Sandy Day's Blog

Sometimes a memory surfaces so clearly I can smell it. I wrote this to pin down one of those nights before it faded completely.

Friday night,
high school dance.
The dark gymnasium.
Alive with possibility
that included none of us.
Feeling as foolish and wordless as mood rings.
Music bouncing off the gym walls.
Warped records on high.
No one dancing.
Standing around.
Or slouching on benches.
Awkward,
hating that we wanted to be there.

Ten o’clock,
shrugging our coats on,
huddling by the chain link fence.
Smoking a joint.
Laughing.
Saying, “Let’s get out of here.”
Racing,
tripping,
calling,
falling down the street from the school.

Pulling open the glass door of The Garden Gate Restaurant,
better known as The Goof.
Yellow lighting,
smelling the fry,
the clink of glasses and chatter.
Piling into a booth.
Our waiter, Kenny, wiping the yellow table with his wet towel.
“Sue’s sister,” he’d nod at me.
My only identity.
French fries and gravy,
cokes all around.
Giggling,
flipping through the songs in the tiny jukebox at the end of the table.
Feeding it a quarter.
Doobie Brothers.
A fish tank bubbling,
green,
a sunken treasure chest,
the odd fish swimming by
like it belonged.

I wrote this in the early morning quiet, trying to catch something true before it slipped away. If this one landed for you, a tip in the jar tells me to keep going.

Tip Jar!

I love to hear from you. Please feel free to reply to this newsletter or leave a comment.

To buy any of my books visit my website.

Visit my Amazon store.

I send you original essays every week—always free, always yours. If my writing matters to you, consider becoming a paid supporter at $5/month. No extra perks, just the knowledge that you’re keeping this work alive.

What if you died and got to attend your own funeral—but nobody knew the real you? Inspired by the life and letters of my Great Uncle, Fred’s Funeral opens with Fred’s ghost discovering he is dead. Think A Christmas Carol, but the ghosts arrive too late. Here’s how it begins.

It is thin and wavering, the barrier Fred Sadler knocks against. But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot pass through. He is like timber in a lake, submerged and waterlogged and the boys above him are gulls in the sky. Fred Sadler doesn’t know he is in that disagreeable place - reserved for those who predetermine there is no life after death but who, upon dying, discover indeed there is more.

It’s the damnedest thing. Fred Sadler waves and calls out to his cousin Birdie and his brother Thomas as the two boys beckon him closer. They are youngsters, just how Fred Sadler remembers them and he longs to be with them. Behind Birdie and Thomas, a strange grove of glorious verdant trees glows and sways. Beyond the trees, Fred glimpses the pure blue brilliance of water. The two boys peer toward Fred Sadler and Thomas asks Birdie, “Is it Fred? Can he not cross over?”

Fred tries again to penetrate the misty layer but he’s held back. Something whispers, As through a glass darkly.

Fred hears the voice of a long ago Congregationalist Church minister breaking through his consciousness like a radio suddenly tuned into a station. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

What in the blue deuce?

On the other side of the ethereal boundary, Fred’s whole family is congregating, all the people who died and went on before him. All the souls he’d felt certain he would never see again. There’s Fred’s mother wearing the look of sweet worry she’d borne after the war, and there’s his father - so proud of Fred, and Pauline, lovely lithe Pauline, laughing and twirling, and by gum there’s Fred’s old friend Stanley!

Hello, hello!

A noise below startles Fred Sadler and he realizes with a jolt that it is October 12, 1986 and he is floating near the pocked beige ceiling of his room in York Manor Home for the Aged. Inches from his nose is that horrid brown stain from the flood in the bathroom upstairs – it’s unmistakable - he’s spent years lying on his back studying it.

Am I dead?

Fred Sadler thrashes, trying to locate his brother and family and the lush green world but it’s vanished. Dammit! Where did that dream go? They are expecting me. I want to go back!

Fred’s Funeral is available on Amazon in e-book and paperback. Click here to read more about it.

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Fred’s Funeral took years to write—piecing together letters, memories, and silences into something true. If this excerpt landed for you, a tip in the jar supports the kind of slow, careful work that brings forgotten stories to light.

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Sandy Day. People often ask, “Is that your real name?” Which kind of baffles me because it’s not that weird, is it?

