“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.
My own funeral? Imagine. Read More »
According to my phone GPS, two of the three children are gone. I asked their mother about this. “Yes, Number Two and Number Three,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. When did they leave?
“Early summer.”
“Yes, of course. To where?”
“Camp.”
Only Child Number One, the Mac nursing student who’s working in a nearby seniors home, sleeps
The wonder of the great outdoors Read More »
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
Training the cats and loving our neighbours Read More »
I have had an opportunity to see the recent move of 33 rooming-house residents from Toronto to Aylmer, a transfer equated by some as Toronto “dumping its trash” into rural Ontario, through the eyes of personal experience. My family owned and operated a private rest home for the better part of 20 years, with tenants, patients as we called them, very similar to those at the Aylmer home run by Anne Borden Maxwell.
Common decency needn’t be a difficult concept Read More »
(The London Free Press – Saturday, May 10, 1997)
“We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer. Together we exist. And forever will re-create each other.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 20th century French philosopher
ST. THOMAS, CANADA – Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, the one day of the year I’m vividly reminded I have never held my mother, looked into her eyes and told her I love her. I have never offered a soft kiss on her cheek. I have never even given her flowers.
A thorny, red rose Read More »
