Grade 2: 1973, Princess Margaret Elementary School, Winnipeg, MB. Teacher: Mrs. Soderstrom. I was added to Grade 2 quite shortly after starting Grade 1. Suddenly, I was with kids who were a year older than me and had been a cohort for a few years already. Even though we’d all been at the same school,... Continue Reading →
Book of Treasures: Kindergarten and Grade 1 – red, yellow, green
Kindergarten: 1972, Princess Margaret Elementary School, Winnipeg, MB. Teacher: Mrs. MacIntyre. This was the age of full-day kindergarten, complete with blackboards, reading time, nap time, arts and crafts. I remember lots of the basics - letters, numbers, chalkboard, colours, and construction paper. For those last two, I have one especially clear memory - frustration. We... Continue Reading →
Lists of 2016
Things that made me sad (a long list this year): Umberto Eco Prince David Bowie Alan Rickman Fort MacMurray Orlando, Turkey, Baghdad, Bangladesh Leonard Cohen Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds Things that irritated me: Christy Clark (a three-peat) Donald Trump and the entire GOP cabal Stanford rapist Brexit, especially Nigel Farage Pokemon Go Things that made... Continue Reading →
Item #16: Book of Treasures
Another digression from the rule about books, this book is more of a compendium of objects than an actual book. Kept within the suitcase of objects, the Book of Treasures is a scrapbook of sorts, an organized way of capturing things from school years. My mom started this for me in kindergarten, and I picked... Continue Reading →
Item #15: Book of Things
While my “rules” for this list of objects proscribes books, I find I will have to make some exceptions, for this book and a few others, because they align with the spirit of the project: things with no value beyond my attachment, objects that require an explanation as to “why keep this”. So I hereby... Continue Reading →
Item #14: Suitcase
This is an object of objects, both symbolic and practical. Like a tickle trunk or Mary Poppins' travel bag, this old suitcase is a box of dreams and memories, represented by things old and older. Although apocryphal, my memory tells me that this suitcase once belonged to my great-grandmother - my mom's dad's mom, known... Continue Reading →
Theatre on Film
As many who know me know, I'm a great fan of both theatre and film. I'm also a fan of lists. One recent insomniac night, I began a list of best films about theatre. I was able to construct (and remember the next morning) a list of ten, and so here they are, for your... Continue Reading →
Item #13: Cow-er Pot
A childish object from my adulthood, this little item is reminiscent of my family’s tendency to wordplay, extensive and repetitious wordplay. At some point, a series began relating to cows. You know the ones: the udderly ridiculous, the moo-re the merrier, the gulli-bull (stolen from Bugs Bunny, that one). I don’t remember how it started,... Continue Reading →
Tell me another one…
Today is Tell-a-Story Day. It is also what would have been my Pop’s 69th birthday. So it seems highly appropriate to tell a story about him. There are many to choose from, some quirky and delightful, some not so much. Sometimes, when I’d tell him something strange or fantastic, or if I attempted a fib,... Continue Reading →
Item #12: Carabiner and nut
A few years after first moving to Vancouver, I started some new hobbies: camping, hiking, and, rock climbing. The first two I still do, albeit only occasionally and not very well. Not unlike the third one, which I did more frequently (and only marginally better) but gave up after a few years, once appreciating my... Continue Reading →
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