When Craig died five years ago today he could not have ordained that his memory would loom large during this week each year as the award in his name is presented at today`s Convocation ceremonies of United Theological College. He would not have chosen, for Mom`s sake at least, to die so close to his [...]
This was the last photograph I took on Sunday before going ass-over-tea-kettle into the waters of the Tay River’s Grant’s Creek at Allan Mills. I then walked across the arched, stone bridge I’ve photographed on other occasions to get to the other side of the creek. In order to get a springtime perspective on the [...]
It was on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen’s March 17 “Saturday Observer” section. The paper sat on a table beside Mom’s comfy chair, where she keeps anything she wants to pass along to me. She knows that, like Jamie Hubley, whose passing touched me so deeply, hockey stories wouldn’t normally need to be on [...]
by kenngc Click on the pic for the complete album. There’s a story to go with the final handful of pictures from Allan’s Mill, one of my favourite spots. As I walked along the banks of the creek, walking backwards mind you so as to get the view I was looking for, I fell flat [...]
This Sunday, yes April Fools Day, would have been my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. I last saw him when the whole family gathered in Perth to mark his seventy-fifth, within months of his first stroke. It was a very happy occasion, given the warning scare we had experienced when he was sick briefly earlier in the [...]
View Full Album I am mindful, on this Father’s Day, that I do not have many photographs of Thomas Arnold (“Arnie”) Chaplin. (The additional ones I do have are wedding party shots with people who might not wish to be published.) However my memory informs me of many more, in safe-keeping with Mom, from the [...]
Mr. G’s eye exam has been changed again, maybe for the last time, so that the antagonist, though dead for more than a decade, might only be identified by his last initial and the responsibilities he held. (Anyone familiar with the school at the time does not need to have him named.) I’m doing this [...]
The month of May is one tinged with melancholy for members of my family. On May 4, 2002 my father dropped dead in his garden which, for him, could not have been a more suitable place. Yet he was only seventy-five, a birthday celebration only a few weeks earlier for which the entire family had [...]
It seemed, in hindsight, to be less of a political rally, such as go on during an election campaign, and more of a small-town welcome to a Prime Minister. It might well have been both. On the lawn in front of a specially-built stage across from the band-shell, between beautiful Stewart Park and the stately [...]
David Letterman, noting Yoko Ono’s 78th birthday last week, joked that she celebrated by breaking up The Jonas Brothers. Back in the twilight of sixties, perhaps early seventies, a much-appreciated Christmas gift (namely for my older brother Craig but which the rest of us took full advantage of) was a record player. Not just any [...]
This is Bell Let’s Talk Day. Multiple Olympic medallist Clara Hughes, lead spokesperson for the campaign, was on CTV News in Toronto today. From among the calls she fielded came this articulate gem, “To kill the pain too often means to kill oneself.” However, and this was Clara’s message, help and hope are available to [...]
Despite impressive hits from Google, I didn’t like the shape and tone of an argument presented here yesterday, ostensibly against PM Harper’s latest cynical Senate appointments but really a tirade against someone not named (yet) so I’ve removed it. I take my leave of Toronto for the holidays and go to my family’s ancestral home [...]
