Like, seriously? with Colleen Stewart Podcast

Despite the suggestion from Microsoft Word’s artificial intelligence tool that I let it draft a short article on how to volunteer at a non-profit organization or create a summer shopping list, I have decided to use my natural intelligence for a topic I am thinking about and, in my view, is more pressing. That is, where on God’s green earth is a Canadian woman supposed to go these days to buy socks, underwear, hand towels, and pantyhose?It used to be that I, nay, every Canadian woman I know, would go to The Hudson’s Bay Company, the iconic Canadian department store spawned by two French fur traders in 1659, and known to modern-day shoppers as The Bay. We had our choice of either the smaller Bay in our local mall or, if we needed more selection and higher end options, our flagship Bay, often downtown and featuring six levels of shopping, designer boutiques on the fifth floor, and a gourmet food cafeteria in the basement.My visits to The Bay always began with a march through cosmetics, holding my breath as I passed the fragrance counters and the ladies who offered perfume-soaked strips of paper or a spray from the bottle they had pointed at me. That march meant I was on a mission. Perhaps to deal with a newly discovered run in my pantyhose that started at my big toenail and ended in the middle of my knee. Nothing could deter me. Not Ladies’ Wear, a department that sometimes made me wonder if being a colour-blind schizophrenic was qualification for employment as a Hudson’s Bay purchaser. Not the dizzying laps around Hudson’s Bay blankets required to ascend the multiple escalators to the hosiery floor. Like many women before and after me, I relied on steady feet, a sense of direction to rival a French voyageur, and a guarantee that I could be in a new pair and back at work faster than a Starbuck’s barista could make and serve a Grande pumpkin latté.It was in this department store, once the governing power of more than half of the landmass now called Canada, that I could find multitude pairs of socks of every brand, shape, size, and pattern; a skin-colour rainbow of pantyhose offering a spectrum of girdle support that guaranteed bellies of any shape or size would be tucked in, smoothed out, and rendered invisible under pants or skirt. Underwear? By God, there was underwear. An entire morning could be spent in Lingerie perusing an endless assortment of materials, styles, and colours. Or, if I needed my Calvin Klein “Old Faithfuls” before my one-year-old woke up and threw his soother, I could head straight for the “Three Pairs for $20” bin and – God bless the Hudson’s Bay Company – be in and out in under ten minutes. And if I also needed hand towels, I was two escalators and one tight lap away from Housewares and a selection of size, colour, and plushness to take my breath away. This was the efficiency and confidence every Canadian woman was gifted by The Bay.Today, I cannot do any of this. On June first of this year, in a move that surely had demons in hell chortling and clinking pitchforks, The Bay ended three hundred and fifty-five years of operation and closed its stores, abandoning millions of Canadian women to drive aimlessly through city streets, stand gaping in parking lots, and ride helplessly up and down mall escalators wondering, “Where do I go now?” when they need socks and underwear.Take slips for example, that distinct article of women’s underclothing that started as a smock in the Middle Ages and became, in the 1920’s, a thin liner of rayon to be worn under the modern fabrics that were either clingy or see-through. For one hundred years, Canadian women were rescued with slips found at The Bay. Half-slips, full slips, short slips, long slips, white slips, black slips, nude slips, pink slips. The Bay had more slips than Dr. Seuss had fish.Arrive home with a new skirt, discover you can see right through it, but love it too much to take it back? Cue: The Bay. If you arrived at the right time in the middle of the afternoon, you would find a 60-something no-nonsense saleslady peering at you over glasses attached to a chain and smelling of the perfume-soaked paper strip that you were offered on your way in. A woman who knew in three seconds what you needed and where to find it. A woman whose two-inch manicured nails would fly over the cash register buttons while she offered you a ten percent discount if you signed up for a Hudson’s Bay credit card. Those days are gone. Today, buying a slip means defining the word “slip” and explaining why anyone would wear one to salesgirls who are thirty years younger than you are and want their clothes to either cling or be see-through.I know from experience. The calf-length sage-green sheath dress looked good in the lighting at Aritzia. The 20-something salesgirl said the fit was “fire”, a descriptor that had to be repeated so I could hear it over the store’s piped-in indie pop track and then translated because I am fifty-five years old and fire is something that happens in my kitchen when I forget I have something under the broiler.“Good,” she explained, convincing me to take the dress home.However, when I tried it on at home, I knew it would never leave the room, let alone the house. I needed a slip. And because thirty years of shopping programming is not easily undone, I went back to the mall, forgetting that the only store guaranteed to rescue me, The Bay, was now bankrupt.The giant space at the end of the mall was now a war zone of broken-down racks and dismembered mannequins dressed in liquidation sale banners. After a few seconds of standing in front of the security panels and willing the department store back into existence, I joined my lost sisters on the escalators, looking for a place to shop.Aha! Victoria Secret! Surely the leader in lingerie for almost half a century, the inventor of the Miracle Bra, and the launcher of super model catwalk careers the world over would have a slip.“Slip?” the young woman looked at me like I was asking for directions to the moon. In Persian.“Yes,” I said. “To wear under a dress.”She stared.I said, “A dress that is not lined and needs a liner.”No response.Wondering if I should check her for a pulse or a reboot button, I tried again, “It’s usually made of rayon. It can start at the waist. Or it could be full length with bra straps.” Pause. Stare. “That’s what I need. Full length.”Her eyes brightened. “Oh! Do you mean a negligee?” And striding towards a rack, she triumphantly raised a ten-inch piece of hot pink polyester lined in fake fur, cut out at the sides and back, and glittering with rhinestones. Now it was my turn to stare.Across the hall at La Senza, a lingerie chain made successful by being across the hall from Victoria Secret, the salesgirl knew what a slip was but lamented the fact that I would not find one in the mall that day.“We don’t carry them anymore,” she said sadly, admitting she did not know why and leaving me to assume that this could only be the work of those pitchfork-clinking demons.No more confident march in and out of The Bay. It was a disappointed trudge through the mall, eyes dry from the recessed LED lighting and feet sore from the polished concrete floor as I tried to remember if I had parked outside Classic Newsstands or Mobile Klinik. I was headed home to order from Amazon where I would attempt to pick the best slip from seven pages of options with only deceptive fashion photography and anonymous reviewer comments as my guide.While I punched in my Amazon username and password and grabbed my phone to access and enter the one-time pass code, I longed for the 60-something no-nonsense saleslady at The Bay with her heavy perfume, glasses on a chain, and two-inch manicure. The one who knew that Lingerie section like the back of her hand and understood what a woman was up against when trying to leave the house during daylight hours in a polyester dress.The latest news is that Canadian Tire, another Canadian retail legend, has purchased the Hudson’s Bay Company brand. I had a look at the website. They are selling Hudson’s Bay-striped blankets, travel mugs, Christmas tree balls, toques, and nutcracker dolls. The demons might be chortling for now, but I have faith in an all-powerful God and He might just hear the distressed cry of Canadian women and inspire someone to put our high quality socks, underwear, hand towels, and pantyhose back in one location where they belong.Until then, ladies, see you on the escalator. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

When I was six, watching television was easy. I would roll into the living room on my plastic Ride On Fire Truck and park next to the couch where my parents would be nestled, my father pointing the four-button Zenith Space Command remote control channel changer at the only television in the house. Deciding what to watch took seconds. We had four channels, fifteen shows that played at specific times, and two decision makers, my parents, the only ones in the room with money to pay the cable bill and thumbs strong enough to push the Zenith’s buttons. Together, our family journeyed through Little House on The Prairie, The Jeffersons, Happy Days, Wonder Woman, and Mary Tyler Moore. “Binging” a series did not happen. Shows played once a week and programming stopped at midnight, the end marked by thirty-seconds of station identification, one-minute of O Canada, and forty-five seconds of static, coloured test bars. After that, the television turned into a crackling box of fuzz until programming resumed sometime close to noon the next day. Staying awake past the fuzz was so contrary to the moral order that the only place you would spot someone slumped in a lounge chair with the television crackling was in a horror film.Had Brock and I decided in 1976 to watch a movie called Bonhoeffer, it would have been because the paper TV Guide told us a movie called Bonhoeffer was showing on one of four channels during one of five time slots. We would have arrived at the couch on time, nestled in, and happily watched our movie.However, it was not in 1976, but in 2025, that Brock and I decided to watch a movie called Bonhoeffer, the true story of a Lutheran pastor who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. We did not pick the movie because we knew it was playing on a certain streaming service at a certain time. We picked it because while listening to a podcast on my way home from Toronto one day, I heard a guest from Manhattan recommend it to a host in Florida. At least we knew what we wanted to watch. Deciding may have been quick in 1976, but in 2025 it can take anywhere from five minutes to five days to no decision at all as everyone grabs their device and scatters to different rooms to watch what they want.Brock and I curled into our respective ends of the sofa, me next to the shelves I steadily populate with books I will never live long enough to read, and Brock next to the end table he steadily populates with reading glasses, phone chargers, and random pieces of hardware one never needs while sitting on the couch. Detaching from our individual devices to watch a movie together had sparked a joy in me akin to being seven years old and allowed to stay up late and watch Charlie’s Angels. With a flourish that would feather Farrah Fawcett’s hair, I raised the remote to find Bonhoeffer in the Roku television search field.Several options with accompanying thumbnail images popped up on the right-hand side of the screen. Three documentaries, one mini-series, a film from Angel Studios whose thumbnail featured a young man with wide blue eyes behind round, 1940’s-era spectacles, and for no reason I could detect, Minions. Recognizing Angel Studios from the podcast, I knew wide eyes and round spectacles was the movie we wanted.While I had chosen to search Roku, Brock had decided to search the world.“Siri, where can I watch Bonhoeffer?” Brock asked iPhone like Captain Kirk asking Scotty to find more power.“Got it!” I announced, winning the first leg of this Battle of the Network Stars and hovering the remote control in the air to point at the screen.Brock looked up from his phone.“It’s on Hoopla.” I paused. “Do we have Hoopla?” I paused again. “What is Hoopla?”“No clue,” Brock answered. He paused and then, “Let’s download it.”I clicked “Install” and then clicked “Agree” to a wall of legalese that was Hoopla’s Terms and Conditions and, for all we knew, lifetime rights for this mystery streaming service to sell our data, our house, or our functioning organs. Never mind. We were getting closer to our movie. Within seconds Hoopla was installed, a new button was added to the growing list on Roku, and I was clicking to open it.“Sign in with your library card,” directed the home screen, the orange-font message sitting neatly under a giant Hoopla logo.“Library card?” I reached for my phone. “I’ll get one.”A minute later, I was on the Burlington Public Library page and down that rabbit hole that is called Enter Your Personal Information. I clicked on the first field of seven, thinking this would take no longer than a 1976 commercial break, and typed my name.“I have a library card,” Brock broke my trance. I looked up. The thumbs he had poised over his phone froze. “I don’t remember my password.”I watched as he typed, trying different passwords and finally succumbing to “Forgot My Password.” He clicked into his email, reset his password, and popped back to the library’s website to login.Faster than Hal could lock a pod bay door, Hoopla replaced the orange-font message with a spinning blue and white circle. At last, the screen showed us what we wanted to see, what Roku had promised, wide blue eyes behind round spectacles, and the name, Bonhoeffer.Joy and calm returned. We set down our phones, united our attention spans once again, and relaxed into the sofa. I hit play.Two minutes later, I was reaching for the remote. “This is not the right movie.”What had played was black and white footage of real Nazi soldiers marching, clips of the real Hitler shouting, and the style of dramatic voice-over only found in Gillette razorblade commercials and World War II documentaries. No wide eyes and round spectacles to be seen.I clicked to exit. There was the correct thumbnail: wide eyes and round spectacles. I hit play. Nazis marching. Exit. Wide eyes. Play. Nazis marching. Brock, dismissing Hoopla for the bumbling fool it was shaping up to be, picked up his phone and with a gravitas that would intimidate a Klingon, commenced multilateral talks with Siri and the public library app.“This would never happen with the paper TV Guide,” I grumbled, realizing we could have watched an episode of Welcome Back Kotter by now. Wishing for 1976 but stuck in 2025, I left Hoopla and headed back to the Roku search page to start the battle again.In my mind’s eye, I could see the 1976 version of my father watching us over the buttons of his Zenith Space Command remote control channel changer chuckling at me at one end of the couch Googling, “Stream Bonhoeffer in Canada no marching Nazis” and Brock at the other end asking Siri to forget about Hoopla and find the damn movie. While we grappled with QR codes and two-factor verification, my 1976 father would wrap his arm around my mother and, with a mightiness of thumb not seen since metal gave way to plastic, execute three clicks to reach Laverne and Shirley. Nineteen seventy-six me would dangle my bare feet over the edge of the couch, hoping I could stay up late enough to see Charlie’s Angels. Maybe even O Canada. Or God and my parents willing, those static, coloured bars. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

