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..
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..
We never got to mourn our friend: A tribute to Dr. Robbie Mahood on the third anniversary of his death on December 26, 2021 We were living far away from Canada when we learned of the death of our good friend Robbie Mahood on December 26, 2021. We never had the opportunity to mourn his..
Indians: A controversial play in 1980 As my exit from the theatre of life is imminent, I remember so fondly the many student actors with whom I had the privilege to work over a 35-year teaching career at Champlain St. Lawrence College in Quebec City. The first play that I directed at St. Lawrence took..
Rascal scooter to the rescue: an alternative to Ottawa public transit (part one) When I was a child my mom always called me “little rascal,” normally in Ukrainian, the language that her Polish family adopted when they came to Canada just before World War One. “Malenʹkyy dyyavol” she would yelp when I misbehaved…literally “little devil.”..
Random Thoughts on “Black Friday” My wife Anne is a latecomer to North American culture. Growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia, she learned at a very early age to tune out the constant drumbeat of mendacious propaganda. This impermeable filter has served her well in the Ameri-Canadian commercial sphere where orgies of greed punctuate a perpetual..
Noisy neighbours “Good fences make good neighbours” – Robert Frost “Hell is other people” – Jean-Paul Sartre We had been living in Paradise…until the new neighbours moved in. Before coming to France in the fall of 2021, we had never resided in a dwelling without at least one adjoining wall. And we paid the price..
Seething Seniors: a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper Dear editor, I’m writing in response to the article headlined Ottawa seniors seething about massive hike in OC Transpo pass price penned by Ken Warren and published on November 14. Ottawa seniors shocked by big hike in OC Transpo pass cost | Ottawa..
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..