James Howden

GUEST Post: “The Balcony” by Karl Mearns

Posted by :James Howden On : July 2, 2026

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Tags:Bluebirds, community, Covid-19, First Responders, gratitude, music hath charms, pandemic, pandemic memories

HAPPY DAY-AFTER-CANADA-DAY, everybody! As is all too typical, thunderstorms got in the way of the festivities here in the nation’s capital. What was NOT so usual was the intensity of the sequence of tempests, and we said quiet words of gratitude for our sump pump and good ol’ Bernie, its installer. Sunny today, so I’m counting this as part of Canada Week (along with our big footy match with Morocco, fingers crossed). And I am happy to report that, without much in the way of overthinking, a Canadian flag was again flying from our home pole on the big day. Only two years ago, I felt too much complication and conflict in doing so, as I wrote here.

In the spirit of looking back, and as promised a couple of days ago, here is my friend Karl’s memory of the days of pandemic shutdown, and people rallying to praise first responders and other essential workers.

[Do you remember? This 2-minute read will help!]

What Did We DO Back Then? A COVID-19 Story Remembered, and a Friendship Rejooved!

Posted by :James Howden On : June 30, 2026

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Category: At First Glance

Tags:basketball, Caledonia, coaching, Covid-19, First Responders, friendship, Hamilton, Karl Mearns, novels, Ontario, pandemic memories, Shakespeare, Silver Linings Playbook, Stratford Festival, writing

On Sunday morning, my bride and I got to talking about the pandemic. We were on the last day of a 10-day jaunt through Ontario, having spent time in the valley of the Grand (my family), the Haliburton Hills (mum-in-law’s home) and Stratford (William Shakespeare and his friends at the mighty Festival). I’d been talking, the day before, to two women of a certain vintage, one of whom had completed an M.F.A. in creative writing during COVID; the other had merely done her Ph.D. in Counselling Psychology. I asked my wife, “So what did *I* do during the pandemic?” She had been hard at work, sometimes harder than ever, in her work with the federal government. Besides the obvious — mass mortality and profound societal disruption — I was most vividly reminded that a) I couldn’t coach basketball, which was hard for a bit, but also that b) the shutdown was easier for me than for my employed and extraverted wife, and many others.

So surely I must have leaped on the golden chance to write like fury! (Well, there was a series of essays exploring some positive consequences we could see during the shutdown. Silver Linings Playbook was a film that wasn’t too old at that time, and I borrowed part of its title, as it had borrowed the idea from one of my mother’s favourite clichés.) But as it turned out, though I read a pile of fine books and rewatched Silver Linings Playbook, I hadn’t published on here as often as my memory briefly insisted, and I didn’t advance my book manuscript much, either. (Yes, that wonderful non-fiction memoir/essay on Men and Sport that the world longs for!)

He’s been “one of us” for more than 50 years, but was raised in the American Southeast. He was a multisport athlete who became, after a move to Ontario, a Physical Education teacher and avid basketball coach in Hamilton, Ontario. Leaving teaching to go into business in a nearby small town, he ran (and boy, did he hustle!) an antiques business in my hometown of Caledonia for years. We shared the better part of a decade there: coaching together in my alma mater high school and in our local basketball club; being dads to similar-aged kids; AND, what was most odd in that little town, we birthed a novel together. It’s his story, featuring a character known as “Kenneth Michaels”, and he convinced a local English teacher to edit it. (Yup, it was me.)

As somebody who taught writing with wild enthusiasm, but engaged in it with self-doubt and inconsistency, I was fascinated by Karl’s dogged approach and his rich trove of coming-of-age-in-Canada-and-America stories. Before too long, just before the turn of this century, he had KM published and sold a few copies. Karl stopped coaching basketball, our kids grew up and away, and then my family moved to Ottawa. Our connection has been rather sporadic since.

But Karl hasn’t stopped. We re-connected in a real way a day after a milestone birthday for him on June 1; he’s a generation older than me, and has referred to himself as “a fossil” since the 1990s, but the same restless energy remains. He began painting during COVID, a sort of ‘Grandpa Moses’. He claims to have re-written KM a dozen or more times, and has added further adventures of a young Kenneth Michaels in a sequel, The Robert E. Lee Monument. There’s *another* novel, a basketball thriller with international intrigue, called Dyad, and a novella, Camp Harmony, that deals with a Japanese-American family interned during World War II. All four are available on Kobo.

