Letters like the one my father received on September 8, 1953, always caused consternation in our family.
 For one thing, the address was typed, not hand-written. For another, the return address—BALLISTER, CLARKE, MARSHALL & ROBSON—was printed in gilt-colored ink. Only “the English” sent letters like that.

Our own mail, hand-scrawled and air-mailed to Agassiz from Mennonite villages in West Prussia, always arrived at rigidly pre-determined times - birthdays, weddings and anniversaries - and always contained the same things: a single-page report, an updated family snap, a bible verse and a pious exhortation. Letters from the English usually contained very formally typed documents with lots of heretofores and whereases and notwithstandings. Such letters almost always meant trouble.

That evening after milking, Father and I took the letter over to Onkel Jacob Sawatsky. Everybody always took their English letters to Onkel Jacob Sawatsky. Onkel Jacob was a short, fat man with a disproportionately large nose and a receding chin, both of which he’d tried to camouflage with a goatee and spectacles. He was rumored to be on a first-name basis with John Diefenbaker.

      Onkel Jacob was publically ostracized but privately admired for his perplexing ability to make sense of heretofores and notwithstandings. His farm was a mess—just a sham of a farm, really—with broken machinery and cast-off junk cluttering the yard in a very un-Mennonite manner. His daughters danced around on his nose, everybody knew that, and his wife spent most of her life in bed. Their garden was always choked with weeds, and their herd records were in total disarray. In fact, most people visited the Sawatskys just to feel better about their own neat farms—and, since they just happened to have them in their pockets, to have their English letters unpuzzled.

      Onkel Jacob took Father and me to his “office”—a tiny windowless room off the kitchen that had once been a pantry, barely big enough for Father to sit and me to stand. The long pause that followed, as he gravely examined Father’s letter, was probably the main thing Onkel Jacob lived for—those few moments when his social betters in Agassiz’ Mennonite community were obliged to acknowledge, however tacitly, his brief supremacy. Then he laid the letter on his desk with the appropriate gravity.

      “So you entered a contest,” he stated flatly, though not quite neutrally. Coming from any other relative this statement would have been unequivocally accusing. Entering a contest, a worldly contest, an English contest, had to be considered, for a Mennonite, very poor form. Not one of the Seven Deadly Sins, not enough to be mentioned from the pulpit on Sunday morning, but nevertheless an undeniable instance of flawed moral judgment.

      Father’s face reddened. “I had to get Margarete’s sewing machine fixed,” he protested.

      Even at my age—seven years and ten months—I knew that father’s embarrassment was really due to the fact that he’d been unable to fix the machine himself.

      “And then he wanted me to fill out a...some sort of...paper for a contest,” Father grumped. “Something about an island - I can never understand the English when they jabber so fast. I wanted nothing to do with it, so he said he’d fill it out for me. What did he want with me and a contest, for heaven’s sake? I’d already paid him for the repairs.”

      We all shrugged automatically, in unison. Who could understand the English? We were Fraser Valley farmers, war refugees from West Prussia, working ourselves to the bone to pay off our passage and the mortgage on the farm. The idea of an island was so incongruous, so absurd and utterly frivolous, it might as well have come from another planet.

       Onkel Jacob frowned and refolded the letter like an Elder presenting the clincher in a scriptural dispute. “Well, but now you have the business,” he said in a way that clearly meant: That’s what comes from such foolishness. “What has happened now, with this “Island In The Sun” contest, is that they’ve had a draw, and the entry they drew was yours. You’ve won a prize - First Prize, this letter says.”
 “And First Prize, in this contest, was an island.”

(“Eating my Father’s Island” is an excerpt from: Renovating Heaven; Novel in Triptych.  More on page 4.)