Roger Ebert is a song from the alt-country band Clem Snide inspired by Ebert’s dying words, as his widow Chaz explains here.

Merry Go ‘Round from Kacey Musgraves has a clever chorus:

Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay

Brother’s hooked on Mary Jane

And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down

It’s also good banjo.

“Which trendy café in Kensington should I go to?” A question that, until recently, nobody had ever asked. Or considered the possibility of asking.

But here I am in the trendy C & B Corner Café, eating a gouda-pesto bagel and drinking a ginger-rhubarb lemonade.

After a Zoom in the car, I’ll pop across the street to the Willow Bakery & Café for an espresso.

Earlier this spring I found my way to Wouter Groeneveld, a Belgian polymath, via a post Ton made about a meetup they both attended.

On Wouter’s blog I read mention of his interest in fountain pens, an interest we share that was later reinforced by Ton purposefully connecting us based on it.

As one does in such situations, I invited Wouter to attend our monthly Pen Night on Zoom, and he generously agreed to do so, despite the time difference meaning our 7:00 p.m. start was midnight for him.

In addition to sharing his pen passion that night, Wouter also touched (because I asked) on his interest in bread baking, and this led to a small diversion where pizza was discussed.

The next day Wouter sent me a recommendation for the book American Pie by Peter Reinhart. Which, of course, I immediately ordered a copy of.

Tonight, as it happened, was our weekly pizza night. Finding myself without cheese, I made up my dough, set it to rest, and cycled over to Kent Street Market for some mozzarella. On the way there I remembered a voicemail from The Bookmark telling me to come in and pick up a book, so I diverted to fetch it.

The book? American Pie.

Which is how I ended up with ingredients for pizza, plus a book about pizza, in my bicycle carrier late this afternoon.

I had a session with my therapist yesterday, and we were talking about what I like to do. What I truly like to do, in my heart of hearts. I related to her my small story about finding Iona as an example of when I feel I am my truest self; the best description I can come up with for that activity is creating the necessary preconditions for serendipity, seeing what happens, and telling the story.

Meeting Wouter was an example of that. So was meeting my late friend Harold and visiting him in Thailand. And going to the Reboot conference. And spending the summer in Berlin. And organizing an unconference. And riding my bicycle to an early morning flight from the airport. Serendipity is how I’ve found every job I’ve ever had and every romance I’ve ever had. It’s how I ended up producing radio shows, and how I became a modern dance promoter.

We didn’t end up coming to any conclusions as to what might come next for me, my therapist and I, but I emerged convinced that serendipity is going to be the engine that takes me there, and likely a good part of the there itself.

To the extent that I lost my mojo in recent years, it was due those necessary preconditions not having a chance to develop: I was needed elsewhere, and happenstance was my enemy not my friend.

One of the gifts of having a blog that’s 22 years old, though, is that I’ve plenty of reminders of what those preconditions look like, and thus a helpful tool in making branching life decisions: “will doing this thing (that I am probably afraid to do) power the serendipity drive or not.”

Twenty years ago, in anticipation of the arrival of our baby, a glider rocker was secured. It proved fantastically well-suited to its task of rocking-baby-to-sleep assisting, but, as baby evolved, it became less useful, and more like an annoying tippy chair (at least in my more strident eyes).

With my stridency now unfettered, I listed it on Kijiji a month ago, where it joined many other glider rockers for sale (perhaps also victims of growing children). For weeks I had no bites, but last week someone from Wellington pinged me; they retrieved it today. $30. A good deal for them, and a little less tippy clutter at 100 Prince Street.

Johannes Kleske wrote an ode to Readwise, and, knowing Johannes to be both wise and organized, I dove in. Without bogarting his description of the app and its place in the digital ecosystem, Readwise is quickly summarized as “highlights management.”

I fed Readwise my Kindle highlights and my iBooks highlights, which amounted to a lot of highlights for someone who long ago rejected the very notion of ebooks.

The result has been a surfacing of much interesting material I’d long forgotten about, thoughts I once felt useful enough to note, now fed back to me, outside of the original flow, living to inform another day.

Like The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband, a book I loved. For paragraphs like this:

But that’s clubbing. At least you can stand for hours without saying a word in a club or sneak out without being noticed. But you can’t do that at a party. At a party, you have to be present. At a party, you have to engage. Mingle. This is where my game falls apart. The social situation at a party falls way outside of my normal daily parameters. Things are not on my terms; events unfold by the terms of the gathering itself. In the midst of this, I feel that all eyes are on me—my own included—monitoring and judging my performance from start to finish. Don’t do anything wrong or unusual, because everyone will think the worst of you for the rest of your life. It’s pretty fucked-up in my opinion.

Readwise is more than simple management of highlights: it’s got some light gamification built in, some very flexible highlight-sharing tools, and has proved simply fun to use.

(Coincidentally, Ton has been experimenting with highlights management too, using an Obsidian plug-in.)

On Sunday I went wandering on the web, ambling about as I sometimes do.

