Mellow Yellow Anne: Brain Cancer and Strangely Chilling Out My wife Anne is currently undergoing three weeks of intensive radiation and chemotherapy treatments. The treatments are leaving her extremely nauseous and totally exhausted. But for lengthy periods, she is preternaturally mellow, chilled out, totally detached from the trials and tribulations of everyday..
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..
How Our Winnie the Pooh Doctor Saved the Life of My Wife Anne to Eat Sushi Another Day We call our “family doctor” Trespassers W in honour of a signpost fragment that recurs in the wonderful children’s stories featuring Winnie the Pooh, the iconic stuffed bear. Here is why our sawbones is so named: ..
Childhood Meatloaf and Anne/ Le pain de viande de l’enfance et Anne La version française de cette vignette suit la version anglaise. When I was a child, growing up in Georgetown, Ontario (1955-1964), my parents were struggling financially. One way that my mother devised to economize was to bake meatloaf cut with breadcrumbs. A lot..
My wife Anne has brain cancer/ Mon épouse Anne est atteinte d’un cancer du cerveau La version française de ce compte-rendu suit la version anglaise. Anne had emergency brain surgery on Monday, May 12. The operation lasted about five hours and was deemed a “success” in so far as the surgical team managed..
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..
A life of elections starting with Dief & Mike in Georgetown, Ontario, 1958: reflections in the wake of the general election of April 28, 2025 Some of my earliest memories are of a family life infused with periodic political bile. My father loved to agitate the fecal matter and took no end of delight in..
For the love of sparrows: A feathered nest of memories from childhood and adolescence Sparrows generally don’t get good press. Bird enthusiasts often find them drab and banal, and others label them invasive species and disparage them as scavenger gourmets. But there are so many reasons to adore sparrows. My wife loves..
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..
Woodland magic in the iconic Des Compagnons Forest of Quebec City, Quebec We raised our two sons in Quebec City, more precisely in a neighbourhood known as La Pointe-de-Sainte-Foy, which was carved out of an old-growth forest, the remnant of which has remained intact behind the local high school, Le Collège des Compagnons. ..