In his post Fix Three Broken Things, David Cain writes about the “psychic injury” of having broken things in your life:

All broken things, no matter how easily they’re fixed, levy ongoing costs to well-being. They cause psychic injury every time you see or interact with them. The Buddha’s word for human angst or suffering was dukkha, referring to a wagon wheel that turned unevenly around its axle. The wagon still gets you from town to town, but the ride is grinding and bumpy.

Catherine’s art piece had been leaning against a wall in the print shop for more than a year, waiting to be cleaned up and moved. It was a glaring “broken thing” and, indeed, every time I opened the door to the print shop its presence there made my day a little more grinding and bumpy.

Reading Cain’s post was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it raised the profile of the “psychic injury” relative to the perceived pain of actually fixing the broken thing. 

In the end, it took me about two hours from start to finish to prepare the art piece, call the Palliative Care Centre to get permission to drop it off, load it into the car, drive out to the Centre, unload it, and come home. Peanuts, relative to the daily grinding bumpiness.

Cain’s post finishes:

But the moment that thing gets fixed, the relief is surprisingly deep; you were bearing more pain than you knew. And so close to its end the whole time!

Exactly.

Five years ago January I spent every day for two weeks at Catherine’s side in the Provincial Palliative Care Centre. My time there, though filled with anxiety and anguish, also feels like a magical bubble of wrap-around support after a six years of caregiving, and I hold a soft spot in my heart for the centre and its staff and volunteers.

It was Catherine’s wish that the piece that she created with BJ Sandiford, The Spirit of Charlottetown, be donated to the Centre. It took a five year procrastination to get me there, but yesterday I loaded the piece into the car, drove out to the Centre, and dropped it off. It was my first time inside the door since the day Catherine died.

Here’s the piece displayed at Receiver Coffee in 2016:

I’m happy that The Spirit of Charlottetown will have a second life: Catherine’s vision for the piece was to represent the care and support she was receiving, from myriad corners, as she lived with cancer. It will continue to do so.

One of the things I learned during the days I spent at the Centre in 2020 was that both of the palliative care physicians of the day, Drs. Lecours and Baker, drove electric vehicles. Despite this, there was no EV charger in the Centre’s parking lot, an absence I felt myself, as we’d purchased a Kia Soul EV just the month before, and having to worry about where and how to charge it was an overhead I didn’t need.

In the months following, I advocated for the installation of an EV charger at the Centre with the provincial government, and received words of encouragement from MLAs James Aylward (then Minister of Health) and Natalie Jameson (MLA for Charlottetown-Hillsborough Park, where the Centre is located). I’m happy to report that, five years later, it appears that this is about to happen: on my visit yesterday I spotted the electrical setup in place:

I’ll choose to see this EV charger as a part of Catherine’s legacy as well.

The blog of Nashville’s Parnassus Books (of which Ann Patchett is co-owner) has proved to be a rich vein for book recommendations. The 2024 Gift Guide: Fiction Edition has, in particular, paid off well for me.

I’ve just read two of the books that appear on that list, both secured from the Provincial Library Service.

Sandwich, by Catherine Newman, is described like this on the Parnassus blog:

This is a book I will place in the hands of every 40-something woman trying to balance raising kiddos and aging parents while attempting to have some semblance of intimacy within their marriage. I had no idea I needed to read this book, and I am so grateful I did. Funny and poignant, I will reread this book on the hard days and remind myself it’s okay to laugh (and cry).

I am neither 40-something, nor a woman, but I loved this book nonetheless. It takes place over a week in a beach house on Cape Cod: Rocky and Nick have gathered for the week, as they have for decades, with their (now-adult) children, and are later joined later by Rocky’s own parents. 

We have spent many weeks at the shore over the last three summers, with various combinations of family, and I saw a lot in the book that rang familiar. It’s a breezy read, well told, structured around the 7 days of the week, and, spurred on by getting it as an one week “express loan” from the library, a whipped through it in a pleasant two days.

In a similar vein, albeit at much greater length, with many more webs that weave together, Same As It Ever Was: A Novel, by Claire Lombardo, is a multi-generational “sandwich” story about parents Julia and Mark, their adult children, and their own parents.

Here’s what Parnassus writes about the book:

Lombardo is a master of the domestic novel. She is able to depict the complexity of a marriage, the pull women feel on various versions of the self, and what connection to others truly means and feels like in a way that feels honest and raw in the most beautiful way possible. I adored this book and almost couldn’t bear to finish it.

I also adored the book. Since I finished it yesterday—also the result of sprint—I’ve felt strangely like I lived inside the novel, and, being unable to discuss this with Lisa (who’s reading it now) feels like keeping secrets.

Lombardo is a skilled writer, and the structure of the novel, back and forth through time, hinting at, but withholding details, feels like the way that life plays out.

