I fold.

The girls in Grade 4 showed me how to make noisemakers out of paper, then fortune-tellers and water bombs, flapping birds and pagodas. Our library had a book by Shari Lewis (of Lamb Chop fame) that taught me how to turn that water bomb into an Easter bunny you could stuff full of jellybeans. Robert Harbin’s books took things more seriously and introduced me to the Jackstone, still the most complicated thing I have ever folded from a single piece of paper. 

     Today, I own a half shelf of origami books and a pack of 500 sheets I’ve never opened.

Inspired by Paper, Scissors, Cloth. Image based on a photo from Folding Paper Puppets.

Paper, Scissors, Cloth

When I was a kid, I had several pen pals. Those letters were fun to receive, but I was particularly drawn to the æsthetics: the cancelled stamp; the air-mail envelope with its barbershop edging and blue stationary; the thin crispness of it all. There are still some things in life that hold that allure: sachets of tea, a wrapped Band-aid, cakes of unopened Ivory soap, a box of amaretti, brand-new skeins of wool, Kleenex, seed packets. Maybe I am drawn to their old-timey paper? Their vulnerability? Unprotected by plastic preparedness, they reveal themselves thoughtfully, one unfolded corner at a time.

Inspired by Notice. Photo by Laurie.

Forgotten Lessons

I recently trod the battlefields of World War One, where hundreds of thousands died horrible deaths. Thousands more bore wounds, visible and invisible, for the rest of their shortened lives. War is hell. Today those battlefields are peaceful, the land is productive, and the fallen, the thousands of fallen, are remembered. Yet the lessons from their deaths are not. 

      Clausewitz called war the continuation of politics by other means. We learned after 1945 to extend politics and avoid war with diplomacy, multilateralism, and rules-based institutions. That consensus is now crumbling. War is hell, and we are drifting inexorably towards it.

Inspired by Already Committed. Photo by the author of the Belgian grave of an unknown soldier, nationality unknown.

Notice

The minutes and hours click by as you scroll on your phone, bored and interested at the same time. Your eyes begin to blur and hurt, you look up, hours have gone by—days maybe—what have you done recently?

Who have you talked to? Did you notice the breeze? The taste of Autumn in the air? The edges of leaves turning gold? The raptors on the wing—riding the thermals? You haven’t? Where have you been? This isn’t criticism. I, too, have trouble being present. I, too, feel numb of late. I, too, let the world pass me by. 

Inspired by September Mourn. Image of what you might be missing right now, by AI (for the irony of it).

September Mourn

Last Monday I saw a skeleton with a Halloween sign, and I felt myself becoming Laurie’s recycle-bin-lady. This is so wrong. But why do I care. It’s a pervasive state of being where we can no longer be contented with the beautiful lingering warm days of September. There must be something more to do, to be over the top about and spew hyperbole. I miss the peaceful Septembers we used to call (inappropriately) Indian Summer. It was a time of reflection as we prepared for the Fall. Halloween wasn’t even on our radar until mid-October. Patience was still a virtue.

Inspired by Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Photo by Wendy Whelan.

The Fear of Skidding Out

Cycling up the new asphalt on Sorauren last week took me back to the town where I first learned to ride, where every summer, the approach to road renewal was to spread a thin layer of tar and a second of very fine gravel, with the expectation it would slowly work its way into the existing surface. The immediate result for a nine-year-old boy, though, was a coin-toss between the most awesome skid ever and one nasty bloodied knee.
     Decades later, I can still feel the thrill my first bike gave me, still haunted by the fear of skidding out.

Inspired by The End of August. Image by ChatGPT.

Already Committed

Dad volunteered for the RCAF in 1940, but they made him wait. Impatient, he joined the army. He landed in Normandy in July 1944 and was deployed to the front. The Allies had a German army encircled near Falaise; the enemy was intent on breaking out. In the fog of war, Allied aircraft mistook the advancing Canadians for Germans and bombed them. It’s called “friendly fire” these days. Shortly afterwards, during a lull in the fighting, a much-forwarded letter arrived for Dad from Canada. The RCAF had finally accepted him. Years later, he related this story with a rueful shrug.

Inspired by a battlefield visit and battles past. Image from the Warfare History Network.

