Letters from Rona / Sort by date

When it comes to sleep, I have long been a woman of firm convictions: I need eight hours, I can scrape by on six and if I don't get my share I'll be an addled, nauseated wraith with an obliterating headache. I was so fixated on sleep that I ended up with a nightly pill habit, which I've just beaten while following a strict and unwelcome set of rules that really work. [more]

When I set out to break my sleeping pill habit, I schlepped by subway and bus to your basic red brick medical building. Alongside a mom with a stroller and an elderly gent in a wheelchair, I rode the elevator to the Toronto Sleep Clinic, where the walls are beige and the furniture best described as functional. It didn't even cross my mind that I could have embarked on this adventure in style, at one of those high-end spas where you're escorted to your treatment in the softest of robes as New Age music wafts in the fragrant air. [more]

It was one of those unloved, unlovely things you can pass every day without noticing what it is you've seen. A man's bike, sheathed in duct tape and many layers of thick black paint, with a matted plush tiger tail dangling from each handlebar. The mismatched reflectors on its wheels suggested a joyriding kid, but the ungainly proportions of the whole apparatus had an air of desperation, of cast-off parts cobbled together into a Frankenbike. [more]

Ever since John Edwards finally admitted his long-suspected affair, moralists have been denouncing the former presidential candidate as the worst sort of scumbag. Yet the truth is that all married people fail their spouse sooner or later--at times grievously. At least most of us can confront our marital problems behind closed doors. Political couples have to do it while the cameras roll. [more]

Next Saturday morning, instead of working out with a butt-kicking trainer who is mercifully away on vacation, we'll be heading down the highway to a place of legend: the southern Ontario fruit farm where my husband briefly lived in his teens. This time of year, he used to stand under a likely-looking peach tree, extend his arm into the branches and let a perfectly sun-ripened peach drop into his waiting palm. Because I haven't been blessed with this experience, I don't know the glory of a peach--or so he has always maintained. [more]

On doctor's orders, I now get up and read in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, although my natural inclination is to thrash grimly in bed. I've found that the best books to read in the pre-dawn hours are the ones you can dip in and out of with no need to follow a plot--like the elegant, opinionated essays that comprise M.F.K. Fisher's Last House, in which I found a wonderful contrarian view of insomnia. [more]

I thought Paris Hilton was a sleek and shiny bimbo with no social graces until I discovered her tart satirical side in her video rebuttal of a John McCain ad. [more]

The world does not look kindly on a woman who swaggers from bed to bed as men have always done. But to my mind, the real inequality is that a naked woman can't display her cellulite in post-coital splendour the way a naked man displays his gut. [more]

The world positively teems with terrific writing, not only on bookstore shelves but online, where eclectic prose and thought are available free to all comers. For readers this is a wonderful thing. For writers it's profoundly humbling to know that people who love to read have more than enough options already to occupy their minds and hearts for a great many lifetimes. [more]

This holiday Monday, I have our loft to myself, with sunlight streaming from end to end of the place and none of the usual Monday sound track (rumbling buses, boisterous pedestrians) from the street outside. A year or even a week from now, I won't remember the sweet languor of this moment in my life unless I capture it now. [more]

Women learn early to bite their tongues and let other people have the floor. We're so well trained in solicitude that we often need permission to speak. That's what my friend Elaine provides every summer at a raucous dinner party in our garden. She always asks us, one by one, to tell the group how our lives have changed since last year. The resulting stories prove that there's no such thing as a life without drama. [more]

When I first learned to read, I liked to flip ahead to the very last line to savour the secret of the ending. I knew this was not the approved way to read, which made it all the more seductive. I was supposed to be patient and let the author surprise me, but my notion of a surprise had nothing to do with what happened at the end, or did not. It was all about the story's destiny. A good closing sentence is the pinnacle toward which the story has been climbing. [more]