In 1954, on a grey winter day, five-year-old Jackie McKee snowshoes along a railway track somewhere north of Sudbury in Canada. The photo, one of many that have captivated me at the Canadian National Railway School on Wheels Museum in Clinton, Ontario, Canada, is taken from behind. Jackie’s wool pants balloon around his tiny frame as he starts his three-quarter-of-a-mile walk home for lunch, alone. After lunch, Jackie will strap on the snowshoes and walk the track again, moving as fast as his short legs can carry him so he will be on time for afternoon lessons.I am standing in one of seven rail cars, operated by Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways, that brought education to remote Northern Ontario communities from 1926 to 1965. I am here because my Nana, Aggie Chéné, attended school this way when, in 1931, my great-grandfather lost everything, moved his family to a cabin in the Ontario bush, and taught his kids how to hunt and fish for their food.For five days, the school car parked on a siding, attracting children of all ages from communities too small to be called villages. At the end of the week, the teacher assigned homework, strapped down the chalk and books, and moved to the next stop on his route. Four weeks later, the car returned.One of these stops was within snowshoeing distance of Aggie’s cabin. The kids came on foot, snowshoes, dog sled, and skis. Before the rivers froze, some came in canoes. Some lived less than a mile away, some more than twenty. Some had lived in Northern Ontario for generations, including many Native kids. More were new to Canada, children of European immigrants hired to maintain the railway and isolated from the country they now called home. Some, like Aggie, were escaping poverty in other parts of Canada. A few spoke English. Most did not. Another photo shows two boys, aged 9- and 11-years-old standing outside a canvas lean-to they pitched in the snow beside the rail car. While their father tended animal traps, sometimes leaving them for months at a time, these boys decided an education was worth the hardship of winter camping.A student quote on the school car wall reads: “Nothing was going to keep us from going to school.” Aggie and her siblings hiked four kilometres each way to the school. My uncle told me she always wore a 25-caliber rifle over her shoulder in case they spotted a pheasant. Aggie was the best shot and most likely to bring home dinner that night. He also told me she did not like going. However, I know enough of the rest of her story to guess that while she may not have always liked school, she might have been as determined to be there as the student quoted on the wall, those boys in the lean-to, and five-year-old Jackie McKee. While moving to a cabin in the Northern Ontario woods might seem romantic, there was nothing romantic about it for Aggie. My great-grandfather sexually abused her from the time she learned to read to the time she was old enough to pack a bag and leave. Hiking to the school car for five days every four weeks was an escape. She learned to read, write, and draw. She learned history, civics, art, and science. She learned the world was bigger than a cabin in the Ontario bush.This was the goal. As a school board inspector commented in 1927 when assessing the program’s inaugural year, “Good citizenship is contagious. The advent of the school car has made these people contented and hopeful.” For kids living with a daily struggle for survival, climbing the ladder to the school car meant aiming at something that transcended themselves and life in the bush.Last week, Charlie Kirk was shot dead on a college campus in Utah. Soon, we might know with certainty why his assassin did what he did. However, media and social media responses to Mr. Kirk’s murder provide clues. There was one day of shared shock and grief. Barely a day. Then, so-called journalists and social media influencers fled back to their political and ideological camps, shuttered the windows on our shared humanity, and pointed barrels of rhetoric through the foxholes, firing blame, threats, and insults at the other side. Some even cracked jokes.When I read the following from the CBC on September 11th, I thought, here we go again.“Some of Charlie Kirk's most controversial takesCharlie Kirk, who died after being shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University Wednesday, had a long history of contentious views and often courted controversy with statements that seemed designed to provoke those who disagreed with him.”Charlie Kirk was a Christian. And what were his contentious views? That the nuclear family matters. That human life matters. That a baby matters. That the truth of male and female matters. That a government that takes care of its citizens matters. That being able to afford a house and food matters. And most importantly, that dialogue matters. Are these contentious views? These are my views. And not too long ago, these were largely shared views and ones we could credit for creating a country people would want to call home. Show those views to the children in the school car and they would wonder what we find so contentious. Those views put the school car in their midst, and nothing could keep them from it.The CBC story offended me. And yet, it did not surprise me. I converted to Christianity two and a half years ago. Conversion did not mean I chose a new “look”, philosophy, practice, or creed. Conversion meant a cloak dropped from my eyes and plugs came out of my ears so I could see the world God created and hear about my place in it. There were sacrifices and big changes but there was also huge upside. Anxiety and despair were replaced with peace and hope. Feeling overwhelmed and afraid were replaced with feeling comforted and strengthened. Like many new converts, I was what you might call “a bit much”. I listened to worship music and smiled at the sky. I turned every conversation into a sermon about God. “What’s for dinner, Colleen?” “Stir fry, Brock. But only after we thank God for what he has given us today! And speaking of God…” I dropped $300 at a Catholic supplies shop, “Let me get you a box for all of that,” and hung crucifixes around the house. I also decided to wear a cross around my neck.While the other stuff was happening at home, wearing the cross was a public display of my newfound faith. I was nervous on my first Zoom call with a client. I knew the dominant script had flipped – that being a Christian went against the culture. And I knew that going against the culture could cost me. Would I lose clients? Would I lose friends? Would I lose family? Never did I wonder, would I be shot?When I think of what offends us, and what situations and ideas we decide are so contentious that they are deemed to be violence, I know none of that would matter if we were living the life my Nana did. Or the lives of so many who struggled to survive in real ways. In life and death ways. I want to write my Nana’s story because being reminded of where we were might put some perspective on where we are. It might remind us that these traditions that we now label contentious, even hateful, are the very traditions we most need right now. It might remind us that we come from stock that is too tough and resilient to let a difference of opinion cause us to rage. A captivating story about a bunch of children in a Canadian school car might just bring some of us together.I still like to laugh. God gave me a sense of humour and a talent for writing. He also gave me a cat, two children, a husband, and a tendency to be impulsive sometimes. Great fodder for a humour column on Substack. So, I will keep writing articles when the ideas hit me. However, something or someone is also waking me up at four o’clock in the morning with scenes from a 1931 Canadian school car in my head. That might be God too. So, when there are long breaks between humour articles, know that I am answering a call to write a book based on Aggie and those children who snowshoed to school all those years ago.That picture of Jackie McKee is not my Nana, but it could be. They say hard times create strong men. My Nana was strong, and I will bet Jackie was too. We are not in the same hard times Aggie experienced in the 1930’s, or Jackie experienced in the 1950’s, but we are in times that are hard. However the book turns out, I pray it will be a story that points to God and, by doing so, reminds us that with Him, we are strong. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

For my readers who are craving another Dash, Brock, or Colleen story, have no fear. There is a hike and a homemade chilli sauce adventure to write about. But now, a rant. This is not so much tongue-in-cheek as gnash-my-teeth while I pull at my hair and ask Brock to search for single family homes in Warsaw, Poland. The provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have delivered perfect rant fodder, and Canada’s rant king, Rick Mercer, is nowhere to be found. So, short of me delivering this on video and in perfect staccato while I wind my way through a graffiti-bedizened alley, I give to you a Mercer-style rant. The thing needs to be said.Not to be outdone by the City of Toronto’s Great Tobogganing Ban of 2024, Canada’s province of Nova Scotia has issued a ban on walking in the woods until the middle of October. To prevent wildfires. In a province where the woods cover three quarters of the land, where it is difficult to spit and not hit woods, and where seventy per cent of the woods sit on private land, one million residents have been ordered to find space on the remaining treeless patches to walk, fish, pitch a tent, or hold a family picnic.Using a capacity for reason found only in public service bureaucracies, the government is allowing an estimated one hundred and thirty-seven homeless people to remain in the woods, where they are walking, fishing, pitching tents, and cooking over open fires.“Most wildfires are caused by human activity,” said Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston justifying the ban by conjuring up vivid mental pictures of, well, nothing. Leave it to the rest of us to wonder if human activity means arson and illegal bonfires or, as the ban’s scope suggests, a guy in gators, knee-deep in the rushing waters of the Musquodoboit, waiting for trout to bite.Those who are not homeless and dare to step into the woods God created for them face a fine of up to $25,000.00, equal to a Lexus sedan on Auto Trader and more than the recent fines levied against those who have set woods on fire. Unlike their Toronto counterparts, who may have been too busy tobogganing to hand out tickets, Nova Scotia authorities are enforcing their law. Six days into the ban, CBC reported that nearly $300,000.00 in tickets had been issued.The writing is on the wall for Nova Scotians desiring the shelter of trees. Seniors seeking shade must confine themselves to darkened, air-conditioned rooms. Children wanting to play outside must bake on sun-drenched play structures or beaches. And radical environmentalists wanting to demonstrate their zeal must trade hugging a tree for gluing themselves to the pavement, confident they will be able to pay the $25.00 mischief fine with the loose change exasperated drivers hurl at them.In a shameless act of “keeping up with the Joneses”, Nova Scotia’s neighbouring province, New Brunswick, has issued a woods ban of its own. This is not only to stop wildfires, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt said, but also to prevent, from Saint John to Nigadoo, and from Edmundston to Sackville, the possibility of falling down and hurting yourself.Falling down and hurting yourself? Welcome to my life since I started walking.Thank goodness walking in the woods was not banned in the small Ontario town where I grew up in the mid-1970’s. Such a law would have been the undoing of my mother’s summer parenting strategy of sending me to the woods until the streetlights came on. After a winter of being wrestled into a snowsuit and told to go and play in a snowbank until the streetlights came on, I was unfazed by the independence and thankful for the warmer weather. Finishing my Corn Flakes and hopping on my bike, I pedalled to the forest up the street to spend hours imagining fairies in the moss, hoping my best friend, Kim, would show up, and praying the boy who liked putting garter snakes down our t-shirts would not. And because knowing when the streetlights went on was the sole responsibility of my seven-year-old self, I would occasionally trudge out of the trees to check them.Unbeknownst to me or the woman putting me through outdoor survival training, a few activists had an environmental movement on slow simmer, waiting for the right time to declare this awesome planet that is barely understood by us to be a used-up and decaying invalid in need of saving by us. On April 22, 1970, Earth Day Round One attracted twenty million Americans who strapped gas masks to their faces, chanted, “Act or die!” at anyone who would listen, and waved signs that read “We have met the enemy, and he is us” at fellow humans trying to complete the commute home so they could put the potatoes on. The slow simmer came to a boil when, in 1990, Earth Day Round Two spanned 141 countries, involved 200 million people, and started a global panic that would turn a fight-the-man effort to remove garbage from the parks and chemicals from the water into an obey-the-man offensive seemingly aimed at removing humans from the earth.The government announcements are impacting Nova Scotians as they would any group of humans whipped into a frenzy of fear, told their fellow citizens are to blame, and promised a pat on the back if they report anyone with a toe past the treeline. Neighbour is shouting at neighbour, citizen is calling out citizen, and anyone unwilling to dispense shame to someone’s face is posting on Facebook, a virtual town square stockade where Nova Scotians are busy exposing the “idiots” in their midst and declaring that “people suck.” That is not burning woods we smell over the Atlantic seaboard, but a scorched cloud of censure and judgment of one’s fellow man.Truth be told, I would like to have a bit more 1970’s, when people were less suspicious of human activity and cared more about the state of their neighbourhoods. I have seen enough black and white photos of 1970 Earth Day activists picking garbage up from city streets and parks to wish that even some of them were around today. They could march through the green space across from my house and pick up the Coke cans crushed against tree trunks, the McDonald’s napkins fluttering in the bushes, and the Tim Horton’s coffee cups littering the grass like double double landmines. Since today’s government officials and environmental activists are too busy saving a 4.5-billion-year-old gargantuan planet from human activity to worry about picking up the garbage, I will grab my rubber gloves and kitchen catcher again and pick it up myself.That is okay. It means I get to go into the woods, wonder at the beauty God created for us, and remember that while He is asking us to keep the place clean, He is not ordering us to keep out. While I am there, I might even imagine fairies in the moss. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

It was when Dash vomited a mass the size of a baby camel that I decided I should take him to the vet. Thankfully, my black American short hair is equipped with two features not mentioned at the animal shelter when, five years ago, I decided a cat might fill the void left by the aloof 18-year-old boy who had left my home to start university.The first is what I have come to call the Barf Alarm. I have only heard the Barf Alarm a few times but when I have it has been consistent. About two minutes before stomach expulsion, Dash emits a piano forte yowl that would wake a banshee and have it complaining about the noise. For symphony orchestra conductors wanting to beef up their woodwinds section, I can recommend Dash’s Barf Alarm as one capable of ascending the harmonic minor scale at Largo tempo, enough time for a violinist to change a string, a cat owner to understand the animal is about to puke, and a cat to high tail it to the perfect spot for puking.The second feature can only be called a gift from God, and it is Dash’s preference that the perfect spot be a flat, cool, and smooth surface, Mercifully, this disqualifies carpets, bedspreads, furniture, and cashmere sweaters left out to dry.On this day, I found him in the upstairs hallway, crouched over the hardwood and in violent spasms. A minute later, the baby camel was on the floor and Dash was sitting up, flicking his tail, licking his chops, and eyeing me with an air of, “Well, that feels better. Glad I don’t have to clean it up.”“Maybe it’s nothing,” I thought trying to ignore the fact that my cat had expelled twice his body weight. “He might be okay.”Then, Dash sneezed.I went for the paper towels, wash cloth, and garbage bag, remembering that Dash had been sneezing all week and the day before I had caught him hugging the bottom of the suitcase I was packing so he could threaten it with dry heaves. Now this. My spirits sank as I realized with horror the truth of the situation. I would have to take Dash to the vet.My goal for vet visits is once a year, for Dash’s mandatory rabies and flu shots. Remembering that we have a vet appointment the next day inspires a feeling of dread akin to remembering that I have a multi-leg discount-airline work trip with tight connections the next day. I plan wake up times, mealtimes, travel times, and wrestling with Dash times. I plan the latest I can let Dash outside and still be confident he will return in time to be chased, cornered, and seized. I plan where to place the carrier so I can get him into it with a minimum amount of wrestling, hissing, and scratching. Something dramatic must happen for me to change the vet schedule. Scooping the last of Dash’s expulsion into the kitchen catcher I begrudgingly allowed that this might constitute dramatic.An hour later, after crossing the parking lot with a carrier that was now bouncing and swaying like a bag holding an octopus, I found a seat in the waiting room and placed Dash on the floor between my feet. The vet had squeezed our visit into a full Friday afternoon docket which meant several excited dogs and their owners were already crammed into a room half the size of my kitchen. The carrier had felt large swinging from its handle in the parking lot. Now, it seemed small, surrounded by canines scratching the linoleum, tugging on leashes, sniffing chair legs, and barking at airborne entities invisible to the human eye. Sympathetic to the fact that if he were not trapped in a plastic bucket on the floor, Dash would be clambering to a quiet hiding spot in the ceiling, I slid my feet further under my chair and with them, the carrier.A young German Shepherd across from us pulled on his leash, all paws, ears, and, unfortunately for Dash, curiosity about the container between my feet. Lurching and sliding towards us, nails tapping on the linoleum, Young Shepherd shoved a nose bigger than Dash’s head into the space below my chair and sniffed at the wire lattice that was the carrier door. After failing to nudge the animal away with my shin, I suggested to the man holding the leash that he might want to pull the dog away.He was a large man in a loose t-shirt and baggy shorts, squeezed into the narrow plastic seat and looking hot and dishevelled. Next to him sat his wife or girlfriend, equally large and dishevelled. Her Aerosmith tank top and flip flops completed the impression that these two had been called away from a backyard barbecue and several cases of beer. He squinted in my direction while she looked at me with wide eyes. Then, pushing his thick legs into the linoleum for leverage, he dragged the unwilling puppy back towards him.