Category: This BackLit Universe

When movie cameras had become cheap enough for families with modest means to own them, it was common to entertain guests by showing the latest home monies. On a family room screen we would watch our host striding out on the diving board, set at a daring two meters above…

Nothing is more important to you and me than the time which is our life. Yet we know almost nothing about time and seldom even talk about it. Space is easier for us to visualize, divide up, separate off, name and talk about. Most people can get excited about space…

At our summer place on Sechelt Inlet our firewood—and some of our building material—floats right up to our waterfront steps. A north wind with a super-high tide sometimes produces a passing parade of miscellaneous wooden relics of every size. Rejected logs, timbers from abandoned wharves and trees that have been…

The stage of a well-equipped theater has ways and means of removing curtain after curtain before the open stage is at last revealed to the audience. At the rear of the stage several backdrops can also be raised or lowered one after another as the play progresses. Each of them…

Did I succeed in convincing you that when things move, their movements are actually somewhat jumpy and jerky, much like a moving scene illuminated by stroboscopic flashes? You probably responded with thoughts to this effect: Well, maybe things do move discontinuously, but somewhere in every movement there’s got to be…

In the year that I was born, a girl baby was also born, but in a place a few hundred miles away. Throughout our childhoods those miles prevented me from having any contact with either her or her family. Not a word about my existence ever drifted through to her,…

Everything at our Sechelt place had been safely put away for the winter. It was a sunny afternoon in late fall. There was plenty of time to catch the next ferry, so I sat for a while on a big boulder down by the water. Leaving Fido Bay closed up…

I remember a night at Sechelt—one so quiet that if a dry leaf had dropped I think I would have heard it. When waves from a boat that passed by over in the channel swashed along our beach, it was as if someone’s boots were tramping and scuffling through the…

For years Kay and I used to go for an hour-long walk before breakfast, even when it was still dark. Those walks along Spanish Banks kept us in good physical condition, and sharing our concerns also kept our marriage strong. Once at a conference over on the eastern shore of…