When, in early 2013, Catherine suggested that we look into getting an autism assistance dog for Oliver, I thought it was an inane idea: she wanted to take our already chaotic family and inject another complicating element into it?!

But I humored her, and agreed to hear the idea out and meet with a trainer from Dog Guides, the national non-profit organization, funded by Lions Clubs, that runs Canada’s preeminent dog guide program.

That fall we met with Alissa, a trainer, in our living room and she walked us through the program and its aims and objectives, and how they would go about selecting a dog for Oliver should he be deemed eligible. When Alissa left it would be a lie to say that I was 100% sold on the idea, but I deferred to Catherine’s wisdom, for she is far more practiced in the art of such things; I agreed to hold my breath and go all-in should the opportunity arise.

The following spring when we got the go-ahead, and a dog was identified for Oliver, and we were scheduled for 10 days of in-house training at Dog Guides in Oakville I agreed, again with some trepidation, to participate in as much of it as possible. And that March, off we went: as Ethan’s handlers, it was Catherine and I who needed the training; I was there for three days (day one, day two, day three) and Catherine for the entire 10 days.

The way that Dog Guides’ training works is that you don’t actually meet your new dog until day three: they do this so that you pay attention to the material on days one and two, rather than to the new adorable pile of dog that’s just entered your life. It is not an exaggeration to say that all my misgivings instantly melted away when Ethan walked into the room and leapt up on my lap:

That night I wrote:

Today is my last day here in Oakville – I’m back to Burlington tonight to pick up Oliver and head into the city tomorrow for our quick vacation. I didn’t anticipate that I would regret this decision. Not the decision to rejoin Oliver, but the one to leave Ethan. Who ever thought I would actually like him. Miss him, even.

And I did: we had an instant bond, and it’s been a rare day when he hasn’t spent a little time back up on my lap like that, despite his 65 pound weight.

Catherine too formed a bond with Ethan, an even stronger and more powerful one, at least initially, because they spent the following 7 days glued to each other, learning how to be handler-and-handled together:

The way we planned our travels that spring meant that Oliver was around for Ethan’s graduation from training, and so on the final night we were able to go to Dog Guides together for the first time, and Oliver got his chance to meet Ethan:

If it looks like Oliver was smiling in that photo, it’s because he was: he and Ethan took to each other instantly.

A few days later we were all at home, getting used to having a dog living with us and the changes in our daily routine that entailed.

By far and away the most dramatic and immediate positive benefit of having Ethan living with us is that Oliver, who had been waking up with night terrors for the 18 months previous, and often needed Catherine to come and calm him in the middle of the night, started sleeping. Soundly. With Ethan at his side.

While Ethan wasn’t a miracle tonic that brushed the egregious aspects of being autistic away, he was a constant presence in our life, a companion for Oliver, a conversation starter for Oliver (we have all answered the “is he a doodle?” question about 1.2 million times), a bridge to independence for Oliver, a touchstone for Oliver.

Because we were a family that traveled a lot, and because Ethan was allowed to travel with us, no matter by what method, we kept on traveling, with Ethan at Oliver’s side. That first summer we flew to Germany from Halifax, with Ethan under the seat and a bag full of EU dog paperwork:

We rented a VW microbus on arrival and camped our way through the Netherlands and a slice of Belgium, with Ethan and Oliver happily together on the back seat:

The next fall we were back to Europe, with my parents, for a visit to Oslo, and Ethan demonstrated a familial affinity with my mother’s lap:

Later that fall we flew to Montreal to visit my brother and his family, along with my mother; our first flight, from Charlottetown to Halifax, had no “under the seat” for Ethan to fit, so the co-pilot advised to simply give Ethan a seat of his own, so we did:

Also in that fall of 2015, Ethan started to go to school with Oliver every day, something that required an entirely new school board policy to be enacted, and something that spawned a Compass story.

The next spring, Ethan was there with Oliver when he graduated from intermediate school, along with Tom Baker, one of Oliver’s educational assistants who’d been one of Ethan’s handlers at school:

The next fall, when Oliver was off to high school, Ethan was at his side:

And throughout those very difficult first few months in high school, with all its chaos and trauma and anxiety, Ethan was there to offer what comfort he could.

