By coincidence, two days before my father’s birth date, on 8 January 2025, my cousin Dawn Morrow called to tell us my cousin, Richard “Rick” Morrow died suddenly that day. I was and am sad, taken aback by this completely unanticipated event. Four+ months later, I am called to ‘pen’ this tribute to Rick and my memories of him, our times together, most especially our boyhood days. My sense, in part is that my grief is two-fold: one in major part for Rick and his death at almost 75 years of age (we were born 9 months apart…Rick the younger); and two, for the ‘death’ of my and our youth…

I start this particular blog having just yesterday (28 July 2024) turned another of my life’s corners….I am now 75 years of age – “old,” by most societal standards and for the most part, I feel no different inside than I did at any other age. For some weeks, I have left the draft of this blog with only its exact title that I wanted but I have been unready to write the text. Right now, I know how I want this blog to feel and it’s time to let it unfold, five or six months after posting my last blog. It has not been procrastination. Instead, I have been…

Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic (the three ‘Rs’) have been my companions throughout most of my life. Arithmetic or math fascinated me as a subject for most of my elementary and high school years. Above the blackboards in my classrroms were both alphabet cards – with letters in print and writing – and number cards in dots, 1 dot for the number 1; two dots side-by-side for 2; 3 dots in triangle shape for 3 etc; I actually did addition picturing and finger-imitating those dots…still do, sometimes.The dot-number-representations looked like the top two rows in this workbook: Proudly, I mastered the arithmetic “times’ tables” from sheer memory work – what’s 8…

On 3 November 2011, I sat in rapt awe listening to 83-year-old Maya Angelou, celebrated poet, novelist, educator, dramatist, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist recite some of her marvellous poems and other writings while seated alone on the stage of Alumni Hall at Western University. She held the room like no other person I’d witnessed before or since – save perhaps Nana Mouskouri singing Ave Maria unaccompanied at a Toronto theatre some years before hearing Maya. At the time, Ms Angelou recently had been awarded the Medal of Freedom, the United States highest honour, by the then President Barack Obama. Stately and absolutely unassuming, she seemed frail or tranquil…

As an Undergraduate student, I pursued a double major, in Physical Education (now Kinesiology) and English. I loved literature from poetry to essays to fiction. Thus, Chaucer, Milton, Homer, Shakespeare, Yeats, Conrad, Hemingway, Lee, Blake, Atwood, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald Leacock, Melville, Salinger, Morrison and many, many other writers became part of my learning and yearning. I infused literature almost osmotically. In high school, from grades 9 to 11, we had to take courses in both English literature and English grammar. Curiously, learning grammar rules, sentence structures, parts of speech – nouns, verbs (past tense pluperfect was always a favourite, if only for the euphony of all the vowels and the cacaphony…