tumblehome

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. 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 near Simcoe, Ontario. Nowhere was the feeling of being on the farm more richly described than in these lines from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, Fern Hill: And as I was…

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…

My father’s medium, the element wherein he came alive was air. His passion was flying. His achieved rank in the Royal Canadian Air Force was flight lieutenant, equivalent to captain or lieutenant in contemporary armed forces terminology. My dad never knew or met his father, Lorance Thomas Morrow because my grandfather enlisted in the army, fought, and was killed in the First World War in 1917 never making it home to see his new-born son. In turn, my dad enlisted with the RCAF sometime after the outbreak of World War Two. My father would have been in his mid-20s when he enlisted and subsequently fought in the War, a fact…

My musings about life and meanings in my life and the lives of others often takes me home, tumbling sometimes. Phil Collins’ Take Me Home – its syncopated, back-beat rhythm and his lyrics – tell me he can’t remember, whereas I hunger to re-member, put my breath back and hone my memories into a sharper perspective. Mostly I see, in my mind’s eye, events, people, concepts, moments…flashes of elements that shape how I think and feel about this miracle that is life. And so for this, my first tumblehome blog, what lures me and has been calling my attention for some time is this image of my mother and her…