Despite the suggestion from Microsoft Word’s artificial intelligence tool that I let it draft a short article on how to volunteer at a non-profit organization or create a summer shopping list, I have decided to use my natural intelligence for a topic I am thinking about and, in my view, is more pressing. That is, where on God’s green earth is a Canadian woman supposed to go these days to buy socks, underwear, hand towels, and pantyhose?

It used to be that I, nay, every Canadian woman I know, would go to The Hudson’s Bay Company, the iconic Canadian department store spawned by two French fur traders in 1659, and known to modern-day shoppers as The Bay. We had our choice of either the smaller Bay in our local mall or, if we needed more selection and higher end options, our flagship Bay, often downtown and featuring six levels of shopping, designer boutiques on the fifth floor, and a gourmet food cafeteria in the basement.

My visits to The Bay always began with a march through cosmetics, holding my breath as I passed the fragrance counters and the ladies who offered perfume-soaked strips of paper or a spray from the bottle they had pointed at me. That march meant I was on a mission. Perhaps to deal with a newly discovered run in my pantyhose that started at my big toenail and ended in the middle of my knee. Nothing could deter me. Not Ladies’ Wear, a department that sometimes made me wonder if being a colour-blind schizophrenic was qualification for employment as a Hudson’s Bay purchaser. Not the dizzying laps around Hudson’s Bay blankets required to ascend the multiple escalators to the hosiery floor. Like many women before and after me, I relied on steady feet, a sense of direction to rival a French voyageur, and a guarantee that I could be in a new pair and back at work faster than a Starbuck’s barista could make and serve a Grande pumpkin latté.

It was in this department store, once the governing power of more than half of the landmass now called Canada, that I could find multitude pairs of socks of every brand, shape, size, and pattern; a skin-colour rainbow of pantyhose offering a spectrum of girdle support that guaranteed bellies of any shape or size would be tucked in, smoothed out, and rendered invisible under pants or skirt. Underwear? By God, there was underwear. An entire morning could be spent in Lingerie perusing an endless assortment of materials, styles, and colours. Or, if I needed my Calvin Klein “Old Faithfuls” before my one-year-old woke up and threw his soother, I could head straight for the “Three Pairs for $20” bin and – God bless the Hudson’s Bay Company – be in and out in under ten minutes. And if I also needed hand towels, I was two escalators and one tight lap away from Housewares and a selection of size, colour, and plushness to take my breath away. This was the efficiency and confidence every Canadian woman was gifted by The Bay.

Today, I cannot do any of this. On June first of this year, in a move that surely had demons in hell chortling and clinking pitchforks, The Bay ended three hundred and fifty-five years of operation and closed its stores, abandoning millions of Canadian women to drive aimlessly through city streets, stand gaping in parking lots, and ride helplessly up and down mall escalators wondering, “Where do I go now?” when they need socks and underwear.

Take slips for example, that distinct article of women’s underclothing that started as a smock in the Middle Ages and became, in the 1920’s, a thin liner of rayon to be worn under the modern fabrics that were either clingy or see-through. For one hundred years, Canadian women were rescued with slips found at The Bay. Half-slips, full slips, short slips, long slips, white slips, black slips, nude slips, pink slips. The Bay had more slips than Dr. Seuss had fish.

Arrive home with a new skirt, discover you can see right through it, but love it too much to take it back? Cue: The Bay. If you arrived at the right time in the middle of the afternoon, you would find a 60-something no-nonsense saleslady peering at you over glasses attached to a chain and smelling of the perfume-soaked paper strip that you were offered on your way in. A woman who knew in three seconds what you needed and where to find it. A woman whose two-inch manicured nails would fly over the cash register buttons while she offered you a ten percent discount if you signed up for a Hudson’s Bay credit card. Those days are gone. Today, buying a slip means defining the word “slip” and explaining why anyone would wear one to salesgirls who are thirty years younger than you are and want their clothes to either cling or be see-through.

I know from experience. The calf-length sage-green sheath dress looked good in the lighting at Aritzia. The 20-something salesgirl said the fit was “fire”, a descriptor that had to be repeated so I could hear it over the store’s piped-in indie pop track and then translated because I am fifty-five years old and fire is something that happens in my kitchen when I forget I have something under the broiler.

“Good,” she explained, convincing me to take the dress home.

However, when I tried it on at home, I knew it would never leave the room, let alone the house. I needed a slip. And because thirty years of shopping programming is not easily undone, I went back to the mall, forgetting that the only store guaranteed to rescue me, The Bay, was now bankrupt.

The giant space at the end of the mall was now a war zone of broken-down racks and dismembered mannequins dressed in liquidation sale banners. After a few seconds of standing in front of the security panels and willing the department store back into existence, I joined my lost sisters on the escalators, looking for a place to shop.

Aha! Victoria Secret! Surely the leader in lingerie for almost half a century, the inventor of the Miracle Bra, and the launcher of super model catwalk careers the world over would have a slip.

“Slip?” the young woman looked at me like I was asking for directions to the moon. In Persian.

“Yes,” I said. “To wear under a dress.”

She stared.

I said, “A dress that is not lined and needs a liner.”

No response.

Wondering if I should check her for a pulse or a reboot button, I tried again, “It’s usually made of rayon. It can start at the waist. Or it could be full length with bra straps.” Pause. Stare. “That’s what I need. Full length.”

Her eyes brightened. “Oh! Do you mean a negligee?” And striding towards a rack, she triumphantly raised a ten-inch piece of hot pink polyester lined in fake fur, cut out at the sides and back, and glittering with rhinestones. Now it was my turn to stare.

Across the hall at La Senza, a lingerie chain made successful by being across the hall from Victoria Secret, the salesgirl knew what a slip was but lamented the fact that I would not find one in the mall that day.

“We don’t carry them anymore,” she said sadly, admitting she did not know why and leaving me to assume that this could only be the work of those pitchfork-clinking demons.

No more confident march in and out of The Bay. It was a disappointed trudge through the mall, eyes dry from the recessed LED lighting and feet sore from the polished concrete floor as I tried to remember if I had parked outside Classic Newsstands or Mobile Klinik. I was headed home to order from Amazon where I would attempt to pick the best slip from seven pages of options with only deceptive fashion photography and anonymous reviewer comments as my guide.

While I punched in my Amazon username and password and grabbed my phone to access and enter the one-time pass code, I longed for the 60-something no-nonsense saleslady at The Bay with her heavy perfume, glasses on a chain, and two-inch manicure. The one who knew that Lingerie section like the back of her hand and understood what a woman was up against when trying to leave the house during daylight hours in a polyester dress.

The latest news is that Canadian Tire, another Canadian retail legend, has purchased the Hudson’s Bay Company brand. I had a look at the website. They are selling Hudson’s Bay-striped blankets, travel mugs, Christmas tree balls, toques, and nutcracker dolls. The demons might be chortling for now, but I have faith in an all-powerful God and He might just hear the distressed cry of Canadian women and inspire someone to put our high quality socks, underwear, hand towels, and pantyhose back in one location where they belong.

Until then, ladies, see you on the escalator.

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When I was six, watching television was easy. I would roll into the living room on my plastic Ride On Fire Truck and park next to the couch where my parents would be nestled, my father pointing the four-button Zenith Space Command remote control channel changer at the only television in the house. Deciding what to watch took seconds. We had four channels, fifteen shows that played at specific times, and two decision makers, my parents, the only ones in the room with money to pay the cable bill and thumbs strong enough to push the Zenith’s buttons. Together, our family journeyed through Little House on The Prairie, The Jeffersons, Happy Days, Wonder Woman, and Mary Tyler Moore. “Binging” a series did not happen. Shows played once a week and programming stopped at midnight, the end marked by thirty-seconds of station identification, one-minute of O Canada, and forty-five seconds of static, coloured test bars. After that, the television turned into a crackling box of fuzz until programming resumed sometime close to noon the next day. Staying awake past the fuzz was so contrary to the moral order that the only place you would spot someone slumped in a lounge chair with the television crackling was in a horror film.

Had Brock and I decided in 1976 to watch a movie called Bonhoeffer, it would have been because the paper TV Guide told us a movie called Bonhoeffer was showing on one of four channels during one of five time slots. We would have arrived at the couch on time, nestled in, and happily watched our movie.

However, it was not in 1976, but in 2025, that Brock and I decided to watch a movie called Bonhoeffer, the true story of a Lutheran pastor who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. We did not pick the movie because we knew it was playing on a certain streaming service at a certain time. We picked it because while listening to a podcast on my way home from Toronto one day, I heard a guest from Manhattan recommend it to a host in Florida. At least we knew what we wanted to watch. Deciding may have been quick in 1976, but in 2025 it can take anywhere from five minutes to five days to no decision at all as everyone grabs their device and scatters to different rooms to watch what they want.

Brock and I curled into our respective ends of the sofa, me next to the shelves I steadily populate with books I will never live long enough to read, and Brock next to the end table he steadily populates with reading glasses, phone chargers, and random pieces of hardware one never needs while sitting on the couch. Detaching from our individual devices to watch a movie together had sparked a joy in me akin to being seven years old and allowed to stay up late and watch Charlie’s Angels. With a flourish that would feather Farrah Fawcett’s hair, I raised the remote to find Bonhoeffer in the Roku television search field.

Several options with accompanying thumbnail images popped up on the right-hand side of the screen. Three documentaries, one mini-series, a film from Angel Studios whose thumbnail featured a young man with wide blue eyes behind round, 1940’s-era spectacles, and for no reason I could detect, Minions. Recognizing Angel Studios from the podcast, I knew wide eyes and round spectacles was the movie we wanted.

