Month: September 2014

Calgary is the third most ethnically diverse city in Canada, next to Vancouver and Toronto. Nearly thirty percent of the population is a visible minority and of that number seven percent of the population identify as black. This is much larger than Vancouver, where less than one percent of our population identify as black, even though over fifty percent of our population is a visible minority. (is it still a minority if it’s the majority?) When I grew up in Calgary in the seventies and eighties we had a Chinatown and that was about it. When I moved to Red…

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Warning: this story is gross. I am orally independent. If you ever need top secret information from me, forget electric shock or bamboo under the nails…threaten to stick someone else’s toothbrush in my mouth. Maybe this distaste for other people’s visible saliva comes from sharing beverages with younger siblings and cousins who were always phlegmy with a cold or too young to understand not to backwash. The communal root beer was always milky by the time it got to me so I would often pass. Likely it was exacerbated by dating not one but two gentlemen who suffered from an…

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I blink my red puffy piggy eyes. Either I am allergic to something or just haven’t adjusted to the dryness of the prairies. I didn’t get a good sleep. I was up late chatting with my fellow. He asks “Do you travel like this often…?” I joke, “Oh, in a few years you will be tired of me and then you’ll welcome the breaks when I’m gone.” He doesn’t smile. “We know that isn’t likely”, he says. True. Somehow I already know. Nora wakes me up early rifling through her suitcase, “Mommy you haven’t packed me enough socks!” “Nora, it…

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