Category Archives: Personal

Because of Travel

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H. and I don’t travel a lot but when we do, it directs my reading.

We took a long-wished-for tour to Spain/Portugal/Morocco this fall, a 4000-kilometre bus ride (with stops of course) that gave us a wonderful overview of three countries. Impressions and bits of experience, such a tour, which both satisfied curiosity and provoked it. Before we went I tried to find books that might provide points of recognition once there, and since returning have enjoyed several books in which the same happens in reverse. Reading, in my opinion, is travel too, the mind not bound by flights or time, but when text and tour overlap in short order, well, it’s a bonus.

So, for what it’s worth, recent reading because of travel. Continue reading →

High Time

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High time for me to show up at my blog.

High time? It means “the time that something is due (bordering on overdue)” and alludes, I learn online, to the warmest part of the day, when the sun is highest in the sky. Which, gauging by my watch, is more or less this moment of writing, though the air is filled with smoke from British Columbia’s numerous wildfires and the sun is hidden and the light has an eerie cast.

In the steady turning of time from low to high and round again, H. and I have reached and passed a year here in Tsawwassen, and are still pleased to be here. We’ve also just reached and passed another year in our marriage, to 43, and are grateful for that. Continue reading →

The pleasure of the puzzle

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In his memoir Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov describes the pleasure of a jigsaw puzzle, which his mother loved:

What had seemed to be the limb of a horse would turn out to belong to an elm and the hitherto unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap in the mottled background, affording one the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction.

Yes, exactly that. Continue reading →