(Thomas Froese Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, October 25, 2025)
I recently sat in a coffee shop across from a man I’ll call Adam.
Adam, as in the beginning when that voice, that song, said let there be something beautiful and grand like light and earth and then Adam, that name meaning “Of the earth.” Then let there be Smith and al-Masri and Rodriguez and Froese and you and many others.
It was 31 years ago in October when I stood in an Ontario court and a judge told me about names. “Write what you want, but no names,” he told me. Of course. So I did. I wrote without names.
I wrote about Adam and his sister and their unpromising start to life. Their white mother and Indigenous father had abused and neglected them. Their white maternal grandparents then fostered them, but when they wanted to adopt, the Oneida, the Onyota’a:ka First Nation, petitioned to raise the half-Indigenous children.
Children’s Aid, with the Ontario government’s support, demanded the grandparents hand over the children. Instead the couple went to the local press in St. Thomas. The story fell to me.
The grandparents were allowed to keep them in the interim, then, two years on, their two grandchildren were legally given to them. The resolution came after, incredibly, elders from the First Nation and elders from the family’s church-school met and found the way forward, bypassing lawyers and the impending court fight.
For my efforts – I was still a young reporter – I was awarded a significant journalism honour. It was something, considering in childhood, with my sister, I was the subject of a bitter custody fight, this one in Berlin, also written up in the papers.
In the coffee shop Adam shares that he remembers me coming into the house when he was four years old. “You’d sit in the kitchen and talk with Mom and Dad.” He speaks of his love for them, his grands, their eventual death and, later, his tough times. I nod and listen.
Adam has lost 100 pounds in a year. Has a good factory job. Understands healthy relationships and breaking cycles. He’s done the work. Then Adam tells me about his sister’s death, just in her 20s, after complications from asthma. I listen more. Hers was an especially hard road. There’s much to tell.
Today, by the way, October 25, is Haldimand Treaty Day, the day in 1784 when Sir Frederick Haldimand, then Governor of Quebec, granted significant land along the Grand River to Six Nations to recognize their support of the British during the American Revolution.
So today is a day in history and also a time to reflect on the resilience of Indigenous people.
We’re born into time and place without choice. Into race and culture. But there’s more. As Atticus told Scout in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you can’t understand someone until you get into their point of view. “Until you get out in their skin and walk around in it.” Like God, in a way. But in this we do have some choice, even as humans.
You’re white? Imagine you’re black. You’re a married father? Imagine you’re a single mother. You’re from a red state? Imagine you’re from a blue state. You’re Jewish? Imagine you’re Palestinian. Or vice versa. It will change your relationships. Maybe even the world.
Talk like this for long and people might look at you like you have three heads. That’s okay. Don’t let it throw you off. You’re sowing seeds. Changing the spirit of our time.
Novelists, remember, do this imaginative exercise all the time when creating characters. It’s why I teach story. It’s both interesting and healing.
Which leads to Adam’s search for someone to write something fuller than what I started 31 Octobers ago. In that coffee shop I told him I’d ask around. So I’m asking. If you’re a writer who’s been touched by Adam’s story and may want to help him write his book, please reach me.