It’s the height of summer but we’re at the rink anyway. It’s our last skate of the season. Liz is flying across the ice with her golden hair streaming behind. Hannah (her black Ugandan locks jammed under a black hockey helmet) is also going round and round, as is Jon, smile from ear to ear, telling […]
Are you enjoying life? Or just skating in circles? Read More »
It apparently came on the back of a friend’s truck down the Ontario highway from Hamilton to London. It was the day My Lovely Bride and I married. The item was an electric piano, the sort that, at that time, wasn’t so small. Even though I was handling most of the details of our wedding reception on that summer day,
Why my wife will always be “My Bride” Read More »
The conversation with my so mature 8-year-old boy went like this: Jon: Dad, when are you going to tell Hannah about the birds and the bees? Me: When she’s ready. Jon: When will that be? Me: When she’s ready. Then shortly later, the conversation, now with Jon and Hannah, all of seven, went like this.
Jon and Hannah on the birds and the bees Read More »
The problem, he told me, is that not once was there any reference to sin or repentance and the entire message was so watered down that it was made simply too irresistible for the lukewarm to refuse. This, at a church picnic. The lament was from a minister who I have known for a long
A knowing minister and a doubting Thomas Read More »
(Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 26, 2013)
Love has always been one of those loaded words, one that means everything and nothing at the same time because we can love the latest Bond movie or country music or summer rain, but this has nothing to do with summer love at, say, a July wedding, or the love that shows on the faces of a couple who have sailed through thick and thin.
On anniversaries and a medley of “summer love” Read More »
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and a time for many things under the sun. This is how the poet in Ecclesiastes put it. He was talking about time in the sense of what happens in it, that is the type
My daughter Liz is a rather astute little 10-year-old and I can’t help but show off her writing every once in a while. Here’s some verse she just wrote about change called Ancient People of the World. Ancient People of the World My friends, my friends, we gather. So much to talk about, history. We
Ancient People of the World Read More »
It’s the other day, Friday, and I’m saying goodbye to my children’s cousin, the little girl of My Bride’s sister, a bright little six-year-old with wavy brown hair and the best manners. ‘Why thank you for asking,’ she would say all week whenever I asked how her day was, her day at the camp that
Miss Manners goes to camp Read More »