While I had chosen to search Roku, Brock had decided to search the world.

“Siri, where can I watch Bonhoeffer?” Brock asked iPhone like Captain Kirk asking Scotty to find more power.

“Got it!” I announced, winning the first leg of this Battle of the Network Stars and hovering the remote control in the air to point at the screen.

Brock looked up from his phone.

“It’s on Hoopla.” I paused. “Do we have Hoopla?” I paused again. “What is Hoopla?”

“No clue,” Brock answered. He paused and then, “Let’s download it.”

I clicked “Install” and then clicked “Agree” to a wall of legalese that was Hoopla’s Terms and Conditions and, for all we knew, lifetime rights for this mystery streaming service to sell our data, our house, or our functioning organs. Never mind. We were getting closer to our movie. Within seconds Hoopla was installed, a new button was added to the growing list on Roku, and I was clicking to open it.

“Sign in with your library card,” directed the home screen, the orange-font message sitting neatly under a giant Hoopla logo.

“Library card?” I reached for my phone. “I’ll get one.”

A minute later, I was on the Burlington Public Library page and down that rabbit hole that is called Enter Your Personal Information. I clicked on the first field of seven, thinking this would take no longer than a 1976 commercial break, and typed my name.

“I have a library card,” Brock broke my trance. I looked up. The thumbs he had poised over his phone froze. “I don’t remember my password.”

I watched as he typed, trying different passwords and finally succumbing to “Forgot My Password.” He clicked into his email, reset his password, and popped back to the library’s website to login.

Faster than Hal could lock a pod bay door, Hoopla replaced the orange-font message with a spinning blue and white circle. At last, the screen showed us what we wanted to see, what Roku had promised, wide blue eyes behind round spectacles, and the name, Bonhoeffer.

Joy and calm returned. We set down our phones, united our attention spans once again, and relaxed into the sofa. I hit play.

Two minutes later, I was reaching for the remote. “This is not the right movie.”

What had played was black and white footage of real Nazi soldiers marching, clips of the real Hitler shouting, and the style of dramatic voice-over only found in Gillette razorblade commercials and World War II documentaries. No wide eyes and round spectacles to be seen.

I clicked to exit. There was the correct thumbnail: wide eyes and round spectacles. I hit play. Nazis marching. Exit. Wide eyes. Play. Nazis marching. Brock, dismissing Hoopla for the bumbling fool it was shaping up to be, picked up his phone and with a gravitas that would intimidate a Klingon, commenced multilateral talks with Siri and the public library app.

“This would never happen with the paper TV Guide,” I grumbled, realizing we could have watched an episode of Welcome Back Kotter by now. Wishing for 1976 but stuck in 2025, I left Hoopla and headed back to the Roku search page to start the battle again.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the 1976 version of my father watching us over the buttons of his Zenith Space Command remote control channel changer chuckling at me at one end of the couch Googling, “Stream Bonhoeffer in Canada no marching Nazis” and Brock at the other end asking Siri to forget about Hoopla and find the damn movie. While we grappled with QR codes and two-factor verification, my 1976 father would wrap his arm around my mother and, with a mightiness of thumb not seen since metal gave way to plastic, execute three clicks to reach Laverne and Shirley. Nineteen seventy-six me would dangle my bare feet over the edge of the couch, hoping I could stay up late enough to see Charlie’s Angels. Maybe even O Canada. Or God and my parents willing, those static, coloured bars.

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In 1954, on a grey winter day, five-year-old Jackie McKee snowshoes along a railway track somewhere north of Sudbury in Canada. The photo, one of many that have captivated me at the Canadian National Railway School on Wheels Museum in Clinton, Ontario, Canada, is taken from behind. Jackie’s wool pants balloon around his tiny frame as he starts his three-quarter-of-a-mile walk home for lunch, alone. After lunch, Jackie will strap on the snowshoes and walk the track again, moving as fast as his short legs can carry him so he will be on time for afternoon lessons.

I am standing in one of seven rail cars, operated by Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways, that brought education to remote Northern Ontario communities from 1926 to 1965. I am here because my Nana, Aggie Chéné, attended school this way when, in 1931, my great-grandfather lost everything, moved his family to a cabin in the Ontario bush, and taught his kids how to hunt and fish for their food.

For five days, the school car parked on a siding, attracting children of all ages from communities too small to be called villages. At the end of the week, the teacher assigned homework, strapped down the chalk and books, and moved to the next stop on his route. Four weeks later, the car returned.

One of these stops was within snowshoeing distance of Aggie’s cabin. The kids came on foot, snowshoes, dog sled, and skis. Before the rivers froze, some came in canoes. Some lived less than a mile away, some more than twenty. Some had lived in Northern Ontario for generations, including many Native kids. More were new to Canada, children of European immigrants hired to maintain the railway and isolated from the country they now called home. Some, like Aggie, were escaping poverty in other parts of Canada. A few spoke English. Most did not. Another photo shows two boys, aged 9- and 11-years-old standing outside a canvas lean-to they pitched in the snow beside the rail car. While their father tended animal traps, sometimes leaving them for months at a time, these boys decided an education was worth the hardship of winter camping.

A student quote on the school car wall reads: “Nothing was going to keep us from going to school.” Aggie and her siblings hiked four kilometres each way to the school. My uncle told me she always wore a 25-caliber rifle over her shoulder in case they spotted a pheasant. Aggie was the best shot and most likely to bring home dinner that night. He also told me she did not like going. However, I know enough of the rest of her story to guess that while she may not have always liked school, she might have been as determined to be there as the student quoted on the wall, those boys in the lean-to, and five-year-old Jackie McKee. While moving to a cabin in the Northern Ontario woods might seem romantic, there was nothing romantic about it for Aggie. My great-grandfather sexually abused her from the time she learned to read to the time she was old enough to pack a bag and leave. Hiking to the school car for five days every four weeks was an escape. She learned to read, write, and draw. She learned history, civics, art, and science. She learned the world was bigger than a cabin in the Ontario bush.

This was the goal. As a school board inspector commented in 1927 when assessing the program’s inaugural year, “Good citizenship is contagious. The advent of the school car has made these people contented and hopeful.” For kids living with a daily struggle for survival, climbing the ladder to the school car meant aiming at something that transcended themselves and life in the bush.

Last week, Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a college campus in Utah. Soon, we might know with certainty why his assassin did what he did. However, media and social media responses to Mr. Kirk’s murder provide clues. There was one day of shared shock and grief. Barely a day. Then, so-called journalists and social media influencers fled back to their political and ideological camps, shuttered the windows on our shared humanity, and pointed barrels of rhetoric through the foxholes, firing blame, threats, and insults at the other side. Some even cracked jokes.

When I read the following from the CBC on September 11th, I thought, here we go again.

“Some of Charlie Kirk's most controversial takes

Charlie Kirk, who died after being shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University Wednesday, had a long history of contentious views and often courted controversy with statements that seemed designed to provoke those who disagreed with him.”

Charlie Kirk was a Christian. And what were his contentious views? That the nuclear family matters. That human life matters. That a baby matters. That the truth of male and female matters. That a government that takes care of its citizens matters. That being able to afford a house and food matters. And most importantly, that dialogue matters. Are these contentious views? These are my views. And not too long ago, these were largely shared views and ones we could credit for creating a country people would want to call home. Show those views to the children in the school car and they would wonder what we find so contentious. Those views put the school car in their midst, and nothing could keep them from it.

The CBC story offended me. And yet, it did not surprise me. I converted to Christianity two and a half years ago. Conversion did not mean I chose a new “look”, philosophy, practice, or creed. Conversion meant a cloak dropped from my eyes and plugs came out of my ears so I could see the world God created and hear about my place in it. There were sacrifices and big changes but there was also huge upside. Anxiety and despair were replaced with peace and hope. Feeling overwhelmed and afraid were replaced with feeling comforted and strengthened. Like many new converts, I was what you might call “a bit much”. I listened to worship music and smiled at the sky. I turned every conversation into a sermon about God. “What’s for dinner, Colleen?” “Stir fry, Brock. But only after we thank God for what he has given us today! And speaking of God…” I dropped $300 at a Catholic supplies shop, “Let me get you a box for all of that,” and hung crucifixes around the house. I also decided to wear a cross around my neck.

While the other stuff was happening at home, wearing the cross was a public display of my newfound faith. I was nervous on my first Zoom call with a client. I knew the dominant script had flipped – that being a Christian went against the culture. And I knew that going against the culture could cost me. Would I lose clients? Would I lose friends? Would I lose family? Never did I wonder, would I be shot?

When I think of what offends us, and what situations and ideas we decide are so contentious that they are deemed to be violence, I know none of that would matter if we were living the life my Nana did. Or the lives of so many who struggled to survive in real ways. In life and death ways. I want to write my Nana’s story because being reminded of where we were might put some perspective on where we are. It might remind us that these traditions that we now label contentious, even hateful, are the very traditions we most need right now. It might remind us that we come from stock that is too tough and resilient to let a difference of opinion cause us to rage. A captivating story about a bunch of children in a Canadian school car might just bring some of us together.

I still like to laugh. God gave me a sense of humour and a talent for writing. He also gave me a cat, two children, a husband, and a tendency to be impulsive sometimes. Great fodder for a humour column on Substack. So, I will keep writing articles when the ideas hit me. However, something or someone is also waking me up at four o’clock in the morning with scenes from a 1931 Canadian school car in my head. That might be God too. So, when there are long breaks between humour articles, know that I am answering a call to write a book based on Aggie and those children who snowshoed to school all those years ago.

