After years of appointments in the cramped/cozy confines of the old Cornwall Post Office, today was my first at the new home of Cornwall Dental Clinic.

The new clinic is like a Brooklyn tech startup as if designed by Alex Colville. It’s rather pleasant, but also deeply unusual given what I’m used to.

Stephanie cleaned my teeth with undiminished efficiency and care.

I received the sad news this afternoon that John Muir has died.

No person has played as many roles in my life as John: from the time I first met him in the fall of 1985 John was, by times, my mentor, my teacher, my landlord, my boss, my interrogator, my arch nemesis and my friend.

He was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and one of the most tactically arrogant people I’ve ever met.

John had ideas, if you didn’t agree with those ideas, or didn’t understand them, he took you for coffee or a meal until you did (either).

Last year around this time John found himself in an extended hospital stay, and he gave me a call. Over the course of that night, and the next few, we talked on the phone for 4 or 5 hours, all told. About all manner of things: our lives, our partners, our children, politics, free speech, public broadcasting, our friends, our shared past. Occasionally he’d have to excuse himself when a nurse came into exact some indignity, but he’d call back a few minutes later and we’d pick up where we left off.

We were in touch a few times by email in the year since, but that series of conversations was our last hurrah as friends, and I’m glad to have had the chance.

John and I shared a love of the music of Curtis Driedger, and I don’t think Curtis would mind if I have him play John out:

I Hope (That the World Doesn’t Blow Up Tomorrow) from Problem A.

We spent Thursday and Friday nights at the Westwood Residence at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. On the edge of the parking lot near Westwood is The Art Landry Building, a lovely and striking piece of architecture that holds the university’s central steam heating plant. Mount Saint Vincent deserves credit for investing in the design of even a workaday building like this.

After everyone else had gone to bed on Thursday night, I took a few minutes and made a sketch of the building: it was a good exercise, with its jaunty angles and interesting smokestacks:

I became curious to learn more about who Art Landry was, and, when I couldn’t find anything online, I emailed the university’s archivist, and they thoughtfully sent a 1996 press release about the opening of the building that explains:

The building is honor of the late Art Landry, who retired in 1987 as Maintenance Supervisor Mount’s Physical Plant Department.

A native of Cape Breton, Landry was a 21-year employee of the university who contributed to numerous construction and renovation projects, including the Seton Annex, The Meadows, and the E. Margaret Fulton Communications project. In her dedication of the building, Mount President Dr. Elizabeth Pan-Johnston commented, “It is the custom of this university to name buildings and other special places after people who have been an important part of our Mount community. Certainly Art Landry was one of them. Those fortunate enough to have worked with him remember him for his tremendous dedication to his work and his unfailing good humor.

I have oft lamented that we are in a pay-for-play era of institutional building-naming where the rich can name the world in their own honour. I much prefer the Mount Saint Vincent model of naming buildings “after people who have been an important part of our Mount community.”

The Art Landry Building  opened on May 14, 1996. It was designed by Sperry & Partners.

Twenty years ago today I wrote the first post in this space.

Apparently the effort it took to do this was so Herculean that I didn’t get around to writing another post until two months later, a post wherein I linked to a description of how I maintained the “constantly updated collection of news and links” that we now call a blog, but didn’t yet really, at least in any popular sense.

I was 33 years old when I started writing here. I’d been with Catherine for 8 years, but Oliver was still seven months from conception, sixteen months from being born.

When the blog turned ten, in 2009, I marked the occasion with a statistical breakdown: 996,016 words written, in 5,388 posts.

Now, 20 years in, it’s 2,670,757 words in 8,970 posts

But a statistical breakdown doesn’t really say much about the last 20 years; so here’s a single post from each of those years as a kind of proxy:

• 1999: Linux Sheep to Shawl
• 2000: Oliver Duncan Lowell Rukavina
• 2001: Twenty-four Hours in West Prince
• 2002: Learning about the body
• 2003: Lessons I’ve Learned from my Gallbladder
• 2004: In Praise of My Dad
• 2005: L’imagerie de la vie en Aniane
• 2006: Farewell Copenhagen
• 2007: The King of Prince Street
• 2008: My Friend the Poet Biologist
• 2009: Getting an Eight Year Old to Sleep
• 2010: Adana Eight Five
• 2011: The Letterpress Came to Town
• 2012: “Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road” Redux
• 2013: Omotesando Koffee
• 2014: Making Dog Poop Bag Dispensers That Matter
• 2015: A Day in the Life of an International Traveling Service Dog
• 2016: Four Minutes of Perfect Television
• 2017: How to talk to people about cancer
• 2018: Autism Coordination Act

That collection is more akin to a series of flashes of landscapes from a moving train than a comprehensive review. But if you want to get a hint of a taste of my last two decades, it’s a good place to start.