It’s not like I’m from Saudi Arabia and covered in sand or something. Though I have resided near a beach for my entire life. But my name’s not Sunny Day, or Wendy Day, or Summer Day. Those would be silly.

Do you know the story of your name? Apparently, everyone has one—a story, I mean—and a name come to think of it.

Okay, enough preamble—this is the story of my name. I was the fourth and final child for my parents, and my mom decided that whether I was a boy or a girl, I was going to be named Sandy.

Perhaps she was influenced by the popularity of Sandra Dee the movie star because there were a helluva lot of Sandy D’s in my classes throughout grade school. Yet Mom denies that. She says it was after her sister Sandra, and her dad’s nickname Sandy (he was a Sanders), and Dad had a brother Sandy too whose last name, of course, was Day.

Uncle Sandy caused, and continues to cause, occasional troubles on Facebook because he and I were “friends” before he died, and people with both of us in their friend lists sometimes mix us up. I get tagged on Uncle Sandy’s various anniversaries, and sometimes it’s awkward to un-tag myself.

Again, I’ve digressed, darn it.

So, I was thusly named Sandra. And the intention was always to shorten it to Sandy. Nowadays, they would just call the baby Sandy and to hell with formalities, but this was the sixties, you know, back when the Beatles hit the airwaves, and people still followed rules. Shake it up, baby.

When I was around six, my mom read to me Now We Are Six, and it was then that she filled me in on the story of my name. In that book is a poem called “Forgiven” and in the poem is a beetle (who I mixed up with The Beatles, naturally) and the Beetle’s name is Alexander Beetle.

So, I asked if I had been a boy named Alexander (to be shortened to Sandy) what would my middle name have been?

I swear to God, she answered, Beetle.

I was tickled pink!

Imagine hearing the teacher call roll and my name would be Alexander Beetle Day.

I loved the idea, and kinda wished I’d had the opportunity to have such a prestigious and preposterous moniker.

I’ve repeated this story approximately a thousand times in my lifetime.

So, when I was thinking about writing this post, I got to wondering. Would Mom really have given me the middle name Beetle. I mean, really?

It was the sixties and she couldn’t even bring herself to just put Sandy on the birth certificate form.

I decided to ask, to verify, and that’s when I realized that my mom was in the hospital—suffering from an infection that had caused congestive heart failure and delirium—and she was fairly non-responsive, if not nonsensical.

Yikes.

Real talk here. One day, my mom is going to die, and then when I need to verify stuff for these little stories—she’s going to be gone.

But the good news for now is she’s back home and thanks to modern medicine she’s doing much better.

I raced down to her room to ask her about Alexander Beetle.

She remembered, of course, she has an elephant’s memory for poetry and lyrics and the names of kids in her grade one class of 1937—she remembered the poem.

I told her that when I was little, she told me that had I been a boy my name was going to be—

She interrupted, “Alexander. And we’d call you Sandy.”

“Yeah, I know, but you also said that my middle name would be Beetle.”

“I didn’t,” she scoffed.

“You did!”

She laughed.

She laughed! She was kidding me way back then and that’s why they call it kidding, isn’t it? Because I was a kid, gullible, innocent, and I’ve been spreading this misinformation around for about half a century.

A few weeks ago, I was applying for the Canadian Dental Plan, which is now available to all eligible Canadians. I filled in the online form and expected I would hear from them in a few weeks. Maybe. I kept my reference number because I was pretty sure I’d have to be calling them back to check on my status.

To my surprise, I received a phone call from them the next day. (I answer blocked and unlisted phone numbers now because it could be a health care provider calling about my mom.) The kind woman on the other end of the phone said she needed to verify something because there was a problem with my social insurance number.

I have my S.I.N. memorized so I rarely take the card out of its secret spot in my dresser, identity theft, and all that.

I thought, uh oh, did I put in the wrong number?

But no. She asked, “Can you confirm the name on your social insurance card?”

Ohhhh, now I knew the trouble.

I had applied for the dental insurance with my real real name, Sandra. The name under which I file taxes, have a passport, and a driver’s license.

“The name on the card is Sandy Day,” I told her. “I applied for it when I was in grade two. The whole class had to fill in the forms—we were seven.”

