Born in Winnipeg’s Women’s Pavilion in 1953, and always too square (or straight) to have any friends his own age, I started hangin’ out – at da library, when I was 13.
I ’tink it was 1966, (Sorry – vernacular is fun), I loved reading, as did/do my parents (Mom’s still with us) and I was a dictionary geek.
Every 5 years I have read through the dictionary to find the new words, or see the words that have fallen out of use, ’til 2006 when I created my own dictionary of Van-isms and now I use these words for politcal rant, trying to make the nonsense make sense.
Like my Dad would have wanted me to. I write because of a wonderful woman (in fact many wonderful women), in my life, at ’my’ beginning 15/16 years my English teacher was Sharon Engbrecht, and she was a person, and not just a position at Hugh John Macdonald, she was interested in her ’kids’ developing, to the point that one class day she brought a tape deck in to school and played Simon and Garfunkel’s "Sound of Silence" for us, and I became mesmerized by the pictures in their words. I still am!
"... and the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls", if you know anything about tenement life, • read slums – even here *.
She was inspirational. She was killed, last year (’07), along with her daughter in a devastating car accident, and I only heard about it well after the fact, (SO), she is one of the many important women in my life, to whom I now dedicate myself to making the world a better place, or to scream my head off (... on paper), TRYING!
For my mother TINA, for my daughter KASSARA, for MY world filled with Sisters.
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