Here, rather late, is my life story. I've read every one else's with much pleasure, enjoying all the twists and turns, but also, frankly, in anxious search of models. What tone to strike, how much candor, competitiveness, black humor, regrets, how subtly to craft the disclosures on achievement, marital and reproductive success, dental deterioration, whether to risk mention of health and aging and how to distract attention from the brutal testimony of our photographs.

Not to start off on too glum a note I want to admit one regret, that even by the modest standard of our youth I was not sexually precocious. I went to McGill like most of us and like everyone else I had a crush on Ellie K.

Went to the Orange Julep once with her in my older brother's convertible. Feared that I utterly failed to make any impression on her. Mercifully, it took about forty-five years for the confirming evidence. About four years ago, through common friends in Toronto, I got to see Ellie, again.

Heart pounding, I arrived at the address I was given and rang the bell. She came to the door looking fit and youthful like always. Bill Brender, Bill Brender, she repeated, frowning while digging deep into her memory. Wait a second, yes, I remember, now. Didn't you have an amazingly athletic and popular sister?

After graduating, I worked for two years with a psychologist who had a large family practice. Soryl Pofelis and Jack Raby were there too and we had a lot of fun. Then I went back to McGill and did a PhD in clinical psychology and was quite happy to be starting a career. Remember how important many of us thought it was, then, to have a career?  I joined the Psychology Dep't at Concordia where I ended up teaching and doing research for the next twenty-eight years.

I also was able to get a part-time position in the Psychology Division at the Jewish General where I am still, after thirty-six years.(I used to bump into Marty Nathanson, periodically in the '70's, I believe, when he was there). Befitting a psychologist, I've naturally given some thought to what sturdy attributes of character enabled my remarkable occupational stability? Two qualities, I've concluded, one I'm a little embarrassed about--a real dislike of flying. The other is a bit old fashioned, namely a strong desire to live in the same city as my parents, both of whom I was able to enjoy into their eighties.

My wife's parents were also Montrealers. I met my wife at about the same time I was getting my career under way. Not entirely coincidental, she claims . Rosanne was attracted to me, she says, in part because I had two jobs. She was finishing National Theatre School in Set and Costume Design when we met but after a few years went back to McGill for a degree in Architecture. My mother had mixed feelings about that decision. She firmly believed that in a good marriage, husbands had to earn more than their wives. I'm quite proud of my mother's progressive views on wives who work outside the home. So Rosanne and I lived together for twelve years and got married when she was pregnant with our twins, Emma and Noah who are now twenty-four. Noah's doing a PhD in Philosophy in Boston and Emma's writing songs and singing where she can in Toronto. She plays good guitar, too. I'm very sorry that both have no fear of flying nor do they think twice about living in other cities than Montreal.

Bill Brender