“I should go to a bookbinding workshop!”, I thought to myself. “In Stockholm!”

Post-COVID thoughts were afoot!

So I Googled stockholm bookbinding school.

Top search result: The Travelling Bookbinder’s Guide to Stockholm.

Well that’s interesting.

But who’s The Travelling Bookbinder?

There’s an excellent video on The Travelling Bookbinder’s website that answers exactly that: she is Rachel Hazell.

As teacher, author and traveller, books, words and the power of imagination have always been central to Rachel’s life. She believes that everyone has a book inside them, and loves sharing the satisfying experience of creating unique artwork, in the most inspiring places.

Hazell is a part time resident of the Scottish island of Iona, and in the video there’s a quote that caught my ear:

The thing about islands is there’s less space between Heaven and Earth.

Living on an island as I do, I feel that to be intuitively true.

I emailed her to ask her more about this idea; she quickly replied, pointing me to George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, who, she related, she had paraphrased.

Here’s a passage, oft-quoted, from Ron Ferguson’s biography of MacLeod, George MacLeod (emphasis mine):

The cattle were certainly lowing in the ruins, but they were moved out of the choir as the rebuilding proceeded. By 1910, the Abbey church had been beautifully restored. A communion table of genuine Iona marble was placed in the sanctuary. The island continued to attract pilgrims, and students came for retreat. The first principal of St Colm’s College, Annie Hunter Small, dearly loved Iona and brought students to the island at least as early as 1913. George was to say later that Miss Small turned his attention to Iona. The Reports of the Schemes of the Church of Scotland for 1921 refers to a retreat held by divinity students the previous year.

The retreats had been started and funded in 1920 by Dr David Russell, who had enlisted the enthusiastic help of George MacLeod from the beginning. George was a popular lecturer at the annual Iona events. The potential of Iona for retreat, renewal and ministerial formation was obvious to him. The history of Iona and its special atmosphere – he described it as a ‘thin place – only a tissue paper separating earth from heaven’ – greatly appealed to him.

I went looking on YouTube to see if I could find any evidence of MacLeod discussing this, and found this excerpt of the 1960s film Sermon in Stone, narrated by MacLeod himself:

“We began to ask,” says MacLeod in the film, “could we make a permanent experiment of cooperation between Sunday and Weekday? ‘Come to Iona,’ a spirit seemed to say, ‘and do it in the large.’ Iona’s a very thin place, only a bit of tissue paper between things spiritual and things material.”

My relationship with the spiritual realm is weak, and so perhaps the tissue paper is more opaque for me than for others; but for reasons I do not completely understand, I am drawn the the notion of islands as portals between Heaven and Earth, and of MacLeod’s “thin places.”

Hazell finished her email pointing me to a review she’d posted of the book Thin Places, by Kerri ní Dochartaigh; here’s a video introduction to the book. Reading it is my next project.

I should still go to Stockholm–or better yet Iona–to take a bookbinding course, but I’m happy for the diversion that my search inspired.

My favourite summertime drink when in Germany is Rhabarberschorle, a rhubarb spritzer. Here’s a bottle I enjoyed in 2011 in Berlin:

With rhubarb in season, I resolved to make some for myself. It’s really easy:

1. Cut some rhubarb up.
2. Place it in a little water in a pot and heat it on medium-high until it’s satisfyingly mushy.
3. Strain the juice out into a bottle.
4. Spritz up some soda water in the Sodastream and add the rhubarb juice to taste.

You can add sugar if you must, but I recommend you start without sugar, as rhubarb doesn’t really need it as much as you think it might.

Seventeen years ago today I was in Montréal, and brother Steve and I found ours way to Délices de l’île Maurice for supper.

Partially due coincidence, and partially due my love of leveraging coincidence for whimsy, today for lunch I cycled out to the equine district of town to lunch at The Dodo, the Mauritian takeout joint that opened three weeks ago.

My order was ready for pickup when I arrived, and it neatly fit in my cycle carrier. I took advantage of my proximity to J. Frank MacAulay Park to scootch down Bills Lane and in the back door of the park, where I enjoyed my tasty lunch of spring roll, shrimp curry, basmati rice, and sparkling water under a gazebo beside the swale.

Lunch presented two mysteries: why The Dodo, and who was J. Frank MacAulay?

The first was easily answered in Wikipedia: the now-extinct dodo was native to Mauritius (its extinction seems to have been more due to humans introducing predators, and destroying habitat, than hunting the dodo itself).

The answer to the second question remains elusive: just who was J. Frank MacAulay (and why is there nothing in the park that bears his name to tell us)?

The large back garden is one of the great aspects of 100 Prince Street, and never is it more beautiful and verdant than in June.

Two years ago—can it really been have been so little and so long ago both?!—the back garden was filled with Crafting {:} a Life conversations and we were all feeling lucky to be alive.

Postscript: as proof that seasons have patterns and my perception of seasons also has patterns, I noted the same thing, almost exactly a year ago, with exactly the same post title.