AS TOLD BY BC PIRES AND FAMILY
Newsday columnist and author of the weekly Trini to the Bone feature BC Pires, 65, died on October 21.
He was unable to finish writing what he had intended to be the last instalment of the series, with himself as the subject. It has been completed by his family.
Newsday has published the feature since January 2019 and is proud and sad to publish this final Trini to the Bone in his memory.
My name is BC Pires and this feature, Trini to the Bone, might be the best idea I ever had “for the papers.”
I’m probably better known for my flagship column Thank God It’s Friday, which has been running in a Trinidadian newspaper and/or online since 1988.
Film people know my writing about movies, and others may remember my Ramesh & Bas Sends Back the Paper series.
Or my Most Boring MP Contest, won by then Speaker Hector McClean (with a 35-way tie for second); or my Book of Kenrick, a summation of the Bible in Trini dialect – but I think Trini/’Bago to the Bone has been better received than anything else I’ve done – and that includes a hard-news Q&A interview of both Santa Claus and Jesus Christ.
Wherever I go, I’ll always be from St Ann’s. The narrow valleys of Sydenham Avenue and Fondes Amandes made me broad-minded. Even in childhood, following a river to its source or walking across the top of a mountain onto another one gives you perspective.
[caption id="attachment_1046713" align="alignnone" width="742"] BC Pires- Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
Many people don’t know that, like Minshall, I was born in Guyana and came to Port of Spain aged one. Even in Georgetown, where they say, “Once a Guyanese, always a Guyanese,” they tell me, five minutes after meeting me, “Nah, you from Trinidad!”
It was my dad, Joe, a public figure, my mum, Ann, and four siblings: Joanne, Victor, me and Joe Jnr. We get along well enough now, and I’m close to my mum and brothers, but if you had 100 words to describe our family, “communicative” would not make the list.
In childhood, I discovered the loving friendship of cats.
They’re the finest creature the God I don’t believe in ever made. If he’d done as well with the politicians as the cats and musicians, we’d all be in a far better place.
I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools, but it still didn’t take. I began doubting at age nine when a nun told me my cat who’d died wouldn’t go to heaven because it had no soul.
That was horse manure, because I knew that cat had loved me deeply and truthfully. And I couldn’t see how anything could love without a soul.
[caption id="attachment_1046711" align="alignnone" width="812"] BC Pires- Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
Cats, music, books, films and the arts have rescued me more times than I’ve rescued animals from the TTSPCA.
My father was an atheist, but my mother made sure we all got up to at least Confirmation.
I think I finally gave up on God and religion in my early 20s. It just doesn’t make sense that I could be more compassionate than God.
My own family is my wife, Carla Kai Castagne, and my
