Today would have been my dear father’s 100th birthday. Born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica. Died in Canada. Dad’s passing, like his life, was not easy. We know little about his early years, except that his father bled to death after being run over by a sugar cane-hauling train when dad was a young boy. His mother lay in her sickbed for several days with my young father by her side, waiting for her to awaken. In fact, she was dead. He wrote about his memories of that event in a long poem called Fragments of Time. I cry every time I read this part, thinking of my sensitive, curious, creative dad orphaned and virtually alone, left to the grudging charity of distant relatives. And…

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