Milne made more sense to me and a missing mouse was easier for me to grasp than an imposing shadow no matter how loose or friendly "Missing" was a state I knew not just from hide and seek but from misstep and getting lost and not knowing how to be found so I found in Milne someone safe and caring and engaged in the quest to find the mouse and me and others again "Missing" began with a question as the best songs do breaking silence not with an announcement but a plea an appeal an invitation to join in and share meaning Has anybody seen my mouse? I opened his box for half a minute, Just to make sure he was really in it, And while I was looking, he jumped outside! I tried to catch him, I tried, I tried…. I think he's somewhere about the house. Has anyone seen my mouse? Uncle John, have you seen my mouse? Just a small sort of mouse, a dear little brown one, He came from the coun...

I don't know if it was just that it was Alberta or the time of the world or something else that I haven't been able to put my finger on but there are things I remember that aren't quite right I was OK with choral speech at the Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton admittedly not knowing it might have been possible for us to choreograph the syllables we spoke with silhouettes but I was focussed on memorizing lines at 5 I may have had feeling in my voice but not so as one could say I was actually enunciating when all I was doing was responding to the cues of Mrs. Kelly orchestrating surprise and other plus forts with her hands and her eyes we performed two numbers that Autumn as a Centennial project obligatory and patriotic at the time there was "Shadow Dance" by Ivy O. Eastwick and "Missing" by A.A. Milne Eastwick was middle-aged at the time Milne of Pooh fame had recently di...

Kipling, who made comments about big guns and so many other politically inappropriate things it would be impossible to include them here, once visited Medicine Hat and declared that it had all hell for a basement.  It does have natural gas, and a flame is constantly lit in the coulees to mark the spot.  Some say it is a waste of gas, but at least you can actually tell the whisperer by his flame.  Harder to pin down is the wind.  In southern Alberta they say the cows sleep standing up because of the wind.  And you only know there isn't a breeze when you get bit by a sand fly. Here I met Danusia, the daughter of Polish combatant, who, along with her childhood girlfriend Bogusia, sold Toni home perms and L'Oreal hair colour to fellow children of displaced persons, who cut hair and did it up just so in the Flats, where it flooded every Spring, or thereabouts. Danka and Bugsy were married, as was the custom, to strapping Polish lads who worked at the IXL brickw...