For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased. ~From The Story, by Michael Ondaatje Gather them together. Loners, stoners, freaks and poets – meet me on the edge of town, the place where Neil Young says the… Read more »
Finding myself without wheels one year, and being desperately afraid of flying, I took the Greyhound red eye trip from Vancouver to Calgary in the middle of winter. Anyone who has ever taken one of these classic overnight milk-runs knows that a trip like this feels like it takes roughly the same amount of time… Read more »
When young love finally arrived, she was thirty years and fifteen minutes late. Ordinarily, that last fifteen minutes would have cost the candidate the chance of a job. But this time was different. She was wearing a cobalt blue suit. Her hair was tied back and the colour of honey. She smelled like the flowers… Read more »
Back when I was growing up in England, I was one of those sickly, pimply, anemic looking children who seem to catch every form of contagion going around. Bronchitis, walking pneumonia, measles, mumps, whooping cough, scurvy, ptomaine, toe jam, beri beri, yellow fever – you name it, and it’s a pretty good bet that I… Read more »
There are a couple of things that are apt to send me, from time to time, into a bit of an existential tailspin about where I’m at in life. The first of these is the habit I have of randomly reading the obituaries of people I have never met. I don’t know why I do… Read more »
I’m sorry, but we can’t come to the phone right now because we are in the backyard sitting in the shade of a pear tree reading Treasure Island. Because we are across town eating hummus and listening to accordion music. We are watching an enormous beetle clacking about inside the shade of our table lamp…. Read more »
Some of the survivors have moved into the house where you and Tom used to live. They arrive almost daily in groups of twos and threes. Some of them are in the house, and others are living in tents in the yard. I was out in the field picking up stones and dead crows yesterday,… Read more »
When Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, The Rite of Spring, premiered in Paris in 1913, its powerful, tumultuous and dissonant celebration of pagan sensuality was met with a stunned and horrified reaction from the audience. Polite silence rapidly transformed into a near-riot of booing, hissing and projectiles aimed at the stage. Today, this jarring and cathartic… Read more »
A few years ago I was in Van Dusen Botanical Gardens with my daughter. Despite the fact that it was a perfect Autumn day, bright and crisp, and I was immersed in a place of tranquility and beauty, my soul was troubled. I had just encountered what seemed at the time a calamitous upheaval in… Read more »
At the age of thirty-seven She realized she’d never ride Through Paris in a sports car With the warm wind in her hair -From The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Marianne Faithful I – Thirty-seven Trapped. Slowly, inevitably the understanding creeps in: I will never be able to afford a house in this city; this crappy… Read more »