You know how you sometimes rundown a mental checklist on your way to work or play? Have I called so-and-so? Have I got all my ducks in order?
This week, on my way from Halifax Airport to deliver an audio-visual presentation at a bookstore in LaHave, Nova Scotia, I suddenly wondered if I’d asked the bookstore proprietor to supply a digital projector for my talk.
“No,” said the LaHave bookstore owner. “We don’t have one.” (more…)
The three of them seemed buried in preparations – arranging the wreath, adjusting their berets, straightening their blazers and ties – and they didn’t notice me approaching with my cellphone camera. Then, suddenly as they stepped to the curb beneath the Menin Gate, a shaft of sunlight caught them.
“Look here guys,” I called out.
Almost in perfect symmetry, the three men – Bill Stewart, Al Thomas and Paul Moffatt – all snapped to attention the way they’ve done thousands of times before. And I clicked the photograph of the three retired firefighters in their parade uniforms, ready to join one of the most poignant Great War commemorations in Europe. (more…)
There I was, a few weeks ago, settling into my TV easy chair on a Saturday night, prepared to watch the Leafs play somebody. And suddenly the screen was awash with picturesque images of rural Ontario. Next, there was a guy in a tractor cab.
“Is this a trailer for a CBC series I haven’t seen?” I asked myself.
Then the same guy was offloading sacks from a flatbed near his barn. And there was a lush soundtrack of orchestral music rising behind him. And I realized this was an advertisement.
“It’s gotta be a beer commercial,” I thought, “because they’re the only sponsors who can afford commercial spots on Hockey Night in Canada.” (more…)
For some, the new year means resolutions, diets, workouts or turning over a new leaf. For me, perhaps because I’m a details person, January means ensuring that household services continue to arrive and that I’m living up to annual commitments. Among them, as usual, I stopped by the Township office to pay the annual licence fee for our dog, Jazz. The clerk said the past few years Uxbridge has contracted that service out to Docupet, an online service in Kingston.
“That’s fine,” I said, “but I’d prefer to pay you.”
“It’s easier if you go online,” she said.
“Maybe, but if I pay you locally, in a way I’m ensuring you keep your job.” (more…)
This week I’ve visited the Uxbridge Music Hall a lot. We were moving staging, lights, props and actors into the facility for performances of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Dec. 13-16. On Monday, as director Conrad Boyce and I opened the front door of the Hall to move a piece of furniture onto the stage, Benny, the custodian, greeted us with a big smile and handshakes.
“Isn’t it great? We don’t have to do this anymore,” and he mimicked avoiding somebody on the sidewalk the way we did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is great,” I agreed. “But we almost have to learn how to deal with people face-to-face all over again.” (more…)
I remember the day I learned what I would do the rest of my life. I received a message from a historical society in the U.S. It described an overseas tour planned for that fall of 2017. Participants would fly to Europe and retrace the wartime steps of Gen. George Patton’s 94th Infantry Division – to halt the Nazi breakout toward Antwerp – a.k.a. the Battle of the Bulge.
That’s where my father served as a medic in the U.S. Army. I needed to experience that tour. But that meant I’d have to quit my position as a journalism professor at Centennial College in Toronto.
“You’ll have to speak to our retirement specialist,” the dean of Centennial’s communication school told me.
I met the specialist in his office a few days later.
“So…” he enthused, “are you ready for retirement?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “I’m not retiring. I’m just going back to where I came from.” (more…)
My wife queued up at the grocery store the other day, she told me. The cashier began tallying her purchases, but then hesitated. She said she wasn’t qualified to process the purchase of beer and had to call on another cashier qualified to check through beer and wine.
“Does it matter that the beer is zero alcohol?” my wife asked.
“Oh, I see,” the cashier said.
And the person next in line at the cash behind my wife piped up, “Mine are zero-alcohol too,” he said.
Is it just our imagination, or has all this talk about the link between alcohol and cancer sparked a sea change in the habits of casual drinkers? (more…)
The room started off sounding pretty rowdy. Many of the regulars had arrived – including Team SMRT, the 74s, Upper Mondolia, the Whatevers and Jan’s Clan – and they’d all begun settling in for Tuesday night’s festivities. A voice on the microphone welcomed everybody to the weekly gathering. And the room went quiet, everybody listening to what the MC was about to say. She paused and read:
“Question No. 1,” she announced. “What fictional doctor lives in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh?” (more…)
The first time she went missing, the rest of the family nearly went crazy with anxiety. We searched in neighbouring yards, down the block, around most of the village. We were beside ourselves with guilt and worry that we’d never get her back. We even put up signs:
“She’s three. She’s friendly. She’s been missing for several days,” our handmade poster proclaimed. “She answers to Topsy.”
She was my family’s first real household pet, a three-year-old collie, the spitting image of TV’s Lassie. And because we knew everybody around us felt the same way about their family pets, we figured she’d be returned to us really quickly. But that was the early 1960s. (more…)
The sign always hung in my father’s office, right over the spot where he worked. That happened to be just above his typewriter (in a time before computers) where Dad pumped out many millions of words in a life-long writing career. But Dad had installed this sign over his work space for those days at his office in the basement of our house when maybe the spirit to actually put fingers on keys occasionally eluded him or when he periodically felt unmotivated.
“There’s only one way to become a writer,” the sign read, “by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”
My father, Alex Barris, wrote probably a thousand radio, television and movie scripts, hundreds of columns for newspapers and periodicals, scores of screenplays and at least half a dozen books at that typewriter in his basement office. And I frankly doubt that he ever needed encouragement, coaxing or cajoling to put the seat of his pants on the seat of his chair. (more…)