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I have a great deal more I wish to write about my father’s life, but my last two days have obviously been quite eventful for me. I do plan on adding more of his story later, but as today is the twentieth anniversary of Dad’s death, I think it is fitting to say something about that, very briefly.

A few months after I left home in 1986, my parents purchased a home in Alix, a small town near Stettler, Alberta. (Abandoned prairie towns often had houses for sale for next to nothing; my parents paid $6,000 for this house; a house we had bought in Manitoba a few years earlier had been purchased for $3,500 at $100 a month with no interest.)

Shortly thereafter, Dad began experiencing strange symptoms, including sudden loss of strength in his right hand, to the degree that he began dropping things such as cups. He also had some stuff going on in his upper shoulder / collarbone area that I at first wondered was connected to a car accident we had been in a couple of years earlier. Soon he was losing his balance and falling to the floor.

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My friend Jamie was dropping off Mom at her adult day program yesterday, but ultimately ended up taking her to the emergency room. There, the diagnosis was a mini-stroke (TIA).

Mom’s personal physician saw her this morning. Unlike the emergency room surgeon who obviously saw Mom in the thick of things, he doesn’t think she had a mini-stroke, after all, and apparently attributes her symptoms to her arthritis. Given what I see, I find it hard to attribute the whole thing to a dramatic turn in her arthritis; and given her history (Mom has had a number of mini-strokes over the years), I have to admit I’m partial to the emergency doctor’s opinion.

At any rate, Mom does feel better, but seems to have lost a fair amount of strength in her left side. She’ll be in the hospital a bit longer…her doctor requested a second CT scan for 10 days from now, and I’m told most people stay in the hospital in that circumstance. Which seems excessive to me; I can’t imagine that would happen if it weren’t a country with socialized medicine….

Your prayers are appreciated.

It is a common conception that marriage gives roots to a man. And I suppose that is true in certain senses (at least, if the man is worth his salt).

But if we’re talking about the taming of wandering feet, it certainly wasn’t true of my father. I recall that at some point our family did a calculation of how many moves we had made. I think it was something like 26 by the time I was twelve.

My father was no longer a hobo, but the travelling never stopped until he contracted ALS. When I was a kid, my Dad at one point figured he made about 100,000 miles a year. None by air.

I guess the moving can’t be blamed entirely on the preaching tours. It started before Dad really turned to preaching much, given the fact the preaching really heated up around 1969 (although I think he first started the year I was born)… and my sister was born in Victoria in 1964, and I was born in New Westminster in 1965, and only lived there for the first three months of my life. And in 1969 we were back in Port Alberni….

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Shortly after his conversion, Dad ended up on the West Coast, in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. I don’t think he had lived there before, but it became a recurring destination during my young years.

Dad settled into a church in Port Alberni; I think it was an ACOP (Apostolic Church of Pentecost) affiliate. It was there he met my mother, who was 4 ½ years his senior (although he always looked older than she did). Not sure how quickly he took a fancy to her, but I do know that when he first asked her out, her response was “Certainly not!”

Dad could be single-minded, and my mother could be naive. She boarded with an older couple from church, and somehow it came about that Dad would go over there and have Bible studies with her on a regular basis. Despite the fact that he had asked her out earlier, it somehow didn’t seem to occur to her that he may have any ulterior motives. (Has anyone else had such unusual parents?)

Needless to say, the relationship did not remain Platonic. (In fact, Dad never quoted any Socrates at all.) He finally got her to go out with him.

Even at that, though, it still remains a curiosity that he got a second date, as his first attempt was to take her to the local dump to rummage around. (Yes, you read that right.) She demanded to leave, asking, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

If you think that’s humourous, it should be kept in mind that in married life, dump rummaging was sometimes an almost regular activity, nearly as appealing as going garage saling. (As an aside, I didn’t usually enjoy it all that much myself – and I’ve never been a garage sale hound to the degree my parents were – but on one occasion I did find an antique miniature vase that managed to net me $17, which wasn’t bad for a young kid without an allowance. Well, in the mid-1970s, anyway.)

