Hamilton Spectator

The life of my mother-in-law, Mum Chamberlain, is now marked in a burial plot near the shade of old trees. Recently it’s been celebrated in various ways. It reminds me of fireworks. Not that “celebration” is a perfect word for these matters. Death can still drag in its bag of

She’s the mother of my bride, Mum, or Mum Chamberlain, as I like to call her. I’m at her bedside. The children and my wife, Jean, are on live video from across the ocean, from East Africa. “We love you, Grams!” Jean shares greetings from the team of Save the Mothers, the Ugandan

Today’s offering is about roots, and where we come from, and these sorts of matters that run under the surface of our lives. My father appreciated roots. And what’s not to appreciate? Roots bring nutrients. They stabilize plants and trees: tap roots for depth, lateral roots to anchor, sinker roots

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about running for president of the United States. I told the family. Everyone got quiet and looked at each other. Then my boy said, “You’ve got this, Paps. I’d vote for you.” That’s all I needed to hear. I’m off. I’m running. I know the way. Follow me!

It’s April Fools’ Day so let’s talk about fools. And hippies. A fool is someone who can’t reason. The dictionary tells us. A fool is a simpleton. An idiot. We understand the idioms and usage. He made a fool of me. She played the fool. A fool and his money are easily parted.

A dream is something imagined for the betterment of humanity. “I have a dream,” is what Martin Luther King said 60 years ago in a prophetic speech about justice and racial reconciliation. We remember because, as Solomon put it 3,000 years earlier, “Without a vision the people will

The interesting thing about Elvis is that he crossed borders. With the Oscars approaching – “Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis has eight nominations – it’s something to think about. Not those sorts of borders. And not that I was really around. I was 12 when Elvis died. My mother-in-law

There are 60 stairs to Tante Eva’s third-floor apartment on Friedrichsruher. I reach them after walking from my hotel for 5 km, walking to see this city of my birth, flowers in hand. Earlier, Eva, 91 and living on her own, navigated these stairs, boarded, by herself, a bus, travelled to a

My eldest, a busy university student, mentioned balance before I flew away. “For balance,” she said to me, after I’d asked how I could pray for her in my absence. It’s a good request, like asking for a compass. Modern western life isn’t known for its tremendous balance.

I’m taking my New Year’s resolutions very seriously right now. Very seriously. This far into January. This is remarkable because I’ve usually broken them by lunch on New Year’s Day. This year is different, people. My resolutions are realistic. They’re attainable. Doable. Within grasp.

We get things wrong. This is to be expected. Because the problem with the church, the global body of Jesus followers, is that, like the larger world, it’s filled with people. We’re not always our brother’s, or sister’s, keeper. We don’t

Today is a good day to talk about peace, starting with Alfred Nobel. As the story goes, when Alfred’s rich brother Ludvig died, Europe’s newspapers mistakenly thought it was Alfred. So the Swedish scientist who’d invented, among other things, dynamite, awoke one day in 1888

“Don’t have children. For God’s sake. Don’t.” This is from the mother in Raymond Carver’s story “A Small Good Thing.” Her boy, hit by a car, is dying in the hospital. Who can blame her? Or anyone else?Years ago some friends of mine, not long married, said the same. “We’re not

It’s a fall day in rural Illinois, near Chicago, and, as I often do, I’m reading aloud to my bride. We’re across the border briefly. It’s just the papers with us. USA Today is in-hand. The Detroit Free Press and Kalamazoo Gazette, in the car’s back seat. I’m looking for a Chicago Tribune.

“Be well.” This is what I said to my students. It was after a recent class. Then they left for the various corners of their lives. We’d just unpacked “Cathedral,” a story by Raymond Carver. He often wrote about broken characters, broken in ways that Carver himself was broken. “Be well.” Then they were gone.