canada

You know, Dorothy, you can__ let people bring you down so easily or you__l have your nose in the dirt for the rest of your life. From what I make of it, for every person with a good thought, there are about fifty who__ try to spoil it. We have to guard our good ideas, our happy thoughts, and fight for them. Because if we let those others snuff them out, well, we didn__ after all deserve them.

They think I__ not entirely __rounded in reality_, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,_ Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. __ou__e eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat__ nest like that?_ Wendy questioned in mock horror. __w hell no, if you get sent there, they__l make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they__l force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!___ear god, they__l have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!_ Mandy added, eyes wide. __It__l be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they__l never go through with sending me there. They always forget.

At her words, words of forgiveness from Rose, an honest and just woman, something broke inside of Wince. His tears began to flow. Age seemed to drift from his face like misty ghosts from a morning field. Katie lifted his chin and, holding back her own tears, looked into his eyes. "Thank you, Wince."Eve placed her free hand on his shoulder. "May we hold her now?"Wince nodded and gently released the baby into the waiting arms of her sisters."You did the right thing, Wince." Rose gave Wince a hug. "And you can help us bury her after Wilson and the Tar Ponds City Police see if they can find anybody to lay charges against after all this time.

Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. __his is a wicked blast,_ Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes.

Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone,_ her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. __here__e you been, what__e you been up to?___om, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend?_ Mandy asked.__o, what in the name of god are you on about?_ her mom sighed in exasperation.__emember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen?_ Mandy insisted.__o, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all,_ said her mom all too quickly.

7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn__ the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering __orms and dirt_ (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long.

There__ a land__oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back__and I will.

Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they__l go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness.

The best leaders are well-rounded, able to draw on whatever skills suits the particular situation at hand. They are determined, insightful, shrewd, and, most important, able to command the attention of the people around them.

Leadership is not a voice crying in the wilderness, aloof and apart. It requires an ability to command as well as to inspire, to learn in the process of collaboration and to build a team with a common purpose that can take action and execute the change they envision.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.

Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?_ Mandy questioned sadly. __ll these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers_ Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now_ I__e only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?___'est la vie,_ said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.

...my body has becomeanother countryand I feel like an unemployedillegal alienhow will I survivewhere I do not belongI belong with you

Canada is the place where maple syrup is its own food group.

You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.

I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.