My Cold War

By Ann Diamond

"On a day in the spring of 1956, my parents dressed my brother and me in brand new outfits, my mother put on makeup and her best, camel-hair coat, and we all went for a drive in the countryside near Montreal. We took along our puppy, Smokey, wrapped in a blanket in case he peed on the seats of our new car. Not long before, my father had agreed to enrol me in a special program, whose directors were very interested in bright little girls like me." So begins Ann Diamond's terrifying tale of growing up in Canada during the Cold War -- an era when secrecy ran rampant, ruining careers and lives. This is the true story of one family caught in a dangerous web of deception. Ann Diamond is an award-winning Canadian writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257348886

Book preview

PART ONE

Spring, 1956

On a day in the spring of 1956, my parents dressed my brother and me in brand new outfits, my mother put on makeup and her best, camel-hair coat, and we all went for a drive in the countryside near Montreal. We took along our puppy, Smokey, wrapped in a blanket in case he peed on the seats of our new car. Not long before, my father had agreed to enrol me in a special program, whose directors were very interested in bright little girls like me.

In the photographs my father took that day, my brother wears a happy, trusting expression for the camera, whereas I am squinting as if I am being dragged off to the dentist, instead of going on a pleasant drive through the country. I am wearing a matching coat and hat, and holding into my puppy, Smokey, for dear life.

Our country drive, in our Sunday best, took us on winding, tree-lined roads, and I do remember getting out of the car to have our picture taken. It seems to me my father told us there was a limestone quarry somewhere nearby, as I remember visualizing white rock, and a big hole in the ground, as my mother described what a limestone quarry looks like. I still have the photos, showing my mother standing next to the car, holding her hair away from her forehead, because it is blowing in the wind. She is smiling, as if this were a particularly auspicious day in our lives. We look prosperous and successful: a middle class family out for a Sunday drive. The question arises: why are we so dressed up, if we are not visiting someone special? I seem to remember that moment, and getting back into the car, and continuing to drive down a narrow country road, and the tree branches meeting overhead, forming a kind of tunnel. I am feeling restless, uneasy. We seem to drive for hours, in our strangely formal clothes, and yet we are going nowhere. I want to go home, but we keep on driving, as the trees form a tunnel overhead into which we might disappear, and I feel myself entering into a hypnotic state, and then there is a bright white light which floods our car, and I feel that I remember nothing more of what happened, or when we turned around, or how we got home.

Looking down from above into the car, what would one see? The tops of our heads, of course – we’re all wearing hats. People wore them in those days, for special occasions, and perhaps for protection. Perhaps to prevent our souls from leaving our bodies, spiraling upward, into infinity. A moment later, we come to, and once again we are a normal family, out for a Sunday drive in the country.

A high school music teacher, 54 years old, and his 44-year-old French Canadian wife, take their twin children, age 5, on a country drive in 1956. The twins look nothing alike. The girl is tall and blonde; the boy smaller, with dark hair and eyes. They are fraternal twins, originating from separate eggs, born five minutes apart. Their grandmother, who is known for having second sight, believes them to be special. She likes the boy, but not the girl. And someone else is very interested in them.

Here is what happens.

The car turns off the two-lane highway and down a narrow road. At the end of the drive, they pass through a gate, which stands in front of a nondescript white building. After a pause, the father gets out and opens the backseat car door. The father is suddenly a little tense and nervous. The mother seems slightly disoriented, as if she doesn’t realize they have arrived. She turns around and sees that the twins have fallen asleep and will have to be carried. The puppy is left behind, and begins to bark. The mother picks up her son, while the father carries his sleeping daughter. A door opens and they step inside, where a smiling man is waiting.

The man is in his fifties, slightly balding, and wears wire-rimmed glasses. He welcomes them politely, asks them to sit down. He has prepared some forms which they will be filling out to begin with: forms which define the arrangements in these kinds of situations.

The parents sit, side by side, on metal chairs, still in their coats, as it is spring and there is a chill in the air, even in here. They hold their sleeping children, and nod their heads, while the man continues to talk. They answer questions. At the end of the interview, the father signs his name at the bottom of the form, where it has already been typed by a secretary. The mother signs her name in the space beside his.

