FERO is a waste management company based in New Brunswick (the name, at least for marketing purposes, stands for Friendly, Efficient, Reliable and On-time). If you’ve hung out in the back allies of New Brunswick restaurants, you’ve likely seen their dumpsters, which, in addition to a large FERO and their toll-free number, are emblazoned with seemingly-random slogans.

Like this one, in the parking lot of the the Cranewood Bakery in Sackville:

(I love the “Tony’s Pastries Only” add-on: this is presumably a dumpster once used by Tony’s in Moncton).

This weekend I stumbled across the pinnacle of FERO slogans, behind McCready’s Irving in Coles Island, NB:

Need a bin? Say no to drugs. Be Happy. Poetry.

A decade-old CBC story tells the story of the approach:

Fero, which operates across the region, puts its name and phone number on each dumpster.

But it also leaves space for messages, such as: Never Give Up, Seize the Day, Don’t Do Drugs, Stay in School, Smile, Be Happy and Safety.

Andrew King, the company’s director of special projects, said the staff draw up the messages on a computer and then print each one onto decals.

The messages are added to the dumpsters when they are returned to the shop for repairs or a new paint job.

“If we can have an effect on somebody, somewhere, at some time, we thought that would be a great way to do it,” King said.

King said there’s no agenda underlying the messages or major commercial benefit to display them.

He said it’s just something that helps Fero — Be Happy.

Smile.

We had occasion to cancel Eastlink Internet service this month. And it took the entire month to do so. 

There’s no way to cancel online.

There’s no way to email a request. 

The Eastlink toll-free number regularly has hold times of an hour or longer (we don’t know how long it takes them to answer, as they never did, over repeated calls). 

The online chat system has never displayed anything other than a wait time of 57 minutes. 

What we ended up doing today—finally—is canceling by SMS.

To do this required texting the word “Tech” to the SMS support number (because texting “Billing” consistently returns an automated “SMS is currently closed”) and then, once an agent responds, tell them you want to cancel service and they’ll “transfer” you to Billing. 

Once connected to Billing—it might take awhile—you will be asked for your PIN. If you don’t remember your PIN, or you don’t have one, you’ll need your account number and the amount of your last bill, to confirm your identity.

At that point, at least in our experience, it just takes a minute or two to complete the cancellation request.

This is a selfie I took in Malmö, in 2016, on the day of Olle and Luisa’s 10th anniversary:

In the hours that followed there was a wonderful party, with fascinating people, free-flowing klezmer, and a free-flowing bar; the night ended with 3:00 a.m. falafel. It was the escape from the everyday I needed, with people I love dearly, at exactly the right time.

In this photo, though, there’s a severity, a flatness, that I couldn’t see at the time. I wasn’t happy, and that unhappiness, looking back, was spread across me.

Last summer my pal Dave emailed a kindhearted message: “You look like a million bucks,” he wrote. And it wasn’t news to me: I felt like a million bucks.

On this morning, a morning peppered with tensions surrounding mercurial moods, worry about my daughter, who’s 4000 km away as I write (and who sat on her laptop last night and cracked the screen), anxiety about finally laying Catherine to rest in a few weeks, and a deeper feeling of instability as tectonic plates shift in my personal and professional life, I don’t, at the moment, feel like a million bucks

But.

I look at that photo, and I know that I also no longer feel that severity, that flatness.

I’m getting better at feeling. I’m getting better (little bit by little bit) at feeling okay at being angry, and especially dispensing with the self-imposed limitation that stanches anger (because being angry seldom makes logical sense). In my deepest depths I feel joy, even though that joy gets buffeted constantly, even though the price of that joy (which requires full-hearted feeling of all the things) is woundingly hard sometimes.

In the summer of 2016, I was holding it together; that is all I could muster. Oh how I wish I could reach back and say to that version of myself: “Pete,” I would say, “uncork yourself.” I don’t know if that Pete would have listened. If he had, perhaps feeling all the things would have started earlier. Or maybe I had to walk through that, to muddle my way through, in survival mode; maybe I didn’t have a choice.

I feel alive now in a way that I didn’t know existed then, in a way that I couldn’t imagine possible then. It’s hard. It’s joyful. It’s hard. It’s joyful.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.