Recent Columns

Why you should always vote, exasperated or not

She was a neighbour crossing the street and we like to have a conversation with each other here and there and I rolled down the window of the van. “Hey. How ya doin?” I said. “Did you vote?” “No,” she said, with a rather exasperated expression. “No. I can’t be bothered. I can’t be bothered […]
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Courage and sacrifice will never be forgotten

It was the nightly news and she wore a large summer hat and a smile on her face while she sat in a golf cart and talked to the cameras, but there was pain too, we all know that, because her husband was murdered last summer. And while the wheels of justice turn slowly to […]
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It’s a nutty world. Now giddy up, horsey.

It’s a nutty world, nutty when it comes to fear, which is why I just had to look at eight pages of permission forms so my son, Jon, could go on a class trip to a local pool. His Grade 3 class goes once or twice a year. So, eight pages. Five (5!) of my […]
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Jim Morrison’s grave and the cold, muddy earth

Something from the other side of this blog, from thomasfroese.com, this commentary here, or below, originally published in Christian Week, some thoughts from Paris, from the Père Lachaise Cemetery. It’s one of the world’s most remarkable graveyards, a solemn place that we as a family recently took some time for on our way home from Africa. + Known by our […]
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Oh, there’s an election? Sorry, the hockey game is on.

Today our family’s hat is tipped to the rouge blanc et bleu, the Montreal Canadiens for a marvelous playoff run, one that brought plenty of people in this country together in excitement and nostalgic memory also. Our annual spring transition from Africa – and it is a transition – was made all the more enjoyable […]
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Headline: Airliner filled with mothers vanishes. No, really – where have all the mothers gone?

The country knows when a mother loses one child for a short while during an outrageous hospital abduction. And the entire world knows when an airliner leaves Malaysia and then vanishes mysteriously. But what about when mother upon mother lose their newborns? Or an airliner full of mothers goes down? It happened yesterday. Did you hear? And today. […]
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“Dad, can I wear my skates to bed?”

A boy can love many things – pizza, pulling his sister’s hair, climbing trees – but my boy loves few things more than putting on his hockey skates. He’d wear them to bed if allowed and has already asked, wanting to follow, apparently, what Guy Lafleur did as a boy – he wore his skates […]
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Known by our love ( … or the things we’re against?)

(Christian Week – Friday, May 23, 2014) PARIS ✦ Dead rock stars aren’t the only idols to worship out there. Houses and cars, retirement portfolios, relationships and sex—or, well, religion—can be equally distracting in a fallen world looking for things as nebulous as truth and meaning. But come to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and see for yourself the cult of rock-star celebrity. In this gothic and tumbledown resting place of some of the world’s best-known artists—Chopin, Bizet, Proust, Oscar Wilde to name a few—Jim Morrison’s grave is by far the most visited.
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The joke’s on us. We’re all living to die. In the meantime … the miracles

We had to pee in the bottle the other day, all of us for our annual check-up and vaccinations against death in Africa. I mean we did this one at a time, in privacy in different bottles, of course, and it wouldn’t even matter that much except for the fact that the doctor soon after […]
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Boogeyman paranoia where shadows lurk at every corner

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, May 17, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ There was a time when a neighbourhood school was a place that nourished your soul. It wasn’t that long ago. I’m not that old. You’d go to play, say, baseball on Saturday morning or, in winter, hockey on the rink that your Grade 6 teacher lovingly flooded outside the row of windows where even the good students looked out to daydream. It was a time when you’d walk to school every morning. By yourself. Even when the school bully – her last name was, fittingly, Greenall – went the same way. It somehow even brought out courage that you never knew you had.
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A Canadian boy and his game. (And by the way, I’m going to @#$%^& kill you.)

This is about a boy who loved to play hockey. He played in rinks, sure, when he could, even outdoor rinks, but more so just on the road, hour after hour, with or without his buddies, often until dark, calling the play-by-play, shooting, scoring, winning with the crowd going wild, of course, at least until […]
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A job that’s not for the faint of heart

Liz: Dad, I have a riddle for you. Okay. Liz: You have to guess what it is. Uhuh. Liz: This is a job. It’s a job where you work all the time. You can never get any rest from it.  You just keep going all the time. Right. Liz: Yeah, it’s 24-7. Especially at first. You have to work […]
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The valley of the shadow of death

The two neighbour boys are 8 and 5 and it looks like their father is about to die. It’s this morning. My kids and I walk to school with them and the boys’ mother. The 8-year-old is in Hannah’s class. What can you say? + It’s yesterday evening and we, Mother and I, that is Jean […]
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Hey, let’s lock the fun out of school!

There was a time when a neighbourhood school was more than a place you simply went for classes and drudgery, when it was more than a place of fear. My own boyhood experience was that we kids would go to school after hours and on weekends to – imagine – play, say, baseball on a […]
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Midnight in Paris

There was Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, of course. We biked through the heart of Paris on Day One, four hours in the morning, anther four in the evening, enough to give the kids a few blisters before we finally got back to our Montmartre flat just past midnight. That was […]
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