Recent Columns

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.”

By the time I came home that day there were already six vehicles in front of the tiny condo that is our neighbour’s – an ambulance, a fire truck, two Emergency 911 vehicles and two paramedic trucks – but they could have brought every life-saving unit this side of the moon and it wouldn’t have mattered […]

I had given my large German flag to my father some time ago, a gift for him to, with a Canadian flag, run up the flagpole that for many years stood by a tree I would climb as a boy at our home in Niagara. But it never made from Dad’s home-office to that pole, and, […]

It was the Ungame and this time the question was for Jon: “Describe your father in three words.” “Big nose,” he started out. The other two words, I somehow blocked out. Then I had to answer the same question about my own father. “Old. Tough. German.” Which is what Jon will be facing, someday. So, careful son. […]

It’s Hannah’s turn now for a few days of Daddy Time and we’re up on a lake near Owen Sound, just my daughter and myself, swimming and gaming and doing plenty of things and then there is this moment. It’s last night and it’s something to remember because Hannah, who is just 8, wants to read from her new […]

We’re in the van on a long drive and we’re talking about being loved and just what on earth this means. Liz is only 11, but she’s there, she can talk about it and engage and we get on the topic of Mom, who we both love and who is also, if you didn’t know, […]

They don’t say it in schools in Ontario anymore, of course, but in the day, they did, we all did, day after day, year after year, right alongside the playing of God Save the Queen, the prayer that is The Prayer, the one that is called the Lord’s Prayer. By the time I finished my […]

Some weeks ago I introduced this book, Forgiving our Fathers and Mothers, in this space, a book by Leslie Leyland Fields that is recently released. Leslie is a writing colleague I met during while studying in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Seattle Pacific University. Leslie knows first-hand the great importance […]

It was Father’s Day Sunday morning and I was speaking to a local gathering about fatherhood and forgiveness. This was a surprise to even me because my own father was perfect. He doesn’t need forgiveness. As was his father, perfect. Never went wrong. Never had a selfish thought. No, not once. And his father too. Always […]