OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS AGAIN

Opportunity knocks often. Sometimes we answer. Other times, we simply aren’t available. Apparently I was unavailable when I was in first-year university. I had a roommate in Kelsey Hall. She and I had much in common. We were both Alberta farm girls. But though our families had lived only 100 miles apart, we might as well have been raised in different worlds.
I was Cookson, she was Ewaniuk. My world was the world of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, English trifle and scones. Her world was a Ukrainian world of funny sounding words. Some of those words stood for foods I had never tried and did not wish to try. Those were the days when I had never tried pizza either, let alone Greek Salad. When my family went out for dinner, something we rarely did, and only did when we were travelling, we dined on hamburgers, or pancakes, or maybe Chicken Chow Mein and fried rice. Jeannette and I were good friends while we studied. But we didn’t teach each other very much. It was truly a missed opportunity.
Friends drift apart when they don’t see each other. We drifted apart. And so I was more than a little surprised to get a call from Jeannette and Orest. They had seen an article by me in Our Canada magazine. They had seen David on TV answering question about the municipal election. They wondered if we would join their traditional Ukrainian Christmas eve party.
Thirty-six years have flown by since I first heard the names of those weird-sounding foods. During that time the foods have shaken off their foreign cloaks. It is not unusual for David and me to sit down to a dinner of pyroghy from Safeway and tiny cabbage rolls lovingly made by our friend Jane ward. Summer days often find me making my own borscht. So we went to this party with empty tummies and willing taste buds.
I was more available this time. We were curious. It warms my heart a little to notice how multicultural we have become, to see that distant worlds, living side by side, have moved across the boundaries. Jeannette and Orest are proud to be leaders in preserving their family traditions. They taught us about some of their family customs and traditional symbols. What’s more, I was surprised to discover that I knew somebody else at the party. One of my high school friends is a distant relative to Jeannette.
Everyone was impeccably gracious to those of us who don’t speak a word of Ukrainian. That evening made me notice how much richer I am for having moved past the time of thinking that roast beef and Yorkshire pudding represent the only normal kind of food. You can love English trifle and also love borscht. It’s mostly a matter of custom.