Letters from Rona / Sort by date

Last summer, with much yawning and complaining, I reduced my coffee intake from five cups daily to two. A doctor had warned that if I didn't ease up on the caffeine, I'd have to put up with chronic insomnia. Now a study of 1400 people shows that drinking three to five cups of coffee a day can dramatically reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease, which has ravaged my family. What to do? [more]

Our grandson had no name for what seemed like the longest time. Then he got one---Gabriel---only to be renamed Cameron. A fine name, in my opinion. But everyone calls him Peanut. As one who never had a baby name, I'd better own up to some mixed emotions about that. [more]

I was in no hurry to read Still Alice, the best-selling novel in which Alzheimer's disease overtakes a woman of 50. I didn't want to care about Alice Howland---wife, mother and Harvard neuroscientist---only to see her erased the illness I fear most, which runs in my family. But I had a long flight ahead, and a little more room in my carry-on bag. Now I'm here to say, "You've got to read this book." [more]

Twenty years ago today, when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and crushed a peaceful protest with harrowing force, I was too caught up in my own pain to give more than a fleeting glance to reports from the scene. My mother was dying of brain cancer. In the fog of impending bereavement, I couldn't mourn the students whose mangled bikes were their only memorial. Now, just back from China, I can't get them off my mind. [more]

Have you ever cringed at some annoying habit of your father's? Have you wished he'd act more like normal people and less like his incorrigible self? Ann Banks has been there. With Father's Day around the corner, she looks back on the first man in her life and sees the gift that escaped her notice then. [more]

We wanted an elegant English toilet for our one and only bathroom. On the throne of our choice, you could complete the most challenging of crosswords in comfort. We were so proud of our champagne-coloured Twyford toilet---until the day it stopped flushing. Then I found myself searching far and wide for a Twyford ball cock, and nothing on earth seemed more precious. [more]

Around our house we never speak of Tim Hortons. It's not that we're too high and mighty for the omnipresent doughnut chain, just that we have our own name for those familiar coffee-scented shops. To us they will always be Hornuts. And when we talk about Hornuts, the real subject isn't fat-and-sugar-laden confections but the identity we've shaped as a family. [more]

My virtual friend Jules Torti will go anywhere, eat anything and write about it with her characteristic full-tilt originality. On the face of things, we couldn't be more different from each other. Yet I recognize myself in Jules's wonderful essay on what it really means to find your soul mate. [more]

My brain goes into spasm at the thought of living in China's biggest, bursting-at-the-seams metropolis, with its omnipresent cranes and pollution haze. Still, I have to admire the city's heritage of openness and the scope of its current ambitions. Here, a few memories I'll be sharing with friends back home. Shanghailights, you might say. [more]

Shanghai, where we've spent six brain-jangling days, is a city of 19 million in one hell of a hurry. You could argue that we've picked a bad time to come, with a World Expo set to open in less than a year and construction hoardings on every block. But it seems to me we've arrived just in time to see vanishing downtown neighbourhoods that have scarcely changed since the Communists came to power. [more]

My virtual friend Marnie Woodrow is about to turn 40. Sesame Street has already reached that milestone. So who better than Marnie, an accomplished fiction writer and fan of the show from its earliest days, to reflect on how Big Bird, Elmo and the gang could expand the world of a child? [more]

Back when I was a death virgin, unscathed by irreparable loss, I had no idea how to write to the bereaved. Then my mother died and I became a student of condolence. Her friends became my mentors, teaching me the difference between a truly comforting thought and an irritating platitude. [more]