Tag Archives: history

FMM 10 11 2024 Oh Canada!

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”~ Martin Luther King, Jr. I have links with Canada on both sides of my family tree.  Many years ago, my great-grandparents (on my father’s side) decided to emigrate to Canada.  This was their second migration.  Earlier, shortly after they got […]

FMM 9 20 2024 Sticks and Stones

“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.” ~ Barack Obama. I have spent more than 85% of my life living in a land that was not the land of my birth.  Thus, as I recently posted on social media, I identify as Immigrant.  My […]

FMM 7 12 2024 Sustainable Storytelling

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” ~ Ben Okri. My father was a storyteller.  He was also a Minister, and so had the opportunity and the venue, each Sunday morning, to intersperse his preaching with […]

FMM 5 24 2024 A Ton of Bricks

“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” ~ Mark Twain. They say confession is good for the soul.  I was an Elvis fan from early.  You could say I had a celebrity crush on him, and even had a postcard sized head shot in black and white pinned on my […]

FMM 5 6 2022 No wrong path

‘Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.’ ~  Thich Nhat Hanh. The first time I went to Key West, it still had the sleepy quality of a fishing village.  I was immediately in love.  Four years before I had been living in Jamaica, and Key West […]

FMM 1 21 2022 On the Tiptoe of Expectation

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” ~ James Baldwin. My father was a minister (parson, preacher) by education and vocation, but became a teacher when we moved to Jamaica. He had two jobs, his charge of three churches, and to be chaplain and parttime Bible Knowledge teacher at the high […]

FMM 11 19 2021 Lessons Learned

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.” ~ Khalil Gibran. I was introduced to the poet Khalil Gibran in high school.  I don’t know who was the first person to find and share ‘The Prophet’ but his prose […]

FMM 12 28 18 Perhaps Inevitable

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.” ~ Charles Dickens.  It has been a memorable week, and a week of memories.  We spent one day sauntering (sauntering at brisk pace though, it was quite chilly) through the city center of Manchester, the city I was born in (but […]

FMM 12 21 18 The long way home

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” ~ Matsuo Basho.  They say we form memories best by associating things with something else.  There are times when a long forgotten scene appears clearly in your mind, along with the associated smells and emotions, triggered by who knows what.  You may go to […]

8 31 18 I’m with Them

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” ~ Frederick Douglass. Music formed the backdrop to my formative years.  In a little Jamaican town where the Saturday open air market was our mall, and the only place we got dressed up to go was church, we milked every ounce of pleasure out of music.  […]