Newspaper columns

In honour of my father and his well-lived life

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 27, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It was a different time and place on the day I watched another human being die in my father’s arms. I was just a boy.

Bert had epileptic seizures, medically uncontrollable then. Tall and lanky, he’d crumple and fall hard on the floor in the house, or outside under the apple tree, or in places between, shaking, convulsing, rigid as a board. I’d watch. All the time. Bert lived with us.

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The good news about the bad news

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 20, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It’s funny how you can give a torch to someone and he’ll light up the world, and give the same torch to someone else and he’ll burn the place down.

It’s like love and hate. They’re both consuming fires, but with different ends. (The ultimate difference is that hate is all-consuming, and, like evil, will eventually consume itself.)

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An anniversary wish to the music of my life

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 29, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It’s a warm and ordinary day, warm and ordinary enough to run around in shorts and bare feet.

The children’s mother, your babe, that is your bride, is playing your song. The cats are in front and the dog’s in back and the kids are doing homework and nothing much is happening, except this song from the piano in the other room, the piece that makes your blood jump every time.

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Lessons we can learn from Eddie the Eagle

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(The Hamilton Spectator, Monday, July 4, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦

“They that wait upon the Lord will mount up with wings as eagles; they will run and not be weary; they will walk and not faint.”

The Hebrew prophet, Isaiah

The sad news of the day, or any day, is that the world is full of people who lack hope and basic belief in themselves because they’ve long been told in one way or another that they’ll never amount to anything, that they have nothing to offer, and the sooner they realize this the better it will be for all concerned.

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A world where the beautiful and terrible live side by side

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 18, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It was my daughter’s first teenage birthday party and the family van was full of giggling girls.

The verdict on the Tim Bosma trial wasn’t in, not yet, when we pulled into the bowling ally across from Carmen’s banquet hall and I said, “Tim Bosma’s funeral was in that hall. And his wedding too.”

Silence fell. One girl said it was terrible what happened to Tim. Then my barely 13-year-old asked, “Why would they have his wedding and funeral at the same place?”

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Home is a place of God’s differences

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(The UCU Standard – Monday, May 23, 2016)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It was in Canada and we were at a campy lakeside retreat, and it was a beautiful summer day and a gaggle of children were playing outside the large window near where we ate.

My daughter, that is my adopted Ugandan daughter, Hannah, looked at me with a tear rolling down her cheek. I asked her what was the matter, and, looking down in shame, she said, “I’m the only black person here.”

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The mouse and the dishwasher

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, May 20, 2016)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ So it’s the middle of the night and my wife walks into the bedroom and says: “There’s a mouse in the dishwasher.”

This is strange even for our household, the sort of announcement that suggests my wife is hallucinating from working way too late, again, or that I’m having one of those dreams.

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