Underdog Read Online Free

To the world, I presented a brave front, always in control, always highly driven. Privately, if I’d stopped to think about it, I’d have realized I was both a mess and a mass of contradictions. It was a verylong twenty-five years before I recognized that I needed help and sought counselling.
    At each family gathering, as I watched distant family members making a big deal of getting married and having children, I forever felt the outsider, which was nothing new for me. Jews have a long and complicated relationship with guilt, and I take some pride in the fact that I was able to put a special twist of my own on it. Ironically, my overachieving side made me feel guilty that I was letting my family down. Unlike many closeted lesbians, I did not end up marrying the men I dated throughout my twenties, thirties, and even forties – despite the ever increasing pressure from my family to do so. But my maternal grandfather, Irwin’s, third wife – with whom I had a very close relationship – didn’t stop trying to fix me up well into my forties. I loved her dearly for her efforts.
    I had a special intellectual connection with my grandfather Irwin, a self-made man who created and operated the first chain of grocery stores in Hamilton. We enjoyed long discussions about politics, government waste, our Jewish heritage, and many other issues. I respected his wisdom, his work ethic, his refusal to succumb to the ravages of old age, his mastery of the game of golf, and his entrepreneurial spirit, especially considering he was forced to survive and raise a family during the Depression. He, in turn, respected me as a journalist. But being from a different, far more chauvinistic era, he couldn’t understand why I had not followed the traditional route of marriage and children. I never really felt I lived up to his expectations, a point always left unstated until about a year before he passed away. While at my parents’ home for dinner and well into his nineties, he let the martinis do the talking. Made even more unedited than normaldue to the early stages of dementia, he told me he thought I was a good journalist but that he plainly didn’t agree with my “lifestyle.” It was amazing to me that he even knew the word
lifestyle
or that he even had some inkling that I was gay. I was upset for days by what he had said, although it didn’t surprise me. But in hindsight, it was likely his disapproval that kept my family from speaking about the subject and that contributed to keeping me in the closet for so many years.
    While I clearly had a tendency to say what was on my mind, I didn’t find a platform or the confidence to champion others like me until I made my mind up to ditch a twelve-year well-paying career in public and government relations and pursue my real calling in journalism. To the shock of my friends, family, and work colleagues, I decided to start my career all over again at the age of thirty-two. It was a calculated risk. I figured I had more to gain than lose and that I had to do it before I became far too comfortable with the much higher salaries in what we journalists quasi-affectionately call “the dark side.” I ended up at the
Bracebridge Examiner,
a weekly in Muskoka, where my ex had a summer home. The public relations agency I left, probably not quite believing or trusting my decision to join a small-town newspaper, told me they’d keep the door open for three months, in case I discovered the error of my ways. I never looked back. Within a month, I knew I was right. Although I had taken a circuitous route, at long last I was fulfilling my late grandmother’s prophecy.
    I did everything but deliver the paper. I asked to help lay out each weekly edition and to learn to write headlines on production day, on top of my writing and reporting duties. Within three months I was working for the
Gravenhurst Banner,
covering town council and trying to effect change withcritical editorials. Again, I figured I had nothing to