After returning to Canada and reorienting myself to “normal” again, it wasn’t long before I met actress Janet Wright and her two kids on an Arts Club Theatre production. I felt I’d met my own little tribe: and it showed in my music – which went from contemporary “new” to unabashed pop. Before long we were married in Nelson.

Looking back at it now, I wonder at the likelihood of this ever happening at all, and how much heavy lifting I had created for the fates to get a young man with no plans all from Montreal with ideas about new music and an uneducated heart to a theatre and a family in rehearsal in Vancouver, but it happened. First, the moment on the bridge, which broke the tie with home, then passing fugue, which clinched the deal once and for all, then the Mexico trip, which got me to the west coast and Vancouver, then the love affair, which both destroyed and restored me emotionally, and finally getting to Australia, which made surviving all this possible, turned me right side up again, shook me out and set my heart on the right track. All because of somebody’s sick aunt who I never met (with some help from Peter Huse, who leveraged me into the music department at DTUC).

In 1980 our daughter Rachel was born while I was teaching at David Thompson University Centre in Nelson. Her birthday was on the winter solstice, December 21. An old soul, so filled with love.

The music department (all 5 of us) formed a band, performing everything from soup to nuts. It was a happy ensemble we called “Muktar Passion”.  Bach one minute, blues the next.