It takes only a moment for the blank stare of a stranger to erase me. We are pedalling up the final stretch of Togwotee Pass in western Wyoming, on mountain bikes loaded with camping gear, food, and water, partway through a 3,000 km journey down the Great Divide Mountain
In mid-August 2022, of Maureen and I sat with the oncologist in a corner examination room of the BC Cancer Centre in Victoria. Dr. Freeman was in her thirties, soft-spoken and attentive, an acknowledged expert in her field. She had the slightly abstracted bearing of the highly intelligent, as if
One day when I was 11 years old, my best friend mustered his courage and asked me flat out, “What am I like?” I knew this was a faux pas. I told him what I would have wanted to hear. “You’re cool. Everybody likes you.” Even though I knew
I am 6’5” and my feet are proportionally large. I wear size 14 or 15 shoes, depending on the brand. Occasionally, a socially indelicate acquaintance will ask me, “How big are your feet?” “Big enough to keep my balance,” I usually say. Sometimes I’ll add, “Big trucks run
(I wrote this in the early 2000s and delivered it as a speech at three different high schools. It was a long time ago, and who cares, but when I re-read it the other day, I felt proud of the sentences and the ideas. In the age of Ozempic, it
A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, the health office at the boarding school where I taught distributed babies to the grade 12s. The initiative was meant to prepare students for adult responsibilities. In more than 35 years of classroom teaching, I saw many attempts to revolutionize the curriculum, but I never