“Do you like pineapple?”, Lisa asked me this morning, as we were sitting on the couch, in the peace between breakfast and the school run.

Lisa and I met 516 days ago. Today was the day we broached pineapple.

My friends Bill and Michelle are both the same age as I am, born the same season in the same year. They’ve been together for a long time. They know whether the other likes pineapple or not. They’ve known for awhile, I’m certain.

Many—most—of my friends and familiars are in well-established, finely-honed partnerships. I am in what is, relatively speaking, the early stages of one. The pre-pineapple, and now-just-post-pineapple, stage. 

I was in the public library yesterday and noticed the instructions for what to do if you discover a fire:

Those instructions seemed familiar, like something I’d noticed before.

I had noticed before, in 2019, in the Queen Charlotte Armoury:

The difference: in the library we’re told to evacuate area immediately, whereas in the armoury proceed to fight the fire.

The gift—flowing from the tragedy, but, yes, also the gift—of being allowed to reinvent myself at my halfway point is that I get to choose what to do in case of fire.

My life with Catherine worked. We reached the pineapple stage, and well-beyond (our last big summer together was spent, in part, in Europe, crossing paths with the selfsame Bill and Michelle, enjoying the easy back-and-forth that well-honed couples can together). We bought and renovated two houses. We raised a child together. We travelled far and wide. We stayed together through many thicks and many thins.

The interior landscape of our relationship, though—the part that nobody ever sees, the layers much, much deeper than pineapple—had an upper limit; it wasn’t shallow, but neither was it vulnerably deep; it was more “evacuate area immediately” than “proceed to fight the fire.”

We were younger, of course, and that explains some of it. But we were both afraid. Afraid to turn to truly face each other, to risk everything by finding our way to a deeper honesty, a more profound vulnerability. I write that with sadness for realizing the terrain we didn’t cover, for the parts of each other we never showed ourselves. Sadness for knowing it’s too late, that I was too timid.

The interior landscape of my relationship with Lisa—the important part, the part of being alive with someone else that’s about being alive—is where the growing edge of our coupling is found. This part—the part that nobody ever sees—this is where we get to decide to “proceed to fight the fire.” Where we turn toward each other when our impulses are to turn away. Where we walk through the discomfort of candour to get to the deeper connection that’s on the other side.

This sub-pineapple part of being together is frightening, thrilling, unfamiliar new territory for me. I don’t know the way. We are finding the way together.

I wish I knew this as a younger man. I am enormously grateful to be learning it now.

Yes, I do like pineapple.

As the generous L² made us breakfast in bed this morning, our planned breakfast meal of smoked salmon bagels got shunted ahead to lunch.

“I propose that we take the lunch, get on our bicycles, and go for a picnic,” said Lisa.

“Yes!”, I replied.

We cycled out Riverside Drive to Murchison Lane, turned right, went past the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to the grounds of Hillsborough Hospital, where we set up our picnic on the beach, fortuitously at low tide. Downtown-to-picnic was a pleasant 14 minute bicycle ride, mostly on separated multi-use trails. It was the perfect distance for a first-time-bicycle-picnic.

The beach at Hillsborough Hospital is covered with bricks; if memory serves, G. told me these come primarily from Falconwood, the original home to the hospital (a building you can see on the cover of Beyond the Asylum: The Evolution of Mental Health Care in Prince Edward Island 1846-2017, by Tina Pranger)

Many of the bricks were inscribed with the name of the brickyard; we pieces together one partial brick with “BATHVI”:

…with another inscribed “VILLE”:

…and thus surmised these were bricks from the Bathville Brick and Fire Clay Works in Scotland. Bricks that came a long way, stood as part of a building for a long time, and have now survived, still readable, all these years on the beach. Amazing.

Jeremy Cherfas writes about a sesame inanity.

Day two on my bicycle for 2023. A late start. It’s like flying. Flying.

We didn’t plan to visit Lyon on our trip to France: technically this was because we had a “no revisiting places one or the other of us has already been” (with an exception for Paris). Lisa had passed through Lyon on the train at one point, so it got ruled out. 

But Lyon was halfway between Skinny Home and Tiny Home, so it made for a logical waypoint between the two. And so we went. And we liked it so much that we went back again on the swing back to Paris.

Both Lisa and I felt immediately comfortable in Lyon: our Uber driver, Jonathan, was an excellent ambassador for the city, and in a 20 minute ride from the train station to our apartment he gave us a short course in the city. 

Our other ambassador was my friend Dan Misener.

In 2012 Dan and his partner Jenna spent a year in Lyon, a posting announced here:

So, why France? Why Lyon?

First off, we’re moving to France to learn French. Right now, my French isn’t great, but it’s halfway passable. I can order food and get directions, but I’m can’t have deep conversations about philosophy and literature. Jenna’s French is much better than mine, but we could both stand to improve. We figure immersion will help, and where better to immerse ourselves?

We chose Lyon for a few reasons. First, because it’s not Paris, and thus, we can afford to live there. It’s the third largest city in France, and feels not too big, and not too small. Plus, it’s la capitale gastronomique française, so chances are we’ll eat well.

Lyon is decently well-connected to other parts of Europe by rail and air, and we’re really hoping it’ll be a good home base for a bit of travel.

As someone with a quiet I-want-to-live-in-Europe-for-a-time obsession, I was an enthusiastic reader of Dan’s blog posts from there onward about Lyon, and so once we got settled I emailed him for advice about where and what in the city; he quickly responded with a well-hyperlinked guide that included a coffee place, thus earning him a place in my Pantheon of most helpful friends.

I resolved to revisit Dan’s writings about Lyon upon my return, but the current stripped-down-to-basics state of Misener.org made gathering them all together a challenge, so for posterity and personal reference I present the posts here:

• .ca -> .fr
• Buying travel medical insurance
• Vendredi XIII
• The joy of setting up a French bank account
• My real-life experience using CanadianForex
• A very fussy morning coffee ritual
• All-you-can-watch movies
• Transatlanticism

There’s a lot unwritten about Dan and Jenna’s year in Lyon; it’s just those 8 posts. But the spirit they set off in continues to resonate:

The past few years of my life have become very comfortable. The same city. The same apartment. The same job. There’s nothing wrong with comfortable, of course, but increasingly, I feel the need to shake things up. To do something that makes me feel uncomfortable. To get outside of the ordinary.

Words to live by.

Lisa took a lot of photos of me in front of green doors. 

Curious flagging tape on the Camp Tamawaby Demonstration Woodlot Trail in Grand River.

“Well, I just really like Kerri Russell…”

“I haven’t seen her in forever… what was she in?

“Felicity!”

—

“I think I’m gonna be back here this afternoon with my regular. Catch you later…”

—

“Well, we do get strike pay!”

Breakfast on the newly-refinished table.

In her post Quackers, Thelma writes about her encounters with a duck, beginning:

Flapping sounds coming from a chimney usually means trouble for both the flapper and the homeowner.

That’s as good an opening sentence as I’ve read in a long while.