“The cat isn’t well,” I explained. “I don’t want to stress him out any more than necessary.”The man laughed.“We have two cats,” he said with a lazy grin. “We haven’t seen them in two months since we brought her home.” He indicated who “her” was by gesturing to Young Shepherd who was now sniffing the bottom of the receptionist desk.I stared at him incredulously.He nodded and chuckled. “She came home, they ran upstairs, and we haven’t seen ‘em since.” He shrugged, giving Young Shepherd more lead so she could investigate the food shelves. “Oh well.”The woman next to him widened her eyes more and nodded her silent confirmation that this was true.Suddenly, illustrating the need for cats to hide from her, Young Shepherd bolted towards the hallway leading to the examining room, yanking on the leash and managing to get her front paws off the floor before the man caught her and shortened the slack. For a moment before she was forced back to his chair, she was half suspended, lolling her tongue excitedly and bicycling her front paws in the air.The reason for the excitement came around the corner and filled the remaining space in the tiny waiting room. Two massive dogs, Bears One and Two I will call them, each pulling a woman behind them. I silently asked God to give the older of the two women strength when I noticed her sandal slip on the linoleum as Bear One tried to drag her to the door.Young Shepherd sprang and barked. The man, giving clear evidence for why two hiding cats might not trust him to keep the new dog from mauling them, invited Young Shepherd, in a tone one might use to encourage babies to walk, to stop barking. Young Shepherd declined the invitation.“Just give me a minute!” the receptionist cheerfully yelled over the barking to the woman as Bear One heaved on the leash. “I’ll get your bill ready in just a minute.”“A minute?” I thought watching this woman’s arms shake. “She won’t last ten seconds!”She turned to the younger woman behind her; a woman I took to be her daughter and who was under an equal amount of stress trying to prevent all thirty-eight inches and two hundred and forty pounds of Bear Two from following Bear One’s lead.The receptionist again called, “One minute!” before sitting at her computer to prepare the bill.While I imagined what it would look like if either woman released a hand to fish a credit card out of a purse, the women started discussing how they were going to exit. A dog had just appeared outside the office door, pressed its nose against the glass, and started barking at all of us inside. The Bears were now in a frenzy. I instinctively gripped Dash’s carrier more tightly, thanking God that at least Young Shepherd now seemed content to sit and pant quietly at the drama.Outside Dog’s owner, a middle-aged woman who cupped her hands around her eyes and scrutinized the office like a rodeo rider scrutinizes a bull, spoke to someone out of view, handed this person the leash, and pushed the dog away from the door. She swaggered into the office, confident and grinning.“Can’t bring mine in here!” she drawled loudly to all of us. “This place would be NUTS if I did that!” I marvelled at her choice of words and wondered how she would describe the room at this moment.The carrier between my feet caught her attention.“A cat!” she cried gaily. “She must be loving this!” Before I could answer and correct her on the matter of Dash’s sex, she continued by shouting at the receptionist, “I’ll wait outside and bring Sheba in when the coast is clear.”The receptionist nodded and smiled gratefully before turning to her computer to prepare the bill for the Bears. At this moment, another woman, like the hat stand hidden in Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, emerged from the examining room.Small, slight, and timid looking, she carried a thick blanket in her arms. Poking out of the blanket was the tiny head of a grey miniature poodle in a state of terrified palsy. The poodle’s trembling head swung from side to side taking in the waiting room mayhem. Its owner did the same before screwing her face up in worry and addressing the room.“I’m coming through!!” the slight and timid lady cried shrilly as she took a step towards the Bears. “I was attacked by a large dog! I suffer from anxiety and so does my little dog!” The poodle stared at us with bulging eyes and vibrated its corroborating testimony.The women, digging deep and finding Hercules, held the writhing Bears firm while the shivering poodle was air lifted past them. Barbecue couple squinted and stared wide-eyed, as lady and poodle approached Young Shepherd who was as curious about the blanket as she had been about the carrier. Now, she was pinned to her owner’s leg.The timid lady hoisted the poodle higher as she tentatively stepped around Young Shepherd. “She’s just had a shot!! She’s quite anxious!” she cried again to the entire room.Now she only had the door to contend with. Through its glass peered that swaggering old rodeo rider, Sheba’s owner. Sheba, still out of view but perhaps sensing the imminent arrival of another dog, started barking again. Now wide-eyed herself, timid lady shrieked at the door and quite possibly the entire parking lot, “We’re coming through!!!” before pushing the door open and fleeing the office.I looked back to reception in time to catch Bear One’s keeper single-handedly restraining the dog and snapping her purse closed. I was happy God had answered my plea for strength for this woman but disappointed I had missed watching her pay her bill. That is the way of the circus; sometimes you do not know where to look.Ten minutes later, I stood watching the vet try to give Dash a pill for what he had diagnosed as an upper respiratory tract infection. His assistant, who had earlier tried to ply Dash with a piece of kibble, as effective as trying to ply a toddler with a Brussel sprout, desperately tried to pin Dash’s body onto the table and keep his claws away from her skin.The vet was in full fencing mode, approaching with his hand and then darting away when Dash snapped at him with his jaws. After four attempts, he managed to seize Dash’s jowls, squeeze his mouth open, and drop the pill into his throat. He blew into Dash’s face, forcing the cat to close his mouth and swallow. For one glorious second, the vet’s face shone with victory. And then it filled the room. Half a measure of the Barf Alarm. A moment later, Dash was licking his chops, and the pill was back on the table.After three more fencing rounds – Dash: 3; Vet:0 - the vet threw in the towel, giving his assistant permission to lift her torso off Dash’s back, straighten her fur-covered top, and fix her glasses.He wiped his brow, taking a moment to find his composure and muster a smile.“I’m going to let you do this at home,” he said as nonchalantly as he could, eyeing Dash warily as he retrieved the bile-soaked pill from the table and keeping his hands well away from Dash’s mouth. “You’ll give him one pill a day for fourteen days. Oh, and there’s another pill. Once a day for five days.”I nodded, silently vowing to never give Dash a pill and rely instead on God’s miraculous design we call the immune system.There was a pause as everyone caught their breath and took stock of what had just occurred.Then the vet asked, “Are you brushing his teeth?” This is a public episode. 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Last month, I did the unthinkable. Unthinkable to many Canadians anyway. I traveled to the United States. Around the same time, CTV News reported a 31.4% drop in Canadians crossing the border and CBC News told me the number one reason for that drop is fear. If this is true, that means for every ten Canadians who hear I crossed the border, a little fewer than three will gnash their teeth, wail in horror, “You did WHAT?!!?” and hit the ground in a faint.I can hear my data researcher friend, Mike, groaning at CTV’s “31.4%” now.“Why the decimal point, CTV?!” Mike would cry, shaking his fists at the CTV news app. “Who CARES about the decimal?? It’s thirty-one percent!! Thirty-one I tell you!!!”Whichever percentage you are working with, this much is obvious. Many Canadians are avoiding the United States, and that fear CBC talked about seems to be stoked by the thought of one man. President Trump. Or, as my local butcher and grocery store cashier liked to call him last week, Orangeman.“Orangeman?!” I thought as I left the grocery store, refusing the five-cent bag and balancing a brick of butter and two lemons on a head of Romaine lettuce. “Sounds like a comic book super villain! Is that what President Trump is? A comic book super villain??”Thinking my three prayer challenges on Hallow were causing me to miss something of death ray proportions, I scoured the headlines for news of President Trump’s evil plan. I primed my search by first reading Google’s “Best Ten Evil Plans from Superhero Villain Movies”. Try as I might I could find no breaking stories of President Trump trying to cull all mutants, destroy Superman, assume control of Spiderman’s body, or annihilate half the universe. That meant one of two things. That President Trump is not a super villain named Orangeman or that he is and has not hatched his plan yet. Doubting that one thousand Canadian dollars, no longer enough to buy two weeks of groceries and gas in this country, would impact anything President Trump had planned, I booked a flight for my son, Julian, and me to visit my sister in New Hampshire.“Do you think you will have trouble crossing the border?” a friend asked when I told him where I was headed for the weekend.I had not thought about that. However, many Canadians have, and it is no wonder with Global News, CBC, and even the Canadian government parroting unfounded Facebook rumours of U.S. Border Control Officers throwing innocent foreigners in holding cells, searching smartphones for AOC retweets, and inflicting psychological torture on would-be travellers by screaming into their faces, “DO YOU LIKE DONALD TRUMP?!!?” and hoping the wrong answer gives them an excuse to put Canadians in cuffs.“Where are you going fishing?” the U.S. Border Control Officer asked Julian after I had told him we were traveling to New Hampshire so Julian could fish with his uncle, and I could visit my sister.“Why is he asking that??!” my mind screamed while my eyes darted fearfully around the room. “Who wants to know??!”“Not sure,” Julian answered, looking into the camera for the mandatory photo. I braced; waiting for border officers to swoop in, beat us with batons, and threaten us with a body cavity search if we did not cough up the name of that lake.Instead, the Officer folded up our passports and popped them back on the counter.“All done,” he said, smiling. “Have a great time.”Huh. I guess all is normal at the border. Someone should tell the CBC and those immigration lawyers they interviewed back in April. The ones who advised Canadians to treat their trip to Newark like an MI5 mission to North Korea by “packing a burner phone” and practicing backing away from men with guns while casually saying, “It’s okay. I don’t want to travel today.”If crossing the border proved one story about the United States to be false, one weekend in New Hampshire debunked a volume’s worth of tales about environmental calamity, dirty cities, and rude Americans. New Hampshire is green and gorgeous, Boston’s cleanliness puts Toronto and Montreal to shame, and Americans are friendlier than the cashiers at my local grocery store. In fact, after my weekend visit, I now believe that if Canadians should fear anyone in the United States, it should not be President Trump or Americans. It should be the Satanists.It was on the second day of the visit, with Julian and his uncle gone fishing, that my sister asked if I would like to go to Salem, Massachusetts.“I am not sure if you will like it,” my sister cautioned. “But I can’t think of anything else to do on a rainy day.”I knew about the Salem witch trials. Sixteen months of mass hysteria that started in February of 1692 and led to the townspeople murdering twenty people. Eight in one day! Other than the history of witch trials, and a smattering at that, I did not know anything about Salem.“Why?” I asked. “Is it run by Satanists or something?” I was half joking.“Well, there are a lot of psychics and tarot cards,” my sister answered.I touched the Blessed Virgin Mary medallion around my neck and grasped the rosary beads in my purse.“It’s okay,” I said. “We can go. I just won’t go into any of the shops.”The skies cleared as we drove away from my sister’s home in New Hampshire. Puffy white clouds parted to expose patches of brilliant blue.“The day is improving!” we sang as we exited onto the highway that led to Salem. Like a scolding from the heavens, the clouds closed in, and traffic slowed to a crawl. When we finally pulled into town, the sky was dark slate, and a swirling wind was buffeting trees and picking loose garbage up off the sidewalk.“It’s like The Witches of Eastwick!” my sister laughed nervously.A town can have a vibe, communicated even to the interior of a car. If you drive past some pretty buildings, smiling people, and charming bridges crossing sparkling creeks, that vibe can call at you to park the car, look around, and find a spot for lunch. Salem had some pretty buildings. But with the sidewalks dominated by scowling people in Satan t-shirts and goth gear, the only call I heard was to lock the doors, douse the car with holy water, and find the quickest way out of there.Still, we needed lunch. My sister parked the car while I looked down a side street at a row of occult shops. A shop called Pentagram announced itself with a giant metal pentagram and Pride flag, both swaying in the wind above the door. As my sister turned off the engine, two women shuffled up the sidewalk beside our car, looking like they had just been cast in a television commercial for a shop called Pentagram.“Give me a minute,” I said to my sister who was starting to open her door. “I think this might call for the prayer to Saint Michael.” I made my ninety-second plea to God’s Archangel to defend us in spiritual battle, and we were ready to hit Salem’s Mexican restaurant for lunch.The streets were busy with people. In my typical fashion, I looked for chances to smile or offer a friendly hello to strangers. There was no cheerful laughter, happy chatter, or “Can you take our picture?” to open the door for a friendly exchange. And as for eye contact, raging extrovert speak for close friendship, it was hard to glean “I’m up for a cheery bit of chit chat” from someone with purple contact lenses, charcoaled eyes, white face, and black lips at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.After half an hour of wandering, my sister and I arrived at the same conclusion. While a few windbreaker-and-sneaker-wearing people in Salem were curious visitors like us, the vast majority, looking grey and unhealthy, dressed for an adults-only Halloween parade, and prowling in and out of dark magic shops with the seriousness of people late for an afternoon sacrifice, were there for different reasons.By the time we completed our one attraction, the Witch Dungeon Museum, featuring what our guide called a “mostly” accurate witch trial reenactment and a dungeon tour that would make Dracula’s skin crawl, I was shivering from a cold that had nothing to do with the outdoor temperature.“This town is lost!” I thought, leaving the museum in despair, rounding a street corner, and giving a wide berth to another row of occult shops. “CBC is right! Stay home, 31.4%! The world outside your bubble is a scary place!”Just as I was thinking my next Substack would be titled “Fear Everything”, we turned another corner and saw Jesus.He was floating in clouds above a modest, red-brick church, his left hand raised in a blessing, his right gently touching his tunic where his heart would be, and rays of soft pink and blue light streaming from the place where his fingers met the cloth. He was on a billboard, installed on the bell tower of Saint John Paul II Shrine of Divine Mercy, a Catholic church flanking the main square and facing the section of Salem we had just toured. Despair left me as quickly as if the good Lord had caught up to me on the sidewalk, grasped my elbow, and whispered into my ear, “Be not afraid.”“I have to go in,” I told my sister and finding an open side door, we climbed the short flight of stairs to the nave of the church.The sounds of wind and cars were swallowed by a still silence as we entered a warmly lit space. A small group of parishioners kneeled in pews, heads bowed, and hands clasped in prayer. On the altar was a golden monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament, what the secularist might call a large bread wafer and what Catholics call the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Believing Catholics understand that Jesus Christ was in that church, surrounded by witch trial museums, black magic shops, dark clouds, and a whipping wind, and whispering peacefully to anyone who listened, “Be not afraid.”I kneeled in a pew behind them, thinking that maybe Salem was not lost after all, that here was a reason for hope. I carried that feeling back to my sister’s place until my son asked, “Did you go to Salem?”“We did,” I answered.“Did you visit the Satanic Temple?”When I responded with a disbelieving snort, he showed me the Google listing. The Satanic Temple, religious destination in Salem, Massachusetts and international headquarters for modern Satanists.