Another book I read this month, found, in this case, not by Parnassus, by by Lisa, who noticed it’s been filmed for release later this year, is The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.

I am a sucker for impossible voyage stories, and I was attracted to the book for that reason, and because it’s a story of a couple roughly my age dealing with loss and illness by heading out to walk the South West Coast Path in the U.K.

I feared that the plodding nature of a long distance walk wouldn’t translate well to the page, and that the book we would a series of “walked some more, had lunch, found a campsite” vignettes. And it is that. But Winn is a colourful writer, and her descriptions of both their interior landscapes and the exterior ones they are trudging through, are lovely. I look forward to seeing how it translates to film.

Here’s the Apple Maps view of the corner of Kent and Great George from the summertime:

And here’s a photo that Lisa took while walking by the same corner earlier this week:

It’s a remarkable change to the neighbourhood, and one that seemingly happened in the blink of an eye: one day the buildings—the Financial Building and its neighbour, the former home of Hearts & Flowers—were there, and the next day, poof, they were gone.

The Financial Building was a quirky building, a model for how to make a non-accessible building, with stairs everywhere. I spent a lot of time inside it, for one reason or another. I can’t say I’ll miss it exactly, but it was a fixture, and part of the fabric of our neighbourhood, an example of a certain school of architecture that has since passed.

It will soon be replaced by a new 85-unit apartment building, being developing by a Homburg company.

We’re hosting a meeting of The Pen and Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island in the print shop in Saturday night, and in service of that I’m preparing an original lino print of a fountain pen—a Nemosine Singularity—that all who attend will get to print the final colour of, and then take the print away to assemble into a notebook.

I’m printing these on the new-to-us etching press, an experience that’s got a very different feel from the unrelenting breakneckery of the Golding Jobber Nº 8 letterpress. “Slow printing,” you might call it.

The pen itself looks like this:

I made a pencil sketch of the pen; the transparent body made for a more interesting sketch, as I could show the inner workings:

Using carbon paper, I traced the sketch onto a 4”x6” piece of battleship linoleum, and the, to start, carved away everything except the body of the pen:

To test the carving, I pulled a print of this in black:

I made some minor adjustments to the carving, and then printed 30 copies, using Ternes Burton pins for registration, and Akua transparent base with a single drop of blue for the ink:

Next I carved away everything I wanted to remain the very light blue background colour:

I overprinted my initial prints using Speedball silver ink:

Finally, I carved off the nib of the pen—the only part I wanted to remain as silver—and ran the prints through again, this time using Akua carbon black:

Here are each of the three stages of the print for comparison:

I ran only one print of the black layer, as we’ll invite the “pen night” folks to print this layer themselves tomorrow night. I turned that print into a prototype notebook:

Here’s what I try to do every night, just before bed:

• Empty the automatic coffee maker, and set it up for the morning to brew coffee at 6:30 a.m.,
• Empty the dishwasher.
• Clean off the countertops. 

I do not bat 1000 on this effort, but when I do it, it’s very satisfying, both in the doing (ending the day by defeating entropy), and the next morning (when it feels like a gift from my nighttime self to my daytime self).

David Cain writes about this sort of task in The Tiniest Mission:

Essentially, you’re taking the little act that’s before you, and making a tiny, focused mission out of it. Find the scissors in this drawer. Put the broom back on its hook. Pour myself a glass of water. You put a little imaginary wall around the act, making it into a small, two-to-ten-second arc in which you’re concerned only with the tiny mission.

Then you watch this little mission unfold to its end, which only takes a few seconds. You watch your hands fold the towel, or button up the shirt, or lift the faucet lever. You notice any obvious aesthetic details, like the bubbles forming and dispersing as you fill the glass, and the “chhhhh” sound of the running water.

Performing the tiny mission is only a matter of taking a real interest in witnessing what’s happening here, which only takes a few seconds. Be here for The Filling of the Glass. Be here for The Hanging of the Jacket. Then, tiny mission completed, you carry on with your day.

You don’t need to think about it or be fussy about it. Don’t worry about doing it slowly, or “mindfully.” Your body already knows how to do the thing. Your job is just to watch this work unfold to its satisfying conclusion, like a curious little film clip. It’s so short you won’t get bored.

While not explicitly written in reaction to recent revelations about writer Neil Gaiman, Annie Mueller’s When you love something made by a terrible person is a useful guide to processing the idea of beloved culture created by terrible people. 

Mueller’s conclusion:

I believe people can change. 

Most people don’t change, though, after a certain point. Changing requires thinking new thoughts, different thoughts. Changing requires adjusting your beliefs. Changing requires letting go of who you used to be and the first step to doing that is to recognize yourself.