The soft-spoken, mild-mannered man takes the form, looks it over, and puts it in a drawer. Then he hands the father an envelope. He folds his hands over his knee in a friendly manner, smiles down at the sleeping children, and says, Well, now that that’s over and done with, we can begin. On his desk is a stack of playing cards.

After a while, the parents leave the building with the boy, who is still asleep. They get into the car, the father behind the wheel, the mother next to him in the passenger seat. The father hesitates, then reaches into his coat pocket and brings out the envelope. Inside is a cheque for $3,000.

The mother sighs. I’m not so sure. she says, vaguely. She is having trouble focusing on things around her. She thinks of the new house they looked at yesterday. Now they have the down payment.

The father says, It’s all right. I know these people. They’re very trustworthy. He puts the key in the ignition. They drive through the gate, down to the highway, and back the way they came.

Are these my parents, the people who brought me into the world, cared for me, raised me to be an honest person, hardworking, respectful of others; the people who have always been my standard of what is decent, good, normal, and sane? The answer is yes, and no.

I know my father was convinced he was doing the right thing - for himself, his family, and his country.

When we were growing up, our Dad would have occasional attacks when he would stop breathing. Whenever this happened, he would begin to gasp loudly for air and gesture for help. My mother would stand behind him and rotate his arms. This seemed to relax his chest muscles, unblock his windpipe, and quell the wheezing. After half a minute or so, he would regain his breath, and return to his chair. My brother and I would sit in silence, helplessly watching. When it was over, we never knew what to say. You ok, Dad? He rarely answered with more than a grunt. We would go back to reading, or watching TV, or playing chess, or doing our homework. My mother would hover nearby making sure the spell was really over. Apparently this had been happening ever since she had known him. She always recognized the first signs of one of these attacks and reacted swiftly, like a nurse, coming to his aid as if she had been trained long ago in the procedure.

These attacks happened no more than once a year, and could come on at any moment. It wasn’t asthma or emphysema – at least not to our knowledge. As children we accepted this as a strange condition of being human – that a person could suddenly stop breathing for no reason and, if no one was around to come to his aid, possibly die a senseless death.

Now I wonder if it wasn’t a reaction to the experiments he underwent, beginning in 1952. Perhaps it was even a programmed command, induced through hypnosis.

In 1952, my dad was given experimental drugs which they told him would reduce his anxiety. Perhaps he volunteered for this program, which was codenamed Project Artichoke. Or perhaps he had no choice.

Perhaps he trusted doctors, believed in their wisdom, and in the power of their scientific credentials.

Or perhaps they simply controlled him. If he resisted, they could wreck his career. Take away his job. Reduce us all to poverty. He knew what it was like to be out of work, in a big city. He had a family to support, which made him that much more vulnerable, and easier to manipulate.

Difficult choices.

While we were growing up, our father lived a double life, as a schoolteacher, family man, and secret intelligence operative. Our family was oblivious. It never occurred to us that our Dad, not the easiest person to live with, had anything to hide. My mother explained his nervous behaviour as resulting from his difficult relationship with his domineering mother. Later, after his breakdown, my father’s personal quirks were attributed to other causes, notably a neurological problem.

Behind all this lay a complex history, of which we had no knowledge. My father was being controlled and manipulated by men whose aim was to control and manipulate whole populations. In many ways, my father was their unwitting puppet, at least during the period when we were children. As we grew up, and the world changed, my father also was fitting together the pieces of a bizarre puzzle which would occupy him for the rest of his life.

He was not alone in his incomprehension. No one at the time could have guessed the nature of the plan, being drawn up and executed at the highest levels of power, in one institution after another. Had someone informed my family of the scenario in which we were embroiled, none of us would have been able to grasp it because it was simply incredible. Instead we lived it blindly, like laboratory animals caught in a maze with no hope of real escape. We learned to run, and respond, and react to situations and conditions which were devised by people we had never met.

My family’s history, which took place in an obscure suburb of a provincial city in Canada, was actually tied to events in the Cold War which to this day remain a mystery, which is beginning to unravel.

