Category Archives: Uncategorized

My sisters are named — and pay attention, this is important — Mary Leona, Mary Charlene; Norma Ann, Bertholde Marie and Mary Hughiena. HEART MONIKERS: Me and my sisters;  namely, Norma Ann, Mary Hughiena Bertholde Marie and Mary Charlene. Read those names again. Each contains the requisite get-into-heaven-free-Catholic names “Mary,” “Marie” or “Ann,” but they’re also superchargedContinue reading “Let's make March 7 International Sisters Day.”

En route to work yesterday I called in to a Toronto FM radio-station quiz show, I actually got on the air (!) and I won! Radio station Classical 96.3, at 7:46 a.m., invites listeners to play The Quiz of the Bumblebee.     ONE AL OF A GUY:  If nothing else, this photo of myContinue reading “A performance only a mother’d love”

When I was a kid, we went to church a lot and at Sunday Mass, the ushers took up a collection. On some days, when the church was involved in a special project somewhere  — like  helping lepers, say —  there’d  be a second whiparound, and the priest would tell us, it’s “for the missions.”Continue reading “Singalong with Billy the Kidder”

When the triage guy at Canadian Tire booked me in for my left head light repair, he estimated it’d take maybe half an hour, 45 minutes. CANADIAN TIRED? The service department’s waiting room welcomes you weary travelers I thought: “Perfect. An hour in the Canadian Tire waiting room! What more could a guy ask for?” I’m not beingContinue reading “Canadian Tire: A lot lot more than tires”

TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES: Keep your friends close, your anemones closer. Here’s something I just learned.  When a giant red sea cucumber  —  one of the 450-odd creatures that make their home in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Aquarium in downtown Toronto — feels threatened, it frightens off its predator by ejecting a portion of its gutContinue reading “And the band played Wake Up Little Sushi”

EH VOILA: My first peek at the Far Side Photo by Chuck Swinden, first published in Northern Life When I was growing up in the west end of the Northern Ontario mining community of Sudbury, I attended St. Albert’s Catholic Elementary school for exactly eight years and one half day. Yup. An extra half day. OnContinue reading “How to Get an F in French”

SUDBURY, ONTARIO: It just occurred to me, after all these years, what the “SO” stood for.  And you’re surprised I still believe in Santa? When I was a very young kid growing up in Sudbury, Ont., we had two TV stations: CKSO and CKNC. Three if you were French. The two we Carters mostly watchedContinue reading “Would I join any Hub's Club that would have me as a member?”

Sometimes when I can’t get to sleep at night, I alphabetize lists in my head: Places I’ve flown to; models of cars I’ve driven; people’s names that go naturally together: Alex & Brenda (My brother and sister-in-law); Chuck &  Di, Eddie & Flo, and like that. LITTLE ITALY: Cultivated gardens and lots’n’lots of wine Invariably,Continue reading “I is for Italian”

 LIFE IMITATING PULP: Why did Mother Nature give us siblings if we can’t exploit them? Pellis News–or “Pellis’s”–was a variety store precisely one city block east of the house in which we Carters grew up in the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury. About the same number of steps from our home in a northerlyContinue reading “All the Pellis News That's Fit to Print”

This Saturday past, my older brother Alex and I spent a few hours visiting another of the Carter boys, TOM’S KNEE: That’s me sitting on it. It would also be a great name for a bar.  Tom, in the northern Ontario village of Elliot Lake where he lives with his patient, loving and very wittyContinue reading “My late brother Ed”