Every Outing is a Date A Wry Vignette About Anne and Me In high school, I was the ugly duckling. I was the only kid who managed to look both invisible and conspicuous at the same time, sporting a truly unfortunate haircut and acne that seemed to have a personal vendetta against me. Dates, for..
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in our Hearts When I was in Grade 12 at Oakridge Secondary School in 1968, a friend passed on a cassette featuring all the songs of the musical “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Brel_is_Alive_and_Well_and_Living_in_Paris At that open and vulnerable age, I..
Tutoring French in London, Ontario, 1967 I was good in French; in fact, I was good at school, the academic part anyway. In phys ed or manual training, I was what my father kindly referred to as a dead loss. Back in the day, being an honours student was a catastrophic blow to any..
Summer Job 1969: A Red Cap My father had to pull a lot of strings to get me a “real” summer job in 1969. His employer, CN Express, offered very few openings for inexperienced 17-year-old whipper snappers, but Dad managed to call in his chips with a golfing buddy/ stationmaster, a Mr. Don Gutteridge,..
School field trips, 1958-1969, Chapel Street Public School, Georgetown, Ontario, Oakridge High School, London, Ontario When I was a child and an adolescent attending Ontario elementary and secondary institutions of higher learning, school trips were a primary source of pleasure and intellectual stimulation, starting as early as first grade. When students see the real-world..
Curling and cancer: a palliative sweep My wife Anne has been stricken by terminal brain cancer, and the treatments have caused her to lose much of her hair. Not surprisingly this has led her to become obsessed with what’s left of her locks and to spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror obsessing..
A Hotline To Treatment: Getting Through and Feeling Blue In the summer of 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family move to London, Ontario, coinciding in my case with the sudden onslaught of puberty, a ferocious hormonal maelstrom that transformed me into an obsessive pop music listener. My favourite DJ in those days..
The Public Speaking Blues: Childhood and Adolescence in a Performance Anxiety Funk When I was attending Chapel Street elementary school in Georgetown, Ontario, back in the 1960s, public speaking was an integral part of the curriculum in the senior grades. And terror was the order of the day. My public speaking anguish typically..
My mom, door-to-door salespeople, and the clarinet: tooting in the 1950s and 1960s My 1950s and 1960s Georgetown childhood was characterized by cacophony, including rumpus and din on our little subdivision street where a knife sharpener man would ring his bell; where the breadman would dart from home to home distributing succulent baked goods with..
First job and first paycheque: Kmart next to McDonald’s, London Ontario, Spring 1969 In April 1969, the brand-new McDonald’s on Oxford Street, in my hometown of London, Ontario, went on a hiring spree. This august establishment, a source of civic pride for many Londoners since it was the first of its kind in the entire..