LONDON, ONTARIO – In the fall of 1996, our family was travelling up to Midland, Ontario to visit the reconstructed Jesuit mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons where for ten years (1639–49) sixty Jesuits and lay French with 12,000 Huron Indians, created and operated the first in-land European settlement in all of North America. (See more on that visit in this May 3, 2021 Hermaneutics: Wilf Jury and the Saga of Sainte-Marie). Zigzagging our way along secondary highways northeast from London to Midland, we passed along the main drags of many smaller Ontario towns, stopping in every third or fourth burg for washroom breaks and to load up on essential provisions like gas and local newspapers and sticky buns.

LONDON, ONTARIO – That’s our firstborn daughter’s dog, Gummy, which is short for 'Montgomery'. He was named after Montgomery Clift - not the famous field marshal - and is sporting the protective cone that a British Columbia vet outfitted him with about ten years back so he’d stop licking and fussing with a wound that needed time to heal. Our daughter had acquired Gummy in the fall of 2008 when she and her partner and two thirds of our grandkids were living back in London for a spell. Gummy had attained a particularly gangly adolescence by the time we acquired a new puppy of our own on May 1st of 2009 and through that summer, Gummy taught Grace all of her essential life skills and the pair of them simultaneously destroyed our back garden through sheer canine exuberance.

LONDON, ONTARIO - With a particular focus on his more devotional writings, this month our Christian men’s reading group revisited the literary remains of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90) for the first time since he was elevated to sainthood in October of 2019. The foremost Newman scholar in the world today, Fr. Ian Ker (now a senior research fellow at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford) was predicting Newman’s elevation to sainthood as early as the 1970s when he began work on his monumental biography, John Henry Newman which was first published in 1987. In the expanded edition of that work in 2009, Ker upped the ante even further and expressed his confidence that Newman will one day also be deemed a Doctor of the Church.

LONDON, ONTARIO – The death of Michael Nesmith this week at the age of 78, called forth a lot of mourning from ageing Monkees fans and a lot of sniping from half-informed curmudgeons who’d always regarded that deliberately manufactured group of ‘60s pop musicians (with their very own TV show and a line in commemorative lunch pails) as irredeemable capitalist stooges and soulless phonies. Yes, the Monkees were brought together in a totally inorganic way, contrived from the get-go to cash in on the success of The Beatles with a less discerning and younger audience. But the Monkees underwent a considerable evolution over the course of their short career and managed to provide more than a few decent tunes that stand up pretty well half a century later. And I look back with even deeper affection and regard for the much less celebrated work that Mike Nesmith produced once the Monkees had packed it in.

LONDON, ONTARIO - Only one year older than myself, when Tom Gosnell was elected mayor of London in 1985 at the age of 34, I doubt that I was the only member of that tiresome generation familiarly (and sometimes sneeringly) known as the Boomers who suddenly experienced a moment of slightly giddy uncertainty. (He had actually served seven years before that as an alderman but that hadn’t significantly registered on my consciousness.) Tom’s elevation to the city’s highest post could best be compared, I suppose, to the first time you find yourself entrusted to the care of a physician who’s roughly your own age or (perish the thought) even younger. It was a moment of realization that, ready or not, our lot was in charge now. Regardless of how ill-prepared we may have felt, we were now the responsible adults in the room. Were we really ready for this?

LONDON, ONTARIO – In Noel Coward's Private Lives, divorced lovers Elyot and Amanda, have unknowingly booked themselves into adjoining honeymoon suites at the same French hotel, and meet each other when they're driven out onto their respective balconies to get away from tiffs with their latest spouses. To make matters worse, the hotel orchestra in the plaza below insists on playing and replaying the popular tune which Elyot and Amanda had once appropriated as "our song". When the tune is going around for the third consecutive time, they glance at each other in awkward embarrassment and laugh. "Nasty insistent little tune," says Elyot, to which Amanda opines: "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is."

LONDON, ONTARIO – Though I received it for my birthday way back in May, I’ve dawdled a good few months in taking up The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene (W.W. Norton, 2021) by University of Toronto English prof (and no relation, as they say) Richard Greene. And I now am delighted to report that Richard Greene does the best job I’ve yet seen of frankly and sympathetically exploring not just the life and career but the maddening fissure of constitutional disloyalty that ran right down the centre of Graham Greene’s personality and made his life such a trial for himself and virtually everyone who tried to love him.

LONDON, ONTARIO - Amidst the global insanity of these last nineteen months when panic about a man-made virus has enabled authorities in once-free nations to impose unprecedented levels of coercion, censorship and intimidation on citizens who have no reason to trust their leaders’ motives . . . it can be distressingly easy to set aside one’s deepest convictions for the sake of a little peace and quiet. Even a thoroughly obnoxious contrarian such as myself has mornings when I come to and sigh at the existential burden of being constituted in this way.

LONDON, ONTARIO - A good number of my favourite photographs in the world are pictures of our kids. This one here was snapped at about 5:30 p.m. on October 31st, 1986. On the left is our five year-old firstborn, kitted out in a meticulous, homemade recreation of the emblematic outfit worn by Rainbow Brite who (you may be excused for not remembering) was that year’s hottest cartoon craze for young girls. Preceding the snapping of this picture, my wife had overseen a week’s worth of fittings, tweakings and adjustments so as to get every detail correct. This doubtless explains the somewhat more pensive expression on our subject’s face. Yes, she knows it’s a magnificent costume but all those previews have somewhat worn away the mind-blowing revelation of it all.