It all started with a cat. . .

PAge 5

Several months ago my girlfriend Dawn and I decided to get a kitten. She had never had one in her life and I thought the raising of a kitten together would be something fun to do. As many new pet owners often are, we were stumped for an adequate name. We wanted it to be a wonderful and magnificent title, worthy of a pet of ours. But nothing immediately came to mind.

In a moment of genius, Dawn suggested I ask my mother, who is fluent in Ojibway, for perhaps an Ojibway name befitting its adopted Aboriginal heritage. On the phone from the reserve, my mother paused for a moment in thought before offering up her double-edged suggestion.

"You should call it Oh-shan" she innocently recommended. Admittedly, my Ojibway is much rustier than it should be and I was momentarily perplexed by the phrase and couldn't come up with an English translation. So I asked my mother what Oh-shan meant and without a beat (which makes me believe she was waiting for me to ask) she announced, "It means grandchild, because that's probably as close as I'll ever get to being a grandparent!"

Me thinks my mother may have had an alternate agenda than just the naming of a cat. With me being the ripe old age of 39, I think my mother may have a few concerns in that area and wanted to share them. So much for just wanting a name for a cat. And to complicate the matter, Dawn is beginning to feel like the Germans caught between the Allies and the Russians.

It's not that I have anything against children. It's just that I'm a single child of a single parent and I was never privy to the instructions manual on the care and feeding of said creatures. While on the other hand, Dawn is one of five children and has some experience teaching Kindergarten. She is somewhat more qualified than I.

All I dimly remember is my aunts mumbling something about burping, peeing, and the high cost of kids' sneakers. I think they need to seriously rewrite the promotional campaign. And many of those same aunts have told me that I'm still a kid at heart, but I tend to discount that statement because over the years I've found that most women say that about men anyway.

So what to do? What to do? I've tried telling Dawn and my mother that we have three plants that require looking after, but they don't seem to buy it. I find it important to add at this moment that my girlfriend is famous for not watering my plants while I'm travelling and yet SHE'S the one who wants children! I refuse to be the only one watering the kids.

And to make the situation slightly more embarrassing, I have a cousin that's two days older than me, and already he's a GRANDFATHER! All of our lives we were somewhat competitive and I guess he finally topped me. Every time I go home, I can see it in all my relations' eyes. "What have you been doing with your life?" It's an accepted statistic in the Native community that 50 per cent of the Aboriginal population out there is under 25 years old. Evidently, I'm not holding up my end of the status card.

So after pondering the increasingly less philosophic and increasingly persistent question of "what to do?" I finally came up with an answer for Dawn. I told her that I would be more than delighted to have a) a child, or b) children, provided she can assure me that they will, in no way, interfere with my accepted and comfortable writing schedule.

I don't quite understand why she burst out laughing.