It’s a strange thing. Our recent conversations have caught us up on family matters, and I got to spend some quality time as well with his lovely wife, Betty — but the central and urgent theme has been writing. After having helped nurse KM into existence, I haven’t been a great friend to his writing. I’ve read parts of Dyad, but I had been only dimly aware of the other two. I have been snobbish about self-publishing, but it has to be admitted: the LitWit Score is Mearns 4, Howden 0.

So I have some work to do, in several areas. The first is this: at Karl’s insistence, I re-read a homely little memoir/story about living through the pandemic in Burlington, Ontario. It is touching and thoughtful, and I suddenly realized Hey, this would make for a good Guest Post on YoursTruly.com! M.P. Freeman, as some of you may recall, is another downhome buddy whose writing has made an appearance here and there in the past.

Trust Me, They’re Tired: Venezuela’s Pain, and the Emptiness of Cliché

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2026

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Category: At First Glance

Tags:cliche, earthquake relief, Ecclesiastes, John Ralston Saul, journalism, language, Martin Amis, NPR, public broadcasting, Romans, The War Against Cliche, thinking, truth, Unconscious Civilization, Venezuela, writing

[3-minute read]

Martin Amis wrote a fine book called The War Against Cliché. He’s mainly known as a novelist, though for too long he was just “Kingsley Amis’s bad-boy son”. That cliché, at least, had been retired decades before Sir Martin’s long and accomplished life ended in 2024. But why would a collection of his essays have been titled as an all-out attack against familiar language? I couldn’t carry his pen-case, but I’m with Amis: “To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché…”

Listen: we have the expression “it’s a cliché for a reason” for a reason. Sometimes an old saying is a useful reminder or a profound comfort; my mother never wearied of gently saying, in the face of misfortune or gloom, it’s always darkest before the dawn (Thomas Fuller, 1650) and all things work together for good (Paul’s epistle to the Romans 8:28, about a millennium and a half earlier). And yes, whoever first said, about some sport or another, that “it’s a game of inches” knew what he was talking about. It expressed an evergreen truth about the games we watch and play. Still, the best jock commentators try to avoid saying it, or give a rueful shrug of apology when they do. Because it’s OLD. It’s TIRED.

But there’s more to Amis’s war, to every good writer’s battle against cliché, than simple fatigue or a wish to seem stylish. And it applies, to a less obvious but maybe even more essential degree, to all of us. It’s this: How can we know if we’re actually thinking if we merely recycle a set of phrases that we have heard from others? The creative writer (painter, film-maker, dancer) restlessly desires to make – even though there’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, several centuries before St. Paul) – something novel, illuminating or (at the very least) interesting. Some describe poetry as the constant renovation, the organic renewal of language. Is that process merely about the quest for a fashionable phrase, some nifty bit of in-group vocabulary?

No.

There’s a crucial and mightier argument. If we’re not actually thinking, actively seeking understanding for ourselves, then we are subject to, in no particular order, empty-headed and derivative pop culture (bingo!), a heartless and bland societal conversation (John Ralston Saul’s “unconscious civilization”), endlessly persuasive Mad Men media urging us to Buy What They’re Selling! (now!), not to mention tyrant business monopolies and their pet politicians greasing the skids for autocracy. (I apologize. “Greasing the skids” is a cliché, though perhaps you’re young enough that it feels refreshing to you as an alternative to “paving the way”.) Thinking as I was about Martin Amis et sa guerre, I ran across a 15-year-old column from The Guardian lamenting, even back then, how decisively Mr. Amis had lost his War. (It’s rather British, but a lively rant against cliché.)

All of which leads me to this morning’s encounter with an online news digest from National Public Radio, an American treasure that is under attack. (Not by me, understand.) My bride and I have been touring Ontario, but our ten days of relatively news-free travel are over. I was having an oh shit re-entry into dismay, mostly at the fate of poor suffering Venezuela. For that country to endure monstrous natural disasters, on top of the human-made kind, feels like cruel and unusual punishment. (A cliché, yes. I’ll stand by this one.) From NPR:

“The search for survivors continues nearly five days after two powerful earthquakes hit Venezuela. The official death toll is nearing 1,500, and thousands of people are still unaccounted for. Families and volunteers are tirelessly digging through collapsed buildings throughout the northern coast and in neighborhoods of Caracas, the country’s capital, in hopes of finding people alive.” (NPR’s second bit of “news we’re following”; Iran and the United States ceasing to cease fire, surprise, was number one on June 29, 2026.)