Believe it or not she said, “I hear that a lot.”

Oh my God. Anyway, since then, I haven’t heard a peep.

So that’s the story of my name: a seven-year-old’s handwriting on a government form, a sixty-year-old lie about a beetle, and somewhere in a filing cabinet, proof that I’ve been Sandy Day all along. At least I got to ask Mom about Alexander Beetle while she’s still here to say to me, joke’s on you—even if I can’t ask her which version of my name the dental plan card will come with.

I write these essays in the early morning quiet, trying to catch something true before it slips away. If this one landed for you, a tip in the jar tells me to keep going.

Tip Jar!

I love to hear from you. Please feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment.

To buy any of my books visit my website sandyday.ca — it rhymes! Or visit my Amazon store.

I send you original essays every week—always free, always yours. If my writing matters to you, consider becoming a paid supporter at $5/month. No extra perks, just the knowledge that you’re keeping this work alive. Thanks!

There was a time when my heart was so badly broken that music hurt too much to listen to. I had to start listening to jazz, because it was unfamiliar to me.

Now, when I hear jazz, I travel back to that time when it was novel, when I was imagining a whole new world for myself.

I liked that me.

I liked the fantasies I had of upscale nightclubs and cool blue lights. People talked smart and were civilized, like in those old black and white movies from the 40s. And I was there among them, shaking loose the brown suede fringed vest and frizzy loose hair of the rest of my life.

I needed a new soundtrack. Something that wasn’t going to make me cry.

I write these essays in the early morning quiet, trying to catch something true before it slips away. If this one landed for you, a tip in the jar tells me to keep going.

Tip Jar!

I love to hear from you. Please feel free to reply to this newsletter or leave a comment.

To buy any of my books visit my website.

Visit my Amazon store.

I send you original essays every week—always free, always yours. If my writing matters to you, consider becoming a paid supporter at $5/month. No extra perks, just the knowledge that you’re keeping this work alive.

I didn’t want my grandmother—I wanted my cousins’ grandmother, Grandma Slossinger who wore a silver charm bracelet with silhouette heads of her grandchildren—each one’s name engraved on the charms.

I checked it frequently, but my head and name never appeared, no matter how much I wished for it.

My grandmother, Granny, wore a single item of jewellery—her wedding rings. They huddled together on her finger below her swollen arthritic knuckle, like two sisters on a narrow bed.

I envied my cousins’ wealth of grandmothers—two, in fact—and they got to call theirs the soft, gentle word Grandma. I had only one because my father’s mother died the year I was born—no correlation, I hope—and I had to call mine Granny, which was a hateful term in my estimation.

Mine wore horn-rimmed glasses and played a melodica, which is what happens when a recorder mates with an accordion. She blew hymns through it, and sometimes she burst into song—a warbly soprano, tuneless as any Protestant hymn could be.

She wore nylon knee-highs rolled down to her ankles. Even as a child, I knew that Grandma Slossinger wouldn’t be caught dead in such things. Grandma Slossinger wore white golf shoes with fringed tongues, plaid shorts, a white visor, and smart sky-blue polo shirts.

I wanted to want my grandmother, but I just didn’t. I wanted some reciprocal love. I was a moth, but there was no light in her to be drawn to. Her self-denial had extinguished her radiance.

Grandma Slossinger spoke in a gravelly voice and filled her glass ashtrays with lipstick-marked Peter Jackson butts. She always kept a stash of hard candies for us, and bridge mixture, blech.

Granny sat in a lawn chair, sensible shoes planted on the grass, a sloppy faded sun hat over her bowed head, keeping her hands busy shelling peas.

Eventually, the two grandmothers died, as all grandmothers do, and I was left with these two opposing role models. I went down the Peter Jackson route for a while but gave it up when it turned me into a fiend.

Now I wear hats to keep my frizzy hair flat—practical and probably unstylish. I still like fresh peas, but I adore charm bracelets. Maybe that’s my compromise—a little bling, a little duty. The buzz, and the hush.

Thanks for reading this week’s essay. I hope you enjoyed it. Each week I send a little piece of writing for you. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If my post prompts you to share something, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I love to hear from you.

To buy any of my books please visit my website to discover them.

