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What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say
There was a time when I thought that feeling pity for someone was a virtue; it meant feeling discomfort at their situation, I suppose, but perhaps it was also tinged with relief that their situation had not happened to me. And yet was that all I felt? Surely there was some concern and a wish…
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Speak low if you speak love
When I was a naïve university student, I read that far from missing out on the thrill of the chase in youth, the elderly are usually liberated from the (presumably) hormonally mediated need for sexual gratification leaving time to evaluate other things. Since procreative duties -or possibilities- would no longer loom large in their thinking,…
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It is the disease of not listening that I am troubled with
I only knew my grandfather when he was very old, but I was also very young then so most people seemed old to me at the time. He had been a carpenter in England before he emigrated to Canada with his young bride as the years turned into the twentieth century. After a long journey…
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Ich und Du?
When I was a child, I had no inkling of cultural appropriation. I eagerly dressed as the cowboy Roy Rogers, and enmeshed myself in what I mistakenly assumed were aboriginal customs of dress and philosophy; I once (and, it must be stressed, unwillingly) played the role of a girl in a Grade 4 school play…
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Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy
I realize how malleable our memories can be; how a passion in our later life can be attributed to a precocious childhood; how we can bend the past like origamied paper. But, short of recognizably dated diary passages, or a still-living family member (whose memory could be equally suspect), there can be no reliable verification…
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I will a round unvarnished tale deliver
There are times when I find myself wondering about things like I did when I was a child: about whether there are any benefits of Age, for example; about why uninvited questions arise while I am gardening, or when I’m having an evening glass of wine. Nowadays, I wonder if it’s all the result of…
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Death be not proud
Sometimes I think I spend too much time with myself. I realize, however, that the only way to spend any time away from me is to die, and that seems a bit harsh. Death is one of those subjects they never taught in school -in my day, anyway. Of course, when you’re young, Death is…
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Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall.
There are times when it is apparent that I have lived a rather cossetted life; when I realize I have been coddled in one gender, and misunderstood the other; when what I assumed was ‘common-sense’, was actually ‘male-sense’ -and not even widely shared, at that. But, I suppose that what we learn from the dark…
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Oh, coward conscience
Most of the time I think of myself as a tolerant person -grumpy, maybe; at times even impatient with opinions not my own, but by and large, accommodating. Of late, though, I have come to recognize that with many things, tolerance is not actually acceptance; it is more often putting up with something which I…
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