Category: Tompkins Blog

Strange This by Paul Tompkins

To love a friend Is to lose a friend Seems strange this way When lovers can not be friends Friends cannot be lovers What a

It’s a Good Friday

Life has been good to me I have to admit, even though it didn’t appear like it was going to end up that way in

Mockingbird Flies South

Canadian Mockingbird is written, the manuscript, providing tremendous relief. It was beginning to feel like the revisions would never end. Three editors who worked on

An Adult Night Out in Riverside, Toronto

Here was a night out to Toronto’s Riverside neighbourhood and the Opera House concert hall to see Belgian group Front 242 playing their final North American

People Were Strange in Santa Carla

Updated August 8, 2022, 1:08 am. Last Sunday, July 31st was the 35th anniversary of feature film The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher. The

The Queer Border I

On a hot Saturday evening my fiancé Susan and I drove across the Peace Bridge to Buffalo, NY from Toronto, ON for a punk rock

10 Fugitive Children

Henry Cousby, pronounced ‘Kosby’, was born in Virginia or Georgia in 1797 and is my oldest documented ancestor, not even two hundred years older. That’s

War Bonds, Pt 1

My father’s oldest brother, Donald, was born in Owen Sound in 1933. For a number of years after Uncle Don’s birth, Grandpa and Grandma lived

Grandpa’s House, Pt 1

Isabelle Grace Althea Tompkins, née McCarter, my paternal grandmother, kept Misty Mints in a Blue Mountain Pottery dish in the living room. Sometimes there were