Danny Williams: The War With Ottawa

By Bill Rowe

This memoir covers the eight months Bill Rowe served with Premier Williams during what became widely known as the Atlantic Accord Crisis and a bitter long-lasting feud between Williams and the top brass on Parliament Hill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781897317952

Bill Rowe

Bill Rowe lives in Maryland with his wife, Sharman. Both are passionate advocates for literacy. When not writing, Bill is most likely planning for, or going on, one more adventure of his own. 

Book preview

DANNY WILLIAMS

THE WAR

WITH OTTAWA

DANNY WILLIAMS

THE WAR

WITH OTTAWA

The inside story by a hired gun

Bill Rowe

FLANKER PRESS LIMITED

ST. JOHN’S

2010

—————————————————————————————————————————

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rowe, Bill, 1942-

Danny Williams : the war with Ottawa : the inside story

by a hired gun / Bill Rowe.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-897317-83-9

1. Williams, Danny, 1949-. 2. Newfoundland and

Labrador--Politics and government--21st century.

3. Canada--Politics and government--1993-2006.

4. Federal-provincial relations--Newfoundland and Labrador.

5. Federal-provincial relations--Canada. 6. Rowe, Bill, 1942.

I. Title.

FC2177.2.R68 2010   C813’.6    C2010-905114-9

—————————————————————————————————————————

© 2010 by Bill Rowe

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5.

This applies to classroom use as well.

PRINTED IN CANADA

This text of this book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper, FSC certified, that is chlorine-free and 100% post-consumer waste.

Cover Design: Adam Freake

FLANKER PRESS

PO BOX 2522, STATION C

ST. JOHN’S, NL, CANADA

TOLL FREE: 1-866-739-4420

WWW.FLANKERPRESS.COM

15 14 13 12 11 10     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

To my wife, Penelope Ayre Rowe, whose contribution to our province’s cause was greater than anyone knew.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Alpha Males at Work

CHAPTER TWO

Danny’s Call to Arms

CHAPTER THREE

In the Belly of the Beast

CHAPTER FOUR

Where Hell Freezes Over

CHAPTER FIVE

To Danny and Paul’s Good Health

CHAPTER SIX

Blowing the Top Off the Equalization Summit

CHAPTER SEVEN

Our Magnificent Seven, Part 1: The Private Members

CHAPTER EIGHT

Our Magnificent Seven, Part 2: The Minister

CHAPTER NINE

Danny and Bill’s First Date

CHAPTER TEN

The Flag Flap

CHAPTER ELEVEN

With A Little Help From Our Friends

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Final Do or Die Meeting

Acknowledgements

Index

Author’s Note

During the months I spent as Premier Danny Williams’s provincial representative in Ottawa, I kept a detailed personal journal. In it I reflected on important and amusing events as they occurred and I recorded my impressions of the intriguing characters involved, for better or for worse, on both sides of the battle lines.

That journal, augmented by memories, emails, conversations, and media clips, forms the core of this story.

Several short pieces from an early draft of the manuscript as a workin-progress appeared as columns in the St. John’s newspapers the Independent and the Telegram and in the Corner Brook newspaper the Western Star.

BILL ROWE, ST. JOHN’S

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR

AUGUST 2010

— CHAPTER ONE —

Alpha Males at Work

WE KNEW THIS LATEST meeting between Premier Danny Williams and the prime minister of Canada was going to be frank, blunt, and edgy. The public war of words that had raged between them for weeks had made even veteran advisers on both sides uneasy. But nobody among us imagined that a fist fight might break out between the two aging statesmen.

The omens for this summit in Ottawa, at which Premier Williams, Premier John Hamm and Prime Minister Paul Martin would meet to resolve the dispute over how much money Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia could keep from their offshore oil and gas, were better than expected. Past exchanges of harsh language and personal insults in the media between Williams and Martin were being superseded now by friendly greetings and amicable handshakes all around. It was a fresh and affable beginning.

The three leaders were meeting on a November afternoon of 2004 in a private room off the prime minister’s office in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. Only the first ministers themselves and some note-taking aides were to be present in that room. The absence of bureaucrats was designed to encourage the premiers and the prime minister to come to grips directly with the issues without official interference. The idea worked—perhaps a little too well.

