Posted on December 30, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

Cheers to the year ahead.

 

Home for the holidays. Where is home? Here’s a little poem that I wrote about the notion of home.

Home

When we’re young, we live at home,

With mom and dad, and sis and bro,

We’re well protected under a dome,

From wind and rain and sleet and snow.

 

We know our house, each nook and cranny,

The common smells, the frequent scents,

If we’re lucky, visits from granny,

Her wisdom and everything it meant.

 

We love our home, our comfort zone,

A place to be ourselves,

To be with others, or alone,

Storing memories on the shelves.

 

We grow up and move away,

To start a life anew,

We find our own place to stay,

We learn when the rent is due.

 

We get married, have kids, and buy a house,

Creating memories of our own,

Plugged toilets and the occasional mouse,

And a lawn that must be mown.

 

There’s always a pull, to get back home,

To spend time with mom and dad,

To walk on the beach with its waves and foam,

And all the good times we had.

 

Is home really about four walls,

A structure that we yearn?

Or is it the memories that we recall,

And the lessons that we learned?

 

Home, I believe, is where you’re at,

At any given time,

The address isn’t important, or the table where you sat,

Or the stairwell that you climbed.

 

Home is where your heart is,

Not the mortar or the bricks,

It’s not towels with “hers” or “his”,

Or the icing bowl you licked.

 

It’s the feelings you engendered,

So many years ago,

The generosity that was tendered,

In wind and sleet and snow.

Posted on December 24, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with one comment

 

Stretching the truth

(Pete MacDonald photo)

 

Another year is hurtling towards its conclusion.

What will you remember most about 2025?

If you want to dwell on the negative, then wars and wildfires will likely be near the top of your list.

Way too many deaths for my liking as many leaves have fallen off the Baby Boom tree.

Tariffs, Trump… and many other tragedies.

But, alas, it is Christmas morning and it is not my intention to leave several lumps of coal in your stocking.

My choice is gratitude.

You see, I am told that if there is coal and if it’s put under sufficient pressure, the results could be a sparkling diamond. Pressure is a constant in our lives. How we respond determines whether or not we will sparkle and shine over time or remain a lump of coal, destined for the furnace.

This Christmas will be incredibly difficult for those who have lost loved ones. The lights on the Christmas tree won’t shine as brightly as normal and Christmas dinner will be salted with tears.

As a new year approaches, most of us are taking stock, a personal inventory, as it were. We’ve all undoubtably had hiccups over the past year.

I have been asked numerous times how I broke my arm earlier this year. My cheeky response is that I got caught in a terrible storm while crossing over the Pyrenees from France into Spain. Rain, fog and high winds made the descent treacherous and after being attacked by a herd of mountain goats, I stumbled and fell. That would make a terrific story, but the truth is that I stubbed my toe on a curb in the mall parking lot and landed on the sidewalk. No ice. No snow. Dry pavement.

Eight months later, I’m still rehabbing the arm. I am now absolutely delighted that I can lift my arm high enough to apply anti-perspirant. My friends are absolutely delighted as well!

It is not always possible to take a bad situation and turn it into something positive. However, I am a big believer in re-framing – taking a difficult situation and turning it upside down.

I don’t mean to brag, but this is precisely what I did after breaking my arm. After lying around for two weeks, wallowing in self-pity, I dragged myself off the couch and decided to keep writing my autobiography that I had started during March break. My daughter came over and put several books under my laptop so that I could get my right arm on the keyboard. For the next three months, I hunted and pecked and churned out 115,000 words, many that mercifully ended up in the scrap heap once my editor got her hands on the manuscript.

With each passing year, I realize that I need to pay closer and closer attention to my body. Yes, I am good to walk every day, but my body is telling me that that is not nearly enough. When getting out of bed seems like trying to extricate yourself from quicksand, then it’s time for action.

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions but I will boldly state mine here.

In order to keep my body from seizing up (my muscles are so tight that I’m finding it hard to tie my boot laces), I need to do A LOT MORE stretching.

I am giving up Chai tea and will take up Tai Chi in the new year!

I am grateful for surviving another year on planet earth.

I’m still standing.

“Don’t you know that I’m still standing better than I ever did,

Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid,

And I’m still standing after all this time.”

I’m Still Standing – Elton John

Merry Christmas.

Posted on December 10, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

 

A perfect hand. A rarity.

 

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

Nobody has ever accused me of being a card shark. OK. I was pretty good at playing Fish and War as a child (!) but once I moved up to 45’s and Hearts, I realized that there were people far more adept at playing cards than me. I loved playing cribbage, but I found my true passion in the basement of the Angus L. MacDonald Library on the campus of St.F.X. University where I learned how to play bridge during my university days.

Depending on the card game, there’s a certain level of luck and a goodly amount of skill involved. Of course, we all love it when we are dealt a winning hand whether it’s a royal flush in poker or a 29 hand in crib. But these are rarities. Most of the hands we’re dealt are average, and occasionally we’re dealt a real shitty hand.

Nobody cares much for whiners. These people always seem to lay the blame on others when things aren’t going right. Cards is an excellent metaphor for life. There are people who are dealt a great hand in life and very often, the outcome is not always what one might think. If everything goes your way all the time, then trouble is just around the corner when adversity rears its ugly head.

The people that I admire most are the ones that take a poor hand and play it well.

I don’t play much bridge any more. When I was first learning the game, I would get annoyed when I was dealt thirteen lousy cards. But as I improved and started playing with people very good at the game, I noticed that they never seemed to get perturbed when the cards were not in their favour. As Paul Newman famously said in the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke, “Sometimes nothing is a cool hand.” A good bridge player keeps track of all the cards played and can eventually put the other team down even with the worst possible cards.

I know some people who are having a very hard time. Some families seem cursed as illnesses and death seem to crop up far too often. They have barely survived one trauma when another appears. Even a card shark would have difficulty playing this hand.

Two people who grew up in my neighbourhood when I was a child developed illnesses early in life that left them with enormous challenges throughout their lives. These women were both very bright and could have made an enormous contribution to society had they been healthy. But wait. They did. With ultimate courage and grace, they faced these hardships head on. They played the cards that they were dealt and in all the years I knew them, they never uttered a complaint. It often seems that those who appear to live a charmed existence seem to have plenty of complaints while others, like my neighbours, take what they are given and live a meaningful life, teaching us  resilience, humility and stoicism.

Rudyard Kipling said it best in his poem If: “If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”

Life is no sleight of hand. It’s real and it’s hard and it’s beautiful.

And when you have nothing in your hands, you can bluff like Cool Hand Luke or take a page out of Kenny Roger’s Gambler:

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”

Have a great weekend.

P.S. I have two book launches this weekend: Saturday December 13^th at 2:00 p.m.at the Heritage Museum and for you folks up in Mount Cameron Circle, I’ll be at The Maples on Sunday 14^th at 2:00 p.m.