refilling my glass with a very fine Shiraz. “His genius is that he makes the women in his life feel as if they owe everything to him.”
In Nick’s telling, Theo led a charmed life. He was the only son of hard-working, proud, first-generation Canadians who lived over the bakery they owned in Regina in the solidworking-class area of Broders Annex. The Brokaws’ dreams for their four daughters were modest: they wanted the girls to grow into industrious and pious women who would marry good men and give them grandchildren. The girls were clever, but they were also dutiful, and so after they graduated high school, they worked in Brokaw’s Bakery, expanded to include delivery service, and in the butcher’s shop that the family had purchased, renovated, and transformed into Brokaw’s Market, a business with a generic name and an impressive ability to ferret out and supply the needs of the neighbourhood’s Eastern European population. The shops prospered, but the family’s most extravagant dreams were vested in their only son.
Theo not only complied with their expectations; he excelled. After graduating from the College of Law, he articled for a respected Saskatoon law firm, decided that his real passion was not practising law but research and teaching, completed an L.L.M., discovered a talent for critical legal theory and analytical jurisprudence, taught law at the University of Saskatchewan, married the daughter of a distinguished jurist, was appointed to the province’s Court of Appeals, and found himself, at forty-five, appointed to the highest court in the land.
His rise had been meteoric, fuelled by his powerful father-in-law and by his wife who knew how the game was played. As Nick Zaba wryly noted, the equation was simple: Myra’s father loved Myra, Myra loved Theo, and Theo loved Theo. The marriage was a happy one. Until they retired from the family business, Theo’s sisters regularly wrapped and shipped his favourites from the bakery: the poppy seed cake; the thick black bread that his father credited with giving him the brains to become a judge; the special Christmas baking that Theo’s sisters knew, without asking, Myra would never think to make him. ButMyra was, they hastened to add, the perfect wife for a professional man.
When I finished reading I packed up the unmarked essays, put on my coat and boots, told Sheila that if any students wanted to get in touch with me, they had my e-mail address, and drove to Broders Annex. It wasn’t hard to justify my visit to Brokaw’s. Loaves of the elaborately twisted and braided Ukrainian Christmas bread were always on the table at our family’s Christmas Day open house and it was time to place my order. Besides, anything beat reading another paper on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.
On a day in which all colour and warmth seemed to have been leached from the world, the bakery, bright, warm, and redolent of fresh baking, was a welcome destination. Except for Christmas and Easter and an occasional impulse buy if I was in the neighbourhood, I wasn’t a regular customer, and so it was a surprise but not a shock when a young couple who introduced themselves as Tony and Rose Nguyen said they were the bakery’s new owners.
I looked at the metal shelves of bread – whole wheat, multigrain, dense dark pumpernickel, sour rye, hearth loaves, and egg bread – and at the glass case of turnovers, doughnuts, strudel, poppy seed rolls, honey cake, sweet buns, and tarts. “Everything looks the same as it was,” I said.
“Everything
is
the same,” Tony Nguyen said. He spoke with the care of someone for whom English is a second language. “We bought the bakery lock, stock, and barrel and that included the recipes. We follow them to the letter.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll have a loaf of the dark pumpernickel, an apple strudel, and three gingerbread girls. And I’d like to place my Christmas order: four dozen cinnamon rolls, half without raisins, and three
In Nick’s telling, Theo led a charmed life. He was the only son of hard-working, proud, first-generation Canadians who lived over the bakery they owned in Regina in the solidworking-class area of Broders Annex. The Brokaws’ dreams for their four daughters were modest: they wanted the girls to grow into industrious and pious women who would marry good men and give them grandchildren. The girls were clever, but they were also dutiful, and so after they graduated high school, they worked in Brokaw’s Bakery, expanded to include delivery service, and in the butcher’s shop that the family had purchased, renovated, and transformed into Brokaw’s Market, a business with a generic name and an impressive ability to ferret out and supply the needs of the neighbourhood’s Eastern European population. The shops prospered, but the family’s most extravagant dreams were vested in their only son.
Theo not only complied with their expectations; he excelled. After graduating from the College of Law, he articled for a respected Saskatoon law firm, decided that his real passion was not practising law but research and teaching, completed an L.L.M., discovered a talent for critical legal theory and analytical jurisprudence, taught law at the University of Saskatchewan, married the daughter of a distinguished jurist, was appointed to the province’s Court of Appeals, and found himself, at forty-five, appointed to the highest court in the land.
His rise had been meteoric, fuelled by his powerful father-in-law and by his wife who knew how the game was played. As Nick Zaba wryly noted, the equation was simple: Myra’s father loved Myra, Myra loved Theo, and Theo loved Theo. The marriage was a happy one. Until they retired from the family business, Theo’s sisters regularly wrapped and shipped his favourites from the bakery: the poppy seed cake; the thick black bread that his father credited with giving him the brains to become a judge; the special Christmas baking that Theo’s sisters knew, without asking, Myra would never think to make him. ButMyra was, they hastened to add, the perfect wife for a professional man.
When I finished reading I packed up the unmarked essays, put on my coat and boots, told Sheila that if any students wanted to get in touch with me, they had my e-mail address, and drove to Broders Annex. It wasn’t hard to justify my visit to Brokaw’s. Loaves of the elaborately twisted and braided Ukrainian Christmas bread were always on the table at our family’s Christmas Day open house and it was time to place my order. Besides, anything beat reading another paper on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.
On a day in which all colour and warmth seemed to have been leached from the world, the bakery, bright, warm, and redolent of fresh baking, was a welcome destination. Except for Christmas and Easter and an occasional impulse buy if I was in the neighbourhood, I wasn’t a regular customer, and so it was a surprise but not a shock when a young couple who introduced themselves as Tony and Rose Nguyen said they were the bakery’s new owners.
I looked at the metal shelves of bread – whole wheat, multigrain, dense dark pumpernickel, sour rye, hearth loaves, and egg bread – and at the glass case of turnovers, doughnuts, strudel, poppy seed rolls, honey cake, sweet buns, and tarts. “Everything looks the same as it was,” I said.
“Everything
is
the same,” Tony Nguyen said. He spoke with the care of someone for whom English is a second language. “We bought the bakery lock, stock, and barrel and that included the recipes. We follow them to the letter.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll have a loaf of the dark pumpernickel, an apple strudel, and three gingerbread girls. And I’d like to place my Christmas order: four dozen cinnamon rolls, half without raisins, and three
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