. See your doc- cially in the extremities. The solution?
tor as soon as possible. Avoid nicotine and caffeine, which
restrict blood vessels, and dress in lay-
WHITE MARKS ers to keep your core temperature up.
ON YOUR NAILS do worry: Raynaud’s phenomenon,
which affects 10 per cent of the pop-
don’t worry: Those mysterious dots or ulation, is a vascular abnormality
lines on your fingernails—called leu-
konychia—are usually caused by bump-
ing or pinching the skin under your
cuticle where your nails start to grow.
They’re usually harmless and take six
to nine months to grow out completely.
If a spot looks yellowish and you can
see thickening of the nail, that could
indicate a fungal infection that requires
a topical prescription.
do worry: If the bands are vertical and
dark-coloured, see your doctor as
soon as possible. “In a fair-skinned
person, these can indicate subungual
melanoma, a rare form of skin cancer
under the nail,” says Tran. Darker-
skinned people do get bands like this

rd.ca 35
reader’s digest
characterized by attacks of cold, pain,
tingling or burning, and white or bluish
colour in the fingers. It can be managed
with medication, but in some cases,
Raynaud’s can be a sign of an autoim-
mune disease called scleroderma.
Anemia, caused by low iron levels,
can also make your hands and feet
feel cold, and is also linked to fatigue,
dizziness and chest pains. Iron sup-
plements can help restore your hemo-
globin levels.
CHRONIC BLOATING
don’t worry: If you feel like a hot air
balloon after every meal, you’re in
good company—nearly 40 per cent of
the population struggles with gas and
36 may 2022
bloating. A food journal may help pin-
point specific dietary triggers, such as
broccoli, beans or fruit. It’s important to
note, though, that it’s normal for bellies
to change shape over the course of the
day, and passing gas (from the northern
or southern route) up to 20 times daily
is just part of the way your digestive
system efficiently turns food into fuel.
do worry: If your bloating never goes
away or is accompanied by other symp-
toms such as severe cramps, changes
in bowel habits, blood in your stool,
nausea, decreased appetite or uninten-
tional weight loss, see your doctor—
diagnosing irritable bowel syndrome,
Celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, diver-
ticulitis, ulcerative colitis, colon cancer
and other conditions can require a
more thorough workup.
CHANGE IN
YOUR STOOL
don’t worry: When it comes to bowel
output, what’s “regular” for each per-
son varies widely—anything from twice
a week to three times a day is in the
range of normal, as is a range of con-
sistencies. A change in diet, medica-
tions such as antibiotics, stress or dehy-
dration can temporarily knock your
routine out of whack, but things usu-
ally resolve within a few days.
do worry: “Any persistent change in
your pattern lasting more than a month
is a sign to call your doctor,” says
Tran. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—
characterized by diarrhea, constipa-
tion or both, along with cramps that
are relieved by pooping—affects up to
18 per cent of Canadian adults, and is
thought to be linked to an imbalance
in the relationship between the brain
and the gut. Antidepressant medica-
tions have shown some promise as
treatment. But your doctor will also
want to rule out thyroid issues, bacte-
rial or parasitic infections, and other
more serious gut-related diseases.
WEIRD SMELLING PEE
don’t worry: Certain foods, notori-
ously asparagus, can give your urine
a funky tang. But stinky pee can have a
bouquet of other possible causes,
including those new vitamins or med-
ications you’ve been taking. B1 is known
for giving urine a distinctly fishy odour,
while sulfonamide antibiotics can
impart a rotten-egg smell. An ammo-
nia smell in your urine could mean
you’re dehydrated and need to drink
more water during the day—or, if
attended with burning, fever or chills,
might be an early sign of a urinary
tract infection.
do worry: Poorly controlled diabetes
can make urine smell fruity from the
ketones. If you’re diabetic and also
experiencing nausea, confusion or
excessive thirst, get medical attention
immediately—you may be suffering
from ketone acidosis, a potentially life-
threatening condition.
JOINT POPPING
OR CLICKING
don’t worry: That snap, crackle or pop
you hear when you stand up, walk
down stairs or stretch is called crepitus,
and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re
decrepit. It’s either caused by gas bub-
bles forming in the fluid that surrounds
and lubricates the joints, or the sound
of a tightly strung tendon snapping as
it slides over a bony surface. Either way,
if the noise is painless, it’s nothing to
worry about (and becomes more com-
mon as we age, especially in the knees).
do worry: If the cracking hurts or the
noise changes to a crunching sound, see
your doctor—as arthritis progresses, the
breakdown of cartilage can lead to
bones grinding against one another.
Your doctor will first recommend
exercise therapies to support and sta-
bilize the joint, and if necessary pre-
scribe medications for pain and inflam-
mation relief.
rd.ca 37
reader’s digest

SWOLLEN KNEE
don’t worry: Prepatellar bursitis, which
most commonly affects gardeners or
anyone whose occupation involves a
lot of kneeling, is caused by inflamma-
tion in the bursa, or fluid pouch, on the
front of your kneecap. If one knee is
noticeably more swollen than the
other, tender to the touch and painful
to extend, try treating it with rest, ice
and a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory
(NSAID) medication like ibuprofen.
do worry: If the symptom doesn’t
abate, if the knee feels warm or if more do worry: A lesser-known form of
than one joint in your body is swollen, osteoarthritis—hallux rigidus—affects
have your doctor check for arthritis. 2.5 per cent of people over 50, and causes
inflammation, swelling and aching in
ENLARGED, the joint connecting your big toe to your
SORE BIG TOE foot. Over time, the bone overgrowth
caused by the condition can make it
don’t worry: Your body’s underappre- almost impossible to bend your big toe,
ciated workhorse is the last part of your and lead to protruding bone spurs.
foot to push off the ground with every The resulting joint degeneration
stride, and bears 40 to 60 per cent of the can’t be reversed, but symptoms can
force load. You may not think about be managed with NSAID medications,
your big toe much, but when some- custom-made orthotic insoles, phys-
thing goes wrong with it, you’ll wince iotherapy, specialized shoes or even
with every step. Ingrown toenails are a joint replacement surgery.
common cause, accounting for one in You should also ask your doctor to
five foot complaints to family doctors. check for gout, a rare form of arthritis
A mild case can be treated by soaking caused by excess uric acid crystals in
the toe and applying antibiotic cream. the blood.

A Decent Proposal
Curiosity is not a good reason to get married.
SHEILA HETI, FROM A DIARY IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

38 may 2022
 so the competition
LAUGHTER thinks the plane is full.”
the Best Medicine — GCFL.NET

My father came home
and found me in front
of a roaring fire.
That made him very
mad, as we didn’t have
a fireplace.
— VICTOR BORGE, conductor
Credit card chip
machines are always like:
)Do not remove your
card
)Hey, seriously, do
not remove your card
)Okay, take your card
out immediately or I’ll
burn this place to the
ground
— @TACKOBELLE
An optimist says, “The
glass is half full.” A pes-
simist says, “The glass is
half empty.” And an
optometrist says, “You
both need glasses.”
— UPJOKE.COM
Strange Request
I was returning home
from a business trip a
few years ago and my
plane was fairly empty.
“We have a little extra
room tonight, folks,” the
pilot said over the PA
system. “If you
wouldn’t mind, please
take a window seat
We have so much
knowledge of the dan-
gers of sugar nowadays.
Twenty years from
now, we’ll be talking
about sugar the way we
talk about smoking
today: “Can you believe
there was no age limit
on ice cream? What a
wild world we once
lived in.”
— RYAN HAMILTON,
comedian
Send us your original
jokes! You could earn $50
and be featured in the
magazine. See page 7 or
rd.ca/joke for details.

THE BEST JOKE I EVER TOLD

By Louis Brady

My dad used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me

COURTESY OF LOUIS BRADY

when I was a kid. Maybe that’s why I’m trans: I kept

hearing “you are my son—” and just went with it.

Louis Brady is a Toronto comedian and actor. In 2019, he

performed at Next Best Comic’s Chatham Comedy Festival.

rd.ca 39
 DRAMA IN REAL LIFE

DEEP DIVER
CHRIS LEMONS
WA S R E PA I R I N G
OIL PIPES
90 METRES DOWN
WHEN THE
UNTHINKABLE
HAPPENED

ALONE
AT THE BOT TOM
OF THE SEA
BY Simon Hemelryk

40 may 2022
reader’s digest

Lemons knew
his job came with
extreme risks.
reader’s digest

Leaving his fiancée to go to work was harder for Chris

Lemons than for most people. The 32-year-old deep-
sea diver was typically away on four-week jobs several
times a year. In September 2012, he would be replacing
oil pipes at the bottom of the North Sea, about 200 kilo-
metres off the northeastern Scottish city of Aberdeen.
Chris gave Morag the usual reassur- saturation divers have died in recent
ances: “Don’t worry. It’s a carefully con- decades around the world.
trolled environment,” he said. But the work paid well, helping them
“I’ll miss you,” replied the 39-year- plan an exciting future together. Their
old school principal. “But we’ll keep in wedding was set for the following April.
touch all the time.” Morag had recently started work at a
The couple had met five years earlier school in Mallaig, in the Scottish High-
at a party in Dunoon, west of Glas- lands, and the couple were building a
gow, where Morag worked at a primary dream house overlooking the sea. They
school. Chris, a tall Englishman from talked about having children and, after
Cambridge, was a diver and dive-boat the kids finished their education, mov- (PREVIOUS SPREAD) THE SUN/NEWS LICENSING

crewman taking a course in the area.
He loved Morag’s gregariousness, while
she found him kind and funny. They
started dating and soon Chris moved
in with her.
The couple lived frugally while he
trained in specialized saturation (SAT)
diving, a job that involved maintaining
seabed pipes for the oil and gas indus-
try. It had its risks, from decompres-
sion sickness to drowning—several
ing to France, where Chris had family.
It was a joyful time.
it’s called saturation diving because,
at the intense pressures found in the
deep sea, gas that a diver breathes sat-
urates into the body. When the diver
surfaces and the pressure drops, this gas
can emerge as deadly bubbles in their
tissues—causing decompression sick-
ness, or “the bends,” which can cause

42 may 2022
 tissue damage and blood clots. SAT high-pitched and distorted—but they
divers reduce this risk by living full- kept connected by email, and Morag
time in a pressurized chamber within sent pictures of her adventures cycling
the dive ship. and climbing local mountains.
For this latest job, Chris would be Just before 9 p.m. on September 18, it
part of a three-person team sharing the was Chris’s team’s turn to dive. The three
SAT chamber aboard the 106-metre transferred to a diving bell, which was
vessel Topaz with three other teams for lowered on cables around 75 metres
a month. He was delighted to learn he’d below the Topaz. Chris and David would
be working with Duncan Allcock. descend a further 15 metres to replace
The 50-year-old had been diving in some pipe on a structure resting on the
the North Sea for 17 years and had seabed. Each man was connected to
worked with Chris on his first few dives the bell by an umbilical cord attached
since he qualified 18 months earlier, to the hip of their diving suits. The
becoming Chris’s unofficial mentor. In cord’s five-centimetre-thick cluster of
a competitive industry with only short- tubes carried air, a communications
term contracts, Duncan had striven line, electricity for the lamps and cam-
to make Chris look good in front of eras on their helmets, and hot water to
supervisors, giving him advice and keep their suits warm on the seabed,
nudging him away from mistakes. “If where the water temperature was 4 C.
you’re unsure about something, don’t At the core was a steel-reinforced rope.
blag it. I’ll talk you through,” he’d reas- Each diver had 50 metres of this lifeline
sured Chris.
The pair had become friends; From left, divers Duncan Allcock, Chris
Chris and Morag had recently Lemons and David Yuasa
stayed at Duncan’s house in Ches-
terfield, England. Their third team
member would be David Yuasa,
whom Chris knew by his excellent
PHOTO COURTESY OF CHRIS LEMONS

reputation in the industry.