Yes, my Dad was a regular Mel Gibson who knew just what women want.

But, for all that, she married him, even though she had long maintained she didn’t need a husband. She lived relatively modestly and took care of herself on her teacher’s salary. How a stable farmgirl from Saskatchewan who had nearly reached midlife came to say “Yes” to someone with the rootlessness, artlessness, and, well… tactlessness of my Dad is one of life’s great puzzles.

But once upon a time, it really happened.

The highway was his home, and it was mid-winter, but his Damascus Road experience – or rather, South Carolina highway experience – served my Dad with clarity: he was in the USA illegally, and needed to get back to Canada.

Not easy to face, since he did not own so much as a winter coat. But determined to do what was right, he started his northward journey. By thumb, naturally. (It was a lot easier to hitch rides in the 1950s than it is today, of course.) And witnessing to everyone who would pick him up.

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I am closing in on an anniversary. It arrives this coming Saturday.

On that day twenty years ago, I lost my father to a 2 ½ year battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 59 years old.

Born in Nova Scotia on January 4, 1931, my father had the calamity of being named by an illiterate mother, and so ended up with unfortunate initials: his full name was Paul Innis Gallant.

An illegitimate child raised in a cold environment, Dad was raised by a grandfather who was (to use the technical term) a tough old S.O.B. On his first day of school, my Dad got beat up and came home crying; his guardian’s response was that he better not do that again unless he wanted to face a worse whupping at home. Not surprisingly, the little guy (who topped out at 5′ 5 ½”) got toughened up pretty quickly.

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So, The Mighty Fed (TM) has done it again. Vanquished Andy Murray – whose time had purportedly come – in straight sets to win his 16th Grand Slam. One can’t help but think he’s going to reach 20, which seemed unthinkable. Read the rest of this entry »

Congrats to Jie Zheng and Na Li, with their respective unprecedented runs to the Aussie Open semis. Of course, no one gives them any chance against Serena and Justine… though Henin is still working through rust.

And oh yeah, congrats to TMF for 23 consecutive Grand Slam semis. Not bad.

For a couple weeks, I’ve had a few friends helping me beta test a new web site for Grande Prairie believers (adults 20 and up). Now it seems ready to go live:

http://grandeprairiechristian.com/

The idea here is to help local believers expand their social circles and get to know fellow Christians from the neighbourhood. Introduce yourself online with a profile, get to know one another by participating in forums and chatrooms – but don’t leave it there; once you’ve made new friends, since the whole constituency will be local, you can make arrangements to get together in real life.

So if you’re (1) a Grande Prairie area resident; (2) at least 20 years old; and (3) a Christian – please join up and join in!

Today, I stumbled across this interview from a few years back:

Interview, Barry Schwartz, Author, “The Paradox of Choice”

It’s interesting, not only for what he says about matters of marketing and such, but more for the rather more fundamental datum that a wide variety of choices is not only no guarantee of happiness or fulfillment, but in fact makes satisfaction less likely. Stunning that he has the nerve to say that people should learn to say “good enough” rather than always look for the “best.”

No idea whether he’s a Christian, but he says some good things about gratitude, too.

Dear _______,

Thank you for your concern regarding HTN1, which is apparently a Technological variant of H1N1 (also dubbed “influnetza”). We assure you, the pandemic is of grave concern to all of us.

We have been in contact with our host, and have been assured that all of the component parts of each server are taken out daily and scrubbed with soap and water. This has had only a minor affect on uptime.

You asked whether we could provide a numerical IP address in case parts of the internet shut down. You should know that IP addresses are in fact most vulnerable to the pandemic, moreso than domain names. This is because there are only ten numbers, while there are twenty-six letters; thus the pandemic spreads easier. We have been lobbying the U.S. government for some time for a larger spectrum of numbers to resolve this issue.

