An episode of the The Widow We Do Now? podcast in August featured widower Treagan White, who talked about the life and death of his wife Kim White through cancer, and his life since. Listening to it over the last week — it’s almost an hour and a half long — I had a lot of “wow, you think that too!?” moments.

One of the things that confounds Oliver is making choices, and when you sit back and think about the number of things in everyday life that are choices—what clothes to wear? what to have for breakfast? lunch? supper? multiple choice tests, what’s your favourite? questions—it’s a tsunami.

The tsunami crested before Christmas when motherless Oliver was faced, for the first time, with buying Christmas gifts all by himself.

One day in late November I came home to find that Oliver had uncorked a prepaid Visa card he’d be given for for his 20th birthday. I asked him what he’d used it for, and he was cagey in that “don’t ask because it involves you” kind of way. He eventually admitted that he’d used it on a website that would take over the process of buying gifts.

Alarm bells immediately went off inside my head: a website that collects credit numbers and the names, addresses, and predilections of friends and family? That had danger written all over it.

While Oliver’s Visa was only worth $25, so his financial liability wasn’t great, his emotional liability was on the line, and so, treading the murky line between privacy invasion and duty of care that parents know well, I set off to find out everything I could about joyful.gifts.

Initial signs weren’t good: there was no physical address or location listed on the site, no social media links to follow, the domain name registration hid the contact information, and an initial email inquiry went seemingly unanswered. I feared the worst, and consulted brother Mike to seek confirmation of my paranoia.

And then a surprising thing happened: I got an email back from Mariam, apologizing for a tardy reply:

Yes! We are real :) We were so excited when your son found us. The internet is a huge place and it’s hard to stand out and compete against the Googles and Amazons of the world.

We exchanged a few more emails, and I learned they’re a small family startup near Bear, Delaware. Based on my experience, they added links to social media on their site, and I was able to follow those to the point where I was satisfied enough that they were on the up and up. So I handed over my credit card and waited for joyful.gifts to save Oliver’s Christmas.

And, as it turned out, they did exactly what they said they were going to do: they sent custom-tailored gifts to everyone Oliver specified, with a per-gift limit of $25 and a per-gift fee of $4.99, shipping included. The gifts arrived on time, with a gift card from Oliver, wrapped nicely in fabric bags. My mother received a music box, my brother Johnny a perpetual motion machine, and I received a USB-powered digital clock.

Oliver, miracle of miracles, pulled a Kobayashi Maru on Christmas.

Today in the mail I got a lovely handwritten thank you card from Jonathan and Mariam at joyful.gifts, and they asked me help spread the word about their enterprise; I’m happy to do so. If you too are challenged by choice (or time, or, during COVID, ability to shop), Oliver’s experience suggests that joyful.gifts might be just the site for you.

How do we develop our daily living consumable tastes? I have no idea. But I’ve been using Ban-brand antiperspirant for as long as I can remember, the unscented variety, as I’ve no wish to smell like “fresh cotton” or “satin breeze,” two of their other varieties. Here’s a photo I took in a Boston hotel in 2012 showing it as part of my gels-and-fluids collection in my luggage, along with toothpaste, hand sanitizer, gold printing ink and lip balm.

I’ve had difficulty locating Ban Unscented for the last year or so: sometimes it’s available a Sobeys or Shoppers Drug Mart and sometimes it’s not, and, more often than not, if it is available it’s only in “powder fresh” scent.

Ban is a brand of the Japan-based multinational Kao Corporation, which also owns other familiar brands like Curel, Biore, and Jergens. In other words, it’s not a small-batch artisanal deodorant maker.

Last I decided to get to the bottom of the apparent Ban ban on PEI and used the contact form on the Ban website to send a query. The initial response, an automated one, was curious for its inclusion of this mystical incantation:

In addition, please be advised that for increased efficiency, we use message preview panes that allow us to read your message without actually opening it.  If you track how your messages are handled, you may get a message that states that your message was deleted without being read.  Due to how we operate, the tracking message will not be accurate.  You can be confident that we read all correspondence that we receive.

Including that smacks of a “someone thought we deleted their email before we read it — get through to legal and make sure we’re protected!!” exchange at corporate. Regardless, this morning came the reply:

We are sorry that you are having difficulty locating our product.

Our products are now sold online only through Walmart.ca and amazon.ca.

