Marilyn and I got married in the Catholic Church in Arima. I promised to become catholic but didn’t take it seriously because the priest wasn’t serious either.
My parents and sister arrived and the highlight of the ceremony was my sister singing and absolutely filling the church with her amazing voice.
I didn’t invite the teachers to the wedding but in typical Trinidadian fashion, they invited themselves. A few politicians also showed up that weren’t invited.
The honeymoon was in Tobago and it was interesting to discover one of Marlyn’s cousins having an affair in the next cabin.
After we arrived back in Trinidad, I moved into the Hop Wo Steam Laundry and Marilyn and I planned for our future life in Canada.
I had heard that it was possible to skip a masters and go straight into a PhD at UBC. My plan was to do it in bio-engineering. We found an apartment in a nice old two story building a block away from Kitsilano beach in Vancouver.
The bio-engineering professor turned out to be a nut case so I looked off campus and found a medical doctor with an engineering background who had some more interesting ideas. I talked the department head into allowing me to switch but when school was about to begin, the department head had a heart attack and died. I decided to switch gears, do a masters and get out of there as quickly as possible. I did a survey of all the professors by talking to grad students and chose a professor in control systems to be my supervisor. He later became the head of the department.
The thesis was pure math – trying to prevent the electrical grid from crashing. It was based on a previous paper that I initially couldn’t read, let along understand. What I did learn from working on it is that if you keep looking at something long enough, it will eventually start to make sense.
February the following year, we were driving across the prairies. The car kept breaking down and I had to keep getting out in -19 weather to try to get it started again. I had been offered a job as a hardware designer at Bell Northern Research (BNR) in Ottawa.
WR Foster 