My Story

In fact, it led me to a very dark place to where I no longer knew how to deal with the basic stresses of life. Around age sixteen, I turned to drugs and alcohol to help me cope, which, as you can guess, made things a whole lot worse. I searched for inspiration, which I found online through social media. When I was twenty-seven years old, I decided to go vegan—raw vegan. There were a few people on YouTube and Instagram who talked about how they ate tons of fruit all day, felt energetic, and lost weight.

In my eyes, they were living the dream. Eat as much as you want? This was when my life changed for the better. I decided this was it. I would quit smoking, quit drinking, and become a raw vegan. I ate around 3, calories a day and, to make a long story short, I gained weight—thirty pounds! I became more depressed over time particularly due to weight gain , felt lethargic, had the worst acne of my life, and I was always hungry.

But I was grateful I found this lifestyle because even though I had gained weight, I overcame a lifetime addiction to cigarettes and alcohol. I knew I wanted to continue the plant-based lifestyle, but if I never ate another banana again, it would be too soon. It was at this time I found Dr. I thought, hey, I love potatoes and rice. Retrieved 13 January Retrieved 30 January The New Indian Express. Retrieved 31 May An old-fashioned romance saved by its two leads".

Retrieved 8 July A love story held together by performances". Parvathy works her magic again". My Story lacks fizz". Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. Languages Bahasa Indonesia Edit links. This page was last edited on 1 December , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Shaan Rahman Background Score: Benny Dayal , Manjari. He always had a very distinctive way of playing. Basically, my father revealed a lot more about himself to us through his music than he did by talking to us. When he played, he even looked different. And he was always smiling.

So I used to listen to him and so did the other members of my family. He played standing up, his back against the wall of the kitchen or the living room. And I think all of us were surprised to see that this man, who ordinarily demanded so little attention, suddenly stood out when he played his accordion. He did more than play. He put "soul" into the music. And that was something we all could feel; it "knocked us out. Then he could feel he had hold of us, and he was happy. And he'd wink at us.

My father is the world champion of winkers. Playing music is also how he seduced my mother. I can guess well enough how he went about it. When my father plays the accordion, he can become dangerously seductive. As a musician, he has this unusual talent of entering directly into people's hearts, of really touching them. Like him, my mother had been transplanted from the Gasp e peninsula - from sea, forest, and sky - to La Tuque, which is in the most remote part of the Mauricie region of Quebec - with its facto-ries and smoke.

That's where they met. She was seventeen, he was twenty-one. He had his accordion, she her violin. They both knew the same repertoire of reels. He showed her the chords to "Mockingbird" L'Oiseau moqueur. A year later, they were married. And then came the children, from Denise to the twins, thirteen children in sixteen years - quite a figure. Then me, unexpected, a mistake, a few years later. W hen I've tried to recount my childhood, I've asked myself if the memories I've kept of it were really mine or if I re-created them in my mind based on what my oldest siblings have told me.

At our house, everybody remembers the day I was born. They've spoken to me about it so much that I can say what the weather was like - cloudy and windy.

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All my brothers and sisters witnessed my first steps; they all waited for and heard my first words. They also remember the first songs I sang with them, and the car accident that nearly cose me my life when I was two years old. I ended up in the hospital with a fractured skull and a concussion. I can visualize the scenery perfectly. It was very sunny.

One of the first days of spring. The earth and the nearby river smelled good. My brothers Michel, Jacques, and Daniel were doing spring clean-ing in the yard. They had to rake up the old grass, clean the flower beds, and pick up the dead branches. I was playing in my sandbox. Through the hedge - a very thin hedge - that enclosed the yard, I saw a woman pushing a baby carriage - a blue baby carriage. I thought it was my sister Denise with her baby Christian. Appar-ently, I was really fixated on Denise and her baby. So I went toward them. I was in the middle of the street when I realized that I'd made a mistake.

It wasn't my sister but a neighbor out with her baby. My brothers, who were in the yard, heard the screech of tires and the cries of the woman. Two seconds later, they were at the scene of the accident, in front of the house. They saw a big black car stopped in the very middle of the rue Notre-Dame, the door open, a man standing beside it, unmoving, and me spread out under the bumper. Michel threw himself to the ground to get me out of there. Daniel and Jacques tried to hold back my mother, who'd come running out of the house because she thought I'd been seriously hurt, that maybe I was dead, and they didn't want her to see me.