Visit my Amazon store.

Appreciate my writing? Please click below to leave a tip in the Tip Jar!

Tip Jar!

Click here for a free eBook copy of An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.

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This original content, sent to you weekly, helps pay my way in the world. To receive new posts and join my supporters, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is very much appreciated!

There is a lot of talk these days about decluttering. And my eyes glaze over whenever I hear the word. Apparently, if I want to be happy in this world, I need to declutter.

Phooey.

Back when I held writing retreats, a writing prompt came to me: Lazy Slob.

I toyed with adding the word Fat to it. Should it be 3 words? Fat Lazy Slob? Or should I get rid of Lazy? Or just Fat Slob? They all have their power rooted in the same shame bucket. What would my writing retreat participants write to this prompt, I wondered.

I am a slob. I am a pig in a sty with a dirty snout and a pungent smell snorting around covered in dried mud up to my tits and I’m happy! I’m the proverbial pig-in-shit happy.

I can’t remember when or where the slobiness first revealed itself but it must have been early on. I had the kind of mother who regularly did housework, made my bed daily, and picked up my dirty clothes, washed them and tucked them back into my dresser drawers clean and folded.

I shared a bedroom with my sister Janey. This was not a good arrangement for either of us on account of all the screaming and crying coming from my side of the room.

I think Janey probably perceived my dependence and despised me for it. She was only two-and-a-half years older and was built like a scraggy sparrow but somehow, she exuded independence. She didn’t need anyone. Or did she? Maybe she despised her own powerlessness because no matter what, she was also unable to command our parents to pay more attention or show more affection.

I know I was certainly powerless.

Janey was likely enraged by my ongoing attempts to get my needs filled and she got quite a bit of attention by provoking me. She perfected the attack and my predictable cry for help.

Did Janey complain about the state of our shared bedroom? I don’t remember. But my scattering of paper-dolls and Barbie clothes might have made her stomp around and lash out at my inability to tidy up after I finished playing.

I never finished playing.

I just moved on to other things. Perhaps took a little breather. Maybe some coloring needed doing. I just moved on, and then on to more sophisticated stuff. Entertainment seemed important. Also working and selling stuff. Talking on the phone, raising kids, cooking.

Have you ever seen the photo of Einstein’s office?

It’s a mess. His mind was probably a squirrel’s nest of swirling ideas. I like to style myself after him—buried in papers and books, post-it notes and reading glasses.

I make my bed and tuck my clothes back where they go, but none of it is neat. I’m too busy to take care of all this stuff. I’m busy reaching out, making noise, saying I’m here, do you see me? And all I have are these waking hours and this blank piece of paper.

Thank you for reading this week’s story. I hope you enjoy it. Each week I send a little piece of writing for you. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If my post prompts you to share something, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I love to hear from you.

Visit my website to discover my books.

Visit my Amazon store.

Appreciate my writing? Please click below to leave a tip in the Tip Jar!

Tip Jar!

Click here for a free eBook copy of An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.

Request a Free Bookmark!

This original content, sent to you weekly, helps pay my way in the world. To receive new posts and join my supporters, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is very much appreciated!

“Are you the author?”

The woman holding Odd Mom Out with its bright, perky cover asks this like she’s identifying a suspect in a lineup. I've been standing by my sister’s quilt display at the Georgina Studio Tour for approximately forty-five minutes, jet-lagged and frazzled after thirty hours of travel from South Africa with my ex-husband, and already I regret setting up my little stack of books on the cash-out table.

“Yes,” I admit.

“What are your books about?”

And there it is. The question that grates my nerves worse than a snoring ex-husband.

I am not one of those authors who pumps out psychological thrillers with twists you can see a mile away—the nanny did it, the husband’s a sociopath, everyone is an unreliable narrator including the dog. I would love to be one of those authors with their hordes of readers who devour books faster than I can write them. I would settle for being a romance novelist, except then I’d have to defend the legitimacy of the genre, and I hate conflict more than I hate this question.

So normally I do what I’ve perfected over years: I demur. I fudge. I launch into something conspicuously vague like “Some fiction, some memoir, poetry...” while performing an interpretive dance with my hands that means absolutely nothing. Then I watch their eyes ring up ‘No Sale’ and the book return to the table like a stale loaf of bread.