It’s awful. And just to be foolishly clear, it’s not the journalistic blandness in general that has my Cliché Alert sounding on a sunny Monday morning. Yes, “search for survivors”, “death toll” and “unaccounted for” are over-taxed phrases, but this is not poetry. Readers want to get their information efficiently, and NPR points them towards more detailed accounts if they want them. No notes, no complaint. It’s just that I have grown chronically fatigued with the adverb “tirelessly”. Obituaries of any respectable professional or half-diligent labourer are almost never without it, but it’s not just the overuse and the lack of genuine thought. It’s the lie.

Don’t start my obituary yet, but I’ll ask in advance: Please don’t use “tirelessly” to describe my life’s work as a dad, or as a midnight grader of English assignments, or as a basketball coach addicted to “the grind”. I wish we could retire the word tirelessly, and for good. (“Indefatigable” is less shopworn, but has too many syllables and is equally untrue.) I was exhausted by all of that. I still am. Life at its best, for most of us, is still tiring.

But widen the scope. As they find themselves in an epic tale of tragedy and pain and heroism, too, I am unsettled by the mere thought of that South American aftermath. Consider that legion of unhappy souls, labouring desperately to find loved ones, neighbours and strangers in a deeply shaken Venezuela!

They’re tired as hell. And they’ll keep going. It’s human nature.

Watching Pro Basketball In Unreal Time: NBA Finals, Game 2!

Posted by :James Howden On : June 5, 2026

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Category: All About Sports, At First Glance

Tags:Amusing Ourselves to Death, basketball, NBA, Neil Postman, New York Knicks, San Antonio Spurs, television

[Two-minute read]

Just home from a gathering of the friends, and now I get to fire up the National Basketball Association Finals. It’s the Knicks, it’s the Spurs, it’s game 2. Game 1 was my second time watching during this playoff run – wait, is that right? – well, in any case, I am trying to limit the amount of time I devote to the watching of televised sport. I do pretty well for a pathological devotee of hockey, baseball, football and basketball on the ‘boob tube’. (Does anybody still call it that? Haven’t heard that expression this century, I do believe.) Not much hockey or baseball anymore, except when the Blue Jays, or I guess any Canadian-based NHL club (thanks, and sorry, Oilers!), make their Big Dance. Football is mainly just the Super Bowl now. Freedom!

My SportsNet feed keeps trying to take me ahead to Spurs-up-7, but I’m gonna watch the whole thing. Okay, I fast-forwarded through the anthem. (Rather attractive young lady, but I’ve heard enough “Banners”; I can hear my sports-centric big sister grumbling about the big pride-of-America hoopla.) And hey, the guy San Antonio had to introduce the Knicks seemed like he was heavily sedated, but for the Spurs, suddenly he was on caffeine, amphetamines and who knows what.

Man, the hype. The game never gets old, but man, the crazed intensity – so much of it performative and rehearsed and amplified, having to outdo the manic fans of days of yore (like, say, way back in March for the Madness) – gotta say, it just, y’know, seems like a lot.

So yeah, I’m watching the NBA. On a sort of television: my laptop screen. (But EVERYTHING IS TELEVISION. If we thought Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was out of date, consider how our screen addictions have only deepened and multiplied.) And you get to read, Not Quite Live But Surely Of Surpassing and Profound Interest, my random thoughts. Blessings! And peace be upon you and your mind. Further instalments to come. TONIGHT.

[This has been lightly edited since last night; a couple of brief elaborations. Parts Two and Three can be found in the **“It’s All About Sports!” section of this site, here and here.]**

Ursula K. Le Guin (on the alleged decline of reading)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 3, 2026

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[6-minute read]

One of her mightiest novels, but she wrote *everything*.

