We walked 15 km today. Vacationing is good for fitness. It helped that it was 15°C and sunny. A birthday to remember.

The last time I stepped on a plane was November 2019, a flight to Toronto, the day after my father died, to join my family in laying him to rest. In remembering my father that day, I wrote about his seminal act of fatherhood, a bus trip with me around the United States:

The trip was, by times, grueling and uncomfortable and scary. But it was the best trip of my life, and the best gift a father could give his teenage son: 21 days of undivided attention in a “wherever the wind will carry us” spirit.

It is not an exaggeration to say that trip changed my life, and laid the groundwork for an approach to travel, and an approach to life, that has been far more fearless, confident, and improvisational than it might have been otherwise.

Whatever possessed him?

It’s been 1,233 days since I stepped onto AC8361 with Olivia for that trip home. They’ve been hard days: Catherine took a turn for the worse shortly after our return from Ontario, and died three months to the day after Dad. Two months later came COVID, and lockdowns, and an isolated amplification of grief. I thrashed about inside for a long, long time, trying to make sense of one thing laid on top of another laid on top of another.

I’m still doing it. But I’ve made my way, slowly but surely, toward brightness.

I wrote earlier this morning, on a widow support group, that I’d “followed grief’s vulnerability through a door to something deeper and more profound,” and that’s very much what it feels like: I chose, determinedly, to open my heart, to take risks, to fall in love, to find a way toward shaping a new way to live.

And so today, day number 1,233, I will step onto a plane again, out into the world, via AC8329 to Toronto, this time with Lisa and L., ready to see what’s out there.

My family is a travelling family, and my parents both instilled in me the notion that a curious life is a life well-lived. Catherine and I travelled widely, together and apart, and I carried on the tradition of father-and-child travel with Olivia laid down by my father, which took us everywhere from Slovakia to Japan. I’m excited about bringing the same wandering spirit to L., an opportunity I never expected to have again.

Olivia will be staying home this trip, which is disappointing for her, and unusual for me. Her travelling days are by no means over, but she’s off on a new adventure, newly living nearby in an apartment of her own, with two fantastic, caring supportive roommates. She’ll miss me. I’ll miss her. But we will ride again together another day. 

If I’m being honest, I have more than a little trepidation about this trip: it’s our first time on a big trip together, L and L and I, and we’re heading out into a world I haven’t set foot in for a long time. Perhaps my footloose muscles have atrophied?

But I also feel a sense of freedom, and more than a little excitement: the prospect of travel, metaphorically, feels like a heavy weight of sadness, and regret, and being stuck, is being lifted from my shoulders. 

I have been unable to go where the wind might carry me for a long time.

Here I go.

The social dynamic of living in this Lilliputian place means that politicians are far more everyday regular people than elsewhere. They are neighbours, friends, friends of friends, the people you meet each day. The mayor was Olivia’s elementary school French teacher, my city councillor used to be my office landlord.

And so it goes in this provincial general election (election day is tomorrow, April 3).

One candidate used to run a grocery store I was quite fond of, another was a supporter of my open data efforts (and yet another ran the actual endpoint of an open data service I was consuming). One candidate owns the coffee shop I used to grab a bagel with Swiss cheese and tomato every morning, one was the community police officer at Olivia’s high school.

I’ve seen enough of political life, from the door to door campaigning, to negotiating the finer points of a bill, to know that it’s demanding, all-consuming, day-and-night work; we owe those who put themselves forward for an of the people, by the people, for the people turn our respect and our thanks.

I got to know Karla Bernard when she was the Green Party candidate for District 12 in the 2019 election. I met with her one-on-one before the writ dropped, and found her a creative, compassionate, smart person, filled with ideas for how to improve the lot of Islanders. She knew that she had little chance of being elected, but she was willing to take leave from her job and spend a month knocking on the doors of her neighbours, making the case for herself and her party. Perhaps none was more surprised than Karla herself on the night that, against the odds, she was elected our MLA.

Seven months later, Karla, as a member of the Official Opposition caucus, had her first private members bill adopted, An Act to Amend the Employment Standards Act. This was followed, the next year, by the passage of the Intimate Images Protection Act she introduced. Karla was not alone: her Opposition colleagues put forward and saw adopted legislation on everything from pay transparency to non-disclosure agreements to poverty elimination. Taken together they represent a bold, progressive, feminist agenda, the result of thousands of hours of discussion, drafting, and debate. It has been a remarkable run in a legislature where private members bills, in the hundred and fifty year Liberal-PC duopoly that came before it, were rare. Our province is better for it.

Tomorrow I’ll go to the Eastlink Centre to cast my ballot again.

And again I’ll be voting for Karla Bernard. And for the hope of the Green Party forming government.

In a place where politicians are friends and neighbours, I’m freed from needing to engage in the kind of politics, so common elsewhere, that seeks to cast those we oppose as wrongheaded, mean-spirited. Premier King has led the Island ably through a difficult time; his government has made bold moves in public transit, social assistance, and housing. I don’t need to think Dennis King and his caucus colleagues are jerks to vote Green. 