That picture of Jackie McKee is not my Nana, but it could be. They say hard times create strong men. My Nana was strong, and I will bet Jackie was too. We are not in the same hard times Aggie experienced in the 1930’s, or Jackie experienced in the 1950’s, but we are in times that are hard. However the book turns out, I pray it will be a story that points to God and, by doing so, reminds us that with Him, we are strong.

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For my readers who are craving another Dash, Brock, or Colleen story, have no fear. There is a hike and a homemade chilli sauce adventure to write about. But now, a rant. This is not so much tongue-in-cheek as gnash-my-teeth while I pull at my hair and ask Brock to search for single family homes in Warsaw, Poland. The provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have delivered perfect rant fodder, and Canada’s rant king, Rick Mercer, is nowhere to be found. So, short of me delivering this on video and in perfect staccato while I wind my way through a graffiti-bedizened alley, I give to you a Mercer-style rant. The thing needs to be said.

Not to be outdone by the City of Toronto’s Great Tobogganing Ban of 2024, Canada’s province of Nova Scotia has issued a ban on walking in the woods until the middle of October. To prevent wildfires. In a province where the woods cover three quarters of the land, where it is difficult to spit and not hit woods, and where seventy per cent of the woods sit on private land, one million residents have been ordered to find space on the remaining treeless patches to walk, fish, pitch a tent, or hold a family picnic.

Using a capacity for reason found only in public service bureaucracies, the government is allowing an estimated one hundred and thirty-seven homeless people to remain in the woods, where they are walking, fishing, pitching tents, and cooking over open fires.

“Most wildfires are caused by human activity,” said Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston justifying the ban by conjuring up vivid mental pictures of, well, nothing. Leave it to the rest of us to wonder if human activity means arson and illegal bonfires or, as the ban’s scope suggests, a guy in gators, knee-deep in the rushing waters of the Musquodoboit, waiting for trout to bite.

Those who are not homeless and dare to step into the woods God created for them face a fine of up to $25,000.00, equal to a Lexus sedan on Auto Trader and more than the recent fines levied against those who have set woods on fire. Unlike their Toronto counterparts, who may have been too busy tobogganing to hand out tickets, Nova Scotia authorities are enforcing their law. Six days into the ban, CBC reported that nearly $300,000.00 in tickets had been issued.

The writing is on the wall for Nova Scotians desiring the shelter of trees. Seniors seeking shade must confine themselves to darkened, air-conditioned rooms. Children wanting to play outside must bake on sun-drenched play structures or beaches. And radical environmentalists wanting to demonstrate their zeal must trade hugging a tree for gluing themselves to the pavement, confident they will be able to pay the $25.00 mischief fine with the loose change exasperated drivers hurl at them.

In a shameless act of “keeping up with the Joneses”, Nova Scotia’s neighbouring province, New Brunswick, has issued a woods ban of its own. This is not only to stop wildfires, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt said, but also to prevent, from Saint John to Nigadoo, and from Edmundston to Sackville, the possibility of falling down and hurting yourself.

Falling down and hurting yourself? Welcome to my life since I started walking.

Thank goodness walking in the woods was not banned in the small Ontario town where I grew up in the mid-1970’s. Such a law would have been the undoing of my mother’s summer parenting strategy of sending me to the woods until the streetlights came on. After a winter of being wrestled into a snowsuit and told to go and play in a snowbank until the streetlights came on, I was unfazed by the independence and thankful for the warmer weather. Finishing my Corn Flakes and hopping on my bike, I pedalled to the forest up the street to spend hours imagining fairies in the moss, hoping my best friend, Kim, would show up, and praying the boy who liked putting garter snakes down our t-shirts would not. And because knowing when the streetlights went on was the sole responsibility of my seven-year-old self, I would occasionally trudge out of the trees to check them.

Unbeknownst to me or the woman putting me through outdoor survival training, a few activists had an environmental movement on slow simmer, waiting for the right time to declare this awesome planet that is barely understood by us to be a used-up and decaying invalid in need of saving by us. On April 22, 1970, Earth Day Round One attracted twenty million Americans who strapped gas masks to their faces, chanted, “Act or die!” at anyone who would listen, and waved signs that read “We have met the enemy, and he is us” at fellow humans trying to complete the commute home so they could put the potatoes on. The slow simmer came to a boil when, in 1990, Earth Day Round Two spanned 141 countries, involved 200 million people, and started a global panic that would turn a fight-the-man effort to remove garbage from the parks and chemicals from the water into an obey-the-man offensive seemingly aimed at removing humans from the earth.

The government announcements are impacting Nova Scotians as they would any group of humans whipped into a frenzy of fear, told their fellow citizens are to blame, and promised a pat on the back if they report anyone with a toe past the treeline. Neighbour is shouting at neighbour, citizen is calling out citizen, and anyone unwilling to dispense shame to someone’s face is posting on Facebook, a virtual town square stockade where Nova Scotians are busy exposing the “idiots” in their midst and declaring that “people suck.” That is not burning woods we smell over the Atlantic seaboard, but a scorched cloud of censure and judgment of one’s fellow man.

Truth be told, I would like to have a bit more 1970’s, when people were less suspicious of human activity and cared more about the state of their neighbourhoods. I have seen enough black and white photos of 1970 Earth Day activists picking garbage up from city streets and parks to wish that even some of them were around today. They could march through the green space across from my house and pick up the Coke cans crushed against tree trunks, the McDonald’s napkins fluttering in the bushes, and the Tim Horton’s coffee cups littering the grass like double double landmines. Since today’s government officials and environmental activists are too busy saving a 4.5-billion-year-old gargantuan planet from human activity to worry about picking up the garbage, I will grab my rubber gloves and kitchen catcher again and pick it up myself.

That is okay. It means I get to go into the woods, wonder at the beauty God created for us, and remember that while He is asking us to keep the place clean, He is not ordering us to keep out. While I am there, I might even imagine fairies in the moss.

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It was when Dash vomited a mass the size of a baby camel that I decided I should take him to the vet. Thankfully, my black American short hair is equipped with two features not mentioned at the animal shelter when, five years ago, I decided a cat might fill the void left by the aloof 18-year-old boy who had left my home to start university.

The first is what I have come to call the Barf Alarm. I have only heard the Barf Alarm a few times but when I have it has been consistent. About two minutes before stomach expulsion, Dash emits a piano forte yowl that would wake a banshee and have it complaining about the noise. For symphony orchestra conductors wanting to beef up their woodwinds section, I can recommend Dash’s Barf Alarm as one capable of ascending the harmonic minor scale at Largo tempo, enough time for a violinist to change a string, a cat owner to understand the animal is about to puke, and a cat to high tail it to the perfect spot for puking.

The second feature can only be called a gift from God, and it is Dash’s preference that the perfect spot be a flat, cool, and smooth surface, Mercifully, this disqualifies carpets, bedspreads, furniture, and cashmere sweaters left out to dry.

On this day, I found him in the upstairs hallway, crouched over the hardwood and in violent spasms. A minute later, the baby camel was on the floor and Dash was sitting up, flicking his tail, licking his chops, and eyeing me with an air of, “Well, that feels better. Glad I don’t have to clean it up.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I thought trying to ignore the fact that my cat had expelled twice his body weight. “He might be okay.”

Then, Dash sneezed.

I went for the paper towels, wash cloth, and garbage bag, remembering that Dash had been sneezing all week and the day before I had caught him hugging the bottom of the suitcase I was packing so he could threaten it with dry heaves. Now this. My spirits sank as I realized with horror the truth of the situation. I would have to take Dash to the vet.

My goal for vet visits is once a year, for Dash’s mandatory rabies and flu shots. Remembering that we have a vet appointment the next day inspires a feeling of dread akin to remembering that I have a multi-leg discount-airline work trip with tight connections the next day. I plan wake up times, mealtimes, travel times, and wrestling with Dash times. I plan the latest I can let Dash outside and still be confident he will return in time to be chased, cornered, and seized. I plan where to place the carrier so I can get him into it with a minimum amount of wrestling, hissing, and scratching.

Something dramatic must happen for me to change the vet schedule. Scooping the last of Dash’s expulsion into the kitchen catcher I begrudgingly allowed that this might constitute dramatic.

An hour later, after crossing the parking lot with a carrier that was now bouncing and swaying like a bag holding an octopus, I found a seat in the waiting room and placed Dash on the floor between my feet. The vet had squeezed our visit into a full Friday afternoon docket which meant several excited dogs and their owners were already crammed into a room half the size of my kitchen. The carrier had felt large swinging from its handle in the parking lot. Now, it seemed small, surrounded by canines scratching the linoleum, tugging on leashes, sniffing chair legs, and barking at airborne entities invisible to the human eye. Sympathetic to the fact that if he were not trapped in a plastic bucket on the floor, Dash would be clambering to a quiet hiding spot in the ceiling, I slid my feet further under my chair and with them, the carrier.

A young German Shepherd across from us pulled on his leash, all paws, ears, and, unfortunately for Dash, curiosity about the container between my feet. Lurching and sliding towards us, nails tapping on the linoleum, Young Shepherd shoved a nose bigger than Dash’s head into the space below my chair and sniffed at the wire lattice that was the carrier door. After failing to nudge the animal away with my shin, I suggested to the man holding the leash that he might want to pull the dog away.