Ursula Le Guin is a hero of mine and, though often labeled as a ‘genre writer’, she is a giant of 20th century American literature. Her series of so-called “young adult” fantasy novels, beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea, were the first Le Guin books that I read. I recently finished The Dispossessed, a remarkable invocation of an extra-planetary society built on the principles of Anarchism, for a book club. (I’d read it before; I loved it again.) I’m midway through a fascinating, diverse non-fiction collection of hers, called Dancing at the Edge of the World. I was lucky enough to see her in conversation before an audience that packed an otherwise underused Anglican cathedral at the Ottawa Writers Festival in 2009. I cannot un-hear, from that electric evening, what her fiction so regularly upheld: her rejection of the trope, so common in speculative fiction (and Westerns, and comic books), of what she called “redemptive violence”. For her, this was an especially ugly non sequitur, a strikingly vulgar contradiction in terms. She radiated intelligence. Wisdom. There was someone to listen to.

Not long before this downright reverent reception at Christchurch Cathedral, in February 2008, Harper’s magazine had published her essay “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”. I keep a photocopy of it. It anchors a school notebook where I keep irregular tabs on my own reading. “Staying Awake” begins: “Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our forests; others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species…” and she goes on to cite both alarmed and shoulder-shrugging so what? reactions to the “alleged decline”. In the essay, she challenges mass-media’s sometimes gleeful response to surveys indicating that we read less, especially in book form. She takes the publishing industry to task with “amused contempt”; she is deliciously snarky as she bites the corporate hands that (carelessly) feed her craft. She analyzes historical and contemporary trends in literacy and what it means, and has meant, to our culture.

Most importantly, though, she centres her argument on what the act of reading actually is, and what it does with our minds. And what is a book, exactly? But wait. Before quoting the Le Guin perspective that brings us together here in electronic communion, please allow a short side trip. (If you jump ahead to read Ursula, who’s going to know? And how could I complain?)

So here’s a personal, but also amazingly planetary, narrative tangent. It’s all about BOOKS.

An abundance of good luck – and a massive adolescent absence of caution – has meant that I have hovered at the margins of the worldwide Bahá’í community for a long while now. This has meant several sweet things. I have a taste and an ongoing hunger for Persian food; the 19^th-century foundation of the Faith in what is now Iran means that I’ve come to understand and love many Persian things and people! I have also known two hopeful and fruitful marriages to believers, the second of which is alive and well, and the first of which is now remembered with fondness and gratitude. I guess I could mention, too, that my worldview has been constantly expanded, enriched, interrogated and confirmed; the globe’s move toward unity and peace and justice is inevitable.

That’s the kind of mindset you can sustain if you hang around with the Bahá’í teachings and those that seek to apply them. So, lucky me!

Literacy, learning, society-building in action. Where in the world?

Now, speaking of “the alleged decline of reading” mentioned by the great Ursula K., the Bahá’í community reads like crazy! The ancient references to the “people of the Book”, applied notably (and approvingly) by the Qur’an to Jews and Christians, also pertains to the followers of Muhammad themselves. In the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, reverence for these and other holy scriptures is deepened by adding a whole modern canon of the Word. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the New Testament (John 1:1), to which I dare to add this: the Word has remained alive, and been renewed, and shall ever continue as the foundation of human progress and comprehension. That’s my take on the Bahá’í take on the power of the Word.

The Bahá’ís, too, are “people of the Book” in their high regard for the sacred teachings and writings of the major world Faiths, as well as the traditional wisdom of Indigenous peoples. It is not some passive, token respect for holy writings. They actually read them. For example, faithful believers are asked to read from the Faith’s writings twice a day; not for long, necessarily, but as part of their spiritual hygiene. What’s more, the worldwide community has adopted, as one of its core activities – all of which are open to the wider public – a series of “study circles” that enhance one’s understanding and application of the Bahá’í principles. (Check ‘em out: truth, justice, love – the old faithfuls – as well as the essential oneness of humanity, the equality of women and men, the fundamental harmony of science and religion, and the eradication of all forms of prejudice and oppression. Yup. Astounding stuff.)

These young’uns are from Boston, could’ve been my town or yours.