My father’s career in covert intelligence would end in disaster in 1962, when the pressure became too much for him. He must have suffered tremendous guilt, made all the more intense by the fact that he couldn’t talk about it with anyone, least of all his family. To tell us what was going on in the background of our lives, would have meant endangering our lives, and my father cared too much about us all to run that risk. So he sank into silence, broken by occasional outbursts of anger, mostly directed against my mother, who bore the brunt of it in silence. Sometimes she tried to get him to talk about his feelings, and when he refused, and withdrew further into isolation inside our family, sometimes she wrote him letters, leaving them on the kitchen table where he would find them, late at night, when he came home from a staff meeting at the high school. Sometimes this method worked. He would emerge from his latest period of withdrawal, and make an effort to communicate with his family.

Is it any wonder we often resented him, and wondered why our Dad had to be that way, when none of the rest of us were like him? In our home, nevertheless, he was the Boss, the highest authority. Despite his flaws, we still loved and respected him. To this day, he still represents my standard of what is admirable in a man and a human being. I still believe my father was, as his Air Force records state so simply, an excellent type, worthy of every consideration. He was incapable of pretension and spoke his mind clearly and directly. He was also nobody’s fool, unless he had no choice. This is probably what ate at him, during all those years that he was working for men whose cynicism and dishonesty he cannot have failed to notice. As he aged, he seemed to become drained of energy and conviction.

I look at the photos taken when we were still a normal-looking, optimistic, healthy family, smiling for the camera during one of those unexplained outings in the country. Something inside me says these captured moments represent my father’s attempts to manoeuvre within the confines of his secret agreements. I see our desire to cooperate, as my father aims the camera, and orders us to Say cheese! Out there, on those windy afternoons, under overcast skies in those anonymous fields, we seem to play our roles to please our Dad. I can’t help thinking some of these photos never ended up in our album, but were passed on to someone in the Air Force, who took an unusual interest in our family. In bringing us out to these remote bases, and photographing us all together, my Dad was fulfilling an obligation that had been placed on him by these unseen others.

It’s perhaps interesting, also, to note that some of the photos were developed several years later, in 1956. That date appears printed on some of them although it’s obvious they were taken when my brother and I were about two years old. It has to be 1953, or 1954 at the latest. We are in the early stages of walking. Our mother holds us up by the arms as we stumble, and grin and wave to the man behind the camera.

Maybe my father suddenly needed photos of us, in 1956, and remembered an undeveloped roll of film he’d been keeping in a drawer.

Looking at them, I think of the man who took these photos. He is invisible, holding the camera. But something or someone is standing behind him. It’s something none of us could see. Even now, I have to strain to make out the shapes that enter the photo, flickering and whispering, You don’t remember us. But we were there.

I believe my father met CIA spymaster Allen Dulles on two occasions. The first was in 1943, in a briefing held at the close of the Quebec City conference, which was attended by Churchill and Roosevelt. Their former ally, Stalin, was absent. (The Russian victory at Stalingrad the previous December had changed the course of the war and Allied strategy. Allen Dulles was already in contact with Nazi intelligence, forging a post-war alliance with a soon to be defeated and disarmed Germany.)

My father was one of a group of Canadian Air Force intelligence officers who were called in to meet with their US counterparts in the OSS. In 1943, Dulles was fifty years old. I’m certain my father, ten years younger, would have admired the charming spymaster, who also happened to be of Scots descent. As Director of the Office of Strategic Services, and later the CIA, Dulles would take official secrecy and double-dealing to unprecedented levels. During his term as CIA Deputy Director, he would transform the secret service into a parallel, shadow government, operating outside all political control. Under Dulles, the CIA became a law unto itself -- a state of affairs which continues to this day. From its inception, thanks to men like Dulles, the CIA has acquired the means to operate in contempt of all democratic control. It is the embodiment of the swirling paranoia that overtook the democracies in the closing months of the Second World War, when men at the highest levels of the US and Canadian governments adopted deception as policy.

The second time they met was in 1948 for another special meeting, the occasion being the crash of a UFO in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec the previous September. Saint Hyacinthe is about 60 miles south of Montreal, not far from Mont Saint Hilaire, which also has a reputation as a magnet for UFO activity.

The resulting investigation and cover-up were part of the meeting that day in 1948. Dulles was then expanding his area of control to include the outbreak of UFO sightings, including several reported crash landings, the most famous of which had occurred the previous year in Roswell, New Mexico.

