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Remembering Karl

Posted by :James Howden On : December 22, 2020
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Category: On Second Thought

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Karl King, 1969-2020. (courtesy of his family)

[Shorty: 3 mins. Full story: 20-minute read. Tea time.]

The blank screen intimidated me. So did my own inadequate expressions of friendship, and the futility of making up for them with words of inadequate tribute after his passing. I filled the emptiness with things I had written under no expectation or goal except to tell somebody. Describing Karl’s departure to Dave (who knew him, and his family) or Louise (who didn’t) – that was necessary, urgent, and without the chance to overthink. Easy.

(That was in October. I didn’t think my written farewell to a friend would be excruciating – I’d had months to prepare and several hospital visits. I’d said my goodbyes, hoping that he heard them at some level. But here I am, in the middle of a grey and chilling December, our tenth month of living small in the midst of an Earth-wide pandemic, and finally I’m ready to punch ‘Publish’ after fitful months of squeezing words from one of life’s bitter fruits.)

My blood brother and sisters are living, so lucky me. Fifteen years back, I was startled (though not surprised) to lose what felt an awful lot like the good kind of Big Brother. “Donny’ coached and quietly guided me early in my circuitous approach to manhood; I later worried over and covered for and, maybe, helped him a little, in his final years of circling the drain. He was a basketball coach who gave far more to the game and his players than it or they would return to him. Rest, Don.

This farewell also began with basketball. Again, that ever-so-American game drawn up by a displaced Canuck foregrounds another bit of Howdy family history, this time a gradually-acquired Younger Brother. I first knew Karl King when he was that southern Ontario rarity, a 1980s small-town hoopshead, and I was learning to teach English and coach high school ball. The good news: we got much farther than basketball in the ways that we knew each other, though until recently we still annoyed our puck-centric buddy Mike with hoops chatter. The bad news is that he’s gone, as we were beginning to deepen and better understand what bound us together. Worse, he has left behind a surprised and surprising second wife, widowed a bewilderingly short time after love and devotion suddenly bloomed. Karl’s mother has now buried her eldest, and his genuine siblings mourn the eldest child. Also pacing about is Karl’s 17-year-old son, slowly becoming aware that his pops might’ve been more than he suspected.

This is what I wrote to Dave to share with other retired staff of that 1980s rural high school, the Home of the Hurricanes, who had just heard of his death:

Karl suffered a shocking double-diagnosis of two cancers, one of them advanced and rare, early last fall. He and his second wife Savinna were a sweet if doomed story (they weren’t married that long ago) as they went together through all the rigours of treatment, hopeful possibilities and painful reverses. He went home from St. Joseph’s Hospital to die at home on the Credit Reserve, directly across Indian/Town Line Road from the house where Max and Karen raised him. He found great solace and inspiration in marrying the Anishinaabe heritage he had via his father and grandfather (and which he explored deeply and passionately), with his embrace of the Baha’i Faith. He was a gentle soul, a whip-smart mind, a helluva teacher, a man of the people and a global citizen.

I jump ahead to this piercing irony: on the very day that he died – October 13, 2020, the first day of school after the long weekend of Canadian Thanksgiving – the Chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit appeared on Karl King’s doorstep. (Lots of Kings on the Credit. Saults. Laformes.) The “New Credit Eagle”, as Karl’s email address proclaimed him, had just come home from weeks of palliative care in a Hamiton hospital to spend his last days. Chief Laforme was be-ribboned in the formal attire of his office, and he had just missed out on his intention to confer honour upon Karl while he yet lived. I can hear Brother King having a quiet chuckle about the timing, but it tore me up when I heard about it.