The initial sequence of courses has titles like “Reflections on the Life of the Spirit”, “Arising to Serve”, and “Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth”. For the Baha’is and their friends, though, in-group shorthand just calls them Book 1, Book 2, and Book 5. (People of the Books!) And you’ll find such study circles, if you look a bit, just about everywhere in the world. They work. Learning happens, habits build, trust is established. And more: the act of reading, and of education generally, is celebrated and valorized in the most grassroots way. I’ve seen photos from all over the world — what happens when a study circle is complete? In a most charming and counter-cultural tradition, the group will have a photo taken, smiling friends holding up their red or yellow or green manuals. They might be saying, with their grins, We love our books! It’s been great to study and learn together! We even memorize certain passages! We are learning to not only read the Word but to read the reality of our place and time, and we find great hope in our shared community-building. How’s that for enthusiasm for the importance of the written word?

Thanks for staying with me! And now, back to Ms. Le Guin, for one of the clearest and most emphatic arguments for the power of the word (not to mention The Word) that I have read.

“At about the two-thirds mark in her essay, Le Guin acknowledges the variety of ‘entertainment media’ available to the modern data-consumer; after all, “the Internet offers everything to everybody: but…there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from [it].” And then she gets to the heart of the matter; here is why reading matters SO MUCH to so many of us:

Reading. Trees.
(Public Domain)

“…[R]eaders aren’t viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the on button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not ‘interactive’ with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

“The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

“…[Meanwhile] [e]lectrons are as evanescent as thoughts. History begins with the written word. Much of civilization now relies on the durability of the bound book—its capacity for keeping memory in solid, physical form. The continuous existence of books is a great part of our continuity as an intelligent species. We know it: we see their willed destruction as an ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been mourned for two thousand years, as people may well remember the desecration and destruction of the great Library in Baghdad [during the 2003 Iraq war]…”

[Italicized emphasis in the quote above is mine, not Le Guin’s. Read the whole essay here.]

Tilting at Track ‘n’ Field

Posted by :James Howden On : May 27, 2026

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Category: All About Sports, At First Glance

Tags:basketball, Chip Hilton, Don Quixote, dreams, John Wooden, Miguel Cervantes, Ottawa Lions, Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills, track and field, windmills

The Don and his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza. (Where is my Sancho?) They seek great deeds, and charge against windmills… (from Wikipedia)

[4-minute read]

[This was originally posted on May 27/26 under the “It’s All About Sports!” rubric.]

I really must read Don Quixote. Many say it’s the first great novel in Western Literature, written in Spain while Shakespeare ruled English theatre. Early 17^th-century work of genius, fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes. Maybe you’ve heard of it. I’m amazed I’ve never gotten ‘round to it. And no, this isn’t English class, and yes, we WILL be talking about sports. Metaphor alert! Hang on tight now!

(Look, never mind my career as a high school English teacher and alleged lit-wit. Ignore the pretensions, the haunting of Writers Festivals (pre-eminently my Ottawa local) and poetry-adjacent mooning (and jooning) and my long affection for being among readers even less accomplished than me. (Hello, Room 2011! Hello, ENG 3A1!) Pretend, you and I, that we barely notice all the faux-brave resolutions and horse-wishes about finding myself, thorough-going small-town balls-for-brains that I was and remain, in the art of writing, and maybe even finding the artist in me. Yeah, Don Quixote is a substantial hole in my reading resume, and likely yours, too. Call yourself a READER? Et cetera.)

But even that cliché shame doesn’t quite cover it, since I know myself to be more than a little “quixotic, i.e., /kwɪkˈsɒtɪk/, defined by Merriam-Webster as the foolishly impractical pursuit of ideals, typically marked by rash and lofty romanticism” (Wikipedia). Furthermore the expression “tilting at windmills describes an act of attacking imaginary enemies (or an act of extreme idealism), [which] derives from an iconic scene in the book.” (This was also Wikipedia.) Don Quixote was so buzzed out on his reading of romances that he charged into noble battle against, yes, windmills, which he mistook for the kind of fearsome monsters that noble knights slew and saved the day in books. Rash romanticism? Extreme idealism? Me? Heck, I spent the bulk of my professional life as a high school teacher in a couple of southern Ontario towns. I loved baseball and hockey, football and basketball, and have long coached the latter as if world peace and climate justice depended on it, as I like to say. Is that the biography of a crazy idealist undertaking missions ridiculous?