I was in a room next door with a dozen other federal and provincial minions from the prime minister’s and the premiers’ offices. We sat around a big circular table waiting for our masters, the legendary negotiators of hundreds of millions of dollars during their previous business careers, to emerge with the impressive fruit of their intellectual labours.

Despite the friendly entrance of their leader into the meeting room, staff members from the prime minister’s office seemed to be in a state of agitation. If grace under pressure was an objective, this gang missed the target by a mile. Perhaps the aura of misery and defeat they exuded came from their secret knowledge that, contrary to his affable appearance, the PM intended to maintain his hard-nosed stance.

The top federal man in our room shook hands with the rest of us, displaying the demeanour of a man receiving mourners at a funeral home. A provincial adviser declared that we’d certainly like to achieve a win-winwin situation here, that is, a win for the feds, a win for Nova Scotia and a win for Newfoundland and Labrador. The PM’s man batted that hope down with the grim reply that what we were trying to avoid here was a lose-lose-lose situation.

I said to myself that it was no wonder this Martin gang had turned Jean Chrétien’s majority government into a bare minority. These guys were masters at spreading expectations of rout and grief. They lent credibility to the jibe that Paul Martin had eked out a win in the last election only because he had run against Stephen Harper; if he had run unopposed, he would have lost.

As we advisers settled in for the long wait, some of our time was filled with smartass remarks back and forth between the federal and provincial sides. One of the federales tried, as usual, to divide our two provinces over Danny Williams’s stubbornness, which he characterized as self-defeating. And when the good ship Terra Nova goes under, he prophesied, remember that the Nova Scotia barnacles sticking to her hull will go down too.

A saucy Newfoundlander wondered how Paul Martin and his advisers had managed to achieve the impossible: Explain to me again, he said, the brilliant strategy you guys employed in the last election to snatch near-defeat from the jaws of victory.

But all this jabber was only a pallid aping of our leaders’ words and actions in the other room. Most of the time, in fact, just about everyone around our table was glued to a BlackBerry, sending and receiving text messages. Often, someone would regale the rest of us by reading a message they’d just received, usually an ancient, recycled one-liner. Here’s one from Scott. ‘Question: What’s the difference between Stephen Harper’s caucus and a cactus? Answer: With a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.’

The BlackBerry wireless device had really come into its own over the past year or so, and everywhere you went in official Ottawa in those days, indoors and out, public servants were gawking at them and thumbing them, even when engaged in conversation. I didn’t own a BlackBerry myself, and perhaps it was my lack of familiarity with them that would nearly startle me out of my skin this afternoon.

I had left our room for a few minutes and was just coming back when I noticed that instead of any sound of human voices inside, there was an eerie silence. I walked in, wondering. The ten or twelve officials were still sitting around the big table, but no one was saying a word. Their heads were bent forward and their hands were all out of sight under the table. Each of them was staring mutely down at his or her crotch in intense concentration. They were all bobbing up and down slightly and swaying a little in their chairs, with blissful expressions on their faces. Not one looked up at me or spoke. I stopped dead in my tracks. What the hell were they doing? My God, no—it couldn’t be—they all looked like they were masturbating under the table.

I didn’t know whether to tiptoe silently back out the door and run down the corridor, or to yell, You people stop that this minute! Then one of the men looked up and saw me. Hi there, he said, with what seemed to me to be an alarmingly erotic smile. Everyone suddenly sat back and raised their hands above the table. They had not been engaged in selfabuse at all, at least not the regular kind. They were all clutching BlackBerrys, into which they had just been lustily thumbing text. I had experienced my first encounter with a gaggle of government advisers participating in a group BlackBerry orgy. The shock has kept me BlackBerryfree to this day.

Premier Williams and Premier Hamm entered the room: the meeting was over. I could see from the ashen face of one note-taker with them, that something scary had happened there, too. What’s going on? I whispered to him. He bent over and muttered in my ear, It got very tense in there.