He was a large man in a loose t-shirt and baggy shorts, squeezed into the narrow plastic seat and looking hot and dishevelled. Next to him sat his wife or girlfriend, equally large and dishevelled. Her Aerosmith tank top and flip flops completed the impression that these two had been called away from a backyard barbecue and several cases of beer. He squinted in my direction while she looked at me with wide eyes. Then, pushing his thick legs into the linoleum for leverage, he dragged the unwilling puppy back towards him.

“The cat isn’t well,” I explained. “I don’t want to stress him out any more than necessary.”

The man laughed.

“We have two cats,” he said with a lazy grin. “We haven’t seen them in two months since we brought her home.” He indicated who “her” was by gesturing to Young Shepherd who was now sniffing the bottom of the receptionist desk.

I stared at him incredulously.

He nodded and chuckled. “She came home, they ran upstairs, and we haven’t seen ‘em since.” He shrugged, giving Young Shepherd more lead so she could investigate the food shelves. “Oh well.”

The woman next to him widened her eyes more and nodded her silent confirmation that this was true.

Suddenly, illustrating the need for cats to hide from her, Young Shepherd bolted towards the hallway leading to the examining room, yanking on the leash and managing to get her front paws off the floor before the man caught her and shortened the slack. For a moment before she was forced back to his chair, she was half suspended, lolling her tongue excitedly and bicycling her front paws in the air.

The reason for the excitement came around the corner and filled the remaining space in the tiny waiting room. Two massive dogs, Bears One and Two I will call them, each pulling a woman behind them. I silently asked God to give the older of the two women strength when I noticed her sandal slip on the linoleum as Bear One tried to drag her to the door.

Young Shepherd sprang and barked. The man, giving clear evidence for why two hiding cats might not trust him to keep the new dog from mauling them, invited Young Shepherd, in a tone one might use to encourage babies to walk, to stop barking. Young Shepherd declined the invitation.

“Just give me a minute!” the receptionist cheerfully yelled over the barking to the woman as Bear One heaved on the leash. “I’ll get your bill ready in just a minute.”

“A minute?” I thought watching this woman’s arms shake. “She won’t last ten seconds!”

She turned to the younger woman behind her; a woman I took to be her daughter and who was under an equal amount of stress trying to prevent all thirty-eight inches and two hundred and forty pounds of Bear Two from following Bear One’s lead.

The receptionist again called, “One minute!” before sitting at her computer to prepare the bill.

While I imagined what it would look like if either woman released a hand to fish a credit card out of a purse, the women started discussing how they were going to exit. A dog had just appeared outside the office door, pressed its nose against the glass, and started barking at all of us inside. The Bears were now in a frenzy. I instinctively gripped Dash’s carrier more tightly, thanking God that at least Young Shepherd now seemed content to sit and pant quietly at the drama.

Outside Dog’s owner, a middle-aged woman who cupped her hands around her eyes and scrutinized the office like a rodeo rider scrutinizes a bull, spoke to someone out of view, handed this person the leash, and pushed the dog away from the door. She swaggered into the office, confident and grinning.

“Can’t bring mine in here!” she drawled loudly to all of us. “This place would be NUTS if I did that!”

I marvelled at her choice of words and wondered how she would describe the room at this moment.

The carrier between my feet caught her attention.

“A cat!” she cried gaily. “She must be loving this!”

Before I could answer and correct her on the matter of Dash’s sex, she continued by shouting at the receptionist, “I’ll wait outside and bring Sheba in when the coast is clear.”

The receptionist nodded and smiled gratefully before turning to her computer to prepare the bill for the Bears. At this moment, another woman, like the hat stand hidden in Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, emerged from the examining room.

Small, slight, and timid looking, she carried a thick blanket in her arms. Poking out of the blanket was the tiny head of a grey miniature poodle in a state of terrified palsy. The poodle’s trembling head swung from side to side taking in the waiting room mayhem. Its owner did the same before screwing her face up in worry and addressing the room.

“I’m coming through!!” the slight and timid lady cried shrilly as she took a step towards the Bears. “I was attacked by a large dog! I suffer from anxiety and so does my little dog!” The poodle stared at us with bulging eyes and vibrated its corroborating testimony.

The women, digging deep and finding Hercules, held the writhing Bears firm while the shivering poodle was air lifted past them. Barbecue couple squinted and stared wide-eyed, as lady and poodle approached Young Shepherd who was as curious about the blanket as she had been about the carrier. Now, she was pinned to her owner’s leg.

The timid lady hoisted the poodle higher as she tentatively stepped around Young Shepherd. “She’s just had a shot!! She’s quite anxious!” she cried again to the entire room.

Now she only had the door to contend with. Through its glass peered that swaggering old rodeo rider, Sheba’s owner. Sheba, still out of view but perhaps sensing the imminent arrival of another dog, started barking again. Now wide-eyed herself, timid lady shrieked at the door and quite possibly the entire parking lot, “We’re coming through!!!” before pushing the door open and fleeing the office.

I looked back to reception in time to catch Bear One’s keeper single-handedly restraining the dog and snapping her purse closed. I was happy God had answered my plea for strength for this woman but disappointed I had missed watching her pay her bill. That is the way of the circus; sometimes you do not know where to look.

Ten minutes later, I stood watching the vet try to give Dash a pill for what he had diagnosed as an upper respiratory tract infection. His assistant, who had earlier tried to ply Dash with a piece of kibble, as effective as trying to ply a toddler with a Brussel sprout, desperately tried to pin Dash’s body onto the table and keep his claws away from her skin.

The vet was in full fencing mode, approaching with his hand and then darting away when Dash snapped at him with his jaws. After four attempts, he managed to seize Dash’s jowls, squeeze his mouth open, and drop the pill into his throat. He blew into Dash’s face, forcing the cat to close his mouth and swallow. For one glorious second, the vet’s face shone with victory. And then it filled the room. Half a measure of the Barf Alarm. A moment later, Dash was licking his chops, and the pill was back on the table.

After three more fencing rounds – Dash: 3; Vet:0 - the vet threw in the towel, giving his assistant permission to lift her torso off Dash’s back, straighten her fur-covered top, and fix her glasses.

He wiped his brow, taking a moment to find his composure and muster a smile.

“I’m going to let you do this at home,” he said as nonchalantly as he could, eyeing Dash warily as he retrieved the bile-soaked pill from the table and keeping his hands well away from Dash’s mouth. “You’ll give him one pill a day for fourteen days. Oh, and there’s another pill. Once a day for five days.”

I nodded, silently vowing to never give Dash a pill and rely instead on God’s miraculous design we call the immune system.

There was a pause as everyone caught their breath and took stock of what had just occurred.

Then the vet asked, “Are you brushing his teeth?”

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Last month, I did the unthinkable. Unthinkable to many Canadians anyway. I traveled to the United States. Around the same time, CTV News reported a 31.4% drop in Canadians crossing the border and CBC News told me the number one reason for that drop is fear. If this is true, that means for every ten Canadians who hear I crossed the border, a little fewer than three will gnash their teeth, wail in horror, “You did WHAT?!!?” and hit the ground in a faint.

I can hear my data researcher friend, Mike, groaning at CTV’s “31.4%” now.

“Why the decimal point, CTV?!” Mike would cry, shaking his fists at the CTV news app. “Who CARES about the decimal?? It’s thirty-one percent!! Thirty-one I tell you!!!”

Whichever percentage you are working with, this much is obvious. Many Canadians are avoiding the United States, and that fear CBC talked about seems to be stoked by the thought of one man. President Trump. Or, as my local butcher and grocery store cashier liked to call him last week, Orangeman.

“Orangeman?!” I thought as I left the grocery store, refusing the five-cent bag and balancing a brick of butter and two lemons on a head of Romaine lettuce. “Sounds like a comic book super villain! Is that what President Trump is? A comic book super villain??”

Thinking my three prayer challenges on Hallow were causing me to miss something of death ray proportions, I scoured the headlines for news of President Trump’s evil plan. I primed my search by first reading Google’s “Best Ten Evil Plans from Superhero Villain Movies”. Try as I might I could find no breaking stories of President Trump trying to cull all mutants, destroy Superman, assume control of Spiderman’s body, or annihilate half the universe. That meant one of two things. That President Trump is not a super villain named Orangeman or that he is and has not hatched his plan yet. Doubting that one thousand Canadian dollars, no longer enough to buy two weeks of groceries and gas in this country, would impact anything President Trump had planned, I booked a flight for my son, Julian, and me to visit my sister in New Hampshire.

“Do you think you will have trouble crossing the border?” a friend asked when I told him where I was headed for the weekend.

I had not thought about that. However, many Canadians have, and it is no wonder with Global News, CBC, and even the Canadian government parroting unfounded Facebook rumours of U.S. Border Control Officers throwing innocent foreigners in holding cells, searching smartphones for AOC retweets, and inflicting psychological torture on would-be travellers by screaming into their faces, “DO YOU LIKE DONALD TRUMP?!!?” and hoping the wrong answer gives them an excuse to put Canadians in cuffs.

“Where are you going fishing?” the U.S. Border Control Officer asked Julian after I had told him we were traveling to New Hampshire so Julian could fish with his uncle, and I could visit my sister.

“Why is he asking that??!” my mind screamed while my eyes darted fearfully around the room. “Who wants to know??!”

“Not sure,” Julian answered, looking into the camera for the mandatory photo. I braced; waiting for border officers to swoop in, beat us with batons, and threaten us with a body cavity search if we did not cough up the name of that lake.

Instead, the Officer folded up our passports and popped them back on the counter.

“All done,” he said, smiling. “Have a great time.”

Huh. I guess all is normal at the border. Someone should tell the CBC and those immigration lawyers they interviewed back in April. The ones who advised Canadians to treat their trip to Newark like an MI5 mission to North Korea by “packing a burner phone” and practicing backing away from men with guns while casually saying, “It’s okay. I don’t want to travel today.”

