In August of 1990 I drove from my home in Peterborough, Ontario, 3,400 km southwest to El Paso, Texas, to take up a post as a nanny for a few months.

We were driving in a convoy: Leslie, mother of my 2 year old charge, an aspiring midwife (El Paso being a hotbed of midwifery education) was driving her mother-in-law’s VW Vanagon, and I was driving my 1980 Toyota Tercel. Leslie’s van had air conditioning. My Tercel did not.

This was in a day before most cars had air conditioning, so this wasn’t unusual. I’d certainly never owned a car with AC, and maybe only the 1975 Dodge of my father’s, the one with velour seats that got totalled in a not-my-fault accident when I was 16 and driving home from my job at Canadian Tire, maybe only that car was the one with AC in my life to date at that point. And, of course, the Vanagon, which I was occasionally allowed to swap into, switching places for a respite from the heat.

The heat came to a head as we stopped in Nashville for a muffler job on the VW. I remember clearly the temperature on the sign outside the muffler shop showing 100ºF (38ºC), and that was without factoring in the humidity (the Almanac validates my memory).

Driving when it’s that hot, you drive with all the windows open and with the fan on full blast, hopeful that somehow blowing blistering hot air over your body will make it feel less blistering hot (it doesn’t).

By the time we got to El Paso a few days later, it was a comparatively balmy 87ºF (30ºC). Cold enough, in fact, the outdoor swimming pools were closed up for the end of the summer, because it wasn’t deemed hot enough to swim.

I love most things about my 2016 Kia Soul EV, but its air conditioning system isn’t one of them. I put $400 into it a couple of years ago; when the AC stopped working again at the start of this summer I got an estimate of $1,300 to repair it, and decided that I had better things to spent that money on, so opted to leave it broken.

It’s been a hot, hot summer, with more heat warning days than not, it sometimes seems. And so this summer, bopping around the Island in my Soul, has felt a lot like that trip 34 years ago down the heart of America: windows open, radio blaring, blistering hot air masquerading as something it cannot and never will be.

When I was a teenager I purchased, at some expense, a book of plans for Star Trek ships. I likely bought it at Coles in the Burlington Mall. 

I wasn’t a huge Star Trek fan as a kid. And, if I’m being completely honest, there’s as much chance that I purchased a book of plans for Battlestar Galactica ships as Star Trek ones; I can’t remember.

It wasn’t out of fictional-universe-fealty that my purchase came, but rather from simple fascination with the plans themselves: they were so beautiful and intricate and ordered. Who could imagine imagining such a thing in such detail!

I thought of that book this week after making a sketch of our camper: I love the sketch because, in making it, I came to see the camper with a fresh pair of eyes. I now see the details I didn’t see before: the extra electrical outlet to the left of the door; the way the muted blue and brown decals flow across the length of the camper, and skip over doors and windows to continue on the other side;

I never imagined in a million years that I would be the kind of person who spent summers in a camper by the shore. The gift of meeting Lisa means that now I am this kind of person, and so it’s a double gift: the experience itself, and the gift of realizing that any sentence that contains “…the kind of person…” is worthy of examination as a made up constraint.

We spent the better part of July in the camper, and though we faced mosquito challenges, and plumbing challenges, and thermostat battery challenges, and challenges from being stuffed together in close proximity, it was, on balance, a delight.

I swam more than I ever have (there have been years—many of them—when I haven’t gone near the ocean once). We barbecued. We hosted family for suppers and beach days. We took advantage of our proximity to our lovely nearby Vermont friends, VBJ and LBJ, to see more of them than we ever have before. We installed a life buoy. We read a lot of books. Sketched a lot of sketches. Took full advantage of the nearby rural public library. Saw myriad breathtaking sunsets.

I reminded Lisa this morning that summer isn’t over yet. By a long shot. We’re in town for a couple of weeks of Cat Camp, in service of my brother and sister-in-law, but we’re both hopeful that there is more summer magic to be gleaned before fall.