Very tense was an understatement of what had taken place, according to a source close to the prime minister who would soon give me his version of events. According to him, the two premiers had been firing their usual billion dollar demands at the prime minister, all three leaders progressing from candid to utterly no-guff on the question of what, exactly, Paul Martin had committed himself to. Whereupon, Danny and Paul abruptly levitated from their chairs and stood toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball, fists raised to punching position, shouting abuse and spittle into each other’s faces.

Judging by the accusations they exchanged, their disagreement had moved away from oil money and to more personal issues. Which of them was the biggest fucking liar in the country and which of them had the tiniest balls. Only the intervention of a valiant note-taker, I was told, who wedged himself between them like an NHL referee, prevented a punch-up between the two senior statesmen. French writer Françoise Sagan would have been delighted. I like men to behave like men, she wrote. Strong and childish.

The intent of this latest gathering of the three first ministers was to correct the gross inequities of the Atlantic Accord and equalization payments, which were robbing the two Atlantic provinces of revenues from offshore resources. But instead, this meeting, like the others before it, had collapsed in disarray—not surprising, since it must have been hard for two of the participants to think clearly when all the blood had gone to their clenched fists.

The PM is really mad, said my federal contact. He used to like your fellow Danny. He was prepared to go as high as three hundred million right now for your petite province. But after that debacle? Bugger all, pal. ZILCH. You might as well drag your sorry ass back to your benighted rock for good. He concluded with what sounded like a direct quote from the prime minister’s office: Because this thing is EFFIN FINISHED!

Buddy did have a point. With my main reason for being in Ottawa having just exploded, anyone sensible would shag off home out of it, away from this cold, navel-gazing hell back to our mild, ocean-gazing heaven. But, goddammit—the paltry, miserable sum mentioned at this latest meeting had not gone up by one loonie in weeks. Despite their reasonable rhetoric, and their constant encouragement to meet and discuss amounts, the feds had deliberately stuck the money train in neutral. They kept attaching strings to a deal. Small wonder the premier had nearly come to blows with the prime minister. The federal proposal dangled before us was an absolute insult.

Prime Minister Martin had publicly stated the following in St. John’s six months before—on June 5, 2004—during the federal election campaign: I had a discussion . . . with the premier this morning, and I have made it very clear that the proposal he has put forth is a proposal that we accept. Provincial calculations showed that, based on Premier Williams’s proposal, the public commitment made to him by Paul Martin entitled our province to hundreds of millions more than the federal government was offering, and did not include the crippling conditions the feds now kept insisting on.

After the fiasco, I walked away from the Centre Block on Parliament Hill with Premier Williams and his chief of staff, Brian Crawley, and his director of communications, Elizabeth Matthews. I expected Danny’s message to the media to be filled with predictions of dire consequences. He stopped for a scrum with national reporters, and then pushed on to an interview at CTV and another with Don Newman on CBC TV. His message was grave all right, but surprisingly upbeat too: Serious difficulties did remain, but progress had been made.

Danny even kept his cool when one senior national reporter, encountering him in the CBC lobby, hoisted her nose high and sniffed, Premier Williams, how on earth do you expect to get any money from the Department of Finance when you keep insulting their officials? This was a reference to Danny’s well-warranted attacks on the lunacy of the federal equalization formula. I’d noticed before now that some others in the national media shared her condescending attitude. You people down there in the boonies? You need to learn how to brown-nose central Canada properly if you want to get anywhere.

At the CBC building, I spotted the federal minister of Natural Resources, John Efford, scooting into a studio for an interview of his own—no doubt about how ungrateful his native province was in the face of Ottawa’s awesome generosity. Efford’s director of communications, Tom Ormsby, a long-time acquaintance of mine, strolled up, and we complimented each other on how good at injury prevention we were: his minister and my premier were the full length of the building away from each.

Afterwards, Danny started back to his room at the Château Laurier, where he intended to call Night Line on VOCM Radio in Newfoundland and Labrador and give a progress report to the province, after which he would pack his bag for the airport. The man had been up till two o’clock in St. John’s the night before—he was a bit of a night owl, one of his young aides had commented to me ruefully—and out of bed before dawn for his flight to Ottawa that morning. Now, after a full day of meetings and media and near fist fights with prime ministers, he was flying home.