Reading the letter from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) eased my heart: “has worked to increase the quality of life of our Community”; “significant and continuous service”; “promote[d] health and healing”; “role model for young people”; “ongoing dedication to teaching our young people about their culture and heritage”; “demonstrates integrity, generosity of spirit and collaboration”; and finally, its tribute to Karl’s demonstration of “the Seven Grandfather Teachings of Wisdom, Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility and Truth”. Covid-19, unsurprisingly, had delayed the MCFN Council’s process. They had hoped for some form of public ceremony. The letter Chief Laforme delivered spoke of possible media availability – it’s poignant, and given how long and how sturdily Karl had hung on before his sudden dip in the previous months, perfectly understandable. Sigh. The MCFN had everything right but the timing. That wasn’t the only temporal glitch, even beyond the obvious fact that Karl died before he reached his 52nd birthday.

That’s the short version. If you’re willing, I’d like you to know more.

+++++++++

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A View From the Mountain: Covid-19 and the Condition of the World. (Or: The Universal *WHAT*?)   

Posted by :James Howden On : September 14, 2020
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Category: On Second Thought

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Big hands, small world.

 

 [18-minute read]

Imagine: what if the world had a governing council, democratically elected, whose only mandate was to guide humanity towards oneness and global renewal? What if such a body were commissioned to rise above partisanship, indeed above the limited advantages of individual nation states, to consider thoughtfully the needs of all the world’s peoples? And while we’re in full-on fantasy, let’s imagine that this council’s members were chosen exclusively because of their capacity to serve, and not due to their power or fame or their desire for either. Wait, how about this? Let’s dispense with nominations, any sort of advantage for the rich (fundraising of any sort), narrowly based constituencies a candidate must favour, and the whole road-show of promises, slandered opponents and vote for me! What do you think? Which is stronger in your mind – the appeal of this flight of utopian fancy, or its impossibility?

 

Well, I have news. In truth, there’s no need for imagination. Such an institution is no mere dream. Did you know that there is a Universal House of Justice in the world? It was conceived in the writings of Baha’u’llah, the 19th-century Persian nobleman who was stripped of his social position and exiled far from his homeland, and why? For championing the renewal of religion, a new age of human prosperity, and the oneness of humankind. (If you have heard of the Baha’i Faith and its principles, Baha’u’llah is their author.) After steady growth in its numbers and capacity, the Baha’i community first elected what is now its supreme institution, the House of Justice, in 1963 in a remarkable process, completely free of campaigning or ambition. The electors, themselves chosen in a series of prayerful, conscientious procedures, privately vote every five years for those whom they feel have the best capacity to serve. This selection is based on assessments of the maturity, cooperative ability, mental strength, loyalty and selflessness of an individual. Not fame. Not good hair. Not vaulting ambition. Not wealth or privilege or lobbying or a telegenic smile. The difference between this process and the national elections we’re most familiar with – Baha’u’llah might have described them as “lamentably defective” – is as wide as your favourite ocean. Two particular qualities mark the distinctness of the Universal House of Justice from any other prominent governing body in the world. One is that most Baha’is in the world, I suspect, couldn’t even name a member of the House, such is its character and the nature of its elections. (A fame-watcher like me? I think I could name three, tops.) Second, and perhaps most important, not only are Baha’i communities everywhere in the world amazingly responsive to its requests, but they also love the institution of the House of Justice! Bizarre but true.

So now you know a little about this unparalleled system of governance, one that I’ve been mildly obsessing over and immoderately enthusing about for most of my life. Now, if you’ve never even heard of the Universal House of Justice, or barely have, don’t feel badly. This is a governing body that doesn’t send out press releases or trumpet its accomplishments, at all. Besides, with some astounding exceptions (such as the “Peace Message”, its 1985 letter to the peoples of the world), most of its communications are addressed to the Baha’i community, and in a human sea of over seven billion, Baha’is constitute only about one human in a thousand. I guess you could call this a minority report.

The seat of the Universal House of Justice, part of the Baha’i World Centre on the side of Mt. Carmel.