From then on, the versions differ somewhat, as is usually the case with this kind of story. She wasn't crying but her eyes were rolled up into her head. I wasn't bleeding either, but I had black and blue marks and bad bruises on my arms and forehead. Cooperative Federation of Quebec ]. The ambulance had already left when he arrived.

There was nobody there but policemen finishing their report. A few years ago, when I began collecting family souvenirs to put together an album for my parents - a gift I have yet to finish - my father took out of his wallet an old piece of pink paper that he'd held on to for more than twenty-five years. It was the police report. Thanks to this document and to the accounts of my brothers, I know the make and color of the car that hit me as well as the name of the man who was driving it - Jacques Picard. He'd offered my brothers twenty dollars not to call the police.

My father understood why a few weeks later, when he saw the gentle-man's face on page three of the Journal de Montreal. The man belonged to the east Montreal underworld. And he'd been bumped off by other criminals for some alleged crime or other. God take his soul!

That evening, for the first time in my life, I slept all alone, far from my mother, in a children's hospital. Obviously, I don't remem-ber any of it, no more than I do the accident. I was only two years old. But it took years for me to experience being alone again. When I was small, I never wanted to go to bed. If I slept at the house of one of my married sisters, where my mother sometimes left me for two or three days, I'd always make a big scene.

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I wanted to stay near her all the time, no matter where she was or what she was doing. I think she basically got used to it. Until I was eighteen or nineteen, we were practically inseparable. Wherever I am today, I'm still very connected to my family. Two of my sisters, Manon and Linda, live near me on nearly a permanent basis. My brothers Michel and Clement are never very far away. And a day doesn't pass that I don't speak to my mother. In addition, she visits me often with my father and my aunt.

Jeanne, her eldest sister, in Jupiter, Florida , where Rene and I have our house. My relatives went with me on tour for years; my mother, of course, who has endless energy and likes big cities: New York , London , and especially Paris. Through her, I always know what is happening in the family - whether it be with brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces - who's doing what, where, when, how, who's got a cold, who was promoted at work, who's bought a new car, who thinks she's pregnant, who's fighting with whom and why.

We see each other a lot and we talk a great deal, about what's hap-pening to us now but also especially about the time when we were all together in the little house in Charlemagne. We think of that house as if it were a lost paradise that we all dream of returning to - as if we wish all sixteen of us could be crammed together, with a single bath-room, four tiny bedrooms, no dishwasher of course , an oil furnace with its hellish smell, without any modern comforts.

How can I explain that this is the place where happiness lives? And how can I be sure of this? I believe there is something magical about big families, families that know and share a lot of human warmth. But sometimes I tell myself that maybe we have forgotten the difficulties and hardships, and that we've remembered only the good times we spent together, and that we exaggerate them more each time we talk about them.

Big families have lots of shared history. And lots of historians, of course. Each of the older children has his version of the facts, her memories, his point of view, and her interpretation. I certainly always want to hear the stories, especially when they go back to the early sixties or even to the mid-fifties, long before I showed up to turn my mother's life upside down. As time passed, I began to know some old stories almost as well as. For example, sometimes I feel as if I really knew my grandfa-ther Dion, to whom fate dealt a "low blow.

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By "we" I mean my family, but actually I never lived in that house, which my father built from the ground up. After the terrible death of his father, he couldn't stand being in that house. Even today, he doesn't like to talk about what happened. There was a terrible noise. And through the kitchen window I saw my father's car hitting the train. When the train stopped, the car was just a heap of scrap metal. I went up to it and stayed there, unable to move. Afterward, my father couldn't stay in the house and see the train that had killed his father passing by every day.

This was several years before I was born, but even so, I can tell the story of our moving as if I'd been there. It had begun to rain, and there was no canvas covering the truck. The men had delivered the furniture and a mattress was completely soaked. The kids liked find-ing themselves in a new house, especially because it had a large yard on the banks of the Assomption River. There were big trees from which my brothers hung tires to make swings. It was an old Canadian house with the kitchen next to the main building, like in the old days. At the front, a very narrow porch ran along the entire front, from which you had direct access to the side-walk of the rue Notre-Dame, which was very busy and noisy.