For the first few days in the
chamber, the men chatted about
Chris’s house build and upcom-
ing wedding, as well as Duncan’s
son, who’d just started working
in diving. Chris couldn’t properly
speak to Morag—helium in the
chamber made the divers’ voices

rd.ca 43
reader’s digest
coiled ready on a rack inside the bell.
Duncan would feed this out as needed.
Above water, the wind was about 30
knots and the waves some four metres
high. Those are rough conditions, but
nothing the Topaz couldn’t handle.
Instead of fixed propellers, the ship
had five thrusters that could each be
rotated. A dynamic positioning system
kept the Topaz locked in place by con-
stantly adjusting the thrusters, so there
was no need for an anchor.
Though it was a routine job, as Dun-
can secured Chris’s heavy helmet he
told him, “There’s no rush. Take your
time.” Chris gave him the thumbs-up.
He felt relaxed, focused and ready to go.
Dropping through the 80-centimetre
A PERILOUS RESCUE
1. Chris,
David, and
Duncan live
for days in a
pressurized
chamber.
2. They get into
the diving bell
through airlocks.
4. When the ship loses
3. The bell is control, Chris’s lifeline snaps
lowered 75 metres. as the bell is dragged away.
44 may 2022
hole at the bottom of the bell and into
the dark ocean was always a magical
moment for Chris. Leaving behind
the claustrophobic SAT chamber
and the bell, he felt weightless among
the sediment and fleeting marine life
highlighted by his helmet lamp. He
and David started work within the
manifold, a structure nine metres high
and 20 metres long; its pipes and valves
managed oil flowing from wells to plat-
forms. Toiling a metre apart with
wrenches and other tools, the pair
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE SUN/NEWS LICENSING; PHOTO OF DIVER: DOGWOOF/FLOATING HARBOUR FILMS
would be in the water for six hours.
Up on the ship, dive supervisor
Craig Frederick sat before a bank of
controls and monitors showing the
feeds from the divers’ helmet cameras.
5. More than
30 minutes later,
David retrieves
Chris’s inert body
and brings him
back to the bell.
He followed their progress, giving
instructions by intercom for each stage
of the job. Meanwhile, in the cramped
bell, Duncan sat surrounded by gauges.
He monitored his colleagues’ oxygen
and carbon dioxide levels.
Chris had been working for around
an hour when he heard a noise in
Craig’s control room—an alarm. Per-
haps the crew was running a test?
The green light on Craig’s instru-
ment panel was suddenly amber, then
red. I’ve never seen that before, Craig
thought, alarmed. The positioning sys-
tem had failed. The boat was drifting
and would soon drag the divers with it.
“Leave your tools and get back to
the bell,” Craig ordered. It was a highly
unusual request, but Chris and David
started climbing hand over hand up
their umbilical cords toward the top of
the structure. In the bell, Duncan, who
couldn’t see what Chris and David’s hel-
met cameras relayed, didn’t know what
was happening but followed Craig’s
instruction to start hauling in the cords.
Glancing up, Chris had expected to
see the bell’s lights, but there was only
blackness. Then he felt his umbilical
tugging as he reached the top of the
manifold and saw that it had looped
around a metal outcrop. He struggled
to unhitch it, but the knot only pulled
tighter. What’s going on? Chris thought.
In the bell, Duncan saw Chris’s umbil-
ical was suddenly taut. Craig ordered,
“Give Diver 2 more slack.”
“I can’t!” Duncan replied.
Not only was the cord too tight, it
was pulling its rack off the wall, and the
bell’s steel struts were bending, bolts
groaning. It was unthinkable: if the cord
broke off, it would leave Chris adrift
and without oxygen. Duncan also knew
that in this tiny space, if it came loose,
it would knock him through the bot-
tom of the bell and into the water. He
quickly climbed onto his seat to get out
of the way, but there was nothing he
could do for Chris.
HE HEARD HIS
LIFE SUPPORT
CABLE CREAK
OMINOUSLY—AND
THEN IT SNAPPED.
As Chris struggled to free himself,
David desperately tried to get back to
help him, flailing his arms against the
water. He almost made it. The two div-
ers’ hands were just a couple of metres
apart when David’s cord yanked him
away. Chris saw a look of resigna-
tion and apology on David’s face as he
disappeared into the dark.
Chris redoubled his frantic attempts
to dislodge the cord. He heard it creak
ominously—and then the air-supply line
broke, followed by the communications
feed. Unable to inhale, Chris opened the
emergency air tank on his back, as he’d
done many times in training. Seconds
rd.ca 45
reader’s digest

later, there was a noise like a shotgun way, into the blackness? He picked a
blast as the cable snapped. His lifeline direction at random and took small
was now severed completely. steps, feeling only the mud beneath
Chris was thrown backward and was his feet. Suddenly his outstretched
sinking slowly, his helmet silent with- hands struck metal. He grasped it in
out the intercom, his lights dead, his relief. He began struggling up the
suit beginning to cool. He knew he had structure, breathing hard.
about eight minutes of oxygen. Reaching the top, he still couldn’t
In the bell, Duncan feverishly pulled see the bell, and there wasn’t a speck
up the suddenly slack umbilical, hop- of light. Where had the Topaz gone? He
ing Chris would be on the end of it. His crawled onto the platform and clung
heart sank as the broken hot-water hose to the metal grille, terrified the current
came up. Then came the hissing air would drag him away. He reckoned he
line. He felt sick. “I’ve lost my diver!” hehad about five minutes of air left, a ter-
shouted to Craig. rifying thought. He knew his chances
of surviving were slim.
landing on the soft seabed, Chris strug- Yet the situation was even worse than
gled to his feet in total darkness. The he realized. The ship was now some
ship could track him via a beacon on 225 metres away. The crew was desper-
his suit, but he knew there was a better ately trying to steer back, but, without
chance of rescue before his oxygen ran the positioning system, it took two peo-
out if he could get himself to the top of ple to manually coordinate the thrust-
the manifold. Yet he had no idea where ers. The Topaz was slaloming agoniz-
it was. What if he walked the wrong ingly slowly against the waves.
The minutes passed, and
Chris’s fear turned to grief.
This is probably where I die,
he thought. He’d never see
their house finished, never
DOGWOOF/FLOATING HARBOUR FILMS

have children. “I’m sorry,

Morag,” he called out. His
mind fumbled with mundane
practicalities. Does she know
when the next payment for
the building work is due?
He shouted out for Duncan:
Footage from when a fellow
diver found Lemon’s inert body
“Where are you?” His chest
grew tighter as his oxygen

46 may 2022
dwindled. He felt himself slowly slip-
ping into unconsciousness.
craig had ordered the Topaz’s remotely
operated underwater vehicle to go
down and look for Chris. It sent back
pictures of him lying on the metal
grille. His hands seemed to be twitch-
ing. But was he still alive, or were his
limbs just moving in the current? It
had been 16 minutes since the umbil-
ical had snapped.
By now David had made it to the bell,
poised to retrieve Chris if they could
get back in position. Craig kept him
and Duncan updated on the boat’s
progress, though he massaged the truth
to keep their spirits up. “We’re nearly
there,” he said.
David already assumed he’d be
recovering a body. Duncan’s thoughts
were darkening, too, and he wondered
how he would tell Morag her fiancé
wasn’t coming home. The wait was ago-
nizing, but he tried to keep hope alive.
Attempts by the Topaz’s engineers to
re-engage the positioning system had
been futile, so in desperation they shut
it down and restarted it. Amazingly,
this worked. But more than 25 minutes
had now passed since Chris’s umbili-
cal had snapped.
Finally, with the ship over the dive
site, David dropped down and found
Chris lying on his back. He briefly
glanced through Chris’s mask; omi-
nously, there was water inside. He
clipped Chris onto him with a rescue
lanyard and began hauling them both
up his umbilical cord. David was fit, but
Chris was a big man; it was like trying to
carry a giant starfish. By the time he was
able to push Chris’s upper body into the
bell, another six minutes had passed.
Duncan unclipped Chris’s helmet.
The diver’s eyes were closed, his bald
head as blue as a pair of jeans. Duncan
knew there was little chance of surviv-
ing that long without oxygen, but with
nothing to lose, he kept talking. “You’ve
had an accident. I’m going to give you
CPR,” he said. Duncan gave Chris two
breaths. Unbelievably, Chris suddenly
inhaled. His eyes opened. He blinked.
HIS EYES WERE
CLOSED, HIS BALD
HEAD AS BLUE AS
A PAIR OF JEANS.
THEN HE BLINKED.
Duncan could’ve danced a jig. He’s
back with us! For Craig, watching via
monitor, it was a big moment. “Are you
all right?” he asked on the intercom—
and Chris gave a weak thumbs-up.
After flushing Chris’s suit with hot
water, Duncan probed him with ques-
tions.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yeah.”
“You know you’ve had a broken
umbilical?”
rd.ca 47
reader’s digest

“Yeah.” of the film through her tears.

Chris was groggy but, remarkably,
seemed himself. Back in the ship’s
SAT chamber, he got medical attention
while David and Duncan had, as Dun-
can describes it, “a bit of a hug.” They
visited Chris once he was stable. There
were more hugs.
Over the next three days, as the men
depressurized on the Topaz, now docked
at Aberdeen, they talked through what
had happened, over and over. It helped
them deal with the shock. Duncan
gently teased Chris about the CPR:
“Snogging on a dive is not normally
done, you know.”
how chris survived, and without brain
damage, remains unclear. The oxygen
in divers’ gas is about four times richer
than normal air, so his body may have
been saturated with enough to keep
him going. Hypothermia could have
put him in shutdown mode, too, send-
ing oxygen to his vital organs.
When Chris phoned Morag, she was
horrified and raced across Scotland to
meet him as he disembarked the Topaz.
They kissed and hugged for a long
time. For a distraction, they went to the
cinema, but Morag didn’t see a second
Three weeks later, Chris was declared
fit and returned to the North Sea with
David and Duncan to finish the job. “I
didn’t want to lose my nerve,” says
Chris, who is still a SAT diver.
“I’m proud of him,” adds Duncan.
“Many would have said, ‘This is too
dangerous. I’m not coming back.’”
The following April, Chris and Morag
got married in a ceremony near their
home. David couldn’t be there, but,
says Chris, “At the reception, people
were buying Duncan whiskies all
night. And they were telling me, ‘I
don’t even want to speak to you, I just
want to hug you.’”
“A band played until 4 a.m., and the
place was jumping,” recalls Morag now.
“People knew it was the wedding that
almost never was.”
Chris and Morag have since adopted
a little girl, Eubh. They finished their
house. But their life plans have accel-
erated. “We’re selling the house and
moving to France already,” says Morag.
“I’ve had a glimpse of dying and I’m
not scared,” says Chris. “I know I’m
lucky to have a second chance. I always
had a lust for life, and the accident only
made that stronger.”

Never Say Never

In interludes between pandemics, we like to think
it’s all over. Epidemiologists have never thought that.
They’re always waiting for the next one.
MARGARET ATWOOD, FROM BURNING QUESTIONS

48 may 2022
 people still going out to
KNOCK, KNOCK large gatherings.
— BEN SCHWARTZ, actor

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Kanga.
Kanga who?
Actually, it’s pro-
nounced kangaroo.
— @YESYESYO13

Will you remember me

in a minute? Yes.
Will you remember me
in a week? Yes.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
You didn’t remember
me!
“Son, some day all these knock-knock jokes will be yours.” — @MADISONCARLY26

Knock, knock. A Royal Pain Grand Finale

Who’s there? Knock, knock. Knock, knock.
Hike. Who’s there? Who’s there?
Hike who? Edward Rex. Candace.
I didn’t know you liked Edward Rex who? Candace who?
Japanese poetry. Edward wrecks the cor- Candace be the last
— FATHERLY.COM onation. knock, knock joke?
— @DUNCAN_GATES — @KNOCKKNOCKJOKES
Knock, knock.
SUSAN CAMILLERI KONAR

Who’s there? Consider a Staycation

Send us your original
Oink. Knock, knock.
jokes! You could earn
Oink who? Who’s there? $50 and be featured
Make up your mind. Armageddon. in the magazine. See
Are you a pig or an owl? Armageddon who? page 7 or rd.ca/joke
— @LUKESTEIN Armageddon tired of for details.

rd.ca 49
 LIFE LESSON

All
BY
Talk
How to
quiet your
inner critics

Christina Palassio
photograph by nikki ormerod
IN 2017, A FEW MONTHS after Meredith Davis of Guelph
had her third child, her husband went back to work
and she found herself alone at home, trying to manage
three kids under the age of four. She was 35, and the
stress of balancing her older children’s needs and
caring for her new baby was taking its toll. “I felt like
my life imploded,” she says. “All I could hear was
this loud, glaring voice saying ‘You’re not a good

50 may 2022
reader’s digest
reader’s digest
mom. You’re not cut out for this.’”
The more stressed she became, the
louder her inner critic got, leaving
her exhausted and struggling to feel
present with her family. She soon con-
tracted pneumonia and shingles—and
realized she needed to do something
to manage her negative self-talk.
Our interior monologue is influ-
enced by the people in our lives (our
parents and caregivers when we’re
young, our peers, partners and bosses
when we’re older) and the cultural
messages and beliefs that surround us.
And it’s active! Experts estimate we can
talk to ourselves as much as 4,000
words a minute.
Our inner voice can be very helpful,
reminding us where we put our keys or
to be careful when we’re walking on an
icy sidewalk. But challenges and stress
in our relationships, jobs, financial
affairs and the world around us can turn
up the volume on our inner critic. This
can lead to negative self-talk and, some-
times, self-sabotage—say, convincing
ourselves we’ll never get that job or that
we don’t deserve a partner’s love.
Luckily, there are practical actions
you can take to shush your self-
critical chatter.
Name Your Triggers
A good first step in managing your
inner critic is to notice what sets it off.
Davis realized hers gets chatty when it
comes to her work. She runs a consult-
ing firm and, sometimes, when she
52 may 2022
thinks about growing her business,
she’ll find herself thinking, Why would
anyone want to meet with you? or,
You’re not good enough to take on this
new project.
In the past, that voice could stop her
from pursuing her goals. Now she’s
learned to spot her inner critic’s favou-
rite topics and regain control. First,
she’ll acknowledge the challenge she’s
facing, then she’ll interrupt the nega-
tive self-talk and show herself some
kindness instead. “Sometimes I just
put my hand on my heart and acknowl-
edge, ‘This is hard,’” she says.
Start by keeping a log of your trig-
gers. Ask yourself what the situation
was. What did your inner critic say?
How did it make you feel? How did you
react? After a few weeks, you’ll have a
list of your triggers and a greater
awareness of how you are or aren’t
managing them. It may feel like a lot of
work—and your inner critic may try to
talk you out of it!—but there’s a lot at
stake if you don’t act.
Ethan Kross, the author of Chatter:
The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters,
and How to Harness It, warns that neg-
ative chatter can undermine our ability
to think and perform. It can create fric-
tion in our relationships, and also has
the potential to undermine our physi-
cal health. Research shows that nega-
tive self-talk can help fuel our stress
response, which can lead to sleep dis-
orders and an increased incidence of
cardiovascular illness.
Create Some
Friendly Distance
Once you’ve named your triggers, it
can help to reframe the conversation.
To do this, Davis asks herself: what’s a
thought that’s more positive than this
one and is also one that I can believe?
For example, “I’m a terrible mom”
becomes “Maybe I’m not the best
mom in the world, but I’m trying.”
Kross’s research shows that distanc-
ing techniques are also effective in
breaking the chatter loop. Say you’re
ruminating on an incident where you
were impatient with your parent, and
your inner voice is telling you that
you’re a terrible, uncaring child. Try
addressing yourself in the second or
third person. So instead of berating
yourself with “Why did I lose my cool?”
ask “Why did Christina lose her
cool?” It can take the oxygen out of the
shame and blame and make room for
objectivity and curiosity about how
to address the issue.
Jane Reichman Van Toch, a Montreal-
based executive coach and consultant,
has clients who struggle with impostor
syndrome behaviours at work. Some-
times, when they tell her they’re not
good enough for their job, she encour-
ages them to look at their own CV and
pretend it belongs to an applicant. Does
this person have the skills and experi-
ence for the job? The answer, more
often than not, is yes.
“We often act on our inner mono-
logue more than we act on our outer
experience,” she adds. “If we’re not
managing our inner voice, then it’s
going to manage us.”
Look Outside Yourself
Professional coaches, partners, friends
and family can be important allies in
our quest to conquer negative self-talk.
Davis relies on her psychologist, her
husband and a couple of favourite pod-
casts to give her the right tools, confi-
dence and motivation. Together they
act as sounding boards and remind her
of the techniques she can use.
Research also shows that awe can be
a powerful circuit breaker against our
inner critic. That’s because it opens up
a world of feeling beyond our own
needs and wants. Awe can come in
many forms: a beautiful hike in the
quiet woods, seeing live music, watch-
ing your kids do something they love.
It’s all about putting yourself in a dif-
ferent frame of mind.
Reichman Van Toch adds that fun
and play can work to change the
channel, too. For example, when one
of her clients’ inner critics prevented
them from being present and effective
at work, she suggested trying an
improv class—something that is all
about being in the moment with oth-
ers and not lost in the negative loops
of their mind.
Finding strategies to manage nega-
tive self-talk will keep you in good stead
throughout every stage of life. Luckily,
it’s never too late to get started.
rd.ca 53
reader’s digest

AS KIDS SEE IT

“Licked clean. I’m better than our dishwasher!”

