The day didn’t start off unusually: I got up, had a shower, made breakfast, made lunch for Olivia, had a cup of coffee.

I was about to head out the door when I got a text from Darcie Lanthier, Green candidate for Charlottetown:

“Can I call you?”, she asked.

“I’ll call you in five!”, I replied.

I called back. Darcie wanted to know if I could drive Green Party leader Annamie Paul around the Island today in my electric car, supporting a visit that came together only in the previous 24 hours.

I told her I’d call her back in 15.

I quickly rescheduled my dentist appointment, and checked in with a friend who had an electric car with considerably more range than mine to see about borrowing it; he agreed without hesitation. I texted work colleagues to let them know I’d be out for the day.

I was in!

I called Darcie back.

“Meet Annamie at Charlottetown Airport at noon,” she instructed.

Which is how I came to be driving Annamie Paul from Charlottetown to Victoria to Albany to Freetown and back today. It was a delightful and unexpected opportunity to contribute to the Green campaign, and a chance to sit inside the eye of the national campaign hurricane for the day.

Beyond that, it was a chance to get to know Annamie, to watch her campaign up close, to hear her give interviews from the back seat of the car, to see how she relates to people, to understand her grasp of the issues and their nuances, and witness her prodigious communication skills and equally prodigious intelligence.

The last few months have not been, I imagine, an easy time to be the leader of the Green Party of Canada: the party appeared to be eating itself alive, with a federal council—the secular arm of the party, so to speak—seemingly at war with the leader, for reasons unknown and opaque even to we members.

And so it hasn’t been an easy time to be a member either: who wants to be a member of an apparently deeply-dysfunctional party, incapable of even governing its own affairs. I felt my own enthusiasm waning over the summer, and wasn’t certain I’d participate in the next campaign, or even vote Green.

But yet here I am, doing both.

Why?

First, as I’ve written before, I strongly believe that Darcie, my local Green candidate, is the candidate most qualified for the job.

Second, I read the Green Platform, and found myself saying an emphatic yes to the plans it lays out—canceling oil pipelines, ending fossil fuel extraction, getting to net zero ASAP, investing in coop housing, introducing a guaranteed livable income, concrete action on reconciliation—seeing my priorities reflected in them; a systematic, bold, integrated approach to tackling the issues of the day.

Third, I realized that the party’s internal struggles don’t, for all immediate electoral intents and purposes, matter: we’re in the business of getting capable private members elected, in support of a strong platform backed by a bedrock of solid values, not running a railroad, nor, for the time-being at least, forming a government. Participatory democracy is a Green core value, and participatory democracy is, by times, messy and chaotic and fractious and capable of pulling people away from their better natures. This messy chaotic fractious internal season shall pass, I am convinced; the essential nature of the party remains true, and it will endure, renewed. And perhaps falter and renew again in the future. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And finally, today, seeing Annamie in action, and realizing that the collaborative style of politics she espouses, the intelligence she brings to bear, the humility and awareness of her own limitations she demonstrates, they are the kind of leadership we need for these polarized times.

Toward the end of our day on the road, Annamie was having trouble getting the window in the back of the car to stay up: every time she’d press the button to make the window go up, it would, indeed, go up. And then go right back down again. I tried from the front seat: same thing. She tried again: same thing. Finally, I pulled the car over, we all took a breath, and she tried it one more time: the window went up and stayed up.

No better a metaphor, I would like to think, for Annamie Paul’s political life, and for the fortunes of the party she leads.

Our friend Erin is the best: on our return from Cape Breton‘s blackberry-drenched coast, we found a pint of PEI blackberries in our vestibule waiting for us.

The Achilles heel of a cycling-not-driving active transportation lifestyle is the rain, because riding a bicycle in the rain is clearly impossible.

And yet it’s not!

I snarfed up a half-price pair of rain pants from Sporting Intentions this summer, and I’ve been keeping them in abeyance for hurricaney days like today.

And I gotta tell you, with a well-fitting rain jacket, a bicycle helmet, and the rain pants on, cycling in the rain is eminently possible: I suited up and cycled across downtown to The Shed for my regular afternoon coffee this afternoon, and discovered that whatever it is that makes cycling in the rain impossible is completely mitigated by the gear. I arrived happy and dry and, dare I say, extra-refreshed.

