Category: Sociology & Psychology
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Full Body Chills On a Hot Summer’s Day
Several times a day my neighbour passes the house walking her toy poodle. It’s an odd day if she hasn’t stopped and chitter-chattered about this and that. But yesterday she had a particular tale to tell. On the weekend she attended an outdoor wedding on the grounds of a picturesque stone home built in… Read more
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Feral
These days I wake up at cat o’clock. Puss meows to escape, the birds twitter and fuss, a din moments before first light appears on the horizon. Little cat’s seasonal wildness begins mid-April or so, while mine lies dormant for another month. By mid-May we are in cahoots while the house sleeps on. There are… Read more
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King Lear, Dementia, Filial Piety and the Profound Vulnerability of Aging
The 30-second summary of Shakespeare‘s King Lear is this: An elderly and increasingly demented King seeks to divide his kingdom in three, according to the degree of publicly pious devotion declared by his three daughters. The two eldest favour him with flattery but the youngest, his favourite, refuses to participate in the tawdry spectacle. He banishes her… Read more
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Walking the Walk
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail that now seem like common sense to… Read more
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The House at Armstrong’s Point
A natural park formed by a bend of [the] Assiniboine River, which surrounds it on three sides, preventing encroachment and overcrowding, well sheltered by fine timber, rich soil sloping south, excellent drainage…wide boulevards…less than two miles from centre of the city, comprising the choicest residential property and the pretties gardens and lawns in the city.… Read more
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Exit the Television
We haven’t had a television in our house for a very long time. One day I got fed-up trying to place the family room furniture in a conversation-friendly layout that also permitted television viewing. So I called up a friend who drove over and drove away with our set, bound for a Community Living group… Read more
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A Carpenter’s Life: As Told By Houses
I was encouraged by my elders to “follow my heart.”…Would not our world be a better place if we all followed what our hearts tell us to do? People with heart won’t fight senseless wars, they won’t strip-mine a beautiful mountain, commit genocide, pollute our land with toxic waste and chemical fertilizers, foul the air… Read more
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At Home With Mrs. Hen
At home with young kids? This is it exactly. The dishes, laundry, food preparation, bickering and incessant demands rarely stop. I feel your pain. Enough to want to fly the coop… Read more
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Dreaming of Houses And Other Interior Spaces
Last night I dreamed I lived in a house where all the rooms were too small. The bed stuck out of the door into the hallway and the visitors had to climb over the couch to come in the front door. The dream dictonary says that too-small houses are about frustration or feeling like some… Read more