My two-year-old grand- I was telling my kids I gave my daughter a

daughter wandered over dinner that their hug in public yesterday.
into the kitchen to wash father was the nicest She responded, “You
her hands. Her mom, man in the world. know, distance makes
who was busy, told her “Well, there has to be my heart grow fonder.”
to use the bathroom at least one man who’s — @IDONTSPEAKWHINE
sink instead. nicer, right?” said my
My granddaughter’s four-year-old. Me: Why are you in
ROSE ANNE PREVEC

response? “Mommy is My two-year-old the closet?

giving me attitude!” then piped up, “Maybe My 11-year-old: I like to
— LYN THOMPSON, it’s Jesus!” fart in here.
Ilderton, Ont. — KATE REICKER, Ottawa — @MARYFAIRYBOBRRY

54 may 2022
“You were once an egg in My daughter has informed me that she
my belly,” I told my son. wants $100 from the tooth fairy. Her reason:
He didn’t react at all.
The next day, how- “I really liked that tooth.”
ever, he came to me — MARA SCHIAVOCAMPO, reporter
crying and asked, “Am I
your son or a chicken’s?” okay, Mom, keep prac- born, when you were
— REDDIT.COM tising. One day you’ll be still in my tummy.”
able to do it quickly.” “I hated it then, too,”
My six-year-old was — CHRISTINE SIMARD, he replied.
quietly eating his cereal Montreal — @ALICETAYLORM
when he paused and
said, unprompted, “I My five-year-old loves A little girl and her mom
hope my sister isn’t a to come up with relax- were looking at me in
criminal when she ing bedtime topics such the coffee shop this
grows up.” as “what happens when morning. Finally, the lit-
— @MAMANEEDSACOKE you die” and “natural tle girl shuffled up to me,
disasters.” pointed at my tattoos
When my daughter was — @WILDRAINBOW2 and asked, “Do you have
seven, she was horrified to put those on by your-
to learn that her grand- My six-year-old con- self every day or does
parents had real names fronted his little sister your mom help you?”
and were not, in fact, after one of his Lego fig- — TUMBLR.COM
called Jeans (Grandma ures went missing.
liked wearing jeans) Looking at her through My son, describing his
and Keys (Grandpa the crib bars, he said best friend in kinder-
always held the keys). calmly yet sternly, “Ella, garten: “He doesn’t
— GLORIA MYERS, tell me where Steve is.” really speak English, so
Scarborough — ASHLEY ASHFIELD, we can skip all the
Hampton, N.B. talking and just get
My five-year-old wanted right to the karate.”
to learn about the tai I was singing a lullaby — @HENPECKEDHAL
chi classes I was taking, to my three-year-old
so I showed her some and he told me he
Send us your original
moves. At first she was hated it. jokes! You could earn $50
totally taken aback. But “That’s a shame,” I and be featured in the
later she hugged me said. “I used to sing it to magazine. See page 7 or
and whispered, “It’s you before you were rd.ca/joke for details.

rd.ca 55
reader’s digest

A harbour view
of Gibsons, B.C.
 ENVIRONMENT

How one logging town is

winning the battle against
the climate crisis

BY Alanna Mitchell FROM BROADVIEW

rd.ca 57
reader’s digest
Schitt’s Creek became the symbol of all
that is good about small-town Canada,
another TV series catapulted a real-life
Canadian place to international fame:
The Beachcombers, filmed on site in
Gibsons, B.C. From its first episode
in 1972 until the finale in 1990, viewers
around the world followed an ensemble
of characters as they salvaged timber
lost from log booms, swigged coffee
at Molly’s Reach diner and figured out
how to put Canada’s best foot forward,
complete with a catchy theme song.
The series was a portrait of a hard-
scrabble world where you took what
you could from the land and the sea,
by chainsaw, backhoe, fishing gear or
plucky tugboat. And sure, the scenery
was terrific, but it wasn’t the main point.
Nature was the backdrop.
Today, Gibsons is known for some-
thing quite different. It is one of the
first municipalities in the world to
declare that nature has a formal book
value in a town’s accounts. That means
the aquifer that sits underneath Gib-
sons has a place in the financial life of
the community of 4,600 residents, just
like the roads do. And town officials
have to maintain this natural infrastruc-
ture just like they do with traditional
bricks-and-mortar assets.
58 may 2022
The “Gibsons model” is part of a
brand-new way of thinking and talking
about environmental problems. It’s
called “nature-based solutions.” The
basic idea: Mother Nature can help
heal climate change and other ways
we’ve destroyed the environment, if
only we’ll let her. That could mean cre-
ating landscapes that imitate nature or
simply leaving nature alone to do her
own thing. In the fight against rising
carbon levels, it’s a secret weapon
(PREVIOUS SPREAD) CLAYTON PERRY; (OPPOSITE) TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY CONCEPTS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
that’s been hiding in plain sight.
In 2020 the International Union for
the Conservation of Nature launched
a set of global standards for nature-
based solutions, saying that, if done
properly, these techniques could suck
up so much carbon that they could get
us more than a third of the way toward
keeping global heating below 2 C. If it
works, it will be a very big deal.
Canada, so rich in wilderness, is posi-
tioning itself to be one of the global
leaders in nature-based solutions. Also
in 2020, the federal government pledged
$3.9 billion to the effort over the coming
decade. That’s earmarked for planting
two billion trees and figuring out how
to coax wetlands, peatlands, grasslands
and even agricultural lands to absorb
more carbon.
And then there’s Gibsons. This town,
once the face of rapacious logging, is
now leading the charge.
gibsons was my second childhood
home. One whole side of my father’s
family moved there after the Second of life or sponges for carbon. In fact,
World War—his grandparents and their the beach was littered with exactly the
children and grandchildren. Some of type of stuff that Bruno Gerussi’s char-
the great-grandchildren live there still. acter was trying to snag: massive logs,
My dad’s mother, Eva Oliver, lived in hacked down from old forests, that had
a tiny house near the ocean, and we escaped on their journey to the mill.
spent most of our summer holidays Logging, fishing and subsistence
there. My siblings and I loved going to agriculture were the lifeblood of the
the beach, although these were not the town, and had been from about the time
sandy beaches of Caribbean holiday George Gibson, a British former naval
brochures. They were rocky and hell- officer, planted a 100-tree orchard there
ishly hard on tender young feet. The in 1886 so he could set up a fruit trade
saving grace was the abundance of with Vancouver. It was a bold play.
tide pools where creatures collected: Even today, there’s no road access to
minuscule crabs, tiny fish, strips of Gibsons, which is in a remote location
algae. I used to crouch down, peering up the twisty coast from Vancouver. To
into their mysteries for hours. get there, you must take a 40-minute
At that time—a couple of years before trip across the mouth of Howe Sound
The Beachcombers first aired—few peo- (now formally known as Átl’ka7tsem/
ple saw the beach or any of the town’s Txwnéwu7ts/Howe Sound) by BC Fer-
other wild spaces as sacred reservoirs ries, a charter or your own boat.
Shortly after the turn of the
20th century, a pulp and paper
mill began operating at Port
Mellon on Rainy River, drawing
people from Gibsons by boat
and later by road. More enter-
prises followed, including a cop-
per mine on the shores of Howe
Sound. For decades, toxic efflu-
ents such as dioxins, furans and
metals including copper, alu-
minum and iron were poured
into the ocean. To me, the har-
bour always smelled of motor
The pulp and
paper mill in
oil, fish grease and desperation.
Howe Sound, B.C. By the 1980s, the contami-
nation in Howe Sound was so

rd.ca 59
reader’s digest
severe that the government was forced
to close down much of the fishery for
health reasons. And by 1995, the govern-
ment began regulating the chemicals
the mills could spill into the sound.
Making sure the environment wasn’t
lethally toxic from waste chemicals was
a big shift in thinking. But the town still
had a long way to go.
THE TOWN’S AQUIFER
WAS ALREADY
FUNCTIONING AS ITS
KIDNEYS, BUT COULD
IT DO MORE?
with astonishing speed, the idea that
nature can help the planet heal has
taken hold among academics and envi-
ronmentalists. They believe environ-
mental answers lie not only in newer,
fancier technology, but in nurturing
wilderness itself. In other words, the
technology we need is already growing
on the planet.
The 2019 Climate Action Summit held
at the United Nations was a turning
point. China and New Zealand both
took the international stage to promote
nature-based solutions. And businesses
are starting to get on the bandwagon,
according to CDP, a not-for-profit char-
ity that runs a global disclosure system
for investors about companies’ envi-
ronmental impacts.
60 may 2022
Graham Saul, the executive direc-
tor of Nature Canada, has been track-
ing the evolution of this idea. He
recalls some of the tortured discus-
sions at international conferences about
a forerunner to nature-based solutions
called LULUCF, the acronym for land
use, land use change and forestry. It
represented a fiendishly complex give-
and-take calculation of how humans
are affecting the carbon cycle through
(LEFT) ALL CANADA PHOTOS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; (RIGHT) GEOFF TOMLIN-HOOD FOR SUNSHINE COAST TOURISM
such things as converting wild land-
scapes to farms, cutting down trees
and planting trees. It was a difficult
concept to explain or get people to
care about, even fervent climate activ-
ists, Saul says.
By comparison, nature-based solu-
tions have a visceral, intuitive, holistic
appeal. In Winnipeg, for example,
new neighbourhood developments are
required to use constructed wetlands
for stormwater treatment. Previously,
conventional stormwater basins suf-
fered from poor water quality. Accord-
ing to Pascal Badiou, a scientist with
Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Institute
for Wetland and Waterfowl Research,
this resulted in most of these basins
developing blue-green algal blooms.
The algal blooms would use up all the
oxygen in the water, fouling it for other
life forms, and increase emissions of
methane, a potent greenhouse gas
(GHG) that eventually converts to car-
bon dioxide in the atmosphere. By con-
trast, the constructed wetlands have
much better water quality and lower
overall GHG emissions. The areas are
also hotbeds of life: flowers, insects
and birds.
That’s a necessary hallmark of any
nature-based solution: it must serve
more than one function at the same
time. “It’s a lot more than just draw-
ing down carbon,” Badiou says. “More
important is that it helps adapt and
mitigate the actual impacts of cli-
mate change.”
in gibsons, the road to becoming a
global environmental pioneer began
with the need to improve its ability to
cope with stormwater surges and protect
its drinking water source, the Gibsons
Aquifer. A construction project involving
concrete pipes came with an estimated
price tag of $4.5 million, a sum so hefty
the town would have had to borrow.
But Emanuel Machado, the town’s
chief administrative and resiliency
officer, and other officials wondered
whether there was another option. Gib-
sons had already begun thinking about
the financial value of its natural assets,
based on what it would cost to construct
systems to provide similar services.
One of those assets was an aquifer
nestled underneath the upper town,
surrounded by creeks. Officials knew
that the aquifer was already functioning
as the town’s kidneys, storing and filter-
ing water. But they wondered if it could
do more. So in 2014 they approached
Michelle Molnar, an environmental
economist at the David Suzuki Founda-
tion, for help in evaluating just what
the aquifer was capable of.
Using tools that were developed
by the United States Environmental
The Gibsons area is
now home to many
trails and parks.
rd.ca 61
reader’s digest
Protection Agency and Stanford Univer-
sity, Molnar and her colleagues showed
that expanding ponds around the aqui-
fer would do the drainage job better
than the concrete pipes and at lower
cost. The plan also meant beefing up
habitat for creatures living around the
aquifer, another bonus.
“Nature’s option was projected to
cost about 25 cents on the dollar—and
it has,” Machado says. “We can get more
stormwater treated on the site than the
pipe would ever be able to take, partic-
ularly in extreme weather events and
future events.”
WE’RE ADDRESSING
CLIMATE CHANGE
AND PROTECTING LIFE
ON EARTH AT THE
SAME TIME.
The aquifer has its own line item in
the annual budget. Monitoring its ser-
vices costs about $30,000 a year. And
while Machado says the aquifer itself
is “priceless,” the value of its services is
appreciating over time, especially as
the climate becomes less predictable.
In December 2020 the Municipal
Natural Assets Initiative, which Gib-
sons co-founded, launched a project
to encourage 30 municipalities to build
an inventory of their natural assets and
learn how to manage them. Twenty-two
62 may 2022
signed up immediately, from Surrey,
B.C., to Charlottetown. It’s a small
percentage of the 3,600 municipalities
in Canada, but it’s a start. And it’s a
trend running hard against controver-
sial moves in Ontario, where some cit-
ies are using special orders to fast-
track development, potentially doing
so on wetlands.
Molnar says the initiative repairs an
economic blind spot. “At the time we
developed our economic systems,
we had the view that nature was limit-
less,” she says. “I couldn’t understand
why the economic discipline, which is
devoted to how to manage scarce
resources, hadn’t been updated.”
Meanwhile, Machado and his team
have presented their system to the fed-
eral government and to groups in South
Africa, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom. Officials from other parts of
the world have made the pilgrimage
to Gibsons to see the innovations for
themselves. “Most people in Gibsons
have no idea that this is happening,
that nature-based solutions are being
developed right here in their back-
yard,” Machado says.
Gibsons has also changed its bylaws
and policies to encourage citizens to
assess the value of the nature that sur-
rounds them. In the old days, for exam-
ple, developers of new subdivisions
would scrape everything off a plot of
land before building. Now, they have to
identify what natural infrastructure is
already there before they start to build.
 Molnar has been fascinated by the
changes within the community. Like so
many others, she knew Gibsons before
she started to work there because she
loved watching The Beachcombers. “It
feels like an evolution,” she says.
nature–based solutions offer great
promise, but they are not climate sal-
vation. Even if they were maxed out
around the world, they would only
succeed in soaking up enough carbon
emissions to get us a third of the way to
solving our climate emergency. That’s
why, in addition to funding nature-
based solutions, Canada has pledged
to be at net-zero emissions by 2050.
As Saul puts it, nature-based solu-
tions are one piece of a huge and com-
plex puzzle. “They’re about how we
can both address climate change and
restore and protect life on earth at the
same time,” he says. “So that is in many
ways much more interesting than a
solar panel or an electric vehicle.”
Last year, Machado took me on a
virtual tour of the watershed that feeds
the town, from Mount Elphinstone
overlooking Gibsons, to the creeks that
run through the community and to
the coast, Pebbles Beach, that I once
played on. It was an astonishing envi-
ronmental bird’s-eye view of a place
Checkmate
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick-boxing.
EMO PHILIPS
that I used to think I knew intimately
but, I now realize, I barely knew at all.
The last time I was there in person—
at my grandmother’s house—I had
no frame for understanding how it all
works together.
I wanted to know how it would feel for
me to live there now. My friend Wendy
Francis, who moved there in 2016, tells
me that escaped logs still wash up on
shore, just as they did in the days of The
Beachcombers. And Gibsons, a rural
community after all, is still playing
catch-up on big-city givens like recy-
cling. The mill remains in operation,
although it now has state-of-the-art
environmental controls. But for all that,
the place is a wilderness wonderland.
Francis moved there because of its rich
nature offerings: cross-country skiing,
and so many hiking and biking trails
she says you can hardly count them.
She recently bought a kayak. I’ve seen
photos of one of her journeys. The ocean
was as flat as a mirror. She says she
passed a small island covered with bick-
ering sea lions. Some were belching.
Seals frolicked nearby, and harlequin
ducks hugged the shore as she pad-
dled back to Gibsons. To me, it now
looked like the promised land.
© 2021, ALANNA MITCHELL. FROM “THE BEACHCOMBERS’
TOWN IS NOW FAMOUS FOR FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE,”
BROADVIEW (MAY 18, 2021), BROADVIEW.ORG
rd.ca 63
reader’s digest

