I was away,

Since when?

For the longest time I’ve been focused on 2014—the year everything went to hell. And surely crafting a usual story from “partner gets cancer while child enters teenage years” is eminently reasonable. Yes, I went away, gathered the horses, receded, armoured up.

Perhaps 2020, when Catherine died? Briefly untethered from the crush. But then the pandemic. We all went away for awhile.

Recently I’ve been revisiting my deeper history, trying to locate, in the forests of my 20s and 30s, the wellspring for prioritizing containment over aliveness. When did my younger self, shellshocked by challenging human relationships, decide that I should follow the emotional path of the armadillo?

All of those time scales are true.

Where was I?

Mark Rego writes, in a 2022 Psychology Today article, about a question clinicians can ask their patients:

The question applies to any disorder, and everyone immediately knows the answer: “Do you feel like yourself?” After working hard trying to figure out what may be wrong, or if the treatment has had a positive effect, I have asked this countless times. In each instance, both the patient and I knew where things stood.

If the answer is “no,” the follow-up question makes it easy for a patient to focus on what is bothering them. After a “no” answer, the follow-up question is, “If you are not fully yourself, what is missing that would get you back to feeling fully like you?” Because the person’s mindset has already been focused on the universal feeling of being oneself, it becomes easy to say why they are or are not fully at their usual baseline. Things like “I am still very tired,” “I still feel blue very often,” or “I feel better but still have no sex drive,” come immediately to the patient’s mind.

This is as good a description as any of where I was, “not myself.”

Rego continues:

Feeling like yourself is like having a jacket that fits perfectly. Only you can tell that every inch of that jacket conforms to your body, and you know as soon as you put it on. Feeling like yourself is similar in that every inch of internal being feels just right and normal.

I have not felt like I’ve been wearing that jacket for a long long time. Which is not to say that my person has been completely compromised, or even a little compromised, all of the time. But the jacket hasn’t been fitting perfectly for as long as I can remember, longer than death and longer than illness.

Faced with that knowledge, what to do?

Phase one was horseback riding, improv, opening myself up to love, lowering some protective shields, seeing vulnerability as an asset not a liability, starting to take maintenance of my physical body seriously.

Phase two involves a lot of reexamination of what my friend Ton calls “my usual story.” What are the tales I’ve long told about myself (to myself, to others), what are the ways I’ve come up with to describe my choices, the events as they played out, the ways I am. What are the habits that I’ve developed to allow me to live the way I’ve lived? Can I change them? What am I afraid of? Am I actually afraid of the things I say I’m afraid of?

I have help to do this, and it’s been challenging and revealing.

I feel energized. 

And I feel like the jacket is starting to fit a lot better.

—

I was away, was printed on my Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress in 24 point Bodoni Bold with fluorescent pink ink on handmade Papeterie Saint-Armand paper. It’s the first piece I’ve set and printed in seven months, the longest I’ve been away from the press since I acquired it.

The yellow dahlias keep on growing in our front yard.

Two years ago last night I plucked myself up and went to my first improv class. Two years later I’m still going, Every week. It’s helped me so, so much in so, so many ways (including leading my heart to Lisa’s door). I owe a great debt to Laurie Murphy for all of this. And to my fellow players, and their yes&ing.

The 5th Wave coffee shop closed up its Queen Street location last week and is relocating to the spot on Great George Street formerly occupied by Coffee Plus. Stopping in at 5th Wave in the morning had become a morning habit on the way back from a cycle run to school: friendly staff, good coffee, laptop-friendly tables (with plenty of power outlets), clean washroom and a good soundtrack. I look forward to their resurrection closer to home.

We took a long walk on the beach a few weeks ago—leaping over a gully and not wanting to leap back the other way meant for a much longer walk that we’d planned—and we encountered scores of woolly bear caterpillars along the way. They were on the beach. On the road. On pathways. Everywhere.

I shot a video of one of them walking toward me on the beach.

