Froese Biography

(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.

(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.”

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, June 15, 2013) It’s 10 years later, dear Elizabeth, and it’s true: Home is where your heart is. You’ve said it now in plain words. Your heart, with your imagination, is in our African home. This is what I know you mean when you say with sorry sadness, “Daddy, the roads are too smooth here. Everything’s too perfect. I’d rather be in a place where the roads are bumpy but more interesting.”

(Christian Week - February 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ There was an old man with a secret. And there was a police cruiser and fire truck and ambulance, large with red lights in the darkness in front of the man’s house. And my children held my hand and looked up and asked me questions. What could I say?

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Once there was a little Ugandan girl who loved school. The girl, who had been an orphan when she was younger, loved learning new things and making new friends and pretty well everything about it, especially the stories. Maybe she loved school all the more because of her years as an orphan, which started in a hospital in Mbarara, in western Uganda, where she was left abandoned when she was barely larger than a cat. There she was given all she ever owned, her name, Hannah.

SANTA FE, N.M. I’m in America’s oldest state capital, in Café Olé, with a sandwich and drink and new hope to never become a moron. Here for some postgrad studies, I’m also enjoying a recent copy of America’s satirical news tabloid, The Onion. “Nation’s Morons March on Washington State,” is its banner headline. Thousands of morons, the Onion reports, recently marched in Washington State thinking they were actually in Washington, D.C.

Old age is not for wimps. We approach it, even from a distance, with trepidation. It’s like your second childhood.

Continents apart, generations and circumstance between them, hands always tell the stories.

As the country’s president seems about to topple, a writer remembers times of living dangerously.

In Berlin, both presidents had watershed moments, and both are revered.

It's hard to know most days what might go through the mind of any three-year-old, let alone an orphan from Africa.

If I have one urgent piece of practical advice for young men today, it's this: Look forward with great hope to the day you marry and have children.

KAMPALA, Uganda✦ So you think you feel good about what unfolded south of Canada’s border on Nov. 4? You should see the party in Africa. There has been dancing in the streets, public holidays and general high-fives from nationals to diplomats to expatriates, all convinced that, as one Ugandan paper put it, “America is reborn.”

Rise in suicide reflects chronic lack of mental health services, especially in Third World.

Good friends, a hospital tragedy, and a lack of toilet paper in public washrooms.