My father had the habit of taking me to the woods from an early age. Six years old, to be precise. Back then, one didn’t have to drive for four hours to reach some form of legitimate wilderness. We had woods even in developing areas such as Ville Saint-Laurent and even more on Laval island in Montreal. I’m talking about woods you could hunt in. But, of course, now all these areas are covered in residential developments and shopping malls. On one occasion, my dad went the extr

When I was nine years old, and my folks had been divorced for a few years, my mother and I lived in an old apartment building on Gatineau Street in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal. The landlady at the time was a Miss Pompadour, a stout French woman from Marseilles, who occupied a huge apartment with a large stone terrace. Miss Pompadour had taken a shine to my mother and me, and we occasionally would go down to her place for pâtisseries and the like, which I enjoyed

My lifelong friend Marion has a wonderful son named Thomas, whom I’ve known all of his life. He’s now in his forties. Growing into a fine man, Tom has done quite well for himself using grit, his wits, and uncommon perseverance with his most current years devoted to skydiving as a respected instructor with over ten thousand jumps to his credit. His many years of bodybuilding have also given him an impressive physique. I’ve been absent from Tom for most of his life for various