Column Six

A dark and dusky beauty, discouraged, beaten, chin down, eyes averted—a 15-year-old whom, for this story, we’ll call Julie. I wanted to reach deep into her being to find bells to ring, to celebrate her beauty, the promise of lovely womanhood.

I read somewhere that positive thinking and laughter will keep you in touch with your inner self and strengthen your immune system. If that shot in the arm doesn’t work for you then maybe you should get the vaccine.

Adventures in language, one European campground at a time F or more than 30 years, my wife, Valerie, and I have owned camper vans that we keep in Europe. This all began when we bought a VW Westfalia in St.

Not everything is what it appears to be T he snowy owl, sensationally magnificent, swooped silently past the picture window. The wonder of it made me hold my breath, but then I yelled, "Boots! Boots! Get on your coats and boots. Let's follow the owl.

O h, how I hated those words! They sounded so mean, though in those early years I did not know what “demeaning” meant. It was meant as a put- down, obviously.

I started out in life in the old-fashioned traditional family. My father, my mother, two younger sisters and I lived together on the upper level of an old two-story house located in the short hills of a ghost village known as St. Johns West.

Talk, jargon, and nonsense W hen my daughter was in SK she came home one day with a story she’d written in a language my wife and I couldn’t understand. It was gibberish, a kind of alphabet soup, but she was delighted with what she’d written.

Last week's Column Six shocker for our own John Chick W hen I saw the headline — “The Boy, the Man, the Mountie” —and first few paragraphs of last week’s Column Six, I took some interest given the subject matter.

O ne morning my Aunt Gladys was speaking to her son, my cousin Jim, about his plans after high school. It was wasn’t going the way she had hoped. “But Mother, I don’t want to go on to university.” “Jim, you need some kind of a career.

E very month for the past ten, we have been asked to adjust to a new normal, which is not such a big deal for me. I’ve been dealing with a new normal every year since my 40th birthday, usually coinciding with my annual physical.