July 30, 2020 – Edmonton Airport As a child I thought the Arabic term for Lebanon was “the Balaad.” That’s what my parents called it whenever they fondly remembered their life before Canada, before I was born. This other world, as they described it, was somehow a more difficult place, yet culturally superior. I was […]
Three summers ago, I took the Greyhound from Vancouver to a family gathering in Winnipeg with my two-year-old son. When I mentioned to friends that I was taking the bus, they were surprised. With a toddler? Was it safe? Did the passengers stink? The choice wasn’t difficult. My partner and I didn’t own a car. […]
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 […]