On the ground floor, next to my parents' room, there was a large living room that actually looked more like a music room. Often there was a drum set in the middle of the room, guitars, mikes, amps, tape recorders, wires running in all directions, records, tapes. There was also, on the side facing the street, a sitting room where you barely set foot unless there were important visitors.

It was a cold, dark place, and I didn't. Even today, I prefer kitchens to living rooms, for talking and playing cards. The children's rooms were on the second floor, two for the girls, two for the boys. In the larger, which I shared with Pauline and Manon, the walls were covered with posters of actors and singers. The beds, which occupied almost the entire room, were so close together, you had to squeeze through the space between them, and between the beds and the chests of drawers, and between the dormer window and the big mirror on the door of the wardrobe. I liked watching my sisters when they put on their makeup, got dressed, and posed in front of the mirror.

I thought they were beauti-ful. And I was impatient to grow up and do what they were doing. Before I even started school, I already knew all these singing stars. I particularly remember one rainy day. Ghislaine, who must have been about fifteen years old, had turned on the record player in our room and she was mimicking a singer's performance over and over again.

I listened to her all afternoon. She held an old mike without a wire or a plug, but she made use of it as if she were on a stage, facing an audience that she was welcoming and thanking. And I felt as if I, too , could hear the applause. I've forgotten the title of the song - it was in English - and I can't remember the name of the singer.

But I remember my sister's concentration and determination. She would ask me to set the nee-dle back to the beginning of the song while she got her breath back. Then she'd start again. I was sitting on the floor next to her. I watched her sing in the mirror. And I was as excited and happy as she was when she succeeded in duplicating the intonations of the singer. Everybody listened, even my father and mother, even Grandma Dion, who'd come to live with us after my grandfather's death. She was already very old and nearly infirm. She didn't speak very much. She had a phobia about open doors. She told us all the time to close them to keep out the flies, even the cellar door, even in the mid-dle of winter, when there were no flies anywhere.

Maman was wonderful to her. She gave her her own room, on the first floor, and she moved to the second floor with Papa.

She took care of her, washed her, changed her like a baby. She even helped her eat and get dressed. I don't know if I'd have the courage and the strength to do some-thing like that, but I absolutely admire those who do it, whether for family members or as a profession. I'm certain that they find pleasure in some part of it. Doing good does you good; it makes you a bigger person.

Once more I see Grandma, huddled in her rocking chair, lost, completely lost in her thoughts. She would smile all the time. Even when you couldn't hear yourself think in the house, because there were several kinds of music playing at the same time. For example, Ghislaine and Claudette, my godmother, would be singing upstairs in the girl's big bedroom. Down below, Jacques would be playing the guitar, Clement the drums, Daniel the piano.

Michel was listening to his jazz records. Another of my sisters was talking on the telephone. And sometimes the TV was playing over all of that. But most often, someone, my father or my mother, imposed some order on the chaos and everybody ended up making music together. This could last hours, all evening, if not through part of the night. Grandma stayed in her rocker and watched her sons family make music, playing reels as old as the earth itself or doing versions of the.

And maybe a little deaf, as well. I wanted this life to last for-ever. It was sweet and good. I must say I had a very unfettered child-hood. It surprises me today that I didn't become a lazy, spoiled woman. I never got a spanking in my whole life, neither from my parents nor from any of my brothers and sisters. Not a slap either, nothing physical. We didn't do that kind of thing.

To me or to the others. My mother did, however, have a way of punishing me that was just as efficient as a smack on the cheek. One day, when I must have been four or five, I was with my parents at the shopping center in Repentigny , which was near us. I wanted to go to the toy store. I'd been a few times with my mother or with one of my sisters.

Several Barbie dolls that I owned came from that store. But on that day, my parents were in a hurry, especially my father. There was no way we were going into the treasure chest. When I saw that there was nothing to hope for as far as my father was concerned, I began begging my mother. But she said no too. And you've already got enough toys at the house. So I threw a real tantrum. I cried my heart out, stamped my feet, and yelled.

You could hear me from one end of the mall to the other. I was so angry I no longer saw anything around me. Suddenly I real-ized I was completely alone. I turned around and saw my parents heading for the exit. They'd simply left me there. I had the scare of my life! In thirty seconds, I'd caught up with them. And I hung on to my mother. That's the kind of lesson she gave me when I acted like a spoiled child. She punished me with coldness or indifference. Never by hitting me, or hollering at me or shouting at me. Her authority was enough to set things straight. I also cried my heart out the day I entered nursery school.

