It's odd -- or perhaps not -- that sometimes when we read of others' lives and events, it stirs memories of our own lives and events. In this instance it was for me reading about a "man with no identity", an elderly man picked up close to Hereford in Britain. Evidently someone in near proximity to this man who appeared to be aimless and in need of attention called an ambulance to say he had found an elderly man wandering around. He vanished, while the elderly man was taken into custody, found to be in good shape, but incapable of adequately communicating his identity.

"He is saying very little but he speaks with either an American or Canadian accent" a public appeal by police stated. The elderly man who was neatly dressed, clean shaven and agreeably tolerant to questioning said little other than appearing, while at Hereford Hospital to say his name was "Roger Curry". Enquiries by police forces throughout the United Kingdom came to naught; no match was discovered to a missing persons case.

Police appealed for assistance to dialectologists and those experts in identifying regional dialects have come up with a choice: Canadian or American in origin -- or possibly said a professor of linguistics at University of Toronto cluing in to the man's random pronunciation of the word "house", clearly Canadian. Evidently, despite outreach to various sources for possible information to solve the mystery of the man's identity, authorities feel no closer to discovering where he comes from, who he is, who might possibly be missing a family member, than at the start.

It's rather sad; a man in his declining years albeit healthy, insufficiently sound of mind to recall his own identity, and therefor a puzzling charge on the social/health system and conscience of a nation.

It brought to mind for me a trifling event, but one which as a teenager I found irritating beyond belief. I had accompanied my mother along with my younger brother, then an infant of three, on a long train trip to Atlanta, Georgia, from Toronto, Ontario. I was about sixteen, and it was my first trip out of Canada, an exciting prospect, even if it meant leaving my then-boyfriend of two years for a three-week period, the extent of our stay. My mother missed her older sister who had moved with her family a year or two earlier from Hamilton, Ontario to Atlanta where more distant relatives had long lived. It was those distant relatives, wealthy in comparison to our modest resources, who had in fact, loaned my mother and her sisters passage funding to leave the Pale of Settlement in Russia for Canada. (Their father was a school teacher and he and her brothers were politically involved "reds" who came under attack by the "whites" who threw a bomb into the family home killing their father and two brothers, wounding the girls; my mother caught shrapnel in one eye, her sister in a leg.)

I can dimly recall that it took my mother many years to pay that loan back to her wealthy uncle; not until I was in my eleventh year or so did she manage to shed that Albatross and I often wondered and still do, why wealthy people might expect to be paid back sums expended in such circumstances.

My uncle, who had been a furrier in Hamilton, on arrival in Atlanta bought a small convenience store on the very street where Martin Luther King and his father before him led sermons from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Many years later when Irving and I lived for a brief three years in Atlanta, with a Canadian diplomatic mission, I visited that church and the memorial building where I watched a video of his most famous speech, "I have a dream", feeling I was in the ghostly company of a rare human being.

On that long-ago visit we stayed with my aunt and uncle in their home and I was able to renew my relationship with my three cousins, one of whom was a boy one  year younger than me. Also a guest in their house and temporarily living there was an older boy, a young man really, who was recently brought to the U.S. as a war-refugee. He was an Austrian Jew who had escaped death but not a stay at a death camp. He had studied architecture before the war, and meant to resume his studies in his new home. A romantic flirtation arose between us and he later visited with me in Toronto to my boyfriend's anguish. I felt unable, finally, despite my attraction to this young man, to abandon my two-year emotional investment in my boyfriend, much to my parents' disappointment. A decision I have never regretted, nor had reason to.

The point of this long-winded reminiscence is that during that time there was one evening when we were all invited to the house of the wealthy uncle. There I met his children or grandchildren, I can't quite recall. My own cousin knew them well and got on well with them. While the adults had congregated in one part of the house, the young people took possession of another, and sat around talking; I mostly listened, pretty intimidated by everything and everyone around me.

The distant 'cousins' seemed to regard me as some rare not-too-bright creature to be studied. They prodded me continually to say certain words among which "house" loomed large. Whenever I repeated "house" at their urgings, they burst into raucous laughter, including my cousin, whose own Canadian roots would have had him familiar with that pronunciation, but who now carefully avoided speaking the idiom we had both grown up with. It was humiliating to be placed in that situation among strangers purporting to be family who found humour in demeaning another stranger who wondered what kind of family this was.

It is odd how such things remain in one's memory, even 63 years later. What remains in the mysterious elderly man's memory now is anyone's guess, but he is being aided, not humiliated.