Polar bears, it seems, like lettuce and radishes.

I've been helping an older lady of my acquaintance, Jess, with her Canada pension application. The government keeps sending her demands for documents, most of which she doesn't have. I've called Ottawa three times for her so far. Once I got a snarky bitch. Who insisted on talking to poor Jess. "Well, is Jess there?" the S.B. demanded, when I had explained why I was calling. When I said yes, she said, "I have to talk to her." Jess listened with a bewildered look on her face for a minute or so, and then said, "I don't understand", and handed the phone back to me. Another operator, on another day, was super-helpful and patient but didn't have a clue where Nunavut is located. She guessed northern BC at one point.

We've been trying to track down documents -- but Jess and her husband were married, she tells me, "Eskimo-style". No certificates. She didn't know him, when they got together it was because her family and his family decided it between them. In fact, she was away at school when the plans were made. I asked her if she was ok with that. She looked a bit confused, and so I said, "Was he cute?" She giggled at that point and said, "Oh, yes, very cute."

One of the forms Jess was sent, a declaration of common-law relationship, required his signature. As he's been dead since the early eighties, this meant another call to the pension office. When I explained to Jess that the pension office had helped me to find and print out a different form, because we'd never be able to get his signature, she laughed and put her hands together as if she was praying, and then looked up at the ceiling, saying, "Please come down and sign my form."

But anyway. We got talking about polar bears. Jess says she has lived in the Arctic all her life, sixty years, and she's never seen a polar bear. And when she was a girl, her family lived out on the land, down at Bathurst Inlet.