Nancy Issenman
What a thrill it has been to read the stories of people I knew so long ago and now come to rediscover. My experience of high school is a bit of a blur though many images stick in my memory. Of some people I have strong recollections, others were on the periphery of my life and still others are just names.
My life from then until now has been anything but “straight and narrow”, other than the obligatory 4 year stint at McGill while living at home. My graduation day spelled freedom and I left that fall for a wake-up year in France and Israel. For the next few years I traveled & worked and was finally pulled along by the hippie tide to California in the early ‘70’s. I spent the next 16 years in the SF Bay Area where my love of afro-Cuban music began, leading me to study and teach congas; where I came out as a feminist and lesbian; and where, in 1986, I graduated as an acupuncturist. A year later I returned to Canada and have lived in Victoria ever since. I continued my Chinese medicine practice and became a Doctor of TCM in 2001. That year I also went on the first of many visits to Cuba where I met my future husband. (Perhaps I was bi all along!) I sponsored him to immigrate to Canada and he arrived Xmas day 2008, the best present I ever got! (The pic is of Daniel and myself in Cuba.) I never had children of my own but have co-parented a girl since she was 2 years old, now 22 and just finishing up university in Vermont.
My life since high school has never been boring, sometimes more challenging than I would have liked and always full. I hope many other TMRHS’s will give me a peak into your lives.
Nancy