The Matter of the Divorce

Well. Since you are here, it must be because you want more information. Pull up a chair. Let me pour you a glass.

Now that the court proceedings have concluded - and concluded they have, with the full weight and ceremony of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice bearing witness to the wreckage of what was once a beautiful thing - I must say, it was quite a tragic affair. A tragedy in the classical sense. Greek, almost. Italian, certainly.

It began, as all great love stories begin, with hope. With Sunday dinners. With the smell of garlic in a warm kitchen and a woman who once looked at me the way my mother looked at a perfectly ripe tomato. We built something. A home. A life. A son - my boy, my heart, the one good thing that came out of all of it, untouched by this review.

Many moons passed. Many pots of sauce were stirred on that stove on Dougall Avenue. Many Wednesday evenings at the Legion Hall, dancing the polka in my red golf shirt, believing - truly believing - that this was enough. That I was enough. That love, tended carefully like a garden, like a bocce court in late summer at Jackson Park, would hold.

It did not hold.

She was unfaithful. The details are beneath this page and beneath this man. I am Tony Alameda of Windsor Ontario - son of immigrants, graduate, custodian, 28-year member of the Caboto Club - and I do not air my gravy in the street. What I will say is this: I found out the way a man should never find out. And I was alone in that house on Dougall Avenue with my son and my thoughts and a pot of sauce going cold on the stove.

But I am rebuilding. Like a good Sunday ragù - and if you know anything about a good Sunday ragù, you know it cannot be rushed - these things take time. Low heat. Patience. The occasional stir. I am broken, perhaps. But I am not destroyed. I am Tony Alameda, and I have survived worse than this. Probably.

I am but a man. A man with a red golf shirt, a Volvo in the driveway, a bocce ball in each hand, and a heart that - God help me - is still full of marinara.