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…

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…