Posts by Bruce Grierson
College Scouting Trip
The life of every parent is shot through with an awareness that the kids will one day fly the coop. And you’ll be left rattling around in an empty nest held together with pride, melancholy and regret about how you bungled the little stuff. (All those “petty treasons we commit against the ones we love,”…
Read MoreE-BUG for a Day
Most days pass so unremarkably that one blends into the next in the compost of memory until they’re just gone. But very occasionally comes a day you never forget. Because it’s a day you’ve been dreaming of since you were a little kid. Around 6pm on October 15, Alex Bishop — a 24-year-old U of…
Read MoreThe Reverse Panhandler of OKC
Doug Eaton, of Oklahoma City, used to be an insurance executive once upon a time. He was other things before and he has been other things since. But all you need to know about him, for the purposes of this story, is how he spent his 65th birthday. As the milestone approached, Doug found himself…
Read MoreEmily Carr Pilgrimage
Deep bow to the artists who were ahead of their time, whose talents were overlooked in their day but whom the zeitgeist is now rounding up. Like: come back, right now. We need you. Emily Carr is so overdue for a second run. I’ve come to think of her as the first real Canadian whose…
Read MoreNew Year’s Eve Career Change
There is a very fine Canadian fiction writer named Jaspreet Singh. A couple decades ago, when he was in his early thirties, he was a chemical engineer working as a senior researcher at a multinational paper company in Wisconsin. It was the kind of job that promises a life of high status, income and job…
Read MoreDay Trip into the Abyss
BBC photo “I really feel like in one day I’ve been to another planet and come back.” It was noon on March 26, 2012, and the film director James Cameron had surfaced in the Western Pacific ocean. Blinking in the sun, he looked like, well, a man who’d just been as far down as down…
Read MoreBrian Doyle Day
Since we last spoke, I’ve tried angel dust. Or whatever it is that Brian Doyle sprinkled into his short essays about the natural world. I’m late to the party on this writer, who died of brain cancer in 2017 at age 60. My initiation came this past weekend. I’d stumbled on his hummingbird story while,…
Read MoreSight Singing for Dummies
The best answer I’ve heard to the question “What is one skill we should all learn in quarantine?” was this from the writer Jia Tolentino: How to make someone feel loved from a distance. But here’s a pretty close second: singing. Yes! Who wasn’t inspired by all the Italians belting it out from their apartment…
Read MoreThe Rocket’s Second Shift
When he showed up at the Montreal Forum an hour before puck drop that night, three days after Christmas in 1944, Maurice Richard told coach Dick Irvin not to expect much of a game from him. He was pooped. “Pooped?” Irvin inquired. “How do you mean, pooped?” Richard explained that it was moving day. He’d…
Read MoreDolly Parton’s Big Songwriting Day
At some point, if we’re lucky, Hrishikesh Hirway will devote an episode of his new Netflix series Song Exploder to getting to the heart of what really happened that day in 1973 when Dolly Parton caught lightning in a bottle twice. He’ll get her sitting alone — she always writes alone – in a chair…
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