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…

My medium, my element where I come alive is under water. Earth grounds me, particularly when running; the latter feeds my soul as well as my body. Anything that defies gravity or is at any height scares me witless. As a boy, I prided myself on how long I could hold my breath underwater or how many lengths of a pool – likely more or maybe less than one length – I could travel before surfacing. Swimming on top of water was of little interest, a means to an end. Diving for objects at the bottom of a pool or lake was far more alluring. In university, playing intramural, underwater…