I had Kraft Dinner for lunch on Sunday.

For normal humans this would be unremarkable, but it was my first time eating Kraft Dinner. I’m 57 years old.

At some point I simply decided that I wouldn’t like Kraft Dinner.

That I wasn’t a person who ate Kraft Dinner.

I imagined it would taste like bubblegum and basketballs.

We carry around mental models of who we are, the things we do and don’t do, the kinds of friends we have and don’t have. Where our upper limits lie.

“I don’t eat Kraft Dinner.”

But deeper.

I recently read about “life quakes,” a term coined by Bruce Feiler, in the book Anatomy of a Breakthrough by Adam Alter:

“These are the wolves that upend our fairy tales,” Feiler wrote about lifequakes. Lifequakes are sticking points, Feiler noted, because they place roadblocks in whatever path we are following. They prevent us from pursuing the lives we previously imagined living and so leave us stuck as we attempt to construct revised lives in their wake.

I have lived through a series of lifequakes in recent years, and I have needed to construct a new life in their wake. As much as this has been all manner of debilitating, it has also presented me a chance to retell my story to myself. Some of these retellings have been involuntary, others I’ve had to reach for, still others seem tantalizingly just out of reach.

It is destabilizing to walk through this: as much as there are exciting new things to try — horseback riding!, improv! Kraft Dinner! — there is the absence of familiar guideposts that makes a boomerang back to old ruts, in roads that no longer exist, alluring. There is an equal and opposite tendency to chart wildly ambitious courses through unfamiliar seas because, well, what’s the worst thing that could happen! And the tension between the two impulses.

Alter writes on about lifequakes:

The most important feature of lifequakes is that they’re hard to predict. You don’t plan for a lifequake the way you might anticipate an impending plateau, so instead you need to develop a general tool kit for managing unwanted change. “Life transitions are a skill,” Feiler wrote. “They’re a skill we can, and must, master.” A particular lifequake may take you by surprise, but recognizing that lifequakes and other profound sticking points are inevitable puts you several steps ahead of the many people who respond first by asking, “Why me?!” 

At my most optimistic, this skill at life transitions is the one I hope I’m cultivating: gifted a decade of lifequakes, big and small, I’m learning to see them, and to see myself and how I react to them, and getting better at seeing the opportunities chaos offers.

It turns out Kraft Dinner is tasty.

Who knew.

Jeremy Cherfas is in the Italian countryside, and has too many zucchini:

It is a pretty isolated spot, which means the old trick of driving into town with a basket of produce and depositing it on the back seat of anyone foolish enough to leave their car unlocked at the height of zucchini season will not work.

This recalls a time in the late 1980s when my roommates at 640 Reid Street and I, faced with a similar over abundance of zucchini, organized an all-zucchini meal (zucchini fritters, zucchini boats, zucchini cake, etc.).

From The Transgender Family Handbook, an essay by Theresa Thorn, When She Says She’s a Girl, Trust Her. In part:

In hindsight, my firstborn, who had been assigned male at birth, had been trying to signal to me about her gender for a while and, without understanding the harm I was doing, I had been subtly dismissing her hints and gestures. I knew trans kids existed, but I hadn’t thought my kid was trans, which led me to discourage her from wearing a dress on Picture Day (“It’ll be confusing”) and repeatedly cut her hair (“It’s just easier this way”). To me at the time, these had been simple exercises of parental judgment. To my child, they had probably been rejections. By spelling it out in no uncertain terms on the night of the reception, she told me she needed me to start really seeing her. And I honestly wanted to. I wanted to understand every corner of this mysterious little person I helped bring into the world. But to see her for real meant I needed to trust her in a way I never really had before.

Laurie Brown, and the Pondercast podcast she partners, are dipping below the horizon.

In writing about this, Laurie describes this “disappearing act”:

So, what’s next?? There is more art waiting in the wings that I can concentrate on now. I can also learn to live unseen and unheard. After being in the public eye/ear for almost forty years, I know there are important lessons for me here.  So, my next act is a disappearing one.

Pondercast has been an important soundtrack for me in recent years, with its zenith coming, for me and Olivia, in 2018 when we went to a live show in Wolfville. That was a loving, connecting trip for us when we really really needed a loving, connecting trip, and Pondercast was the supportive glue that stuck it together.

No sentence sums of the zeitgeist of the last 4 years for me better than this one, from October 2021:

There is an upside to music dropping out of your life, and that’s having it return.

Having those words to accrete feelings around helped me dig myself out of a hole that I’d been digging for a long time. For that I’m truly thankful.

So long for now, Laurie.

Beautiful writing:

Words held back, feelings not felt, stories misunderstood, assumptions not tested, details forgotten or suppressed, joys “undeserved”, shames buried or carried too long, excitements so bold they need protecting, dreams so fragile they can dissolve before they’re spoken. These are the beginnings of my unwritten “poems”.