But nobody wants to see a monster in the mirror.
Most people stay in the ruts they’ve dug and keep walking, back and forth, back and forth, around and around, deeper and deeper, straight into hell. 

But I believe in redemption. I believe if you can turn yourself into a monster, you can undo it as well. 

What you created, you can destroy.

Annie Mueller was featured last week in People & Blogs; the week before it was my friend Steven Garrity. Neither of them are terrible people in any way.

The photographer and impresario Oliviero Toscani died earlier this month. Toscani was a co-creator of Colors magazine, a brazen, colourful, quarterly, published between 1991 and 2014 by Benetton, the Italian clothing brand.

I loved Colors, and always bought it when I came across it (which was rare, as it wasn’t widely distributed in the hinterlands). It was an enormous influence on my typographic and design sensibility, and only served to cultivate my naturally occurring contrarian nature.

Frab’s and magCulture shared have remembrances.

The process of setting cold type is fiddly. Perhaps it’s the most fiddly thing there is, arranging tiny metal letters in a row, inserting spaces, filling out lines to be the same length, creating a forme that gets locked into a chase for printing.

Most of the time it’s just fiddly. Sometimes, though, things go horribly wrong. Often these times are times when too much time has been spent in the print shop, trying to do just one more thing, taking advantage of the ink already on the press.

Yesterday was one such time:

It was, indeed, the end of a long day. I’d set the type for a set of This Box is for Good boxes we’re about to send to our collaborator Simone, in Adelaide. 

I was tired, and rushing, and annoyed with the fiddliness. In a move to optimize the printing process, I turned everything 90 degrees at the last minute. And, in doing so, I crossed a line from stable to unstable; lifting the chase into the press, everything came crashing down to the floor.

I know enough to know that the proper response to this is to clean up and go home, returning the next day with fresh energy. 

That’s what I did, and today’s session went pleasantly crashing-to-the-ground-free. 

Hence this pile of almost 200 boxes, ready for shipment over the Pacific early this week:

Receiver Coffee opened a new treehouse location, a labyrinth of levels set into the branches of a banyan forest located, oddly, in central Charlottetown.

One afternoon, Tim Chaisson and I were sharing a coffee at the highest level of the forest-café when we both leaned back over the railing too far and fell over the edge.

“Grab the vines, Tim, GRAB THE VINES!”, I yelled.

We grabbed the vines, and we survived, unscathed.

Safe on the ground, I came up with a little rhyme to describe the ordeal, to which Tim exclaimed “That’s a song!”, which he then proceeded to improvise on his guitar.

And then I woke up from my dream.

Having spent the week nursing a cold and watching a lot of TV, including the entire season of The Day of the Jackal, it’s not hard to see the seeds of the dream.

That, and also that Tim’s band, The East Pointers,  released a new single yesterday, Anniversary. Give it a listen: it’s a rousing anthem, well-suited to January doldrums.

Also new in music this week, A Heart That Never Closes, the next in a slow drip of tracks from a collaboration among singer-songwriters Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. The first track was Hold Everything. They are a folk-pop power trio, and I look forward to hearing what comes next (they’re doing a 6-night UK tour in March).

My cold has broken (it packed a wallop, that one: a solid 6 days from start-up to wind-down, complete with a classic mix of cold symptoms), and in my powering back up to REM sleep my dreams have been particularly active. 

In last night’s edition, I finally came to peace with the girl I had an unrequited (never expressed) crush on through much of public school. “We could just be good friends!”, she said. And rather than a come-down, that seemed like the best idea ever. That only took 40 years.

Yesterday I had enough energy to pull my first print on the etching press we have on loan, using a lino block Lisa carved in 2023, along with some Speedball blue-green ink, overprinted on Caligo Safe Wash burnt sienna that we picked up in London last month. 

It was only a technical test, a way to get to know the press. But I like the result:

One of our Australian This Box is for Good collaborators, Simone Tippett, was helpful in getting us this far. We need “rails” to assist in pulling the print through the press, and Simone told us she uses rails made from 1/8” MDF. 

When we went looking for some at Home Depot, there was nothing in evidence, but Ritchie Simpson (yes, that Ritchie Simpson: he is the perfect Home Depot employee) suggested that paint stir sticks might suit. 

It turns out that Home Depot paint stir sticks are exactly 1/8” thick. And they are free, as many as you want to take. So this is what the rig looks like now:

The paint stir sticks are attached to the bed with self-adhesive magnetic tape, so we can move them around.

We’re very excited to have a new press in the studio, and to see what new things we can produce as a result.

Just before the cold hit I pulled out my sketchbook for the first time in 2024, and, sitting in the window of The Gallery, sketched a slice of Victoria Row:

Over Christmas I read The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, and highlighted this:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

That’s my intention for 2025.

Happy New Year.