To Ease the Passing of Time

I’m a retired French teacher. I was born in the Gaspé Coast area, in the eastern part of the province of Québec, in Canada. I’ve been living in Ottawa for more than twenty years with sweetheart Maria who is from Vietnam and came to Canada as a refugee. We met in a Latin dance lesson. I wrote about Maria in an article called “Maria and the Butterfly.” We’re planning on getting married soon. But hey, why not? It’s never too late.

I taught French to federal government employees for forty years. I was a little bit reluctant to retire because I knew that I was going to miss to interaction that I had with my students and the mental activities involved in preparing my classes and producing teaching material. That’s why I started this blog a few months after I retired, to keep my mind busy. I knew that my physical activities like cross-country skiing, kayaking, dancing and biking would not be enough. I also have a blog in French but I decided to also write in English to give myself a challenge and to activate different regions of my brain, just like you work different muscle groups when you do weights.

At first, I was writing for fun, but after a while it became like a spiritual quest as I was making connections and reflecting on my life experiences, the important people that I had met, the meaningful books that I had read, songs that I had heard and movies that I had seen.  It was like putting together patches of material of different sizes and colors to make a quilt. I have to say that writing helped understand better where I came from and who I am today. That’s what I want to share with you in this blog.