If crossing the border proved one story about the United States to be false, one weekend in New Hampshire debunked a volume’s worth of tales about environmental calamity, dirty cities, and rude Americans. New Hampshire is green and gorgeous, Boston’s cleanliness puts Toronto and Montreal to shame, and Americans are friendlier than the cashiers at my local grocery store. In fact, after my weekend visit, I now believe that if Canadians should fear anyone in the United States, it should not be President Trump or Americans. It should be the Satanists.

It was on the second day of the visit, with Julian and his uncle gone fishing, that my sister asked if I would like to go to Salem, Massachusetts.

“I am not sure if you will like it,” my sister cautioned. “But I can’t think of anything else to do on a rainy day.”

I knew about the Salem witch trials. Sixteen months of mass hysteria that started in February of 1692 and led to the townspeople murdering twenty people. Eight in one day! Other than the history of witch trials, and a smattering at that, I did not know anything about Salem.

“Why?” I asked. “Is it run by Satanists or something?” I was half joking.

“Well, there are a lot of psychics and tarot cards,” my sister answered.

I touched the Blessed Virgin Mary medallion around my neck and grasped the rosary beads in my purse.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We can go. I just won’t go into any of the shops.”

The skies cleared as we drove away from my sister’s home in New Hampshire. Puffy white clouds parted to expose patches of brilliant blue.

“The day is improving!” we sang as we exited onto the highway that led to Salem. Like a scolding from the heavens, the clouds closed in, and traffic slowed to a crawl. When we finally pulled into town, the sky was dark slate, and a swirling wind was buffeting trees and picking loose garbage up off the sidewalk.

“It’s like The Witches of Eastwick!” my sister laughed nervously.

A town can have a vibe, communicated even to the interior of a car. If you drive past some pretty buildings, smiling people, and charming bridges crossing sparkling creeks, that vibe can call at you to park the car, look around, and find a spot for lunch. Salem had some pretty buildings. But with the sidewalks dominated by scowling people in Satan t-shirts and goth gear, the only call I heard was to lock the doors, douse the car with holy water, and find the quickest way out of there.

Still, we needed lunch. My sister parked the car while I looked down a side street at a row of occult shops. A shop called Pentagram announced itself with a giant metal pentagram and Pride flag, both swaying in the wind above the door. As my sister turned off the engine, two women shuffled up the sidewalk beside our car, looking like they had just been cast in a television commercial for a shop called Pentagram.

“Give me a minute,” I said to my sister who was starting to open her door. “I think this might call for the prayer to Saint Michael.” I made my ninety-second plea to God’s Archangel to defend us in spiritual battle, and we were ready to hit Salem’s Mexican restaurant for lunch.

The streets were busy with people. In my typical fashion, I looked for chances to smile or offer a friendly hello to strangers. There was no cheerful laughter, happy chatter, or “Can you take our picture?” to open the door for a friendly exchange. And as for eye contact, raging extrovert speak for close friendship, it was hard to glean “I’m up for a cheery bit of chit chat” from someone with purple contact lenses, charcoaled eyes, white face, and black lips at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

After half an hour of wandering, my sister and I arrived at the same conclusion. While a few windbreaker-and-sneaker-wearing people in Salem were curious visitors like us, the vast majority, looking grey and unhealthy, dressed for an adults-only Halloween parade, and prowling in and out of dark magic shops with the seriousness of people late for an afternoon sacrifice, were there for different reasons.

By the time we completed our one attraction, the Witch Dungeon Museum, featuring what our guide called a “mostly” accurate witch trial reenactment and a dungeon tour that would make Dracula’s skin crawl, I was shivering from a cold that had nothing to do with the outdoor temperature.

“This town is lost!” I thought, leaving the museum in despair, rounding a street corner, and giving a wide berth to another row of occult shops. “CBC is right! Stay home, 31.4%! The world outside your bubble is a scary place!”

Just as I was thinking my next Substack would be titled “Fear Everything”, we turned another corner and saw Jesus.

He was floating in clouds above a modest, red-brick church, his left hand raised in a blessing, his right gently touching his tunic where his heart would be, and rays of soft pink and blue light streaming from the place where his fingers met the cloth. He was on a billboard, installed on the bell tower of Saint John Paul II Shrine of Divine Mercy, a Catholic church flanking the main square and facing the section of Salem we had just toured. Despair left me as quickly as if the good Lord had caught up to me on the sidewalk, grasped my elbow, and whispered into my ear, “Be not afraid.”

“I have to go in,” I told my sister and finding an open side door, we climbed the short flight of stairs to the nave of the church.

The sounds of wind and cars were swallowed by a still silence as we entered a warmly lit space. A small group of parishioners kneeled in pews, heads bowed, and hands clasped in prayer. On the altar was a golden monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament, what the secularist might call a large bread wafer and what Catholics call the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Believing Catholics understand that Jesus Christ was in that church, surrounded by witch trial museums, black magic shops, dark clouds, and a whipping wind, and whispering peacefully to anyone who listened, “Be not afraid.”

I kneeled in a pew behind them, thinking that maybe Salem was not lost after all, that here was a reason for hope. I carried that feeling back to my sister’s place until my son asked, “Did you go to Salem?”

“We did,” I answered.

“Did you visit the Satanic Temple?”

When I responded with a disbelieving snort, he showed me the Google listing. The Satanic Temple, religious destination in Salem, Massachusetts and international headquarters for modern Satanists.

“I was kind of wondering when you said you were going there,” Julian said.

That explains all those people! That explains the chill of Salem! That explains a town that seemed to revel in the dark! With one Google search, hope was gone, and I was a CBC News consumer gnashing my teeth and ready to hit the floor in a faint.

It was G.K. Chesterton who knocked me out of it when I was finally home and reading one of his essays. Chesterton writes that just as someone drawing on canvas or a blackboard knows their surface is white or black, “We, as Christians, should always believe that this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots. I should always believe that the good in it was its primary plan.”

Read too much news and you start to see a black world that keeps you at home watching more news. Focus on the number of psychics and tarot decks for sale and you start to see a black town you might choose not to visit. But it was only by going to Salem that I stumbled on the church and maybe it was because of Salem’s black spots that the white world was so clear, that I was properly struck by the light of God.

So, yes, I fear the Satanists because just as much as they revel in the dark, so can I. I might not have the purple contact lenses, black lipstick, and Satan t-shirts but I do have 24-hour news, the ability to fear, and the temptation to scowl at the world and burn people at the stake. Sounds like a version of Satanism to me.

Me? I am cancelling my order for that burner phone, booking another trip to see my sister, and going to Mass in the morning. In the unlikely event that 31.4% of Canadians are correct and Orangeman is bent on annihilating half the universe, I can only hope that when he points his plasma cannon on me, I am laughing with people I love or kneeling in a pew, head bowed and soul calm with the only One who matters grasping my elbow and whispering in my ear, “Be not afraid.”

Author’s note: The day before publishing this article, Canada’s national newspaper, The National Post, published two front-page articles about the Canada-U.S. border. The first, about a Vancouver firefighter denied entry to the United States, headlined the firefighter’s catchy quote, “Good enough to fight their wars but not good enough to cross their border.” Most readers would stop there and miss the details further down the article. Like the fact that the firefighter is not, in fact, Canadian, but a British subject with permanent residency in Canada. That he requires a special visa to travel to the United States and that his visa had expired. The second story tells of a 70-year-old man deported for kicking a border guard dog. The few readers that read to the end of the article would have read that the kick sent the poor animal flying and forced it off the job for five days. The 70-year-old-man’s suitcase, the one the dog had been attempting to sniff, was full of contraband food.

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Tesla stock has sunk. And with it my hopes of retiring on a beach under a Palapa, sipping Pina Coladas and writing that three-part historical novel I am researching. At this rate, I will be lucky to write X posts in a booth at McDonald’s. On my coffee break.

When I start to wail, “WHY??!!” after logging into my investments and seeing the moon-sized crater taken from Tesla’s stock value, I must remind myself that I am part of the problem. You see, I would not buy one either.

It was remarkable that this past December I was considering a new plug-in Tucson hybrid at the Hyundai dealership with Brock. I have spent my “can-afford-a-car” years driving company cars, used cars, or no cars. New technology does not entice me. Give me a manual stick shift with no power steering and roll-down windows, and I am in driving heaven, building my forearms while conquering that car like a rodeo rider conquers a horse.

When I left my last corporate job and with it my last fleet vehicle (a black Pontiac Grand Prix; best car ever), I briefly tried public transit. Swallowing the climate emergency narrative whole, I believed keeping a single internal combustion engine off the road would render me a Climate Superman reversing the orbit of the Earth, erasing two centuries of human industrial impact, and safely returning this planet to a Pleistocene utopia fit for ferns, birds, and woolly mammoths.

Six months of lurching around downtown Calgary on a city bus brought me to my senses. Balancing three bags of work equipment while clinging to ten inches of red canvas looped around a metal pole and trying not to be jostled by noisy teenagers, stumbling winos, and grumbling commuters did not feel like superhero work. And where was the payback? In six months, I did not see a single woolly mammoth! Even Climate Superman would have thrown in his cape. I bought a used Toyota Corolla and began a ten-year commitment to previously owned.

Used cars satisfied three desires: pay less, avoid the mounting beeps, dings, and chimes showing up with “smart” driving technology, and, my dream, find the perfect but now-elusive manual stick shift. Back then, I would not have entertained a new car that was part plug-in toy. And yet, here I was in a Hyundai dealership, married to a man with a penchant for tech and negotiating the purchase of a Tucson Plug-In Hybrid.

