The Crow Who Tampered with Time

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In this collection of essays, Saskatoon writer Lloyd Ratzlaff tackles a
wide range of topics, from the mundane and early details of everyday
existence (early morning crow caws, scampering gophers, elusive weasels)
to the mysterious and spiritual (dreams of a dead grandfather,
archangels). Organized into four sections, headed simply A, B, C, and D,
the pieces are replete with autobiographical revelations and memories of
childhood, adolescence, and maturity—a modernization, if you will, of
Shakespeare’s seven stages of man. Ratzlaff is intensely open about
his failed relationships (including his first marriage); his interest in
religions of all sorts; his attitudes, good and bad, toward his
students; his vocation as a pastor and his avocation for writing, his
preferred career.

Ratzlaff’s well-crafted essays are personal in nature, lyrical in
tone, and polished in style. He is wryly funny and self-deprecating when
describing himself as “forty years and forty pounds past
adolescence,” caring and compassionate in discussing a troubled
six-year-old “who drove his first grade teacher to distraction,” and
philosophical when considering an 80-year-old homeless man’s unique
concepts of Finalism. In these troubled times, this collection is an
island of calm.