“I was kind of wondering when you said you were going there,” Julian said.That explains all those people! That explains the chill of Salem! That explains a town that seemed to revel in the dark! With one Google search, hope was gone, and I was a CBC News consumer gnashing my teeth and ready to hit the floor in a faint.It was G.K. Chesterton who knocked me out of it when I was finally home and reading one of his essays. Chesterton writes that just as someone drawing on canvas or a blackboard knows their surface is white or black, “We, as Christians, should always believe that this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots. I should always believe that the good in it was its primary plan.”Read too much news and you start to see a black world that keeps you at home watching more news. Focus on the number of psychics and tarot decks for sale and you start to see a black town you might choose not to visit. But it was only by going to Salem that I stumbled on the church and maybe it was because of Salem’s black spots that the white world was so clear, that I was properly struck by the light of God.So, yes, I fear the Satanists because just as much as they revel in the dark, so can I. I might not have the purple contact lenses, black lipstick, and Satan t-shirts but I do have 24-hour news, the ability to fear, and the temptation to scowl at the world and burn people at the stake. Sounds like a version of Satanism to me.Me? I am cancelling my order for that burner phone, booking another trip to see my sister, and going to Mass in the morning. In the unlikely event that 31.4% of Canadians are correct and Orangeman is bent on annihilating half the universe, I can only hope that when he points his plasma cannon on me, I am laughing with people I love or kneeling in a pew, head bowed and soul calm with the only One who matters grasping my elbow and whispering in my ear, “Be not afraid.”Author’s note: The day before publishing this article, Canada’s national newspaper, The National Post, published two front-page articles about the Canada-U.S. border. The first, about a Vancouver firefighter denied entry to the United States, headlined the firefighter’s catchy quote, “Good enough to fight their wars but not good enough to cross their border.” Most readers would stop there and miss the details further down the article. Like the fact that the firefighter is not, in fact, Canadian, but a British subject with permanent residency in Canada. That he requires a special visa to travel to the United States and that his visa had expired. The second story tells of a 70-year-old man deported for kicking a border guard dog. The few readers that read to the end of the article would have read that the kick sent the poor animal flying and forced it off the job for five days. The 70-year-old-man’s suitcase, the one the dog had been attempting to sniff, was full of contraband food. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Tesla stock has sunk. And with it my hopes of retiring on a beach under a Palapa, sipping Pina Coladas and writing that three-part historical novel I am researching. At this rate, I will be lucky to write X posts in a booth at McDonald’s. On my coffee break.When I start to wail, “WHY??!!” after logging into my investments and seeing the moon-sized crater taken from Tesla’s stock value, I must remind myself that I am part of the problem. You see, I would not buy one either.It was remarkable that this past December I was considering a new plug-in Tucson hybrid at the Hyundai dealership with Brock. I have spent my “can-afford-a-car” years driving company cars, used cars, or no cars. New technology does not entice me. Give me a manual stick shift with no power steering and roll-down windows, and I am in driving heaven, building my forearms while conquering that car like a rodeo rider conquers a horse.When I left my last corporate job and with it my last fleet vehicle (a black Pontiac Grand Prix; best car ever), I briefly tried public transit. Swallowing the climate emergency narrative whole, I believed keeping a single internal combustion engine off the road would render me a Climate Superman reversing the orbit of the Earth, erasing two centuries of human industrial impact, and safely returning this planet to a Pleistocene utopia fit for ferns, birds, and woolly mammoths.Six months of lurching around downtown Calgary on a city bus brought me to my senses. Balancing three bags of work equipment while clinging to ten inches of red canvas looped around a metal pole and trying not to be jostled by noisy teenagers, stumbling winos, and grumbling commuters did not feel like superhero work. And where was the payback? In six months, I did not see a single woolly mammoth! Even Climate Superman would have thrown in his cape. I bought a used Toyota Corolla and began a ten-year commitment to previously owned.Used cars satisfied three desires: pay less, avoid the mounting beeps, dings, and chimes showing up with “smart” driving technology, and, my dream, find the perfect but now-elusive manual stick shift. Back then, I would not have entertained a new car that was part plug-in toy. And yet, here I was in a Hyundai dealership, married to a man with a penchant for tech and negotiating the purchase of a Tucson Plug-In Hybrid.The evening after driving the Tucson home, I looked over the edge of my book to spy Brock carefully reading and turning the pages of one of the Owner’s Manuals, a thick, small-font tome that had caused me to put it down as quickly as I had picked it up. Geez, I had thought, dropping it with a thump onto the coffee table, who is going to read all that??Brock was. And he was not just reading it. He was marking pages with skinny coloured tabs he had grabbed from the office before settling onto the couch. He had been at this for more than twenty minutes, my personal time limit for concentrating on anything that does not possess a hero, villain, and serial-worthy story arc. There were a lot of tabs.“What are you doing?” I asked.Brock finished placing his tab and looked at me from over his glasses.“Reading the Owner’s Manual.”“What are the tabs for?”“I am marking areas where I have questions.”His serious tone made me think I should do the same. The feeling relievedly passed and I went back to my book, a thinner volume with heroes, villains, and one tab which was really a crinkled shopping list to mark my page.My first indication that I should have read the manual came when I went to drive the car the next day. Instead of hopping in, starting the engine, and driving away, I was forced to study electrical engineering on my driveway so I could unplug it from the outlet inside my garage. Making my outdoor crash course more enjoyable was a morning snowstorm. With the clock ticking and wet snow piling onto everything, I grabbed the charging connector that connects the charging cord to the passenger side of the car. With an ergonomic handle and elegant release trigger, the connector resembles the type of gun Han Solo might wave at Storm Troopers. Turns out “gun” is an apt metaphor since this thing can kill you.I learned this after trying twice to release it, failing, and fishing the Owner’s Manual out of the glove compartment. The quickening wind flapped Brock’s coloured tabs at me, a reminder that I could have done this inside my house and on the couch. Inside the manual, every page featured bold exclamation marks sitting in triangles of various colours.“WARNING!” the manual screamed on page ten using a bright orange triangle to house the accompanying exclamation mark. “The following hazardous situations if not avoided could result in death or serious injury.”I gave my boots a shake, hearing the squelch of slush beneath them as I planted my feet back on the driveway. Thinking this sounded important, I peered at the snow-covered page, grabbed the handle of the charger, and kept reading.“Do not touch the charging connector and charging plug with wet hands, or when standing in water or snow while connecting the charging cable.”Thank goodness we humans are rational creatures, especially when reality jolts us into regretting a sizable purchase we have made with our spouse. Quickly forecasting what the next few seconds could look like for me, my calm and logical brain took over, erasing any memory of my role in buying this car and placing all blame for my brush with doom squarely on Brock.“Don’t pay any attention to that,” Brock reassured me that evening while we were preparing dinner. I had just pointed out, in attention-grabbing staccato kept time with spirited use of my vegetable knife on a carrot, that it might have been foolish to purchase a car that can kill you if you stand in snow when you live in a country where you spend a great deal of time standing in snow.I wonder if Karl and Bertha Benz had similar conversations when Karl was tinkering with what would eventually become the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1885.“No brake pads, Karl?” Bertha might have asked, warily considering the mountains that stood between their home in Mannheim, Germany and any destination one might want to travel to in Karl’s Motorwagen. “What if the brake blocks wear down or slip? Will that not present a danger of death or serious injury?”“Don’t pay any attention to that,” Karl might have replied, sticking his head out from under the machine and waving a wrench with the confident fervour of an inventor who knows he is this close to having his new machine ready to drive.Of course, Bertha Benz was made of tougher stock than I. In the early hours of August 5th, 1888, while Karl slept, Bertha, determined the public should see her husband’s invention as she did, grabbed two of their children, clambered aboard the newly finished Benz Patent-Motorwagen, and, with no proper roads, permits, or notice to Karl, drove along rugged wagon tracks to her parents’ home 104 kilometers away. The first long distance drive in a motor car caused a publicity frenzy that made both Benz’s famous and changed human transport forever. And it all happened without an Owner’s Manual, coloured tabs, or orange warning triangles.I imagine Bertha probably wrote the Manual when she got home, what with her figuring out how to refuel a car with no fuel tank, fix a blocked fuel line with her hat pin, use her garter for insulation, and, yes, invent brake liners with the help of a shoemaker she encountered along the wagon tracks. All this with two kids in tow.I cannot drive thirty kilometers alone on paved roads with shoulders and road signs before the Tucson beeps an alarm at me. It will even stop itself, stubbornly refusing to proceed if it senses hazards that it thinks I am too inept to detect. Like the time I was pulling away from my mailbox while a truck passing in the opposite direction was in range of Tucson’s rear sensor. Oh no you don’t! Tucson cackled with a wailing alarm as it slammed on its brakes and turned the dashboard red.I realize now that Tucson and I disagree on many things, like where I should sit in the lane, how much faster than the speed limit I should go, how close to the car in front is too close, when I can safely switch lanes, and how soon I should touch my brakes when the driver ahead of me hits his. With the power to instantly cut the volume on my podcast by seventy percent, make the dash go an angry red, and scold me with alarms that would send any driver into a ditch, Tucson wins more arguments than I do.“I don’t know if I can keep driving this thing,” I muttered to Brock as we drove to the other side of town for a bit of furniture shopping. Tucson had just sounded one of its milder alarms as I switched lanes behind a car that had just passed. I must have been inside the one kilometer of clearance Tucson prefers for safe manoeuvres.“Just what do you think you’re doing, Colleen?” I swear Tucson whispered menacingly through that quiet alarm. I shuddered, silently vowing to read the Owner’s Manual that night and learn the override codes for a car I now believed would pull itself over, stop at a curb, and disconnect life support while coldly elucidating, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”“Open the driver’s door, Tucson,” I would plead as the air ran out.“I’m sorry, Colleen. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”I pictured all of this while Brock, oblivious to the sentient menace that was carrying us to Furniture Warehouse in Oakville, happily distracted himself with Tucson’s CarPlay system in the passenger seat beside me.Thankfully, we have another car in the driveway, a 2015 Buick Verano that sits next to Tucson like a submissive cat that has lost enough fights to know which of the two is really in charge. Verano has more sensors and alarms than I would like, including one that mysteriously sounds when I get within two feet of Tucson. “I’ve got a bad feeling about him, Colleen.” However, Verano does not seize control and do the driving and that suits me just fine.Bertha Benz looked at her husband’s invention and saw freedom. Freedom to pack up the kids, take command of a machine, and drive 104 kilometers to see the grandparents. She probably felt fear but summoning faith, courage, and perseverance, did it anyway. I am not the expert on God’s plan for us, but I have a strong hunch that being controlled by a Hyundai Tucson is not it. I think the plan might be closer to Bertha Benz. I think God gave us more smarts than Tucson’s “smart” technology gives us credit for and, if left to struggle through problems while aiming at the higher good, I think we can change the world.Just give us a few hat pins, a garter belt, and a shoe cobbler willing to help. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

I will admit. Writing humour is NOT easy during a simmering trade war that could destroy our country’s economy. Despite tough talk about retaliation from some of this country’s politicians, TikTok videos abound with armchair economists pacing in the snow and predicting the next Great Depression, the worst unemployment in one hundred years, and, in some cases, the end of Canada altogether.Most Canadian mainstream media is out in full biased force throwing incredulous palms to cheeks and painting President Trump as a super villain unjustifiably bent on destroying his harmless and friendly neighbour to the north. With few outlets giving us a balanced story, the news is affecting people. Just before attempting a deep-end cross-country-ski manoeuvre to the lively beat of ABBA’s Voulez-Vous, a woman in my Friday Aquafit class shouted to the woman next to her that she has a new mantra.“Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump!”I started to see her as an angry villager marching to the woods to find the ogre. The spell was broken when the music switched to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way and our instructor called, “Jumping jacks!”, modelling the move from a firm spot on the deck while we desperately tried to imitate her in six and a half feet of water.The mood was no better in the change room after class when the throng of wet sixty-something ladies crowding the showers and lockers howled for President Trump’s death – by lightning strike, sharpshooter bullet, or their own bare hands. The talk was strong and lent an air of violence to the wringing out of Speedos and snapping of bra straps.“Maybe draw the line at wishing for another human being to die,” I said quietly to a woman beside me.She must have only heard the word “die” because she nodded enthusiastically and cheered, “Exactly!”“No,” I tried to clarify. “I am suggesting you do not wish for him to die. I am suggesting you remember he is a human being.”Her smile turned to a grimace as she realized what I was saying. In my imagination, she threw a flaming Speedo onto a snorkel, pumped it towards the ceiling, and chanted, “Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump! Hang Donald Trump!” In actual reality, she threw her bag on her shoulder and growled, “He pretends to be human, but he certainly is not.”I left the change room quickly, worried one of the villagers would spot my iPhone and with it a recent search for MAGA shoes, size ten. If that happened, a mob of damp, foaming-at-the-mouth Aquafitters would surely be upon me.President Trump says Canada must clean up immigration and drugs. Canadians are right to smart at his threatened punishment if we do not, tariffs that could turn this country into something that makes Somalia look like Monaco by comparison. However, any Canadian with working eyeballs has only to spend ten minutes near Dundas Square in Toronto to know we are already headed in that direction and understand why someone trying to tidy up their property might not be thrilled with having us as neighbours.“I don’t think we can use the elevator,” a fellow theatre patron commented. We had just finished a matinee performance of Moulin Rouge across the street and were with with other theatre goers also returning to their cars in the St. Michael’s Hospital Parkade in Toronto. The woman who had spoken walked up to the elevator and hit the button. The door opened. She peered in and shot the rest of us a look that made me think, “Good grief! You would think there was poop in there!”“There is poop in there,” she said.“Poop” was all we needed to hear to forget we were total strangers, step closer to each other, and head for the stairwell in light infantry platoon formation.The stairwell was a field of human poop mines. However, unlike the elevator’s promise to pin us next to it for the two-level descent to the parking, the stairwell allowed us to scurry past it, even providing a diversion in the form of thousands of empty alcohol swab packets plastered to the cement.Finally, down the stairs and as breathless as if we had just ascended to the roof, we swapped a few shaky grins before parting with the only farewell a Canadian knows, even after three harrowing minutes passed with strangers never to be seen again.