Lakeside Lair
Life & Reflections
Childhood Memories
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The Man Who Loved Women
This is what most people remember when they think of Albert Einstein – the perfect caracature of the ‘mad scientist’. Albert, along with Madame Currie and Louis Pasteur were childhood heroes of mine. While other kids swooned over rock stars and movie idols, I’d spend...
Easter 1966
Forty years ago this Easter I was convinced my mom had won the Irish Sweepstakes. I didn’t know it at the time but the only way you could get Irish Sweepstakes tickets was on the black market. Mom had been buying them from “a friend of a friend” for years and she’d...
My Frankenstein Car
This was my first car. It was a 1969 Chevelle and cost $25. I was dating a mechanic, Pat, at the time and for my 18th birthday he bought it for me off a farmer in Lunenberg, Ontario. It had been sitting in the farmer’s barn for years with a seized engine, missing...
I Need To Know The Words
The other day while in the car, I was listening to a performance of First Nations drumming on the CBC. Caught up in their cadence and the sound of their chants I began to recall the first time I had attended a Pow Wow… When I knew him, Bill was a tall, thin man in his...
Confessions Of A Garden Ho
The first house I bought had an ugly back garden. The previous owner used to park his truck on the pad where the old garage used to be. The area around the concrete pad was waist-high in weeds. This is what it looked like after we had cleared the weeds. Pretty ugly...
The Big Lie
The mornings my boss is in town on the way to the office, he picks up a coffee for me and we shoot the shit for a few minutes before he starts his day. One day last week he came in and told me about a web site his friend told him about. The site examines the official...