So sorry for your loss: an open letter to VIA Rail Canada VIA Rail President and CEO Mathieu Paquette 3 Place Ville Marie, Suite 500, Montreal, QC H3B 2C9 1 email @viarail.ca Dear Mr. Paquette, I am writing you as an inveterate train enthusiast. My father spent 30 years as a railway employee, and..
Geno Lewis: Scoring a touchdown for compassion (revisited) https://www.cfl.ca/2026/08/02/redblacks-release-receiver-eugene-lewis/ Responding to the above press release of August 2, 2026 A letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper The Ottawa Redblacks have certainly been experiencing a miserable season on the gridiron, but they’ve scored big points in so many other ways. My..
Facing the yawning abyss of solitude in the fall of my life It was a beautiful fall day in early October, 2023, when Anne and I were still living in Dijon, France. We were heading for Mâcon for a day trip, on a local train destined for Lyon. The train was an old..
The unrelenting brutality of grief and the pervasive pall of mourning The verse that emerges in these clumsy attempts at Haiga creation is often bleak, reflecting the unrelenting brutality of grief and the pervasive pall of mourning. Haiga is a Japanese concept describing a refined visual art of combining brush painting, Haiku,and calligraphy. A traditional..
Unsafe at any speed revisited I’m a horrible driver; I’ve always been a horrible driver. This deficiency is in my DNA: behind the proverbial wheel, my father was unsafe at any speed and my mother was beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst driver in history. (Various friends and relatives wanted to sue the..
Escaping the rough by choosing the right club In 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family moved from Georgetown to London Ontario. This permanent change of scene came as a devastating blow, complete with the typical leaving behind of school and friends, entailing the requisite adjustment to a new, bigger city culture. In..
Unhappy Campers Revisited For many more pictures, please click here: https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/unhappy-campers/ It was the summer of 1980. Anne and I were spending our holidays in Vancouver with her family. We were child free. When fall approached, we settled on a novel way to return to our home in Quebec City, opting..
Glioblastoma Awareness Day: July 15, 2026 Today is Glioblastoma Awareness Day intended to raise awareness of glioblastoma (GBM), one of the most complex, deadly, and treatment-resistant cancers. As many of you know, I lost my sweet, courageous partner, Anne Schlenker McBryde, to this scourge on May 3, 2026, after a year-long battle with the..
Fête nationale française le 14 juillet 2026 : Vive la Révolution ! Retour sur la prise de notre Bastille en 2023… et aujourd’hui Bastille Day, July 14, 2026: Vive la Révolution! Looking back on the storming of our Bastille in 2023…and today The English version of this very short sketch immediately follows the French. ..
We are just grains of sand in the vast cosmic ocean One key element that makes death so weird and disconcerting is that we are but dust in the wind, quickly blown away and forgotten, yet when we inevitably leave this veil of tears, a unique sensory, psychological, and intellectual universe, an entire history in..