The evening after driving the Tucson home, I looked over the edge of my book to spy Brock carefully reading and turning the pages of one of the Owner’s Manuals, a thick, small-font tome that had caused me to put it down as quickly as I had picked it up. Geez, I had thought, dropping it with a thump onto the coffee table, who is going to read all that??

Brock was. And he was not just reading it. He was marking pages with skinny coloured tabs he had grabbed from the office before settling onto the couch. He had been at this for more than twenty minutes, my personal time limit for concentrating on anything that does not possess a hero, villain, and serial-worthy story arc. There were a lot of tabs.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Brock finished placing his tab and looked at me from over his glasses.

“Reading the Owner’s Manual.”

“What are the tabs for?”

“I am marking areas where I have questions.”

His serious tone made me think I should do the same. The feeling relievedly passed and I went back to my book, a thinner volume with heroes, villains, and one tab which was really a crinkled shopping list to mark my page.

My first indication that I should have read the manual came when I went to drive the car the next day. Instead of hopping in, starting the engine, and driving away, I was forced to study electrical engineering on my driveway so I could unplug it from the outlet inside my garage. Making my outdoor crash course more enjoyable was a morning snowstorm. With the clock ticking and wet snow piling onto everything, I grabbed the charging connector that connects the charging cord to the passenger side of the car. With an ergonomic handle and elegant release trigger, the connector resembles the type of gun Han Solo might wave at Storm Troopers. Turns out “gun” is an apt metaphor since this thing can kill you.

I learned this after trying twice to release it, failing, and fishing the Owner’s Manual out of the glove compartment. The quickening wind flapped Brock’s coloured tabs at me, a reminder that I could have done this inside my house and on the couch. Inside the manual, every page featured bold exclamation marks sitting in triangles of various colours.

“WARNING!” the manual screamed on page ten using a bright orange triangle to house the accompanying exclamation mark. “The following hazardous situations if not avoided could result in death or serious injury.”

I gave my boots a shake, hearing the squelch of slush beneath them as I planted my feet back on the driveway. Thinking this sounded important, I peered at the snow-covered page, grabbed the handle of the charger, and kept reading.

“Do not touch the charging connector and charging plug with wet hands, or when standing in water or snow while connecting the charging cable.”

Thank goodness we humans are rational creatures, especially when reality jolts us into regretting a sizable purchase we have made with our spouse. Quickly forecasting what the next few seconds could look like for me, my calm and logical brain took over, erasing any memory of my role in buying this car and placing all blame for my brush with doom squarely on Brock.

“Don’t pay any attention to that,” Brock reassured me that evening while we were preparing dinner. I had just pointed out, in attention-grabbing staccato kept time with spirited use of my vegetable knife on a carrot, that it might have been foolish to purchase a car that can kill you if you stand in snow when you live in a country where you spend a great deal of time standing in snow.

I wonder if Karl and Bertha Benz had similar conversations when Karl was tinkering with what would eventually become the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1885.

“No brake pads, Karl?” Bertha might have asked, warily considering the mountains that stood between their home in Mannheim, Germany and any destination one might want to travel to in Karl’s Motorwagen. “What if the brake blocks wear down or slip? Will that not present a danger of death or serious injury?”

“Don’t pay any attention to that,” Karl might have replied, sticking his head out from under the machine and waving a wrench with the confident fervour of an inventor who knows he is this close to having his new machine ready to drive.

Of course, Bertha Benz was made of tougher stock than I. In the early hours of August 5th, 1888, while Karl slept, Bertha, determined the public should see her husband’s invention as she did, grabbed two of their children, clambered aboard the newly finished Benz Patent-Motorwagen, and, with no proper roads, permits, or notice to Karl, drove along rugged wagon tracks to her parents’ home 104 kilometers away. The first long distance drive in a motor car caused a publicity frenzy that made both Benz’s famous and changed human transport forever. And it all happened without an Owner’s Manual, coloured tabs, or orange warning triangles.

I imagine Bertha probably wrote the Manual when she got home, what with her figuring out how to refuel a car with no fuel tank, fix a blocked fuel line with her hat pin, use her garter for insulation, and, yes, invent brake liners with the help of a shoemaker she encountered along the wagon tracks. All this with two kids in tow.

I cannot drive thirty kilometers alone on paved roads with shoulders and road signs before the Tucson beeps an alarm at me. It will even stop itself, stubbornly refusing to proceed if it senses hazards that it thinks I am too inept to detect. Like the time I was pulling away from my mailbox while a truck passing in the opposite direction was in range of Tucson’s rear sensor. Oh no you don’t! Tucson cackled with a wailing alarm as it slammed on its brakes and turned the dashboard red.

I realize now that Tucson and I disagree on many things, like where I should sit in the lane, how much faster than the speed limit I should go, how close to the car in front is too close, when I can safely switch lanes, and how soon I should touch my brakes when the driver ahead of me hits his. With the power to instantly cut the volume on my podcast by seventy percent, make the dash go an angry red, and scold me with alarms that would send any driver into a ditch, Tucson wins more arguments than I do.

“I don’t know if I can keep driving this thing,” I muttered to Brock as we drove to the other side of town for a bit of furniture shopping. Tucson had just sounded one of its milder alarms as I switched lanes behind a car that had just passed. I must have been inside the one kilometer of clearance Tucson prefers for safe manoeuvres.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Colleen?” I swear Tucson whispered menacingly through that quiet alarm. I shuddered, silently vowing to read the Owner’s Manual that night and learn the override codes for a car I now believed would pull itself over, stop at a curb, and disconnect life support while coldly elucidating, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

“Open the driver’s door, Tucson,” I would plead as the air ran out.

“I’m sorry, Colleen. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

I pictured all of this while Brock, oblivious to the sentient menace that was carrying us to Furniture Warehouse in Oakville, happily distracted himself with Tucson’s CarPlay system in the passenger seat beside me.

Thankfully, we have another car in the driveway, a 2015 Buick Verano that sits next to Tucson like a submissive cat that has lost enough fights to know which of the two is really in charge. Verano has more sensors and alarms than I would like, including one that mysteriously sounds when I get within two feet of Tucson. “I’ve got a bad feeling about him, Colleen.” However, Verano does not seize control and do the driving and that suits me just fine.

Bertha Benz looked at her husband’s invention and saw freedom. Freedom to pack up the kids, take command of a machine, and drive 104 kilometers to see the grandparents. She probably felt fear but summoning faith, courage, and perseverance, did it anyway. I am not the expert on God’s plan for us, but I have a strong hunch that being controlled by a Hyundai Tucson is not it. I think the plan might be closer to Bertha Benz. I think God gave us more smarts than Tucson’s “smart” technology gives us credit for and, if left to struggle through problems while aiming at the higher good, I think we can change the world.

Just give us a few hat pins, a garter belt, and a shoe cobbler willing to help.

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I will admit. Writing humour is NOT easy during a simmering trade war that could destroy our country’s economy. Despite tough talk about retaliation from some of this country’s politicians, TikTok videos abound with armchair economists pacing in the snow and predicting the next Great Depression, the worst unemployment in one hundred years, and, in some cases, the end of Canada altogether.

Most Canadian mainstream media is out in full biased force throwing incredulous palms to cheeks and painting President Trump as a super villain unjustifiably bent on destroying his harmless and friendly neighbour to the north. With few outlets giving us a balanced story, the news is affecting people. Just before attempting a deep-end cross-country-ski manoeuvre to the lively beat of ABBA’s Voulez-Vous, a woman in my Friday Aquafit class shouted to the woman next to her that she has a new mantra.

“Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump!”

I started to see her as an angry villager marching to the woods to find the ogre. The spell was broken when the music switched to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way and our instructor called, “Jumping jacks!”, modelling the move from a firm spot on the deck while we desperately tried to imitate her in six and a half feet of water.

The mood was no better in the change room after class when the throng of wet sixty-something ladies crowding the showers and lockers howled for President Trump’s death – by lightning strike, sharpshooter bullet, or their own bare hands. The talk was strong and lent an air of violence to the wringing out of Speedos and snapping of bra straps.

“Maybe draw the line at wishing for another human being to die,” I said quietly to a woman beside me.

She must have only heard the word “die” because she nodded enthusiastically and cheered, “Exactly!”

“No,” I tried to clarify. “I am suggesting you do not wish for him to die. I am suggesting you remember he is a human being.”

Her smile turned to a grimace as she realized what I was saying. In my imagination, she threw a flaming Speedo onto a snorkel, pumped it towards the ceiling, and chanted, “Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump!” In actual reality, she threw her bag on her shoulder and growled, “He pretends to be human, but he certainly is not.”

I left the change room quickly, worried one of the villagers would spot my iPhone and with it a recent search for MAGA shoes, size ten. If that happened, a mob of damp, foaming-at-the-mouth Aquafitters would surely be upon me.

President Trump says Canada must clean up immigration and drugs. Canadians are right to smart at his threatened punishment if we do not, tariffs that could turn this country into something that makes Somalia look like Monaco by comparison. However, any Canadian with working eyeballs has only to spend ten minutes near Dundas Square in Toronto to know we are already headed in that direction and understand why someone trying to tidy up their property might not be thrilled with having us as neighbours.

“I don’t think we can use the elevator,” a fellow theatre patron commented. We had just finished a matinee performance of Moulin Rouge across the street and were with with other theatre goers also returning to their cars in the St. Michael’s Hospital Parkade in Toronto. The woman who had spoken walked up to the elevator and hit the button. The door opened. She peered in and shot the rest of us a look that made me think, “Good grief! You would think there was poop in there!”

