Category: Stories
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Everything an Untrained Heterosexual White Male Knows About Dancing
Dancing is one of those things men are of two minds about: On the one hand, it is far too easy to seem effeminate or foolish when dancing in the eyes of your peers. On the other hand, it’s fun, and it lets you get close to women. It seems, then, that the pros outweigh…
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A Boer War Story
This is another photo from my grandfather’s collection. In his album the caption at the side reads, “1938. Dad (E. J. Anderson) and fishing buddy Mr. Monaham (Boer War Vet). (Dad age 49)” As in my last post, this photo inspired a story from my grandfather. I don’t know Mr. Monaham’s first name. I’ve run…
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A Car Story from the Early 1920s
This is another photo from the collection I scanned up at my grandparents’ place two weekends ago. My grandfather thinks this photo was taken before he was born, which would date it prior to 1924. There is a small possibility that he’s the little boy second from the left whose face is in shadow, which…
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A Play: Performance Evaluation
Yesterday I put up a play I wrote back in OAC Writer’s Craft, and it ended up being my top post of the day. I actually did two plays in that course. I was going to wait a bit before releasing the other one, but I suppose there’s no sense holding it back if people…
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A Play: The Artists’ Farce
I took OAC Writer’s Craft in my last year of high school. For anyone not familiar with the Ontario secondary school system prior to 2004, there used to be grades 9 through 12, and then there was an optional fifth year of courses called Ontario Academic Credits that functioned as university prerequisites. You could take…
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Awesome Pictures: The Great Depression Era’s Concept of Gun Safety
What is it: This is my grandfather, Murray Anderson, in 1942 at age 17, pointing his gun directly at the photographer. Why is it Awesome? Okay, let’s get a closer look at this. You tell me, what’s interesting about this image? Is it the bit where you can see directly down the barrel of what…
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The day a red-winged blackbird hit me in the head seventeen times
My first job out of school was working as a production assistant for a weekly community newspaper in a little town in the heart of Mennonite Country north of Waterloo, Ontario. One slow news day we received a call about a neighbourhood being terrorized by a dive-bombing red-winged blackbird. One of the things I love…
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My grandfather was a horse-driving milkman as a young man. This is his story.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I spent last weekend up at my grandparents, and I scanned in over a hundred old photos. Here are a couple of them, along with an essay my grandfather, Murray Anderson, wrote at some point for a local newspaper about his days as a milkman in Bracebridge, Ontario,…
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In 1830 some of my ancestors founded the town of Kenmore, Ontario
Last weekend I went up to my grandparents’ place in Gravenhurst, Ontario. Their health is beginning to fail, and so I decided we should find a sedentary activity to occupy our time. I went through half a dozen old family albums with them and scanned in over a hundred family photos. Many of them, and…
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A long, beautiful day, with a funeral in the middle
Yesterday I woke up at quarter to six in the morning. That’s unusual for me. I’m a night owl. Long ago I gave up trying to fall asleep before midnight. I just lie awake, urging myself unsuccessfully to slumber. My internal clock isn’t set up to go to bed early, and, as a consequence, I’m…