Three years later, when Oliver completed high school as a confident, accomplished, proud 18 year old, Ethan was at his side, along with Dave and Maritza, who played such an important role in Oliver’s (and Ethan’s) passage through Colonel Gray Senior High School:

Along the way Ethan was there when Oliver needed a tooth extracted:

He gamely, if not enthusiastically, participated in several cycling-with-dog experiments, both well-equipped ones in the Netherlands:

And more home-brew efforts here at home:

What we didn’t know when Ethan joined our family in March of 2014 was that six short months later Catherine would be diagnosed with incurable cancer. In one fell swoop everything became more complex, more fraught, more fragile, and Ethan was then, and for five years has continued to be, a stabilizing element, sometimes as much a therapeutic aid to me and Catherine as to Oliver:

After Oliver completed high school last spring, he started at the day program at Stars for Life, and Ethan joined him there too. As the months drew on, Ethan started to exhibit some behaviours that were proving problematic in his service dog role: paying too much attention, too protectively, to other dogs when out and about, for example. This was something that had been developing for a year or two, and something that I’d tried to work on with him, but with a complex family life and a lot going on, I’m afraid I didn’t have the discipline to go at the issue with the rigor it required, and it was becoming more stressful than helpful for Oliver to have Ethan in his day program life.

Simultaneous to this, Oliver himself has been growing more independent: he hasn’t needed Ethan at his side in bed for some years; he’s gained tremendous confidence, and is learning new things and new approaches to solving problems. Ethan’s job as a service dog was becoming less vital in Oliver’s life.

Putting those two together, it was recommended that Ethan retire from daily service in mid-December, and we proceeded with that; as expected, Oliver’s done fine without him, and has, if anything, become more independent as a result.

This left us with the difficult decision as to whether to formally adopt Ethan in his retirement as a family pet, or to ask Dog Guides to find a new adoptive family for him.

This all played out at the same time as Catherine’s cancer was advancing, and the day to day challenges of managing our family were growing; it was a hard time, in other words, to be making big decisions, especially when those big decisions involved the possible voluntary surrender of an important part of our family life.

Ultimately, though, we had to decide what was best for Ethan, and that meant coming to terms with the fact that, despite our best intentions, we don’t have the horsepower to provide him with the love, exercise, and attention he deserves. So we made the difficult decision to send the word to Dog Guides to look for a new home for him; at the same time we sent word out through a network of friends to see if there was anyone locally who might want to take him on.

The holidays interceded in all of this, and we enjoyed Christmas with Ethan and, happily, with Catherine, who left hospital just a few days before Christmas.

With Christmas over, and Catherine, unfortunately, back in hospital, and then, a few days ago, moving to the Palliative Care Centre, I realized that, as much as I could try to keep Ethan in the style to which he was accustomed, it was time to seek assistance more urgently; I contacted Dog Guides and within a couple of hours they identified a local foster family who could take him immediately, and tentative promise of a new permanent adoptive family for him on the horizon.

So today, in a way that was really, really hard, we packed up Ethan’s food and his dog bowls and his toys and his biscuits. We took one last selfie:

I let Ethan out in the back yard for one last pee:

And then we three piled into the car for the ride to Ethan’s weigh station on the road to his next chapter. What we found there was a loving home, filled with two other service dogs, one retired and one active, a cat-tolerant dog, and two people who are obviously full of love for animals and will work with Dog Guides to find the perfect new place for Ethan.

It dawned on Oliver, and on me, that with Catherine’s move to Palliative Care, and Ethan moving on, our house at 100 Prince Street is down to just the two of us. We both had tears streaming down our faces for the ride home. It’s a hard day. In a hard week. In a hard year.

When Ethan first joined us, and became a part of our everyday life, in my less-lucid moments I would imagine that eventually someday he would gain the ability to have conversations with me, and I would imagine what we would say to each other.