Dear reader, this has also been your preamble to a longer discussion of a superb talk I heard recently. The above introduction will help make sense of what follows, and explain why a group of us were so compelled to hear from a gentleman agricultural scientist we had previously known almost nothing about. (It’s a Baha’i Thing.)

*****

For the second time in a year, the Ottawa Baha’is and their like-minded friends recently benefited from the insights of a former member of this institution, Dr. Firaydoun Javaheri, on current conditions in the world. The first was in a sweltering lecture theatre at the University of Ottawa – we shook hands! hugged! listened and perspired, packed shoulder to shoulder! – and, the times being what they are, the most recent talk was on Zoom.

Originally from Iran, Dr. Javaheri trained as an agronomist, then made a pioneering move to Africa where he worked in several nations, primarily The Gambia and Zambia, finally as technical director for the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations. As a volunteer activist, he was in the forefront of the Baha’i community’s growing efforts in social and economic development and served on elected local and national councils – Baha’is call them “spiritual assemblies” – and subsequently as an appointed “Counsellor” for the African continent.¹ In his 50s, he was then elected to serve as a member of the Universal House of Justice, and did so for three 5-year terms, living and working on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel, where the Baha’i World Centre is located.² He is now retired and living in southern Ontario, Canada, where he has family ties..

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Paradise Is Always a Garden: The Baha’i Thing, From Then to Nearly Now

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2019
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Category: On Second Thought

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After finishing this piece, I learned of the passing of a great pillar of the Canadian Baha’i community, not to mention an internationally renowned painter. His name was Otto Donald Rogers, “Don” to most who knew him. He was a quietly magnificent human being, and I’d like to retroactively offer this as a small tribute to a great man. Peace to his family and friends.  
[12-minute read]
A rather different (shorter) version of this piece appears at the Baha’i Teachings website: click here for Part 1, here for Part 2. 

Maybe you’ve been obsessing about the NHL or NBA playoffs. (No Canadian teams left in the quest for the hockey grail. No LeBron, no more Spurs.) Or wondering if spring will ever come. (Spoiler: it will. It’s underway. Just ask flood victims all over everywhere, but don’t mention climate change. That would be rude!) But for the Baha’is, it’s coming near the end of the “Most Great Festival” of the Baha’i calendar, and I’m all in.

This is not the original Najibiyyih Garden that Baha’u’llah called Paradise, but it evokes the same spirit.

This festival is called “Ridván”, an Arabic word meaning “paradise”, and the best my Canadian mouth can manage is something like ‘Rez-VAHN’. It’s a 12-day period that celebrates the public “mission statement” of the Faith’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, in a Baghdad garden in 1863. This Persian nobleman, already stripped of wealth and social status and banished from his homeland, was turning a supposedly humiliating further exile into, well, a mighty big party now celebrated by millions around the globe. It’s Day 11. Two nights ago I prayed and partied with a small group not far from my house. I’ll do it again tomorrow night on Day 12, but on April 21, I joined in with a big crowd of Baha’is and their friends for the Big Ridvan Opening, where we were invited to consider how the Baha’i community got from 1863 Baghdad obscurity to the world-wide reach it has today. I’ve been trying to follow Baha’u’llah’s mighty System of knowledge and practice for a long time now. Sometimes it feels I haven’t gotten very far, but I’m still walking, and the Baha’i Big Picture is bright and ever-developing.

Anyway, it all got me thinking about histories: my own, that of the Baha’i community over the past century and a half, and even of earlier crossings into New Millennium territory.