But this weekend something is different. Maybe it’s on account of a month in another culture. Maybe it was watching my daughter get married under African skies and realizing that life is short and I should stop apologizing for my work. Maybe it’s the stupendous coffee.

I sell a whole bunch of books.

The trick, I discover, is to actually tell them what the damn books are about.

Odd Mom Out? It’s about a divorced woman desperate to get to her daughter’s wedding in Croatia before she completely ruins their relationship. It’s satirical. It’s about midlife. I wrote it during the pandemic when I was tired of being sad and serious and needed a laugh.

Fred’s Funeral? A ghost attends his own funeral and discovers everyone got his entire life wrong. He’s a WWI vet with shell-shock who spent decades in asylums because nobody knew what PTSD was back then. It’s as realistic as a novel narrated by a ghost can be but—my sister blurts out to a customer clutching the book, “I cried at the end!” I didn’t know that. It’s usually me who’s crying about stuff.

Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand? A messed-up teenage girl in 1970s Cape Breton tries to lure her delinquent boyfriend to her aunt’s farm. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well. And full disclosure: I forgot to bring copies to the studio tour because my brain is still on a jet plane somewhere over Dubai, but I have a whole box in my office gathering the kind of dust that whispers, “you're a terrible businesswoman.” I know. Shut up.

One quilt browser—a six-foot-tall woman who materializes like a cumulus cloud passing over the sun—spends twenty-five minutes telling us about her father-in-law. He is a very important man, she wants us to know. Very rich. He drives a Mercedes. Wait, no—a Rolls Royce. And she, naturally, is an art buyer for a museum. She knows good art when she sees it. My sister and I nod with the glazed enthusiasm of hostages. Thank God she doesn’t get onto literature—I've already admitted to being an author and can’t take it back. She does not buy a book. But she does give us a comprehensive understanding of her father-in-law’s criminal frenemy, which I promptly forget.

Between six-footers, I sell An Empty Nest, my collection about moving to Georgina when I was suffering from empty nest syndrome so severe I could barely see straight. “I never expected to miss them,” I tell a grandmotherly looking woman with kind eyes. “I was sad for years that my little kids didn’t need me anymore. I still am.” She buys two copies. One for herself, one for her daughter who just dropped her youngest at university and won't stop sobbing.

See? When you tell people what the book is actually about—the human thing underneath the plot—they buy it.

I didn’t bring Birds Don't Cry because I’m dithering about revising it into a second edition. I think about the bones of that novel the way you might think about an ex who seems like a fixer-upper. Which, like the ex, is probably a terrible idea. I’ll keep you posted.

And Chatterbox, my poetry collection from the year my marriage dissolved? Nobody asks about poetry. Who reads or writes poetry besides beautiful, devastated twenty-three-year-olds on Instagram? But that book is about a woman locked in her own story, who has much to say but doesn't know how to let it out.

Which is ironic, I realize now, because this weekend I finally open my mouth.

Turns out people do want to hear what I have to say.

I’m writing today from my home in Georgina, Ontario. I’ve been travelling the past few weeks in South Africa and returned to sensational weather here in Southern Ontario. The sun is out, it’s warm enough for slides and t-shirts, and the deciduous trees are changing colour oh so slowly.

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter. I hope you enjoyed it. Each week I send a little piece of writing for you. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If my post prompts you to share something, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I love to hear from you.

Visit my website to discover my books.

Visit my Amazon store.

Appreciate my writing? Please click below to leave a tip in the Tip Jar!

Tip Jar!

Click here for a free eBook copy of An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.

Request a Free Bookmark!

This newsletter from Sandy Day is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I had a keen appreciation for buttercups and cornflowers when I was a kid, though I didn’t know that, like them, I too was growing up wild and free.

Who doesn’t like a buttercup? As we all know, if you hold one under your friend’s chin and a little glow of yellow is reflected on their skin, it means they like butter.

(At some point, some wise-guy held the tiny yellow flower against my throat and declared, “Margarine!” I was of the margarine generation.)

Cornflowers I loved because—who can resist that colour of blue? It’s so perfect it hurts my heart.

How it got its dumb name, I’ll never know—like Corn Flakes. No one likes those.

