My Mother's Ark

And how it sank

During the Covid lockdowns in 2020 an old woman finds a ring in the parking lot of the motel where she is quarantined -- near the scene of a recent car crash. It fits her finger perfectly.

A package arrives by courier containing her 1955  "Psychiatry" file which is how I learn she was an " artificial personality,' designed from before birth to serve a military cult and engaged to marry a future rock star.

Peering through the ring she views the past before she was born.

She is the only living descendant of a public figure: "Le medecin des pauvres" Quebec 1940

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At the scene of a terrible accident a young woman is comforted by police and neighbors. Her father, a saintly doctor and politician has just been killed in a suspicious collision with a train in 1940.

Visiting bankers and notaries, his sheltered daughter finds out her father left behind nothing but a mountain of debt.

Forced to sell the family house where she lives with her wheelchair-bound mother, she moves to find work in the big city in wartime. She rents a room to an RCAF soldier, my future father who works in intelligence and has come to search for Nazi spies who are carrying out assassinations on Quebec politicians.

Montreal in 1941 is the jazz capital of Canada, and my future father plays piano in a big band. His future wife is a statuesque beauty, and makes an impression on his superiors when he takes her to clubs to hear young stars like Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson.

When the war ends, they marry but jobs are scarce and with few other options they  became entangled in a secret "genetic experiment" at a hospital on the hill.

Soon my father lands a job and starts teaching music in Montreal high schools. My mother gives birth to twin children - my brother and me -- who become part of a brave new program that fuses mind science with the future of warfare.

All the important people are invited to the Open House party where a little girl in a party dress (me) meets a skinny red haired teenaged boy from England who likes to jump and shout - and a future wedding is arranged.

My mother doesnt know about the basement laboratory full of children where her daughter goes to be programmed on weekends. On advice from the doctors, she enrolls me in ballet. It is never mentioned that we are all part of a secret Psychiatry program and that her daughter is engaged to the future singer in a band that will launch much more than a musical fad but a major cultural phenomenon.

The "British Invasion" comes to Quebec as weaponized psychiatry wrapped in music. Mind control is wedded to rock and roll, to entertain and harvest the souls of generations to come. I fail as a ballerina because they keep taking me out of school to the laboratory downtown where I am trained in photographic memory and mental telepathy.

My father opposes the new music. He and my mother move to separate bedrooms during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- when we twins throw our first Halloween party the same day the band record their first demo in England.

Then my father's career as a high school music teacher comes to a sudden end when he is sent to the hospital and brainwashed so that when he comes home he barely recognizes his own family.

He is now an outpatient at the Day Hospital downtown. Our modest bungalow at 202 Dauphin Street is the focus of secret intrigue as the mothers plan our wedding, although the future bride is only 11 and the singer's band has no name.

My prospects improve when I turn 12, and at church an older boy asks me out on a date thinking i am at least 16. Over in England the fledgling blues band finds a manager and they begin recording as young people flock to their performances.

In June 1963 I am flown to London where the fledgling Rolling Stones are releasing their first record, a flop which goes nowhere. Neither does the 12 year old girl who was kidnapped by Air Force doctors from a school outing and flown in her track suit to Swinging London where their manager, an Air Force brat, drops her arlt the flat in Chelsea.

After a weekend with Mick in London, she gets flown home and debriefed with the doctor's voice speaking from her pillow repeating "You're no good. You will fail. You will never succeed at anything."

She tells her mother her heart has turned to Stone. From now on she will be Joan of Arc - wearing men's clothes and fighting in wars even if it means getting burned at the stake.

In April 1965 the #2 band from England lands in Montreal on their first big American tour and the singer comes to our house with a ring in his pocket. My mother believes my dream is about to come true, like in a scene from My Fair Lady. The doctors have promised a stellar career with marriage to the English boy who is already famous. But in reality management in London has chosen another young woman, 19, a gorgeous blonde angel with big boobs.

I have a 158 IQ. I have read the teen magazines and recognize him as the rock star all my friends are crazy over, but not as the nice boy I once knew.

Alone in our family basement he zeroes in for the kill: "I've come to ask for your hand in marriage."

It's only after she hears loud laughter echoing up the basement stairs that my mother realizes something is wrong with her brilliant pretty daughter. The shocked singer leaves in a hurry and never returns and the daughter goes back to the doctors for more programming.

A week later I watch Mick later on the Ed Sullivan show. He seems vaguely familiar.

"Have you seen your mother, baby
Standing in the shadows?"

My mother has come down with a crippling case of arthritis - just like her own mother did in the roaring 20s when the world was a different place and everything seemed to be soaring, especially the stock market.

"Why dont you soar?" - the future poetess Rina Lasnier asked my shy, too-tall mother, age 16 in 1929, at the convent run by the Sisters of Notre Dame.

Then came the Great Depression.

For a decade my grandfather delivered babies and cared for the sick without getting paid - earning the nickname "Le medecin des pauvres" -- before he was tragically killed by the late train from Montreal at the beginning of the war.

Ten thousand Quebecers came to pay their respects at the church of St Jean l'Evangeliste.

Forty years later, on the day of my mother's small funeral in Montreal I dream she is a little bird taking off from the palm of St Francis of Assisi. Her doctor, a Holocaust survivor, tells me "Your mother was a Giant."

A giant of suffering but she never complained.

As for me, I have taken off in planes and visited islands in the sun...

Somewhere far away young Mike is 80 and lives with a ballerina who is the exact image of my mother. Everything in time comes around. There are many ways to soar.

On the street where my grandfather lived for years when he was mayor of St John's, my Mother's Arc is still sailing over the roofs.

But according to the local historians at the Historical Society and the museum, my mother Therese Bouthillier, only daughter of mayor Alexis Bouthillier (1870-1940) “le medecin des pauvres,” never existed. All records of her have disappeared. Her name is not inscribed on the family tomb.

Therefore I might not exist, either- except for my grandfather's clock.