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…

Over the last 4 years, I have become smitten, enchanted by a court sport, pickleball. Elsewhere in my blogs (here), I have traced my immersion in and involvement with court sports throughout my life. In this entry, I want to attempt to express what it is – in its totality and in my sense of plentitude – that captures a human – me – in a web of interest seemingly far out of proportion to the activity itself. As I think about how to put a vocabulary to something that is best experienced rather than described in words, I am reminded of essayist William Hazlitt’s profound 1828 tribute to the…

As Summer 2022 blends delicately into Fall, I have been thinking back to all the jobs I had during my high school and university years. Most students experience the agony and the ecstasy of working at summer jobs. In reflection, I thought of those jobs as kind of in-between real life time with a view toward making as much money as possible to have during my secondary school academic years and to help pay tuition and attendant costs while doing university degree programs. Some of the summer jobs extended into the academic year; however, playing sports limited the amount of time I could commit to working during school time. I…

Bicycle, bicycle, bicycleI want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle I want to ride my bicycleI want to ride my bike…  Queen, Bicycle Race, 1978 (lyrics on original video here) How could I begin a blog about my lifelong fascination with one of humankind’s greatest of inventions, the bicycle, without homage to my favourite Rock band, Queen and its iconic lead singer, Freddy Mercury. There is an element of escapism in the song along with political undertones, and rampant sexism (65 naked female professional models rode around the Wimbledon stadium track on bicycles in the song’s video release). I abhor the sexism. However, like most things in my very limited…

For me, Christmas pretty much always has been steeped in traditions, rituals, and kind of living tableaus of memories anchored in smells, tastes, sounds, and emotions. Growing up Protestant in the United Church of Canada, I did know what Christmas was supposed to mean in the Christian religion. And yet, during the 1950s Christmas was just chock full of secular, celebratory events that seemed to overshadow or subsume the religiosity of the annual event. Perhaps this word cloud encapsulates the admixtures of Christmas-time meanings…. It seemed to me as a boy that the richness of Christmas was akin to this word cloud in that there were so many layers to…