BY Erin Pepler
FROM SEND ME INTO THE
WO ODS ALONE
illustration by spencer ashley
HEART
Important
lessons I’ve
learned while
playing board
games with
my kids
MY SON, A SIX-YEAR-OLD boy in a dinosaur T-shirt,
sits across from me in front of a chessboard that
once belonged to his great-grandfather. He’s hold-
ing a plastic knight in his little hand and humming
quietly to himself as he debates his next move with
the intensity of a chess master in his prime. His
eight-year-old sister watches carefully. She’s going
to play the winner, so she wants to know what
she’s up against. As with any serious chess match,
an episode of Wild Kratts, an animal show for
kids, plays on a nearby TV.
rd.ca 65
reader’s digest
My son turns his head toward the TV
and then back again. “Did you know
that hippos can’t really swim?” he
offers casually. The knight moves, and
he takes one of my pieces. Dammit.
And wait, how is that possible about
hippos? How long can they hold their
breath, and what happens when they
sink? Are hippo drownings an issue
I’ve never known about? Our game
carries on, neck and neck, the Kratt
brothers continuing their impossible
adventure in the background.
When I play a board game with my
children, I want to win. It doesn’t mat-
ter if it’s cards or Monopoly or the chil-
dren’s version of The Settlers of Cat-
an—I’ll happily destroy them. I did not
go through pregnancy and birth two
humans just so I could pretend to be
bad at chess. I mean, I’m not particu-
larly good at chess, either, but I’m still
going to try my best.
If they make a bad move, I let them
make it. I’ll clearly explain the rules of
the game, but if they fall into a trap
because they weren’t paying attention,
so be it—better luck next time. I love a
good board game and I love my kids,
and I respect them too much to treat
them like delicate flowers who will
wilt in the face of defeat. I’m playing
to win, and they’re doing the same.
Failure has an important role in child-
hood development and building resil-
ience. When I take them down in Clue,
I’m teaching them that it takes prac-
tice and effort to succeed. Also, I’m
66 may 2022
showing them that Mommy excels at
murder-themed games.
This isn’t just my competitive streak
in action—I also need to engage fully
rather than watering myself down in
the name of being a mom. If I sit there
with my kids, letting them beat me at
checkers again and again just so they
feel good about themselves, I’m doing
them no favours. I’m not doing myself
any favours, either. I’d be performing a
routine, one where I’m a playmate, not
a whole person—a prop, rather than a
human being with motivation and
skills. I’d be bored.
I SIP A COFFEE
WHILE I LOOK MY
KID IN THE EYE AND
CAPTURE HIS PIECE
WITH NO REMORSE.
MY SON MAKES his bishop do a little
dance, commenting on how many of
my pawns he’s taken. I move my rook
and exact my revenge. “Dammit!” my
child mutters under his breath.
Because he is six years old, I remind
him not to curse, but I’m secretly
amused. We eye each other’s pieces,
trying to anticipate next moves. His
sister has wandered off to find a snack.
I love these times with my children,
casually sprawled around the ottoman
in the living room. We laugh, we get
mildly frustrated when the game isn’t
going our way, we chirp at each other
and have fun. The competition is real,
but each battle ends with a friendly
“good game,” and then my children
immediately request one more round.
This is how we manage the after-school
lull or find quiet moments on a lazy
Sunday afternoon. It’s close to paradise.
So much of my life is spent with my
children, nurturing their interests and
abilities. I happily bake with them, sit
and draw pictures, take them hiking,
show them how to pick herbs or plant
flowers in the garden, play tetherball
in the backyard, or I read them endless
stories. But I’m no good at playing
dolls or pretending to be a pirate. I lack
the ability to get lost in any imaginative
game in which I have to be a character
or, even worse, an animal.
Games, however, are where I feel at
ease. They differ from other types of
play-based interaction because they’re
a dedicated task for my brain. I can
sip a coffee while I look my kid in the
eye, capture his piece with no remorse,
then watch him jump up in glee when
he figures out a countermove. High
fives all around.
That said, the only thing that out-
weighs my desire to win is my pride in
having happy, smart, capable children.
I’m thrilled when they do beat me. It’s
no different than seeing your kid fare
well on their report card or score a goal
in soccer—they’re succeeding, and it
feels good. It may not be a milestone
you note in a baby book, but when your
children beat you and your partner in
Pictionary for the first or the 50th time,
it feels like you’ve done something right.
For years, I felt guilty about being
the type of parent who begrudgingly
gave horsey rides and was always
quick to suggest that Daddy does them
better. I didn’t give myself nearly
enough credit for all the love and
attention I gave to my kids because I
felt so bad about the handful of things
I wasn’t good at or didn’t do. Some
families bond over sports or Lego,
while others play backgammon. The
love comes through, no matter what
your quality time looks like—even if it’s
a semi-intense game of chess.
My son usually takes the win these
days. He’s mastered the art of playing
well while half-watching a cartoon.
He’ll hover a hand over his king, his
eyes wandering toward the TV as he
spouts a random biology fact. The more
he does this, the more distracted I get,
and yet he always seems to be two
moves ahead. “Got you, Mama,” he’ll
say triumphantly, slamming his player
down as he closes in on my king. “I got
you so good. Can we play again?”
We eventually run out of game time,
with dinners and homework and bed-
times always on the horizon, but
tomorrow, or the day after, my answer
is always yes.
EXCERPTED FROM SEND ME INTO THE WOODS ALONE,
BY ERIN PEPLER. COPYRIGHT © 2022, BY ERIN PEPLER.
PUBLISHED BY INVISIBLE PUBLISHING. REPRODUCED
BY ARRANGEMENT WITH THE PUBLISHER. ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED.
rd.ca 67
reader’s digest
 SOCIETY

JEH OVAH ’ S W ITN E SS ES BE L I EVE

T HAT EVI L SURROUN DS US.

W HAT I S H OU LD HAVE F EAR ED

WA S T HE REL IGIO N I TSE LF.

