In Amsterdam, we were so fortunate to have the best tour guides, remember I mentioned the Jewish girls who lived on my grandmother’s farm during the war? Now 85 and 80 years old, spending time with them was a huge privilege. I explained that I wanted to make my setting ring true, and they were happy to give me the local’s tour. I’d written a scene where two of my characters take the train from the Centraal Station towards the Waterlooplein (a.k.a the old Jewish quarter) and I wanted to retrace those steps to see how far it was, to imagine the barriers, the smells, the vendors. Today it’s impossible to compare the black and white photographs to the current neighbourhood as much of the area has been torn down and rebuilt, but the Jewish Historical Museum helped to fill many of the gaps.
Read MoreMy Story Begins May 10th, 1940 (Or, At Least, That's What it Feels Like) /
As a kid, when I used to get sick, I was sent to my grandmother’s home to lie on a brown and orange velour couch. My parents were working in the orchard, and even if they weren’t, my grandmother was the best nurse around. She brought me stale ginger ale, dry toast and let me watch the Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver. After lunch there were only soap operas on television, so she turned to her bookshelves to find me something to read. Though I loved Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Charlotte’s Web, none of those (WASP) classics touched me like Anne DeVries’ novel Journey Through the Night. This slim series of stories, commissioned to capture the war years, were popular in the Netherlands and in Canada in English translation. The story of one family’s heroism captured my imagination, but also perhaps coloured my imagination, and my self-perception. After devouring the harrowing survival tale of war, I concluded that I belonged to a salt-of-the earth tribe. My people were oppressed, resisted and survived to tell the story. If anyone (like say, Queen Wilhelmina) were looking to boost the self-esteem of a generation using the novel as a propaganda vehicle, it worked. I grew up believing that basically every Dutch citizen had tried to save Anne Frank. It wasn’t until I began interviewing my own family about the realities of the war that I realized life wasn’t, isn’t, so black and white.
Read MoreLet Them Eat Cake /
Then.
Six years ago, some of our dearest friends came over on a Sunday afternoon bearing a chocolate ganache cake. In thick, white loopy icing were the words “Happy Church Transfer.” Earlier that morning, we’d said goodbye to our church community across the bridge. Something had been percolating in our hearts and minds that was propelling us to find a place to worship in the neighbourhood we’d moved to five years earlier. Our pastor placed a book in our hands that had us imagining what it would look like to live in community with folks whose central ethos was cultivating a culture of belonging. The main tenant of this paradigm shift was rather than professing belief and thereby being included in the life of the church, a church *should* enfold everyone, and as ordinary and extraordinary folks journey in community, "faith happens." We looked at our children, wondered about what "The Church" might look like in twenty years, and jumped in.
First Sundays are weird.
Read MoreA Time to Play /
On the last Wednesday of the month, my writing group and I sit down and dedicate a portion of our weekly gathering to goal setting. Our ambition ranges from writing 15,000 words to finding joy in writing again to submitting a memoir piece for publication. But this month, my goal was much less lofty. Inspired by the wisdom of the late Carol Shields, I vowed to rebel against some of the structure I’d put in place as a guidepost. April would be a month to play.
Read MoreRainy Day Blues /
I’m chilled to the bone with rain seeped through my sweater, toes cold from walking through puddles on the glassy asphalt in Fashion Boots instead of Practical Boots. It’s grey and windy, and though I was tempted to stay inside and keep warm by the fire, I’m pulled west today. As soon as the kids are bundled into the car after school, we head into the downtown traffic. It takes us three quarters of an hour in the pouring rain to get from our neighbourhood in the east end, a few kilometres from the steel mills, to the leafy west end university borough with the gold and green storefront, but we have to go to this place today, because it won’t be open tomorrow, or ever again.
Did you ever see Nora and Delia Ephron’s 1998 movie “You’ve Got Mail”, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan?
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Paying the Love Tax /
When my daughter was little, she loved to play make believe, and I loved eavesdropping on her pretend world. But there was one thing that always startled me about her world-building endeavours: she always took me and her dad out of it.
Her games would begin with: “Okay, so we need to get some food because Mom and Dad are dead.” Or “It sucks living in the attic because we’re orphans.” Or (slightly better) “All the grown-ups have been kidnapped! What should we do?”
Later I realized all Kid-Lit and children’s movies share this one commonality. In fiction, kids are alone and must navigate the universe by themselves. (Think Harry Potter, Anne of Green Gables, etc.) Kids internalize the potential for disaster and try to fantasize a way around it. It's fascinating until the world of make-believe collides with reality. As occurred this week in our corner of the world.
Read MoreFrozen, Burned & Toothless: Tales from the Valentine's Front-lines /
It was five o’clock in the afternoon and he’d been awake for fourteen hours, moving non-stop to get the orders out. It was our second year in business and we’d long ago run out of start-up money, investor’s money and any other kind of money we could scrounge together for the dream of running our own business. He took off his sweaty tuque (it was cold in the warehouse), rubbed his head in exhaustion, and walked over to the playpen where our five month-old daughter had been seconded for hours in a pale pink snowsuit. Gently picking her up, he snuggled her close and accepted a bowl of his mother’s homemade cheesy-bean soup. We’d done it! Valentine’s Day 2008 was soon to be a wrap and we could sit back and celebrate. Until the phone rang.
Read MoreGrocery Cart (& Story) Collector /
I’ve been thinking of writing a post about my day job for a little while now, since the morning a few weeks ago when I found myself pushing a banged up grocery cart through the ice and slush down the sidewalk.
It was 8:45 a.m and I’d just confiscated this “Go-Cart” from a group of boys who knew from the moment they saw me approaching, their fun had run out. One of them, the blond with mischief tattooed on his eyeballs, had hauled it out of a nearby alley and began racing it around the school yard, more or less with two wheels touching the ground as it swerved around the basketball nets.
It looked pretty awesome.
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