Three observations this season:

• We turned the heat on in the house for the winter heating season on October 24, 2023; last year it was October 9, 2022 (compare to Ton).
• The first snow of the season was today, October 30, 2023 (in 2019 it was November 8).
• By lucky coincidence, today was also the day we got the winter tires put on both of our vehicles (repeating my success in 2021).

Here’s the weather warning that appeared on my phone this morning when I woke up:

The chorus of Feeling of Home, new from The East Pointers:

Soul’s invisible, a bit unknown, a little tragic
On a lonely boat, where the longing never ends
Here, then we’re gone, we can’t do this alone
Carrying on, we’re still looking for that feeling of home

The “feeling of home” has been much on my mind, as Lisa and I reimagine together the blue-house-with-the-red-roof to be ours, an exercise in crafting a feeling as much as it is about organizing, painting and rearranging. It’s big, making space—physical, emotional, spiritual—in this house that has been home, in one guise, to me for so long (as long as I can remember living somewhere).

It is a welcoming embrace to Lisa and L., a finding of nooks where stillness can be found, a stanching of the uproot, all of that.

But it’s also about giving myself permission to find hope, future, joy, in a space that was, for so many years, a place of vigilance, expectation, unease, fear, grief.

It is welcoming myself home too.

We get tied in knots, and we try so hard
And it takes everything that we got
And it can breaks our hearts

There used to be a Freshii a few doors up from my office, and it became an occasional lunch spot.

At Freshii, you ordered at the cash register, gave your name, and picked up your order with your name printed on it. The first time I went in, I gave my name as Pete, a nickname I abide a select few others using for me, but a name I’d never ever called myself before.

When I went in the next week, I felt an obligation to consistency to again give my name as Pete (“hold on, buddy — last week you told us your name was Pete, and now suddenly you’re Peter — what gives?!”; clearly I’m very conflict-averse).

Subsequently I extended this Pete-ing to all similar orderings (what if someone from Freshii switched jobs?).

Today I set myself free: I realized I could use any name I wanted to order my doppio macchiato at Starbucks.

And so, for a brief flash, today I became Jaz.

“Doppio macchiato for Jaz… Jaz…”

Why do I spell it with one z? Who knows!

What will I become next time?

I’m in the process of stitching the Reinventorium back together, and part of that is bringing order to the chaos of the scattered archive of letterpress jobs I’ve created over the last 13 years.

Heretofore I’ve had a set of drawers with things randomly stacked; Lisa secured me portable file folder hampers, with rails for legal hanging folders, and we spend the last week organizing larger items into these, and smaller items into a set of photo boxes. It was a good opportunity to see the breadth of things I’ve printed, from business cards to coffee bags to broadsides.

In 2009, as part of a series of interviews about Prince Edward Island’s history of controlling carbon emissions, I recorded an interview with Kirk Brown.

In the blog post I wrote to point to the interview, I wrote:

Kirk was the Director of Research for the Institute of Man and Resources, moving to Prince Edward Island after working with the Ontario Research Foundation and, before that, with Exxon.  He knows as much about Prince Edward Island’s energy needs as anyone you’ll ever meet.

And that proved true.

Kirk died last week; his obituary is a loving paean from a granddaughter for a life well-lived. It starts:

Charles Alexander Kirkland Brown, 17 years old, boards a train in Vaudreuil in 1953, going into Montreal. He notices a young woman boarding at the same station. “Who’s that?” He elbows his friend in the ribs, eyes not leaving the girl. “That? That’s J’Nan Bishop!” Kirk, always calm in a crisis, looks around the train car. He has to get her attention, make an impression. What’s going to impress a girl like this? His heart beats too fast, palms sweaty. Time to gamble. He grabs a paper cup and shoves it down the back of her dress. “Hey!” J’Nan, fierce and confident, turns to give him a piece of her mind. She sees a young man, wiry and strong, with dark curly hair, sparkling brown eyes, and a mischievous smile. “Well, hello!” she says. They get off at the same station. 

So much of what was good and holy about Prince Edward Island in the 1970s and 1980s as an alternative energy leader is due Kirk’s wisdom and leadership. His words in 2009 remain a wise pointer forward. He will be missed.