But the cornflower often grows where cows graze, in ditches and along fence rails, its dusty leaves and fuzzy stem dug deep into the dirt—a stubborn beauty.

Though weedy and unappreciated, no one can deny that colour is worthy of the finest dress.

When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time in fields and ditches and leaning against fences, admiring cows and horses.

I laid my bike down in the gravel at the side of the road and trekked through prickly grass, following someone who had an idea about something.

Their reasons have long since faded. Only the memories of the scratched shins and the wildflowers remain.

What does any of this matter now? Probably nothing.

It’s just of interest to me to discover what’s rooted inside—what wild thing is entwined and won’t come out, no matter how hard I tug at it.

Impossible to hide, glowing and windblown, ashine with possibilities.

Each week I send out a little piece of writing. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If the post prompts you to share something with me, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I’d love to hear from you.

For something lighthearted grab a paperback copy of my novel Odd Mom Out click here.

For a paperback copy of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand, click here. And don’t forget to leave a rating or review. Your reviews and ratings help other readers find the book.

Haunted by war. Silenced by family. Desperate to be heard—at last.

After surviving the trenches of WWI, Fred Sadler expects peace, purpose, and a place in his family. Instead, plagued by anxiety and misunderstood by those closest to him, he slips further and further into the margins of life.

Now it’s 1986, and Fred is dead. But death doesn’t stop him from hovering at his own funeral, tethered to his bitter-tongued sister-in-law as she tells a version of his life he hardly recognizes. Watching, remembering, and bristling at Viola’s distortions, Fred aches for someone to understand the truth about him at last.

With a blend of poignancy and wry observation, Fred’s Funeral is a moving portrait of a forgotten life—and a reminder that even the most overlooked among us long to be remembered as we really were.

Order Fred's Funeral

Appreciate my writing? Please click below to leave a tip in the Tip Jar!

Tip Jar!

Visit my website to discover more of my books.

Click here for a free eBook copy of An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.

Request a Free Bookmark!

This newsletter is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

A friend asks me to write down her story, and I agree. Readily.

Why? Don’t I have better things to do? Like writing down my own story?

But I agree because she is fairly young — and maybe her penmanship is bad, or maybe she hasn’t mastered the keyboard yet. I mean young. She doesn’t even know what age she is. It could be five, it could be twelve. She says it’s all a bit of a blur.

Sometimes there was someone holding her hand, and sometimes — she swears — there was no one there at all. Her memories fold in on mine, like pages of a diary stuck together by a squished bug.

I agree to interview her first, because that makes sense, right?

I mean, I know her story generally, but I’m guessing there’s a lot more I haven’t seen yet — and even if I do become aware of all the events, it may or may not be a story.

A story is always prescriptive or cautionary, and I’m not sure which hers is yet.

Do I want to end up like her?

I scratch my noggin. I don’t know — she seems to be in a pretty good headspace now.

She sits on a wicker chair, legs crossed like a real little lady, fingers plucking at a loose strand of rattan, eyes scanning a window that looks out on nothing but a blinding white lake.

But she’s hinted — I mean, she’s stated plainly — that things on the outside don’t match up to things on the inside.

So, the first question I ask is: Why do you not write your own story?

I’m expecting her to say all the usual stuff people say, like I’m not a writer; you’re better at writing than me; I just can’t seem to get started

But she surprises me. She says none of these things.

Instead, she whispers, her sibilants slipping slightly sideways, “Because I am you. You know exactly what to say.”

Each week I send out a little piece of writing. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If the post prompts you to share something with me, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I’d love to hear from you.

For something lighthearted grab a paperback copy of my novel Odd Mom Out click here.

For a paperback copy of Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand, click here. And don’t forget to leave a rating or review. Your reviews and ratings help other readers find the book.

Haunted by war. Silenced by family. Desperate to be heard—at last.

After surviving the trenches of WWI, Fred Sadler expects peace, purpose, and a place in his family. Instead, plagued by anxiety and misunderstood by those closest to him, he slips further and further into the margins of life.

Now it’s 1986, and Fred is dead. But death doesn’t stop him from hovering at his own funeral, tethered to his bitter-tongued sister-in-law as she tells a version of his life he hardly recognizes. Watching, remembering, and bristling at Viola’s distortions, Fred aches for someone to understand the truth about him at last.