A M O N G D E M O N S

BY Daniel Allen Cox FROM MAISONNEUVE

photograph by cindy boyce

rd.ca 69
reader’s digest
I N T H E
O F 1 9 8 4 ,
I W A S E
my parents took me on a trip to Sauble
Beach, Ontario. While they tanned, I
played in the waves of Lake Huron, built
sandcastles and befriended seagulls.
The water wasn’t that deep, and there
was otherwise nothing to be afraid of.
But it was a different story at night in
our rented cabin.
A clock kept falling off the wall, no
matter how many times we put it back
up. Same thing with the toilet seat
that kept slamming down. It had to be
demons, my mom told me; they swirled
through the drafty shack all night, angry
that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, deter-
mined to convince us of the superiority
of evil. My mom sat on my bed and
prayed for deliverance: “Jehovah, Jeho-
vah, Jehovah.” We left the cabin early,
70 may 2022
S U M M E R
W H E N
I G H T ,
sleepless and before our rental was up,
and drove back home to Montreal.
What most people know about Jeho-
vah’s Witnesses is that they proselytize
on street corners, telling strangers they
can live forever on a paradise earth.
They’re the ever-smiling Christians
who don’t vote and who discourage
their kids from going to university
because they would be better served
by attending meetings and missionary
training organized by the Watch Tower
Society, the group that controls all Wit-
ness life and is the sole source for what
it calls “the truth.”
Few outsiders are aware how much
JWs see their own persecution as irre-
futable evidence that they’re on the right
path. Whenever a country’s government
bans their preaching work or shutters
Kingdom Halls, the group says, “See?
They wouldn’t do that if we didn’t have
the truth.” When the apparent perse-
cution takes a more paranormal slant,
they believe that the Devil and his gang
of demons are behind it.
The Watch Tower Society constantly
warned us not to view the occult as
harmless fun, the way it is often por-
trayed in pop culture. Ouija boards were
off limits. We couldn’t celebrate birth-
days, as they were seen to displease God
because of their pagan origins and con-
nections to astrology. On Halloween,
we turned off our lights so we wouldn’t
be harassed by goblins and witches
seeking candy. I wasn’t allowed to eat
Lucky Charms cereal because shooting
stars, green clovers and horseshoes
were “magically delicious.” Fearing the
occult was our group obsession.
FEAR OF SATAN has always existed in
some form or other, but it was brew-
ing with new intensity in the North
American consciousness in the 1960s,
around the time the Manson family
murdered at least eight people and
Anton LaVey founded the Church of
Satan. By the 1970s, The Exorcist had
entered the public imagination. By the
1980s, Satanic Panic was in full swing.
In 1983, a rumour crept from King-
dom Hall to Kingdom Hall: one Sun-
day at a Jehovah’s Witness meeting a
stuffed Smurf allegedly slithered out
of a child’s lap, shouted obscenities
and walked out of the building. The
Watchtower, the Witnesses’ flagship
magazine, told us to destroy anything
that showed evidence of possession. I
had a Smurfs sing-along record that
skipped. It couldn’t have had anything
to do with the quarter-sized hole in it.
I watched, both horrified and grateful,
as my uncle smashed it with a rock in
the backyard.
THE SOCIETY
C O N S T A N T LY
WA R N E D U S N O T T O
V I E W T H E O C C U LT
AS HARMLESS FUN.
Where did all this leave me? I’d been
born into a religion that used panic
to keep us in fear, so we would stick
around for Jehovah’s protection. When
the article “An Epidemic of Homosexu-
als” came out in a 1983 issue of Awake!
magazine (companion to The Watch-
tower), I was too young to understand
it meant that I would myself someday
become feared and subject to the
group’s cruel shunning policies. I didn’t
know how easily the adults I trusted
could betray me, and I wasn’t supposed
to know. We were taught to fear our
own minds and to “reject the goal of
independent thinking.”
So in darkness I continued. Not once
during the 18 years I was a member did
rd.ca 71
reader’s digest
anyone warn me to watch out for Jeho-
vah and everything being done in that
strange ghost’s name.
It was the warning I had needed
the most.
IT WAS EMBARRASSING to be a Jehovah’s
Witness at school. I drew unwanted
attention for not celebrating my birth-
day, and I was once called into the prin-
cipal’s office for refusing to do Valen-
tine’s Day arts and crafts. I was the only
Witness that teachers and fellow stu-
dents knew, so they asked me a million
questions out of curiosity.
SHUNNING MEMBERS
AFTER A SERIOUS
TRANSGRESSION OF
THE RULES IS MEANT
TO TEACH A LESSON.
I’m not sure if they knew that Michael
Jackson was the most famous Witness
to moonwalk the earth. His religious
background—the fact that he and
most of his family were raised as JWs—
wasn’t much discussed. Jehovah’s
Witnesses aren’t supposed to take
jobs that place them in the limelight,
because that would be taking attention
away from Jehovah.
But once JW stars like Jackson
achieved a measure of fame, they
entered—unofficially—a category of
72 may 2022
Witness that was slightly beyond the
rules. Still, the degree to which a famous
Jehovah’s Witness could rely on their
special status was limited. In the 1983
music video Thriller, Jackson appears
with the eyes, fangs and claws of a
werecat. The elders at his congregation
in California weren’t okay with this
occult sensibility and threatened to dis-
fellowship him.
Disfellowshipping is a form of JW dis-
cipline reserved for serious transgres-
sions of the rules. The disfellowshipped
person can still attend meetings but
can’t participate or socialize. Family
and other congregation members don’t
speak to them, save for exceptional
circumstances. The JWs believe this
policy is kindness, not cruelty, and that
shunning will teach a lesson. But the
net result is that someone in crisis is
cut off from most of their social, famil-
ial and spiritual supports.
Jackson wanted to stay in the group,
so he begged his team to destroy the
Thriller tapes. Instead, his legal advisor
convinced him to find a solution to
keep the video and quiet the elders.
Thriller starts with a card that reads:
“Due to my strong personal convic-
tions, I wish to stress that this film in
no way endorses a belief in the occult.”
By the late 1980s, Jackson had been
disciplined for reasons that likely
included sexual suggestiveness in his
videos and dance routines. When the
elders commanded Jackson to shun
his sister La Toya, who hadn’t been
 The author at age 14
going to meetings, he instead disasso-
ciated from the Witnesses.
I found myself wondering how much
leeway I would be granted if I deviated
from “the truth.” Would I be given as
many chances as Jackson had to break
the rules before being expelled?
IN MY TEENS, I started an alternative
rock band with two congregation
friends. Making music was allowed in
the Jehovah’s Witnesses, so long as we
COURTESY OF DANIEL ALLEN COX
didn’t try to emulate singers who were
“worldly,” meaning anyone outside
“the truth.” (Secretly I made Prince an
exception because of his genius, and
maybe also because I could feel some-
thing liberating in his music.)
I began reading Billboard and its
Canadian equivalent, Chart. I learned
guitar and keys, and we spent hours in
the studio obsessing over effects and
fader levels, trying to create the kind
of mystical experience that we’d been
taught could only be found through
the Holy Spirit. We began turning to
music, instead of Jehovah, for tran-
scendence. Now, when I listen to the
sole, warbly cassette that remains of
our recording sessions, I can hear
moments of yearning for escape amid
a whole lot of mediocrity.
When I say escape, I mean I could
hear queerness. I had known for years
that I was queer, which for JWs is a sin
that leads to destruction at Armaged-
don—when, according to the religion,
Jehovah and his son Jesus will liter-
ally kill billions of non-JWs, leaving
their bodies to rot in the streets. At
rd.ca 73
reader’s digest
the appointed time, God would smite
me to pieces and leave my bones for
the birds. Fear of my final fate did
nothing to deter me. When I was 18, I
started having sex with other men.
One evening, I was bowling with a
congregation friend and made the com-
ment that her boyfriend was hand-
some. The congregation’s presiding
elder found out, confirmed with me
that I was queer and then gave me the
option to leave the group voluntarily
to avoid disfellowshipping. I decided to
mail a letter to the body of elders
renouncing my membership. I never
kept a copy, but I know it’s the best
thing I’ve ever written—proof that I
could think outside of the group’s nar-
row parameters and envision a world
where the real me could flourish. After,
I told my mother so she wouldn’t be
surprised when they announced the
news at the next meeting. She and I
are still trying to heal from the pain of
that conversation.
My more pious friends and their
families stopped speaking to me, and
the elders never checked in to see
how I was doing. Others, including
my mother and my bandmates, broke
the rules and maintained contact, but
I was still lonely and isolated. This was
before Internet use was so ubiquitous,
and there was no one—aside from the
men I slept with—whom I could talk
to about being queer. I eventually
moved downtown to make a new life.
I bought Lucky Charms and every
74 may 2022
other contraband cereal I could find.
When I celebrated my first Halloween
with the new friends I had found, I
wore a ghoul mask and knocked on
doors in my neighbourhood without a
Watchtower script for the first time.
AFTER I LEFT
T H E S O C I E T Y,
MY MORE PIOUS
FRIENDS STOPPED
SPEAKING TO ME.
By this point, I was no longer in the
band, but music was still key to dis-
covering who I was as a queer man. I
built a collection of albums to have sex
to, which included multiple copies of
Prince’s Purple Rain. (To my disap-
pointment, he became a JW in 2001.)
When I went to arenas and stadiums, it
was no longer to suffer through Witness
conventions—it was to attend concerts
that electrified me in a way Jehovah
never could. Music created the new
neural pathways I needed to finally
think for myself.
PRINCE DIED A WITNESS in good stand-
ing, which qualifies him to be resur-
rected in Paradise. The Witnesses
believe that billions of the dead—a
combination of JWs and “worldly” peo-
ple who hadn’t gotten a chance to
hear the Kingdom message—will come
back to life. When you think about it,
what could be more occult than that?
It makes me sad to picture Prince ris-
ing from the grave to ditch his entire
luminous catalogue for two-bit hymns.
Jackson, who died an apostate, has
no chance of resurrection. In the 2019
documentary Leaving Neverland, Wade
Robson and James Safechuck, who’d
been in Jackson’s coterie as boys, told
their stories of the artist’s horrific abuse
of them. We see Jackson take a young
Safechuck to a jewellery store to buy a
ring, a symbol of their twisted bond. My
hands shake when the adult Safechuck
takes it out of the box and shows it to the
camera. These disclosures have made
me rethink Jackson’s discography and
whether I can enjoy his music anymore.
A few days before part two of Leav-
ing Neverland first aired, the Superior
Court of Québec authorized a class-
action lawsuit against the group on
behalf of current and former Witnesses
who were sexually assaulted as minors
by any fellow member. (Within Jeho-
vah’s Witness congregations, an inves-
tigation into child sexual abuse often
requires that two witnesses to the
offence come forward. Even if this
unlikely scenario occurs, the crime is
not always reported to external author-
ities.) The Quebec case is only one of
many lawsuits against—and investiga-
tions into—Jehovah’s Witness policies.
The scope is unimaginable.
The news has hit close to home: this
is where I had spent almost half of
my life, and the news could have life-
altering effects on people I know and
love. It’s clear that the Society is no more
morally upstanding than the members
it expels, and that the trauma that results
from being a Jehovah’s Witness can take
many forms. It makes sense that the
Witnesses latched onto ’80s stranger
danger, with the occult as one of its focal
points: it perpetuated the myth that
the threat always comes from outside the
God-fearing house, when we know that
the opposite is true. If my upbringing
has taught me anything, it’s that it’s a
mistake to assume demons live any-
where but inside of us.
© 2021, MAISONNEUVE. FROM “OCCULT FOLLOWING,” BY
DANIEL ALLEN COX, MAISONNEUVE (OCTOBER 14, 2021),
MAISONNEUVE.ORG

Hit the Road

Stop worrying about the potholes in the road
and enjoy the journey.
BABS HOFFMAN, BASEBALL PLAYER

On this road trip, my mind seems to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present itself a

cure for a disease that it had not, until now, known it had.
ELIZABETH BERG

rd.ca 75
 HUMOUR

THE
it was more a siren call than a store—
provocative pink exterior and bold,
black-paned windows that revealed

TRIP
a seduction of accessories within. The
shiny new cannabis store on the main
drag of Stratford, Ont., had the ultra-
chic Phase Two look of Canada’s mar-
ijuana legalization journey. Each time
I walked by, I felt like I was missing out
My group lesson on something. It was only a matter of
time before I found myself deep inside
in pot potency studying pre-rolled joint options.
“Nothing too strong,” I began with
the courteous saleswoman. “We don’t
BY Cathrin Bradbury like to feel anxious.” By we I meant the
illustration by kayla buium four women I’d come to town with on
our annual weekend getaway. I wasn’t
sure how my purchase would go down:

76 may 2022

most of us were in our 60s, but we also
came of age in the ’60s. Still, we found
the results of the legal marijuana being
sold across Canada unpredictable and
best avoided. Wine was our reliable
go-to—until this pretty store took hold
of me and would not let go.
“I’d like the equivalent of two glasses
of Sauvignon Blanc,” I said to the sales-
woman. The lively man next to me was
re-ordering shatter, an ultra-strong
cannabis concentrate—“It changed
my life!”
I asked him the THC level of his
purchase to avoid something similar.
“Fifty,” he said. I left with a modest 17.5
per cent THC pre-roll called Jack Haze.
I timed my surprise reveal for the
post-dinner lull, as my friends and I
gathered in our host’s welcoming
kitchen. I’d barely explained Jack
Haze’s gentle merits before said host
grabbed it from my hand and toked
like she had to get in one last drag
before the fuzz busted us. Within min-
utes—we’d all eagerly partaken except
for a lone abstainer—the Haze part
of Jack became evident in the form of
absolute immobility. It felt as if we
were pinned under a fine but powerful
mesh. But under that mesh, sprawled
on a circle of couches and chairs in the
living room, we were as jacked up as
drivers at the Indy 500.
Three hours later—or maybe 15
minutes, time had lost its purpose—I
attempted to get a glass of water from
the kitchen. On my knees. “Seriously,
reader’s digest
I can’t stand up,” I said to my friends,
who did not try something similar.
“Here’s your water, Cathrin,” said the
abstainer, whom we had begun calling
The Mother (let’s not examine that).
“Now I am going to bed. And I don’t
want to be disturbed.” As she said this,
she rolled up a magazine and slapped
it in her hand. Which was, like, super
scary. When we did eventually walk, we
all crowded into The Mother’s bedroom,
afraid to be alone in our own rooms.
“Get to bed, Little Stoned Women,” she
said, and as soon as we did, we fell
asleep with the serenity of the innocent.
The next morning, I returned to the
store to helpfully school the staff on
selling marijuana to 60-year-olds.
“First of all,” the man at the counter
said, after asking me a series of ques-
tions including how much THC was in
our system on any given week (none).
“Comparing wine and marijuana is a
false equivalency.”
“Good note,” I said.
“Second, your joint…” (I had brought
along Jack Haze—three-quarters of it
remained—as evidence) “…is 17.5 per
cent THC pre-roll. Given your absti-
nence and inclinations, what you want
next time is a six per cent CBD-THC
hybrid roll.”
Hybrid roll, I thought as I walked
slowly home, jointless. That’s what
I’m missing.
Cathrin Bradbury is the author of
The Bright Side.
rd.ca 77
reader’s digest
 INSPIRATION

Believe
in
Progress
In an excerpt from
his book Rationality,
psychologist Steven
Pinker explains why,
despite everything, our
future is bright
illustration by dan page