He and I talked alone in the lobby before he went up to his room. I half-expected him to be crestfallen and exhausted after today’s flop. Before his meeting with the PM, he had talked very frankly to me about his fear that his Accord initiative might fail.

One of the traits I liked about Danny was how honest he was about his feelings, almost to the point of wearing his heart on his sleeve. I considered it a superior feature in a leader, much preferable to the bravado and bluster of some. I’d told him earlier that his anxieties were natural, but, from my vantage point, I couldn’t see the Accord negotiations failing in the end: ultimately Paul Martin would have to keep his word in a way that allowed Danny and Hamm to say publicly that he had honoured his commitment.

I knew from talking to close, long term friends of Martin that he was a my word is my bond man, which many credited for his success in business. He would never allow his reputation for honour to be permanently sullied, no matter what the bean counters in Finance or the Privy Council urged him to do.

As Danny and I said goodbye at the hotel, he was, in fact, far from discouraged. He had the air of a man whose round of negotiations had gone extremely well. I asked him how Premier Hamm was holding up; Hamm worried me. When I’d first met him, I’d described him privately to people in the premier’s office as a marshmallow compared to Danny, who was a razor blade.

But I discovered it was easy to dismiss Hamm like that, because he was exceedingly courteous and soft-spoken, and although he laughed easily, he did it very quietly. When you got to know him and his history better you realized that, although Danny had forced the commitment out of Martin the previous June, Hamm had started this campaign to ameliorate the inequities of the Atlantic Accords to begin with, nearly four years ago, and he had stuck to his guns ever since. Danny told me that despite serious attempts by the PMO to divide the two provinces and separate Nova Scotia’s position from ours during this latest meeting, Hamm had retained his rock-like solidarity.

When we parted with a handshake that evening, Danny said, We’re getting there. But we need to push it ahead. Keep up the networking and the campaigning.

And so, a little later, during a talk with my acquaintance close to the prime minister, I told him, no, it was not finished. That he and his gang had no idea what they were dealing with.

Oh, they had a pretty good idea, he replied—that was to say, from top to bottom on Danny Williams’s team, we were all off our goddamned heads.

Well, being crazy was certainly a plus in dealing with the federal government, I responded. It only levelled the playing field. Crazy? He and his chums in the PMO hadn’t even glimpsed crazy from our side yet. The two provinces were going to get the money they were entitled to, I told him, or we all might have the pleasure at the next big summit meeting of seeing Danny and Paul rolling about the floor amongst the dust bunnies in their fifteen-hundred-dollar suits, throwing punches at each other’s angst-furrowed faces and kneeing each other in the alpha male nuts.

Confronted with that enchanting image, the federal guy couldn’t quite squelch his snort. But then he shook his head in dismay at what federal-provincial statesmanship was coming to. We both had to agree on one thing, though: whichever way the battle went in the future, this was one hell of a fascinating time to be adversaries in Ottawa.

— CHAPTER TWO —

Danny’s Call to Arms

WHAT WAS I DOING in the nation’s capital in the first place, up to my neck in the most vicious federal-provincial battle in Newfoundland and Labrador’s history? Not even the clash over the offshore in the early ’80s between the bad boy of Confederation, Brian Peckford, and the haughty Pierre Trudeau, or that conflict over something called Term 29 back in the 1950s between the two egomaniacs Premier Joey Smallwood and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker matched this one in ferocity and nastiness and public entertainment. So, how was I blessed enough to find myself in Ottawa as Danny Williams’s representative during his take-no-prisoners combat with Paul Martin which so enraged and amused the gobsmacked Canadian public?

For years, I had inhabited an agreeable niche as a talking head in the provincial and national media. I never harboured the slightest intention of playing any role for the provincial government in Ottawa, and there was no personal or political relationship between Danny and me that would have made my appointment to such position a natural consequence of Danny’s election as premier in 2003.