It is Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on the sidewalk at the front door of the public library in Morell, using the wifi account I signed up for yesterday. For all intents and purposes it feels like 2005 when I had a favourite wifi-enabled tree in the south of France as my tenuous connection to the Internet.

The sun is beaming down, and I’m a little anxious about getting a sunburn (I’m always a little anxious about getting a sunburn). I’m streaming Never Better as I write this, a new track from Wild Rivers. I was listening to it on the stereo in the car on the drive here, and tears started to inexplicably stream down my face.

I am sitting here because I just had a date with my friend Pedro in Bali, and this is the time of day when his evening overlaps with my morning, and the the library wifi was in service of that. We’ve been trying to connect for a month—and I’ve been wanting to connect with him for much longer than that—so I didn’t want to fuck this up with flaky cellular bandwidth.

Are we both out of our minds?
Walking a line we said we wouldn’t cross
Head first into disaster
Still if you ask me how I’m holding up
I’ll say “Nеver better”

Pedro has been a force in my life since I met him in Copenhagen 18 years ago. We’ve crossed our face-to-face paths in Portugal and Germany and the Netherlands, and our virtual paths in everywhere from Dubai to Jakarta. On paper our connection is fleeting, temporary. From the inside it feels like plugging back into a switchboard that gives me access to parts of myself, and to parts of him, that aren’t available elsewhere.

I realized earlier this week that I could plug in an ePub of my book Using Her Marbles to Readwise Reader, and use its Ghostreader feature to, in essence, interrogate myself.

Q: Does it seem like Peter might have been holding in his feelings, trying to maintain order and calm through putting on a false front?  

A: Yes, it does seem that Peter may have been holding in his feelings at times, as he navigates the emotional turmoil of Catherine’s illness. He acknowledges the difficulty of confronting his emotions and reflects on the temptation to shield himself from pain by pretending not to feel deeply, indicating a struggle between maintaining a calm exterior and processing his profound grief and love for Catherine.

Q: What is the role of “escape” in Peter’s life over the years he writes about?

A: In “Using Her Marbles,” escape serves as a vital coping mechanism for Peter amidst the overwhelming challenges of dealing with Catherine’s illness and eventual death. It allows him moments of reprieve from grief, providing a space to process his emotions and maintain a semblance of normalcy in his life, especially while caring for Oliver.

Add all the asterisks you like about what AI is and isn’t, and what it may or may not be making up, and stipulating that, in the end, I may simply be seeking a slightly more nuanced ELIZA, that’s still a useful mirror to be able to hold up to myself. 

If you like, as a stretch goal, add into the mix that the book itself was me conjuring up a story about my life (really a 6 year collection of short stories), and that what I was writing at any given moment may or may not have been a “hallucination.” Who is interrogating who?

In a related/unrelated development, the casual poet library in Singapore opened recently:

Hello! We are a shared community library in the heartlands of Singapore—Alexandra Village, to be specific, a cosy little neighbourhood where we are surrounded by a bird shop, an antique shop, a spectacle shop, barbers, bakeries, coffee shops, 50-year-old furniture and electrical appliance stores, a laundromat, delicious hawker food, a famous tze char restaurant and so on.

Our shared library is entirely community-funded. Every shelf in our library is rented and curated by a different individual (there are 180 of us in total!). We tend to our own shelves, share our favourite books and take turns to keep the library open.

I am so impelled to visit. Or perhaps to create something similar in my own “cosy little neighbourhood.”

Being on FaceTime with Pedro this morning, I told him, felt like alchemy. Blip, blop, bloop, and, blam, 15,000 km of distance — antipodal distance, almost — is erased. Or at least dulled.

That it seems like alchemy is perhaps a useful metaphor for the larger context of my life right now: we are all alchemists, most of us unaware of the true spells we have access to.

