Upon reading my last post, about my father, after I had posted it, I realize that it is an even rougher first draft than I had thought. It does altogether too much telling and not enough showing. It needs a serious rewrite, but I won’t post the rewrite. Everything I post here will need to be revised before publication and there is no use boring you by posting multiple revisions of every chapter.

Jerry Jenkins describes himself as a “pantser”, one who writes by the seat of his pants without having a clear idea in mind of where a particular story is going to take him until he is finished. That is what I am most comfortable with, but I think a memoir needs a rough outline to know what episodes in my life are worth including, and in what order. I will get back to posting further chapters of my memoir in a few days.

– When did the pronunciation of schism change? My wife and I say shizm. I have three current dictionaries of Canadian English (Oxford, Collins and Nelson-Gage) and they all say skizm. How long has that been going on? The Brits say sizm. In French it is shizm, maybe that’s where we got it. My impression is that all Canadians used to pronounce it that way, is my memory playing tricks on me?

– There is a scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends find a chasm barring their way. The Cowardly Lion is afraid to try jumping over it. One of the group suggests he go back and take a run at it. “But that’s not the way a cat jumps,” he responds. Indeed it isn’t. Cats have powerful muscles in their back legs and usually just crouch and leap. Our Pookie doesn’t even crouch. He is the smallest of our cats, with legs that are a little longer than most cats. He walks up to our bed , 66 cm / 26 inches high, slightly flexes his legs and he is on top of the bed. It looks like he just floats up without much effort.

– We always thought the mounds of fine rich soil in gardens, lawns, fields and pastures were the work of moles. Some folks told us there are no moles in Saskatchewan and we didn’t believe them. What else would do that? Yesterday there was an unfamiliar rodent lying dead beside our front walk, courtesy of one of our cats. It took some searching, but we discovered it is a Northern Pocket Gopher, and that they make exactly the kind of mounds we are seeing and are hardly ever seen above ground. Another lesson courtesy of our cats. There must be a whole city of these critters beneath our feet.