On this day I simply say thank you, Ethan: you came along at exactly the right time, you helped our family through five wrenching, difficult years, you lightened our load. We are forever in your debt.

Godspeed.

Godspeed is one of my favourite words. I’m going to have to work harder to bring it back into vogue.

See also Ron Hynes.

My distant coworkers upped their gift-giving game this Christmas.

In recent years the only regular exception I have made to my vegetarianism has been Eugene Sauve’s meat pie at the Landmark Café in Victoria. I even wrote a book about it.

When the Landmark closed, I thought I’d eaten my last meat pie.

But then, a few weeks ago, Eugene sent me a text offering to drop one off.

OMG.

“We’re getting the Beatles back together.”

We enjoyed it for supper tonight. And it was as good as it ever was.

Twenty years ago tonight, close to midnight, at the very precipice of the last millennium, Catherine and I conceived a child.

That night in 1999 we toasted Y2K with a bottle of Henkell, a gift from Mrs. Hennessey.

Tonight Catherine is in hospital and in a bad way; it’s an enormously anxious and stressful time for all of us. But that child we conceived is 19 years old and here beside me as we forge on, and that ain’t nothing.

So tonight we take a moment to toast Catherine, and each other, and 2020 with all that it holds, good and bad. With a bottle of Henkell. A gift from Mrs. Hennessey.

Happy New Decade.

The Christmas of 2006 was peak Playmobil at 100 Prince Street.

My father was an early adopter of personal computers, and I inherited a “learn to do by doing” ethic from him in this regard: neither of us had any formal computer training, we just hit our head against the wall until we knew what to do.

There was no greater expression of this than Beach Changes, a computer-animated film that Dad created in 1985 for the open house at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters. I found a copy of the film on an old server, and save it here for posterity. As you watch it, remember that this was all created on a TRS-80 Color Computer from Radio Shack, painstakingly animated in BASIC, letter by letter by letter. And, what with CCIW being a federal agency, in both English and French.

The heart of the matter, starting at 2:30, is a series of photos of the shore of Lake Ontario taken between 1980 and 1982, illustrating, like the tin says, beach changes over the seasons.

The music is from Moe Koffman’s jazz rendition of The Four Seasons (GRT, 1972).

The week that I was home in Ontario for my father’s death in November I packed up a box of things from his office and workshop that I wanted to remember him by. That office and that workshop were perhaps the truest manifestations of who Dad was: packed full of things that might one day be useful, extremely well organized, and kind of weird. I had no more emotional moment that week than when I entered his office for the first time after he died, seeing it exactly as he left it; it was sacred space, with his atoms still swirling around. I had to leave and come back the next day.

By the end of the week I’d filled the box I’d found in the basement (Dad was nothing if not a compulsive saver of cardboard boxes–a trait I have inherited). The box arrived in the mail today, courtesy of brother Mike’s postal prowess, and before its contents got scattered to the corners of my office, I took photos of everything, and thus am able to present here a Museum of Norm.

Door Sign

For years and years and years Dad had an index card taped to his office door at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters with a pointer that he could rotate to indicate where he was when he wasn’t in his office. It bears the marks of much use, and many edits, and it’s lost its pointer, but it survived:

Here are the places Dad could be that weren’t his office (clockwise from top-left):

• Working at Home (689-5218) – that was our home phone number in Carlisle; I still sometimes call it even though my parents moved. and their phone number changed.
• Eng. Geol. or Srd. Lab
• Elswhere in the Bldg.
• Out
• Printer or Xerox Room, R132/132A
• Library
• French Class/Seminar/Mtg.
• Leave
• Room R105
• Computing Centre
• Burlington, Hamilton, Mac – Mac was McMaster University
• In

This is my most treasured artifact.