By lucky happenstance, this anniversary comes on the day that we’ve rendezvoused with Luisa and Olle here in Halifax. They have been such dear friends over such a large swath of these 20 years. Catherine and Oliver and Olle and Luisa and I went out for an excellent Japanese meal tonight and we continued the conversations we started many years ago. And started new ones. Kind of like this blog. It was an excellent way to mark the date.

We are in Halifax for 48 hours to retrieve Olle and Luisa, who arrive by air late late tonight via Copenhagen, Reykjavík and Toronto. We arrived today so as to get our bearings.

We had supper at Tako Loko, a new Mexican restaurant on Isleville that makes tacos as they are intended: small corn tortillas filled with simple ingredients. We’ll be back.

After supper we went around the corner to Humani-T for tea and dessert, and I captured Catherine and Oliver just before they were about to eat cake:

With the tourist high season ramping up, the nights of $69 rooms at the Westin are no longer, so we are staying in the Westwood Residence at Mount Saint Vincent University. I booked here because it was cheap–$114 a night for a 4-bedroom apartment with kitchen, living room, and two baths–but was pleasantly surprised to find it’s in a quiet, wooded location, high above Bedford Basin, but is just 10 minutes from downtown Halifax. It also sports a pond:

We’ll rendezvous with Luisa and Olle tomorrow morning, have 24 hours of fun & frolic in the big city, and then high tail it back to Charlottetown for Pen Night on Saturday.

My seminal memory of high school history class is a black and white film that we were shown about the war of 1812. It was a low budget educational film, and because of its low budget there were several scenes where it was obvious that the characters were walking around and around and around the same tree. I guess they could afford only one. We were not impressed. But we did learn something about Laura Secord.

Oliver is taking MUS801A - Styles of Popular Music this semester, a course that offers a decidedly different lens on history: he reports that this week the focus is on the 1970s, and today’s subjects included Joni Mitchell, the Eagles and Frank Zappa.

While the 1980s were certainly a more educationally enlightened decade than, say, the 1950s, the idea that Frank Zappa would ever be a subject of study in high school history would have been so outside the realm of possibility so as to never have even been considered.

We’re traveling to Halifax tomorrow and so Oliver is missing two days of school. As a result, he’s going to miss the history of punk.

Anne Boyer has a piece in the April 8, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, What Cancer Takes Away, where she writes, in part:

Being sick makes excessive space for thinking, and excessive thinking makes room for thoughts of death. But I was always starving for experience, not its cessation, and, if the experience of thought was the only experience my body could give me beyond the one of pain, then opening myself to wild, deathly thinking had to be allowed. I warned my friends in a set of e-mailed instructions: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.

In the you-or-someone-in-your-family-has-cancer world there’s a social prohibition about talking about death. As though talking about death will kill you. Or as though admitting the possibility of death is somehow bursting a bubble of hope, letting the team down; “don’t talk that way.”

It took me a while to be able to say “when Catherine dies” out loud. But as soon as I did, the monsters receded just a bit, as I’d taken away some of the power they have from being unspeakable.

I’ve had Montreal, by Port Cities (recorded | live | remix) on rotation for weeks now.

It is a lovely song, with strong lyrics. But, more than that, I think it’s a sort of universal song, inasmuch as the possibility of meeting someone at a house party in Montreal is within the atlas of possibilities for many Canadians: it just seems like the kind of thing we might all have in our past.

I recall hearing a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the late Marc Gallant: he was living in an apartment in Montreal, and about to be evicted. So he invited everyone he knew to a house party and asked everyone to take something from the apartment home with them, to prevent the apartment’s contents from being seized by the landlord.

Just over a decade ago we saw Bruce Guthro in concert at Harmony House in Hunter River; Bruce brought his then-17-year-old son Dylan up on stage with him during that concert, and it was obvious that he’d inherited the family musicality. Ten years on he’s one of the trio that is Port Cities.

VBike, in Vermont, is a non-profit cycling advocacy group:

VBike is a unique advocacy group dedicated to bringing super bike mobility to Vermont. We’re talking a bike revolution. Electric-assist cargobikes for families & households, e-bikes and e-trikes for seniors & commuters – it’s a game changer! Now we can get over the hills, ride our kids, smile, and not be confined to the automobile.

In my experience it’s really hard to get information about anything other than “regular” bicycles here on PEI; while bike shops occasionally get in tricycles or three-wheel recumbent bicycles, they tend to be presented as a rare, unusual and expensive.

It seems clear that the future is going to demand that we use bicycles more, and for that to be accessible to all of us we’re going to have to tackle a broader range of active transportation options.