• Age: 6 to 18
• Grade: 1 to 12

Loneliness was there in our childhoods, although we had no name for it. It was there in high school, as distressing as at any other time in our lives because we had little experience of it, had not yet developed a means of coping. And it has been there in all the years that followed. One place in particular it keeps turning up—in the stories we tell. When we are older, that is, when the end is somewhere up ahead, within sight more days than we want to admit, loneliness speaks with a more insistent voice. Beckons to us as if urging us to go further. It is now that our stories can take on a different mood. A thread runs through the cloth, colouring all the fabric. In these later years, when the bartender dims the lights, we take notice.

Here follow the stories of an eighty-three-year-old, bits and pieces of memory that managed to snag on the fenceline and make a story because they sounded right.

“At my age some say the best years are gone. Perhaps. But I wouldn't want them back. True, I awaken at the wrong times and fall asleep when I should not. I don’t believe much of what I once did. But there remains a bit of memory, a recollection of old stories told many times and waiting to be told again, an awareness of all that might have been. And a fire that burns more brightly than it ever did before.”Ron Evans

Ron Evans was born in Saskatchewan in 1936. With the exception of four years in a parish, his working life was spent as a chaplain and teacher in psychiatric and general hospitals in Houston, California, and Saskatchewan. In another life, he would ask to have the courage to be an actor or join the circus; as it was he got only as far as the church. He and his wife Norma live at Shields, a village south of Saskatoon on the edge of Blackstrap Lake in Saskatchewan.

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