We don’t remember days. We remember moments. ~ Cesare Pavese Terrible moments never to be retrieved, when I said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, failed to do the right thing, or made the wrong choice. Golden-coloured moments when all the angels of heaven crowded about us and everything momentarily was right with the… Read more »
One of the things I most enjoy about autumn living in the city of Vancouver is the way it so often seems to offer a pre-taste of the long-prophesied apocalypse. In the space of a one, three or four week span, for instance, we “Wet Coasters” have experienced a variety of seemingly apocalyptic omens. We… Read more »
When I was very young, I was a staggering toddler drunk on milk and wonder, and lullabies and nursery rhymes. My head was filled with songs that were mine alone. I would lie awake for hours in my crib, so I have been told, babbling in the singsong tongue of lunatics and infants. I was… Read more »
So, let’s see. In the last little while, thanks to surrealistically violent wind and rainstorms, the basement in our family home has flooded twice. The floods have incapacitated the furnace and resulted in seemingly endless hours of work continuing into the wee hours of the morning in ankle-deep water with sponges, buckets, and a faulty… Read more »
Say a part of your brain is destroyed by a car wreck or an aneurysm. Say someone randomly fires a gun from the window of a passing Mercedes, and the bullet rips through your leaded window glass, through your Venetian blinds, and through the bone of your skull. Chances are, what’ll happen to you is… Read more »
One of the great pleasures of my life, from the time I was a small boy, has been the pastime of beachcombing. I am happy to say that the amount of my life frittered away on this activity very likely amounts to thousands of hours. Of course, I have very little in the way of… Read more »
Sometimes amazing gifts come in unlikely ways. Sometimes they fall, like wounded birds, at our feet as we walk down crowded streets. Sometimes they spring out of strange hiding places, like flocks of blackbirds baked in a pie. They can turn up in the form of mysterious messages spelled out in Alphagetti, or exotic currency… Read more »
There is this photograph of me. I’m eleven years old, living in Northern Ontario. My head is poking out of the entrance of a tunnel dug into a snow bank. The tunnel entrance is maybe six feet off the ground. We used to dig these tunnels into the huge mounds of snow piled up on… Read more »
There is this photograph of me. I’m eleven years old, living in Northern Ontario. My head is poking out of the entrance of a tunnel dug into a snow bank. The tunnel entrance is maybe six feet off the ground. We used to dig these tunnels into the huge mounds of snow piled up on… Read more »
My buddy tells a story about the day he saw the towers falling to the ground, the day he knew he would never have kids of his own. Here is how I picture it. He’s in between jobs on the rigs and staying with his sister in her Edmonton apartment. It’s early in the morning,… Read more »