Meanwhile, we are  extensively masking domains. Unfortunately, this still leaves the problems of domain propagation undealt with, and there is always the threat of proliferation due to the common practice of “forwarding.”

To date, we do not believe our sites have been affected, although it can be hard to discern, as computer use invariably involves headaches at the best of times.

We prepare for the worst case scenario, of course. We are aware that hacking is very hard on the system, and once that level is reached, a “hands-off” approach is no longer appropriate.

Thank you once again for your concern. Please be assured that, as long as we are healthy, we will do all we can to keep our corner of the internet running.

Yours sincerely,
_____________

An infectious diseases expert says:

1. having swine flu is preferable to having “regular” flu
2. wouldn’t give the “dangerous” swine flu shot to his kids

More confirmation of my own suspicion that, while potentially dangerous, H1N1 is as much about power grabbing and hysteria as it is about genuine public safety. (Although claims are that some 3500 have died worldwide, the majority have been folks who had serious underlying conditions. Seems to me if that’s a “pandemic,” there are a lot of pandemics around.)

Make sure you click more and view the video.

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When defending champ Rafael Nadal withdrew from Wimbledon with injury, the tennis world was heavily disappointed. So many were looking for yet another epic match between Rafa and Roger Federer; last year’s grandiose 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7 victory for the Spaniard has been labelled the greatest tennis match ever. And that was a follow-up to another brilliant 5-setter the previous year, and the pair also had yet another at Australia in January of this very season.

The secondary hope for a great final rested with Andy Murray, the great UK hope and now world #3, who holds a 6-2 head-to-head against Federer. It was thought he had a nearly clear path to the final, but world #6 Andy Roddick played him brilliantly for his third crack at a Wimbledon final against The Mighty Fed (Andy lost this same matchup in 2004 and 2005). Most gave him virtually no chance, expecting him to get perhaps one set at best.

Instead, the world was treated to yet another epic battle that didn’t end until 16-14 in the fifth (the most amount of fifth set games in Grand Slam history), as Roddick, playing fitter and smarter under coach Larry Stefanki, had the match of his life. In the end, it took Federer a personal best 50 aces to get the best of Andy, who didn’t drop serve until his very last service game. Read the rest of this entry »

Nadal must be really hurting to withdraw from Wimbledon. He’s a very tough athlete, and he was defending champion.

And to top it off, he had an apparently easy draw – all the players who have given him some difficulty in the last year or two were in the bottom half (Federer’s), including Robin Soderling (who beat him at Roland Garros a couple weeks ago, and also nearly beat him at Wimbledon a couple years back), Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (who beat him in Australia in 2008), Novak Djokovic (who nearly beat him on clay in May, and also has given him fits at Wimbledon in the past), and even Fernando Verdasco (who came within a hair’s breadth of upsetting him in Australia this year). The only nemeses in his half were world #3 Andy Murray (who beat him at the 2008 U.S. Open), who he wouldn’t face until the semis, and Mikhail Youzhny, who once posed a problem, but hasn’t been a threat for some time.

If Federer wins Wimbledon, he will not only be the new recordholder for career Grand Slams (fittingly breaking Sampras’s record of 14 at the latter’s favourite tournament), he will also regain the #1 ranking. (Even had he entered, Nadal would have needed at least a semifinal berth to retain #1 were Fed to win the title.)

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There will doubtless be those who suggest that Roger Federer’s long-desired championship at Roland Garros is tainted, because he  didn’t have to defeat Rafael Nadal in order to win it.

I will not be one of those. To be sure, a victory over Nadal would have been more dramatic and much sweeter. It would invoke more staying power in people’s memories. And it’s also true that – not so unexpectedly, really – the moment was just too much for Robin Soderling, playing in his first Grand Slam final (he had never so much as reached the quarters previously).

