Letters from Rona / On my mind / Sort by titles

Just when I was getting used to the welcome but startling notion of a black president who invites his opponents and their kids to watch the Superbowl at the White House, Barack Obama surprised me again. He told NBC news, "I think I screwed up." [more]

When I read the grim news about a suspected domestic homicide in a picture-book Calgary family, I immediately thought of Mary Swan's arresting and devastatingly assured first novel, The Boys in the Trees. [more]

Every generation of women aspires to what mom didn't have. Now it's baby boomers' turn to be told that our frantic lives didn't cut it. [more]

Sometimes I look back on my son's teenage years and wonder how we ever got through. It's not that we had a hell-raiser on our hands, just that there are so many ways for a promising, likeable, headstrong kid to fall from the precipice of adolescence. A kid like Brandon Crisp, age 15. His funeral in Barrie, Ontario, is expected to draw 1,000 mourners who loved him, searched high and low for him or simply know in their hearts that what happened to Brandon could happen to their own child. [more]

The world does not look kindly on a woman who swaggers from bed to bed as men have always done. But to my mind, the real inequality is that a naked woman can't display her cellulite in post-coital splendour the way a naked man displays his gut. [more]

You wouldn't think there's any call for fake rocks in southern Utah. The place teems with real ones, majestically sculptured by nature over many millions of years. But the strangest things happen when you start paving paradise. [more]

You never know how an online encounter with a stranger is going to enlarge your life. This morning, an e-mail from a stranger did precisely that. [more]

What with a baby boomlet in the family and Christmas practically upon us, I've become a reluctant expert in the latest style trends for those of us too tiny and clueless to care how grownups deck us out, provided the clothes don't itch. So I am here to tell you what I've learned from wide-eyed contemplation of eensy-weensy toddler jeans, fashionably distressed like Dad's. Guess who they're for! A boy, of course. Baby Gap and its competitors dress boys like men (or at least like college freshmen) and girls like dolls. The gender divide lives on. [more]

When kids run wild on safe streets, they stretch their minds and bodies while learning a sense of fair play. Now traditional childhood games are all but forgotten. A Canadian hero aims to turn things around, and she\'s looking for help. [more]

When Dr. Henry Morgentaler received the Order of Canada for his unstinting, often life-threatening efforts to make abortion safe, legal and accessible, I thought he deserved the honour. Yet I couldn't rejoice; it would have felt like clapping at a funeral. I had no words to frame my conflicted thoughts until I watched a brave, remorseless movie about illegal abortion in Romania's darkest days. [more]

Mind if I brag for a minute? After all, it?s not every traveler who follows in the footsteps of the world?s greatest climbers, drawn by the forbidding power of Mount Aconcagua, the tallest peak outside the Himalays. [more]

I used to think that to experience a totally foreign culture, I would need a phrase book and an intercontinental flight. Turns out all it really takes is a road trip through the far southern reaches of my native land, the U.S.A. [more]