Unfortunately, we are not able to sell directly to consumers due to licensing issues.

We hope this information is useful and we look forward to your continued interest in our products.

Sure enough, Amazon sells Ban Unscented for $8.17/container, and Walmart sells it for $3.98/container.

Has it come to this? Must I really go to Walmart for my deodorant?

How difficult it is to find non-payola mattress reviews online is perhaps the clearest example of how how the commercial internet fails us. At the same time, in a not-unrelated development, mattress technology and marketing has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I last bought a mattress, with the arrival of the compressed-bed-in-a-box disrupters and their “why do you need a showroom when we let you try it for 100 nights?!” entreaties.

I’ve a feeling my mattress is slowly killing me in my sleep: it’s a old school, not particularly well-made king size coil mattress set on a pair of twin box springs. From an earlier time. I have never loved it, perhaps in part because my experience of it before it was wrangled up our stairs by burly delivery drivers was a 10 minute test drive at Sears. For a time it was set on a prison-like wooden bed frame that ultimately fell apart; in recent years it’s just sitting on the floor.

So, dear readers, tell me about your mattress if you will. Where did you buy? What style? How did you choose? How do you sleep? Every body is different, yes; but I need to get the lay of the land in a forum outside of the influencer echo chamber.

Catherine died a year ago tomorrow night.

I am into my fourth year of making regular voluntary blood plasma donations at the Canadian Blood Services centre in Charlottetown.

Truth be told, I’ve been at it for longer than that, but I fell into a lapse for an awfully long time simply because, at the time, the mechanisms for “donor engagement” were weak, and I stopped getting reminders to make appointments.

In the intervening years things have improved dramatically, and there’s now an excellent, useful website and an excellent, useful mobile app to support donors, combined with a full-court press WUPHF-style ”we’re going to remind you in all possible media” engagement effort that makes it next to impossible to drop off.

One of the things the updated website sports is a “Bleed Times” chart that shows the time it took to donate–or at least the “harvesting” phase thereof–with the option to export the image, or the data underlying. Here’s mine, showing donations from 2018 to present:

The standard plasma donation is 500 ml. There’s a cycle to the donation process: blood is removed, plasma extracted, and blood returned. Each cycle takes 5 to 6 minutes, and, depending on a number of conditions, sometimes it takes two cycles to complete the 500 ml donation, sometimes it takes three, and, in rare occasions, four. That’s why the bleed time varies from 15 minutes to almost 30 minutes.

The donor centre in Charlottetown has been open throughout the pandemic (they were closed at the very beginning for plasma donations, but have been reopened fully since the summer). As with everything else in public life, they have new protocols in place to mitigate COVID-19 transmission: mask wearing, plexiglass barriers, a reduced set of pre-screening operations (they no longer take your blood pressure or your weight).

Despite these enhancements, donating plasma remains remarkably easy and, if not “painless,” at least limited to a few very quick, skilfully-executed jabs. I’m generally in, pre-screened, and have completed my donation in under an hour.

There are plasma donation centres in St. John’s, Charlottetown, Halifax, Saint John, London, Sudbury, Edmonton and Calgary, and you can make an appointment quickly and easily online.

Remember the Geese, from Karine Polwart and Pippa Murphy.

We are each other’s wind resistance, a human skein. And we’re not going to make it on our own.

A poem by Heather Christle, anthologized in Set Me On Fire: A Poem for Every Feeling, by Ella Risbridger.

At the beginning of every drop-in grief support group I’ve been to we’ve started with the reciting of “Our Promise,” which is a very helpful scene-setting for the hour following:

Our Promise

This is a safe, welcoming place.
What is spoken here, stays here.
Share only as much as is comfortable for you.
Listening to others is a good growth experience.
If you feel pressure to talk and don’t feel like it, say so.
Your story is true and unique and not open to comparison.
We will avoid giving advice.
We will listen and not interrupt.
Each of us has equal time, we do not monopolize.
Your spirituality and belief system is yours and is to be honored.
The group will begin and end on time.
Thoughts and feelings are neither right nor wrong, they just are.

This is a support group, not a therapy group.

Support means I will walk with you.
I will not try to change you or how you feel.
I will simply be here beside you.

Reading this in the clear light of day, it strikes me as valuable guiding words for any group, grief-involved or not. Or, indeed, for a romantic partnership.