“See you later!” (And our Prime Minister says we have no identity. Take off, eh?!)If you live in a major city in Canada, maybe you have observed, as I have, that above ground is no better. I have discovered that sauntering into Dundas Square or the adjoining shops at Eaton Centre promises the cheerful prospect of being confronted with someone stooped over to hold up his pants and stick a needle into his leg, masked protestors screaming at shoppers to obliterate Israel, or, as I witnessed in broad daylight on a Saturday, while Brock and I steered through throngs of people on our way to Toronto’s Christmas Village, a man proudly pointing his male appendage at the street while grinning at us all and urinating.I remember when an encounter with the dark and seedy in Dundas Square involved me chewing Hubble Bubble while a fast-talking street hustler tried to sell me “One hundred percent real!” Christian Dior sunglasses from a tea towel he had laid on the sidewalk. With a fifteen-year-old’s allowance in my pocket, it was the glasses or a Duran Duran record from Sam The Record Man. A tough decision but there was no time for humming and hawing back then. One glimpse of a cop car and the towel, the sunglasses, and the hustler would be gone. Alas, the days of a police officer encouraging and, where necessary, enforcing a minimum standard of behaviour appear to be gone.If all of this was not enough to convince me that we have let the neighbourhood go, I can always arrive for my volunteer shift at the Mission and count how many more families are in line that week for our free Food Market.If a new neighbour pokes his head over the fence, notices the poop in there, and barks at us to clean it up, we may bristle at his approach. Some might label him an ogre, grab the flaming torches, and call for his head on a platter. However, it might be better if we take a good look around to see if there is any truth to his complaint. We could also ask how that truth might be hurting people we do not see during our forty-five minutes of showgirl kicks and jumping jacks in the deep end at Aquafit.If that inspires us to clean the yard, just so we can better enjoy it, how could that not be a good thing?Like, seriously?Author’s note: In the above article, I refer to the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto as Dundas Square. This despite Toronto City Council’s 2023 decision to spend $2M changing the name to Sankofa Square, a name from Ghana, a country that is not Canada. After an unscientific and uncontrolled survey of random friends near Toronto elicited reactions akin to, “Sanwhat the Square??”, the author decided to choose the name still used by most people today and the one that honours the memory of Henry Dundas, a Christian Scot who, in the 1790’s, led the legal team that freed an escaped slave, convinced Scotland’s highest court to declare that slavery was illegal, and worked with William Wilberforce, another Christian politician from England, to craft the plan that led to Upper Canada becoming the first territory of the British Empire to abolish slavery and the slave trade. This is a story to make Canadians proud. God bless Henry Dundas. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

This past Friday, I went to AquaFit wearing a pair of gold earrings my mom had given me. Purchased fifty years ago from a jeweller in Ottawa, the earrings are small gold balls cut in a lace-like pattern. They had been a favourite of my mom’s until she finally admitted she never wore them and gave them to me.Now, they sat in my earlobes as I entered the packed YMCA pool, paddled my way to the deep end, and spent forty-five minutes trying to execute jumping jacks, a motion similar to cross-country skiing, high knee raises, and showgirl kicks without sinking like a stone to the pool bottom.After class, I waited with a throng of ladies for a shower, rinsed off quickly when one came free, towelled off, and made the brisk ten-minute walk home for a proper shower before starting work. It was after the second shower and while rubbing my head with a towel that I looked in the mirror and discovered one of the earrings was gone.I searched my bathroom. Nothing. I retraced my steps through the house. Nothing. I retraced my steps back to the YMCA, stooping to search the grass. Nothing. I talked to a lady at the YMCA services desk. She asked the morning crew to search the change room and showers. Nothing.“We can wait for the pool filter basket to fill later today and take another look,” the lady said to me. Moved by my look of dismay, she added, “Pray to Saint Anthony.”I am a new soon-to-be Roman Catholic. So new that after being recommended to my church’s Adoration Chapel to sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament and receive Jesus’ answers to the questions that plagued me, I sat there for half an hour thinking the Chapel was dark and cold, wondering where the Blessed Sacrament was exactly, and hearing nothing but my mild tinnitus. I tried again the following week spending another half hour in the dark, cold room and coming up empty. Still, I was determined.On my third visit, I was kneeling in prayer but thinking that I was just not getting the whole Adoration Chapel thing when another parishioner came in. She glanced at me before walking to a wooden box at the front. Grabbing handles in the center of the box, she opened two doors. Behold, the Blessed Sacrament! Perched in a monstrance and set aglow with brilliant yellow light that filled the room. Now I understood! Now I could feel Jesus’ presence! And maybe hear his exasperated gasp, “Finally! I have been trying to tell her, but the doors were closed!”All of that to say I did not know to which Saint Anthony I should be praying for the safe return of my earring, and so I turned to Google. Saint Anthony of Padua, dedicated to preaching, died in 1231 and canonized only eleven months later. “He is invoked in finding all lost things and by women seeking husbands,” says my illustrated Book of Saints. Sounded legit so I Googled a prayer.Now one thing I have learned on my journey back to Christ is that praying is not making wishes. God is no genie. He may in His wisdom decide that what you are asking for is not good for His plan or His plan for you. Battling the “wish” that my earring be found, I humbly added, “And, Saint Anthony, if God does not wish me to find the earring, I accept His will and ask that He let me find something that will be better for my soul.”God seemed to be taking me at my word when I found a misplaced silver bracelet the next morning. He put emphasis on the point when a gold ring I had been missing for days turned up that afternoon. And to be sure that I understood the I-am-not-your-genie-and-I-do-not-grant-wishes state of things, He let me drop my glasses so I could find a lost pair of gloves in the crease between my car’s driver’s seat and door the following night.Now I know what you are thinking. “Boy, Colleen sure loses a lot of stuff.”Yes, yes, but let us not get distracted because my story continues.“My gloves!” I cried to my son, Julian, who was standing on the sidewalk in lightly blowing snow, waiting to walk to the church that was a couple of blocks away. We were headed for an Advent Hymn night. Julian is sixteen years old, and I was considering it a miracle that he had agreed to come with me on a cold, snowy night to an old, unfamiliar church where scripture and a choir would take us through the story of the Old Testament prophets, the Angel of the Lord visiting Mary, and the promise Christ makes that he will come again.Julian and I sat in a pew next to a lone woman who looked up, smiled, and handed us a program.“Welcome,” she whispered. Then she added, “You’re new,” while laying her hand on my arm and then greeting Julian. “This will be an inspiring night.”The choir invited us to sing with them. Hearing the strong voice of the woman next to me, I sang with abandon, moved to tears by the unison of voices, the story of Christ’s coming, and the love that filled my heart as I thought of my own sons as babies. As the evening ended and we all stood to leave, the woman in the pew grabbed us both and gave Julian a penetrating look.“You get double points in Heaven for coming, Julian.”Julian smiled shyly and nodded.Then she leaned towards him, pressed her fingers into his arm and said, “If you pray for my son, Matthew, I will pray for you.”Julian nodded again. “I will pray for Matthew.”Monday morning, I woke early and fired up the prayer app on my phone for my daily reflection on the Gospel with Bible scholar, Jeff Cavins. Monday’s topic? Miracles and God-incidences! A Roman centurion goes to Jesus and asks that he heal his servant who is in the centurion’s home, paralyzed with sickness. Jesus says, “Sure, I’ll be right over,” but the centurion protests that he is not worthy to have the Lord enter under his roof.“Only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.”Jesus says it is done. The centurion goes home to find the servant healed.“God can do anything,” Jeff Cavins intoned through my earbuds, “He can do miracles, and He can gift us with a God-incidence.” Not a coincidence. A God-incidence. Not a full-on miracle, but a moment that, “if we have eyes to see and ears to hear,” Jeff Cavins says, reminds us that we should pray for people because prayer works.I thought about finding the bracelet, the ring, and the gloves. Saint Anthony had petitioned for a decent God-incidence. How could I complain? I would remain grateful and pray the last little bit of “but I want my earring” out of me before bed. There had to be a Litany of Detachment and Acceptance somewhere in the Catholic prayer canon that would replace want of the earring with surrender to His will.Two hours later, I headed back to the YMCA for my Monday trip to the gym. The lady who had told me to pray to Saint Anthony was there, and I asked her if anything had turned up in the pool filter basket. She checked and placed an earring into the palm of my hand. My heart leapt and then fell when I saw that this was not my earring. Okay, Colleen, I thought to myself. Enough. The earring is lost. You must accept it.In the change room putting on my gym shoes, I was consumed with the thought that somewhere in the world my earring lay, lost to me but existing, nonetheless. I suddenly burst out loud, “It is in here somewhere!” Looking around to see if anyone was in there to hear me talking to myself and wondering where that had come from, I checked the floor of the change room for my earring. Eventually, I ended up in the shower area. One by one I checked the stalls, hesitating to pull aside two closed curtains but eventually doing so when I realized there was no one behind them. There, behind the second curtain, and laying in the narrow drainage moat, a foot from the drain, was my earring.I held the earring high as I strode excitedly to the services counter.“No way!” Pray-to-Saint-Anthony exclaimed, her eyes widening, when she saw my hand raised in triumph.I pointed to the sky. “You told me to pray to Saint Anthony! God is good!”“It’s a miracle!” she cried and then she told me that every night the cleaning staff hose down the change room and shower floors with disinfectant foam. Those floors had been washed three times since AquaFit on Friday.I walked home in the radiant yellow of God’s morning sunshine, marvelling at the power of prayer, remembering my morning Bible reflection, and giving what had just happened the proper name. A God-incidence.Arriving home, I came through the door to greet my cleaning lady, Charlotte, who was standing in the front hall.“You told me to keep an eye out for your earring,” Charlotte said. “Well, I found something. I was cleaning your shower and when I got to the corner, something popped up and landed in the palm of my hand. It was a gold backing.”“Substack that!” my friend, Nicole, urged me when I told her the story. And so, I sat down today, determined to write a faithful retelling of the God-incidence that had started with a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua on a Friday and ended with the return of what had been lost, my mom’s earring, on the following Monday.But while writing this piece, I have found the true purpose of my God-incidence. And like a glint of gold on a dull shower floor, the truth is dazzling.“Pray for people,” Jeff Cavins said, “because prayer works.”“If you pray for my son, Matthew, I will pray for you,” the woman in the pew had said to Julian.I remember that she had sat alone. I remember that she had looked at Julian with wonder, even when he appeared to doze off during a few of the hymns. (He swore he wasn’t sleeping. Listening with his eyes closed, he said). I remember the urgency in her voice when she asked him to pray for her son.I do not know Matthew. I do not know what cross he bears. I do not know if he is struggling in the world without eyes to see and ears to hear. I do know his mother has asked we pray for him and now I know that Saint Anthony of Padua and God cooked up a three-day boot camp to teach me and by association, Julian, that prayer works. And so, with steadfast faith that Jesus will come, in a manger two thousand years ago, on a cloud at some time in the future, into our hearts today, and into Matthew’s life when it is time to heal him, we will pray.“Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and your servant shall be healed.”This is the fastest I have written and recorded a story. My only explanation for finding my words so quickly is that God wanted the tale to be told. Happy Advent if you’re celebrating and my heartfelt prayers for a season of light and love to everyone! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

I used to think I would not like getting old because of the physical changes. More wrinkles around the eyes, less hair around the crown of my head, and more body parts than I care to count sagging in defeat to that eternal opponent, gravity. It turns out, I do not mind those changes as much as I thought I would. I have avoided Botox, found a hairdresser who can hide thinning spots, and willingly parted with those clothes that no longer mask gravity’s pull.Keith Richards once quipped, “Getting old is fascinating. The older you get, the older you want to get.” Well, Keith, I do not know if being unable to read a menu under anything less than shopping centre lighting qualifies, but I suppose one aspect of aging is fascinating. How busy I am.  Do I mean the type of busyness depicted on those old Freedom 55 brochures? The palm-tree-sandy-beach-and-yellow-golf-shirt variety of busy? Oh no. I have no time for those idle pursuits. In my older years, I am a different type of busy. A type of busy the London Life Insurance Company kept under wraps while peddling their wares.“Could you do this once a day?”My dental hygienist peered at me over the three instruments and two fingers she had managed to squeeze into my right cheek. She was shouting over the whir of the suction wand, and I was answering with, “Arrrgggwwwlll” and spraying her with spittle. She had just asked if I could add a lukewarm saltwater mouth rinse to my daily brushing and flossing routine. Time, she shouted, was taking its toll on my gums and a saltwater rinse would keep them in good health. Desperate to preserve the thread of oxygen reaching my nose, I quickly wobbled my head and gargled a yes.Finished, she raised my chair and wiped my chin. Just as I thought I was good to go, she showed me a small, round brush with plastic cover. “Proxy brush!” she explained, handing me a mirror and directing me to watch her technique of pushing the little brush into the spaces between my teeth and wiggling it around.“Twice a day, okay? Get all the plaque out. You have more plaque.”I nodded, thinking, Got it. Saltwater rinse. Two minutes with the proxy brush. No problem.“I want you doing this twice a day,” my dentist announced when he took over from the hygienist over a few minutes later. He poked a hard, toothpick-like tool into the same gaps between my teeth. “Push down on the gum, like this, and wiggle.” He smiled as he completed his three-minute demonstration. “Keeps the bone under the gum healthy, and it will only take a few minutes.”See? Busy. And this was on top of the eye care routine assigned to me by my optometrist the day before.“Forty seconds in the microwave and then rest it on your eyes for fifteen minutes twice a day,” my optometrist held an eye mask in one hand, the thing to be microwaved, and a short fat spray bottle in the other. Before I could answer about the eye mask, he sprayed my eyes with the bottle.“Twice per day,” he waved the bottle. “For the bacteria on your eyelids.”Bacteria on my eyelids?! I wanted to exclaim but before I could, he asked if I use saline drops. He received my negative reply with something that looked like dismay and promptly told me to use drops a couple of times per day.“Just to keep your eyes in good condition and healthy.” He paused, noting I was not smiling with him, and then offered, “The eye mask feels great. You can have a little nap!”Who has time for a nap, doc? I am busy!There is the ten-minute physiotherapy routine of hand and finger exercises prescribed to keep my arthritis at bay (twice per day), the arthritis cream to be applied to my hands and feet (twice per day), the vitamins, carefully batched and timed for effectiveness (three times per day), the neck and shoulder stretches to counteract the effects of sitting at a computer and writing (“several” times per day), the leg raises, squats, and hamstring stretches for runner’s knee (twice per day), and the thyroid replacement pill to keep all of this alive (once per day). For kicks I added a miracle drug my sister swore would start new hair growth around the crown of my head.