With a blend of poignancy and wry observation, Fred’s Funeral is a moving portrait of a forgotten life—and a reminder that even the most overlooked among us long to be remembered as we really were.

Order Fred's Funeral

Appreciate my writing? Please click below to leave a tip in the Tip Jar!

Tip Jar!

Visit my website to discover more of my books.

Click here for a free eBook copy of An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories.

Request a Free Bookmark!

This newsletter is reader-supported. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

My boyfriend Kenny got mad at me because I didn’t butter his toast to the edge of the bread. It wasn’t even butter—it was margarine from a big plastic tub on his mother’s kitchen table.

I laughed. But he wasn’t kidding. To him, it was some kind of serious violation to not spread the yellow stuff—or the jam that went on top—to the very edge of the flimsy slice of Wonder Bread. His family ate Wonder Bread. It was my first encounter with it.

Kenny lived year-round in the cottage-town where my family summered. During the long winter, we talked on the phone. I probably sent him the odd letter, but we didn’t have a connection that way. Not like I had with my summertime friend, Caitrin, who also lived in Toronto in the winter.

She and I sent missives to each other’s homes from Thanksgiving weekend to Victoria Day. Once, we had an unspoken competition to find out what was the smallest envelope we could get through the Canadian postal service. We made our own envelopes, sometimes so little all they held was the smallest postage stamp and our addresses in the tiniest handwriting possible. Caitrin’s ingenuity always made me laugh.

But Kenny—every couple of weeks, I talked to him on the phone. After dinner, naturally, when the long-distance rate went down.

He told me one night that he’d baked a cake—a birthday cake for someone in his family. He sounded very proud of himself, and I was amazed and impressed. I’d never attempted such a feat. Lucy Maud Montgomery had mentioned fallen cakes and other such oven disasters often enough in the books I was reading that I knew cake-baking was beyond my reach.

In my family, my mom made the birthday cakes from scratch, and part of being the birthday girl was being allowed to choose the flavour and the icing. Although if you were my sister, Janey, you often got a heart-shaped cake because her birthday fell close to Valentine’s Day.

I don’t know how much she liked that. I sensed—and maybe so did she—that it wasn’t an “I love you” from our mom. It was a “look what I read how to do in Chatelaine magazine.”

I asked Kenny how he made the cake. What recipe did he use? Wow!

He said, why, the recipe on the back of the box, of course.

“That’s not a real cake,” I scoffed. “That’s a cake mix!”

I was stunned when he argued with me and refused to see the difference. His mother always made cakes this way, he said, in defense of his position.

We bickered.

I don’t know why I felt the need to change his mind on cake correctness, but I was a food snob—I just didn’t know it then. I believed packaged food products were inferior, and I thought that fact was obvious. Kenny, I’m sure, just thought I was a jerk, and our phone call ended with no resolution.

Kenny wasn’t wrong. He and I came from different worlds, and this was my first foray into the power struggle that erupts in relationships when the cultures of two families clash. I was blissfully unaware that my upbringing was baked into everything I believed. I thought the way we did everything was normal and correct.

Oh boy, was I wrong.

Each week I send out a little piece of writing. Sometimes it’s a personal essay and other times it’s a poem or piece of fiction. I hope you enjoy my scribblings. If the post prompts you to share something with me, by all means, hit reply to this email or leave a comment wherever you read this story. I’d love to hear from you.

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Haunted by war. Silenced by family. Desperate to be heard—at last.

After surviving the trenches of WWI, Fred Sadler expects peace, purpose, and a place in his family. Instead, plagued by anxiety and misunderstood by those closest to him, he slips further and further into the margins of life.

Now it’s 1986, and Fred is dead. But death doesn’t stop him from hovering at his own funeral, tethered to his bitter-tongued sister-in-law as she tells a version of his life he hardly recognizes. Watching, remembering, and bristling at Viola’s distortions, Fred aches for someone to understand the truth about him at last.

With a blend of poignancy and wry observation, Fred’s Funeral is a moving portrait of a forgotten life—and a reminder that even the most overlooked among us long to be remembered as we really were.

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