We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

Warm Spring days and tree planting at our beloved Whitepines of Northumberland Tree Farm went hand in hand. Visits to the Provincial forest station at Orono in rural Ontario was an annual ritual. We picked up our pre-ordered white pine, white spruce and black walnut seedlings on our way to the farm on Friday afternoons and the rest of the weekend would be spent planting them.   Succulent bright green little trees, no longer than a hand, bare tiny bunches of roots, were ready for the soft warm soil. We did it together, dig, wiggle the spade, drop in the tender roots, step on the soft soil, move on the next…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

Warm Spring days and tree planting at our beloved Whitepines of Northumberland Tree Farm went hand in hand. Visits to the Provincial forest station at Orono in rural Ontario was an annual ritual. We picked up our pre-ordered white pine, white spruce and black walnut seedlings on our way to the farm on Friday afternoons and the rest of the weekend would be spent planting them.   Succulent bright green little trees, no longer than a hand, bare tiny bunches of roots, were ready for the soft warm soil. We did it together, dig, wiggle the spade, drop in the tender roots, step on the soft soil, move on the next…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

Warm Spring days and tree planting at our beloved Whitepines of Northumberland Tree Farm went hand in hand. Visits to the Provincial forest station at Orono in rural Ontario was an annual ritual. We picked up our pre-ordered white pine, white spruce and black walnut seedlings on our way to the farm on Friday afternoons and the rest of the weekend would be spent planting them.   Succulent bright green little trees, no longer than a hand, bare tiny bunches of roots, were ready for the soft warm soil. We did it together, dig, wiggle the spade, drop in the tender roots, step on the soft soil, move on the next…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

Warm Spring days and tree planting at our beloved Whitepines of Northumberland Tree Farm went hand in hand. Visits to the Provincial forest station at Orono in rural Ontario was an annual ritual. We picked up our pre-ordered white pine, white spruce and black walnut seedlings on our way to the farm on Friday afternoons and the rest of the weekend would be spent planting them.   Succulent bright green little trees, no longer than a hand, bare tiny bunches of roots, were ready for the soft warm soil. We did it together, dig, wiggle the spade, drop in the tender roots, step on the soft soil, move on the next…

We were walking in thick Vancouver fog with our little daughter, age two-and-a-half. She was testing her wings in the park where we had gone for some family time. She ran ahead of us into the dense white cloud only to find that we had disappeared from her sight. There was an exuberant shriek, and she ran back into our view and our welcoming arms. It quickly became a game. Off she would run, again and again, each time with greater confidence, testing her ability to be out of sight, shout, and excitedly come running back to safety. It would be several years, in adolescence, where she would be ready…

I am filled with gratitude for my Mennonite roots. At age ninety I have spent more than half of my life away from that community, but the anchor of my life has always been the deep, unfathomable, and permanently sticky, connection to that community and its special people. A sociology professor once explained “marginal man” as people born to the immigrant parents who had decided to live in a new and unfamiliar country. Their children have learned to live partly in the country of their parents’ origin and its beliefs, language, and culture, partly in the new country. Theirs is a dual identity, he said, so very many years ago,…

Peter and Ernie don’t know each other; they belong, however, to the family of creative story tellers. Peter tells stories of his contemporaries as though on a mission. He sees it as his duty to describe the foibles of people in his cultural group in order to maintain the ethical standards of the community and to warn his acquaintances of the danger of stepping off the familiar and acceptable path. He is the community’s moral watchdog. Many of his stories, he recognizes, are colored by a highly active imagination and this makes the telling an entertaining event. He can talk about someone’s indiscretions with an enthusiasm that grips the full…

An old friend from college days was now professor of English at a small college in the States. It was the early seventies, and he was teaching a class of sophomores when, suddenly, two local police officers walked briskly into the classroom. One officer stayed at the door, hand on his side arm, the sergeant marched to the front of the room, and announced in clear tones to the surprized professor that he was now under arrest. The big, muscled cop turned Jack against the wall, had him spread-eagled, frisked him, then roughly and quickly he was hand-cuffed. Without further words, the cops briskly led Jack out of the room,…

Warm Spring days and tree planting at our beloved Whitepines of Northumberland Tree Farm went hand in hand. Visits to the Provincial forest station at Orono in rural Ontario was an annual ritual. We picked up our pre-ordered white pine, white spruce and black walnut seedlings on our way to the farm on Friday afternoons and the rest of the weekend would be spent planting them.   Succulent bright green little trees, no longer than a hand, bare tiny bunches of roots, were ready for the soft warm soil. We did it together, dig, wiggle the spade, drop in the tender roots, step on the soft soil, move on the next…