I sought outfit advice from my brother Mike this morning—he has stronger connections to the real world, and tells the truth, both useful qualities.

He branded it “smart casual.”

Which is a huge step up from the, say, “lethargic distracted” or “frugal deluded” style that might describe my stock in trade otherwise.

Having brothers is great, you know.

Photo by Oliver.

My office mate, and the closest thing I have to a spiritual advisor, Archdeacon John Clarke turns 60 on March 10, 2021, and all he’s asked for is healthy mothers and children in Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Tanzania, asking well wishers to make a donation to The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund:

Your gift helps ensure the gains made in maternal and newborn health, food security and nutrition will be sustained in Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Tanzania, while these partners work to supply vulnerable communities with PPE (personal protective equipment), information and facilities for handwashing and proper hygiene, and science-based information about prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

You can donate online and gifts are matched 6:1 by Global Affairs Canada.

Lucy Dacus’s Night Shift has been on repeat in my house, my car, and my head for months: while I lack the vocabulary to describe its wonderments, suffice to say that it’s three or four songs packed into one. I love it.

Dacus released Thumbs to Bandcamp today, and it promises similar delights.

My morning so far.

In his New Yorker piece on Mike Nichols, Louis Menaud writes:

Nichols later said that he never had a friend until he went to the University of Chicago. He entered in the fall of 1949, when he was seventeen. Nichols was well read, but academically indifferent, professionally undirected, and highly defended. He had nothing to back up his sense of superiority, which is not a good place to be.

This prompted me to think about the notion of being defended versus being undefended, about which I’d use to describe myself, and about whether one is a healthier state than the other.

What do you think?

Beau Miles walked 88 km in 29 hours, from his home in the countryside to a workshop he was presenting in the city. The topic of the workshop: “I chose to walk to work, and this is why.”

He is such a compelling filmmaker and storyteller. What emerges from this film, among other things, is the value of experiencing the same-old same-old in unfamiliar ways so as to see it anew all over again, a helpful ethos during a time when few of us wander more than a few blocks from home.

Don Jardine has been posting up a storm on his Our Island Climate site of late, including an item today about a 1963 lightning strike on Trinity United Church, our neighbour just down Prince Street.

The full story from the September 3, 1963 edition of The Guardian, written by George Condon:

Trinity Church Damaged By Lightning Saturday

Lightning struck Trinity United Church in Charlottetown with the force of an explosion at the height of a storm Saturday and left damage in its wake affecting the entire city.

Trinity itself suffered damage which will run into several hundreds of dollars while neighbouring homes were bombarded by flying brick and pierced by lightning.

Cars in the street were battered while power lines and transformers were burnt to a crisp, causing power failure through most of the city and surrounding districts.

The fury of the lightning was so great persons in most parts of the city, some a half-mile or more away, though[t] the bolt had struck in their immediate vicinity.

The storm began without great fury. It was not until approximately 3:30 p.m. Saturday that it struck with all its force. The sudden crash of thunder was heard for miles while the flash of lightning ran from Southport to the western section of the city. Almost an inch of rain drenched the area at the same time.

DEBRIS SCATTERED

The lightning bolt which struck the church hit with such force that brick-chips from the chimney at the centre of the east wall were found as far away as Grafton Street. The chimney itself disintegrated while lightning tore through the building and out the other side.

The Henry Wooldridge residence, next door at 203 Sydney Street was pelted by falling brick and sustained three holes in the roof and broken windows as a result. The lightning passed right through the house shattering a salt shaker held by Mrs. Wooldridge.

Damage to the Church included the destruction of the rear chimney and nearby brickwork, smashed wall boards and shingles, a rafter split tom the peak of the roof to the eve, loosened bricks and stones on the walls, and curling of the lead flashings at the inside ridge of the roof.

Damage to the church’s electrical system is still undetermined but it is known that many fixtures were shattered, wires were burnt and fuses blown. There were no services in the Church on Sunday.

Sidney Street resembled a war-time scene with great chunks of rubble and broken glass lying about.

M[r]s. Henry Wooldridge, standing over the stove in her kitchen next door, thought there had been an atomic blast. “The windows started breaking and the lightning came right in the back door and out the front,” she said.

As the lightning passed through her kitchen it struck the salt shaker in her hand, scattering the fragments in all directions and stunning her for a second.

LUCKY TO BE ALIVE

“It seemed to come in through the back door and over to the stove. The whole stove was sort of blue and a big flash came down from the light socket. We are lucky to be alive,” she said.

Damage to the Wooldridge home included broken windows, holes in the door, loss of power, including the destruction of the electric motor in their stove, and piles of rubble in the yard.

A hugh slab of concrete missed the house by inches and crushed a wooden tool box Mr. Wooldridge had in the yard.

Sarah VanIderstine, 83, who lives across the street at 200 Sidney, left her chair for only a moment, but when she returned there was broken glass all over the floor and a brick was laying on the chair.

