Tag: family

Perspective… and Pizza

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A while ago I mentioned being in the “home stretch” on the book I’m writing. A bunch of people were very encouraging when I said that, which, well, encouraged me. (Thanks, everyone.) Thing is, I still am in that home stretch, pretty close to where I was at the time I made that comment, in fact. I’m kind of stuck there. Not writing-stuck: I would be done the draft if it wasn’t for the exigencies of life. A recurrent, won’t-go-away ear infection has been gnawing on our son, and I developed bronchitis (seemingly the same damned bug), just as a …

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Dad and the Ostensibly Zulu Floor Hockey Stick War Dance

gordsellar22 Comments

Just because I’ve tweeted it (in much shorter form) doesn’t mean I won’t blog it. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad lately. He passed away in 2006, and some of the stuff I’m working through now has brought up old memories that I’d forgotten. One of them occurred to me on the way home from the coffeeshop tonight. When I was in the Cub Scouts — well, actually, it was Beaver Scouts, to be technical —  in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, my father taught us a Zulu War Dance. At least, that’s what he claimed it was. Knowing him, …

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Bye, Yves

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I don’t know my realtives on the French-Canadian side of my family too well, but I know that it’s been a hard few years. The uncle who used to chase us around the house hollering mock-threateningly (with a huge smile on his face) that he was the Cookie Monster and he was going to eat us up, he passed on not so long ago. (It feels like a little while ago.) And I just go the eulogy for my uncle Yves by email from my cousin Carlo. Liver cancer, sudden, unexpected. He passed away about a week and a half …

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The Story of Banana Mountain

gordsellar4 Comments

My father used to tell me stories all the time, stories of the Old Country. That Old Country being Nyasaland, of course, and sometimes Rhodesia. Neither of those countries existed by the time he left the Old Country with my mother and me for Canada. His stories were weird in the kind of way that stories immigrants tell can be, but it used to hammer home to me the fact that, despite being a white man, he was absolutely a foreigner to the place I was growing up. It’s not to say he didn’t have advantages over, say, some of …

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