A few months before that election, when he was still leader of the Opposition, Danny had telephoned me at home one day. Could I meet him at his house for a little chat? I was surprised by the call, but it wasn’t hard to deduce what he wanted. He thought no doubt that, because I’d been in politics before, I was still daft enough to want to get back into that noble profession/wretched racket.

However, I’d lost all interest in re-entering provincial politics. Elected five times before and defeated twice, I’d had my fill of it. So I could easily have said no to Danny right there on the phone. But instead I agreed to meet with him. How come? Politeness, a desire to hear the man out? Yes, a little of that. Curiosity about his celebrated powers of persuasion? A bit of that too. But mainly, it was pure nosiness on my part: I wanted a gawk at the inside of his big fancy house.

I liked Danny’s style. Anyone who would lift a quote from Harold Ballard, former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs and convicted fraud, and apply it to Mayor Andy Wells—proclaiming that a public argument with His Worship was like getting into a pissin’ contest with a skunk and adding for good measure that what the mayor of St. John’s really needed was a good shit-knockin’—well, how could you not like the guy?

But Danny and I had never been buddies. I’d known his father, Tommy, better. When I first started practising law in the late 1960s, Tommy Williams, QC, was already a veteran lawyer, affable, hail-fellow-well-met, and extremely helpful with friendly advice to novices like me. Tommy was a big Tory, and I was an active Liberal, but whenever I ran into him in the courthouse or on Duckworth Street, he always had the time to stop and have a chat about law, politics or sports with a youngster like myself, going out of his way to make a greenhorn to the fraternity of the robe feel welcome.

So when I first met the young Danny Williams, I was already predisposed in his favour. And I was glad to find that he was a good bit like his old man—same affable and down-to-earth personality. I first got to know him in the early 1970s when Progressive Conservative Premier Frank Moores appointed him as a deputy law clerk or the like in the House of Assembly. I was then a Liberal MHA and Opposition house leader. Because Danny was a Tory, many of my fellow party members were perplexed at our friendly interaction. They figured we should be natural political enemies. That tone had been set earlier by Joey Smallwood. I well recall Joey shooting glares of disbelief and scorn my way whenever I strolled across the House to have a friendly gab with dirty Tories like Tom Hickey or Ank Murphy or Gerry Ottenheimer, or, worst of all, the turncoat John Crosbie. But I tried never to let politics interfere with genial relations with anyone, and I appreciated Danny’s similar temperament. During breaks in House proceedings, we often sought each other out for a coffee and a cordial chinwag.

Ten years later, though, I glimpsed a hard-nosed business side of the man which I didn’t care for. In the provincial election of 1982, after thirteen years in the House of Assembly, I got kicked out into the political cold with most Liberal candidates by PC Premier Brian Peckford’s anti-Ottawa, anti-Trudeau, it’s Newfoundland’s oil juggernaut. I resumed the practice of law and began to do commentaries on public affairs. One of my media appearances was with a weekly panel of pundits on the community affairs channel of Danny’s cable TV network.

I loved it. Debating public issues with Patrick O’Flaherty and Gerry Phelan and other skilled commentators every week—who wouldn’t love it? But I was struggling with the recession and the stagflation and the 20 percent interest rates then raging. So I told the cable company that, as with all other media I had gigs with—CBC, CTV, VOCM, newspapers—I would have to charge them a fee if they thought my opinion valuable enough to put on the air for their own paying customers. No fee, said the cable company.

I left the show on principle. More mystified than angry, I mentioned to someone I happened to encounter, a higher-up in Danny’s company, how strange it was that a cable TV outfit—a licence to print money, as billionaire media baron Lord Thomson of Fleet, former chancellor of Memorial University, had described it—would not want to pay equitable recompense to professional commentators for their expertise. But that’s how Danny is making his millions, Danny’s man replied. He’s as tight as a crab’s ass.

A few years later, in 1989, when Tom Rideout ran for leader of the provincial PC Party, Danny appeared on television to complain about party manipulations that had somehow finagled him out of running for leader himself. I was struck by his scowling face and surly tone, and remarked to myself how different he seemed from the days when he was that young official in the House of Assembly, fresh out of law school, all dressed up in his court duds. The sight of Danny then in his bib, tabs and tucker had caused one woman in the gallery—and she a big Liberal—to blurt, Oh my God, that Danny Williams looks right huggable.

