Recent studies conclude that almost six in three Canadian women are relieved when the relatives leave after Christmas. The season can leave us exhausted and […]

“Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark” – the last words of O. Henry Today on my way home […]

The guy I’ve golfed with more than any other the last few years is Mike Olver. Mike is younger than I, slightly shorter, but monumentally […]

A recent cover of Time asked, “What Scares You Most?” How would you respond? Hundreds of phobias were listed including Arachibutyrophobia, which is fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth! My dog has this fear, but I do not. However, I do experience the number one fear among humans—speaking in public.

After the release of my first book, the phone rang. I answered. “Phil, we would like you to speak to our high school graduating class,” said a sweet voice from a nearby school. “You went to high school once, so we thought you’d have something to tell the graduates.”

“Um …” I stammered, “I would rather crawl across molten metal in a loincloth.” No, I didn’t say that. But I did say, “Well … uh … let me think about it for a minute. There, I thought about it. I can’t. I just get too nervous. My lips quiver. My knees knock. My liver hurts. I drool. But … um … thanks anyway. Please call me again. In about four hundred years.”

When our children were young, my wife and I began watching and praying for suitable mates for them. We even took to carrying pictures of our two sons and daughter in my wallet, primarily to barter with other parents. Many were eager to participate in dowry negotiations. I once haggled with a couple in Oregon who were willing to sign papers betrothing their two daughters and son to ours, but when they asked for my house, the talks broke down. (Don’t worry, Jim and Jean, I won’t mention your names.)

I say we start an organization called Arranged Marriages Work Awesome Eh? (AMWAE). Our slogan will be “Save money! Your honeymoon can double as your first date!”

Here are a few of our credos:

The current match-making model is broke. Let’s tinker with it.

You think we don’t know and love you? We changed your diapers.

We have a dog by the name of Mojo, which is a Bible name, of course. Named after Moses and Jonah (Moses who stuttered, and Jonah who ran away from home a lot), this Maltese-Shih Tzu lap dog does not appreciate my laptop computer. When my father was alive, Mojo was his biggest fan, following him around their suite, grinning up at him past crooked teeth, and pouncing on his lap. The two sat by the window happily munching bananas, lost in a one-sided conversation.

Dad loved the old saying, “If you can start the day without caffeine, live without complaining, eat the same food every day and be grateful, relax without liquor, and sleep without the aid of drugs, you are probably the family dog.”

One night, as Alzheimers' began to rear its ugly head, Dad asked, “Do you have any books on doubt?”

One month before Christmas, Ed sat in disbelief listening to a doctor's shocking news. At the age of 49, he had colon cancer. The words struck him over and over like a baseball bat: “The cancer is very advanced. I've seen other cases like this and it's highly unlikely that your body can fight it more than six months. We'll do all we can to help you, but you had better get your affairs in order. I'm so sorry.”

Driving home through the blinding tears, the disbelief turned to shock. As one of Canada's most successful oil executives, Ed was accustomed to controlling things. With a spacious office high atop a Calgary skyscraper, everything he could ask for was waiting to be summoned. He wondered how he would tell his wife. They'd hardly spoken all week. All year, for that matter.

As he cradled her in his arms and told her the diagnosis, she broke down and wept. After a sleepless night, Ed called the office. For the first time in 17 years, he would not be at work. His work meant everything to him, what would he do without it? He could have retired long ago, but it kept him from facing a string of broken relationships.

It's Nostalgia Night at our house. Ramona and I have been going through some old record albums. Yes, records. You may remember them. A curious form of transmitting sound waves, but nonetheless very popular back when the earth was cooling and we were attending high school. Although we've since opted for compact discs, I still can't bring myself to toss out these old albums. Recorded here is a part of my past. A part of the good old days. A part of me.

When I was a boy of eight or nine, my parents saw fit to give me a room of my very own far removed from the rest of the family, in a rather dark area at the south end of our house. I'm sure they thought they were doing me a big favour. After all, a boy with some space of his own is a happy boy, a well-adjusted, confident child, ready to face the world. But parents can't be right about everything.

Dear friend,
I hope you enjoy this gift box. It comes with my love to you. I am sick and very weak now, so do not write well. I have three granddaughters and seven grandsons and I love them all. My prayer is that they will all come to know Jesus as their Saviour. I believe they have accepted Him, but not all are living for Him. I pray you will accept Him too. I am your new Grandma – I'm 85 years old.

I was only four when Mrs. Muddle adopted me for a week. With my mother in the hospital and my father needing help, she must have seen me pulling my wagon complete with a cargo of grasshoppers along 8th Avenue on "Prairie Heights," looking sad and forlorn. And so she took me in. That's what neighbors did in those days. Although I may have been a handful, Mrs. Muddle smiled a lot during that week. A four-year-old doesn't remember much. But he remembers a smile. I wasn't her first child. She had five others. But none of them seemed to mind my intrusion.

This past summer my wife's family had a reunion.
I wasn't going to attend this year. I had other plans. Plans to go fishing. Plans for peace, tranquility and bass. When I shared my feelings with Ramona, she had some feelings of her own. "I grew up with these people," she said. "You go fishing and you might as well just take your parka and stay the winter." I decided to take her advice.

I've always wanted to write something that would last forever, so I signed a mortgage. We were told that building a house would not only sink our bank account, it would stifle our marriage. But one of the reasons both are still intact is that Ramona has never been one to ask for the moon. In fact, as it turned out, I was usually the one saying, "Honey, let's put a marble staircase here," and she would say, "Phil, have you looked at our chequing account lately? We can't even afford marbles."

I have the flu. Symptoms include everything from voice loss to a lack of enough physical stamina to hold up a paperback. Painfully, I muster up enough energy to reach for the remote control.

On a recent Sunday night I returned from a trip and noticed that the customary sparkle in my wife's eyes had been replaced by sadness. “I have bad news,” she said, putting an arm around me. “Cordell is gone. Killed in a car accident.”

My mother is in a nursing home and the doctor just gave her six months to live. But when he found out she couldn't pay her bill, he gave her another year. Last night after spending some time with her, the thought hit me: If I stay in peak physical condition, I will live long enough to be a drain on the medical system. And so I have uncovered three ways to ensure this does not happen.

Jeff is our youngest child, a big tough stylish kid, handsome and strong, the teenager all the little kids love and the kind girls phone to discuss math problems with (or at least that's what they tell us when they finally get past our customer service department). His laugh was enough to bring the house down when he was a boy, but that contagious laugh began to vanish by the time he turned 12 and was completely extinct by his 13th birthday. It's a horrible thing to watch someone view life wearing the glasses of a teenager, trading in joy because it isn't so cool.
Our kids have always laughed a lot, partly because they got their sense of humour from my wife's side of the family, whose motto is this: “It's all funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's hilarious!”

Though I am only 46, my hair has begun to vanish. I do not have trouble growing hair. But location is everything with hair. I am like a struggling oil company. I have great production, but poor distribution.
If you're one of those guys who still has his original hair, go ahead and laugh. But if you're experiencing a recession yourself, if you've been cluttering pillows and clogging drains, if you've stopped combing and started rearranging, you'll be happy to know that there is hope. I can't think of anything hopeful at the moment, but give me some time and I'll think of something. While I do, let's look at some ways in which the scientific community, working hand-in-hand with laboratory rats, has shown us just how bleak the picture really is.