Recent Columns

We work this out in fear and trembling. This is what he said to me. We work it out daily. He said this on the first day we met. He sat there, large, across from me, feet firmly on the ground, voice rich and steady. He told me he rolled out of bed every morning […]

As the story goes, she wanted to marry and she wanted to travel too, so she married a man who had a gazillion stamps in his passport — only to discover that he never wanted to move again. This is how it goes with so called Third Culture Kids, or TCKs, the term coined to describe […]

It’s a strange world, especially here on what is, for all I know, my deathbed. It’s malaria and I’m dreaming. Or maybe in the fight of it I’m actually hallucinating. I see a friend, a writing mentor, a bear of a man, the sort you can disappear into when he hugs you. He’s an American […]

It’s the height of summer but we’re at the rink anyway. It’s our last skate of the season. Liz is flying across the ice with her golden hair streaming behind. Hannah (her black Ugandan locks jammed under a black hockey helmet) is also going round and round, as is Jon, smile from ear to ear, telling […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, August 17, 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It’s a strange world, especially here on what is, for all I know, my deathbed. It’s malaria and I’m dreaming. Or maybe in the fight of it I’m actually hallucinating. I see a friend, a writing mentor, a bear of a man, the sort you can disappear into when he hugs you. He’s an American who’s never been to Africa, no not once. But he’s somehow made it over the ocean and through the walls to kneel at my Ugandan bedside. ­“What are you doing here?” I ask. “I’m praying for you.”

It apparently came on the back of a friend’s truck down the Ontario highway from Hamilton to London. It was the day My Lovely Bride and I married. The item was an electric piano, the sort that, at that time, wasn’t so small. Even though I was handling most of the details of our wedding reception on that summer day, […]

(Christian Week - August 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It was a summer Sunday and communion was finished and so was the sermon and they stood, both of them, old and gray and a little stooped. And we all clapped for some time to say 'congratulations' and 'thank you,' too. This, in a Hamilton church, a moment to show that even after 60 years of marriage you can still stand as man and wife and smile at the world, and smile with the sort of lines that show old things like truth all over your face. It's something to think about as marriage hits hard times.

The conversation with my so mature 8-year-old boy went like this: Jon: Dad, when are you going to tell Hannah about the birds and the bees? Me: When she’s ready. Jon: When will that be? Me: When she’s ready. Then shortly later, the conversation, now with Jon and Hannah, all of seven, went like this. […]

The problem, he told me, is that not once was there any reference to sin or repentance and the entire message was so watered down that it was made simply too irresistible for the lukewarm to refuse. This, at a church picnic. The lament was from a minister who I have known for a long […]

(Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 26, 2013) Love has always been one of those loaded words, one that means everything and nothing at the same time because we can love the latest Bond movie or country music or summer rain, but this has nothing to do with summer love at, say, a July wedding, or the love that shows on the faces of a couple who have sailed through thick and thin.

(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 26, 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ Love has always been one of those loaded words, one that means everything and nothing at the same time because we can love the latest Bond movie or country music or summer rain, but this has nothing to do with summer love at, say, a July wedding, or the love that shows on the faces of a couple who have sailed through thick and thin. This is what it was the other day, an anniversary of 55 years. The man smiled and looked me in the eye and told me that he knew from the first time he saw her. “She stepped off the train and I heard a voice: ‘This is the woman you’ll marry.’”

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and a time for many things under the sun. This is how the poet in Ecclesiastes put it. He was talking about time in the sense of what happens in it, that is the type […]

My daughter Liz is a rather astute little 10-year-old and I can’t help but show off her writing every once in a while. Here’s some verse she just wrote about change called Ancient People of the World. Ancient People of the World My friends, my friends, we gather. So much to talk about, history. We […]

It’s the other day, Friday, and I’m saying goodbye to my children’s cousin, the little girl of My Bride’s sister, a bright little six-year-old with wavy brown hair and the best manners. ‘Why thank you for asking,’ she would say all week whenever I asked how her day was, her day at the camp that […]

‘This is how you do it, she said, and she put some water in the sink and got some soap and took it all in her hands and showed me how to wash my shirt in the sink. The shirt was short-sleeved and striped blue and white, horizontally, and the sink was in the attic […]