Our Story

by Dan Driscoll, Goa, India (member of Corpus Canada)

   The following was written on the invitation sent by Dan Driscoll, a member of Corpus Canada, to friends to help him and his wife Germana celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. The celebration, a "little surprise" for Germana, took place in their flat in Betim, Goa, India on November 2, 2002. Betim is near the Basilica of Bom Jesus, in Old Goa, a world heritage site where lie the remains of St. Francis Xavier.

   We first met in Toronto in 1969, upon introduction by my Office Assistant at the National Film Board of Canada, Rose Paes (now Misra), whose family origins in Goa were the basis for a friendship soon after her meeting Germana in Canada in 1968. Germana, residing in Canada from 1962, suffered the loss in 1966 of her husband Tom Wilcox, a London "Fleet Street Journalist" who had come to Canada to join the senior editorial team of the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. Germana, too, was employed in Toronto as a journalist -- as writer/editor for the Maclean-Hunter Group of Publications.
My initial vocation phase was with the Oblate Religious Order, as teacher of English and History at Senior Secondary Level with school boards in Ontario and Alberta. After ten years of teaching I did a Masters Degree Program in Media and Communications at Syracuse University in New York State. I obtained a canonical dispensation from clergy status and joined the Liaison Staff of the National Film Board of Canada in April 1967.
After an acquaintance of about three years Germana and I were married, with Fr. Lorne MacDonald then Provincial Superior of the Oblate Fathers presiding, at Canadian Martyrs Church in Ottawa. on the evening of November 2, 1972. Our intention was to have a very quiet (private) marriage, and so together we drove the 400 kilometres by car from Toronto to Ottawa for the ceremony as prearranged with Fr. Lorne. This meant that even our dear friend of our first meeting, Rose, was not informed.
On arrival at the church in Ottawa we were greatly surprised to find that a kindly plot, involving my cousin Francis Driscoll, and some Oblate contemporaries in Ottawa resulted in there being fifty or so present in the church -- teaching colleagues, former students, friends, and some of my relations living in the Ottawa area, at what turned out to be a cheerful little "wedding," with a champagne and cake reception at the Oblate Community House afterwards.
It may be consolation even to Rose, who has remained our loyal and true friend while living still in Toronto, to be assured that we probably have no more serious regret than that through this miscalculation of ours she was not an honored guest for the event. My dear "Cousin/Aunt" Madeline Driscoll gave Germana "motherly/sisterly attention" -- begging pardon for the much-mixed metaphor -- and along with Jim Trainor, a friend from college days, joined with us in signing the register.
Quite soon after marriage we journeyed to my home district in Eastern Canada, and then within the year to India, for meetings with Germana's family in Bombay and others of her relations and friends. In the years following we toured India several times, coming back to Canada in 1978 on a six-month leave of absence. By this time it had become more clearly evident that Germana was ever to be "a child of the tropics," not very comfortable with the frosty physical climate of what is kindly referred to by geographers as "the temperate zone." But then I, too, was never much at ease in winter cold; it came as a fascinating anecdote for Germana when I told her, years later, that the favorite popular song of my youth (truly) was Xavier Cugat's Down, among the Sheltering Palms -- my honey waits for me!. So in the early eighties we began making plans for a retirement residency in Goa, from early 1984. As Germana often exclaims, "How round the world is!"