Almost a year ago, I reconnected with Richard Osborne Moyer, a man I hadn’t seen since for close to 45 years. We had worked together as farmhands in the early 1970s, but he met a woman from Tasmania, they married, and then disappeared to that island paradise near mainstream Australia. For those of us of […]

As seniors, we were prepared for giving up things days, months, years before the COVID-19 containment period started. We have expertise the government should tap. Just one example, or maybe it’s three. By the time I entered Freedom 55, then headed for Freedom 65, now possibly Freedom 75, I had given up alcohol, nicotine and […]

As part of my job, I participate in an annual performance evaluation. There’s something reassuring about those words “annual performance evaluation”. They’re in a ballpark with “audited financial statements”.  They roll off the tongue reasonably well, inspire confidence, sound like we are doing things right. And I’m sure we are, especially with the audit. When […]

My dad took a very straightforward approach to sex ed, at least he did with me. Maybe it was the same with my two brothers. I don’t know, since I’ve never discussed the topic with them. In the area of sex and romance, teenaged brothers tend to say terrible things to each other, or at […]

In 2019, the Dolly-verse expanded yet again. One direction it took was the streaming series Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings which stretches and reimagines eight of her most successful songs as stories. “Family, faith, love and forgiveness come to life” according to Netflix promo material. The other is a podcast called Dolly Parton’s America. Here’s the promo […]

The closest I came to the big time was as publisher of The St. Thomas Times-Journal from the spring of 1993 to the summer of 1996. I say “the big time” because it was a daily. The arc of my “career” went from weeklies to a daily, then other things for a few years, then […]

Here’s a favourite saying of a Saskatchewan farmer I worked for in the last century: Ve are too soon olt und too late schmart.” A second-generation Canadian, the son of a German homesteader in the Peace River Country, he usually spoke with no remnant of a Teutonic accent, but the way I wrote that is […]

In early October, we took a call at the office from a man who had googled “St. Thomas foundations”. We had to explain that Elgin – St. Thomas Community Foundation couldn’t help him with his basement wall. While it’s easy to explain what we don’t do, it’s not nearly as simple to give a thirty-second […]

What might the October election mean to us seniors? We could get all riled up (a term no longer applied to teenagers or twenty-somethings; only seniors become riled up) over a perceived threat to our Canada Pension or Old Age Security. Or, I don’t know, just about anything that’s not like it used to be […]

My father belonged to the Greatest Generation, and one of the things that made him great was his firm grasp of child psychology. He knew how easy it was for young’uns to start down wrong paths and end up in strange, fearful woods without the tools or resourcefulness to get out. His solution, as brilliant […]