The name is Penny O'Hara, and I'm a construction manager with Renard Engineering, a general contractor that does a lot of business in downtown Ottawa, Ontario. You don't see a lot of women working in construction, and you see even fewer in construction management. I was born in the town of Perth, Ontario, to a provincial police officer, Winston O'Hara, and a schoolteacher, Gwendolyn Stuart. My father raised me to be fearless, encouraging me in my tomboy streak and my pursuit of non-traditionally feminine interests. I am every bit my father's daughter, folks.
I grew up to be six feet three inches tall, athletic and fit, with alabaster skin, brown eyes and long black hair. My friends call me Tall Penny, or Penny The Amazon. Yes, it's because I am a tall female. Get used to it. I attended the University of Ottawa, graduating with a bachelor's degree in commerce in the summer of 2006. I was twenty two years old at the time. I couldn't find work in my field, and ended up walking onto a construction site owned by Renard Engineering. That's when destiny called, folks.
The owner, Michael Renard, happened to be on site that day, and he was impressed by a ballsy chick like me. I quickly proved myself, for I had trade school training thanks to my father, who became a trade school instructor after retiring from the Ontario provincial police force. I became a construction worker, and I proved myself to the men by my skill and expertise, and also the fact that I wouldn't hesitate to get in a guy's face if he dared talk down to me. Female does not equal weak and submissive in the world of construction work, folks.
Construction work across Canada and much of North America has always been a mostly white, male occupation. A lot of these white guys working in construction are backwards in their attitude toward women and racial minorities, but not all of them. You'll find lots of decent, friendly and hard-working men in the construction field. I've met guys of every color, every religion you can think of, and they treat each other like a brotherhood. I love what I do, and I get along with most of the guys I work with. Life is good.
Alright, I might have exaggerated that last part. These days, folks, my life is in shambles. For the past three years I'd been dating this guy named Lionel Rosenthal. Tall, handsome and smart, with alabaster skin, lime-green eyes and curly dark hair, Lionel and I met while I was doing some contract work for an engineering company in the City of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Lionel and I totally hit it off, even though I don't make it a habit to date guys I meet on the job. Lionel is Jewish and I was raised Catholic, I didn't think that would be a problem but it proved to be, at least for his family.
When Lionel met my parents, they loved him and I thought everything would be fine. My father in particular thought Lionel was a fine gentleman and saw a lot of himself in him. I can't tell you how happy that made me. I thought that my tall and handsome Lionel, the McGill-educated civil engineer, would be mine and we'd live happily ever after. I'm a die-hard tomboy but I even started wearing skirts just to please Lionel. I loved that guy something fierce, and unfortunately it wasn't enough.
Lionel's parents, Mariam and Samuel Rosenthal are Jewish. Actually, they're not just Jewish, they're from the rather conservative Orthodox branch of Judaism. Prior to meeting Lionel Rosenthal and his family, I didn't know much about Judaism, to tell you the truth. I didn't know that Jewish guys aren't allowed to marry women from other religions. My cousin Jasmine who lives out in the City of Montreal, Quebec, is just as Catholic as I am and she's married to Ali, a Muslim guy from Morocco.
If super-strict and traditional Islam permits a Muslim guy to marry a Catholic gal, why wouldn't supposedly more liberal Judaism allow a Jewish man to marry a Christian woman from the Catholic faith? Lionel and I dated on and off for three years, and then, a few weeks ago, he broke up with me. We'd been arguing a lot lately. I wanted to move in with Lionel, preferably someplace far from his uptight Orthodox Jewish relatives, and he wasn't down with that, as they say. Lionel wanted me to convert to Judaism, largely to appease his uptight mother. I, um, wasn't ready to do that. I don't go to church often but I am a Catholic woman and I love my religion.
Lionel Rosenthal dumped me over our religious differences, and I was heartbroken. I didn't have time to mourn the demise of our relationship, though. Renard Engineering put me in charge of a special project downtown. A certain Canadian government building in the downtown core which badly needed renovating. While working on that project, I had to hire a lot of sub-contractors. One of them is The Pierrot Group, owned and operated by a tall, dark and very handsome gentleman named Jean-Jacques Pierrot. The first time I met Jean-Jacques, he definitely made an impression on me. The guy was actually two inches taller than I am, something I always appreciate in a man. I thought Jean-Jacques was a dark-skinned Arab, or maybe an Indian, but he told me he was actually biracial, born in la belle province to a Haitian immigrant father and a white Canadian mother. Wow, that's not a combination you hear about every day, let me tell you.
I liked Jean-Jacques Pierrot because he was a very polite and friendly guy, and he had the most diverse crew I'd ever seen on a construction site. His assistant manager Rosa Gutierrez is a short, plump, bronze-skinned and dark-haired Hispanic woman. His lead contractor Louis Eugene, a stocky, dark-skinned young guy, is Haitian, his project leader Emilia Abdullah is Lebanese, while his laminator Roger Tremblay is French Canadian, and his drywall expert Anderson Clarence is a white guy from Montana, USA. They formed a small but close-knit and hard-working team.
I found the Pierrot Group's work efficient and reasonably priced, which is always wonderful for a project leader like me. I found myself becoming fascinated by Jean-Jacques, and we often went to lunch together. One thing I hate about working in downtown Ottawa is the presence of so many government workers, pretentious bastards and bitches who strut about, cigarette in one hand and coffee cup in the other, taking a break every hour and coming down from their ivory tower to gossip and waste the taxpayers time and money. I hate the whole lot of them.
