Blog posts are breadcrumbs

Here’s a sketch I made of the house, at 233 5th Avenue in Cochrane, Ontario, where my mother grew up:

I loved that house. It started off life as a bottling plant, and was later converted into apartments by my great-grandfather Ed Caswell. I loved the smell of my Grandma Ada’s fur coats, stored in the bedroom on the second floor behind the glassed-in porch. I loved the door stop used to hold the bathroom door open, the microscopic kitchen, the plant that grew up and around the entire living room. Making the sketch, I imagined my grandfather, Ross Caswell, sitting in his chair, looking out the big window, twiddling his thumbs.

A few years after Ed died in 1950, Ross converted part of the back of the house into an additional apartment. Dorothy Gray and her husband Chuck, newlyweds, saw the construction at the back of the house, talked to Ross, and Ross agreed to rent to them. They lived there for four years, time that overlapped with my mother’s teenage years.

I didn’t know about Dorothy and Chuck’s role in the life of my family until last month when, out of the blue, I got an email from Dorothy, 66 years after she and Chuck moved out. She had come across my post about the house from a few years ago, and sent me a message wondering if I was related to Ross. 

I’m not sure who was more amazed and delighted by this 6-decades-later connection, Dorothy or me, but I can tell you that I was awfully amazed and delighted.

It is no secret to longtime readers that I love coincidences, and Dorothy delivered more of them, as I found out as we chatted back and forth by email: she grew up in here in Prince Edward Island, near Alberton, where her 103 year old brother lives still. She went to nursing school in Summerside, and on graduation she was offered a position at Lady Minto Hospital in Cochrane. Lady Minto was the hospital where my mother was born, where my great-grandparents died, and where my grandfather Ross spent the last years of his life in de facto long term care.

Hearing from Dorothy, and being able to tell Mom the story, made my day. What a gift to have a simple noticing of a house unearth such as wondrous connection.

In the past couple of months I’ve had an unusual bunch of delightful things happen as a result of things I’ve written in this space over the last 25 years.

Earlier in the summer, I received an email from a woman named Angela, in Switzerland, referencing this post I wrote 17 years ago about my late friend Sandra Furrer. 

Angela and Sandra met, in the mid-1980s, when Sandra apprenticed in the Swiss hotel where Angela was working. They became fast friends, and were part of each others lives until Sandra’s untimely death at age 39.

In her email, Angela wrote that she and her husband Beat were travelling to Prince Edward Island in August, and wondered if I might facilitate their visiting people and places that were part of Sandra’s life. I put out a call, and was able to connect them with several. Then, when Angela and Beat visited, Lisa and I had lunch with them at The Cork & Cast, which, in a former life, was the Black Forest Café that Sandra owned. They were a delightful couple, and we enjoyed meeting them. 

A meeting that happened because I’d taken a few minutes, a couple of decades ago, to memorialize Sandra.

Memorializing also came to play last month, when I received an email due this 2010 blog post about Len Russo. A friend of Len’s in Halifax, where he’d moved in the years following his time here on the Island, wrote:

Though we knew him for 25 years, we knew very little, for certain, about him. We were hoping you might know more about when he came to PEI?

I didn’t, in fact,  know Len all that well. He was friends with Catherine Hennessey, and it was at Catherine’s house that I first met him, as I wrote in 2010:

I met Len for the first time when he walked into Catherine Hennessey’s old house on Dorchester Street one Saturday afternoon.

I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Catherine about something or another and Len walked in a started, unbidden, making focaccia (it was very good). And then he left.

After that first meeting I’d see him around and about, but I didn’t know much about his back story. I suggested the correspondent contact Paul MacNeill, Publisher of the Eastern Graphic newspaper where Len’s column, referenced in my blog post, had once run.

A few days later, Len’s obituary appeared, and I learned a lot about the man I knew only a little about, starting:

This obituary is based on Len’s own words, a series of autobiographical poems he wrote late in life, looking back and reflecting.

They made it clear that there was a consistency behind the bewildering variety of jobs he took and places he lived. He never once wavered in his youthful commitment to Dorothy Day’s Distributionism, even as he reflected that most all his companions had moved on to conspicuous consumption.

A few weeks later, Paul MacNeill published a column about Len, and about the rabbit hole that he fell into as a result of Len’s death and this blog. Paul began:

It started with sad news. Len Russo, who many long-time Graphic readers will remember for his 1990s slice of life column, Looking Around, had died in Halifax.

Len was one of those writers who saw the world in human terms. He’d stroll into a government office (back when the public was allowed to stroll into a government office) and chat with everyone from secretaries to deputy ministers. Those chats and observations became fodder for columns that put a human face on the public service.

As Paul continued, in a way I am certain would delight Len, the trail led to the late Andy Wells, whose daughter Krista had also contacted Paul about Len’s death:

I had heard of Andy Wells, but did not fully appreciate his contribution to this province. He was principal secretary to Alex Campbell, perhaps the most consequential premier in our history. His four terms brought the Development Plan, which took PEI kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Running water was delivered to rural homes. UPEI was created as our primary school of higher education with the merger of St Dunstan’s University and Prince of Wales College – a feat of political nerve and negotiation that rivals any. The public school system was reformed.

When I don’t know something – and this happens more often than I care to acknowledge – Google is sent to find me what I need to know. High in the list of Andy Wells hits was a link to a 2009 interview with Wells by Peter Rukavina. It is 16 minutes of Prince Edward Island gold. Wells died in 2012.

I loved doing that interview with Andy, and I’m proud that I play a small role in keeping memory of his contributions to the province alive.

While all of this was playing out, I got another email, this one from Peggy Smith in Saint John, New Brunswick. Peggy was great friends with the Cudmore family, late of Charlottetown’s Henderson & Cudmore, and had found a photo of Beth and Brian Cudmore I posted on the occasion of Beth’s death in 2011.

Peggy is a painter—she painted portraits of most of the Cudmore children and grandchildren, she told me—and, at 90, paints still. One of the Cudmores described her to me as someone with “a kind heart and a vivacious laugh,” and it’s never a bad day to hear from someone like that.

I have been writing here for 25 years—a good chunk of my adult life—and in the 10,000-odd posts I’ve written there has been obscure writing about technical niches, the entire life and times of my now-23-year-old daughter, a lot of petulant misdirected midlife anger, sadness, grief, love, hope. I’ve grown up here; writing these words has been, and remains, an integral part of my operating system.

It’s a web, a very personal one that’s part of a worldwide one: the posts I write are  breadcrumbs—public, searchable, hyperlinked—that connect me to you, and bits of my past to bits of your past. I love it when a bit of happenstance web magic happens, and connects me with a tenant of my grandfather’s, the friend of a late friend, or a painter with vivacious laugh.