‘Fraid so. I have charged, on an overloaded donkey, sporting a rusty sword and a lance not much longer than my left arm, numerous windmills of my fevered athletic imagination. (Ask Cap’n Gord about my vision of new lights, a large grandstand and the hundreds-nay-thousands watching the Mount Hope A’s play Senior Men’s fastball. I played shortstop, batted leadoff, wasn’t bad, but in my mind was headed for the Olympics in a sport the IOC barely considered.) (Ask Coach Donny, who shared – though less scarred by ‘rash and lofty romanticism’ – my vision of challenging the great high school hoops teams of Toronto from the banks of the Grand River in a small hockey-mad town. I played the role of a less accomplished Chip Hilton turning into a Coach John Wooden Of The Western Niagara Peninsula. But we never quite made it to small-school provincials.)

The most recent evidence of this quixotic strain, this passion for the unlikely, comes at a French Catholic high school where I find myself coaching, deep into retirement from teaching, a junior varsity basketball team. I’m in a good-sized city this time, working alongside a fine young coach, but again as if world peace…etc. (And as if my remaining hair was on fire.) I still love it. Kids get fine things from it. I feel useful and engaged. And for a couple of years now, realizing how much high school ballers would benefit from such cross-training, a Phys. Ed. teacher and I have tried to develop a track ‘n’ field program, une équipe d’Athlètisme.

I must be nuts. Another windmill? A big-city championship in school basketball, in a time when AAU clubs and alleged “prep schools” are ascendant, isn’t improbable enough?

I convinced, Mighty Persuader that I am, two of my kids (and not ONE varsity ballplayer) to make their fairly half-arse efforts at being tracksters. They weren’t really feeling it. But still I fell, rookie coach and raging romantic fool that I am, in athletic love with a group of new kids who initially came out for my back-hall Speed’n’Power training in March. Not gonna lie, as the kiddies say: it was such a pleasure to get to know and coach a number of girls, mostly in grades 9 and 10, who are regularly more pleasant and grateful and funny than their male peers. Some of the school’s best athletes made occasional appearances, wanting to get a few days off school for this year’s more ambitious slate of meets. Times went down and measurements rose.

Still, unlike Don Q, the “man of La Mancha”, reality does eventually register with me. Few kids were able to sustain much commitment to this new adventure of building a track and field team. “Coach, I train on my own for my soccer (or football, or hockey, or basketball, or improv) team…” As coaches, we tip-toed in setting expectations; predictably, most showed up for the bare minimum of events and, after a month, for way less than that. Sheesh, we had two kids take a pair of days off school for the City of Ottawa championship meet without having been to ANY of the previous ten practices. Good athletes, nice kids. Not my idea of team- and culture-building. Reality bites. Dreams grow mouldy.

The tabs of my laptop are littered with videos on the arm mechanics of hurdlers and the footwork of triple-jumpers; meanwhile, our school has a cruddy gravel track, no starting blocks, the most embarrassingly cobbled-together imitation hurdles, and one weedy jumping pit. But never fear! I see provincial championships and NCAA scholarships and genuinely strong and fit basketball boys in our future. Well, I did sustain that dream for a month or so. Athlètisme might even have a lower social media Q-score than hoops in my city, but there’s this: the best track and field athletes in Ottawa were all at the City championship meet. The best of them are members of the Ottawa Lions TFC, and are FAR out in front of the field. I’ve picked out a handful of names to watch for in future Olympics. And hey, we did have two athletes, admittedly inexperienced but in non-marquis events, win Novice (girls javelin) and Junior (boys 300m hurdles) titles. Eight more kids qualified top-five to go to Regionals tomorrow and Friday. (So did I!)

But as the chief coach, acknowledging my excellent general knowledge about track and field (Olympic Games quadrennial appointment television!) and my rudimentary technical skills in teaching events I never participated in, I can’t help reflecting that this “team” practised substantially less often and far less hard than my middle of the road JV basketball team. Still, I habitually think, Okay, it’s a start. We’re building something that could be meaningful, that kids would care about for more than just a barely-earned day (or six!) off school. From tiny acorns mighty oaks do grow. If you build it, they will come. And so on.

Right this minute, I’m not convinced. The kids sure aren’t buying it! I don’t like admitting defeat, but the alternative feels suspiciously like slaying monsters that don’t exist.

Windmills, man oh man. Windmills.