rd.ca 79
reader’s digest
W
when we look beyond the headlines to
the trend lines, we find that humanity
overall is healthier, richer, longer lived,
better fed, better educated and safer
from war, murder and accidents than
in decades and centuries past.
Although many measures of human
well-being, when plotted over time,
show a gratifying increase (though not
always or everywhere), it’s not because
of some force or evolutionary law that
lifts us ever upward. On the contrary,
nature has no regard for our well-
being, and often, as with pandemics
and natural disasters, it looks as if it’s
trying to grind us down.
What we call “progress” is shorthand
for a set of pushbacks and victories
wrung out of an unforgiving universe.
It is a phenomenon that needs to be
explained. The explanation is rational-
ity. When humans set themselves the
goal of improving the welfare of their
fellow beings (as opposed to other
dubious pursuits, such as glory or
80 may 2022
redemption), and they apply their
ingenuity in institutions that pool it
with that of other people, they occa-
sionally succeed. When they retain the
successes and take note of the failures,
the benefits can accumulate, and we
call the big picture “progress.”
Here are four areas of great progress
we have made together. With these in
mind, perhaps the future isn’t as dire as
doomsayers might imagine. In fact, we
have much to hope for as we look ahead.
We Live Longer
Beginning in the second half of the
19th century, life expectancy at birth
began rising from its historic average of
around 30 years to 72.4 years worldwide
today—and 83 years in the most fortu-
nate countries. This gift of life was not
dropped onto our doorsteps. It was the
hard-won dividend of advances in pub-
lic health, particularly after the germ
theory of disease displaced other causal
theories, such as miasmas, spirits, con-
spiracies and divine retribution. The
lifesavers included chlorination and
other means of safeguarding drinking
water; the lowly toilet and sewer; con-
trol of disease vectors, such as mosqui-
toes and fleas; programs for large-scale
vaccination; the promotion of hand-
washing; and developments in basic
prenatal and perinatal care, such as
encouraging nursing and body contact.
When disease and injuries do strike,
advances in medicine keep them
from killing as many people as they
did in the era of folk healers and barber-
surgeons. Those advances include anti-
biotics, antisepsis, anesthesia, trans-
fusions, drugs and oral-rehydration
therapy (a salt and sugar solution that
stops fatal diarrhea).
We Have Enough to Eat
Humanity has always struggled to grow
and gather enough calories and protein
to feed itself, with famine often just one
bad harvest away. But hunger today has
been decimated in most of the world.
Undernourishment and stunting are in
decline, and famines now afflict only
the most remote and war-ravaged
regions, a problem not of too little food
but of barriers to getting it to the hun-
gry. The additional calories that now
exist did not come in heavenly manna
or from a cornucopia held by Abundan-
tia, the Roman goddess of plenty, but
from advances in agronomy.
These advances include crop rota-
tion to replenish depleted soils; tech-
nologies for planting and harvesting,
such as seed drills, plows, tractors and
combine harvesters; synthetic fertil-
izer (credited with saving 2.7 billion
lives); a transportation and storage
network to bring food from farm to
table that includes railroads, canals,
trucks, granaries and refrigeration;
national and international markets
that allow a surplus in one area to fill a
shortage in another; and the Green
Revolution of the 1960s, which spread
productive and vigorous hybrid crops.
We Have More
Money Overall
For most of history, around 90 per cent
of humanity lived in what we today
would call extreme poverty. In 2020,
that number is less than 9 per cent—an
amount still too high but targeted for
elimination in the next decade. The
great material enrichment of humanity
began in the 19th century, with the
Industrial Revolution. It was literally
powered by the capture of energy from
coal, oil, wind and falling water and
later from the sun, the earth and nuclear
fission. The energy was fed into
machines that turn heat into work,
factories with mass production and
conveyances such as railroads, canals,
highways and container ships.
THE GIFT OF LIFE IS
A DIVIDEND OF PUBLIC
HEALTH ADVANCES
LIKE SAFE DRINKING
WATER.
Material technologies depended on
financial ones, particularly banking,
finance and insurance. And neither of
these types of technologies could have
been parlayed into widespread pros-
perity without governments to enforce
contracts, minimize both force and
fraud, smooth out financial lurches
by creating central banks and reliable
rd.ca 81
reader’s digest
money and invest in wealth-generating
public goods, such as infrastructure,
basic research and universal education.
We Fight Less
The world has not yet put an end to
war, as the folk singers of the 1960s
dreamed, but it has dramatically
reduced the number of wars and their
lethality, from a toll of 21.9 battle
deaths per 100,000 people in 1950 to
just 0.7 in 2019. Peter, Paul and Mary
deserve only some of the credit. More
goes to institutions designed to reduce
the incentives for nations to go to war,
beginning with Immanuel Kant’s plan
for “perpetual peace” in 1795.
WE NEED CHEAP
CLEAN ENERGY AND
TREATIES TO MAKE
SACRIFICES GLOBAL
AND EQUITABLE.
One of those institutions is democ-
racy, which really does reduce the
chance of war, presumably because a
country’s cannon fodder is less keen on
the pastime than its generals. Another
is international trade and investment,
which make it cheaper to buy things
than to steal them—and make it unwise
for countries to kill their customers
and debtors. (The European Union,
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012,
82 may 2022
grew out of a trade organization, the
European Coal and Steel Community.)
Yet another is a network of interna-
tional organizations, particularly the
United Nations, which knits countries
into a community, mobilizes peace-
keeping forces, immortalizes states,
grandfathers in borders and outlaws
and stigmatizes war while providing
alternative means of resolving disputes.
brainchildren of human ingenuity
have also underwritten other historical
boosts in well-being, such as safety,
leisure, travel and access to art and
entertainment. Though many of
today’s gadgets and bureaucracies
grew organically and were perfected
through trial and error, not one was an
accident. People at the time advocated
for them with arguments driven by
logic and evidence, costs and benefits,
cause and effect and trade-offs between
individual advantage and the common
good. Our ingenuity will have to be
redoubled to deal with the trials we
face today, particularly carbon emis-
sions. We’ll have to apply brainpower
to develop technologies that make
clean energy cheap, pricing that makes
dirty energy expensive, policies that
prevent factions from becoming spoil-
ers and treaties to make the sacrifices
global and equitable.
But progress consists of more than
gains in our safety and material well-
being. It also consists of gains in
how we treat each other: in equality,
benevolence and rights. Many cruel
and unjust practices have declined
over the course of history. They include
human sacrifice, slavery, despotism,
blood sports, eunuchism, harems, foot
binding, sadistic corporal and capital
punishments, the persecution of her-
etics and dissidents and the oppres-
sion of women and of religious, racial,
ethnic and sexual minorities. None has
been extirpated from the face of the
earth, but when we chart the historical
changes, in every case we see descents
and, in some cases, plunges.
How did we come to enjoy this prog-
ress? The 19th-century American theo-
logian Theodore Parker, and Martin
Luther King Jr. a century later, divined
a moral arc bending toward justice.
But the nature of the arc and its power
to pull the levers of human behaviour
are mysterious. One can imagine more
prosaic pathways: changing fashions,
shaming campaigns, appeals to the
heart, popular protest movements and
religious and moralistic crusades.
A popular view is that moral prog-
ress is advanced through struggle—the
powerful never hand over their privi-
leges, which must be wrested from
them by the might of people acting in
solidarity. Sound arguments have
guided, and should guide, movements
for change. They make the differ-
ence between moral force and brute
force, between marches for justice and
lynch mobs, between human progress
and breaking things. And it will be
sound arguments—both to reveal
moral blights and to discover feasible
remedies—that we will need to ensure
that moral progress will continue, that
the abominable practices of today
will become as incredible to our
descendants as heretic burnings and
slave auctions are to us.
Steven Pinker is a professor of psychol-
ogy at Harvard University.
FROM THE BOOK RATIONALITY BY STEVEN PINKER, PUB-
LISHED BY VIKING, AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN PUBLISHING
GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC.
COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY STEVEN PINKER.

Keepsakes
A passport is a little book printed for a single situation, the condition of being
between countries. To hold it is to be going from home to elsewhere.
STEPHEN MARCHE, FROM LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA

I have pots and pans that were my mother’s that I will never part with,
not only because “no one makes them like that anymore”
but also because they remind me of her and the extraordinary
meals she made for us as a family.
STANLEY TUCCI, FROM TASTE, MY LIFE THROUGH FOOD

rd.ca 83
 EDITORS’ CHOICE

Rescuers found
Dylan Ehler’s boots
in a nearby creek.
 reader’s digest

LITTLE

BOY

LOST
WHEN
DYLAN EHLER
DISAPPEARED,
THE INTERNET
TURNED ON
HIS PARENTS

BY Katherine Laidlaw FROM WIRED

photographs by justin carter

rd.ca 85
reader’s digest
DYLAN
EHLER
CAME
INTO THE
WORLD
RUNNING.
He pummelled and squirmed his way
through his mom’s pregnancy. He was
a boy in constant motion. Almost as
soon as he was crawling, he was climb-
ing. His parents, Ashley Brown and
Jason Ehler, would walk into their living
room, in a grey-green house in a place
called Bible Hill, across the Salmon
River from the town of Truro, Nova
Scotia, to find him perched on the win-
dowsill, grasping at the ledge above.
Dylan turned three in April 2020. In
the weeks after, the atmosphere in the
family home was tense. Because of
the pandemic lockdown, Ashley lost
her job as a detailer for a Hyundai
dealer, and Jason lost his delivering
water bottles for the Canadian Springs
plant. Money was tighter than usual,
and it was usually pretty tight. Lily,
86 may 2022
Ashley’s 12-year-old daughter from a
previous relationship, was home all
day while she attended virtual school.
And Dylan was Dylan, running around
the house with a smile, blink-and-
you’d-miss-him like always.
Three-quarters of Nova Scotia is blan-
keted by gnarled fir, spruce and pine.
Bible Hill sits at the innermost point of
an inlet off of Cobequid Bay, which
is an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy. The
town is a quiet, pastoral kind of place
that offers little by way of excitement
but ambling Holsteins.
So, in the early months of the pan-
demic, 32-year-old Ashley joined Tik-
Tok, the app she’d seen all over social
media, as an escape. When she had
time, she’d upload clips in batches.
She posted a video of her swaying in a
hoodie and baseball cap, backlit in red,
to a Nelly song. In another, she blows
puffs of smoke from a joint toward
the camera. In one clip, Dylan sits
beside her, smiling widely: “You ever
just look at somebody,” she mouths
along to the meme, “and think to your-
self, ‘This motherfucker is going to be
the reason I go to jail?’”
One April afternoon she stood in the
kitchen and pulled the phone in close,
her brown bangs falling across her fore-
head. A TikTok filter called Euphoric
Makeup swept deep purple across her
eyes and sharply contoured her cheek-
bones. In the years since the Disney
movie Frozen had come out, more than
100,000 people had participated in a
popular, if sinister, meme that had made race at derbies before he sold his Monte
its way to TikTok, a parody of the mov- Carlo to build his own mud car. He
ie’s song “Do You Want to Build a started taking it and his daughter to
Snowman?” Ashley began to sing along rallies instead. It made sense that Ash-
to the meme’s pre-recorded vocal track: ley would find work as a car detailer.
“Will you help me hide a body?” a high- Jason grew up down the road from
pitched voice-over asked. “Come on, Truro, in Masstown, a farm village of
we can’t delay / No one can see him on about 150 people. He met Ashley one
the floor / Get him out the door before night at a friend’s place. She liked his
he can decayyyyyyy.” booming laugh and his kind, hazel eyes,
She uploaded the video, a few of her which creased at the corners. They
followers liked it, and she went back to began to party together, and eventu-
an utterly unremarkable day. ally they moved in together. Ashley’s
family didn’t much like him. He was
weeks turned to months in a pandemic loud and gruff, and they thought he
blur. Breakfast, potty time, playtime, was a bad influence.
storytime. Ashley and Jason’s world They weren’t perfect, but they were
grew smaller, revolving more tightly a family. For years Jason had wanted a
around Lily and Dylan. Dylan was the child of his own. He was stepfather to
kind of kid who went looking for
joy. He loved the rain. One after- Ashley Brown and Jason Ehler
noon he stood outside in his
patched green parka, the fuzzy
fur lining of his hood matting in
the storm. He leaned his head up
and stuck his tongue out as far as
it would go, rain pattering against
his cheeks as he licked the drop-
lets, his face beaming with glee.
Jason captured the moment on
video, not knowing then that his
son’s face in that frame would
soon be seen the world over.
Ashley grew up around cars.
Her dad, Norman Brown, still
runs a mechanic’s shop out of
his garage about a 10-minute
drive west. Norman used to drag
reader’s digest
Lily, but he’d been keen to have another
kid. To Ashley, it never seemed like
the right time. But when she turned 29,
things had started to settle down. They
each had steady work, and they weren’t
partying as much as they once did.
Ashley said even her mom, Dorothy
Dowe Parsons, who had a history of
drinking, was sober by then. So when
he asked again, she said yes. Nine
months later, Dylan was born.
DOROTHY PARSONS
TIED UP HER PUPPY.
WHEN SHE TURNED
BACK, SHE COULDN’T
FIND DYLAN.
One morning in May 2020, Ashley
was exhausted and trying to keep her
head on straight. Jason woke up angry.
Ashley can’t remember exactly why,
but things escalated fast, and she hit
him. Jason sprang out of bed, and sud-
denly everyone was yelling. He’d kill
her, he shouted after her. He grabbed her
phone and smashed it on the kitchen’s
tiled floor. Someone in the neigh-
bourhood called the cops. Ashley was
charged with assault, and Jason for
uttering threats and mischief. Both were
released on an order to appear in court
later that summer. (The charges were
withdrawn after the two went to a court
counselling program.)
88 may 2022
In the meantime, a judge issued them
a no-contact order. For days, Jason
stayed with his parents, a 15-minute
drive away, while Ashley took care of
Dylan and Lily at home. The couple’s
moms acted as intermediaries, shut-
tling Dylan between houses. Jason
made sure that he saw Dylan almost
every day; he was a devoted dad that
way. But the situation also created ten-
sion. Jason didn’t like that Dorothy was
helping to care for his son, even if she
was just ferrying him back to his home
in Bible Hill. He didn’t trust her, in part,
he says, because of her history of slip-
ping in and out of sobriety. One day, in
the fuss of it all, he didn’t realize until
her car had pulled away that he’d for-
gotten to kiss Dylan goodbye.
The next morning, Ashley awoke
around first light to find Dylan tucked
in beside her. They spent a few minutes
cuddled in bed. Then she got her boy
up and took him to the coffee shop
down the road. She ordered him his
favourite breakfast, a chocolate-glazed
doughnut. As usual, he ate the icing off
the top before zeroing in on the rest.
She took her coffee to go, and the pair
headed home.
Though Ashley enjoyed the morning
with Dylan, she was tired. It had been
a long time since she’d been a single
parent. So when her friend Vanessa sent
her a text inviting her over for a coffee,
she was relieved: she needed a break.
She messaged her mom to ask if she
could watch Dylan for a while, then
packed him a bag with pull-ups and a
snack. She drove by Truro’s dormant
smokestacks and over Lepper Brook.
The water was unusually high.
Dorothy’s grey-blue shingled house
is 135 metres away from Lepper Brook,
a stream that flows to the mouth of the
Salmon River and from there to the Bay
of Fundy. Dorothy had a puppy, and the
dog was one of the only family members
who could keep up with Dylan, nipping
at his heels. She’d mentioned to Ashley
that she was going to take the pair out
to play in her backyard, which held a
picnic table and a chest freezer and
opened onto dead-end Elizabeth Street.
Ashley joked that Dorothy had better
put both babies on a leash: “Dylan’s a
runner. He needs one,” she said.
At around 11 a.m., Ashley pulled out
of the driveway to go meet her friend.
Like the sediment that lines the banks
of a river, tragedy builds in layers, too, a
series of tiny and inconspicuous choices
that look clear only after the force of
their cataclysmic outcomes.
At about 1:15 p.m., Dorothy and
Dylan were out in the yard. She turned
around to tie her puppy to its lead, and
when she turned again, she couldn’t
find her grandson. She ran into the
street, yelling for him. Her yells turned
into screams, and she pleaded with
her neighbours to call 911. The police
arrived at the house just four minutes
later. They fanned out, searching the
area’s nooks and crannies for any-
where a playful toddler might hide.
When Ashley’s father showed up at
her friend’s front door, he was stone-
faced. She had not been expecting
him. She knew instantly that some-
thing was wrong.
“Get in the car,” he said. She com-
plied, tucking her slender frame into
the truck’s passenger seat like she had
so many times when she was young.
“Dylan is missing,” he told her, eyes on
the road. For much of the rest of the
ride, the two sat in silence, a harbinger
of the quiet to come. She thought to
herself that by the time they got there,
the police may have found him. She
was certain they would find him. Jason
arrived at Dorothy’s shortly after Ash-
ley, the pair reunited in their panic over
where their son could have gone. (The
court lifted their no-contact order after
Dylan’s disappearance.)
ACROSS THE
PROVINCE, PEOPLE
LEFT OUT PAIRS OF
BOOTS, BEACONS OF
HOPE IN THE NIGHT.
Firefighters and search-and-rescue
volunteers were called in, trudging
waist deep into the creek. For six hours,
they searched the area, finding nothing.
When a rescue volunteer pulled one of
Dylan’s little grey rain boots from an
errant shopping cart submerged in
rd.ca 89
From top left:
a baby photo
of Dylan; a sign
posted by his
parents; Dorothy
Dowe Parsons’
backyard