Pedro and I made plans to reconnect later in the week. I’m writing this in my car in the parking lot of the selfsame library, borrowing the selfsame wifi. I will hit publish, then turn the car on and drive the 8 minutes back to home base, perhaps streaming the same tear-inducing track as I drive, and, as I just texted Lisa, prepare for a day of adventure and intrigue.

The 2017 Ed Sheeran track New Man showed up on my playlist this morning. It’s sung from the perspective of the old boyfriend, ruminating on the new boyfriend:

I heard he spent five hundred pounds on jeans
Goes to the gym at least six times a week
Wears boat shoes with no socks on his feet
And I hear he’s on a new diet and watches what he eats
He’s got his eyebrows plucked and his arsehole bleached
Owns every single Ministry CD
Tribal tattoos and he don’t know what it means
But I heard he makes you happy, so that’s fine by me

In a 2019 interview with Esther Perel on The Knowledge Project, Perel touched on the big relationships of our life, and how breakups — and the quality of the breakups — inform the quality of what comes next:

And not all of us will necessarily only have one relationship, an adult relationship. We will have two or three, many of us, and some of us will do it with the same person, but others will sometimes change. And if you can live and to the best of your ability, wish good to the other person, wish them well and wish you well, then you actually are more prepared for the next relationship.

The more you remain tied in your bitterness, the more you bring that with you. The way people live the previous relationships, the quality of the breakups, is really at the heart of how people start the next relationships. How much they will trust, how they trust, how they collaborate, how they protect themselves, how they anticipate what had happened, how much they bring these invisible others, exes with them, be they ex-partners, husbands, wives or boyfriends or founders.

It’s really very interesting to see the parallel of those things.

In a Facebook support group for widows and widowers I read this morning a post from a woman who’d just received her late husband’s phone from the police. Among the things she found there was his FitBit app, and in that FitBit app she found the recording of his heartbeat in the minutes up to and at the point where he took his own life.

The afterimage of reading that has been careening around my head all day. I can’t shake it. 

I have little in my own grief to relate to the enormity of that, and yet the pain behind her words, the rumination, the wonder, the angst, the dreadfulness of her discovery, the questions, it all resonated with me on some level.

And thinking of Sheeran’s lyrics and Perel’s words, I can’t help but thinking that while we are steeped in the all manner of songs, movies, and advice columns about romantic-life-after-breakup, finding your way through death and grief and everything that means—and it often means hard as nails turmoil—and finding your way to your next adult relationship is something we in the Kingdom of the Grievers are left with Sleepless in Seattle as a model for, shrouded with an extra coating of guilt, shame, and confusion about whether it’s even a right and proper thing to consider.

Perel is an advocate for “conscious uncoupling” as a way of ending a relationship, an opportunity for a deliberate mutual accounting and recasting, and is in that context that she was speaking about the utility of a good breakup. For the bereaved, there is often no such opportunity.

Things.

End.

Whether it’s suddenly and unexpected, or incurable and drawn out, the opportunity for a conscious uncoupling is rare  

No matter how much I wish to think of myself as a clean room project, “the way I live the previous relationship, how much I will trust, how I trust, how I collaborate, how I protect myself, how I anticipate what had happened,” to paraphrase Perel, is woven into me.

In the most positive light, I have come to know myself in a much clearer way, and have been granted the opportunity to actively think about the answers to all of those Perel questions, and more.

At my worst, I am shadow boxing with past versions of myself, reacting to unhealed hurts and phantom pains.

It’s a harsh notion to think of “building back better” when someone has died. But nonetheless that’s what all of us, seeking connection again, after death or circumstance, seek.

I didn’t have an opportunity to consciously uncouple.

But I have been granted one to consciously couple, bringing all that I’ve learned, about myself, about trust, about collaboration, about protection, to my life with Lisa.

There are struggles.

Many.

The “invisible others”—both sets—are always there.

But there is joy in the discovery, the uncovering, the adventure.

It feels good to be alive.  

Lisa and I are plotting to install a life preserver at the unsupervised beach nearest to where we’re spending time this summer. We’ve got the container and the device, and now turn our attention to mounting the container on a pole on the beach, a job that’s required us to level up to my first concrete job.

