My mother was a straight talking woman. Straight talking in the way the English are born to using words with a surgeon’s precision to eviscerate her unfortunate target, the skill ever the more impressive because she rarely raised her voice. I was at one and the same time intimidated and in awe of how someone could use words so sparingly and efficiently.

In her later years mum turned this candour unsparingly on her friends and her family. If it was on Gloria’s mind, it was shortly thereafter embedded in yours. My father died some years before she did leaving behind a very lonely woman and one who was increasingly direct with her comments. She paid a price; one by one her friends turned away, leaving my mum alone and lonely.

Her doctor had recommended that she go on anti depressants, something to help elevate her mood but that suggestion left her furious.

“My husband has died, my friends have abandoned me and I have cancer. Of course I’m depressed!”

But this was no capitulation to the medical advice, it was rather a categoric rejection of it. She was simply reciting the reasons she was depressed, not acknowledging a clinical depression just an emotional sadness and for good reason, the reasons she recited. Don’t misunderstand she was not unsympathetic to those who do suffer from clinical depression just deaf to any suggestion that she had it.

And there it was again. The same woman who had always spoken with precision and efficiency, unadorned by self pity. It was ungarnished, unaffected candour only this time she was talking about herself. She did not accept her doctor’s advice. She acknowledged that she was depressed but was straightforward about the reasons behind it. No medicine required. Perhaps it was ‘the English’ in her, the ‘stay calm and carry on’ generation that weathered a world war with equal parts courage and candour or perhaps that is dismissive of her strength. Whatever it was in my mother, I have never forgotten it, part of me admiring how simple intractable questions can be answered if we come out from behind the layers and simply speak with candour, say what we are thinking without anger, without rancour, civilly to one another.

I was with my wife Mac recently at Homesense in Nanaimo. We had picked out a small cabinet but noticed that one of the door locks was broken in two pieces. It was priced at three hundred dollars and the clerk said they would adjust the price at the counter. After a five minute delay at the front we were presented ceremoniously with an official discount coupon for $10.

“Ten dollars?” I said querelously “but the lock is completely broken.“

I should say for context that at no time during the subsequent exchange did I raise my voice, or create a scene. I was however what my personality profile will confirm as genuinely assertive.

“Well yes sir” said the obliging if obsequious young woman “all you have to do is find a replacement lock and install it and it will be as good as new.”

It took me a moment to absorb the absurdity of it all. If I was to understand the Homesense clerk correctly, we were to go online and try to find the specific lock for that cabinet which as it turns out had been made in India. What were the chances!? Alternatively, one imagines she thought we might get in our car and go from hardware store to hardware store until we located an equivalent lock. For which we were to receive a $10 discount. The mind reels at the possibilities.

“Yes Sir, we know the meal is undercooked. Why don’t you and your girlfriend take it home. Put it in at 375 for ten minutes. Should be delicious. Here we’ll give you $5 off.”

“I know, I know we saw that. There’s a crack in the front window of the car you want to buy. We send all of our vehicles to a super guy just down the road. Just take it to him. He’ll fix it for you. Here, we’ll throw in a $50 coupon.”

Good Lord what is it all coming to? Although THAT is a discussion for another blog.

In any event, as my focus sharpened on how wrong it all was I turned to the unfortunate clerk.

“This is absurd. You are selling us a broken piece of furniture for which you are charging three hundred dollars and giving us ten dollars off as some sort of fair compensation for what you are telling us to do to make it right!”

Still no raised voice. I didn’t know it in the moment but mother was guiding me through this exchange.

“Don’t be upset Sir!”

It was the young woman, bringing her newly learned customer relationship management skills to the task at hand, falling as you might imagine on my very deaf seventy-three year old ears.

“But I am upset!”

It was me. No, it was my mother, showing me the way. Don’t overstate, don’t exagerrate. Don’t create a scene.

“No need to raise your voice Tony. There is a need to be heard.”

We left with the cabinet.

And a thirty dollar discount.