My father was part of the group that met with him that day in 1948. They were there to outline future strategy for Canadian military intelligence in the post-war era. The Cold War was becoming a reality. New methods and approaches were needed. Dulles explained that our new enemies, the Soviets and Chinese, had made massive strides forward in the area of brainwashing. This was not the time to rest on our achievements and past victories. The face of global politics was rapidly changing, and in future, intelligence men and women would need to abandon some of our long-held beliefs and values, because our democratic way of life was vulnerable and under attack by stealthy foes who were unhampered by any belief in human freedom. Don’t imagine the war ended in 1945 with the victory of our Allies, Dulles remarked to a hall of riveted listeners. It has only begun. You are the men who will make the difference. The security of our two nations, our values and institutions, is in your hands. I am calling upon all of you to make another heroic effort, this time in another theatre of war: the human mind. That is the new battlefield, and I am asking you to become soldiers on this unexplored frontier.

Someone asked Dulles about the recent reports of crashed Flying Saucers, one of which had happened only sixty miles to the south of us. What conclusions had been reached? What was the source of this strange object? Was it of military origin? Or could it have come from beyond our planet.

Dulles paused, and tilted his head. That matter is under review in Washington. I can’t go into it any further at this time.

There was a murmur from the assembled military men. Can’t you tell us any more about these objects? We’ve had numerous reports, coming in from across Canada, in the last few months. These things seem to be showing up everywhere, in the skies, and even on the ground. What should we say to the press who’ve been calling us pretty regularly since last year?

Say nothing. Some of these reports of Flying Objects are probably mistaken. Tell them nothing. Our government is at work on a secret study which we will reveal at the proper time.

The meeting was adjourned.

My father was out in the hallway, smoking a filter-less MacDonald’s cigarette with some colleagues, when Dulles walked by on his way to his next briefing session with the Royal Canadian Air Force senior command. Dulles failed to recognize him, of course. It had been five years, and in those five years, much had changed. One war had ended, and another had begun.

The apartment where we began our lives as a family, on Prud’homme Street, was in a building dating back to the turn of the century. It had an outdoor staircase, a non-descript dark brick façade, and inside it was furnished with the once-stylish contents of the house in Saint Jean: heavy, dark, imposing chair, sofas, tables, some of them reflecting my grandmother’s taste for Art Déco. There was a tall grandfather clock which not only told the time as it chimed out the quarter hours, but also showed the phases of the moon. There were books in French and English, including one which had been owned by the actor Tyrone Power, who like his friend Errol Flynn, had starred in many swashbuckling films made in Hollywood during the thirties. For some reason, this particular volume had been signed in the author’s large, flowing handwriting, and personally inscribed To my dear friend, Dr. Alexandre Boisvert -- my grandfather.

How my maternal grandfather came into possession of this book, and whether or not he was actually a dear friend of the author, are two mysteries among many. Had they met in person? And if so, where and how? What did they have in common? Two details cause me to pause over this odd detail. One: Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, in addition to being good friends, were both suspected Nazi sympathizers. Two: In the 1930s, Flynn was working for a Nazi doctor based in New York, whose mission in America was to drum up support among the medical profession for Hitler’s racial policies. Is it possible Tyrone Power, on a book tour which took him to Montreal, contacted my grandfather as part of an undercover operation, hoping to draw him into the Nazi fold? Could my grandfather ever have been open to a racial ideology that held some individuals and groups to be unworthy of life? His record as a humanitarian, tirelessly delivering babies for poor families during the Depression, tells me he was not.

Was my grandfather Boisvert an anti-Semite? In Quebec at the time, this would have been possible. Or had he dropped into a book signing by a Hollywood personality, and had a copy inscribed, perhaps as a present for his daughter or his wife, back in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu?

The fact that the book is inscribed in English leads me to wonder if someone outside Quebec had blindly targeted my grandfather, as a doctor and politician, and sent him the book as a gift, in the hope of gaining his attention, and possibly influencing him in future. Certainly there is no reason to think that my grandfather was ever really a dear friend of Tyrone Power. And if they were really courting doctors, why this book, rather than something on a medical topic? Well, perhaps as an introduction.

Perhaps it means nothing at all, but it sticks in my memory, as I wander through the apartment on Prud’homme Street, that I only knew as a baby before I could walk. In my mind, I pick up objects that have been sold or given away, long ago, or which have simply disappeared. This book has somehow survived with its mystery intact. Growing up, I never questioned why we owned it. My brother still has it somewhere on his bookshelves. It seems to connect our grandfather to some glamorous outside world, which he likely took no real part in -- or did he? Indirectly it points to the historical truism, that anti-Semitism was deeply embedded in Quebec, and also elsewhere, before the Second World War, and although my grandfather belonged to the Liberal Party, which disowned racist ideologies, unlike the Union National which at the time of my grandfather’s death was no longer in power -- still, it makes me wonder.

