Georgetown, Ontario, 1962, Chapel Street School: Skipping Grade 5…a crippling blow My grade skipping saga began oh so long ago, in 1961, when I was in 4th grade. Back in the day, kids were routinely “skipped” if deemed academically meritorious by some individual or board. This fate was my social undoing. During first term in..
Armageddon revisited …The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962 “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Hindu Scripture My parents began hoarding industrial quantities of tinned food and cumbersome sacks of powdered milk in October 1962. They spoke in hushed tones about our imminent demise. Nuclear war was all but inevitable. At 10..
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..
Welcome to Hell… September 11, 2001 At 9:30 am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the telephone rang in the office that I shared with my friend, the French teacher René Moisan. At the other end of the line was his daughter, Geneviève. “Have you seen the news?” she asked, with a peculiar catch in her..
Wildcat/ Flannery O’Connor revisited We just watched a brilliant cinematic portrayal, directed by Ethan Hawke, of the brief but richly productive career and heart-breaking personal life of the iconic author Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). The film presents vivid and disturbing insights into her writing through the director’s depiction of her creative process, as he conceived it. ..
I can’t get no…family doctor Being new to Ontario, my wife and I assiduously followed the Ontario Health Insurance Plan instructions and put our names on a waiting list for a family doctor. We learned that there are about 250,000 supplicants without a personal physician in our city alone. By the time we’re allocated..
Returning home… Adieu à notre belle vie française After two and a half years of living in beautiful Dijon, France, a city that we have grown to love, my wife and I are returning to Canada for keeps on Easter Sunday. Friends on both sides of the Atlantic – and our two sons as well..
The French version of this excerpt from my book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny follows the English. The French version of the book will be published in a very few weeks. Stay tuned! La version française de cet extrait de mon livre Le temps passé avec vous fut bref..
Avignon January 2024: A winter landscape and a bridge to nowhere There is a stark beauty to this winter landscape: Pared down. Bare bones. Hills swallowed by the mist. A bridge Cut off abruptly. Leading to nowhere. A river flowing to the sea. Here’s an eraser. Remove that man from the scene. In..
Skinned alive… surviving by the skin of my teeth For a great many years, I contemplated suicide on a near daily basis. That I didn’t actually follow through on these ideations had much less to do with principles or consideration for others than with an abiding terror of disappearing forever into the yawning abyss of..