Archdeacon John Clarke writes about the parish’s internal debate about requiring proof-of-vaccination to attend services.

“It’s going to be a nice day today,” she declared.

The sun had climbed higher. The whole island, and the sea, were glistening. The air seemed very light.

“I can dive,” Sophia said. “Do you know what it feels like when you dive?”

“Of course I do,” her grandmother said. “You let go of everything and get ready and just dive. You can feel the seaweed against your legs. It’s brown, and the water’s clear, lighter towards the top, with lots of bubbles. And you glide. You hold your breath and glide and turn and come up, let yourself rise and breathe out. And then you float. Just float.”

From The Summer Book (via Hundred Rabbits)

James A. Reeves, in part:

There’s nothing sane to do except remain vigilant and uncertain. And that’s the hardest thing, isn’t it? Remaining uncertain until the shape of a thing becomes clear.

Yes.

I make the mistake—I think it’s a mistake—of assuming the Algorithm is serving y’all up the same new tracks as it’s serving up to me.

So, for that reason only, I point you to Day After Tomorrow from Phoebe Bridgers, a cover of the Tom Waits original: just to ensure it doesn’t escape your attention.

The track joins Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (2017), Christmas Song (2018), Silent Night (2019) and If We Make It Through December (2020, my favourite) in her pantheon of holiday season releases.

I am, needless to say, a fan.

Last week I rode Jack for the first time, and felt compelled to document the experience.

I rode Jack again today, and learned even more. Jack will be the horse I successfully “post” on, I think; I don’t have this down yet, but I’ve been practicing, and I know enough now to know what I don’t know. 

I’m also getting increasingly self-contained with saddling Jack up; again, I’m not there yet, but I’m at 90%, and I’m pretty sure in a “saddle the horses, the Cylons approach!” emergency situation I could hold my own. 

Last night was the annual “Modified Yankee Swap” meeting of the Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island, the highlight of the fountain pen-based social calendar in Charlottetown.

The “modified” comes from two important departures from tradition: the gifts at play come from The Bookmark and its suppliers, rather than the participants, and the gifts are actually desirable rather than “amusing and impractical.”

I left the night with a lovely Monteverde fountain pen (with a magnetic cap!) and a copy of Danny Gregory’s new book.

In other words, I left the night with just about the perfect gifts, as if tailor-made for me, despite having started the night with a jigsaw puzzle and some (admittedly desirable) Pilot ink. The trading fates were good to me.

There was, for a club about pens and pencils, remarkably little talk of pencils and pens, evidence that, for many of us, they are partly something of a conceit for getting together with other weird people.

The lack of nib-talk was due in part to the remit from host Dan to “tell the group something they don’t know about you,” a task everyone commendably rose to. So there were a lot of stories of lost passports, altitude sickness, bagpipe playing, African Grey parrots, and pen-adjacent hobbies.

The evening was hosted at The Pilot House, with free-flowing hors d’oeuvres throughout. At some point the allure of bacon-wrapped scallops busted through my vegetarian shields, and I went a little mad with porcine gluttony.

I was thinking recently about the number of peer support groups I’m a member of: families of trans children, parents of autistic adults, grief support. I realized last night that my monthly night with the stationery-mad for the past three years has been an important source of peer support in its own right, and I owe my fellow weirdos a great debt of thanks for that.

We all need a night once in a while where it’s okay to eat bacon-wrapped scallops, talk about our parrots, and admit an unusual fondness for certain types of paper.

When I was a child I was a regular at the Hamilton YMCA on Saturday mornings. True to the Y’s “spirit, mind, and body” ethos, that included everything from basketball to tumbling to swimming to model car racing to arts & crafts.

And watching a lot of 16 mm films.

Most of those were Laurel & Hardy comedies, Disney cartoons, and the like, but there was an outlier, a film I recall viscerally to this day that, until this morning, I couldn’t recall the name of.

I knew two things.

First, it starred well-known Canadian actor Barry Morse; there was a scene featuring him standing on the edge of the Burlington Bay Lift Bridge as it came down that is burned into my memory (my father worked at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, right beside the bridge, so this was particularly significant to me).

Second, it had a memorable score, music that today, 40 years later, still runs through my head often.

I woke up this Sunday morning determined to identify the film, and, perhaps aided by foggy-headedness resulting in a different search strategy, I did it: the film was Hailey’s Gift, and it was directed by Bruce Pittman in 1977.

Armed with this wonderful revelation, I reached out to Bruce on Facebook (where, it turns out, we have two friends in common), and he told me it was the first dramatic film he ever directed, and that the music was by Hagood Hardy.

Bruce has had a career of enormous breadth in the years since Hailey’s Gift: he co-founded Saturday Night at the Movies for TVO (a staple in our family for years), founded the Revue cinema in Toronto, and has directed heaps of episodic television.

I’ve requested a copy of the film via interlibrary loan, and I’m so looking forward to revisiting it.

I’ll be needing a new Holy Grail now.

Found in the 1964 Prince Edward Island telephone directory, just before the “Alberton” section.

It’s helpful to remember, in the age of Delta and Omicron, that the phone book once contained the suggestion to maintain a pee bucket and playing cards in our fallout shelters.

I had coffee this week with an emissary from Toronto, someone considering a move to the Island now that COVID times have rendered the big city lifeless and crowded, with none of the old upsides.

She brought word of a new CBC show, Sort Of, a show well-summarized by John Doyle in The Globe and Mail (paywall):

So far, while the series has been on CBC Gem, there’s been glowing attention to the fact that CBC has a series with a queer, brown, gender-fluid star at its core. But that’s not the sum and total of it. What makes it truly special is the energy, vitality and the fact that the tone is beautifully judged. The series is a very urban contemporary comedy, a wry portrait of the power plays in romantic relationships – of all types – and amounts to a humane, messy tale of sexual and artistic self-discovery.

You’ll come for the gender-fluidity, but you’ll stay for the performances, the writing, and the Toronto energy that, lifeless and crowded or no, remains alluring to those of us on the fragile edge.

The show is streaming on CBC Gem in Canada, and has been picked internationally. I encourage you to seek it out.

We opened the door at 100 Prince Street this morning to find a lovely pumpkin sitting in the vestibule:

Where might this pumpkin have come from, I asked myself. We are lucky to be the recipients of all manner of interesting things left by friends in the vestibule: books, mustard pickles, bicycle seats, Christmas ornaments, sponge toffee. But a late-season pumpkin was a new one.

Then I remembered that our doorbell is all-seeing and all-knowing, and would have record of the pumpkin delivery. And it did:

So it was late nite hooligans!

But kindly hooligans: those of an earlier time, with a meaner bent, would have smashed the pumpkin on the stoop, but these midnight pumpkineers simply left it, intact, for us to turn into pie.