travel

Recalling the lost art of hitchhiking

The sunny news from around here is that I recently drove up a regional road with the three Chumbuckets, that is my three teens, to get their COVID jabs. We didn’t see any hitchhikers. Yeah, yeah, who hitchhikes anymore? Still, I like to keep an eye, you know? One summer day – Child No. 1 was with me – we did help one, a middle-aged woman who clamoured into our vehicle with her

FaceTime during African sunrises and other musings

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ This morning I FaceTimed the family. Child Number 1, a musical girl, was having sinus pain. So I looked up there and noticed Taylor Swift and a hall of high school girls having a party. Looks like they’d moved from my daughter’s inner ear. I suggested this may be causing her pain,

Waking up to the shortness of life

I’m gardening with my son, the cool, wet dirt between our fingers. I think of John, my friend, a fellow traveller, recently dead of cancer. He’s still somehow, seen. Still felt.

Funny how that goes, how you often miss what’s right in front of you. Then, when you take the time to pause, the smelling salts of life get you to sit up and do what your mother always told you: pay attention!

We live with our parents, even when we don’t

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, September 17, 2016)

ABOARD KLM FLIGHT 535 TO UGANDA ✦ I’ve always envied people who could watch their mothers grow old.

My mother, I’ve shared previously, passed on when I was in kindergarten. I hadn’t seen her for two years prior to that.

Funny to think of it here, half asleep at 40,000 feet.

Wrong seat. Wrong country. No phone. No mouse.

So, I just filled out Canada’s most recent census, barely beating the May 31 deadline and thus staying out of jail and fulfilling this duty of those of us living in this great country. Before letting me go, the questionnaire asked if I or anyone in the family would mind if all the sordid details …

Wrong seat. Wrong country. No phone. No mouse. Read More »

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