Golden Brown

Fall smelled like new Woolco clothes, a PVC school bag with yesterday’s banana. Fresh Crayolas. Then Avon perfumes (samples) and lined-paper diaries (with lock and key). And on Mondays, a freshly-scrubbed Mike, the boy who sat ahead of me.  Later, cafeterias and university course catalogues off gassing cheap acidy papers, promising much but delivering little. Fast forward ten years to the first (perfectly burnt) toast before kindergarten. Fifteen more years to Canadian Tire and dorm smells and sad/happy Tim Horton’s. Ten more years to slower coffees and Saturday’s Globe dampened by a window left open to let September in. 

Inspired by The End of August. Image—Cat’s paws and pencils—by the Author.

The End of August

I confess I don’t know what to write about. Not one clever line or idea has come to me. I’m in that dull transition phase—my breath held—before the onslaught of September. I always feel like this at the end of August—after the quagmire heat of high summer, just before everyone comes back from vacation and the school across the street is once again alive with children’s voices. I have shut off the screens. I am in the backyard listening to the cicadas, anticipating that perfect bit of coolness in the evening. I am wondering what comes next.

Inspired by not much really. Image is of Nancy’s overgrown, late-August garden.

Ungilded

Walking past the US Consulate in Toronto recently, I spotted a plaque in a bed of greenery. It celebrated a unique friendship that was forged over many years through many painful challenges. 

     Dear America, we’re honoured you deemed us the “best neighbours any nation ever had.” (Ask yourself if that applies to you.) 

     “Neither terrorism nor any adversity will conquer free peoples.” (That sounds ironic now.) Yes, we were with you in your then-darkest hour. (Who knew it could get darker?)

     The plaque (bronze, not gilded) was almost overgrown. Perhaps that’s a metaphor. Perhaps it will soon be taken down.

Inspired by domineering belligerence, imperial grandiosity, and a stunning ignorance of history, economics, and geopolitics, which culminated in the imposition of yet more punitive US tariffs on Canada on August 21. Photo by the author.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Everyone but me is retiring. I had no plans to until I met Joanne from Kingsville. Joanne takes daily walks around the subdivision—the one behind the Zehrs—and returns deliciously scrappy.
     One day, she fired up her Facebook and posted that she counted seven—SEVEN—recycle bins that had been incorrectly placed, barcodes facing in, handles facing out, some left teetering, most lawlessly crooked.
     “Folks!” she PSA’d, “the barcodes should FACE the street!”
     She is my C.A.R.P. lodestar. She completes me. I want to hold hands and walk about, our feet pale as chicken meat in low-profile Mephistos.

Inspired by Weird Sudden Changes. Image from the Kingsville Ontario Recycling Schedule.

Weird Sudden Changes

The way I see it, maybe me and my planet are just growing old and decrepit together. And maybe the summers are getting hotter, because I sure as hell don’t remember sweating like this when I was a kid, or maybe I just didn’t care, and I just never noticed the weight I was putting on—that is, until the moment my innie became an outie; because, just like the planet, it is just me getting older and more prone to weird sudden changes.

     Oh, and if you haven’t already figured it out, I’m pretty sure I’m getting dumber, too.

Inspired by Just Weather. Image by the Meta AI.

Just Weather

“But temperatures are rising…”

     “It’s summer. It’s supposed to be hot.”

     “But I mean, we’re setting records. In Europe, this year’s all-time hottest temperature is 2° higher than last year’s, which was 2° hotter than—”

     “Yeah, Europe. Who cares about Europe?”

     “Glaciers are disappearing. Rivers are running dry. There’s drought everywhere. Hundreds of wildfires are burning out west right now. Up north, too. The air’s poisonous.”

     “There've always been fires in summer. When I was a tadpole—”

     “It’s raining ashes in Michigan today.”

     “There. You see? The rain will put out the fire. Really, kid. It’s just weather.”

Inspired by A Little Bit of Magical Thinking. AI image created by Angus Peterson.

A Little Bit of Magical Thinking

“It’s doomsday,” texts my son about the yellow miasma out there. Close the windows tight. Shut the doors. Put on the fans. Purify your air. Wear your mask. Help the evacuated if you can. Wish the firefighters well. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES reply to those idjits down south who think we’ve given them the stink-eye just to mess with their summer vacations. What would be the point? You can’t argue with magical thinkers. But do, while grinning, envision our crappy air infiltrating his gold-plated office and taking up residence in his lungs. After all, what goes around comes around.

