The young fellow above is about to become a new Dad. And I suspect that means that I will soon become a Grand Pa.

Shocking to think of it. One the one hand there is a huge fantastic WOW!! Congrats!! All my love to the 3 of you!! form of joyous response. There follows a period of reflection, a working back through memory. A reliving of the past.

I found a glove. A single red woollen glove that once fit Colin’s tiny hands. It showed up when I was investigating the contents of a drawer. It appeared only to vanish again. There was no sign of its opposite number. Then, tonight, as I was searching for childhood images of Cols, the glove, or perhaps its partner, once again surfaced, hidden deep inside an old shoe-box.

The above photograph was taken at the Slide Lake campsite during a four day hike in Frontenac Park. Colin was 13. He enjoyed the hike but did not like the mosquitoes. I have a great many images from this trip plus photographs from Halifax. None of them are properly organized. All are still in the original format. It is strange now to think of “photographs” as being discrete physical entities, small square packages of celluloid and cardboard, or little rectangles of stiff paper hidden in an old shoe-box. Twenty one years after the above image was captured, a “Kodak moment” lacks meaning and all imagery is digital, a collection of invisible fugacious bits.

The anticipated birth date is in December. I have my fingers crossed the TAQ process will have been wound up by that time. I cannot believe it can go on much longer. There are still submissions to be made and I am working on those but the primary summary went in two weeks ago. There are days when I think it was well argued and represents a winning brief. And there are those days on which I acknowledge my weak understanding of the law and the great likelihood that I will lose as I am unable to afford the benefit of counsel.