Marriage

Here’s something for young people. Who you marry will have a larger impact on your life than your career. I’m reading about it in The New York Times and The Atlantic. There’s a new wave of research. Marry and be happy. This is what it says. It’s interesting because it’s easy to assume

Most of us have no clue what we’re doing in these matters of the heart, but if you’re looking, and if it’s any help, here’s something for a summer day. It starts with a fine young lady, Corinna. Little Boy Hopeless, that’s me, hit her with a rock. In Grade 2. Seated behind her, I’d also pull her dark, silky hair. I liked her

Eat. Read. Pray. Fly out the door. School mornings this is the routine in our home. A recent reading was about waiting. Cereal went into empty stomachs. I closed the book and made a comment about slowness. The children’s mother said, “But remember, with God a day is like

In a few days the children’s mother and I are at a marriage retreat. It’s our first since I can’t remember when. The invitation, by fluke, came a day after I was propositioned to have an affair. Now, in this space, I don’t talk much about it, sex and all. This is because Mennonites didn’t even know what sex was until 1985,

So I'm in the middle of Africa dining with a colleague and he declares, "That's great news about Jean. Congratulations!" Out comes his phone and all the details and I'm in the dark and feeling rather sheepish about it. My bride, the children's mother, in her natural humility, hadn't told me of her recent recognition as a Canadian

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, July 29, 2016) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It's a warm and ordinary day, warm and ordinary enough to run around in shorts and bare feet. The children's mother, your babe, that is your bride, is playing your song. The cats are in front and the dog's in back and the kids are doing homework and nothing much is happening, except this song from the piano in the other room, the piece that makes your blood jump every time.

The news of the week is good news. Our family friend, Dorothy, a Ugandan who has filled this space from time to time, had a change of heart and mind and decided, with her husband Patrick, to get herself to a Kampala hospital for a planned caesarian section after all. You’ll recall the great concern […]

(Christian Week - August 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The ring that my wife put on my finger on the day that we married stayed there for some years until the sorry day it flew off while my arm was in mid-upstroke in an Ontario lake.

When you’re 20 the world (thank you Rich Mullins) is your parking lot. When you’re 30 you know better. When you’re 40 you’ve had a crash or two. You live with a regret or three (even if you’ve divorced them). By the time you reach my age – I turned 50 this past week – you’re happy […]

The best time to talk to your nine-year-old boy about women’s plumbing and these sorts of sexually delicate territories is when he’s asleep. This is what every trying father discovers after said boy lays splayed on the living room floor pretending he’s having a baby. Yes, my son Jon was in obvious pain – it seems no epidural […]

Some days I wish I was more musical, at least as musical as the rest of the family. I think the dog wishes the same for himself. Sensing this, yesterday I let Zack listen to Handel on my i-pod. It was Handel’s Concerti Grossi Op 3. I held the buds in his big German Shepherd dog ears. He […]

It’s a beautiful morning in Africa, not just because the sun is rising and the birds are singing and the monkeys jumping, but because my daughter too is singing. She has been working on this piece for weeks – it’s an Adele song – and I will never tire of hearing it because there’s a […]

I don’t know. All this talk about sex and my manhood. It started when this post simply shared our updated family photo and the news that while the Family Dog is now in our annual shot, our family won’t get larger because I’ve had the snip-snip, that is a vasectomy. My Obstetrician Babe gave her […]

From my last post here, the only thing left to say is that while Jon’s birthday cake was finely decorated, My Bride is very much decorated in another rather beautiful way, with the Order of Canada now, which you know about through this. Yes, it is getting to be a regular question asked of me these days, […]

My daughter vomited on the way to school yesterday morning. This, of course, is the sort of thing that makes any parent’s heart go pitter-patter, thump-thump, yes, one of the golden moments of any dad’s day. In our family, on what is a rather onerous school-run every weekday morning, vomiting, in fact, is sort of shared […]