“Two a day,” she said into the phone, slowly to show how serious she was. “Trust me. It works.”Of course, I must do all this around my prayer schedule which, if I follow a good Catholic regimen of soul healing and redemption involves three Our Fathers (three minutes each), one Daily Rosary (twenty-one minutes), three Liturgy of the Hours (nine minutes each) and, for good measure, one Litany of Humility (seven minutes).“Time to stop praying for humility,” I grumbled one afternoon while trying to walk from a client office to the train station. I had convinced myself that my feet were not that arthritic, and I could survive one day in my pointy-toe high-heeled shoes. Now with the workday at an end, I was standing on the concrete, feeling my right foot go numb, and wondering how long it would take to hobble the remaining two blocks once the walk sign signalled that I could start moving again (answer: longer than would allow me to catch my train).That night, after cleaning my teeth, massaging my gums, and praying to my God, I slipped on my carpal-tunnel wrist guards, jammed foam plugs into my ears, and balanced my CPAP mask and hose on my forehead so I could turn to Brock and wish him a good night. It suddenly struck me that he is not as busy as I. Sure, he takes medication twice a day, but the man can get out of bed and walk normally without applying arthritis cream to his feet twice a day. I contemplated the fact that I had spent twenty years busily pursuing and worshipping the god of fitness and Brock had not. Brock can walk in the morning. I am Frankenstein’s monster.What might be most fascinating about aging is that the ways to age well are as varied as the people who age. The man who found aging fascinating, Keith Richards, survived drugs, drinking, heavy smoking, no exercise, and eating all the wrong foods. He is still alive and, according to himself, thriving. Now, I have not seen the man walk lately, but I did read that he fell out of a tree when he was older than I am now and my first thought was, “Wow. He can climb a tree?”Lately, I have realized the truth of my increasing “busyness”. The reasons I am busy are the reasons I am slowing down. And this is a good thing. It was while hiking with Brock that this truth hit home.We had parked the car and were making our way down a steep dirt trail that led past a waterfall and along a rushing creek. The fall day was perfect. The leaves had just started to turn, the air was cool, and the sun glittered through the trees. My right foot complained as my boot pinched on newly swollen joints, so I took the trail slowly.After a few minutes, we stopped briefly to enjoy the sound of the water gushing over the rocks, and I realized something. Not once had I said to him, “Let’s pick up the pace!” Or called, “Can we go faster?” Not once had I worried about making a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Not once had I thought that we should be hiking two, three or four hours for it to count as exercise. I had hiked next to him, chatted away, watched the rocks and tree roots, and taken care with my steps. After half an hour, I winced at a sharper pinch on the outside of my boot and asked him if he was okay with turning back.Brock, the man who has followed me on a hiking trail for four hours because it made me happy, smiled and said, as he usually does when I ask if he wants to do something, “Sure.”Okay, I thought, maybe the Litany of Humility can stay in the program.Even the humility that comes from realizing your hair is thinning, your gums are receding, your joints are swelling, and your eyes are drying out in their sockets. It is okay to be knocked off the perch of fast-moving pride and slow down a little.Okay, God in heaven, bring it on. Let me grow old and accept my twice-a-day, three-times-a-day, and fifteen-minutes-a-day busyness that really means I will not move as fast as I used to. Maybe I can make one request. Teach me to savour the things I will slow down for and, most of all, to always find them fascinating.The author ignoring her arthritis and hiding her thinning spots while hiking with Brock. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Is it just me or is art weird these days? Now, I am no sculptor or painter. As any Like, Seriously subscriber who has read “’That doesn’t make any sense’ and other truths about Paint Nite” will know, I will not win any art competitions. But while I may not be an accomplished creator, I am an experienced viewer. Growing up in the 1970’s, long before I made it to Europe to marvel at the Mona Lisa, David, and the Sistine Chapel, I had parents who occasionally packed me into a car of chain-smoking adults for an outing to an art gallery or art-filled heritage site like Casa Loma. I also attended grade-school art classes where we were shown DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Renoir before being handed a brush and told to paint a bowl with fruit in it. I spent enough time tacking my unrecognizable blobs of colour next to Rembrandts painted by pre-teen phenoms to know the difference between God-given talent and rudderless ineptitude.If I needed more childhood lessons on what constituted fine art, I had my Nana to teach me. A five-foot-one French Canadian woman who liked to smoke and laugh, my Nana was a gifted painter with a love for the Old Masters. She painted exquisite oil copies like she was rolling cigarettes, producing enough knock-off masterpieces to allow four children and several grandchildren to turn their living rooms into Louvres salons. On a trip to Ottawa’s newly renovated National Art Gallery in the 1980’s, my Nana even taught me the art of critique.“What IS this?!” my Nana shrieked as we made our way through Contemporary Art. She marched across a salon, stopped in the middle, and surveyed the room in disgust. Suddenly, a security guard was at her side, lightly touching her elbow.“I am sorry, Ma’am,” he said gently. “I have to ask you to step off the art.”My Nana looked down. She had unknowingly marched off the gallery’s polished wood floor and onto a large, grey square of thin, bumpy stone. She gave the stone an incredulous look while thrusting her hands towards it. The security guard could only cringe while she shrieked, “This is ART?!”Last month, a day in Montreal gave me the opportunity to use my limited art education. I spent an afternoon visiting that city’s downtown Basilica-Cathedrals, Notre Dame, St. Patrick’s, and Marie-Reine-du-Monde. Here were structures designed to do exactly what they did to me. Inspire a gasp at their beauty and a desire to sit quietly in a pew, look up, and contemplate the magnificence of God. In Marie-Reine-du-Monde, while visitors wandered the aisles in quiet admiration, I watched an elderly gentleman perched on a ladder polishing a statue with a small cloth and wondered how long it would take him to finish his work. Seventy-five feet above was the cathedral’s cupola, a soaring embrace of heavenly rest and consolation.I sat for a while, feeling humbled and thinking that if men can create this cathedral, there is hope for us yet. Exiting, I stood on the steps and smiled, my soul nourished.And then bubble-gum pink smacked me in the face.Across the street, a group of enormous, bubble-gum pink blobs were scattered along half a block of city sidewalk. As I got closer, I saw that the blobs were positioned to make a massive, sexless figure seem to protrude from the concrete. A bald pink ball at one end pointed a round nose towards the sky. Two fat columns on either side of the head were outstretched arms, topped with massive hands, palms upward and stubby fingers splayed. Some distance away and giving the illusion that the rest of the body was hidden beneath the sidewalk, two short, pink stumps propped up bulbous feet with short, fat toes. People circled the blobs, snapping selfies and posing for pictures next to feet, arms, and the bald head.Standing under an arm that loomed a few feet above my head and feeling like I had unknowingly stepped off reality’s polished wood floor of sanity, I wondered, What IS this?? A large pink sign with white lettering flanked the space between the arms and legs. I headed for it, trying to ignore which part of the figure’s anatomy the composition suggested I was walking over, and hazarded a guess at what a giant rotund figure in bubble-gum pink was doing on the city sidewalk.Maybe this is an elementary school project! I thought. Or a new kind of urban jungle gym for six-year-olds!“Monsieur Rose,” declared the sign (Mister Pink in English), “celebrates beauty in simplicity and wonderment in the everyday. With his touching and funny creations, the artist turns downtown Montreal into his playground.”Aha! I thought, triumphant. Playground! Then I looked around. Where are the kids then? Why aren’t they clambering up Mister Pink’s nose to slide down his forehead? Why aren’t they jumping on the soles of Mister Pink’s feet and swinging from Mister Pink’s fingertips?A second sign answered those questions. “This artwork is solely contemplative. It is strictly forbidden to climb or swing from the Monsieur Rose sculpture.”Not a playground? Contemplative??I looked at Mister Pink and concentrated. I tried to find something to contemplate in his fat little nose, some way to connect his bald head to a universal truth, some piece of illumination hiding between his pink toes or fingers. Maybe I need more grade-school art classes, but I came up empty. What I did contemplate was how many children had been dragged away from Mister Pink that day.“But I want to climb the bubble gum man!!”“I know, honey, but you can’t. He is art.”In the end, I gave Mister Pink an incredulous look and thrust my hands at him. The people taking selfies and posing next to his feet could only cringe as I shrieked, “This is ART?!”Some will say I do not understand contemporary art because I do not know enough about it. Trips to Casa Loma and watching security drag my Nana off a piece of grey stone in the National Art Gallery do not a formal art education make. This is true. However, does a person need an education to know art when they see it? Is it not the artist’s pursuit to ensure they do not? During two trips to the Sistine Chapel, I did not observe anyone walking in and shrieking, “This is ART?!” Nor did anyone need an art education to gasp, look up, and recognize the magnificence above them.I Googled Mister Pink’s creator and found a snapshot of his other work, a series of distorted, pink faces, one with snot running out of its nose, one with its face upside down, and one with heart-shaped eyes perched over bared, sharpened teeth. The last time I saw art like this, my teacher called the kid’s parents and asked them to come in. Reading about the work, I stumbled on another possible problem lurking under Mister Pink. “For the artist, the goal is to make what might be difficult to bear more pleasant by transforming the unpleasant into something cute.”You and I know, difficult to bear is not pleasant. Unpleasant is never cute. However, both are inherent to living. Both are necessary for strength. And because both are universal truths, they can, if depicted as truths, move a soul to love and compassion. Perhaps if an artist distorts the truth, they distort the art, and cute becomes ugly.The builders of Montreal’s downtown cathedrals and the classic sculptors and painters who filled them were charged with communicating the glory of God to people who could not attend art school. They were tasked with inspiring contemplation in people who could not read. They were commissioned to strengthen faith in people who would suffer, and that was all people. In the end, their work spoke the truth without any words at all and that meant anyone who saw their work, regardless of education, could transcend their struggles and gape in shared wonder.When a friend and I stumbled on the Burlington, Ontario Sculpture Trail near Lake Ontario last year, we knew nothing about it but decided to follow it. After twenty minutes of becoming more and more disheartened at nondescript shapes and freakish distortions, we stopped in front of an ambiguous figure leaning off its display block like a broken toy, spiky metal sticking straight up from a trapezoid-shaped head that leered at us with lime-green sparkle eyes and sneered at us with a blood red mouth.We contemplated it.“Yikes,” my friend said gently. She touched my elbow. “Let’s go back to the lake.”Unlike the National Art Gallery security guard, she did not have to drag me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

In 1985, I had an English teacher named Nick DiMarco. Mr. DiMarco rarely spoke, spoke quietly when he did, and accompanied moments of silence and speech with a look of anguished torment. Now that I am a mature adult who has completed more than one workplace personality assessment, I recognize Mr. DiMarco was an introvert whose quirks likely inspired fond admiration in people his age. But in 1985, I was a teenager assessing personalities with the guidance of Weird Al Yankovic, Saturday Night Live, and Mad Magazine. In my circle of friends, Mr. DiMarco’s quirks inspired jokes and snorts of laughter.It was while flipping through a magazine and stumbling on a photo of a man who looked like Mr. DiMarco, tormented expression and all, that I decided to write a graphic short story about my English teacher. Inspired in the unhindered way of adolescence, I punctuated my prose with hand drawings and magazine cut outs that I glued to the page. A few hours later, I admired my work, eight sheets of satire thick with glue that I stapled together, titled The Nick DiMarco Story, and decided was clever enough to take to school the next day. The Nick DiMarco Story made its way into English class where the hero himself sat at his desk at the front. During a quiet moment when we were supposed to be writing a haiku and Mr. DiMarco seemed safely distracted by a book, my classmates started passing around The Nick DiMarco Story. Two weeks earlier, this same group of students had successfully passed a twelve inch pizza and two-litre bottle of Coca Cola around a seventy-five minute French class under the nose of hard-of-seeing Madame Sirois. Eight pages of foolscap was nothing. However, Nick DiMarco was not Madame Sirois.“Ha!” Derek Dupont guffawed as he finished the tale and reached across the aisle to pass it to Barb Wirvin in the desk beside him. Mr. DiMarco looked up from his book. His anguished gaze landed on Derek’s outstretched arm. Derek froze.“Bring it here, Derek,” Mr. DiMarco said mildly.My stomach sank. As he walked past my desk, Derek shot me a pitying look. He lay the pages on Mr. DiMarco’s desk before scurrying back to his own. I watched fearfully as the subject of my unfiltered humour put his book down, picked up The Nick DiMarco Story, and started reading.Any hope of writing a haiku was obliterated by panic. Staring at the blank page on my desk, I recalled what I had written and groaned a little when I remembered the ending. “Stay tuned for the next adventure when Nick DiMarco goes grocery shopping, wonders why a carrot is called a carrot, and is stuck in Produce for days!”When the bell rang, and everyone rushed for the door, Mr. DiMarco waved me to his desk. Looking up at me from his chair, he held the pages beyond my reach. I swallowed, waiting for the verbal execution.“This is good,” said Mr. DiMarco.Wait, what? I stared at him, not believing what I had heard.“This,” he shook the pages for emphasis, “is a great piece of satire. Funny observations and visuals.”He then thrust the story towards me, letting me grasp a corner of the pages.“Next time,” he said before releasing it to my grip, “please share your extracurricular writing outside of class or ask for permission to share it in the class.”Then, Mr. DiMarco did something I had not seen him do before. He smiled.“Yes, sir,” I answered quietly, my cheeks burning with embarrassment.Just as I started to think it would be safe to smile with him, his smile disappeared. He let go of the pages and dismissed me with, “That is all, Colleen.”I never did write the next instalment of The Nick DiMarco Story. It was hard to satirize a man who could evaluate a joke made at his expense with objective curiosity. Clearly, Mr. DiMarco’s quiet torment was a sign of great character. I chose to retire the glue stick, point my pen at other topics, and avoid high school detention.Oh, to be back in the days of mere high school detention!In 2024, I live in a Canada where an online version of The Nick DiMarco Story could get me fines, house arrest, or jail. The Online Harms Bill is a piece of legislation peddled by our government as protecting kids from online exploitation. However, its clauses and provisions seem more bent on jailing ordinary Canadians for saying anything online that our government decides is “harmful.” What constitutes harm? It does not appear that the Bill knows. How do you prove harm? Not sure, but oh here is some direction. If a person feels there is harm. What could go wrong?As a special treat for the financially strapped, the Bill sets up monetary rewards for anonymous “tips.” A ‘get-paid-to-snitch’ scheme we can tap into whenever we need a little grocery or gas money. Need a few dollars to fill the pantry for the in-law’s visit next week? Go find that tongue-in-cheek Facebook post from your neighbour and, presto! Prime rib and caviar!“Orwellian,” declares Margaret Atwood.“Poison,” warns Jordan Peterson.“Unacceptable,” concludes the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.And from everyday Canadians on X,“Desperate,” cries dwiddlydo.