The Children’s Mother has returned from Tanzania which means, besides the addition of some fresh flowers in the house, I can focus anew on what it is that I do. When you discover what this is, please tell me. Ah, yes, it’s answering questions. From the kids. Interesting questions. A full-time job, for sure, but […]
Answering the tough questions Read More »
The last note in this space was that life is a gift and life is a mystery, both clichés and both true. The other truth, as true as the sun rising every morning, is that we’re not made to live forever. The children’s Papa, their grandfather on their mother’s side, said this to me right around
The hands of the old and the young Read More »
We were sitting around the couch the other evening and Liz, all 12 years of her, like she was pulling it out the empty space around her, said the sort of thing that can linger in a room a lifetime. “You know,” she said. “World War II was just awful.” I suspect she meant that
The boy in the striped pajamas, and a 12-year-old girl Read More »
It was a view from a porch or two but there was a third porch I sat on right around the same time, this front porch at home where I grew up, an old manor in Niagara that dates back to the 1870s, where Opa Froese, that is my father, still lives. It was my
Yesterday’s stories. Grandparents. Beauty deep inside. Read More »
So over the weekend Hannah and I did a little dance because Hannah wanted to dance in her new birthday bathrobe, this during an intermission of The Sound of Music, the first time all five of us sat down to watch it together. Maybe Hannah danced too because we’re still basking in the glow, that
The hills are alive with the sound of mystery Read More »
One day, maybe, science will measure just what exactly happens to the deepest part of our beings when we go home — what happens not just to our emotions, but what happens physiologically in our organs, in our cells, in our very molecular makeup when we go to the place where we belong. I don’t mean
I’m on the elliptical at the club and the news clip shows a bloody and ugly scene from yet another suicide bomber from one of those places that is and isn’t so far away. And there’s a man who stands out from the crowd, who somehow looks toward the camera, a bearded and rotund man
A father can be many things Read More »
My wife is back in two days. Yeah. Thanks for reading during the last couple of weeks. I did hire pollsters to query my many, many, many, many readers, and found that 2.39 (with a .00000000623 per cent margin of error) of you want me to continue. With this sort of overwhelming support, I do
My dad the single dad Read More »
