I didn’t want to learn Irish when I was growing up. It wasn’t a thing. I knew that my mother could speak some Gaelic, but I never really thought of it as another language. I grew up in Quebec, so there was English and French. Those were the languages on my horizon. But when my…
A friend once told me that whenever he finds a penny, he thinks of his mother. In fact, he thought that she was sending him a sign. By having him find the penny. In Canada, the penny stopped circulation around 2012. So, it is unusual to find one. Last year I read Medium Mentor by…
Sometimes the Woo Woo doesn’t happen to you. But it happens around you. When our eldest daughter, Caileigh, was two years old, we let her know that we were expecting another child. We told her that she was going to have a brother or a sister soon. Immediately, she kept referring to the new arrival…
On Mother’s Day, I usually write about my wife. The mother of my children. I don’t often write about my mother. Bernadette Kelly was a great mom. I called her Mommy. It felt weird to call her “mom”, though. Too short. She was always “mommy”. My earliest memory of her is when I’m about four…
One of the things I love the most about my wife, Deb, is her maternal instincts. She has always had them. It was the epiphany that she would be a great mother some day, that made me see her in a new light almost forty years ago. One of her qualities that made me love…
When I was a kid, I had a magic closet. New clothes (to me) would appear from time to time. I would open the closet door one day, and there’d be a shirt or a pair of pants that wasn’t there the day before. I never questioned it. I accepted that fact that new things…
I met my wife when we were both in a play 32 years ago. I had heard of her before I met her. My friend Jimmy had spoken about this Deb Dagenais who was a good actress. It was easy to be attracted to her. She was vivacious and fun. Sometimes after rehearsal, I would…
What is the time frame to get over the loss of someone you love? Is there a point where you say it doesn’t hurt anymore? My brother passed away 27 years ago; he was only 22 years old. I often think of the life he missed out living; so many things he never got to…
peter gruner 