The baby part of me which is lying in my crib in that old apartment, watches my mother as she picks up this book, turns it over, and then packs it into a cardboard box which is destined for the moving truck. We are moving to a bigger, newer apartment, a few kilometres to the north on Decarie Boulevard, where my first real memories begin to take shape.

My first childhood memory is of catching pneumonia, at the age of three and a half, in the middle of a long dark winter night, and of being bundled in blankets and carried on a stretcher along a walkway walled with snowdrifts, at the end of which was the rear door of an ambulance, gaping wide. The light on top flashed red, because this was an Emergency. Two men handed me in and they made me lie there, flat on my back, with the siren wailing while they rushed me to the hospital. I hated the mask they fitted over my nose and mouth – it smelled like gas and I pulled it off. The attendants forced it back on and held it down, until I passed out.

Sometime later I woke in the blue twilight of the children’s ward, the nurses like phantoms, appearing at my bedside with bedpans, injections. They seemed to circulate effortlessly between the world of the living and the world of the dead, while I stood on the threshold, making up my mind. Were they nuns or witches? Doctors, or RNs?

I was twisting among snowflakes in the vast night of infinity, searching for my mother among the shadows, but never finding her, as I wandered down grey, endless corridors that flowed into concrete rivers where I drowned, again and again, under waves of delirium.

I finally woke one morning to find myself strapped to the mattress. At my bedside was a nurse, turning up her nose at a cold black turd curled up beside me on the clean white sheet. I feigned ignorance. Disowned it. Never saw it before in my life. Somebody must have dropped it there while I was sleeping.

Not long afterwards, my life saved, they rolled me out into the hallway. My father walked me down the ramp to the parking lot, where our new, blue Zephyr, waited. My mother sat framed in the backseat window, my brother beside her, in his cute cap and jacket. And I was the star, the invalid. Child Lazarus coming toward them through the fog.

For a week, I took Sulpha, a quarter pill at a time, chalky white, marked with crosses. Imagining those pills, I think of Flanders Fields, I think of soldiers and nuns lying silent in their graveyards. I swallowed them obediently, and got better for a while. Until my tonsils had to come out and there was another trip to the hospital.

Sometimes it could seem I spent my childhood coughing up my lungs.

My mother was always coming to my bed in the night with medicines, shaking her head, upsetting the water glass.

The guilt never abandoned her. While I had lain in pneumonia and delirium, she was down the hall in the maternity ward. Miscarriage at five months. The shock of nearly letting one child slip away had made her lose another that same week. Some poor little unborn brother, lost at sea, drowned in blood, tears and afterbirth. In and out of this liquid life the tiny voyager sailed. I missed that family tragedy, the second in a week. Due to my being the first.

At least I was home. My childhood resumed. What there was of it.

My next memory is of walking to the shopping centre after a blizzard, when the whole neighbourhood lay blanketed in white. Everything had disappeared, nothing was visible. We were without bearings in an ocean of snow. And then, beside the path on the sidewalk, a miracle: three small black stones perched on a drift. Treasures clasped in the red wool of my mitten, three bright hard objects which I presented to my mother. To my shock, she screamed and knocked them to the ground, then told me to hold out my hands which were covered in red woollen mitts. She scraped the palms with rough clean snow. What had I done really, other than to give her a special present? Something rare: rocks in winter. Merde! Those black gems weren’t precious stones at all, not black diamonds, nor were they even useful lumps of coal. Frozen cat shit is what they were. Albeit odourless, perfectly rounded, probably deposited on the fresh snow by some sneaky cat, hoping to trick a hapless child.

My mother was out of reach of my best efforts to save her.