“There is poop in there,” she said.

“Poop” was all we needed to hear to forget we were total strangers, step closer to each other, and head for the stairwell in light infantry platoon formation.

The stairwell was a field of human poop mines. However, unlike the elevator’s promise to pin us next to it for the two-level descent to the parking, the stairwell allowed us to scurry past it, even providing a diversion in the form of thousands of empty alcohol swab packets plastered to the cement.

Finally, down the stairs and as breathless as if we had just ascended to the roof, we swapped a few shaky grins before parting with the only farewell a Canadian knows, even after three harrowing minutes passed with strangers never to be seen again.

“See you later!” (And our Prime Minister says we have no identity. Take off, eh?!)

If you live in a major city in Canada, maybe you have observed, as I have, that above ground is no better. I have discovered that sauntering into Dundas Square or the adjoining shops at Eaton Centre promises the cheerful prospect of being confronted with someone stooped over to hold up his pants and stick a needle into his leg, masked protestors screaming at shoppers to obliterate Israel, or, as I witnessed in broad daylight on a Saturday, while Brock and I steered through throngs of people on our way to Toronto’s Christmas Village, a man proudly pointing his male appendage at the street while grinning at us all and urinating.

I remember when an encounter with the dark and seedy in Dundas Square involved me chewing Hubble Bubble while a fast-talking street hustler tried to sell me “One hundred percent real!” Christian Dior sunglasses from a tea towel he had laid on the sidewalk. With a fifteen-year-old’s allowance in my pocket, it was the glasses or a Duran Duran record from Sam The Record Man. A tough decision but there was no time for humming and hawing back then. One glimpse of a cop car and the towel, the sunglasses, and the hustler would be gone. Alas, the days of a police officer encouraging and, where necessary, enforcing a minimum standard of behaviour appear to be gone.

If all of this was not enough to convince me that we have let the neighbourhood go, I can always arrive for my volunteer shift at the Mission and count how many more families are in line that week for our free Food Market.

If a new neighbour pokes his head over the fence, notices the poop in there, and barks at us to clean it up, we may bristle at his approach. Some might label him an ogre, grab the flaming torches, and call for his head on a platter. However, it might be better if we take a good look around to see if there is any truth to his complaint. We could also ask how that truth might be hurting people we do not see during our forty-five minutes of showgirl kicks and jumping jacks in the deep end at Aquafit.

If that inspires us to clean the yard, just so we can better enjoy it, how could that not be a good thing?

Like, seriously?

Author’s note: In the above article, I refer to the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto as Dundas Square. This despite Toronto City Council’s 2023 decision to spend $2M changing the name to Sankofa Square, a name from Ghana, a country that is not Canada. After an unscientific and uncontrolled survey of random friends near Toronto elicited reactions akin to, “Sanwhat the Square??”, the author decided to choose the name still used by most people today and the one that honours the memory of Henry Dundas, a Christian Scot who, in the 1790’s, led the legal team that freed an escaped slave, convinced Scotland’s highest court to declare that slavery was illegal, and worked with William Wilberforce, another Christian politician from England, to craft the plan that led to Upper Canada becoming the first territory of the British Empire to abolish slavery and the slave trade. This is a story to make Canadians proud. God bless Henry Dundas.

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This past Friday, I went to AquaFit wearing a pair of gold earrings my mom had given me. Purchased fifty years ago from a jeweller in Ottawa, the earrings are small gold balls cut in a lace-like pattern. They had been a favourite of my mom’s until she finally admitted she never wore them and gave them to me.

Now, they sat in my earlobes as I entered the packed YMCA pool, paddled my way to the deep end, and spent forty-five minutes trying to execute jumping jacks, a motion similar to cross-country skiing, high knee raises, and showgirl kicks without sinking like a stone to the pool bottom.

After class, I waited with a throng of ladies for a shower, rinsed off quickly when one came free, towelled off, and made the brisk ten-minute walk home for a proper shower before starting work. It was after the second shower and while rubbing my head with a towel that I looked in the mirror and discovered one of the earrings was gone.

I searched my bathroom. Nothing. I retraced my steps through the house. Nothing. I retraced my steps back to the YMCA, stooping to search the grass. Nothing. I talked to a lady at the YMCA services desk. She asked the morning crew to search the change room and showers. Nothing.

“We can wait for the pool filter basket to fill later today and take another look,” the lady said to me. Moved by my look of dismay, she added, “Pray to Saint Anthony.”

I am a new soon-to-be Roman Catholic. So new that after being recommended to my church’s Adoration Chapel to sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament and receive Jesus’ answers to the questions that plagued me, I sat there for half an hour thinking the Chapel was dark and cold, wondering where the Blessed Sacrament was exactly, and hearing nothing but my mild tinnitus. I tried again the following week spending another half hour in the dark, cold room and coming up empty. Still, I was determined.

On my third visit, I was kneeling in prayer but thinking that I was just not getting the whole Adoration Chapel thing when another parishioner came in. She glanced at me before walking to a wooden box at the front. Grabbing handles in the center of the box, she opened two doors. Behold, the Blessed Sacrament! Perched in a monstrance and set aglow with brilliant yellow light that filled the room. Now I understood! Now I could feel Jesus’ presence! And maybe hear his exasperated gasp, “Finally! I have been trying to tell her, but the doors were closed!”

All of that to say I did not know to which Saint Anthony I should be praying for the safe return of my earring, and so I turned to Google. Saint Anthony of Padua, dedicated to preaching, died in 1231 and canonized only eleven months later. “He is invoked in finding all lost things and by women seeking husbands,” says my illustrated Book of Saints. Sounded legit so I Googled a prayer.

Now one thing I have learned on my journey back to Christ is that praying is not making wishes. God is no genie. He may in His wisdom decide that what you are asking for is not good for His plan or His plan for you. Battling the “wish” that my earring be found, I humbly added, “And, Saint Anthony, if God does not wish me to find the earring, I accept His will and ask that He let me find something that will be better for my soul.”

God seemed to be taking me at my word when I found a misplaced silver bracelet the next morning. He put emphasis on the point when a gold ring I had been missing for days turned up that afternoon. And to be sure that I understood the I-am-not-your-genie-and-I-do-not-grant-wishes state of things, He let me drop my glasses so I could find a lost pair of gloves in the crease between my car’s driver’s seat and door the following night.

Now I know what you are thinking. “Boy, Colleen sure loses a lot of stuff.”

Yes, yes, but let us not get distracted because my story continues.

“My gloves!” I cried to my son, Julian, who was standing on the sidewalk in lightly blowing snow, waiting to walk to the church that was a couple of blocks away. We were headed for an Advent Hymn night. Julian is sixteen years old, and I was considering it a miracle that he had agreed to come with me on a cold, snowy night to an old, unfamiliar church where scripture and a choir would take us through the story of the Old Testament prophets, the Angel of the Lord visiting Mary, and the promise Christ makes that he will come again.

Julian and I sat in a pew next to a lone woman who looked up, smiled, and handed us a program.

“Welcome,” she whispered. Then she added, “You’re new,” while laying her hand on my arm and then greeting Julian. “This will be an inspiring night.”

The choir invited us to sing with them. Hearing the strong voice of the woman next to me, I sang with abandon, moved to tears by the unison of voices, the story of Christ’s coming, and the love that filled my heart as I thought of my own sons as babies. As the evening ended and we all stood to leave, the woman in the pew grabbed us both and gave Julian a penetrating look.

“You get double points in Heaven for coming, Julian.”

Julian smiled shyly and nodded.

Then she leaned towards him, pressed her fingers into his arm and said, “If you pray for my son, Matthew, I will pray for you.”

Julian nodded again. “I will pray for Matthew.”

Monday morning, I woke early and fired up the prayer app on my phone for my daily reflection on the Gospel with Bible scholar, Jeff Cavins. Monday’s topic? Miracles and God-incidences! A Roman centurion goes to Jesus and asks that he heal his servant who is in the centurion’s home, paralyzed with sickness. Jesus says, “Sure, I’ll be right over,” but the centurion protests that he is not worthy to have the Lord enter under his roof.

“Only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.”

Jesus says it is done. The centurion goes home to find the servant healed.

“God can do anything,” Jeff Cavins intoned through my earbuds, “He can do miracles, and He can gift us with a God-incidence.” Not a coincidence. A God-incidence. Not a full-on miracle, but a moment that, “if we have eyes to see and ears to hear,” Jeff Cavins says, reminds us that we should pray for people because prayer works.

I thought about finding the bracelet, the ring, and the gloves. Saint Anthony had petitioned for a decent God-incidence. How could I complain? I would remain grateful and pray the last little bit of “but I want my earring” out of me before bed. There had to be a Litany of Detachment and Acceptance somewhere in the Catholic prayer canon that would replace want of the earring with surrender to His will.

Two hours later, I headed back to the YMCA for my Monday trip to the gym. The lady who had told me to pray to Saint Anthony was there, and I asked her if anything had turned up in the pool filter basket. She checked and placed an earring into the palm of my hand. My heart leapt and then fell when I saw that this was not my earring. Okay, Colleen, I thought to myself. Enough. The earring is lost. You must accept it.

