I grew up in a lower-middle-class western Canadian home with a limited haircut budget for male children—zero, to be precise—which meant a tension-filled hour for me and my four younger brothers whenever our father brought his Sears Craftsman thirteen-piece barber kit out of the closet, the one that claimed on the box to contain “all […]
I was eighteen when I heard Margaret Atwood tell an interviewer that none of the details of daily life in her patriarchal dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale—the militarized religious state, the religiously-prescribed and ritualized rape, the policed pregnancy, the enforced prostitution, the absence of basic human autonomy—were made up. These, Atwood asserted in her deadpan, deal-with-it […]
I stood under a cloudless sky near the peak of Mont Fort, at Verbier, Switzerland, staring at the glaciers of Grand Combin, which shone like starched sheets. Mont Fort is one of the steepest ski runs in Europe. Most of the people who came up on the tram went back down on it. My friend […]
Pop music remains amongst the most accessible and inclusive cultural conversations because, for the past half-century, it hasn’t really changed. In 2020, for example, I Think We’re Alone Now took Tommy James and the Shondells to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and then twenty years later, with negligible updating, Tiffany to #1. Then there’s […]
In a recent stroll in the woods, I came across a leafy bramble loaded with small dark fruit. Recognizing they were blackberries, I extended my arm and grabbed a handful. Moments later, I encountered a straight but flexible tree branch. I fashioned a fishing pole and dipped the hook into the nearby pond. Three quick […]
I was a third-grader when I first entered a psychiatrist’s office. The prelude to my visit was a skipping lesson I gave my brother, who was in first-grade at the time, one morning before school. Not skipping as in using a skipping rope, but the locomotive kind in which you lift your knee and hop […]
A friend and I recently walked into a dark cave-like room full of young, cool men and women. Most seemed to have tattoos, piercings, and smartphones. We didn’t fit in, though it wasn’t at all uncomfortable. We were at the nightclub/bar to attend a Toronto lecture series called Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture series with […]
One typical Monday morning in September, Londoners narrowly avoided collision with each other in their rush-hour dance through Paddington Station. Navigating the crowd, I slipped on the slick marble floor as I headed for my train to Somerset. A drop of water splashed against my face and I looked up. It was raining inside the […]
That was as much as Ellen could get out of Yolanda, hovering above her in bathroom, holding back her golden hair while she retched. “Maybe you should stay home,” she said. Yolanda lifted her face, pink with misery, out of the toilet and let Ellen wipe it with a cool damp cloth. “I can’t skip […]
A very personal look at the unexpected evolution of marriage … and divorce