“See you in prison,” promises AEhronNulet.Of course, the Bill might not be as “poisonous,” “unacceptable,” or “Orwellian” as it sounds. Perhaps the Digital Safety Committee, the group of five to six individuals the Bill decrees shall police us all, would never have time to scrutinize the online musings of regular Canadians. On the other hand, it is possible five people able to jail anyone who criticizes them might lose restraint and start wielding power like a fourteenth century monarch drunk on mead.In fact, in January 2011, a similar-sized committee at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council decided to act on a complaint from a single resident of St. John’s Newfoundland and ban Dire Straits’, Money for Nothing, from Canadian airwaves. Fewer people than can fit around my dining room table deprived thirty-seven million people of four minutes and six seconds of harmless radio joy or, if they were as offended as the lady in St John’s was, the burden of changing the station.Yes, considering historical precedent in this country, many of us have good reason to believe we will see AEhronNulet in prison.I imagine the entire Nick DiMarco Story affair would be different in future Canada with online harms and paid snitches. First, I suspect the contraband pizza and Coca Cola being passed around would be okay. It might even be encouraged, being a whim-satiating distraction from the nuisance of learning. Sure, an old dinosaur like Madame Sirois might tell students to save the food for lunchtime, but one yowling protest of colonialist pizza-phobia (“Ways of eating!”) would put an end to that. The teacher would probably slump into a bean bag, grab a slice, and start a movie.Eight pages of sharp wit, however. That would be a different story.Before English class had even begun, I imagine one or two of these future classmates would have read The Nick DiMarco story on Substack, immediately recognized the opportunity for easy pizza money, and sharpened their cry-victim pitchforks. While I wrote a haiku about the sunrise, they would use the Digital Safety App to tip off the Committee and watch rewards appear in their bank accounts. In seconds, artificial intelligence would take over and authorities would be notified.Derek Dupont would not be in the classroom that day. With a sense of humour that made girls laugh and could have won him a full-time spot on Saturday Night Live in 1985, Derek would have inspired jealousy in a shyer and more awkward boy in future ‘no-harm-allowed-but-don’t-ask-us-what-harm-is’ Canada. The boy would only need to say he suspected Derek would post something harmful to Snapchat and Derek would be in an ankle monitor, under house arrest, and out of the running for a date to the prom.Come to think of it, Barb Wirvin would not be in class either. Ever, I imagine. “What an idiot!” Barb was known to exclaim loudly when confronted with people who acted like idiots. Transplant that to Facebook, and there would surely be a teacher claiming emotional trauma and pleading with the Committee to stop being soft with five thousand dollar fines and slap Barb with that life imprisonment The Online Harms Bill promises.In fact, ankle monitors would become common, a sign that some students were true rebels, to be feared and revered. Instead of huddling in the parking lot to smoke, the ankle monitor kids would lurch through the quad, swinging one leg awkwardly, careful not to breach the school’s perimeter and the confines of their imprisonment, but coming just close enough to prove their spirits were not completely broken.Before I could put the finishing touches on the sunrise haiku, the principal would poke her head into our English classroom and ask Mr. DiMarco if she could “borrow Colleen for a moment.”“Bring your things, dear,” she would say sweetly with an expression like cold stone.Students already giggling at the story would screw up their faces, bite their tongues, and swallow their laughter, terrified of who might be firing up their smartphone to report the giggling and a future harm.I would have little choice but to pack up my books and head for the door to face my fate. Hearing someone behind me, I would turn and see Mr. DiMarco holding his phone in one hand and swinging his bag over his shoulder with the other.“This,” he would shake the phone for emphasis, “is a great piece of satire. I shared it on Facebook.”Then, shooting his look of anguished torment at the Anti-Harm Police now crowding the classroom door, he would lurch past me, swinging one leg awkwardly.This is when I would feel a surge of hope, when I would realize that an Online Harms Bill was no match for the human spirit, that the darkness would never consume the light, and that no matter how hard they try, five people would never stop enough of the thirty-seven million to stamp out the human quest for truth.Because this is when I would look down and see Mr. DiMarco’s ankle monitor.The author and Nick DiMarco in 1985. They even look like mug shots. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Previously published on this Substack, this piece was a fun one to record. With spring springing and Pride flags just around the corner, it seemed a good time to revisit Canadians’ obsession with safety. Oh! To be in Greece!Three Greek ladies who probably won’t warn you about the consequences of rude or abusive behaviour, or try to dissuade you from driving the hairpin turns. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Keep scrolling if you prefer to read and enjoy an original illustration by Canmore artist, Caroline Marion. Note: the text below states that I do not snore loudly. After vehement disagreement with that statement by Canmore artist, Caroline Marion, who once shared a back country ranger’s cabin with me after a day of hiking, and my son, Julian, who has suffered many sleepless nights while on vacation and sharing a hotel room with me, I have edited the recorded version to omit the part where I say I do not snore loudly. The truth hurts, but it will also set you free.I am a Christian woman who makes every attempt to follow God’s commandments. I do not kill. I do not covet my neighbour’s house. I do not steal. Truth be told, there is not a lot to covet of my neighbour’s place. He also owns a 1960’s bungalow with drafty windows and a leaky basement. And in the spirit of confession, I should admit that in grade nine and on a dare, I stole a handful of black rubber Madonna-inspired bracelets from my local convenience store and, in a moment of mischief that could only be concocted by a group of bored and broke teenagers wandering around a department store, the hands off a ladies’ wear mannequin. All that aside, I am today a mostly mature woman with a desire to imitate Christ, repent when I do not, and love my fellow man as God loves me.Until I do not sleep.Like the other night at 2 am, when I found myself hovering over my boyfriend, Brock, a chronic snorer, who I had earlier banished to the basement bedroom. Now I stood by his bed, eyeing a pillow, and wondering just how bad eternal condemnation could be. Blissfully asleep, Brock was oblivious to the congested-walrus snorts he was catapulting at the floorboards and drywall to echo around the house. I had three options. Smother the man and go back to sleep. Wake the man, go back to sleep, and let him lay awake for the rest of the night. Or, as 1 Corinthians 13 teaches me to do, show the man charity by being patient and kind, and letting him sleep.“Can’t do it, 1 Corinthians,” I thought desperately, forgetting the serenity prayer, the surrender prayer, and perhaps most needed in that moment, the litany of humility. Too sleepy for smothering, I chose toddler-style option two, shaking Brock awake, hissing into his startled face, “Stop snoring!” and running back to my bed so I could fall asleep before he did.However much I would like to at times, I cannot blame Brock for my sleeping woes. My trouble with sleep started long before I met him. And even if I wanted to delude myself into thinking it had not and pin the blame on him, all hope of that was dashed two months ago at breakfast.“You stopped breathing last night,” Brock announced with concern. He glanced at his Apple watch, always on his wrist and visual evidence of the veracity of his next statement. “For eleven seconds.” He paused, looking at the watch. “Twice.”Some historians speculate that Napoleon Bonaparte had sleep apnea. “Yellow, obese, bloated, with his head too far down on his shoulders,” wrote novelist Paul de Kock of Napoleon in 1811, describing a few physical characteristics that can lead to what doctors call stop breathing events during sleep. I am not a French Emperor, yellow, obese, or generally bloated. Whether my head sits too far down on my shoulders is a question for other people to answer. However, in some ways, I am like Napoleon. It was also observed that he would fall asleep anywhere, anytime, and frequently in front of witnesses.“You can fall asleep anywhere,” Brock once commented. Our plane had reached its cruising altitude and I had just jolted awake at the fasten seatbelt sign turning off. I wiped drool from the corner of my mouth, groggy from the involuntary nap that for me always starts on the tarmac after the safety demonstration and finishes in the air with the seatbelt ding or, in moments of extreme somnolence, the clinking of the drinks cart. I once fell asleep during a particularly long business meeting. My colleague hovered a dry erase marker at the whiteboard and asked, “Is this really happening?” as she watched my eyes close and my head drop to my hands, already in position to be a temporary pillow on the boardroom table below.At least I am not Franklin Roosevelt, another excessively sleepy human who, historian, Robert Hugh Farrell tells us, “…blacked out halfway through signing his name to a letter, leaving a long scrawl.” No mention of where his head sat on his shoulders, but this sounds like a severe case. And while I do not want to start a who-has-less-sleep-apnea competition, I can at least get through a signature, Mr. President.A month after Brock’s alert about my stop breathing events, I was at a sleep clinic sitting in a straight back chair in pyjamas and woolly socks while a sleep study technician placed electrodes on my head, face, chest, back, arms, and legs.“To see if you kick your feet at night,” the technician explained as he snapped wires to the electrodes on my shins. I suddenly had a vision of my unconscious body frantically kicking sheets while my brain blared a need-to-pee siren hoping to wake me before I asphyxiated. It seemed like something from a horror film. I had not been nervous but now I was, thankful I would be monitored and hoping my technician was not one of the one-in-three Canadians who also suffers from sleep apnea, making him prone to nodding off while patients gasp and choke their way to the other side.The connection of fifty or so wires to my body complete, I awkwardly tucked myself under the stiff, cotton sheets and into a pose resembling that of a homicide victim. Once he had every wire connected to a machine next to the bed, the technician wrapped a plastic tube around my ears and pushed nasal prongs up my nose.“Okay,” he said, heading for the door and the light switch. “Have a good sleep!” I raised my eyebrows in response, pinned to the bed with wires and afraid to move anything for fear of upsetting an electrode. “Remember,” he added, turning off the light, and finally making clear the emergency protocol for a patient in distress. “Bang on the wall if you need to get up.”I lay for a moment feeling every bit like someone who has fallen and cannot get up. Then, as I am prone to do at the slightest indication that it might be possible and preferable to the circumstances that surround me when awake, I went the way of Franklin Roosevelt and passed out.Contrary to widespread belief, or perhaps just my belief, snoring does not equal sleep apnea. It is said that Winston Churchill was a “famous snorer.” Despite this, the man lived to 90, not great proof that he suffered with a condition that, if left untreated, can shave more than a decade off your life. Theodore Roosevelt’s snores were described as so “thunderous” that while recuperating in hospital one time, every patient in the wing was kept awake and, President or no President, filed complaints against him. (Mess with sleep and you mess with something deep in people.) One might chalk that up to sleep apnea. Some have tried. But other historians point out that Teddy Roosevelt rarely fell asleep before bedtime and, in a luxurious indulgence I would dream about if I ever slept long enough, was known to read at night, able to get through more than one page and never letting a book fall onto his face because he passed out mid-sentence. I am no sleep researcher, but I have book bruises and that does not sound like sleep apnea to me.It turns out I do not snore a lot or loudly, but I do stop breathing. Thirty-nine times an hour during shallow sleep and 70 times an hour during deep sleep. To put that into perspective, I went to Google and searched, “What happens 39 times an hour?” Google sent back two pages of websites about my and Napoleon’s severe obstructive sleep apnea. It appears no one does anything 39 times an hour, except blink. And, lucky souls, breathe.Next step is a CPAP machine and mask which I will strap to my head so it can force pressurized humidified air into my nasal passages and allow oxygen to nourish my body through the night. I can only imagine how I will feel. The energy! The stamina! The patience and kindness! 1 Corinthians 13, here I come.And so, in the spirit of truth, I must put the pillow away and declare Brock not guilty of keeping me awake. In fact, I will have him to thank when I at last enjoy a good night’s sleep. And I will thank him right before wrapping my head in rubbery plastic and stuffing my ears with foam earplugs. I will be Darth Vader, slumbering peacefully to the rhythm of my unobstructed breath. With Teddy Roosevelt beside me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Hello Like, Seriously? subscribers! I am holding you at bay while Caroline Marion completes another hilarious drawing for the next instalment. Here is another oldie but goodie. The tale of a birthday gift gone wrong (or did it go right?). Paint Nite. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

This story first appeared on Like, Seriously? back in November. Now, enjoy the antics of Dash the cat while you ride to the gym, the grocery store or, maybe, to the pet store! And yes, he really does drink out of the toilet bowl. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

Aug. 21, 2017, was still a sunny day when I pulled two cereal boxes out of my kitchen pantry, stuffed one plastic interior bag into the other, and cut a small rectangle out of the bottom of the now-empty box. A sudden idea had propelled me to ask Google, “how do I watch a solar eclipse with a cereal box?” Now I was tearing foil, grabbing scissors, and hunting for tape to build a pinhole projector while yelling down the stairs at my nine-year-old son, Julian, to get dressed so we could go and see the solar eclipse.Julian, who was fiercely opposed to changing out of pyjamas before noon in the summer, obeyed with uncharacteristic speed. It seemed watching a solar eclipse, scheduled to happen at 11:30 am and in less than half an hour, was a more inspiring proposition than X Box.I was following in the footsteps of Mrs. Votery, my formidable third-grade schoolteacher who had done the same when, in 1979, a total solar eclipse was partially visible over Ottawa, Ontario, Canada during school hours.“This is a rare event, students!” said Mrs. Votery. We were cutting our boxes and measuring our aluminum foil. Mrs. Votery tapped a wooden pointer at a diagram she had carefully drawn on the chalkboard.“In a short while, the moon (tap) will pass between the earth (tap) and the sun (tap) and the sky will darken.” She peered at us through her glasses, a slight smile playing on her lips before she furrowed her brow and boomed in a tone of terror and doom, “Do not look directly at the sun! Or you will go blind!!”Soon we were waiting at the school doors, cereal boxes in hands, peering out the windows at the dimming sky. My eyes were fixed on Mrs. Votery’s neat bun, straight back, and broad hips which was all I could see of her over the heads of my classmates. I remembered her command, “Do not look directly into the sun!” Our class had seen enough Helen Keller movies to know what blind meant. Panic gripped me. What if I lose control of my body? What if I look directly into the sun?!“Eyes in projectors, children!” Mrs. Votery commanded, silencing our twittering and my fears. She pushed the doors open and we stepped out into the schoolyard.Now on a hot summer day in 2017, I stood at my own front door and called to Julian, “It’s time!! Let’s go or we’ll miss the solar eclipse!”Julian ran up the stairs and soon we were on the sidewalk headed for the park that was a two-minute walk from the house. The air was still and the sky was starting to dull.As we raced along the sidewalk, I reminded Julian that in a few moments he could only watch the sky using the cereal box. No looking at the sun. A few people were in the park, perched on the small hill that faced the sun and overlooked the valley below. Julian asked breathlessly, “Are we going to make it, Mom?”Oh, the pride in that moment! I had created a thirst for learning in my child. I had built a celestial viewer with my bare hands. I had commandeered a nine-year-old into clean underwear before lunch in the summer! Stand aside, Mrs. Votery! Chalkboard, shmockboard! Who needs a pointer and a diagram? Not a passionate parent who can wield a pair of scissors while shouting astronomy lessons down the stairs! I was beyond such simple tools. And now, here was a boy who would tell his grandchildren about the day his mom showed him a solar eclipse.