It’s one of the most compelling wartime stories I’ve ever encountered. And I almost missed it. There I was, up to my eyeballs in other stuff, when I got a call from two acquaintances. Jeremy Van Dyke organizes overseas travel tours and Frank Moore, a retired former banker, collects classic cars.
“Ted, we’ve got to meet,” Van Dyke said on the phone from Cambridge.
“I’m really busy,” I said.
“We’ve got a story you’ve got to tell,” Van Dyke insisted.
We were just peeling off our hockey gear. We were considering a little refreshment after what we thought was a Pyrrhic victory; in others words, we had won our final game of the oldtimers’ tournament, but figured we were out of the running to win the championship in our division. Then, suddenly, in came the tournament organizers – members of the Uxbridge Islanders hockey club – and they were carrying what looked like a box of prizes.
“You guys won!” they told us. “The other team got too many penalties in their last game and you won on points.” (more…)
When I got there, members of our organization, including myself, clustered the meeting chairs into a smaller grouping. It appeared there would be fewer people coming today. Indeed, the president pushed the lectern closer to the chairs since there wouldn’t be as large an audience.
“Not very many here today,” one man said.
“Getting worse too,” said another, noting the recent passing of a friend and regular member. (more…)
I watched an entertaining and important movie at The Roxy Theatre in Uxbridge this past week. It reminded me of a very scary time in the world. It made me wince at the lunacy of the fear mongering. It saddened me to think that people lost their careers (and in some cases their lives) for their political views in a democratic country … in my lifetime. The hero of the story, Dalton Trumbo, summed it up late in the movie.
“No one on either side (of this feud) who survived it, came through untouched,” he said. “The blacklist was a time of evil.” (more…)
They are the most soothing and at the same time perhaps the most mysterious symbols of Christmas. They appear in carols, in the Bible, in Christmas cards and just about every nativity scene one could imagine. They are seldom quoted, but always acknowledged as trusted and worthy guides to a safe and protected place.
“And there were in the same country,” it says in the Book of Luke, “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night…” (more…)
I walked up the front walk in the darkness of the early evening. I quietly put my luggage down on the front step of my parents’ Los Angeles home and knocked on the door. This was a plan my dad and I had hatched weeks before. It was finally coming to pass. He knew I had flown in from Toronto. My mother didn’t know. And this night – just before Dec. 25 – my mom opened the front door. I was the last person she expected.
“What are you doing here?” she shrieked.
“It’s a surprise Dad and I’ve been working on for weeks,” I said, as I hugged her for the first time since the summer. “I just wanted to be home for Christmas.” (more…)
It took us nearly a lifetime to recognize a lifetime. But we finally did it on Sept. 19, 2009. It was a tribute to one of our own – a photographer, innovator and award-winning artist. And in the days afterward, as the person given the distinction of hosting the evening and interviewing the man being honoured, I received two touching written snapshots of the occasion. One came from the subject of the tribute.
“Thank you for your introduction of me,” Christopher Chapman scribbled on a card a few days later. “And thank you for guiding me through that interview.”
The other snapshot came as an email from Christopher’s wife, Glen.
“How thrilling to have a significant number of family, friends and community there,” she wrote. “We’re still in awe of the whole evening.” (more…)
I have listened to it. I have read it. I have asked my friends – both women and men – what they think of it. And because I have a sister, a wife, two daughters and a granddaughter and many female friends of various ages, cultural origins, linguistic backgrounds and religious faiths, in my life, I have agonized over its message.
“Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice … that is not transparent, that is not open and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women?” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in Parliament earlier this year, “That is unacceptable to Canadians, unacceptable to Canadian women.” (more…)
My sister and I made it our business to arrive in the theatre aboard the ship before most other passengers. We loved the idea – especially on rainy days during our Atlantic crossing – of getting the best seats from which to watch the Hollywood movie screened that afternoon, a new one every day.
But this day, when we got to the theatre, most seats were filled with other passengers. The Greek Line ship on which we were sailing – the Olympia, bound from Athens to New York City in the summer of 1964 – had recently stopped at Naples. A large number of Italian passengers – we sensed they were immigrants – had come aboard. Anyway, when my sister and I entered the theatre this day the woman in charge of ship orientation was scolding some noisy children among the immigrant passengers.
“Be quiet!” she scolded with a thick Greek accent. “If you do not behave, I will throw you away!” (more…)
The group gathered as instructed at the end of a long walkway in the Pennsylvania woods near Uniontown. We waited for a few moments and he joined us – complete with ochre-coloured polo shirt and pants and a hardwood walking stick – to begin our tour. He seemed a rather young man to be guiding us through something as prestigious as this Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house. But the moment he began to speak about this place called “Fallingwater,” we sensed we were in the hands of a master tour guide.
“Just the way my arm rests across my walking stick,” he said, placing his forearm at right angles to the stick, “is the cantilever design that Wright used to build this home for Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann.” (more…)