I believe there are living ghosts. People you bump into in life who influence you, make an impact and move on, who become part of who you are as a person, part of your makeup or character. People who nudge you awake, like ghosts, just passing through.
Ghost or What?
What are ghosts? What are they really? Are they tickles on the back of your neck, a shiver along your spine, a shadow crossing the kitchen floor? Out of the corner of my eye, I occasionally see motionless grey shadows, forms sitting in chairs and hallways, but I never feel threatened.
DO Something: When Crowds Ignore Rape
Indifference? Pack Mentality? Stupidity? Fear? Margaret Blackwood asks how a recent gang-rape in BC could have been allowed to occur — and why no one intervened.
It Is What It Is
A writer ponders her loathing of the expression “It is what it is” as she decides what it really is and what it’s definitely not.
Stranger Danger
Margaret Blackwood remembers when kids were free to roam their neighbourhoods without fear of abduction by strangers. She also remembers her first encounter with a potentially dangerous stranger.
Not Your Average Wedding: Part 2
A bride continues with the saga of contracting the Chicken Pox right before the big day and discovers no one wants to be around you when you have the Chicken Pox. Not even the doctors.
Not Your Average Wedding: Part I
There are few days we considered more significant or laden with emotion than wedding days. But what happens when the bride gets chicken pox? Does the show go on?
Something to Remember Me By
Special occasions like Mother’s and Father’s Day usually went by with very little fanfare at our house. Choosing gifts for one another was not my parent’s forte. Mum gave Dad his fair share of socks and ties for Father’s Day, and while other ladies we knew received pearl earrings or flowers and chocolates on birthdays and anniversaries, Dad would present Mum with a coffee percolator or an electric can opener…
Look Who’s Talking: Cell Phones, Eroding Etiquette and User Illusions
In the months since the ban on cell phone use while driving, I’ve noticed more people murmuring into their cell phones in line ups at the movies, in the bank, at the drug store, in grocery aisles. It’s usually while they’re shopping. And it’s not just “Hey, it’s me. Do we need parsnips?” It’s “Hi, Whatcha doin’? How’s it goin’?” Murmur, murmur, murmur.
A Fistful of Dandelions
“She’s not my mother, you know,” my father would declare every Mother’s Day, in his best Archie Bunker voice, when I asked him why he hadn’t even given Mum a card. “But she should be acknowledged by the man who made her a mother,” I’d answer. Of course he was only pretending to sound like […]