Business Cards

Dad spent his entire career working for the federal government at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario. Over the 30+ years he spent there as research scientist, his practice of nearshore sedimentology was organized under a variety of sections and divisions. Here are a selection of his business cards reflecting those changes:

Geolimnology Section, Lakes Division

Hydraulics Division

Aquatic Ecosystem Management Research Branch

Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Branch

Aquatic Remediation Technologies, New Technologies Research Branch

Have Computer Will Travel

When Dad and I ran Cellar Door Software together in the 1980s, we made up some business cards on a dot matrix printer, under the tag line Have Computer Will Travel:

Tools

I inherited my love of having the right tool at the right time for the right job from my father. Between his workshop and his office he had the right tool for a lot of jobs, and I used the opportunity to fill gaps in my own collection.

Battery Tester

From the number of batteries of all types – AA, AAA, watch batteries, and more – that Dad had in his office, it’s obvious that he found nothing more frustrating than not having the right battery at hand when needed. This tester allowed him to gauge whether any given battery was still worth keeping around:

Paint Scraper

A well-equipped workshop has many scrapers, and Dad’s certainly did. I remember this one in particular, though, both for its compact design, and for using it in a summer-long effort to scrape the paint off my dresser:

Wire Stripper

I used to marvel at Dad’s ability to use this wire stripper tool to remove just the insulation from a piece of wire, leaving the conductor itself intact. Now I can do it myself!

Sliderule

If I’m to be perfectly honest, I have no idea whatsoever what a sliderule is for, or how it works. But this beautiful, compact one in Dad’s desk drawer needed saving; its twin is in the collection of the Computer History Museum.

Try Square

I don’t know why, but of all Dad’s tools I have the strongest attachment to this try square:

Dividers

Dad was very much of the “pay more for a well-made tool and keep it for life” school, and these dividers are a good example of that. I love the tool; I also love his printing on the box.

Magnifier

I just love everything about this tiny magnifier with its sliding metal cover.

Pencil Sharpener

Pencil sharpeners these days are flimsy; this one, a model KS from the Boston Pencil Sharpener Company, is built like a tank. I’m going to mount it near the letterpress, and heretofore it will sharpen all my pencils.

Rubber Gloves

A pair of heavy duty rubber gloves that are perfect for the wet work of letterpress. I also like the idea of holding hands with Dad.

Snips

I’ve a feeling Dad might have inherited these snips from his own father: there are well-worn, but still very usable.

Rubber Stamps

My father and I shared a love of rubber stamps–I’ve got a whole barrel of them somewhere here in the office. These date from his days as a graduate student in Rochester, New York; the bottom one comes from C.H. Morse & Son.

Supplies

Electrical Tape

It happens enough that it’s almost a law: when you need electrical tape you can’t find electrical tape. And so you use masking tape. Or cello tape. Or something else entirely inappropriate to the job. Now I have electrical tape.

String

Dad had an entire shoe box full of string in his basement workshop, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from taking it all. But space was a consideration, so I took only the two most interesting examples. I’ll use this for tying up metal type and for bookbinding.

Cords and Adapters

Are these a tool? A supply? Like me, Dad had boxes and boxes filled with power supplies, extension cords, and adapters. When will I ever need a stereo-mini-male to stereo-mini-male adapter? I don’t know. But if Dad felt he needed one at the ready, I should honour this.

Ephemera

63

When we moved from Burlington to Carlisle in 1972, the house my parents bought was at 63 Progreston Road; sometime thereafter the street got re-numbered, and what was № 63 became № 343. Dad saved the 63. I would do the same thing in his position.

Quik-Bands Tin

Second only to a love of tools, Dad and I also shared a love of things-that-hold-other-things (I have an entire shelf with that label, filled with envelopes and boxes and pouches). This is a lovely example of a thing-that-holds-other-things, a Quik-Bands bandage tin. It now holds the aforementioned rubber stamps.

Joseph Brant Hospital Volunteer Badge

In his retirement, Dad volunteered every Friday at Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington. His dedication to his post was such that the week he had a heart attack several years ago he phoned to apologize: “I’m afraid I won’t be able to make my shift on Friday, as I’ve had a heart attack.” This is one of his volunteer ID badges from that post.

CCGL Puffin Plaque

The RoxAnn surveys that Dad and his crew conducted in the Great Lakes were done from CCGL Puffin, a survey launch (CCGL stands for Canadian Coast Guard Launch).

