HENSALL, ONTARIO – In the week before Christmas, a 58 year-old pharmacist, Egyptian immigrant and devout Roman Catholic named Michael Haddad had his quarter million dollar bid accepted to purchase a recently shuttered United Church in Hensall, Ontario. Haddad’s sole reason for making this purchase is so that this town of 1,200 situated about an hour’s drive north of London will not lose its last remaining Christian church.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In early November of 1974, George Harrison launched a 26-date North American tour in support of his third solo album, Dark Horse. It was a pretty anxious and gloomy time in the life of this most circumspect of ex-Beatles. His wife Patti Boyd had recently dumped him for Eric Clapton and a bout of ill health had left the never-robust Harrison as thin as the proverbial rake and unable to shake a voice-shredding case of laryngitis that dogged him throughout his tour of Canada and the States.

LONDON, ONTARIO – “So this guy goes to Hell,” Little Loss told me in our tenth or eleventh winter as we were waiting around for some of the other guys to come out for a game of road hockey. “And the Devil’s showing him around the place and tells him he’s got to choose one of these rooms to live in forever. In one room people are burning up. In another room, they’re all getting whipped and in this other room people are getting chewed up by rats. Then they come to a room where all these guys are standing around in shit up to their necks drinking coffee. ‘Sure, it’s disgusting’ he figures, ‘but at least in here I won’t be in constant pain.’ So that’s the room he chooses and they give him a cup of coffee and in he goes. He’s introducing himself to some of the other guys and asking, ‘Why doesn’t everybody choose this room?’ when the Devil pokes his head in through this little window in the door and says, ‘Okay, boys. Coffee break’s over. Back on your heads’.”

LONDON, ONTARIO – Like most adolescents of the last three or four generations who were not averse to picking up a book and pondering the meaning of existence, my first encounter with The Catcher in The Rye (1951), the only novel so far published by J.D. Salinger (1919 – 2010), was momentous. Driven by the pitch-perfect and miraculously timeless vernacular of its American adolescent narrator – 17 year-old Holden Caulfield – the novel movingly depicts the struggles of a bright and defensively caustic upper class kid who thinks he might be going crazy as he comes to discern his constitutional incapacity to fulfill the deepest longing of his heart to align himself with any cause or person that isn’t fundamentally compromised or (Holden’s favourite word) “phony”.