And I thought: I would have made a very poor 1st– or 2nd-century Christian. I would’ve wanted the Kingdom to come NOW! But the growth of Christianity was slow, and the times were confusing. Heck, Pope Gregory wouldn’t be born for centuries, so the Gregorian calendar that dates our lives based on Jesus’s life hadn’t been invented; 100 years after Christ, the word “Christian” was just beginning to distinguish this tiny community from the many other Jewish cults and sects that had arisen. Even 300 years after the life of Jesus Christ, His followers were found only in tiny pockets in what we call the “Middle East”¹, Turkey, northern Africa and southern Europe, basically within a few donkey-days journey of the Mediterranean Sea. They were just beginning to organize their scriptures and get their doctrines and dogmas together, 325 years after Christ’s life, and the Christians wouldn’t become a major population even in the Mediterranean region until the 6th century. Today, it’s the most widespread religion in the world, of course, and we all take its supernatural degree of influence and prestige for granted. But I would have been so impatient as an early Christian!

¹ Ever noticed how Eurocentric that term is? As if everyplace should be measured from London or Paris (which, for many centuries, it was.)

So listen: when I joined the Baha’i community as a 1970s teenager, I began to wonder, Why are other faith groups, often younger than we are, seeming to grow so much faster than we are? I was noticing the Hare Krishna chants on Toronto streets, or the sudden North American splash, in news media and in recruitment, of the Unification Church, the so-called “Moonies”. I wasn’t tempted to join them, or even emulate their methods, but their bursts of public prominence bugged me.  A wise Baha’i elder answered our youthful questions in his deep, heavily accented but utterly logical way. (If you want to channel the voice of Dr. Danesh, imagine American diplomat Henry Kissinger, but with a Persian rather than a German accent, and with a devotion to the psychology of peace and justice rather than to strategies of conflict.) He calmly explained it this way: Think about what we are trying to grow. If you look at two plants in their first season of growth – one of them a pumpkin, one of them an oak tree – your conclusion might be easy. The pumpkin is obviously more impressive, vines and bright flowers and, within months, gigantic orange fruits! Meanwhile, the oak looks like a tender, fruitless twig. The community of Baha’u’llah is growing like an oak tree; as impressive as pumpkins seem to be, at the end of a year you have a few pumpkin pies and maybe a rotting jack-o-lantern, and that’s it.

That made sense to me then. (The reference to pie and jack-o-lanterns is probably mine, but you get the point.) There must have been a host of movements, 1900 years ago, that would have soundly defeated the Christians on a “Most Likely To Succeed” ballot. But the followers of Jesus, in the above analogy, were a slow-growing but eventually mighty oak tree, not a flash-in-the-pumpkin-pie-pan. I still have a lot to learn about patience, but the evolution of the Baha’i community, from its quietly intimate beginnings in the rose-coloured Garden of Ridvan to what I see now, is enough – barely – to keep me hopeful and sane. It’s over 150 years since Baha’u’llah announced his mission in Baghdad, which isn’t as long ago as our present-focussed obsessions and shortening attention spans can make it seem. His writings confidently predicted the growth of world-wide attention to his teachings and of the community that would arise in his name:

It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness….Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.

The original “Ridvan” garden, on the shores of the Tigris River in Baghdad. There were roses, roses and nightingales, and joy.

Ridvan now feels like a mighty Declaration, but back then even an attentive neutral observer might have missed the planting of that seed. Baha’u’llah confirmed publicly, to only a few people, what many of his family and friends had quietly known: that he was the one who would lead us to the long-promised day of peace and justice. He thus transformed his upcoming banishment into his modern community’s greatest festival. So how did we get HERE from back THERE? The Baha’is then were few in number, decimated by persecution, and frankly their fellowship seemed like a rather hopeless little twig. I seized on five pivotal years in the steady, seemingly unspectacular growth of the Baha’i community into the beautiful young tree it is today. Here is annual snapshot number one:

 

1892. My father’s parents were young, and would soon meet each other. It’s a little over 125 years since then, the year when Baha’u’llah passed away, leaving his son and family and a still-tiny band of followers to carry on the astounding, world-changing mission he had described and put into motion. Baha’u’llah (an Arabic term, meaning “splendour/light of God”) was not much more widely known than Jesus Christ (“the anointed one”) had been on the cross. His son, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, still a prisoner of the Turkish empire, was left to encourage and inspire a few thousand believers, in a few Middle Eastern countries, to live as his father had prescribed, and to tell the world of Baha’u’llah’s message of world peace, world unity, and the essential oneness of humanity. Good luck with that, folks! But listen: they began.

