Butting in and butting out: Childhood, adulthood, and cigarette smoke (Georgetown, Ontario and beyond) (38) smoke smoke smoke that cigarette Tex Williams with Lyrics – YouTube From earliest childhood, I was constantly engulfed in a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke, and growing up in Georgetown, Ontario in the 1950s, I was mad keen to butt..
Tarpon Springs, Florida 1959…and 65 years later When I was seven years old, our family made a trip from Georgetown, Ontario to Tarpon Springs, Florida, on the train. (My father worked for the CN railway, so we had a family pass.) Tarpon Springs, Florida – Wikipedia We made this odyssey to visit our mom’s favorite..
Gender-bending for Halloween “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” – Lola, The Kinks Born in 1952, I grew up in what was then a small southern Ontario municipality called Georgetown, an epicenter, I decided later, of what has been dubbed the Southern Ontario..
Ode to the Zamboni: in honour of the new hockey season For my friend, the writer and Zamboni expert Mark Oshinskie By the time our first son was a pre-school tot, he was a rabid hockey fan. Growing up in Quebec City, he lived in a hotbed of hockey frenzy where the local media blared..
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees (photo of my mom circa 1950) I was born in 1952, the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. Growing up absurd in a small southern Ontario town in the 1950s and 1960s meant being fed a steady diet of..
My American Cousins, July 4, 1963, St. Albans Street on the corner of Church Street, Enosburg Falls, Vermont For Tammy MacBryde Farr Folding chairs and outdoor dining tables festooned with colorful paper table cloths were positioned at regular intervals across the vast corner yard of our cousin Robina MacBryde Randall’s Vermont home, like a series..
Willy Loman : I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese! Why am I always being contradicted? – Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman For Daniel MacDonald, the finest Willy Loman ever For his birthday, June 27, 2024 Getting old is no piece of cake Getting old is no piece of cake; The feast..
Deaf as a post For years I have been in denial about my hearing impairment, blaming it on wax build-up and congestion, while secretly recognizing that my experience of a typical soundscape is akin to that of a skin diver trapped in a massive reverberating fishbowl, especially in venues such as bars or restaurants where..
Je suis ton Père/I am your Father Dans mon livre, je parle de mon beau-père originaire d’Europe de l’Est. Il est décédé de complications liées à la maladie d’Alzheimer en 2009. Aujourd’hui, en 2024, j’ai l’impression que mon déclin s’est amorcé et que mon destin sera bientôt semblable à celui de mon beau-père. In my..
Dads with fedoras…A Tanka poem about a 1950s childhood Childhood: an ocean Of dads in fedora hats… Oh a kid could drown! Only present in absence, Dads erased; headgear remains. Tanka poems follow a set of rules. They all have five lines and each line follows a pattern: the first line has..