“One day it all falls away and you are alone”…

I used to be a voracious reader. During the endless summers when I was 11, 12, 13, I’d walk down to the local library every week. I’d get out seven books and read one a day, sprawled on a lawn chair in the backyard, or propped with my back against the...

Don’t You Forget

There’s a certain kind of emotional upheaval that has absolutely no sense of scale. It’s incoherent, both random and hardwired. I have no idea what to do with it except write about it. My daughter’s heading down to the Eaton Centre this weekend with...

Rise and Shine

My elder daughter is 13.5. When I was her age, I was obsessed with taking things in. I wrote often, and copiously, in my journal—about a lot, but especially about The Feeling. This was the sensation that struck me when the wind was high, or the guy I liked waved to me...

Estragon Supplement

We’re waiting for a storm, here in over-sensitive, whingey, smelling salts-requiring Toronto. Yes: there will be SNOW! Radar and every single local news station say so. And we prepare, mostly by gathering in each other’s cubicles and talking about how...

Ave atque vale, Ronald Watts

I struggled, before and during the writing of this. Ron didn’t want anyone except a chosen few to know about him. And yet I’m writing this. He’s dead, so I can. Hence the struggle. Part of this is selfishness, because this is a story I want to tell....