My Mother was always going to write 'her book'.

She wrote on every topic, on every kind of paper, with every kind of pencil or pen.

She would write down a joke she had hear from her father, one my brother Doug and I had learned from our childhood and she would send it to the radio station.

Doug and I had a jokebook which was entitled: 1000 Jokes. We both read it and memorized it. We still tell those jokes. We also knew all the family jokes by heart for they were repeated every Christmas at Aunty Marion's place. One day Doug happened to hear the 'family joke' on his radio. When he heard that Eva Laird had won $1.00 for the joke she entered he mumbled to himself, "That old chestnut finally paid off!"

Mom sent music she had written to a music publisher in the United States. The 'publisher' took her money and assured Mom that her song would be a bestseller. That's the last she heard of it.

To every family occasion and celebration Eva brought a newly written poem. She used words she had collected in her youth, like elan and porte cochere: words which took an otherwise mundane sentence and gave it a sense of foreign mystery. She never forgot that her childhood was spent in Montreal and that she had conversed in French with her little friends before the idea of bilingual schools had been thought of.

As Eva and Albert grew older there were occasions when Daphne, Doug and I were required to sort through and organize their collection of a half century of marriage and the memorabilia from their parents. We hated these occasions. What right did we have to be looking through all the treasures?

The treasures were a rich mixture of gold and dross, and we hated sorting a 80 year old Marriage certificate from a napkin of candies from last Christmas. A kind of hilarity came over us at times in the midst of our messing with the sacred so that we laughed and almost cried with the beauty and pathos of this experience we shared.

But intermingled with everything was piles of writing. Some as much as manuscripts. Occasionally a sign that Mom had sent it to a publisher and it was returned rejected.

Manuscript rejected, writer rejected.

When Dad died in 1975, we learned the news while our family was in Tübingen, West Germany. Daphne and her friend Helen visited us in Germany. It was good to meet family in the foreign land. Doug Scott had been with us the year before. Daphne came to us, fresh from visiting our father's birthplace in Kullukin, Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, Ireland. We grieved together for this wonderful man but missed being with the group which gathered in the funeral parlor in Vancouver.

Mom was an excellent correspondent. She wrote for Dad, and for the whole family. She wrote for the extended family. This part of her writing was extremely successful.

She wrote us every week while we were in Germany. I have all those letter carefully saved.

After Dad's death her letters turned retrospective. She relived the day she met Dad in Truro, Nova Scotia and the day about a year later in Vancouver when they wed, June 15, 1921.

How could we be anything to Mom in her grief from Germany? I pressed her for more and more details of how she had met my father and what exactly happened after they left the reception. Gradually I built up a file of a dozen letters from Mom about those early days.

When we returned from Germany and after getting settled into the new life of new congregation and new responsibilities at the Theological College, I began to look again at those letters.

With the help of my daughter Anne we sorted and resorted those letters, eliminating only duplicate stories. We added nothing, but drew Mom's writing into four Chapters:

- Chapter I A Wedding at 1865 W. 16th

- Chapter 2 From Truro, Nova Scotia to Vancouver

- Chapter 3 Albert Laird of Killukin

- Chapter 4 William and Annie Martin

For the title we drew words from a sentence in Mom's own writing: Fifty-four Loving Years.

Anne typed it in copy-ready form using a rented IBM Selectric with a carbon ribbon. I took it to a quick photostat shop and had 25 copies run off. Adding white Duotang covers and the title labels we had Eva's first book.

The book was finished in February 1978, ready for her birthday that year. I took it to the Crofton Manor where she autographed copies for her children, grandchildren and close friends.

Eva had published her first book. But that is not all. That is not what brought me to write this story.

I never had a very good relationship with my Mom. I was always concerned that she would interfere too much in my life, so I held her at a distance.

But now I am learning all the ways I am like her. How much of her gifts are my gifts - particularly music, language and writing.

Now I realize an even greater truth. It was not that I had given Eva her first book. I had never published a book before. I have since - in the simple way I published Fifty-four loving years.

No, I didn't give Eva her first book.

My Mother, who had given me the love for languages and the written word, had given me MY FIRST BOOK.