Inspired by Heading Home. Image cropped from a photo by Cole Burston.

Heading Home

I found myself today on one of those crash course collisions with another human. You know the one—you make eye contact from afar, do the dosey doe but invariably end up sidestepping to the same side, as if you were a mirror image of each other.

It can go on for seconds until you stop, laugh (or are annoyed) and continue around. I genuinely laughed today. I wondered if we were magnetically drawn to each other by our atoms and why. What do we share together as two strangers that only the universe knows, prompting us to discover.

Inspired by What the…‽ Image by Etienne Boulanger.

Harold Edwin Doughty

It was a hot summer day in 1910, when Mrs. Eva Doughty caught her stepson, Harold, scratching his name into the bricks of their brand new house on Garden Avenue—egged on, no doubt, by the bad influence that lived next door. And so, the next morning, she walked up to Mrs. Mary Prescott’s stationery shop at 357 Roncesvalles and paid the twenty-four cents for a single insertion of the following classified advertisement in the Personals column of the Toronto Daily Star: 

WANTED—A good home in the country for the summer, where boy of 13 can make himself useful.”

The farm was but a short walk from the station in Emery, but not a long trip at all from Parkdale. John Watson, a widower, lived there with his daughter, Jennie. He was 88 when they responded to the ad, and Jennie—who had never married—was 53. Not a particularly exciting prospect for a teenage boy up from the city, but they promised his mother there was a boy his age—Mary Devins’s son, David—living on a farm nearby. History doesn’t record how Harold got on, but the 1911 census does show he went back the next summer.

Inspired by Mrs. Eva Doughty. Photo by the author.

Tainted Love

Perhaps it would be a stretch to call it a modern reiteration of Gift of the Magi, but a few Christmases ago, Jim bought Leslie a TUSHY. Unbeknownst, Leslie bought one for her beloved, causing an embarrassment of selfless exchange and bidet attachments. When it came to installation, Jim, handy but procrastinating, didn’t get around to it. Until last week.

     The next day over coffee he recounted in discrete detail his tactile and hygienic awakenings, his metamorphic revelation of mysteries exotic yet familiar.

     He may not have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon, but it was still a moving experience.

Inspired by Potentially Useful Stuff. Photo of Agamemnon from Wikipedia, modifications by ChatGPT.

Potentially Useful Stuff

Henry would never move, because he’d have to get rid of things: furniture, personal effects, his salvage trove. His wife belittled the latter as junk. 

      This rankled him. There was virtue in thrift. When something broke, he fixed it—yes, perhaps imperfectly, but it worked (sort of). Before discarding anything, he stripped it of parts and fasteners that might prove useful, storing them in bins in the basement. “Why buy a hundred screws,” he told Margaret, “when a single repurposed bolt works fine?”

      She called him a hoarder. 

      “No,” he rejoined stubbornly. “I am the custodian of potentially useful stuff.”

Inspired by My True Nemesis. Image by cheetahlip on Reddit

My True Nemesis

I hate packing, so I’m never moving again. My kids will have to pack up all my stuff when I’m gone. So I’ve said countless times. But that was before the meniscus tear on my left knee and the onset of arthritis in both. Now I know my true nemesis—the one that might make me go back on my word—the stairs. It’s an Edwardian workers’ house, so they’re steep, narrow and worn. I am frantically exercising to strengthen the muscles around my knees—wondering if I’ve left it too late. While every day, my nemesis creaks with laughter.

Inspired by Existential Home Improvement. Image of her stairs by Nancy

In which a Nerd Confronts his own Mortality

Turns out there are only fourteen different calendar configurations: one for each day at the start of a regular year; another seven for leap years. Had I known sooner, I could’ve bought enough calendars to last my entire life.

Still, by 1995, I had managed to collect half of them, and so pulled out a chart I’d found, and for each wrote down every year for which it would again be valid. Pushing into the 2040s, I began to wonder just how much longer I might be valid, and ended up scuttling the project for fear of tempting the fates.

Inspired by Existential Home Improvement. Image by Meta.