My grandmother Nettie was born in 1915 and died in 1999, missing the millennium by 9 months, and Oliver’s birth by 18.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, my father equipped her with an older computer and set up on an email account for her — she was natalie@worldchat.com.

While she was an curious person (which is why she would abide the computer in the first place), she never quiet took to the medium, and so I don’t think we exchanged more than a few messages.

Looking through an old backup disk from the late 1990s, I found a copy of the last email she went me, and my reply:

Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 19:49:45 -0400 (AST)
From: Peter Rukavina 
To: Natalie Rukavina 
Subject: Re: Catherine's birthday

Catherine's birthday is June 18th.  She was born in 1963 and
so will be 34 in 1997.

-Peter

On Sat, 14 Dec 1996, Natalie Rukavina wrote:

> I don't the date of Catharine's birthday.
> Would you please let me know.
>
> Natalie

My favourite part of this exchange is that she signed her name Natalie, which is a name we never called her and, as far as I know, she never called herself.

The cable-laying ship Isaac Newton pulled into the Port of Charlottetown late last night in advance of its work to lay the new submarine electricity cables under the Northumberland Strait to New Brunswick. It’s a massive ship (it has to be: it’s carrying 37 km of cable that’s 10 inches in diameter). Drop down to see it before it leaves: the best vantage point is from the lot where they pile the gravel at the foot of Hillsborough Street; if you get to close at the potato wharf you will be scared off by port security.

This video from the ship’s owners provides a good overview of how the ship works.

Three months ago, with a lot of hullabaloo, I stopped pushing links to new posts here on the blog to Facebook and Twitter.

While the change hasn’t affected my relationship with Facebook at all (other than to make me feel less icky all over), I’ve found myself continuing to use Twitter, directly, at pretty much the same pace. And because I wasn’t auto-posting from here to Twitter, I started to post to Twitter directly more than I was before and, in so doing, losing a POSSE-style permanent home here.

So I’m recanting, partially: still no Facebook, but I’m resuming push-to-Twitter, and shifting my focus back to ruk.ca being the mother ship and Twitter being a remote and regrettably commercial satellite operation.

Back in late 1990s, Peter Richards, Kevin O’Brien and I went thirdsies on an Apple QuickTake digital camera. It was among the first of its kind, and it was amazing. One day I took a bunch of photos of the cows next door to our house out on the Kingston Road; I’d thought the photos were lost until this afternoon when I found a CD-ROM marked “My Documents Backup - 2000.” And there they were.

From my friend Laurie Kingston, who taught me much of what I know about metastatic breast cancer, years before Catherine’s diagnosis, a pointer to mBC Time, a video by Teva Harrison.  It is as Laurie describes it:

It’s about living with metastatic breast cancer, less than 3 minutes long and very, very worth it.

Harrison’s In-Between Days: A Memoir About Living with Cancer is another helpful window into this terrain.

On the way to school on Thursday, Oliver and I saw a personalized Prince Edward Island license plate that was 8-letters long, the longest that will fit on a standard license plate. I seized this as a teachable moment, and for the rest of the walk to school we tried to figure out how many possible combinations of personalized license plates this would result in.

Things went horribly wrong.

We reasoned that of there are 36 possible characters that can go in each of 8 spaces, the total number of possible license plates would be 8 x 36, or 288.

But that didn’t make any sense: there are obviously more than 288 cars on PEI, and so there must be more than 288 license plates.

So last night we returned to the problem, and started with something simple: a 2-character license plate, with the range of A, B, C available.

Our earlier (wrong) calculation would come up with 2 x 3 = 6 possible combinations. But look:

AA
AB
AC
BA
BB
BC
CA
CB
CC

That’s 9 combinations, not 6 combinations, so obviously our original formula was wrong.

The source of our error: simply multiplying the number of positions by the number of possible characters works fine if each possible character can only be used a single time.

So if you’re arranging Peter, Bobby and Sue into two seats, your options are:

Peter - Bobby
Peter - Sue
Bobby - Peter
Bobby - Sue
Sue - Peter
Sue - Bobby

In that situation, where there’s only one Peter, one Bobby, and one Sue, then 2 x 3 = 6 calculates the number of possible seating combinations.

But for license plates, there’s no such restriction: each letter can be used any number of times.

And so the proper calculation for our simple test is 3² — three squared. Or 3 x 3 = 9.

Or, more generally characters^positions. So for our PEI example, it’s 36⁸.

Or 2,821,109,907,456 combinations.

Which is to say, two trillion eight hundred twenty-one billion one hundred nine million nine hundred seven thousand four hundred fifty-six.

More than 288, thank goodness.