CARS DAMAGED

A Volkswagen car belonging to Roger MacLaren, 205 Sidney Street, had the roof pushed in and the rear window of broken by falling brick. Fred Roberts lost the rear window of his car. A New Brunswick car and at least one other vehicle also received damage.

A gaping hole appeared in the roof of 205 Sydney St. where a bolt of lightning passed through.

Power was disrupted for hours as wires in the immediate vicinity were down and a transformer in the Federal Building was damaged. Power company linemen responded to over a hundred calls in and around the city.

Lightning was seen to be dancing along wires, the top of the new Confederation Memorial structure, and Woolworth’s in the city, and as far away as the Southport Country Club.

Residents saw the lightning which struck the church signalled the end of the storm here.

The story was accompanied by this scene of Sydney Street:

I have taken great comfort from attending the monthly grief support group sessions offered by Hospice PEI. As Catherine was living with cancer, and my thoughts would turn toward how I would live on afterward, it never occurred to me that the company of other people, united by grief, would be part of it; if my thoughts did turn to such things, more often than not I would picture myself running as fast as I could the other direction.

I wrote to a friend this week that a year ago I was acting as though I could “treat grief like it was an extracurricular course that I could skip,” and that I was “acting like I was some great exception to the rule of how these things work.” Later I wrote to my family that last spring it felt like I was  “trying to outrun grief.” And both were true: the template I had for grieving was all about “moving on” or “powering through,” and I truly did think, in my heart of hearts, that if I buckled down hard enough I could skip the usual grieving rigamarole and get on with life.

I was wrong.

And, fortunately, in mid-May I came to my senses, and reached out for support. I stopped running.

In the months since I’ve found support in many different places in addition to the grief support group: from Oliver, from my mother, from my brothers, from friends, from my psychologist, from my social worker, in talking to others who are grieving, in podcasts and books, and, mostly recently, on Facebook. Through all this my conception of grief has changed completely from “something I need to power through” to “a new part of who I am and always will be.”

That’s a hard thing to write in a way that doesn’t make it sound like “I will now and forever be sad,” especially if, as I once did, you think of grief and sadness as synonyms. What I mean by it is that I have been cracked open in a substantial and undeniable way, and that crack–a wound is one way of thinking about it–will always be with me. But the wound need not be disabling, and the wound need not lead me to being stuck, or being jaded or being depressed (although, no doubt, it can, and I’ve felt those tugs as much as anything else I’ve felt). 

All of which leads me to men.

Although the monthly grief support group is open to all, and although there have certainly been other men who’ve attended by times, they have, especially recently, been few and far between. On a personal level this doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of my attending, as long as I remember to listen mindfully and to stanch my natural inclination to fill silences (the “promise” that’s read at the beginning of every session is so helpful, in part, for its role in that reminding). But every time I find myself as the only man in a support group I cannot help but worry about the other grieving men, my brothers-in-grief, and whether they might be stuck where I was, trying to power through.

I am afraid for them, and I am afraid for those around them, because I’ve learned enough to understand that grief ignored, grief bottled, grief contained, grief powered through, has the power to leak or explode in harmful, dangerous ways.

Everyone’s grief is different and we each need to find the path that works for us; there’s no way to prescribe a universal path, a universal timetable, a universal result. But I have been well trained by my lifetime growing up in western society that, as a man, my emotions are to be constrained and managed, that admitting fallibility is weak and to be avoided at all costs, that anyone atypical needs to be culled from the social herd, that self-reliance is noble, and asking for help is something you only do when the water is well and truly pouring through the roof. If even then.

I am so grateful that I am finding my way through this in a way that allows me to be mindful of that education-in-masculinity and to start to unpack it. In this I owe a great debt to Oliver, who we tried so hard to raise with that mindfulness, and who’s atypicalness, fortunately, extends to his regard for gender; to my trans and gender-non-binary friends who’ve shared profound insights into what they’ve learned as they’ve confronted the world on their terms; to the women I’ve listened to and shared with around the grief support table who’ve said, beyond anything else “we see you there, it’s okay.”

All I can do in the face of this, knowing what I’ve learned, is to write about my own path with hopes that it will, at least a little, open up the atlas of what’s possible for others that follow on.

I missed in January that The Peter and Oliver Podcast passed its 15th anniversary.

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of Oliver over the last 20 years, but none captures as much of him, and of us, as these audio snapshots of our life.

Remember the Jacobean Cacao Husk Chocolate Tea that I mentioned in November? Well it’s back in stock at Riverview Country Market after a long time out of stock.

“You got more of the Jacobean tea in stock!”, I exclaimed yesterday.

“Yah, we brought it in mostly for you,” my smiling cashier revealed.

So I feel an extra responsibility to encourage you all to pop out and buy some. It’s not cheap, but it is the perfect cold-winter-night drink.