I’m voting Green because Peter Bevan-Baker, and the Green slate of candidates he leads, seek to set a higher upper-limit for Prince Edward Island, a higher vision for what we are collectively capable of.

I want a government with an action plan for protecting the rights of 2SLGBTQI+ Islanders, a government that will make birth control free, a government that will move to make healthcare administration independent from politics, a government that will commit to public housing. A government that is grounded in core values that I share.

And a government that, after four years of learning the ropes of the Legislative Assembly, is ready to govern, that knows how to legislate, and that has a legislative agenda ready to go.

Karla Bernard lives just up the street and around the corner; she’s a neighbour, and she’s become a friend. I’m proud to call her my MLA, and I’d like to see what she and her Green colleagues are capable of as members of Executive Council.

Ton related a story of how an empathetic call nine years ago had an outsized effect:

The fate of anyone working to change something in how government works, or any larger organisation or system really, is that most often you’re not around to see the effects. Small course changes can take years to become noticeable shifts, and by that time no-one will remember where that started or who helped start it.

I’m a strong believer in making calls to reinforce the positive; it’s the companion to my equal and opposite tendency, learned at my father’s knee, to criticize the bad vociferously. Beyond the ripple effects of paying it forward that Ton describes, there is the simple pleasure of calling someone to tell them you appreciated their service, or noticed them going the extra mile, or recognized their going out of their way, or that you saw them doing good when others were being critical. It’s something that’s done so seldom that you will almost always make someone’s day.

A testament to the kind of winter it’s been: I only made it over to the letterpress shop this morning, three months after Christmas, to put away the type from our Christmas card job. I’m eager to get back to printing now that the shop is cleaned up(ish) and ideas are starting to flow.

The first crocuses appeared in the front garden at 100 Prince Street this weekend, right in time for the vernal equinox. See also 2020 (March 24), 2021 (March 12), 2022 (March 18).

In the hamlet of Ameliasburgh, in Prince Edward County, Ontario, you will find a street, about an eighth of a mile long, that runs from County Road 19 up to the Harry Smith Conservation Area. 

If you visit the website of Quinte Conservation, however, you won’t find any mention of the Harry Smith Conservation Area; when I spoke with someone there this morning I was told that the area has been decommissioned and re-naturalized, and that the footpath that circumnavigates the Ameliasburgh Mill Pond is no longer maintained.

The Harry Smith Conservation Area is remarkable for two reasons, beyond the mere fact of its generous donation by Harry Smith to “retain its natural atmosphere and be developed into a day-use area.” 

First, there is a photograph in the Irving Layton fonds titled “A man at the Harry Smith Conservation Area, Ontario.” How I’d love to see that photo. Why was Irving Layton in Ameliasburgh? Which man?

Second, the name of the street running up to the Harry Smith Conservation Area is Purdy Street (originally Purdy Lane), named for Canadian poet Al Purdy:

So when it came to celebrating its celebrity, as small burgs like to do, Ameliasburgh named a lane after him. Al was amused by the fact that Purdy Lane led down to the graveyard. It is now called Purdy Street, and you can follow it down to the beautiful book-shaped stone with Al Purdy’s name on it, not many steps from Owen Roblin’s resting place.

Ameliasburgh, you see, was the hamlet chosen by Eurithe and Al Purdy as the site for what became the most well-known A-frame house in Canadian literature:

In 1957 the Purdys bought the property on “the south shore of Roblin Lake, a mile or so from the village of Ameliasburgh, in Prince Edward County… (the) lot bordered the lake shoreline, a teacup of water nearly two miles long. Dimensions of the lot were 100 feet wide by 265 long.”

With a pile of “used lumber, concrete blocks, studdings, beaverboard and the like” Al, Eurithe and Jim Parkhurst (Eurithe’s father) began construction on the now famous A-frame. Al tells the story in Reaching for the Beaufort Sea.

Things happened in that house. Alfred W. Purdy, the “failure” of a man and poet (as Al looked back on that time), started publishing as Al Purdy. Just as Al and Eurithe composed the A-frame from available materials, Al began to compose poems about Roblin Lake, Ameliasburgh and Prince Edward County. In 1962, Poems for All the Annettes was published. Al considered this book a “watershed” in his development. The following year he submitted the manuscript of The Cariboo Horses to McClelland and Stewart. It won the first of Al’s two Governor General’s Awards.

The presence of the Purdys in Ameliasburgh helps explain why Irving Layton would be taking photos at the Harry Smith Conservation Area.

(It is worth noting that while the sons and daughters of Ameliasburgh have embraced poet Purdy, here in his hometown of Charlottetown, we’ve yet to embrace Purdy’s friend, and fellow poet, Milton Acorn).

This Ameliasburgh jag was triggered by the news Yann Martel to match donations to Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame Foundation Campaign. 

Longtime readers will recall my own brief encounter with Yann Martel, the bond between Al Purdy and my friend and former next door neighbour, Mike Johnston, and my love for the Bruce Cockburn song 3 Al Purdys.

All of these led me to believe that it is fated that I should contribute to the A-Frame Foundation campaign. 

So I did.

In memory of Milton Acorn.

Perhaps you’d be willing to match my donation?