Author Archive
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
astigmatism
for months now, i’ve been feeling like i can’t see straight. metaphorically, i’m used to that. literally, not so much.
not anymore.
about the end of seventh grade, i got my first pair of glasses. i’d been having headaches for awhile, a couple of years. my mom took me to an opthamologist, who snapped lenses in front [...]
21 Comments » - Posted in pondering stuff by bon
Monday, March 1st, 2010
easy as A B C
a Sunday afternoon. after a morning spent almost entirely in motion and frequently in peril of minor injury, the wild Josephine has been bagged – sleeping-bagged – and corralled in her crib with an entire safari of stuffed animals. there is silence.
except for her brother.
Oscar no longer naps, a fact against which my time-jealous mind [...]
39 Comments » - Posted in issue stuff, stuff to be done by bon
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
hitler has only got one ball
my grandfather is back in the hospital.
for two weeks, he was out. in a community care facility, a convalescent ward carved out of the old, cavernous, high-ceilinged Protestant hospital where i drew my first breaths. decommissioned thirty years ago in the name of ecumenism, the place has been relegated to the old and the frail: [...]
31 Comments » - Posted in relationship stuff, stuff to be done by bon
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
junior
he caught me on Facebook chat.
i have all the balls and forthrightness of Piglet when it comes to cutting conversations short. my mother raised me polite to a fault, especially with people who make me uncomfortable. but this conversation got ugly fast. by the time i managed to pull my parachute and eject, he’d already [...]
21 Comments » - Posted in pondering stuff by bon
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
snips and snails
here’s the truth of it, in all its ugliness: raising a boy is making me a better person. not a better parent, mind you. but a more rounded human being.
i didn’t know i needed reinvention. but turns out those beer ads from college were correct: what does not kill you makes you strong.
or at least, less [...]
25 Comments » - Posted in pondering stuff, relationship stuff by bon
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
done & doner
on Friday, we had a snow day. and a very small special guest.
Theodore is seven weeks old. he’s a jetsetting babe, born in Korea just before Christmas, now circling the globe meeting his grandparents. he has the cutest passport picture in the world.
his parents are good old friends, of ours and of each other. we [...]
41 Comments » - Posted in mama-baby stuff by bon
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
so i peed in the fountain of youth
i am 38 today.
i remember my mother’s 38th birthday. i was in grade 10. i have no recollection of what i bought her, what she might have liked at that stage in her life. i have even less sense of what i might have thought she liked at that stage in mine. it was only a [...]
41 Comments » - Posted in relationship stuff, stuff to be done by bon
Monday, January 18th, 2010
i went to the woods
i went to the woods because i wanted to live deliberately
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
to rout out all that was not life
and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau. (or Dead Poets’ Society. take yer pick.)
when a part of your life [...]
39 Comments » - Posted in stuff to be done by bon
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
do not go gentle
when my grandmother was in her last years, and failing, she lost everything she cared about.
except my mother and i, who sat vigil at her bedside as her entire world narrowed to those two iron rails. but there was only so much we could do to stem the tide of what slipped from her, day [...]
45 Comments » - Posted in coping stuff by bon
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
twelfth night
around here, most of the Christmas lights stay up into January.
tonight, Old Christmas, the twelfth day in the ancient festival, is the end of it all. the orange glow of electric pillar candles will disappear from the windows of the city tomorrow; the neighbour’s spruce will no longer cast a pall of sparkling blue on [...]
