Next Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evening hundreds of people will spend the night laughing and it’s all because of Gord Bastian. Laughter is perhaps our most valuable emotion. We relax. We forget the ‘bad’ stuff that’s in our lives. Our judgement drops. The world is a wonderful place. And so Gord’s gift continues as the…
As you round the corner on the second floor of Georgian College, just in the walkway between the theatre building and the new Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning… an eight foot tree twinkles at you, arresting with its beauty and power. The story behind the tree is even more beautiful and represents truly the power…
It was one of those critical moments of life. Mid eighties. My business partners and I had bought a national magazine and were publishing for the teen market. We had a sturdy vehicle that went to every high school in Canada and offered a potential 3.25 million readers between the ages of 12 and 19….
As I write this, a cluster of devoted career and employment counsellors is hovering light and energy over one of their flock. Just 44. A twin. A financial wizard. A woman cut down by a brain aneurism on the day after Christmas. One local story of loss lost among pages and pages of devastation in…
The elusiveness of world peace gets in the way, sometimes, of our ability to appreciate how wonderful the world really is. Here in our country, a large percentage of us have been caught up in our own celebration of a starry night, a message of unconditional love and acceptance of our fellow human beings. And,…
As every woman who celebrates Christmas will tell you, December is a busy month. (read understatement in place of word ‘busy’). I won’t go through the litany of things to be done, and regular readers have heard my diatribe on keeping it simple. In fact, I spent my annual pleasant Saturday in Kim Keckes’ greenhouse,…
There he sat, a short, round-faced, pleasant young man, hunched over the dining room table, various strips of plasticene in hand. To his right, his wife’s sewing kit, threads, needles, scissors etc. To his left, an xray of a brain. With painstaking patience, this young surgeon recreated that brain, blood vessels, arteries, tissue et al….
Festering. That’s what this idea has been doing. Festering. And it’s been festering most in John Cameron as his body in his car ached its way up and down Highway 400 for several years. A telecommunications technology worker, John and his wife chose Barrie for family life. The choice for Barrie was a ‘down’ choice…
It’s funny how one person’s generosity can affect an entire community. Circles, I guess that’s what it is. Certainly circles encircle celebration at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church these days. St. Andrew’s is the birthplace of Out Of The Cold, that service of unconditional love from the kitchens and the hearts of people who want to…
Animals all over the region are less fortunate today, because this is the weekend we said goodbye to Edie Madigan. Edith Payne was only nine when her parents moved to Canada from Britain, to start a new life here. The vivacious young woman, giggling at work with her other female cohorts… was teased about the…