Lepper Brook, it didn’t look good. An
hour and a half later, another volun-
teer found his other boot, stuck in the
muck about 18 metres downstream.
For days, police investigators and
ground-rescue volunteers searched. On
stoops across the province, firefighters
and parents left pairs of rain boots out
for Dylan, beacons of hope in the night.
in the hours after Dylan went missing,
a theory began to take shape: that Dylan
had taken off running and made it to the
creek. He didn’t yet know how to swim.
A dive team combed the riverbeds
from below, using an underwater cam-
era to take pictures they could later scan
for something, anything, they may have
missed. A helicopter flew low overhead,
looking for Dylan and flagging areas of
interest for searchers on the ground.
The next day, more Truro residents
joined in. Word of Dylan’s disappear-
ance spread—first across the province,
then the country, then the continent.
Thousands of web sleuths descended
on Facebook groups created to discuss
details of the case. The same day, a fam-
ily friend started a GoFundMe cam-
paign to help out with the family’s bills
and fund search efforts. Jason and Ash-
ley turned to Facebook for support,
using it to plan searches, organize fund-
raisers and update their community.
The couple knew that keeping Dylan’s
picture circulating was also critical.
A missing child captures the atten-
tion of the compassionate and curious
reader’s digest
among us, the ones with saviour
complexes and the people who rec-
ognize themselves in these parents’
nightmares. Before long, Dylan had
become a symbol to a collection of peo-
ple who were awash with pain and had
nowhere to put it.
Two days after Dylan disappeared,
Jason and Ashley were frantic. It felt
surreal; their son still hadn’t been found.
That morning, Ashley received a mes-
sage from her sister-in-law: don’t go
on Facebook, she warned.
FACEBOOK GROUPS
OF AMATEUR SLEUTHS
SPRANG UP, AND
TARGETED ASHLEY
AND JASON.
It was too late. Ashley already had a
stream of messages from strangers
accusing her of killing her son. An
Internet sleuth had discovered her Tik-
Tok page and posted the videos she’d
made to Facebook. Forty-eight hours
after her son went missing, online
detectives declared her suspect num-
ber one. Missing-person cases are mag-
nets for psychics and obsessives, and a
medium named Jada Brooke, who said
she was based in the New York area,
joined the conversations in one of the
Facebook groups that had sprung up to
dissect Ashley’s and Jason’s behaviour.
rd.ca 91
reader’s digest
In a Facebook Live post, she described
visions she’d seen of the boy. She told
followers that a family member of
Dylan’s had called her to ask for her
help. Soon she was offering theories
on the case and information she said
came from locals. She claimed the fam-
ily was into “dark magic” and that Dylan
was sacrificed to Satan.
AFTER SIX DAYS WITH
NO NEW EVIDENCE,
THE POLICE CALLED
OFF THE SEARCH. BUT
JASON DIDN’T STOP.
In one group, people criticized Ash-
ley for getting a haircut. Was that a new
nose piercing, they wondered. In yet
another, they mocked Jason’s search
attempts, saying “It’s just him lurking
in the bushes.” They even excoriated
him for sleeping. “I would be searching
non-stop until my feet were bleeding if
my child vanished,” wrote one person.
The vitriol spilled over into real life.
People started standing outside their
Bible Hill home glowering, taking
photos or following them in their cars.
When Jason and Ashley put up a memo-
rial for Dylan in Bible Hill’s Holy Well
Park—a blanket laden with teddy bears
and a toy fishing rod, with the boy’s
first-ever pair of rain boots hanging
from the tree overhead—someone tore
92 may 2022
it apart and dug a hole beneath it,
looking for bones.
The abuse spilled beyond accusa-
tions about the couple’s parenting.
Jason received scam ransom notes from
online trolls; one included a doctored
picture of Dylan’s face battered with
bruises over his right eye and a deep
gash on his lip. “You must transfer three
Bitcoins within 72 hours,” the message
read. The sender, a Facebook account
under the name Brad, told Jason he’d
release his son once the transfer was
made, and if he didn’t, he’d never see
him again. “You have three days to save
Dylan’s life,” he wrote.
After six days, with no new evi-
dence—no footprints or debris or cred-
ible sightings—the police called off
their search, having found nothing
but the rain boots. But Jason didn’t
stop. He walked the creek bed day after
day, drawing dozens of people to help.
The GoFundMe page would raise
about $12,500 for the family. Ashley
and Jason offered it up as a reward for
any information.
Jason handed out lapel pins con-
sisting of a blue ribbon and a green
ribbon intertwined. He gave away
key chains bearing his son’s face. He
ordered bumper stickers of Dylan look-
ing upward, eyes scanning the sky.
for months, facebook group members
examined the case’s scant evidence,
gnashing details like bolts of harden-
ing chewing gum. It was a dizzying,

dystopian fun house of rumour and
speculation. Theories raged: to many,
the grandmother’s story didn’t check
out. Others believed she was covering for
her daughter. And still others believed
the fact that the family was collecting
money on a GoFundMe page meant
they’d gotten rid of Dylan because they
needed the money—for booze or drugs
or both. At one point, the groups’ ranks
topped 23,000 people, more than twice
the population of Bible Hill.
By the end of September 2020, the
harassment and threats had gotten so
bad that one group member con-
tacted a local lawyer named Allison
Harris. Harris knew about the missing
boy—Dylan’s story was in the news for
weeks after his disappearance—but
Lepper Brook, which
eventually flows
to the Bay of Fundy
she was shocked to learn about the
abuse the online sleuthing community
had spawned. Harris was one of just
two lawyers in the province who had
argued online personal injury cases in
court. She told the group member to
have Ashley and Jason get in touch and,
after hearing their story, offered her
services pro bono.
Together the three of them set to work
documenting thousands of abusive
screenshots, hundreds of awful mes-
sages, dozens of death threats. They
wrote letters to the administrators of
two of the Facebook groups, asking them
to shut down. At first, both refused,
though one changed her mind after
becoming the target of a harassment
campaign within her own group.
rd.ca 93
reader’s digest
“This case has surprised me,” Harris
says. “Instead of appreciating that
they’re doing damage and harm, they
seem to feel they have a right to have
these groups.”
covering the distance from Dorothy’s
house to the creek bed where Dylan’s
first rain boot was found takes a cou-
ple of minutes at a brisk clip. Stretches
of unfenced land lead down to the
water; wizened tree roots and matted
grasses create resting points along
the shore. The Salmon River winds for
kilometres past flood plains and brick
chimneys, over waterfalls and under
skeletal steel bridges. While most riv-
ers flow in one direction, the Salmon
is a tidal river, which means it runs in
two. Every day, a tidal bore sends a
wave nearly two metres high rippling
up the river, straight into town, then
back out again. The water, a mix of silt
and clay, is a ruddy chocolate brown
all the way out to the estuary where the
river meets the bay.
The Bay of Fundy is a funnel of feroc-
ity. From above, it’s a depression in the
sandstone of Canada’s east coast, bor-
dered by the provinces of Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick and the state of
Maine. There, peace is thin on the
ground. Most oceans, on average, have
a tidal range of around one metre. The
range in Fundy is 16. Imagine the force
created by the pounding hooves of 24
million charging horses, and still Fun-
dy’s tides are stronger.
94 may 2022
The search-and-rescue team had
attached radio-frequency trackers to a
mannequin about Dylan’s weight and
height, then dropped it into Lepper
Brook, tracking it as it disappeared
into deep, invisible pockets under
the water. It took less than an hour
for the mannequin to be swept up by
those powerful tides.
JASON BELIEVES
THAT HIS SON IS
STILL ALIVE—THAT
SOMEONE TOOK HIM
FROM THE BACKYARD.
“Nature was working against Dylan
from square one,” says Tom Fitzpatrick,
president of the team that led the search
on the ground. The banks of the brook
were so swollen that the currents
knocked full-grown men off their feet.
Fitzpatrick used clues to piece
together what happened that day.
“We think the child was in the back-
yard and his grandmother got dis-
tracted—we’re not sure by what and
for how long. We think the child went
out the corner of the yard, behind the
neighbour’s house. There’s a path that
leads down to the brook, and just
below there’s a bit of a logjam,” he
says, pausing. “About 15 metres down
the water from there is where we found
the first boot.”
 He can’t bring himself to say it,
exactly, that the boy was caught up in
the tides, so forceful and thick with mud
that, underwater, it’s impossible to see.
one year after dylan went missing,
Ashley and Jason’s living room is
somewhere between time capsule and
shrine. Dylan’s rain boots sat on a
wooden bookshelf. “Missing” posters
papered the windows. Art from people
across the continent, commemorating
Dylan, hung on the walls alongside a
list of things for Dylan to do each day.
(“Brush teeth. Learning time. Time with
Lily. Lunch time.”)
Since Dylan disappeared, Ashley
has retreated into herself. She no lon-
ger speaks to her mom, who she feels
hasn’t apologized for her role in what
happened. She rarely speaks to Jason’s
family, who she says believed she
was involved once they saw the TikTok
videos she made.
Early one Saturday morning last year,
Jason, Ashley and Jason’s twin brother,
Justin, climb into their white SUV
and drive through Bible Hill, Truro and
Masstown and on toward familiar
shores. The morning is misty grey, and
they pass winding driveways, where
wary barn cats keep neighbourhood
watch. The gravel turns to sand, and
Baseline
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
ARTHUR ASHE, TENNIS GREAT
they pull into a makeshift parking spot
in front of the rolling dunes of Fundy.
Jason pulls gear out of his trunk: neon
orange vests, a briefcase holding the
drone he’ll fly up and down the shore-
line. Because while he believes that his
son might still be alive—must still be
alive—that someone took him from the
backyard that day and vanished, the only
clues in the case point to the water.
Out on the dunes, it starts to rain.
Detritus has washed up here, scraps
the tides have deigned to return: soggy
red Tim Hortons coffee cups, cracked
scallop shells, one of the eight boots
Jason threw into the creek last year to
see how far they would go.
Early on, someone at Wings of Mercy,
a volunteer search-support group, told
Jason to be careful, that it’s easy to get
lost in the looking. But the absence of
a body means hope, and his hope is a
pilot light. He’ll come out here on the
same day again next week, because he
does this every week, walking the shores
of the river and the bay, then going
home to post the footage to a Facebook
group dedicated to his ongoing search.
He walks interminably on, trudging
his way along the shoreline of a bay
where the water never runs clear.
© 2021, KATHERINE LAIDLAW. FROM ”RAIN BOOTS, TURN-
ING TIDES, AND THE SEARCH FOR A MISSING BOY,” WIRED
(SEPTEMBER 9, 2021), WIRED.COM
rd.ca 95
reader’s digest

martha wainwright has mother issues.