We are spending the week some blocks north, at the house shared by my mother and my brother and sister-in-law. We’re taking care of the cats, while Mike and Karen are taking a much-deserved break in Ontario. To be clear, Lisa and L. are taking care of the cats, and their needs for petting, loving, injecting, feeding. I am cleaning the litter box.

I love the idea of cats; actually executing cat life is a high-level logistics exercise. I tip my hat to those able to do it day after day after day. And I tip my hat to Lisa, who has become completely comfortable at administering units of insulin to the scruff of the neck.

CatCamp has its virtues. It’s a staycation where we can return to the mothership to pick up underwear. And we are getting to spend a lot more time with Mom—eating meals every night together, and taking a daily constitutional. It’s also a kind of limbo: life, but tuned a few MHz out of phase. Come Thursday we’ll settle back down the street, happy to have facilitated. And happy that our underwear is closer. Maybe I’ll even miss the cats.

The weather, meanwhile, has turned from dark rainy depressitude into summer. In the Sobeys checkout line yesterday there were a lot of people responding to “why don’t you pick up things for the BBQ on your way home” calls. Myself included.

When I was a kid, growing up in Carlisle, I’d start every summer day yelling downstairs to my mother “MOM, SHORTS OR LONGS?!”. This was followed by a 50 year period where I dressed uniseasonally, wearing a significant “this isn’t relaxation, folks, take life seriously” chip on my shoulder. Or maybe I just thought my schlumpy body didn’t look good in shorts. But yesterday, facing a 24ºC school run on bicycleback, I switched into the smart shorts I bought last summer, when things first tipped toward summer sensibility, and I ended up wearing them all day, including to our improv class. Which made me feel strangely like Robin Williams minus the suspenders.

We have been cycling with L. to school almost every morning for the last two months. When we started we were wearing gloves and winter coats. While the parentheses surrounding the school day can feel constricting—as any parent knows well—I love cycling, and the mornings that L. and I cycle to school, just the two of us, we have good conversations. Talking while moving is always better: I know that from raising Olivia. I know that from walking with Lisa. (I had a client once who insisted we conduct business meetings while walking, at a good clip, from Springbrook to Long River, on Saturday mornings, before sitting down to breakfast at the Kitchen Witch; despite the hassle, and his pace, it was surprisingly effective).

Our friend Silva turned 60 a few weeks ago, and there was a big party in the architecture office with good people and good food and artisanal rum drinks. It was fun (that in itself is saying something; as part of the shed snakeskin of my younger years, I’ve cast off a lot of my social anxiety, and now kinda like going to parties).

Silva and Catherine were the same age, 1963 babies. So Catherine’s would-have-been-60th birthday (Olivia’s wording) would-have-been this Sunday, June 18. Olivia misses her Mom, and wants to have a big birthday party for her. It’s hard to explain to her why I don’t want to have a birthday party for her.

Catherine turned 30 the year we moved to Prince Edward Island. We didn’t know anyone, and so that birthday was just the two of us. I don’t remember what we did, but I remember it was something good, that I mustered well, and we were happy. Ten years later, for her 40th, I attempted to rise to the occasion again, and somehow failed. It might have been less that I didn’t rise to the occasion and more that Catherine was in a funk about turning 40, and nothing I did would have registered as maximum fun. 

What did we do for her 50th? I have no idea. Or maybe we went to The Pearl? Or The Dunes? Maybe there was another funk? Maybe it was lovely. I don’t remember.

When I think about Olivia’s persistent insistence that we celebrate Catherine’s birthday, and my persistent reluctance, I think of Lisa’s coaching, encouraging me to “stand in the ‘win for all’ ”, and so standing for what Olivia wants. And for Olivia to do the same. That’s hard. And uncomfortable. The memory of Catherine, what Catherine meant to us, lives so differently in the two us: what offers her comfort can trigger me, what she wants to draw closer to, I want to face forward from. Maybe that’s why trying to stand for what she wants is a route out of our impasse. Today, in any case, is the day to find our way through.

Meanwhile, fresh off the morning school-cycle, I’m sitting at one of the back tables at The 5th Wave, my new morning coffee spot of choice (good coffee, good tables and chairs, good soundtrack, open early). I’ve just finished the last sip of a nitro cold brew, which is as effective for its name as its essence (it’s not hard to imagine it confers temporary superpowers).

I’ll shortly depart, crossing the street to The Bookmark to pick up my copy of Linocut: Learn in a Weekend, just arrived as a special order. And then I’ll plunge into work, having blocked off today for a big push on several Almanac.com projects.

Later we’ll cycle to pick up L. We’ll figure out supper together. I’ll make a playlist for Olivia to go to sleep with. I’ll ask her how her day went. The cats will get fed. Maybe we’ll watch a show.

And then I’ll climb into bed beside Lisa, and, right then, all will be right with the world.

From The Last Egg:

We do very well for ourselves, given the circumstances, but the stark reality is: we won’t see fresh eggs for another five full months. Another facet of our weird, weird adventure here at the bottom of the world.

The brr blog has been one of my favourite blog discoveries of the year.

My brain loves a good numerical coincidence.