A couple of days ago I made a concerted effort to embarrass my granddaughter in front of her ballet friends between classes at an open house at Granville Island’s Arts Umbrella. But it was to no avail. My granddaughter Lauren will have a splendid future in milking people of their money should she decide to play poker. She is unflappable. I showed a picture of her mother crying as a baby and tried to pass it a picture of her. With that card-sharp face of hers she simply said, “That’s not me. That’s my mother.”

In our recent move to our new home in Kitsilano I found lots of stuff and threw a lot of it. But I kept a cache of colour negatives which I may not have taken. I believe my oldest daughter Ale took them. We had moved to our new house on Athlone Street from Burnaby. Two of these photographs were in preparation for Hilary’s (Lauren’s mother) high school prom. I hired make-up extraordinaire Inga Vollmer to do her hair and makeup.