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Home Visit (A K’wow Story)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 20, 2017
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Category: On Second Thought

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Not the girl we visited. Cute, though. (A Dreamstime image.)

[3-minute read]

Dreamily, we’d been visiting new friends, a young mother and her daughter, a freckled, smiley kid with straight auburn hair, cropped just below her earlobes. She had the radiant, gappily eccentric grin of somebody losing baby teeth and growing big ones. She was six or seven. She didn’t really have much to say, but she wasn’t timid.

My wife and I learned more about the woman. She was relaxed having new people into her small home, easy-going in her loving but not overly attentive side chats with her daughter. The details have become gauzy, ephemeral, except for this: so casual, so homely was our meeting that, at one point, I realized that the girl was washing her hair right in the middle of the living space, in a 19th-century tub. My bride had decided to recite a favourite meditation that she thought our young hostess would enjoy. I sat quietly. Just behind and to my right, the girl raised her head from the water.

Probably her ears were plugged; she was speaking more loudly than she had been before, and was clearly enjoying the oddness of surfacing from the small tub in the middle of an adult conversation. “WHAT’S GOING ON?” she blurted. My wife carried on with the psalm, the prayer, the poem, whatever it was. The girl’s mother tried a gentle ‘sshhh’, and I put my forefinger to my lips with a quick wink and a smile. “But HOW COME?” she blurted with a twinkle that showed she knew she was just a bit naughty. She did then lower her voice.

The girl also switched from English to her mother tongue. I guessed that she really did want to understand what was happening. Maybe she hadn’t known why these two strangers had come to her home. She clearly wondered why quiet was suddenly, and unusually, necessary.

I think she was asking why? It sounded to me like k’wow. She said it very softly, but she repeated it over and over.

K’wow    K’wow    K’wow    K’wow

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Electric Boy Meets Conductor Girl: A Short Story

Posted by :James Howden On : September 8, 2017
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Category: On Second Thought

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[4-minute read]

Some people don’t follow directions very well. He wanted to do it right, he really did, he always wanted to do the right thing but he had gotten a little confused that day.

He’d always thought there was only one place for all that nutty energy, and that was Games With the Boys, so many games, though not that many boys. It was always the same crew, with the odd newbie thrown in who would sometimes come back for more but most often wouldn’t. Not everybody wanted to play that hard or that long, but there you go. One schoolboy morning, he learned a new thing.

He turned his head, more slowly than he would have to find the outfield fence while racing back for a deep flyball, less furiously than when detecting tacklers with a brown ball under his arm. He was in the right-hand row, four desks from the front. She just walked into room 10, eyes down and too many books held against a softening chest. She bustled right by.

Surely he wasn’t too obvious. His hair was a little longer now. He didn’t stand out so much,  Sunday school cuts and careful combing having been refused. The loud girl had stopped spitting his name in scorn. This was pleasant, but he still never talked to any of them. Why bother? Mr. P. always took their side, wasn’t fair, but it didn’t do any good, and that guy had some scary vocabulary and a wooden pointer that he didn’t just point with. Anyway. Game Boy kept his head down, too, until the girl with the long blonde hair was two desks past him.

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HimBits: Poems on a Man I Never Knew

Posted by :James Howden On : August 1, 2016
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Category: On Second Thought

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[2-minute read, tops]
Pinched this image, but glad to promote this collection; sounds like a book to own.

Pinched this image, but glad to promote this collection; sounds like a book to own.