In those days, we were creeping towards the suburbs. Our second home was on the second floor of a square, brown-brick apartment block, thrown up in the post-war period and aiming to house floods of new immigrants as well as the new families who were products of the Baby Boom. The stairs in the hallway were of some multi-coloured composite material, which small children find fascinating. Because of that beautiful floor, I used to take my time dawdling down the stairs with my mother and brother, and I remember descending those steps in my snowsuit, on my rear end, one bump at a time. Tied in with that early memory is one of getting separated from my mother one day in the Dominion store at the Norgate Shopping Centre. In fact, my mother had only darted into the next aisle to pick up some article, or I had wandered away from her, and got on the wrong side of a vegetable display -- but all of a sudden I felt fear rising as I switched myself to Emergency Mode. Realizing I was lost, I walked up to the first adult I saw, a well-dressed, good-looking, youngish man, and recited my name, address and phone number, just as my mother had trained me to do. The man was trying to make sense of this, when my mother ran up, apologized, and led me away. I remember I was deeply embarrassed at having panicked, but also of course relieved.

Many of my memories involved feelings of fear, embarrassment, or withdrawal. I remember my mother taking me to the park one day when I was 3 or 4 years old, and pushing me on the swings. Where was my brother that day? There was another little girl, about my age, sitting all by herself on the seesaw. My mother took me over and put me on the seat opposite the girl, but I quickly climbed off. refusing to play with a strange child. My mother scolded me, and I still remember her exasperation at my lack of social graces, my stubborn unfriendliness -- symptoms of an extreme shyness which was one of my basic traits. I hated to be forced into socializing with outsiders. There was a boy in the next apartment building, whose name was Peter Glass, whom I heard about through my mother before I actually met him in person. When he turned four, his mother organized a birthday party for him, and invited the other children in the complex. My mother told me we were going, and hearing his name, I imagined him as green and transparent, like a bottle, and looked forward to meeting this special glass boy. As it turned out, he was just a normal child, and the party was nothing magical. I had expected lights and enchantment, but I found only cake and ice cream and much confusion, which is to be expected when three and four year olds are gathered together. I also remember Peter Glass suddenly taking my hand and inviting me to come see the turtle. I was thrilled that something remarkable was about to happen -- a real, live turtle! A possible romance! He led me to the end of the hallway, and opened a door, and we were suddenly in the bathroom. Turtle was just his baby-talk word for toilet. I made my exit, and bumped into my mother, who took me home, and I remember her commenting that she had never talked to us in baby-talk because it would hamper us, socially, and she would rather we were able to make ourselves clearly understood. I agreed with her.

What I find curious about my childhood memories is how my twin brother seems to be absent from most of them, and yet as children we were close. We ate at the same table, we slept in the same room when we were small, and since we were exactly the same age, we must have been together almost every day. I don’t remember him at that party, or in the playground, but logic tells me he must have been there. What this suggests to me is that children are ego-centric, and also that, no matter the size of our families, we all go through life in solitary. Or rather, the events which matter most to us, and convey the deepest lessons, the moments we stubbornly hold on to, often involve encounters with loneliness and the Void. At least, such is the case for me.

These memories may seem trivial, but they are almost all I have. They are all about embarrassment, disappointment, and disillusion. It’s tempting to wonder if this was the big theme of my childhood. I also have general recollections of summer times spent in the country, near Black Lake, with my cousins, aunts and uncles from my father’s side. I remember singing around the piano, and feeling part of a wonderful extended family, a clan. And my little, ancient grandmother, Julia MacDonald McAllister, with her fine, white hair gathered in a net, feet planted on the linoleum floor of her country kitchen, telling me NOT to go down the cellar stairs, as there was a big black hole down there that could swallow a little girl, and I believed her and was terrified. I remember my father at our cottage by the Ottawa River, drinking beer in the evenings with his friend, Harvey, who was a great storyteller with an explosive laugh, a farmer who couldn’t wear a watch because they always stopped dead. They would talk about old friends, including Asa Stephenson, who had died at the age of 50, and had been my father’s closest friend. I remember good times, but they are vaguer in my mind than the events that stopped my heart or taught me that things are not what they seem.

There were other lessons, like the time at the Black Lake Fair when my cousin Nancy, already five, was drinking Coke. My brother and I were only four, and had to settle for Seven-Up, a baby drink, as we suddenly realized. We must have made a fuss, until we extorted a promise from our parents that when we turned five, like Nancy, we would be old enough to drink Coke. How I waited for my fifth birthday, so I could experience the taste of Coke, and with it all the other benefits of maturity.

But there are also memories which haunt me because they don’t make