This week the Toronto Star reported the story of the death and burial of Charlie Hunter, which is also the story of his parents’ thirty-seven year effort to have their son’s remains returned to their community of Peawanuck for burial.
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Notes On Adulthood In A Time Of Stress
The day that my son was born, I knew I’d passed irreversibly beneath the lintel demarcating the antechamber of my as it then seemed trivial youth from the salon of for-keeps adulthood. I expected as much. What I did not anticipate was the arresting shock of the first time staring into the depths of a mortgage amortization table, the reckoning with the fact that you are now a name and number in someone’s file, and that this constitutes a bond backed up by the full force of the state. What was I thinking, marching willfully into this arrangement?
The Haudenosaunee | Part Three, That Which Divides Us
The history of the Haudenosaunee (the people who are building a longhouse) is one of unceasing challenges, from without but often also from within. It was no foregone conclusion that the eventual five constituting nations of the “Iroquois League” would accede to the Peacemaker’s vision of unity. Suspicion and hostility posed an enormous impediment to the cause of peace. The impediment obtains to this day.
Continue reading The Haudenosaunee | Part Three, That Which Divides Us
Remembering Rick Martin
It’s odd what one recalls years after — the expression of a face, a sound, words spoken which at the time seemed of no special importance. I remember the smell of the glossy hockey programs sold in the 1970s and 1980s at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. For some years my uncle Mark held seasons tickets, and together we watched a number of games. But of course everyone with a connection to the French Connection will recall above everything else the 1975 Stanley Cup final, the Buffalo Sabres versus the Philadelphia Flyers. I watched those games in the bedroom of my grandparents’ Fort Erie house where my father had grown up, and I can recall with great clarity the bats and fog which constitute a good part of Sabres legend.
Newt Gingrich’s Last Grasp
If it happens that you wish to be President and that your name is Newt Gingrich, then it’s a pity for you that the common man has such a ready nose for the rank stench of human hypocrisy.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 