Category: The Captain

  • Eighty Men Died Trying to End That Spree

    It seems like the only time we really have is time that’s under pressure from five different directions. We were at the rink Thursday, Friday, twice on Saturday, and yesterday. We’ll be at the rink again tonight, tomorrow night, Friday, and Sunday nights. It’s the nearing-the-end-of-the-regular-season crunch to get all our games in. And then…

  • Just an earthbound misfit

    Just a wee preview, then. No long-winded stories about Canadian pilots. No jibber-jabber about aeroplanes. Just this: The skellington of the Nieuport 17, covered in tissue paper, shrunk and strengthened. Tomorrow is Painting Day.

  • Taking an Aeroplane Across the World

    I have been peeling glue from my fingers for a week. This, too, is strangely cathartic. Insert long-winded, slightly purple prose about shedding the old skin and leaving troubles behind, blah-blah-blah. In reality, there are little fingerprint flakes all over my favourite spot on the chesterfield. Don’t tell His Nibs. The Captain and I cut…

  • I don’t need no arms around me

    It occurred to me that in putting together this aeroplane methodically, piece by piece, painstakingly gluing one tiny piece of balsa wood to the next, that this has become my therapy. It wasn’t a huge revelation. I didn’t fly through the streets of the greater metropolitan valley centre area shouting that I’d discovered the next…

  • Take these broken wings and learn to fly

    This is a balsa and tissue paper model of the Nieuport 17 aeroplane flown by Billy Bishop during WWI. Well. Technically, this is the completed fuselage of said aeroplane. In the top left corner of this photograph are the parts for a Sopwith Camel, which Bishop also flew, although only a handful of times. The…

  • My Underage Roommates

    Sometimes, you just have to stop thinking of them as your own flesh and blood and start thinking of them as what they really are – your underage roommates. This is how you will begin to understand where we as parents all go wrong. All of us. We forget what it’s like to have to…