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This is a late-life love story – one that started on the loading docks of the old Daily Bread Food Bank operation at the bottom of Bathurst St. and lasted for 10 years.
Wonderful years, says Mary Wingate.
Even though Peter Wingate, a tough Scot with a lived-in face offset by his direct, twinkly gaze, was diagnosed with lung cancer just after their second anniversary. And even though during the past two years, both were battling the disease.
Last fall he came home from a doctor's appointment and said: "Well, Mary, I'm going to have to leave you my telephone number in heaven." He had been given six months to a year to live.
The next night he teased her: "But, Mary, I'm not paying for any long distance calls."
But two years earlier, when Mary told him she too had cancer (of the uterus) he had been heartbroken. He sat back on their couch in the gaily decorated living room of the small apartment in Malton they shared – and wept. "Come hell or high water, we will get through this," Mary said to him.
She told him she would stick with him to the end – and she did.
She made him sandwiches and left them with his Players cigarettes by his chair in front of the TV when she went for her own chemo treatments. She was happy to.
"In all our 10 years, he never said a cross word to me," she said.
She knew he was a good man the moment they met. She was Mary Baird then, single for 22 years, and a newly retired rehab nurse turned dynamo volunteer who worked the order desk five days a week at the downtown food bank warehouse.
"Mary kept everybody on their toes and all orders going out," said her friend and food bank volunteer Pat McCartie.
Peter was a volunteer with St. Peter's Anglican Church food bank who picked up their food supplies every Thursday, and yes, Mary spotted him soon enough.
"I thought `There's nothing lazy about this man,'" she recalled. If she went to the freezer to pick up a case of tomatoes for an agency, he'd be a step behind her, telling her not to strain herself, shouldering her load.
Peter never talked much about himself. He told her he'd worked a few different places, but never went into any detail.
When he proposed, he told her he was a poor man, but Mary didn't care.
"I saw who he was and that's all that mattered to me," she said.
She had only one question for him: Had he ever been in trouble with the law? He hadn't and they were wed June 20, 1996, at St. Peter's church.
Peter was resplendent in a bow tie and Mary wore emerald green and a "kind of Lady Di hat," said McCartie.
Bride and groom treated everyone to dinner at the Mandarin, their favourite Chinese restaurant.
"A wonderful wedding. It was the loveliest story we'd ever seen," said Helga Baiersdorfer, a volunteer at St. Peter's food bank.
Mary's son, Victor, came up from Florida with his family.
He'd been leery when his mother told him about Peter. "Then I met him and he was a wonderful man, a kind, simple man. A real old Scot. Liked to have a drink, a smoke and go to the track," he said. "I'm so glad my mother met him."
Before Peter became too sick, the Wingates had day trips to the casino at Niagara, days at Woodbine where they would stay for the buffet after the races. "He'd study the horses, everybody knew him at the track," Mary says proudly.
Most days she made him tea – it wasn't her drink but he loved his tea. Before dinner, they had a glass of sherry – he loved his glass of sherry, too – while watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
They watched CityPulse News at 6 p.m. and stayed up late enough to find out if they won anything on the Pick 3 lottery. Sometimes they did.
And at the end of every night of their marriage, he always thanked her. "Mary, there's nobody who has done so much for me as you have," he'd say.
She never asked him to explain. And he never did.
But he told his friend Garry Hoffman, director of the food bank where Peter volunteered for 19 years, he'd come to Toronto in about '57 after a rough upbringing.
He once told Victor's wife, Cathy, he knew about the abuse of children – and some tough jobs in British coal mines.
He got a job as a hand on a farm near Aurora – "They worked him hard there, dawn to dusk," Hoffman said – before he moved to Toronto for a job grooming the horses at the old Greenwood racetrack.
He later worked at a meat packing plant until a workplace accident.
He was living in a room on Bleecker St. when he popped by the church one day and pitched in to bag food at the food bank. He became a regular, taking on more and more of the work.
"He was a strong man, loading and unloading up to 3,000 pounds at a time from our truck," Hoffman said. "You couldn't wish for a better guy."
When Hoffman promised an elderly parishioner, a Mrs. Wainwright, that he wouldn't let her die in hospital and took her into his own apartment, Peter was the one who stayed with her all day when Hoffman went to work.
"He'd come over at 6 a.m.," Hoffman said.
Wainwright lived for 23 days and with Peter's help, did not die in hospital.
Until he married Mary, Peter lived in a house with three other single men run by the Christian Resource Centre.
"A wonderful tenant," said its director Carmel Hili. They'd talk over tea around the kitchen table. One time Peter told him he'd had other life partners, all named Mary. But marriage to this Mary, he said shyly one day before the event, "was a wonderful thing."
Up to 2005, Peter made the trip from Malton to St. Peter's twice a week – it took him an hour each way on transit. Then he kept in touch by phone. The food bank regulars missed him, often asking after "Scotty."
Peter was fighting hard to live. He had help. Mary said the staff at Princess Margaret Hospital found a donor when he couldn't afford to pay for his cancer medication. She has the receipt for six months worth of the pills. It's for $2,790.20. "I will always keep this," she said.
In February, he moved into the palliative care unit at Etobicoke General. Mary promised him he would not die alone, and she was there when he died at 8:20 the morning of Feb. 16. He was 76.
There will be a celebration of Peter's life on Saturday at St. Peter's Church organized by Mary, 73. "It's been a real good marriage," she said.
cdunphy@thestar.ca