I like to hear my mother recount that scene of horror. I had to leave the cozy, comfortable family nest and live every day for hours far away from my mother. It was the same, only more dramatic, the following year, when I left for grade school. This time, however, my memory has retained a few precise snapshots. I remember my mother went with me on foot and I held her hand very tight. Once we were in the schoolyard, she had to pry open my fingers to separate herself from me.

She took several steps back and then left me all alone. She positioned herself behind the fence and watched me. Never, I think, has my heart been so heavy. Because I knew that I couldn't go back and remain a baby. My mother had told me this was coming. And I was, and continue to be, a very obedient girl. I do what must be done. I do, have always done, and will always do what I'm asked to. As long as those who are asking are people I love and in whom I have confidence. I know every child has had to go through the first day of school.

At five or six years old, all of us have been torn from our families and found ourselves all alone on an asphalt playground full of strangers. For me, it wasn't fear of a hostile or strange world, but rather a feel-ing of boredom. A profound sense of boredom, an immense sadness. I had always lived surrounded by adults and children a lot older than me. I learned everything I needed to know from them. As far as I was concerned, real life existed around them.

Not in the middle of a schoolyard full of terrified children who knew nothing about noth-ing. From that day on, I detested school. I'm not setting myself up as an example; I simply believe I wasn't made for this. My whole life had been turned upside down. Maman had found work in a department store called American Salvage in east Mon-treal , where she sold boots, raincoats, etc. I would eat dinner at my sister Louise's, who lived near the school and at whose place I had to stay and sleep on Thursdays and Fridays when Maman worked evenings.

At Louise's everything was modern, ordered, polished, and com-fortable. What's more, Louise is sweetness itself. But in the evening, alone in my bed, I thought about the house. I wanted to wait up in the kitchen with Manon and Pauline. When Maman came home from work, we could make toast and hot chocolate. And even if I'd been sent to bed, there would have been those familiar noises, those voices, those smells, all of that world that I so loved. At Louise's, like at school, I felt that I'd been exiled. I didn't hide my suffering from my mother, who was soon eaten up by guilt was this exactly what I wanted?

So that I could travel between school and the house, she bought me a green bicy-cle. From then on, I went to eat dinner at Louise's but slept at our house. One night I had a dream. I was coming home after school. I didn't have my bicycle. All of a sudden I felt incredibly light. And everything started happening in slow motion, my strides got larger and larger, as if I were running on a rubberized surface. And I was extraordinarily happy. I have never forgotten this dream. Even today when I think about it, I can still recapture a little of the extraordinary sensation it gave me.

When I think of that time, I can easily see that in some way, I always found it difficult to connect with children of my age. I don't think their world interested me. Today, I'm fascinated by it. But at the time, although I myself was a child, I didn't under-. I didn't feel capable of finding a way to connect with tiny children and become part of their games or I thought it was useless to try.

I preferred to be alone. Even when I played. Near the shed next to the house, my brothers had put up a punch-ing bag like those used by boxers in training. I spent hours hitting it, sometimes with one of my sisters as sparring partner or with my niece Cathy, the daughter of my sister Claudette. But most of the time I was alone.

Sometimes I punched the bag until my fists and wrists were swollen. I just kept punching, without being able to stop. When I came in to eat, my hands were bleeding. My mother wrapped gauze around my wrists, just like they do for boxers. And I'd go back to my punching bag, find my rhythm and stroke once again, forget-ting about everything. I also played with dolls.

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Especially during summer, and usually outdoors. I'd set myself up at the foot of the staircase leading to the backyard. I'd wash my Barbies, change them, one after another, and put them into poses, talk to them, and scold them. Then I'd put them to bed the proper way in an old wooden chest my uncle Valmont, Maman's brother, had made for me. I was my mother's and my sisters' doll. They did my hair up in buns and braids, they put polish on my nails, and made up my face, even when I was only seven or eight years old.

