Recent Columns

Friends – Today we — My Bride, the children, Yours Truly — are back on a plane to Uganda. (And, as they say, it’s not the destination that counts, but the journey. This is why in my family we don’t really care where exactly the plane may be flying, as long as the movies are all working fine.) […]

It was the last night in my Canadian home. The day, a busy one, the end of a stretching week, was spent keeping some semblance of order, some idea of knowing what, with the dwindling time left, was still most important. I was outside my front door, in the dark, fumbling with my keys, looking for […]

It’s been a mad dash these days to pack up the house – again – for our annual return to Uganda. The plane flies this holiday weekend. One of the cats at our African home – she was a kitten not long ago – has apparently given birth in our absence. We’ve been sent video […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, August 23, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ He needs a home with others. Assisted living. There are options in Hamilton. He needs one before he’s destroyed by his uncertainty and fear, his black as midnight darkness. He’s not a star, not a celebrity, not, say, Robin Williams, whose suicide just shook us so deeply. He’s simply your neighbour. This is his story.

The highlight of the week was seeing a buddy from ye olde boyhood years. I hadn’t seen him for more than three decades. He and his wife came the other evening for dinner. “This is my son, Jon,” I said, at one moment. “And this is my friend …” “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Jon. “This is your friend […]

In the end, we are story as much as we are anything. This is one reason why it works so well, this movie, Boyhood, which follows in real time filming the life of a boy who, over the span of a dozen or so years, grows up. It’s a remarkable movie-making twist — thank you Richard Linklater […]

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ You’ve worked hard for this your whole life, this, your university career, your education and future, your dreams of a better life. Then it happened. You made a mistake. Now you’re pregnant. You’re pregnant while at a religious university. You know what happens next. You get thrown out. Everything will be gone. Your hard-earned tuition and your honour and your hope for tomorrow too, all lost. So you got that abortion.

(Christian Week - Friday, August 15, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The sad truth of the matter is that when we stop reading the Bible with any faith or confidence, when we stop discussing it at dinner with our children, when we stop wrestling with it in our meeting places and home gatherings and while lying in bed, we’re no longer connected to the grand sweep of it, to history, that is His Story, which is also our story.

It’s the other day and we laugh about it, Jon and myself, because we had just been fishing at the bayfront and this is what got us on the topic of tattoos. Jon wants a tattoo of a fish. Of course getting a tattoo isn’t what it used to be. Even people of my own set […]

The scene is a snowy one and there is a bus travelling down the road. And as the bus roars along, these are the thoughts – you can hear them right inside his head – of the traveller aboard. He’s looking, with all his pain and hope too, out the bus window. “All of life […]

Getting married, not to mention being a journalist, in Africa has its cultural quirks, and dangers, as evidenced by the recent strange death of journalist Godwin Chepkurgor, who was apparently just killed by a herd of bull elephants while on assignment for a Kenyan publication. This sort of thing happens in Africa once in a […]

We’re still putting our feet up —it is summer after all – skimming without hurry through Leslie Leyland Field’s book, “Forgiving our Fathers and Mothers.” If you missed the first couple of excerpts, they are here and here. This is Leslie’s reason for writing about all this in the first place, her reason for telling […]

From my last post here, the only thing left to say is that while Jon’s birthday cake was finely decorated, My Bride is very much decorated in another rather beautiful way, with the Order of Canada now, which you know about through this. Yes, it is getting to be a regular question asked of me these days, […]

I was on the phone this morning and got the question – again – ‘so what’s it like being married to someone so decorated?’ I figured the fellow meant this, not the chocolate cake we gave Jon for his birthday party the other day, although it was, I must say, a fine cake, covered in black, red […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, July 19, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It was in the whirlpool at the Les Chater Y when I was congratulated for My Bride’s recent naming into the Order of Canada. The woman, another early-morning swimmer, had read the news in this publication. “Let’s face it,” she said. “You’ve had a role to play in this all. Any woman who wins something like this has to be married to a certain sort of man. If Madame Curie hadn’t been married to Pierre, she’d have been forced to be home barefoot, baking bread.”