Earlier this year, when I was in South Africa, I was sitting with my mom, talking, when she mentioned that she had been cleaning out some more of my dad’s things (on the 28th it will be six years since he passed away, and on the 1st of May it will be his birthday) and
April 15, 2014. Back to winter. Snow coating the grey, bare, reluctant magnolia. Bleakly blowing down Marchmount Road. Coating cars and rooftops. Wind-chill of minus 8. This long, dull, heartless season.
Would you believe it, the first, tiny, beautiful crocuses – the first bulbs Rob and I had ever planted, last autumn – have just made their pale appearance, against the garden wall, in the shade of the still-to-blossom magnolia. May they give you as much pleasure as they do me!
Today is the the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the American Civil Rights Act – an action long, long overdue, much delayed, not least by Lyndon Johnson – the same man who, as President, finally fought, cajoled, and won over enough votes to carry this epochal legislation through, and signed the legislation with a
I am sitting outside, on the front porch, with a glass of red wine on the table beside me, smoking a cigar. It is my last Cuban, from the stash I bought last year at the Indian smokes shop, up near Muskoka. Not bad, eh? It’s almost summer. That pale mild light, the bare trees
I think I may have helped in last night’s crushing defeat of Pauline Marois’ Parti Quebecois, and with it the the shelving, for another decade at least, of all talk of another referendum on Quebec independence, along with the total demolition of the PQ’s Orwellian Charter of So-Called Values: the crappiest kind of identity politics,
I can’t say if I ever really saw a cobra, down near the ash-heap at the bottom of the garden, or if being told that there were cobras living down there, that I should beware of them, was enough to make me think that I had seen one. Also, no doubt, my reading of The
Optimism is unwrapping your bike from its winter cover, pumping up the tyres and cycling 25 minutes downtown to work, when the maximum temperature for the day is supposed to be around 10 degrees, there is a stiff cold wind blowing, and Spring is just a hope, not a promise. I was optimistic yesterday, and