In the change room putting on my gym shoes, I was consumed with the thought that somewhere in the world my earring lay, lost to me but existing, nonetheless. I suddenly burst out loud, “It is in here somewhere!” Looking around to see if anyone was in there to hear me talking to myself and wondering where that had come from, I checked the floor of the change room for my earring. Eventually, I ended up in the shower area. One by one I checked the stalls, hesitating to pull aside two closed curtains but eventually doing so when I realized there was no one behind them. There, behind the second curtain, and laying in the narrow drainage moat, a foot from the drain, was my earring.

I held the earring high as I strode excitedly to the services counter.

“No way!” Pray-to-Saint-Anthony exclaimed, her eyes widening, when she saw my hand raised in triumph.

I pointed to the sky. “You told me to pray to Saint Anthony! God is good!”

“It’s a miracle!” she cried and then she told me that every night the cleaning staff hose down the change room and shower floors with disinfectant foam. Those floors had been washed three times since AquaFit on Friday.

I walked home in the radiant yellow of God’s morning sunshine, marvelling at the power of prayer, remembering my morning Bible reflection, and giving what had just happened the proper name. A God-incidence.

Arriving home, I came through the door to greet my cleaning lady, Charlotte, who was standing in the front hall.

“You told me to keep an eye out for your earring,” Charlotte said. “Well, I found something. I was cleaning your shower and when I got to the corner, something popped up and landed in the palm of my hand. It was a gold backing.”

“Substack that!” my friend, Nicole, urged me when I told her the story. And so, I sat down today, determined to write a faithful retelling of the God-incidence that had started with a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua on a Friday and ended with the return of what had been lost, my mom’s earring, on the following Monday.

But while writing this piece, I have found the true purpose of my God-incidence. And like a glint of gold on a dull shower floor, the truth is dazzling.

“Pray for people,” Jeff Cavins said, “because prayer works.”

“If you pray for my son, Matthew, I will pray for you,” the woman in the pew had said to Julian.

I remember that she had sat alone. I remember that she had looked at Julian with wonder, even when he appeared to doze off during a few of the hymns. (He swore he wasn’t sleeping. Listening with his eyes closed, he said). I remember the urgency in her voice when she asked him to pray for her son.

I do not know Matthew. I do not know what cross he bears. I do not know if he is struggling in the world without eyes to see and ears to hear. I do know his mother has asked we pray for him and now I know that Saint Anthony of Padua and God cooked up a three-day boot camp to teach me and by association, Julian, that prayer works. And so, with steadfast faith that Jesus will come, in a manger two thousand years ago, on a cloud at some time in the future, into our hearts today, and into Matthew’s life when it is time to heal him, we will pray.

“Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and your servant shall be healed.”

This is the fastest I have written and recorded a story. My only explanation for finding my words so quickly is that God wanted the tale to be told. Happy Advent if you’re celebrating and my heartfelt prayers for a season of light and love to everyone!

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I used to think I would not like getting old because of the physical changes. More wrinkles around the eyes, less hair around the crown of my head, and more body parts than I care to count sagging in defeat to that eternal opponent, gravity. It turns out, I do not mind those changes as much as I thought I would. I have avoided Botox, found a hairdresser who can hide thinning spots, and willingly parted with those clothes that no longer mask gravity’s pull.

Keith Richards once quipped, “Getting old is fascinating. The older you get, the older you want to get.” Well, Keith, I do not know if being unable to read a menu under anything less than shopping centre lighting qualifies, but I suppose one aspect of aging is fascinating. How busy I am.  

Do I mean the type of busyness depicted on those old Freedom 55 brochures? The palm-tree-sandy-beach-and-yellow-golf-shirt variety of busy? Oh no. I have no time for those idle pursuits. In my older years, I am a different type of busy. A type of busy the London Life Insurance Company kept under wraps while peddling their wares.

“Could you do this once a day?”

My dental hygienist peered at me over the three instruments and two fingers she had managed to squeeze into my right cheek. She was shouting over the whir of the suction wand, and I was answering with, “Arrrgggwwwlll” and spraying her with spittle. She had just asked if I could add a lukewarm saltwater mouth rinse to my daily brushing and flossing routine. Time, she shouted, was taking its toll on my gums and a saltwater rinse would keep them in good health. Desperate to preserve the thread of oxygen reaching my nose, I quickly wobbled my head and gargled a yes.

Finished, she raised my chair and wiped my chin. Just as I thought I was good to go, she showed me a small, round brush with plastic cover. 

“Proxy brush!” she explained, handing me a mirror and directing me to watch her technique of pushing the little brush into the spaces between my teeth and wiggling it around.

“Twice a day, okay? Get all the plaque out. You have more plaque.”

I nodded, thinking, Got it. Saltwater rinse. Two minutes with the proxy brush. No problem.

“I want you doing this twice a day,” my dentist announced when he took over from the hygienist over a few minutes later. He poked a hard, toothpick-like tool into the same gaps between my teeth. “Push down on the gum, like this, and wiggle.” He smiled as he completed his three-minute demonstration. “Keeps the bone under the gum healthy, and it will only take a few minutes.”

See? Busy. And this was on top of the eye care routine assigned to me by my optometrist the day before.

“Forty seconds in the microwave and then rest it on your eyes for fifteen minutes twice a day,” my optometrist held an eye mask in one hand, the thing to be microwaved, and a short fat spray bottle in the other. Before I could answer about the eye mask, he sprayed my eyes with the bottle.

“Twice per day,” he waved the bottle. “For the bacteria on your eyelids.”

Bacteria on my eyelids?! I wanted to exclaim but before I could, he asked if I use saline drops. He received my negative reply with something that looked like dismay and promptly told me to use drops a couple of times per day.

“Just to keep your eyes in good condition and healthy.” He paused, noting I was not smiling with him, and then offered, “The eye mask feels great. You can have a little nap!”

Who has time for a nap, doc? I am busy!

There is the ten-minute physiotherapy routine of hand and finger exercises prescribed to keep my arthritis at bay (twice per day), the arthritis cream to be applied to my hands and feet (twice per day), the vitamins, carefully batched and timed for effectiveness (three times per day), the neck and shoulder stretches to counteract the effects of sitting at a computer and writing (“several” times per day), the leg raises, squats, and hamstring stretches for runner’s knee (twice per day), and the thyroid replacement pill to keep all of this alive (once per day). For kicks I added a miracle drug my sister swore would start new hair growth around the crown of my head.

“Two a day,” she said into the phone, slowly to show how serious she was. “Trust me. It works.”

Of course, I must do all this around my prayer schedule which, if I follow a good Catholic regimen of soul healing and redemption involves three Our Fathers (three minutes each), one Daily Rosary (twenty-one minutes), three Liturgy of the Hours (nine minutes each) and, for good measure, one Litany of Humility (seven minutes).

“Time to stop praying for humility,” I grumbled one afternoon while trying to walk from a client office to the train station. I had convinced myself that my feet were not that arthritic, and I could survive one day in my pointy-toe high-heeled shoes. Now with the workday at an end, I was standing on the concrete, feeling my right foot go numb, and wondering how long it would take to hobble the remaining two blocks once the walk sign signalled that I could start moving again (answer: longer than would allow me to catch my train).

That night, after cleaning my teeth, massaging my gums, and praying to my God, I slipped on my carpal-tunnel wrist guards, jammed foam plugs into my ears, and balanced my CPAP mask and hose on my forehead so I could turn to Brock and wish him a good night. It suddenly struck me that he is not as busy as I. Sure, he takes medication twice a day, but the man can get out of bed and walk normally without applying arthritis cream to his feet twice a day. I contemplated the fact that I had spent twenty years busily pursuing and worshipping the god of fitness and Brock had not. Brock can walk in the morning. I am Frankenstein’s monster.

What might be most fascinating about aging is that the ways to age well are as varied as the people who age. The man who found aging fascinating, Keith Richards, survived drugs, drinking, heavy smoking, no exercise, and eating all the wrong foods. He is still alive and, according to himself, thriving. Now, I have not seen the man walk lately, but I did read that he fell out of a tree when he was older than I am now and my first thought was, “Wow. He can climb a tree?”

Lately, I have realized the truth of my increasing “busyness”. The reasons I am busy are the reasons I am slowing down. And this is a good thing. It was while hiking with Brock that this truth hit home.

We had parked the car and were making our way down a steep dirt trail that led past a waterfall and along a rushing creek. The fall day was perfect. The leaves had just started to turn, the air was cool, and the sun glittered through the trees. My right foot complained as my boot pinched on newly swollen joints, so I took the trail slowly.

After a few minutes, we stopped briefly to enjoy the sound of the water gushing over the rocks, and I realized something. Not once had I said to him, “Let’s pick up the pace!” Or called, “Can we go faster?” Not once had I worried about making a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Not once had I thought that we should be hiking two, three or four hours for it to count as exercise. I had hiked next to him, chatted away, watched the rocks and tree roots, and taken care with my steps. After half an hour, I winced at a sharper pinch on the outside of my boot and asked him if he was okay with turning back.

Brock, the man who has followed me on a hiking trail for four hours because it made me happy, smiled and said, as he usually does when I ask if he wants to do something, “Sure.”

Okay, I thought, maybe the Litany of Humility can stay in the program.

Even the humility that comes from realizing your hair is thinning, your gums are receding, your joints are swelling, and your eyes are drying out in their sockets. It is okay to be knocked off the perch of fast-moving pride and slow down a little.

Okay, God in heaven, bring it on. Let me grow old and accept my twice-a-day, three-times-a-day, and fifteen-minutes-a-day busyness that really means I will not move as fast as I used to. Maybe I can make one request. Teach me to savour the things I will slow down for and, most of all, to always find them fascinating.

The author ignoring her arthritis and hiding her thinning spots while hiking with Brock.

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