Bruce’s One Big Day
Big Trig Day
Sometimes it hits me: I’m kind of a bad parent. Not whipped-them-all-soundly-and-sent-them-to-bed bad, just … a bit lazy. Neglectful. Inattentive to the shifting emotional barometric pressure of youth. When the girls are quietly dealing with some issue, it’s almost always their mom who picks up on it and helps them past that pinch point, while…
Read MoreBig Apollonian Day
The two sons of Zeus couldn’t have been more different. Apollo, god of the sun (not to mention music, poetry, plague and disease) was a logic freak. He prided himself on his rational thinking and sound reasoning. He was forever telling younger brother Dionysus not to touch his carefully ordered record collection — because the…
Read MoreBig Dionysian Day
Big Apollonian Day This is the second of a two-part post. The setup is explained in part one, Big Apollonian Day. * Sunday, May 14, 2023, 8am: Naxos, Greece As church bells gong, and waiters set up breakfast tables on patios on the beach, Mad and I jog through the narrow streets of the Chora,…
Read MoreA Horrible, Hideous No Good Very Bad Day
From time to time my congenital optimism — the emotion that underpins this whole project — gets pierced by sadness. Awful things happen. When the awfulness unfolds on a single day, you could call it a Big Day. Even though only thing “big” about it is the hole it leaves in your life. ** On…
Read MoreStart Me Up: How winning a hackathon changed Max Macaro’s life
The low points in our lives can break us. Or make us. In the fall of 2014, Max Macaro, a student from small town in Siberia, was right up against it. From a young age he’d had big tech dreams. He’d learned English through a mail-order program, taught himself coding, been accepted into an accelerator…
Read MoreBig No-Sugar Day
Recently, my friend Debra Jang, who’s a certified health and life coach, launched the Five-Day No-Sugar Challenge for her clients and any interested guests. It seemed a worthy project: the addiction to refined sugar is a scourge of contemporary Western life. This stuff, at scale, is making us fat and clouding our brains and killing…
Read MoreCollege 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 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 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,…
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