I was subtly slain by a friend’s quick response to an end-of-July piece I wrote for a trio of birthdays: one was my big brother’s, which immediately followed that of a sorely missed coach and friend, which in turn was the day after the anniversary of my long-dead father’s entry into the world in 1911. My buddy Buck had known them all, for nearly as long as he’s known me, and he was especially moved by the paragraphs about my Dad. He slipped a dagger between my ribs with one brief, benign sentence: “In the years I’ve known you, you’ve never spoken about him.”

Really? Come on! That can’t possibly be true, forgetful and faithful friend! I said to myself, or sin-covering words to that useless effect. Of course, the absolute truth of the thing doesn’t matter a bit, and besides, in that same piece I did confess that, other than oblique and occasional references, I had never written about my father in the fog-bound annals of my Blogdom.

But as a kid – and, incidentally, inspired back then by teenaged forays into poetry that buddy Buck had startled me awake by making – I did write some rarely shared, bemused poems about my Dad. They were clumsy, but had a good heart. I reworked them 17 years later, and they were read by, I believe, three or four people other than me. Prompted by the point of Buck’s gentle stiletto, I took another look at them, and now have officially pronounced them Not Awful. I decided to give them a little air.

I couldn’t help playing with them a bit, but here are two poems about a Dad, mine – businessman, father of five, steadfast husband, demon-fighter, melancholic, man of principle and provision – nearly 40 years gone and still a mystery to me.

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STRICTLY MID-LIFE: Crisis? What Crisis?

Posted by :James Howden On : November 17, 2014
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Category: On Second Thought

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Here’s another piece — not that anybody asked for it, as Kurt Vonnegut once muttered in opening a collection of essays called Fates Worse Than Death — that now sees the light after nearly a decade in the electronic cellar. When I wrote it, I was in Ottawa, not yet in my 50s. Five years in China are in the rear-view now; we’re back in the same house, and visiting the same local complex for its library, pool and workout facilities. For reasons mainly organizational, this one never got posted, but despite the years that have passed, it’s nearly as true now as it was when it was fresh. And hey, how are you doing?

“Well, this sure isn’t Monday Night Football,” I thought. It’s been a long while since I was twitching and “ready for some football!” that late on a weeknight, anyway. But on this particular Monday, I was in the St. Laurent recreation centre getting ready to put the ol’ bod through its paces.

Now, I have spent more pigskin hours in front of the Sacred Tube than I care to remember, but Monday nights weren’t always about a football broadcast. They never are, now. Even as a kid, there were hockey practices, and from about age 15 on, the squeak of sneakers and the pounding of basketballs were the soundtrack to any given Monday (Tuesday, Wednesday…). Even in my increasingly clumsy thirties, as the rim somehow felt higher with each jump-shot, I could still be found running around on my wife on a winter evening. Nope, not a romantic betrayal, but another doomed attempt to outrun a bunch of teens and 20-somethings. The dream was dead, but I could still fool myself for minutes at a time.

It seemed, back then, that my competitive fever had finally broken. A successful night had come to mean a few jumpshots, a good sweat, a few laughs and no icepacks. (Well. I tried to define success this way, but I was chronically annoyed with my uncooperative hands and reluctant legs.) But there I was last Monday at St. Laurent,

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Sweet Teeth and Faulty Scales: Hitting Two Hundred

Posted by :James Howden On : September 28, 2014
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Category: On Second Thought

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LOOK-BACK: 200 FOR THE 2000s.

Five years in China, partly ’cause I walked everywhere and pounded basketballs on car-free pavements, helped me climb down from a high-level status I’d never asked for and never fully believed. When I went there in 2009, I was still tipping my bathroom scales a little too ferociously. In Dalian, it was a lot harder (or, in a few cases — I’m looking at you, Haagen-Dazs! — the price tripped my cheapness alarm) to get sweet treats that met my lofty Canadian-consumption standards. Summers back home were exercises in box-ticking (can’t get that in Dalian, gotta do it now!). Um, and in not exercising that much. My personal record: one summer, in our seven weeks home I put on seven kilos — 15 pounds!

