To-day, the road all runners come,Shoulder-high we bring you home,And set you at your threshold down,Townsman of a stiller town.~ A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young I saw his muscles move, marveled at them, as though in living bas relief, every day for more than 10 years. Temba lived in his body and I lived in wonder and awe of how he moved. And greatest of all, I was privileged to move with him, to run with a being who exuded grace, power, fluidity, and just the sheer joy of movement. He wasn’t about how or why, rather he was all about what; he knew his own magnificence;…

The first page of text in W.P. Kinsella’s pastoral, fantasy novel, Shoeless Joe, begins with two of the most well-chosen words relative to the theme of a novel, “My father….” On the surface, the novel is about building a baseball diamond, in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and recapturing some of the players from the notorious Chicago Black Sox team of 1919, the year 8 members of that team were convicted of trying to fix the world series’ outcome. One of the 8 men was renowned athlete, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, so named after he removed his ill-fitting cleats to play in his baseball stockings early in his career. Voices…

My high school, Sir Adam Beck Collegiate Institute in London, Ontario, was very special to me and to a host of students over many years. My family moved to the city from Exeter, after my father’s heart attack and retirement from the Air Force, just as I was entering grade 9. I remember he offered us, my 2 sisters and me, the choice of staying in Exeter or moving to the big city in order for him to join an independent, general insurance company. We chose the city. My delight in previous trips to London was going through the village of Arva on the sign for which someone had hand-painted…

A good segment of my growing years were spent in the presence of tobacco. My father was a 1.5- to 2-pack per day smoker and smoking appeared to be ubiquitous in the southwestern Ontario of the 1950s and 1960s. Everyone seemed to know smoking wasn’t “good for you” and yet there wasn’t either the overwhelming evidence against tobacco use or the stigma attached to it then as now. In late high school, I remember having to do a health project on smoking behaviour; my task was to interview 10 people about smoking; I don’t know if the questions were pre-formed but I do remember there was a raise health-awareness agenda…

In the 1950s, everything was black and white, at least it seemed to be to me. TV was black and white; the test pattern on our television comes to mind, a black and white dartboard-like image, akin to a 45 rpm record encased in a 75 rpm record picture. The Indian-headed (why?) test-card was used, I now know, to calibrate black and white television sets. It seemed to stay on until programming resumed each day. It looked like this: Life choices seemed to be more black and white. One of the aspects of my life that radiated in the colour of warmth was my time spent on my grandparents’ farm…