I purchased an 8 foot length of treated 4x4 at Home Depot, along with a bucket and a bag of Quikrete Fence n’ Post. Finding the fastener selection at both Home Depot and Kent disorganized and lacking in variety, I purchased the stainless steel nuts and bolts at Fastenal, which is my new go-to place for nuts and bolts.

Yesterday morning I set to see about drilling the required holes in the 4x4, and finding our borrowed drill bit collection without a ⅜ inch bit, I called up nearby Joe Dunphy Custom Woodworking, where they generously agreed to drill a couple of holes on short notice (nicest bunch of people you’ll ever meet).

Returning to base, I channelled my inner This Old House memories, and got the post plumbed up inside the bucket, using odds and sods to secure it:

Next, I suited up in eye and hand protection, and an N95 mask, heeding the dire “you cannot rely on pain to alert you to cement burns” advice on the Quikrete bag. Following the instructions, I poured half the bag into the bucket, added 3 litres of water, then poured the rest of the bag in, tamped things down, and stepped back to let the magic work.

Initially the mix looked suspicious, like I’d added too much water, and was doomed to failure:

I paid attention to the guidance on the bag not to fuss, and by 8:00 p.m. we had something closely resembling dry concrete:

Rather than moving on right away, we decided, as the concrete wasn’t fully cured, to give things another 24 hours.

It’s kind of a miracle to realize we mortals have the capability to do things like this.

While I was fussing about with hold drilling and concrete mixing, Lisa and L. were down at the beach digging a hole into which the post will sit, an impressively-deep execution:

Later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow morning, we’ll move the post-and-bucket down to the beach, bury it in the sand plumb, affix the housing, and install the life preserver.

Total cost of the post job:

• 8 foot 4x4 post: $17.79
• Bucket: $4.97
• 3 pack of N95 masks: $12.82
• Eye protectionL $7.99
• 60 pounds of Quikcrete Fence n’ Post: $12.45
• 2 stainless steel bolts, plus (too many) nylock nuts and washers: $21.28
• Level: $9.99

For a total cost of $87.47.

Olivia and I had a quick pop-in to Starbucks by the mall while we were out and about this afternoon. I ordered a cold brew, and she ordered a Frappuccino. 

My drink came out almost immediately, but Olivia’s was nowhere to be seen after 10 minutes, so I asked the staff if her order had gone missing.

They had a very good excuse: while we were in line, an order for 390 Frappuccinos came in, and each one generated a sticker to be stuck on the cup. That’s a lot of stickers, and Olivia’s got lost in the sea of them. They were very quick on the rebound, and she had her drink in-hand about a minute later.

But, 390 Frappuccinos!

Who in Charlottetown ordered 390 Frappuccinos on a Monday afternoon?

How do you transport 390 Frappuccinos?

Does a Starbucks have enough Frappuccino gunk to make 390 Frappuccinos?

The mind boggles.

I find cars notoriously difficult to sketch: something about all those angles. And the confounding roundness of the tires. Something inevitably ends up being not quite right. An automotive uncanny valley.

Sketching my car this morning was instructive, in part because I realized that it’s far less red than I think of it. The red roof is a substantial thing, of course, but otherwise it’s a black car with some tactically placed red accents.

A long week, punctuated by a bicicletta under the gazebo by the shore.

My grandfather Dane Rukavina, who we called Papa Dan, had his 15 minutes of fame sometime in the 1970s, via the cover of the Brantford Expositor. My father must have requested a print of the photo, as I have this copy.

Somehow the word got out that he had the best beans in town in his garden, and he’s proudly holding them up.

The man I see in the photo is evocative of the grandfather I knew: his scruffy face, his hat, his eyeglasses, his jacket.

But I don’t recognize his smile: was this the only time he smiled? I also see my father’s face—he smiled a lot more though—and a little bit of mine too.