While I was pretty certain the Puffin sank, as Dad’s 2008 email about the plaque was titled “The Puffin in happier days,” word is that she’s still on the water, acting as a sort of “tow truck for boats.” The Puffin’s sister, the Petrel, is still in Coast Guard service, and is their oldest launch.

Dad included a photo of the launch with that email:

Plan Your Visit

Alas after I surveyed the collection and took photos, I dispersed the items making up The Museum of Norm into various spots in my office, ready for deployment when needed. So there’s no way to tour the collection as a whole other than virtually. But as I test batteries, tie strings, scrape paint, and wrap things in electrical tape in the weeks, months and years to come, the museum will live through me.

What are children if not museums of our parents.

It’s been a blur of a couple of weeks leading up to Christmas, and this photo I took of our Christmas supper table last night is a good visual metaphor for it all:

Catherine came home from a week’s hospital stay on Sunday morning; Sunday evening we celebrated the winter solstice with our friends Paul, Lori, Ila, Sosi and G., as is our tradition. We enjoyed a taco buffet and pumpkin pie (all solstices should be celebrated with tacos).

Monday morning I had a lie-in, only to realize at 9:30 a.m. that Oliver had an appointment for 10:00 a.m.; we managed to pull off a miracle of waking-showering-dressing-eating and got to the appointment only a couple of minutes late. I spent the balance of Monday at work, and finished the day getting a fleet of 2020 New Year’s Day cards in the mail.

I started Christmas Eve with a visit to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market for coffee and a smoked salmon bagel; it was a quieter Christmas Eve market than in previous years, perhaps because it fell on a Tuesday.

From the market I went to CBC Prince Edward Island to tape a piece about the 2020 levee schedule with Mitch Cormier, and got a bonus tour of the renovations underway that will see Island Morning move to a new studio near the main entrance that, for the first time ever, will have windows to the outside.

From the CBC I went next door to Sobeys to pick up some last minute groceries for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; for the first time ever I was the person responsible for turkey acquisition, a task that, as a vegetarian, I was uniquely unqualified for. I ended up with a 4 kg fresh turkey and fears of killing my family via Salmonella.

Oliver and I headed to Cineplex for the afternoon to join our friends Darcie and Peter and two of their boys for a matinee showing of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, thus fulfilling Oliver’s dream of having a Green Christmas event (the effort started in early December with him calling a meeting for me, Catherine and Darcie to come up with something; I was very proud of him for managing this).

On the way from Star War’s to Darcie and Peter’s house for supper we dropped in at our house to pick up the German potato salad I’d made earlier in the day, only to be greeted by Catherine’s mother Marina, who arrived stealthily from Ontario by train without any of us having the slightest idea she was coming. A Christmas miracle (generously facilitated, and kept completely secret, by our friend BJ).

We enjoyed vegetarian meat pie, glazed carrots and the aforementioned potato salad for supper, and then quickly piled home to organize the house for Christmas morning.

Christmas morning started very, very early: Oliver set his Google Home to start holiday blasting music at 5:00 a.m., with reminder klaxons at 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m.

I fetched Marina from BJs, we opened our stockings, had breakfast, opened our presents, and had a lunch of potato pancakes. In the midst of all that we had a mega-chat, organized by Oliver, on FaceTime with my mother and with brothers in California and Ontario.

With Marina in the house I was saved the task, for another year, of having to learn how to cook a turkey. I was her sous chef, though, and came to understand the broad strokes; good grounding for future years.

Around 5:00 p.m. we were joined by friends J. and G., and we enjoyed a supper of turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and turnips, with ice cream and Marina’s fruitcake for dessert.

Christmas Day ended around 9:00 p.m. with Marina off to BJ’s, Catherine and Oliver off to bed, and me, in the quiet of the snowy evening, wrapped in a blanket reading about the history of left-wing direct action and playing Fortnite on the Nintendo Switch Lite that Oliver and Catherine received for Christmas.

It may all have been a blur, but, in the end, it was a good blur.