One of the gifts—actually maybe the only gift—of having your partner up and die on you is that it’s a complete reset for what’s the worst thing that could happen!?

It has taken a long time for me to conceive of this as a gift, but I’m coming around, and committing (usually very) small acts of heretofore inconceivable bravery.

Today I found myself with a slightly bruised heart, and instead of crawling under the covers, I decided instead to level up, and went to Laurie Murphy’s Improv Drop-in Class at the Haviland Club.

I was terrified at the prospect, and, to be honest, I almost bolted, even as I was climbing the stairs up to the front door.

But I didn’t bolt.

I did walk in the front door.

And joined a small but hearty band of two others, improv newbies each of us, in 90 minutes of improvisational derring-do.

And I loved it.

Perhaps not surprising for someone who’s long dreamed of joining a competitive charades league. But charades is an individual sport where improv is a team sport, and absolutely everything that was great about tonight had to do with being vulnerable with strangers.

It was exactly what I needed.

Laurie’s classes are drop-in, run every Monday night in November from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., and are $25 a night. She proved a patient, encouraging teacher who helped us all stretch out of our comfort zones.

I’ll be back next week.

Max Braithwaite wrote a profile of Mary Grannan for Maclean’s in 1947. Grannan’s Just Mary stories on the CBC played an outsized role in the childhood of my parents’ generation.

Mary gets her ideas for her stories from what she sees about her. For instance she was recently walking with a friend along Dundas Street in Toronto when she noticed a church steeple without a top.

“I wonder where the weathercock went off that steeple,” the friend remarked.

“I’ll tell you next Sunday,” Mary assured her. And she did in “The Strange Adventures of Lucy Littlemouse,” which featured a mouse with a new bonnet who wanted to be of some use in the world and who climbed up on the church steeple, gnawed the golden weathercock loose, and took his place with disastrous results.

I penned a message to future Pete that flows from a revelation that, 654 days after I would have preferred to have had it, I had tonight:

When I’m in thrall of anxiety, I’m not thinking straight, and pretty well anything I’m thinking about anything is compromised, and need not be taken at face value (as realistic as that face value might seem at the time).

From the calm everything will seem possible.

Last year, in the long shadow of the Great Quit of 2018, I rejoined Instagram. I wasn’t interested in actually posting anything, I was just getting frustrated following links to photos on Instagram and being told I needed an account to view them.

So, under the account qusqpr, I’ve been quietly lurking. I’ve not posted anything. I have no friends. I’ve never commented or liked anything. I’ve never slid into anyone’s DMs.

And yet somehow I managed to violate Instagram’s Terms of Service, under which egregious acts include:

…artificially collecting likes, followers or shares, posting repetitive content or repeatedly contacting people for commercial purposes without their consent…

None of which, clearly, I’ve done.

My only recourse to replatform was to take a photo of my face and a piece of paper with a unique code that was emailed to me. So far this has resulted in absolutely nothing.

I’ve got very little to lose here: no photos, no friends, no reputation, no business interest. The worst that’s happened is that the door to the creativity of a select few creative friends has been slammed shut.

More than anything, I’m curious to know what digital tripwire I triggered with my lethargy.

Olivia decided again this year that is was important to dress in a new Halloween costume every day in the week leading up to Halloween.

Depending on how you look at it, this was a delightful burst of creative energy to be nurtured and encouraged, a stressful week of Olympic-level parenting, or Catherine’s karmic last laugh for my leaving her in charge of the wardrobe department all those years. Or all three.

Her Stars for Life support workers were extremely helpful with securing supplies; we could not have pulled it off without them  

Here is a gallery of what resulted.

Megan Hallinan writes, in part, about emotional distress:

I remember over a decade ago when I was going through a very major breakup. Every morning I woke up and felt like I had been in a car accident. It was miles worse than the general “Whyyyy” I feel when I remember that we’ve shifted the clocks again. This process of readjustment was felt far more acutely and it took a very long time to not feel like the worst person on the planet. Indeed at one point I proclaimed, “I want a fast-forward button” even though I knew this wouldn’t be possible. Emotional distress is not something that any of us can grow out of, and it is not something that can be intellectualized away.

As someone who really truly did think, in the wake of Catherine’s death, that I had secret access to a special fast-forward button, only to learn it was a mirage, I can attest to this from experience.

I can also attest that simply thinking I shouldn’t be feeling something is an ineffective defence against feeling it.

Doctrine of Discovery; Stolen Lands, Strong Hearts is a film produced by the Anglican Church of Canada:

This film is one of the responses of the Anglican Church’s Primate’s Commission on discovery reconciliation and justice. The purpose of this film is to respond to the calls to action by helping to provide education and insight into the racist foundations of many of our property and other laws still in existence to this day.

I found my way to the video through the email newsletter of The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, an organization with which, despite not sharing root religious conceits, I feel tremendous solidarity.

The sugar maple tree in our front yard is resplendent this week, something that prompted me to learn more about the species.

On the Canadian flag, for example:

Although many people think a red sugar maple leaf is featured on the flag of Canada, the official maple leaf does not belong to any particular maple species; although it perhaps most closely resembles a sugar maple leaf of all the maple species in Canada, the leaf on the flag was specially designed to be as identifiable as possible on a flag waving in the wind without regard to whether it resembled a particular species’ foliage.

There’s an interesting story about the making of the flag:

On a Friday afternoon in the late autumn of 1964, an urgent request came from Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to the desk of Ken Donovan. Mr. Donovan was then an assistant purchasing director with the Canadian Government Exhibition Commission, which later became a part of the Department of Supply and Services.

The Prime Minister wanted prototypes of the proposals for the new flag to take to his new residence at Harrington Lake the next morning. The three proposals on the table included the single maple leaf design.

The only design samples in existence were drawings on paper. So Mr. Donovan and his team of designers managed to do the impossible. The flag prototypes were assembled in just a few hours. Graphic artists and silk screeners Jean Desrosiers and John Williams were called in to work on the Friday evening. Since no seamstress could be found, the flags were stitched together by the young Joan O’Malley, daughter of Ken Donovan.

The story bears more than a little in common with the story of the late Anne of Green Gables PEI license plate that I wrote about in 2007; from Baxter Ramsay, its designer:

“The next time I saw the Anne Plate it was done on a metal plate and all the mistakes were still there: her hair curls were wrong, door on the house in the wrong place along with the windows trees etc… I just did a fast sketch on ink and from memory (which was not very good) and sent it to motor vehicle. I said if it was to be used it needed to be corrected and made to fill in the plate more… Well what you see is what we got…”

I wonder how much of the design landscape is the result of processes like this, how much of what we assume was a long and deliberate process was, in fact, thrown together in a rush at the last minute.

Learning about cyanotype is learning about shadows and light, which is not one of my strong suits, so sometimes things I think are going to make an awesome print end up being an amorphous blob.

And then there are ferns. 

I honestly didn’t think I’d derive any pleasure from making prints of things from the natural world, but, boy oh boy, are ferns amazing. 

Taken at twilight from the porch at Beaconsfield while waiting for the monthly Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island meeting to start. A beautiful night.