Exquisite Corpse

Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille was a French astronomer noted for his catalogue of nearly 10,000 southern stars. He mapped great swaths of sk...

We named our boy Daniel because it sounded good both in French and English. I wanted to name him Damase, a name that’s been passed through f...

Mitzi was the name that was planned for me. Then Mitzi Gaynor made a comeback. My parents did not want it to look like they were naming me...

Rogers (Roy) was still a star When I came on the scene, With Charles Schulz’s comic strip In every magazine. But then Hogan and his her...

Bill and Joe are just regular guys. John seeks out a hooker. Where I come from, crazy people acted like Mels . Or worse, if you pulled ...

My mother often cites the metaphor of people banging their heads against a brick wall because it feels so good when they stop doing it. The...

Somehow, I’ve managed to bung up my wrist, and as usual my ill-advised attempts at self-medication have only made it worse.      David woul...

Some women give up coffee, others don’t drink, but for me, the height of maternal sacrifice came when my doctor advised me to take either sh...

If our family was stranded in the woods in winter I would have been the first to go. I was the scrawniest kid and had no insulating fat wha...

So much about camping is just keeping dry and keeping all your stuff dry, too, and of course finding clever ways of drying your stuff once i...

The thought of camping fills me with dread.   Lumpy ground, cold stinky tent. The washroom, if it exists, is filthy, with a wet, dirty flo...

Whenever I see a bottle of Bombay Sapphire I think of the Raj in India, sitting on shaded verandas pickling themselves with gin and tonic du...

Before you begin, you’ll need to set aside at least four solid days for this project. Mornings can be especially problematic.      Pour a f...

Once on a kindergarten walkabout down Drouillard Road Sister Mary Diane chastised me for shouting “There’s my Daddy’s Vitamins!” as we passe...

If you knew me when I was a child, you would never guess I would grow up to be a vegetarian. I steadfastly refused to eat any vegetables ex...

Trier-of-Stuff wasn’t bright, but the tribe depended on him. Whenever they encountered something different—a new fruit, another tribe, an in...

I enjoyed being a new mom, I just didn’t like hanging around other new mothers. They were mostly gals with spurious CBC jobs, bemoaning thei...

I was being observed and viewed with ridicule as I edged around the cow-pies in the field. The town girl who was squeamish about excrement. ...

I don’t know if my family were particularly fastidious flushers, but I don’t think I saw another person’s shit until I was at least nine yea...

Kathy was the first girl to befriend me when we moved from Windsor to Pike Creek. She also gave me my initiation into country humour, the ki...