So now we’re back for good, and this summer’s victory is that I’ve kept my balance, dietarily, and though I’m not where I’d like to be, I’m still well under the critical threshold that so alarmed me at the beginning of my Chubby Decade, towards the end of the 20th century. The piece below, another one that pre-dated this website and never saw the light of readership day, was my reaction to realizing I’d hit 200 pounds. The words below were indignant and disbelieving, fun to read years later, and pretty much useless in getting me to actually do anything about the ballast I was packing. Not right away, anyhow.

Two hundred?  Now that’s just a lie.  Hah!  Hah!  says I to myself, it’s an el cheapo scale, and besides, it was on a carpet, and shoot, it’s been cold and I’ve been sick, and besides, hey, I like to eat, it’s not like I drink or smoke so I deserve the occasional treat and I just need to get working out a little more regularly and by the way, I’ve never cracked two hundred and I still have pretty good moves for an old guy…

Okay.  So this new level of larditude is not exactly one of the “firsts” I’d envisioned for the (pre)Millennial Me. Plea-bargains and pitiable denials aside, one nasty bit of gristle in the stew of midlife is unrequited affection:  I love ice cream but it doesn’t treat me right.  (There, I’ve said it.) 

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A Letter to My Son (When He Was Only One)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 21, 2014
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Category: On Second Thought

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He’s six feet tall now, with arms and legs madly off in many directions, a big smile, a stubborn spirit, floppy hair, and arguments that seem to never end. He drives me nuts, but he’s also smart and talented and funny as hell. It was fun to look back at how I saw him as a wee one. There were clues right from the beginning, and I’m not just talking about the messes he leaves behind. This is why baby pictures are so lovely, so necessary.

 

Dear Goonybird, Stinkerbomb, Punky Poobler, SammerBammer, my honey bunny boy,

Today you have six teeth, four consonants, and one candle on your cake. You delight the heart of a Dad who thought his diapering days were behind him. You love your little purple and orange basketball, and your peek-a-boo skills are splendid. “Clap, clap, hooray!” we say as you grin and applaud the wonders tumbling about you. With two deep dimples and the softest of skin and hair, you are a shameless magnet for kisses.

And I get to thinking about three bigger boys that I’ve hugged and smackerooed, probably a Dad’n’Lad world record, and wonder when did I stop kissing your gigantic brothers? They are rather more elusive targets, and two of them are bigger than me now, but young men can still benefit from a whisker rub now and then. Thank-you for reminding me how my chest explodes when I hold my sons.

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For a Change

Posted by :James Howden On : July 6, 2014
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Category: On Second Thought

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Two more sleeps, and we fly to Canada, ending our five-year service in China. So much to say about our stay and our going, but little time to write. I did, however, stumble on this from my archives, a 2007 piece recalling my halting, erratic progress along a spiritual path. That road eventually led to several warm, lovely evenings and afternoons of farewell to good friends in Dalian, China. CHINA! 

I was a small-town Baptist, though I mainly worshipped Gordie Howe. I reverently oiled my baseball glove at least twice a year. We also went to church every Sunday, and were allowed to ransack our stockings and open only one present before attending Christmas service. Sunday school attendance prizes were an annual treat, but I rarely read or discussed the Bible at home. The patron saints of our southern Ontario Protestant family were Rocket Richard, who crowned my sister “Miss Corvair” in 1965, and a skinny, bespectacled local football hero named Garney Henley. Oh, and Rusty Staub, le grand orange of another Montreal sports squad, the brand-new Expos. As I became a teenager, though, love and spirit began to mean something different.

One September morning, a new girl sat in the desk behind mine, a girl with long blonde hair. In a grade eight instant, I knew there might be a reason for females after all. Within two years, I had not only fallen for her brains over basketballs, but was also fascinated by the Faith lived by her mother.

It said the Creator keeps promises.

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