Hamilton Spectator

End of summer, back to school, time for JFKs

So, my children, like children everywhere, are about to return to school.

This brings some uncertainties. It’s my children’s first-ever September back-to-school in Canada.

More so, I’ll need to work at having more JFKs again.

Before I explain what a JFK is, let me say that in

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Don’t tell the kids, but we bought a new house

So, the children’s mother and I bought a house.

“Let’s not tell the children,” she said.

“Okay,” I replied.

So we didn’t.

Now before I share why, let me say that we all have a relationship with our houses, and in my family I’m the one with a sort of longsuffering in this union.

This is the story.

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There’s bound to be some blood along the way

Today we’re going to talk about the boy. Child #2. My son.

You may have a boy also. And if he hasn’t yet put his head inside the open mouth of an alligator, then, well, congratulations.

My boy announced recently that he’s going to jump from a plane.

There’s bound to be some blood along the way Read More »

Wherever we are, we all need grace in our lives

I’m a white Canadian. But I easily imagine myself as a dark Arabian. A Muslim.

There, on the streets with a kufiya on my head. Or there, I’m a Muslim woman with a beautiful, but hidden, face, walking along the beach.

I’m just telling you.

I mean, what if I was born in, say, Yemen.

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For Gloria, the fatherless girl we left behind

She’s the Ugandan girl who we left behind in a part of the world where, this weekend, there is no Father’s Day. And even if there was, this girl, our friend, has no father to honour on it.

So while it’s only suitable that so many fathers and children

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Many Ontario doctors caught in euthanasia dilemma

He’s a friend. A doctor. His name is Stuart. I stood at the front door of his home, my son beside me.

Stuart is the keeper of the children’s bicycles while we’re abroad. We swung by to make arrangements to get them. That’s all it was, an ordinary May evening. But the world was somehow different. Its axis had shifted. At least for Stuart.

He’d just returned from Queen’s Park, he informed me, with other doctors lobbying for a

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Saving mothers, one modest step at a time

In sub-Saharan Africa they call childbirth “war.”

If you’re a woman about to deliver a child in that part of the world, this is your fate. Imagine it. You’re young. (Younger than most Canadians can imagine.) You’re poor. You’re alone.

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Israel: a small nation with a very large history

It was Shabbat, the Sabbath, Friday evening, and after a mad frenzy to close the markets and clean the strewn and tossed streets by 6 pm, everything got quiet.

This is when I saw them, an Orthodox Jewish father and his boy walking …

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