MEANINGMAKER

mother

  • lift what you can

    My mother taught me  to shovel snow the way I imagine some mothers teach prayer – patient, shoulder to shoulder. She’d come home from a long day, and say: Come on, let’s go. Out into the dark we went, into… Continue reading

  • new year’s eve 1975

    She slipped the deep blue coat from the hanger. The fur collar brushed her cheek, a brief vanishing softness. I watched from my doorway, a child awake when I shouldn’t have been, drawn by the thin slice of light —… Continue reading

  • a gift in the cold

    Can we just talk about how the rain froze on the windshield this morning for a minute? Like a tiny murmuration of starlings – that breathtaking, swirling ballet you sometimes see those delicate birds perform by the hundreds in the… Continue reading

  • we are so lightly here

    Today, my phone’s photo app offered me a montage it called Looking Back. I usually ignore those compilations, but this morning I opened it as the downtown blurred past outside the train’s window, on my way to work. There, among… Continue reading

  • the river

    The river is rolling by this afternoon. On its way, I realize, to I don’t know where. As I sit next to it, listening to its song, I wonder why it is that such a simple thing is stirring the… Continue reading

  • what it will be

    Whenever life got hard, Mom would often say, “it will be what it will be.” I assumed that she meant that things would turn out as they should — good or bad — and she would deal with it either… Continue reading

  • time goes by

    This picture was taken the day my mom turned 75. That was seven and a half years ago now. Four years ago this afternoon, we sat together – my mom and dad and sister and I – in a puke-coloured… Continue reading

  • on longing

    A couple of weeks ago, Richard Gere spent a day just up the street from my City Hall office filming scenes for his new movie called ‘Longing.” It’s an English remake of a critically-acclaimed Israeli film that premiered at the… Continue reading

  • the only one

    Tucked away in the corner of a little Italian place that, after the sun went down, was dim like a mine shaft and just as cold, we sat discussing the living we’ve done over the last 30 years. The two… Continue reading

  • about mothers

    This is the thing about mothers…. Even as a small child some of us will understand that our mothers have secrets. Longings and hidden sadnesses. Silent sorrows and quiet pains. Some of those things will only ever be told to… Continue reading