My rainy cycle was rendered slightly safer by the presence of a new billion-foot-candle red flashing light on the back (adding to the million-food-candle flashing white light already on the front), newly-acquired from MacQueen’s.

Provincial Credit Union, where I’ve been doing my banking for almost 30 years, is amidst a merge with several other PEI credit unions. The question of naming the merged entity was raised to the combined membership earlier in the summer, and the suggestions were of a nature only someone skilled in naming startup companies could love: I’ve put them out of my mind, but they were names like Extriva, Benefico, Xsmortootha. One of the options, though, was to gather under the legacy Provincial name, and that received my vote.

As such, I was happy to read this morning that it was the clear winner:

We heard you loud and clear. 

An overwhelming majority of members surveyed from each of the four legacy credit unions indicated Provincial Credit Union as their top name choice for the new credit union. 
We are ready to embrace the name Provincial Credit Union and to build on the success of our legacy credit unions to better serve you and your community 

Thank goodness.

The house I grew up in didn’t have a true attic, but it did have an interconnected web of crawlspaces wending around the gabled roof, and at least once I was called to make the crawl thorough the spaces at the behest of my father. The reason why escapes me, but two memories remain: one was the experience itself, and the other was that part of the reason for my recruitment was that my father was claustrophobic.

As far as I can recall my father wasn’t afraid of anything—that seems like an odd thing to write, but I truly can’t think of anything—and so that he was afraid of small spaces was notable. As was the word claustrophobic, which must have been uttered at some point, and struck me as being rather exotic.

I don’t consider myself claustrophobic, and I’ve been in my fair share of submarines and subterranean passageways and tiny elevators without panicking that I’m pretty certain I didn’t inherit the quality from my father.

But COVID claustrophobia is something else entirely.

I first experienced it this summer at The Haviland Club when attending an Island Fringe show there. While I was assured that all the COVID protocols were adhered to, sitting in closer proximity to other people than I’d sat in 18 months felt deeply uncomfortable. I almost had to leave.

And so while many friends and acquaintances have plunged into attending concerts and movies, eating indoors at restaurants with abandon, it’s been all I can do to attend Pen Night twice and to have a few carefully-curated meals out-in.

I make no claims to a moral high ground here, and I suspect that I’m being overly cautious given the actual risks involved.

Indeed I imagine this doesn’t have much to do with COVID at all, and more with more full-throated expression of a pre-existing social anxiety than usual, brought on by spending a year and a half in relative seclusion.

There is likely a dollop of grief-involvement mixed in: when I stop to think about it, the notion that Catherine died and then, two months later, we were all locked inside our houses for months on end, was deeply weird. And not a typical grief pathway.

I’ve been reading The Body Keeps the Score, and the passage that’s jumped out at me most so far is this:

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.

That the world pressed pause at the very moment my life got flipped-turned upside down, at the very moment I was trying to figure out a new kind of normal: that was freaky and destabilizing. Imagination was what I needed more than anything, and COVID did a good job stanching it; is it any wonder, at this point, that I’m reluctant to power the engines up to full and resume my regular diet of public engagement.

Perhaps I am not alone in this?

We’re on our way home from Cape Breton, via the ferry, our band of merry travellers.

The Chief Public Health Office has done something really smart: in place of the tourist information kiosk on the ferry, they’re running “PEI Pass” pre-checks, where they review your paperwork and, if it all checks out, and you don’t need testing, you get a golden (pink) ticket that allows bypass of the lineup on the other side.

Nancy, our cordial shipboard CPHO staffer, was very patient with our various complexities (she didn’t bat an eye when Olivia explained that she’s a trans woman and thus her PEI Pass name doesn’t match her ID), and a ticket we did indeed receive. So at Wood Islands we’ll “keep right,” hand it over, and glide right through.

My friend Eve is teaching a Beatles Ukulele course on Zoom this fall.

On this, the last full day of our summer vacation in Cape Breton, we have been gifted a day of sunshine after many days of rain. So I end my vacation where I started it, in the hammock.