And father issues. And brother issues.
reader’s digest Her push-pull, hot-cold, love-hate

BOOK CLUB relationships with her family members

provide the fuel for her new memoir,
Stories I Might Regret Telling You, a
freewheeling tell-all the likes of which
we rarely see in the age of publicist-
muzzled celebrities. Wainwright, a
gifted songwriter with a voice that
sounds like Kate Bush after a late night
in a smoky club, has released nine
albums. She’s also famously the daugh-
ter of folk singers Loudon Wainwright
and the late Kate McGarrigle and the
sister of the baroque troubadour Rufus
Wainwright. Her memoir lays bare
both her aching adoration for her fam-
ily and her many, many grievances. In
Wainwright’s telling, the wholesome
Canadian icon McGarrigle insults her
daughter in one breath and consoles
her in the next. Her rakish father
admits he pressured Martha’s mother
to get an abortion instead of have her.
Rufus is her closest ally as well as
her rival, both for their parents’ love
and the public’s attention.
Wainwright comes across as a bohe-
Martha Wainwright’s mian raconteur who darts around in
time and makes digressions within
fiery new memoir is digressions. She traipses from her
a family affair mother’s sprawling Victorian house
in the Anglo suburb of Westmount in
Montreal to her father’s London flat
BY Emily Landau in Hampstead Heath. She recounts her
years taking drugs and playing gigs in
the Chelsea Hotel and the East Village

96 may 2022
in the ’90s and early 2000s. She cata-
logues her love affairs and hook-ups
and the challenges of balancing
music and motherhood (she has two
children). But it always comes back to
her family of origin. Back to her com-
petitiveness with Rufus and her envy
of his closeness with Kate. Back to the
time her mother told Martha she was
mediocre and unintelligent, and Mar-
tha responded by shoving Kate to the
ground. Back to when she learned that
her father’s song “I’d Rather Be Lonely”
was about her and the time they’d
lived together. “I kept my dad from
doing what he really wanted to be
doing, which was music and being by
himself,” she says.
THEY TURNED
THEIR SQUABBLES
AND RESENTMENTS
INTO A POWERFUL
MYTHOLOGY.
Where most families might bury
their feelings or seek out group ther-
apy, the McGarrigle-Wainwright clan
have spent decades airing their feuds
in their searing songs—and now, in
this equally acidic memoir. Martha’s
first hit song, whose title is too vulgar
to be printed in these pages, was
inspired by her futile attempts to win
Loudon’s love (she now says it could
be about a number of men she’s
known). “I will not pretend, I will not
put on a smile, I will not say I’m all
right for you,” she sings.
Taken together, these works are as
much about the family’s dirty laundry
as they are about their intense bond.
And by the end of the book, Martha
seems to have come to terms with her
place in this Greek tragedy. “[We are]
a broken family whose members hang
on tight to each other nonetheless,”
she writes. “We fight, but we make up
relatively quickly. We try not to hold
grudges, but it’s hard not to.”
By processing their pain so publicly,
the McGarrigle-Wainwrights have
done something remarkable: they’ve
turned their squabbles and resent-
ments into a vast musical mythology,
a web of lore haunted by jealousy,
casual cruelty and things previously
unsaid. Their songs, and Martha Wain-
wright’s deep gash of a memoir, speak
to each other and to their audience,
each new entry made more poignant
by its connection to the previous ones.
It’s a powerful collective reckoning—
and a canny publicity ploy. Because
more than most famous Canadian
music families, we know these people.
We care. We’re invested. “Journalists
often ask if music is something I was
‘made’ to do,” Martha writes. “The
answer is yes, I was made to do it by
my parents, but I liked it and I wanted
the attention.” Decades after it all first
began, we’re still listening.
rd.ca 97
reader’s digest

BRAINTEASERS

Quick Crossword 1
Easy Fill the grid
2
with these words,
all of which mean 3
“thank you” in
various languages. 4

HVALA (Croatian)
MERCI (French) 6 7 8

(QUICK CROSSWORD) EMILY GOODMAN; (GOODY GOODY GUMDROPS) FRASER SIMPSON.

WADO (Cherokee)
ASANTE (Swahili) 9
TODA (Hebrew)
GRACIAS (Spanish)
KIITOS (Finnish) 10
ARIGATO (Japanese)
DANKE (German)
MAHALO (Hawaiian)

Goody Goody Gumdrops

Medium Jasmine created nine numbered
goody bags, each containing a different
number of individually wrapped candies
(none of the bags is empty). The average
number of candies in bags one through
eight is 10, and the average number of
candies in all nine bags is 11.

1. How many candies are in the ninth bag?

2. What is the maximum number of
candies that could be in the first bag?

98 may 2022
 Shopping Spree
Medium Nizam has been
shopping online using an amount
of money he saved. On Monday, he
spent one-fifth of the money. On
Tuesday, he spent one-third of the
money he had left. On Wednesday,
he spent one-half of what remained
(SHOPPING SPREE) FRASER SIMPSON; (WORD SEARCH) MARCEL DANESI; (COMPUTER) ISTOCK.COM/HIRANMAY BAIDYA.

after Tuesday’s purchases.

After all this shopping, Nazim still

has $60 remaining. How much
money did Nazim have originally?

O Y R A U Z I O D B
W L H V K I U B F K
Word Search
X U H F H W F K R T Easy Find the hidden
words that correspond to
L P U S M E I K E W the seven clues.
C U A O U L E E P Y 1. They allow you to see
U R D C S U C L N O 2. Typically, you keep this
in your pocket or purse
E K Y K I W M J S A 3. It opens a locked door
4. They are used to
Y Q Q S C J C E V I tighten or fasten shoes
5. The back parts of feet
E U I W A L L E T U 6. They keep your
feet warm
S B C O L A C E S Q 7. You can dance to it

For answers, turn to PAGE 103

rd.ca 99
reader’s digest

11. The majority of

TRIVIA gallstones are made
up mostly of what
substance?
BY Samantha Rideout
12. Where is the world’s
tallest waterfall?

1. Which country 6. Decades before Taylor 13. The U.K.’s prime-

removed the British
queen as its head of state
in 2021?
2. The vampire film Nos-
feratu (1922) prompted a
copyright-infringement
lawsuit from the estate of
which writer?
3. Which Canadian holds
the record for the most
goals scored in interna-
tional soccer?
Swift crossed over to pop,
what other country
singer recorded the
mainstream hits “Crazy”
and “I Fall to Pieces”?
7. The Cyrillic alphabet
was added to euro
banknotes after which
country joined the EU
in 2007?
8. Do sea sponges
have organs?
ministerial residence,
10 Downing Street, origi-
nally had yellow bricks.
What led to their now-
iconic black colour?
14. What breed of dog
is helpful to fishers
and more recently
gained fame as
Obama-family pets?

4. What crustacean can 9. What is the bestselling

you try as an ice-cream video game of all time,
flavour in Bar Harbor, with over 238 million
Maine? units sold?

5. Worldwide, what 10. Nearly every country

country was the top
trending news-related
search on Google
last year?
in the world has ratified
the UN’s Convention
on the Rights of the Child.
Which one has not?
15. Roughly what per-
centage of leopards and
jaguars have black fur?
ISTOCK.COM/GLOBALP

dog. 15. Ten or 11 per cent, at most.

them black. They’re now painted black to maintain the appearance. 14. The Portuguese water
United States. 11. Cholesterol. 12. Venezuela (Angel Falls). 13. Air pollution originally turned
Cline. 7. Bulgaria. 8. No, but they are nevertheless considered animals. 9. Minecraft. 10. The
Answers: 1. Barbados. 2. Bram Stoker. 3. Christine Sinclair. 4. Lobster. 5. Afghanistan. 6. Patsy

100 may 2022

 WORD POWER
Everyone loves a party. Dress up your
vocabulary with these festive terms.
BY Beth Shillibeer
1. shindig—
A: clambake. B: large,
lively party. C: country
dance.
2. sideshow—
A: small show within
a larger exhibition.
B: unofficial entertainers,
as in buskers. C: rigged
game at a carnival.
3. zeal—
A: sleight of hand.
B: enthusiasm in pursuit
of something. C: musical
instrument similar to
a zither.
4. ebullient—
A: crowded and noisy.
B: waning energy due to
exhaustion. C: cheerful
and full of energy.
5. symposium—
A: flower festival.
B: gathering that features
an exchange of ideas.
C: classical music festival.
6. marquee—
A: large tent set up for an
outdoor event. B: seating
area for dignitaries.
C: carnival vendor.
7. hippodrome—
A: oversized float in a
parade. B: giant balloon,
often animal-shaped.
C: venue for equestrian
events.
8. dudelsack—
A: German bagpipe.
B: Bavarian strudel
served at Oktoberfest.
C: wire-hooped clown
pants.
9. gilly—
A: carnival slang for
patrons. B: circus master
of ceremonies. C: truck
used to transport circus
or carnival equipment.
10. kermis—
A: puppet show.
B: mystery prize bag.
C: local summer fair.
11. saturnalia—
A: stargazing party.
B: wild revelry or indul-
gence. C: victor’s wreath
or crown.
12. bazaar—
A: strange. B: market-
place. C: stringed
instrument.
13. feria—
A: Spanish market festival.
B: costume designer.
C: parade horse master.
14. mela—
A: ceremonial dress.
B: type of Indian dance.
C: religious festival.
15. tintamarre—
A: Acadian noisemaking
parade. B: cherry-
blossom festival.
C: Portuguese festival of
the sea.
rd.ca 101
reader’s digest
WORD POWER
ANSWERS
1. shindig—B: large,
lively party; as, Marie’s
30th birthday promised
to be a real shindig, as it
coincided with the folk
music festival.
2. sideshow—A: small
show within a larger exhi-
bition; as, Although the
rodeo was the main
event, Jorvak preferred
the sideshows.
3. zeal—B: enthusiasm in
pursuit of something; as,
The dogs raced over the
obstacles with zeal at the
World Agility Open.
4. ebullient—C: cheerful
and full of energy; as, At
the Highland Games, the
Scottish reelers were so
ebullient that they inspired
the crowd to dance, too.
5. symposium—B: gath-
ering that features an
exchange of ideas; as,
Band teachers and stu-
dents from all over the
country shared ideas
about performance at
the annual symposium.
102 may 2022
6. marquee—A: large 12. bazaar—B: market-
tent set up for an outdoor
event; as, The children
place; as, Emira appreci-
ated seeing all the
watched excitedly handmade items for
through the fence as the sale as she wandered
marquee went up. the bazaar.
7. hippodrome— 13. feria—A: Spanish
C: venue for equestrian market festival; as,
events; as, Pierre always Jules booked his trip to
attended the prestigious Spain for April so he
Prix d’Été race held at the could see the Spring
Trois-Rivières Hippodrome. Feria in Seville.
8. dudelsack—A: Ger- 14. mela—C: religious
man bagpipe; as, The festival; as, Ravi was
dudelsack players made excited to join millions at
their way through the the Kumbh Mela.
streets of Schleife, Ger-
many, during the Interna- 15. tintamarre—
tional Bagpipe Festival. A: Acadian noisemaking
parade; as, Naomi could
9. gilly—C: truck used to hear the noise of the
transport circus or carni- tintamarre from her room.
val equipment; as, Once
the gillies were loaded up,
the convoy began driving CROSSWORD
to the next town. ANSWERS
10. kermis—C: local FROM PAGE 104
summer fair; as, Anneke
R I M P R I M E
volunteered for the
T E R A H O U S E S
church rummage booth I M O N A S H A R P
at Edam’s kermis. M I N I S T E R S
E X I L E S
11. saturnalia—B: wild C A N T E A T
A R C A D E
revelry or indulgence; as, A N Y N A C H O S
Thomas enjoyed some N A H E E D R I T T
saturnalia after finishing a E V E N A S U N E S
big contract at work. Z O N E S E I D
 BRAINTEASERS
ANSWERS SUDOKU

FROM PAGE 98 BY Jeff Widderich

Quick Crossword
H
M
A
V
WA DO
8 3 9 7
H A L
A
L
GRAC I A S
I
5 6
TODA G M
A
N
A S ANT E
T R
1 4 5
K I I TOS C
E I 5 9 6 8
Goody Goody
Gumdrops
1. 19 Candies 2 9 4 5
2. 52 Candies

Shopping Spree
6 2 4
Nizam started with $225.
Work backward:
5 3
$60 ÷ 1/2 = $120
$120 ÷ 2/3 = $180
4 8 7 2
$180 ÷ 4/5 = $225
To Solve This Puzzle
Word Search
O Y R A U Z I O D B Put a number from 1 to 9 in
W L H V K I U B F K
X U H F H W F K R T
each empty square so that: SOLUTION
L P U S M E I K E W 2 1 5 6 3 7 9 8 4
C U A O U L E E P Y )every horizontal row and 6 3 8 9 5 4 7 2 1
U R D C S U C L N O vertical column contains all 9 4 7 8 1 2 5 6 3
E K Y K I W M J S A nine numbers (1-9) without 5 7 3 1 4 6 8 9 2
Y Q Q S C J C E V I repeating any of them; 1 2 9 5 7 8 4 3 6
E U I W A L L E T U 8 6 4 2 9 3 1 7 5
S B C O L A C E S Q )each of the outlined 3 x 3
3 5 6 4 8 9 2 1 7
4 8 2 7 6 1 3 5 9
boxes has all nine numbers, 7 9 1 3 2 5 6 4 8
none repeated.

rd.ca 103
reader’s digest

CROSSWORD

Clock Wise 31 See 9-Down

32 Ramadan’s wrap-up
festival

BY Barbara Olson DOWN

1 Song’s update
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2 Like “rain on your wed-
ding day” in an Alanis
9 10 Morissette hit
3 Type of brown envelope
11 12 4 Prepare to be shot?
5 German industrial valley
13 14 6 “Your guess ___ good...”
7 It’s bleu in an atlas
15 8 Fortune teller’s forte
9 With 31-Across, what
16 17 18 19 the phrase formed
by the starred answers
20 21 22
helps you remember
(Hint: see circles)
23 24 25
10 Display racks in a
26 27 28 millinery shop
14 Ottawa NHLer, to fans
29 30 17 Significant period
in history
31 32 18 Build up, as bank
interest
19 Sesame-based paste
ACROSS 20 Montreal indie band ___ 21 Fussed over, with “on”
1 Lip on a glass Fire 22 Superlative suffixes
4 *___ time (most viewed 23 *No matter which 23 “Two owls and ___...”:
TV hours) topped tortilla chips Edward Lear limerick line
9 Prefix meaning “trillion” 26 ___ Nenshi, former 24 Goose of Hawaii
10 Provides lodging mayor of Calgary 25 Parliamentary yesses
11 “___ a roll!” 28 Martin who directed 26 Pince-___ (clip-on
12 B-flat equivalent Norma Rae eyeglasses)
13 *Certain preachers 29 “___ we speak” 27 Main ingredient in guac
15 Banishes, as Napoleon (currently)
16 *Is fasting, say 30 Articles in Le Devoir? For answers, turn to PAGE 102

104 may 2022

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