4 Friday, September 30, 2023 brooklintowncrier.com It's Sunday night at 8 and we're off to hockey practice. My daughter is in the back seat reviewing her science notes. She has a quiz tomorrow. The car study periods are starting to become a regular occurrence. High school homework is more challenging than in grade 8 when she could complete it in class. She's got three sports on the go, hockey, soccer and, her new love, rugby, which means she has to carve out pockets of time when she can. They're taking up every evening and a good portion of her weekend. When I look at our calendar, I don't see a free night until next Saturday…oh wait…scratch that…it's Grandpa's 81st birthday. What a pace Life is busy and I am wondering how long we can sustain this pace. Looking ahead, soccer tryouts loom. If she makes the team, we get a break until November. Rugby only goes until about Halloween. Add in hockey tournaments in October and November plus five days a week on ice. Then we're into the holiday season. So we're going to be eating a lot of 15-minute meals. However, when I think of mornings when I can sleep in or not race out the door to practice, I also consider the alternative. While I grumble about yet another night at the rink, I'm aware of just how lucky I am to afford to get my kid involved. Some families can't. She's busy because she wants to be. But some kids don't want to do it all. Last week I went by a popular hang out where kids were laughing and having fun in unstructured, unsupervised free time. Great, right? Except some were vaping and being a nuisance. I wondered if they're doing this because they don't have better things to do. Expensive activities What I do know is that the cost of activities is high. The older they get, the more expensive they become. Many families are struggling right now and kids' mental health is fragile. Youth activities have never been more needed. As the new sports complex begins construction, it's time to consider ways to offer low cost, safe activities for the 12 to 18 year olds. Yes, we will fill the new centre with activities for the younger ones. But we need to ensure that the teens have a variety of opportunities as well. We're nearing into the rink and my daughter tucks away her schoolwork. She starts texting teammates. One of them is two cars ahead. They call us and our two families talk on speaker phone about the game ahead. The fun begins. Brooklin Family Matters: by Leanne Brown Busy Time Begins The Brooklin Town Crier recently sat down with local author Richard Bercuson to chat about the book he has recently co-authored with Ted (E.W.) Zrudio. Q: You say this project took 30 years to write. Why so long? Life got in the way. We'd started it at each other's houses in Ottawa, side by side, with chips and beer. A few drafts later, both of our lives in Ottawa took twists and turns and it ended up being set aside. We'd get back to it now and then. But of course in the 90s, there was no internet, no real way to effectively collaborate on such a project. Then when together, such as when I visited Ted in the US where he lived for a while, it'd start up again. At one point, we thought we had a publisher. Turns out the guy went out of business, which was a good thing because the story really wasn't in the kind of condition we loved. Technology allowed us to revisit the story, make changes, and re-examine it. By this time though, Ted was in Seoul where he's now a school principal and I'd moved here. So in 2021, we took another crack at it, with editing help from a friend and writer in Ottawa. We'd grown as writers. Ted had published some works as had I with short stories and plays. I think our craft as storytellers had improved immensely. We knew the characters much better and we were closer to it being a proper mystery than ever before. Then this past spring was the major rewrite. We changed the per- BTC Editor Pens Novel By Rhonda Mulcahy Continued on Page 5