In September, 2018, my lovely wife Nancy and I attended the Oneida Fair with two of our granddaughters who would have been nine and seven at the time. We may have been a tad conspicuous. Nancy and my granddaughters tend toward black Irish paleness, and I present as a ruddier Irish/Scotch type, but there could […]

Months ago, before COVID, I bumped into a man I’ll call John. He was what my mother would have called “an old high-school chum.” We began reminiscing, and he suggested the teachers we’d had at West Elgin District High School (WEDHS) weren’t all that good. His comment jolted me. My mind flashed to the past. […]

According to the 2007 Oxford Canadian Dictionary, a senior citizen is “an elderly person, especially a person over 65.” And elderly is defined as “rather old; past middle age.” By the time this column is published, God willing, I will have crossed from “past middle age” into the freedom-70 category. It’s not easy to admit to this three-score-years-and-ten rite […]

Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying, “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” It sounds like Churchill, fearless and funny, but apparently he never said it. And it’s […]

In Crinan, the Scotch Presbyterian farming community where I was raised, people displayed a variety of talents – singing, piano playing, humourous readings, bagpipe playing in kilts, poetry recitals and so on – during what we called programs, often in the church basement. A hit at these programs was a recurring series of skits dubbed […]

A page 3 headline in the National Post recently announced: “Canada’s high school world champs show how debate is done.” The sub-head said, “Proof that future of argument isn’t bleak”. In our social-media-obsessed and cancel-culture age, this is good news. The beauty about organized debates is that it doesn’t matter what you believe. Both sides […]

When I was young, if I had heard that somebody’s grandmother had passed away, I might have felt sad, but I also would have thought, “She lived a good, long life” and moved on to more pressing concerns like acne raising its ugly red head again, or how to call a girl from a rotary […]

Ross Lunn, who’s married to my first cousin, June, is living proof that COVID-19 is no laughing matter. On June 7, his 71st birthday, he emerged from St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital, smiling and waving. Thanks to COVID-19, he had spent 70 days at STEGH, many of them with a breathing tube down his throat. […]

Just after Christmas, Rick, a man I see once in a while socially, told me that he had been working at Winter Wheat before it had unfortunately lost most of its buildings in a fire. I asked Rick what he had been doing there and he said, “Whatever they need. Mostly welding on some of […]