But Federer was the best player on this fortnight, and that’s what any championship is about. If we go through the lists of titlists in any sport, almost all of them at some point have won a final against someone other than their chief archrivals. It’s just the nature of sport, and there will be no asterisk beside Federer’s name, explaining that he did not have to defeat Nadal in order to win the 2009 Roland Garros crown. Nadal on this occasion was not good enough to beat Roger’s eventual finals opponent. He was not good enough to win Roland Garros in 2009; Roger was.

Today we are reminded why it has been so important for Federer to improve continually, to keep putting himself in positions where he has a chance to win, even on the clay at the French, where supposedly he would never succeed. There were many naysayers who said he could never beat Rafa Nadal at Roland Garros, and therefore would never win the title. But nonetheless, he became the second-greatest claycourter of his time. Only Nadal himself was able to stop Federer at Roland Garros for the last four years. It is therefore not a cheap victory, but entirely fitting, that the man who invested so much of himself in winning this tournament has finally done so. This could never have happened had Federer resigned himself to being an also-ran on clay.

This tournament has raised all sorts of other questions. What does this event do to the confidence of both Nadal and Federer, respectively, heading into Wimbledon? Will Federer reclaim, not only his Wimbledon title, but the number one ranking? Even if Nadal’s tendonitis was some sort of factor, has Soderling’s dominant performance against him shown the way for other players to present a real challenge to Rafa – even on clay? And what of Soderling himself: has he finally turned a corner, so that the promise of his talent will be fulfilled to the extent that he can challenge repeatedly at the majors?

The coming months promise some very interesting storylines….

A year ago, it almost seemed inevitable that the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins would meet again in another Stanley Cup final.

But the Penguins lost some key pieces of their puzzle over the off-season, including local favourite Ryan Malone, and more importantly, superstar Marian Hossa, who signed with… Detroit, as a free agent. And halfway through the season, neither club looked likely to make it: Detroit was having all sorts of defensive and goaltending woes, while Pittsburgh didn’t so much as have hold of a playoff spot.

But here we are, and they’ve both made it, and done so in pretty impressive fashion.

There are a host of reasons why this particular matchup is highly intriguing:

1. It’s the first back-to-back Stanley Cup finals rematch since 1983-1984, when the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers faced off in successive years.
2. It’s the first opportunity for a team to win back-to-back Cups since New Jersey made the finals in 2001 after winning in 2000. The bid was unsuccessful – the last team actually to win two in a row was… Detroit, in 1997-1998.
3. It pits Hossa against the team he left because he felt he could win the Cup in Detroit (even signing for much less money than he could have received elsewhere). Naturally, there are folks who say that karma will get him, and Pittsburgh will win….
4. It pits probably the two most skilled teams in the NHL. It is so nice to see the cream rise to the top.
5. It offers a chance for redemption to Evgeni Malkin, who virtually disappeared halfway through the 2008 playoffs, apparently when he was taking a physical pounding early in the Philadelphia series. This year, he has only seemed to get stronger as the postseason has progressed.

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Regretfully, I have just learned that Canon Press will not be publishing These Are Two Covenants. We signed the contract about 13 months ago, and contract signing to release date is usually about a year, so I thought I’d contact them and see what the story was. My understanding is that Canon is cutting back for financial reasons.

Unfortunately, I have no idea regarding an alternative publisher at this time. Disappointing, but five years after first writing and two failed contracts later, I’m still without a publisher, and don’t have the resources on hand myself to print it through my own company.

If the fourth century were the twenty-first century….

This would be highly amusing were it not so sad. A fossil is discovered which has certain shared characteristics with humans, and this proves “direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.” Why we must imagine that we are descendants of a creature simply because it has nails rather than claws, and opposeable big toes, will perhaps be lost on some of us.

Just for the record: It is impossible for a fossil to demonstrate that humans descend from another form of animal life. Just because it would be impossible for evolution to be true unless there were transitional moments does not at all imply the roughly converse – viz, that an animal appearing to be somewhere between humans and other animals is a transitional creature proving the evolution of humans.

But evolution is every bit as much a faith as Christianity is. In this case, apparently quite a lot less logical.