“Mom?”“Yes, Julian?”“Will we be late for the apocalypse?”On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will once again grace Ontario skies and this time several cities in Southern Ontario will sit on the path of totality, astronomy’s equivalent to front row and center. A position so rare that it could be 360 years before those cities sit there again. If the sky is clear, anyone who steps outside at 2 pm with the proper eyewear or reconfigured Shreddies box will see what the Canadian Space Agency is calling a “rare and spectacular celestial event.” An event that will peak with the total eclipse of the sun, perfectly visible and lasting up to three and a half minutes.Here comes to Ontario an event of such significance that when it occurred in May of 1919 it sent astronomer, Arthur Eddington, to a remote island off Africa and the path of totality so he could watch the stars around the eclipse. Doing so would make him the first person on Earth to directly observe Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.“REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE” celebrated a 1919 London Times headline. Eddington’s observations “were decisive in the verifying of the prediction of the famous physicist, Einstein.”A revolution in science! Are the Mrs. Voterys of 2024 smoothing their buns, googling NASA lesson plans, and gathering up cereal boxes to teach from the heavens? No. It seems when astronomers said solar eclipse, most Ontario school boards heard apocalypse and, citing “an abundance of caution” for children’s eyes and bus driver’s safety, rejigged the school calendar to turn April 8 into a Professional Activity Day and cancel classes.“Eclipse!” marvelled the Waterloo Region Record in 1979. “A spectacular light show in the sky.”“School boards across the province are bracing,” quakes the CBC in 2024. “A recipe for chaos.”To be fair, the Ontario school boards are not alone in their cautious view of things. The ancient Chinese, believing the eclipse was a giant dragon devouring the sun with its massive jaws, would bang gongs, shout, and shoot rockets and firecrackers to scare the beast away. In 431 B.C., the Athenians froze in terror when the sun disappeared from their sky just as the Syracusians were preparing to attack them. They called it a PA Day, cancelled fighting, and ran to hide. Sadly for them, the Syracusians were a little more Mrs. Votery, attacked anyway, and Athens was sacked.As Ontario’s school boards make like Athenians, I imagine Mrs. Votery turning her straight back and broad hips over in her grave. This was a woman who had cut her elementary-school teaching teeth on atomic attack dive-and-cover drills. If anyone had suggested she cancel class on the day of a three-minute solar eclipse because students might go blind, she would have raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips before politely informing that person that the strength of her lessons and authority with students rendered that outcome unlikely.Alas, it is not 1979. Ontario students must hope their parents have Syracusian courage and time off work to sit in the backyard and share in the once-in-a-lifetime marvel. Let us hope during the next total solar eclipse that is so clearly visible in our skies, in 360 years or so, there are a few more Mrs. Voterys to smooth their buns, tell us to stop our twittering, and lead us out to the schoolyard. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

A recent motion passed in the City of Toronto should reassure residents how seriously their Mayor and Council are taking the harsh realities of one in ten Torontonians visiting a food bank, more tents popping up in parks where children should be playing, and hopeful homebuyers watching inflation steal their dream and replace it with the second-highest rent in the country. A thoughtful plan to alleviate suffering and improve the city, you ask? Do not be silly. Of course, I am talking about the ban on tobogganing.Conflicted feelings may have gripped City employees, tobogganers among them no doubt, who drove to 45 of Toronto’s parks in early January to pound “No Tobogganing” signs into the ground; signs with just enough space to also lecture would-be sledders about the dangers of, “trees, stumps, rocks, rivers, or roads.”“We used to fly over a concrete wall, land in the school parking lot, and try to bail before we hit the traffic on Kennedy Road,” a friend of mine told me over a Friday night beer. I had just regaled the table with my own tobogganing tale, recounting the time in 1973 when my mother and uncle took us kids to a hill near my Nana’s house in west Toronto.Our solitary wooden sled held one adult and two children. That meant three, three- and four-year old youngsters waiting at the top in the only way we knew how: whining, crying, and, in my cousin, John’s case, stuffing as much snow into our faces as possible before Uncle Ernie or Aunt Gail told him to cut it out or they would give him something to cry about. Three runs in, watching my uncle sail down the hill with two satiated kids while she policed the impatient ones at the top, my mother contemplated the shin-length leather coat she was wearing. By the time my uncle returned, she had a plan.“Give my shoulders a push when I say,” she instructed my uncle and then lay on her back like a board, her feet pointed towards the bottom of the hill.“I think I can take three!” she said to us and patted her chest and stomach. “Hop on!!”The leather coat was an Olympic bobsled. The other children could only gape in awe as we sailed past their sleds like they were standing still. At the top of the hill, we had something else to argue about.“I want to ride on Aunt Gail!!”“NO! I want to ride on Aunt Gail!!!”Little did we know how lucky we were to be riding on Aunt Gail at a time in Toronto’s history when weekend tobogganing did not lead to fines, arrests, or worse.During The Great Toboggan Controversy of 1912, so-called by University of Toronto historian, Greg Howard Homel in his 1981 article on the subject, Protestant church groups and one Lord’s Day Association, pressured Toronto’s City Councillors to ban tobogganing on Sunday, not to save sledders’ bodies from physical harm but their souls from eternal damnation. This caused a furor among the thousands of people, many of them labourers, for whom Sunday was the only day to get outside and slide.“God put slides in Riverdale Park,” was one pro-toboggan cry. “Let us worship outside!”The debate became so heated that in Toronto’s daily press, news of the City’s Sunday tobogganing deliberations eclipsed death threats against Winston Churchill and hundreds perishing in a sunken ship off the coast of Scotland.“Look here, City Fathers!” wrote one indignant Torontonian to The Toronto World on January 19, 1912. “The average Toronto man is getting very tired of the attempts of certain busy-bodies to interfere with his personal liberty.”If the average Toronto man was “very tired” of “busy-bodies” in 1912, he would have gone ballistic today. In a city of three million people living in 294 square miles, those who want to toboggan on any day must now crowd one of 27 approved locations where the City Fathers and Mothers have found no tree, stump, rock, river, or road that might require the average Toronto man, woman, and child to use their own daring, wit, and caution.“Ridiculous,” proclaimed one east Toronto resident to the CBC, likely echoing the private thoughts of many Toronto City Councillors who also stow a crazy carpet in their garage. “If you’re going to go tobogganing, you know what you’re doing. You’re going down the hill on a piece of plastic.”Back in 1912, the Sunday ban was passed, and it remained in place until 1961. That means, if the tell-tale signs of tobogganing in the prohibited area behind the CBC interview are any indication, Torontonians could be dodging the authorities along with the trees until the year 2073.Riding on Aunt Gail lost its novelty before its feasibility as we got bigger. Ten years later, now in high school, two of my cousins and I were together at their woodland acreage north of Toronto. John, who would still stuff snow in your face if you did not keep an eye on him, looked out the window, saw huge flakes, and suggested we go tobogganing.As we trudged through the soft, deep snow, I wondered where we would launch the wooden sled. We were surrounded by thick groves of tall, skinny leafless trees.“Where is the toboggan run?” I asked.John’s sister, Carmen, stopped at a piece of yarn tied around one of the tree’s branches. She pointed at a narrow snake of packed snow that wound its way down a steep hill and through clusters of trees.“There!” she answered, grinning widely.That run would today send the City of Toronto into conniptions of worry about bruised elbows, bumped heads, and broken arms. And I admit. I was scared.However, like any teenager faced with a thrill that was not that likely to end in death, I ignored my fear and hopped on the back. I reasoned that if anyone was going to suffer from an out-of-control veer into one of those trees, it would be John because he had chosen the front.As John cackled and slowly pushed us off the edge, I wrapped my boots over Carmen’s thighs and gripped her coat for dear life, oblivious to a future where the same City Council that abandons its people to food banks, homeless tents, and soaring inflation would stop a group of kids from sliding down a hill in the snow.I had only two wishes that day. That John could steer and if he couldn’t, that his face would be stuffed with snow. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

If you are like me and you have finally taken down the Christmas lights and have a couple of back-to-school weeks under your belt, you might just now be thinking about New Year’s resolutions. If you are also like me, this thinking might happen while scrolling through social media posts when you should be at the gym, knowing you have a piece to write about New Year’s resolutions but choosing instead to eat the last three brownies, fold laundry, polish every inch of glass and stainless steel in the house, and, with a final procrastinating flourish, click “Start Again” on your Sudoku app, promising your conscience only one more game before you get to work. “It will get the mental juices flowing!”Do not fret. There is still time to put the brownie and Sudoku down and rescue 2024 with meaningful resolutions to get your daily living in tip top shape.For me, there is the usual go to the gym and spend less, the first of which is not a true resolution because I already go and the second of which means 12 months of rationalizing and moving goal posts so I can spend more. Like last year, when I hovered my cursor over “Add to Cart” on the complete works of Pierre Berton, a spontaneous purchasing decision inspired by a podcast about this award-winning chronicler of Canadian history. “Of course, you should buy the books,” my brain whispered. “Spend less? Less than whom? Lots of people spend more money than this.”As well as shallow and unachievable, those resolutions seem so same-old this year. And they are, says Forbes Health which reports that 2024’s most popular resolutions are improving fitness, finances, and mental health. This was proven true when my son tried to visit the gym last week at 4:30 in the afternoon.“Can you come pick me up?” he texted me twenty minutes after I had dropped him off and just as I had sunk into the couch for an hour of uninterrupted resolution crafting. “It’s crowded in here. All I’m doing is standing around waiting.”Ten minutes later, I saw why Julian had bailed. Crunch Gym looked like a rave with the lights turned on.“There must be more to resolutions than this!” I thought, deciding then and there to create resolutions that would set me apart from the madding bench-pressing crowd. This year, I would aim higher and adopt resolutions that change the world!First stop, Antiquity. Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians made yearly promises to the gods. Eureka! Inspiration would surely be found in the ancients. Paying debts and returning things they borrowed….wait, really? I might be missing something, but the Babylonians sound like modern-day suburbanites trying to pay off the house and stay on the right side of neighbours who may be called upon to babysit. Read ahead a few hundred years and it appears all this debt-paying and thing-returning got them no more than God’s anger, society’s collapse, and 3000 of their citizens impaled on the city’s walls by conquering Persians. Hmmm. Maybe the Babylonians are not the example I am looking for.Next stop, Modernity. As any brave journalist knows, measuring the pulse of the modern-day populace means getting up from the home-office chair, grabbing a coffee, sitting back down, and starting a new Google search. Oh sure, it used to mean grabbing a tape recorder and flying out the door for some man-on-the-street interviews, but with certain Canadian politicians resolving to call that assault, Google it is!The first offering in the search results was an episode of Inside the NBA where Charles Barkley told the audience his 2024 resolution was giving up Diet Coke. It sounded more like something you give up for Lent than a New Year’s resolution. Still, I briefly considered stealing this easy win as I have not tasted the stuff since Mr. Barkley was a 1980’s NBA Rookie. In the end, I had to admit it scored low on “aim higher and change the world” so I kept looking.The Pioneer Woman (a magazine I have never heard of until now; is it written for Quakers?) offered suggestions. With the chipper subtitle, “Change Your Habits, Change Your Life!”, their article, “New Year’s Resolutions to Inspire You” looked promising. “Practice Breathing Exercises” was at the top of the list which I immediately started to do when I realized the article contained 69 more suggestions each accompanied by a kitschy stock photo and lengthy description. I got through two more, “Start A Podcast,” and “Get A Standing Desk” when I sensed a familiar ploy of showing you what you lack and selling it to you. Declaring the article to be an advertisement in disguise, I threw in the towel. I own a standing desk. Occasionally it relieves my sciatica but world-changing it is not. That brief brush with 70 suggestions inspired new respect for the simplicity of Mr. Barkley’s single resolution. Now I needed one that would change the world. It was then I stumbled on a set of resolutions set down by English clergyman, John Wesley. An actual pioneer, Mr. Wesley founded the Methodist church in 1730. In his journal, written ten years later and published online by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, he writes that “this year” he will renew resolutions with a focus on, not things or activities that make him look or feel better, but rather “…my own behaviour.”This looked promising, something that aims higher than a stand-up desk.Mr. Wesley’s resolutions are noble. I especially liked number one, “To use absolute openness and unreserve with all I should converse with.” With the noose of what you can and cannot say bruising the necks of free speakers across the Western world, following Mr. Wesley’s 1740 resolution would be brave in 2024. And if that resolution was guided by Mr. Wesley’s stated wish to use that speech to contribute to a “valuable end” for others, it could change the world.However, as a hopeful humour writer, I can’t back Mr. Wesley’s number two, “To labor after continual seriousness, not willingly indulging myself in any the least levity of behaviour, or in laughter; no, not for a moment.” If any reader thinks this has already been achieved through reading this article, let me resoundingly endorse Pioneer Woman’s number 31, “Start A Diary.”I like Mr. Wesley’s focus on changing behaviour. Dedicated to doing something more than resisting a beverage and clearly caring for the people around him, I think he was on to something. As our New Year’s resolutions become more self-serving and self-centred, a bit too same-old-same-old, some 1740 sensibility might be what we need in 2024.For me, I am jumping ahead to 1979 and an award ceremony where the recipient shared Mr. Wesley’s focus on behaviour and whose resolution affected a change that is monumental and still universally doable. The resolution checks all the boxes. It is singular, aims high, and allows for brownies and Sudoku. It will not fight with my conscience, force me to wait for nautilus machines, or require me to buy anything. It will forgive me for failing and reward me for succeeding with the greatest change anyone could ask for, the change on a face when despair gives way to joy.When accepting her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa told us we could change the world and gave us the only resolution we need to get it done. She said, “We will begin to love. And if we love, naturally, we will try to do something. First in our own home, our next-door neighbour, in the country we live, in the whole world.”Happy 2024! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

In October, I was shocked to read that the Canadian Human Rights Commission had declared Christmas to be discriminatory. Like many thoughtful consumers of the news today, I read the three-word headline, let my emotions run wild, and cursed the idiocy of “them” before moving to the next piece of click-bait. But now, a month into the Christmas season and having had some time to reflect on Christmases past, I realize I might have some grievances to file about Christmas. Perhaps the commission will take my call. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit colleenstewart.substack.com/subscribe