Claudette, Liette, and Linda often took me with them to stores and had fun having me try on dresses, coats, shoes, and hats. We fell in thick very quickly. I became part of their games, their conversations, and especially a part of their music and songs. That was the game that I got the most pleasure from. The one I still play today: Dion and His Ensemble, which gave shows in Lanaudiere and east Montreal. Maman had bought a new violin. Jacques played the guitar. Clement was on drums, and Daniel was playing the accordian-piano; Denise sang folk songs and current hits. They even did some TV shows.

I was almost always with them, in the studios, clubs, and bars, even when I was only six or seven years old. Later, with a friend of the family named Michel Desjardins, Ghis-laine, Jacques, Michel, and Daniel formed a real rock and rhythm and blues band. On weekend nights, they played in a club in Charle-magne: They were called "Les Decides" the Determined Ones and they had T-shircs made with two D's sepa-rated by the note "si" "ti" in English. I was their number-one fan. When they were near us, I never missed a show. I have some very clear memories of those evenings, the sound of the Hammond organ, the Les Paul Gibson guitar they were so proud of.

I even think that today I could recognize the smell of the Bord-de-1'Eau with my eyes closed. It's a mixture of cigarette smoke and potpourri, very fruity, very sugary. And it was damp and warm. Ghislaine, who called herself "Penelope" then, had taken up Clement's drums. And they brought me too, of course. When I'd had enough, I went to sleep on a bench. I ate when I was hungry, I slept when. I missed school regularly, or if I did go, I was so tired that I nodded out during class.

I was never a good student. In school I really didn't look for friends, try to get ahead, or to attract anyone. Nor did I even let it be known that I sometimes sang with a band. In the playground, I didn't talk very much. I must have seemed like a lunatic to some of the girls in my class, a lonely person paralyzed by shyness, or a complete snob.

Everything that interested me was somewhere else, at home or at the cabaret. Or it was at the little club on the riverbank that my father and sister Claudette had bought. It was called the Vieux Baril Old Barrel , and my family played music and sang there. The evenings when I didn't go with them, I'd hear them coming home: I was above, in my bed, and I listened to them tell Maman about their evening.

They were giggling, happy, leading the most exciting life you could imagine. I wanted to grow up as soon as possible so I could go with them. The Vieux Baril was the place where I saw real shows for the first time. It was also the place where I first experienced being in a crowd and had my first successes outside of the family circle.

After the applause, they'd find me, at four in the morning, sleeping on a bench. Maman had warned me: So in the morning, I got up despite my fatigue and went to school to sleep. I could hardly open my eyes and follow what was going on in class, so I dreamed. Like my brother Michel and my sisters Claudette and Ghislaine, I dreamed that I'd be on a big stage one day, the doors to recording studios would fly open for me, and I'd be a singing star.

The D si D Decides fell apart, so Michel formed other groups. The Eclipse, which didn't last long, then the Show, which had a cer-. Then he recorded two 45s, and one of his songs rose quite high in the charts. The Show was preparing for a big tour of Quebec. The fashion at the time was for frock coats and long, tailored double-breasted jackets. Maman had made a white satin one with coattails and lapels for Michel.

I sat admiring my big brother, the lead singer of the group, talking onstage under the spotlights. Michel has a strong, steady voice, and he moves well. I wanted to stay right to the end of the last set. As long as there was action, something to see and hear, I refused to go home. I knew an incredible number of songs by heart. At the Vieux Baril, the customers asked me to sing some songs and gave me pennies. My parents were astonished to discover that I was no longer afraid of strangers, that I could face an audience without a problem.

I became accustomed to crowds, to applause, to laughter and bravos. I couldn't do without them any longer. At school, I remained a stranger, an exile. As soon as lessons started, if I didn't sink into a half sleep, I left for the moon and started making little movies in my head. The decor was usually the same: The action was simple: I was singing in a big rock band directed by Daniel or Michel. And the people at the tables stopped talking and listened to me. Just like they did for my idols, Ghislaine and Michel.

Sometimes, as well, I went to Africa as a missionary, into the dark-est part of the jungle. I saved children from misfortune, hunger, fear. Or instead, I was a gymnast, like Nadia Comaneci, who'd become my absolute idol, the most. I was eight years old. I'd plastered the walls of my room. I loved her intense look and her very serious man-ner. I thought there was nothing more beautiful on earth.

Most of all, I admired her rigor and precision, the concentration she put into all her movements. For me she represented perfection - and she still does.