(It’s not exactly 36⁸, of course: some personalized combinations are disallowed by regulation,  like “any messaging related to public or well-known figures, including members of the government and other dignitaries.”)

This wasn’t first order I placed on Amazon.com – that came the year before, and resulted in this email exchange with Jeff Bezos – but this is still a very old Amazon.com packing slip. Twenty years old, in fact: order placed on December 22, 1996.

I visited our safe deposit box at Provincial Credit Union today for the first time in 12 years, looking for a copy of Oliver’s birth certificate. I didn’t find it. But I did find this 1924 receipt from the “American Consular Service” for $1 paid by my great-grandfather, John Pothalo (born потягайло and anglicized when he emigrated to Canada), “for preparing Alien’s Declaration and administering oath thereto as prescribed by regulations of the Department of State.”

I’ve no memory of how this receipt survived for 92 years in the family records, nor for how it ended up with me. But I’m glad it did.

If I recall what my grandmother told me properly, the trip to the US, from Fort William, Ontario, was to go to the Mayo Clinic, 700 km away in Rochester, Minnesota, for cancer treatment.

I am not a natural beach-goer, especially here on Prince Edward Island where that means saltwater beaches, which I’ve never quite taken to.

But having not as much as dipped my toes in the ocean this summer but once, this past Saturday, faced with a bright, warm, sunny day, and positing that the sun had spent the summer warming up the ocean for us, Oliver and Ethan and I headed off to Brackley Beach midday to at least have one day at the beach in 2016.

Despite his genetic background as a Pudelhund, Ethan has no love of water: he won’t even willingly get his toes wet, and seems deathly afraid of the idea of waves. So Oliver and I had to split into ocean-going squads, taking turns minding Ethan, and frolicking about in the water.

While the sun may indeed have been warming the ocean all summer, either it didn’t do a very good job, or the effects had waned, as the ocean was cold.

Not too cold for a quick run-jump-dive-run out, but certainly too cold for a frolic. So Oliver got his toes wet, I spent a quick minute running in, going under, and running out, and Ethan entertained himself digging holes in the sand.

As cold as it was, the pleasure of accomplishment made my quick dive worth it. We packed ourselves up and headed to the PEI Preserve Company for lunch, enjoyed a walk through the Gardens of Hope afterward, and were home for supper with the feeling of a bonus summer day well spent, two days before Thanksgiving.

For the past two years I’ve been living with a heightened thrum of emotional complexity.

The greatest survival advice I’ve received came from my occasional psychologist, who reassured me, in a moment of particular stress, that I will not break. Whether or not this is true, it was, and has continued to be, a great comfort. Believing I will not break allows me to bend more deeply than I ever thought possible.

Some days I feel uniquely unskilled at this dual role I am playing as supporter-of-partner-with-cancer and supporter of son-with-autism. What they never tell you, in emotional elementary school, is that it’s all very well and good to imagine yourself a Platonic provider of aid, support, and comfort, but you also need to be mindful of, and prepared for, the effects the swirling complexity have on you, yourself. I’m still here. In other words.

A few months ago I managed to leave the kettle boiling: a carelessly placed plate wedged itself on top of the automatic shut-off switch, and so the kettle just kept boiling and boiling and boiling until I returned, 15 minutes later, to find the kettle hot, angry and depleted.

Sometimes it’s like that. And sometimes it’s not.

All of this has made me more sensitive, in both helpful and unhelpful ways; being attuned and empathetic is great until you find yourself, however temporarily, unable to find your way home. And being more sensitive has led me to recognize renderings of emotional complexity with new eyes and ears.

Two years after first hearing it, for example, I am unable to listen to Ingrid Michaelson’s Open Hands without crying.

Look, there, it happened again.

In this regard I am greatly in debt to British writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the gifts she’s given us in recent years. Chief among these gifts is the BBC television program she wrote and stars in, Fleabag.

In the fourth episode of the first series, Waller-Bridge’s character, Fleabag, goes with her sister (played by the estimable Sian Clifford) to a silent retreat in the British countryside. She escapes from the retreat and encounters, by chance, her bank manager, played by Hugh Dennis, sitting at the edge of the property.

What follows is four minutes of the best television I’ve ever seen.

Hugh Dennis’s soliloquy is a masterful display of pathos, and one that hits close to home, specific circumstances aside.

Waller-Bridge, sitting beside him, says only seven words in the entire scene, and yet conveys so much otherwise that it is breathtaking.

This scene too I cannot watch without crying.

You can find Fleabag on the BBC, and on Amazon Video, among other places (the music, by the way, is Allistrum’s March from the self-titled album of Irish supergroup The Gloaming; you should seek it out too).

“I want to take clean cups, out of the dishwasher, and put them in the cupboard. at home. And the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good.”

I have no greater wish.