Gift of art

Stained-glass artists Sue Parkinson presents her work as a gift.

A few months ago, my wife and I were invited to a meeting in downtown Toronto. We thought it was about planning our European battlefield tour for next spring. So, we arrived at the Merit Travel agency on schedule. We were then escorted through a rabbit’s warren of office cubicles and into a boardroom and introduced to a member of the agency staff whom we didn’t know.

“This is Sue Parkinson,” we were told. “She’s got something for you.”

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Keepers of the shelves

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School librarians give students more than a Library of Congress number and a table of contents.

I think I remembered discovering it when I was about 11 years old. Until then, I had kind of dismissed it as a remote corner in my life. I think because I happened to be in a brand new school – in a village northeast of Toronto – there were lots of other places I chose to explore first: the baseball diamond, the cafeteria and gymnasium. Then, Mike Malott, my Grade 5 teacher, challenged us.

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