This is a selfie I took in Malmö, in 2016, on the day of Olle and Luisa’s 10th anniversary:

In the hours that followed there was a wonderful party, with fascinating people, free-flowing klezmer, and a free-flowing bar; the night ended with 3:00 a.m. falafel. It was the escape from the everyday I needed, with people I love dearly, at exactly the right time.

In this photo, though, there’s a severity, a flatness, that I couldn’t see at the time. I wasn’t happy, and that unhappiness, looking back, was spread across me.

Last summer my pal Dave emailed a kindhearted message: “You look like a million bucks,” he wrote. And it wasn’t news to me: I felt like a million bucks.

On this morning, a morning peppered with tensions surrounding mercurial moods, worry about my daughter, who’s 4000 km away as I write (and who sat on her laptop last night and cracked the screen), anxiety about finally laying Catherine to rest in a few weeks, and a deeper feeling of instability as tectonic plates shift in my personal and professional life, I don’t, at the moment, feel like a million bucks

But.

I look at that photo, and I know that I also no longer feel that severity, that flatness.

I’m getting better at feeling. I’m getting better (little bit by little bit) at feeling okay at being angry, and especially dispensing with the self-imposed limitation that stanches anger (because being angry seldom makes logical sense). In my deepest depths I feel joy, even though that joy gets buffeted constantly, even though the price of that joy (which requires full-hearted feeling of all the things) is woundingly hard sometimes.

In the summer of 2016, I was holding it together; that is all I could muster. Oh how I wish I could reach back and say to that version of myself: “Pete,” I would say, “uncork yourself.” I don’t know if that Pete would have listened. If he had, perhaps feeling all the things would have started earlier. Or maybe I had to walk through that, to muddle my way through, in survival mode; maybe I didn’t have a choice.

I feel alive now in a way that I didn’t know existed then, in a way that I couldn’t imagine possible then. It’s hard. It’s joyful. It’s hard. It’s joyful.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I really think we need to get a new Sharpie,” I said to Lisa last night at Dollarama. She agreed, with only a little reluctance.

We’re had a garage sale today, something I haven’t done since I was a kid. After the ceaseless schlepping, getting to make price stickers, merchandise the tables (“the culinary arts,” “sporting goods and frames,” “flagons and vases”) was great fun. As was deploying Mega Sharpie this morning.

The Cavendish Beach Music Festival announced that Tyler Childers will be headlining the 2024 event. Olivia and I saw Childers at Paradiso in Amsterdam in 2018, and I waxed enthusiastic:

While the other acts were solid, Childers and his band were crackerjack, and transported the night from a novelty to a happening. Their Kentucky-fueled country rock was well-crafted and energetic; it’s almost impossible to believe that Childers is only 27 years old, as his songs seem written by someone with considerably more life under their belt. We stayed for the entire 75 minute set, and enjoyed every song (it’s not every Kentucky country band that inserts a cover of Kiss Me by Sixpence None The Richer into their act).

Permit me to bask in the ephemeral glow of being ahead of the country music zeitgeist. 

From the book 350 Lost Buildings of Canada, an entry on Charlottetown’s Peter Pan:

Peter Pan Drive-In 1958-2020

In the postwar years, the Peter Pan was beloved by locals for its milkshakes, burgers (served in a basket), and lobster burgers. There were few franchised fast-food restaurants at the time; this locally owned place in an A-frame building was a landmark. The restaurant closed in 2013 and was demol-ished, but carpenters from Holland College rescued its sign, featuring Peter Pan and lettering that seemed to have been created by a young child. 711 University Avenue; demolished.

We dipped our toes in the waters of vinyl this spring: I was gifted a collection of LPs, and the loan of a portable turntable, to see if we could muster what it would take to replace Spotify et al with a record collection.

The vinyl was as good as it gets: Lisa and L. curated a collection of Dennis Ellsworth’s deaccessioned collection, which had remarkable crossover with albums I played on the radio thirty years ago.

But the vinyl didn’t take: we’ve been lulled into the comfort of “Alexa, play Rosemary Clooney on Spotify,” and going back to needle-dropping wasn’t meant to be.

With hipster street-red eroding, I realized urgent action was required to re-establish, so to return the turntable across town I fashioned a bungie-cord-based system to strap it to the front of my Brompton. After dropping it, I came to the library to have an espresso, just to cement my credentials.

Not since the big Coles Building stairs rebuild in 2017 has there been a downtown Charlottetown  stairs project to match, but the new Grafton Street steps at the Polyclinic, which reopened this week after months of work, surpass in both beauty and utility.