Before he telephoned me in 2003, virtually my only other association with Danny Williams had been during his guest appearances as lawyer for Gregory Parsons on my VOCM phone-in show. His staunch advocacy of Greg’s innocence of the charge of murdering his mother, when public opinion was against Parsons, and his tireless public pursuit of compensation for Greg’s wrongful conviction impressed me mightily.

Not long after Danny had become leader of the PC Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, I ran into a friend of his in the lounge of an international airport. Over our delayed-flight drinks, this man gave me his theory on Danny’s business, legal and political ambitions and successes— a theory that would have done Sigmund Freud proud. My companion believed that the motivation behind Danny’s drive had everything to do with a childhood and adolescent sense of inferiority within his extended family, which had led to a secret, heartfelt vow early in his life: One of these days I’ll show those bastards.

Danny’s father, my lounge companion said, had married Teresita, one of the celebrated Galway sisters of St. John’s. Other Galway sisters had married Jim Chalker, John Mahoney, and Noel Goodridge, all lawyers too.

Jim Chalker became one of the foremost lawyers in the province, heading up his own highly successful firm which represented some of the largest corporate clients in Newfoundland, and the government and agencies thereof. He had fended off many invitations to be elevated to the province’s Supreme Court.

John Mahoney, too, was a member of one of the top law firms in the province. He was elected to the House of Assembly, became minister of Justice, and went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Newfoundland.

Noel Goodridge was the grandson of a prime minister of the old Dominion of Newfoundland and a partner in a pre-eminent law firm; at a very early age, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Newfoundland, and later became chief justice of the province.

So these were some of the illustrious uncles by marriage, together with a growing band of first cousins belonging to these elite families, that surrounded our Danny growing up in St. John’s. And then, said my barstool psychologist with a smirk, there was Tommy Williams.

Tommy had a modest law practice all his life, he said, including a stint with Danny which didn’t last; ultimately, he was appointed by the Tory government to the Public Utilities Board. Tommy was laid-back and extremely sociable, and he enjoyed his drink. His main claim to fame had occurred early in life, when he excelled as a tennis player. But no one would accuse him of being a flaming professional success later in life, especially compared to all those hotshot brothers-in-law. This, said his friend, was the origin of Danny’s need to succeed at everything he touched, and not just succeed but to be the best, to be head and shoulders above everyone else. Most of all, he was determined to tower above the progeny of his extended family, those elite-born first cousins in their fancy uptown residences.

Bullshit. Absolute and unadulterated bullshit. This was the reaction to all that from another St. John’s professional, who had gone through school with Danny. From Danny’s youngest years, he told me, you could see that he was destined for big things. An admired athlete, top marks all the way through, a natural leader who had an unaffected, down-to-earth relationship with everyone around him. Ashamed of Tommy? Felt inferior to his cousins’ families? Total rubbish. In fact, part of Danny’s prestige in school was his father’s status as a top-rung athlete—sixteen championship titles in tennis—and his reputation as a lawyer who was knowledgeable, approachable and at ease with everyone.

According to the second source, Danny won a Rhodes Scholarship as a young man because of his natural brilliance, his natural athleticism, and his natural leadership, not because he was festering with resentment. You didn’t have to dig with a Freudian shovel to discover why he was successful. Given his great intelligence and energy, it would have been surprising if he hadn’t been such a success.

Two theories of a man’s success. I opted for the latter, myself. But, then, I’m no shrink.

In any event, I trundled along for the palaver with Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader Danny Williams in his big fancy house with mixed feelings.

At the front door, Danny greeted me like a best buddy. I figured we’d go into his study or den where, as a busy party leader preparing for the upcoming election, he and I would get right down to brass tacks. Instead we strolled into the living room. His gracious wife, Maureen, came in for a chat, and to offer refreshments. A daughter and grandchild appeared and said hello, and for a while we all