Dandelions Help

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This collection of columns appeared in the Montreal Gazette between 1990
and 1995. Eve McBride’s professional writing career began in 1982,
when Peter Growski, host of CBC Radio’s Morningside, was so taken with
the fan letter she wrote to him that he hired her to read other
listeners’ letters on the air. Until then, McBride was a struggling
would-be actress, mother of four, wife of a lawyer, and daughter of a
country doctor. What Growski saw in McBride’s letter, and what she was
eventually able to turn into a full-time vocation, was her ability to
“give good weight to life’s banalities.”

Banality, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. McBride
investigates the unsung triumphs and disasters that confront
middle-class Canadians on a daily basis. She thrills, for example, at
the sight of two dandelions growing in an otherwise bleak urban
landscape. She humorously ponders her commitment to feminism after
purchasing a pair of “delicious” high-heeled shoes. She fears for
the safety of a grown daughter who is touring America by car. She rages
at two male judges whose public statements trivialize sexual assualt.
She is terrified by a bat in her bedroom and made queasy after a family
pet eats it. Each column is elegantly written and beautifully
structured, but it is McBride’s ability to find the magic moments in
everyday life that gives her words enduring substance.