(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 6, 2015)
CHARLESTON, S.C. ✦ We’re in the ocean, waves crashing at our knees, salt on our lips, my daughter and me and all these poets in my head.
My daughter (today she turns 12) laughs and dances and spins in circles and says, “No, Daddy, don’t take any more pictures. Just come and run with me. Enjoy the moment.”
We’re stuck in this brokenness together Read More »
(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, May 2, 2015)
DACHAU, GERMANY ✦ I may be a ghost you don’t even believe exists, but before I get there let me tell you about this scene in the Arthur Miller play “Incident at Vichy,” where there’s a well-to-do professional, (like I was when I lived), standing before the Nazi authority now in town.
The man, dignified with degrees and references and these sorts of things, presents what he has to the Nazi who then asks, “Is this all you have?” The man nods. “Good,” says the Nazi, throwing it all into the garbage. “Now you have nothing.”
Where angels and devils collide Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, April 4, 2015)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ This is about two friends, two neighbours, some hard math (if not hard truth) and a dead musician.
The things we leave behind Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 21, 2015)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ He was Swiss and we were talking over coffee and he said he’d just read my story about Canada’s new look at assisted suicide. He spoke as if I’d written on this, which I had not, or maybe he called it my story simply because I’m Canadian.
He said he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Europe, after all, liberated itself from any shameful baggage on assisted suicide long ago. If you want to die, he explained, you can easily go to places and doctors for help.
One day, my story could be yours Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, January 24, 2015)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ He goes by a false name so he’s not found and killed. I just met him. I’ll call him Ahmed in this, his story. He recently shared it around our dinner table.
Cradle-to-grave without free choice Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 20, 2014)
ISTANBUL, TURKEY ✦It was a Sunday, the first day of Advent, en route from Hamilton to my African home, when I toured the Old City here, a place where religions and cultures and empires have collided for centuries. This is when my guide for the day said what he did.
I had asked him about some historic notes and holy relics in the Topkapi Palace Museum, items identified as thousands of years old from ancient Israel, but looking dubiously more modern and Ottoman-like, when he told me as plainly as if he was giving the weather report that, “It’s all mythology anyway. Whatever you believe is true, that’s the truth.”
The paradox of Christmas Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, November 15, 2014)
KAMPALA, UGANDA — It was still morning in Berlin on this Sunday when candles at the Church of Reconciliation were lit to honour yesteryear’s dead, the brave souls who ran from the uniforms and helmets and strong-armed authorities, who ran for freedom that was torn away, even as their flesh would be torn by barbed-wire and vicious dogs and bullets at that wall.
25 years after The Wall fell Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, October 18, 2014)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s hard to know what it means to be human some days, let alone a saint, but there are clues here and there, like in this novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus, where two atheists – one a doctor, one a journalist – have a brief conversation.
They’re in Africa fighting a devastating plague when one says to the other, “It comes down to this. What interests me is learning to become a saint.”
There’s a mystery to the whole thing, a hunger, a longing …
The long and mysterious road to sainthood Read More »
