Remarking upon the end of an adventurous day is not entirely unlike the welcome ceremony of brewing fresh coffee. This is particularly so as I am now curiously accustomed to having my roasted bean narcotic as a relaxation in the late afternoon rather than in the morning. The intellectual equivalent of percolating an evening reflective summary may in this instance be more accurately stated as filtrate (as in “liquid passed through a filter”) or even transude (basically, “to gradually sweat through pores”). Hear me out. After having had a sleepless night, and having forcibly ejected myself from the lair prior to 7:00 am in anticipation of the early morning arrival of our housekeeper, then thrown ourselves onto an equally abrupt collision with Canadian Co-operative Wool Growers in Carleton Place (in search of white woollen socks) followed by a perfunctory perch at table in the clubhouse overlooking the first tee while putting on the nosebag, it has been in all an exhausting commotion! And this before I relate the toxic circuitous drive into the city to collect an article from Mountain Equipment Company fettered by endless construction for the LRT (Light Rail Transport), boundless highway construction and unspeakable urban building expansion.

Light rail (or light rail transit, abbreviated to LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit using rolling stock derived from tram technology while also having some features from heavy rapid transit. The term was coined in 1972 in the United States, to create an English equivalent for the German word Stadtbahn meaning City railway.

Yet somehow, by an alliance of my superior inclinations (with their customary soothing accreditations), I have once again succeeded to restore myself to my aimless evening enterprises with shamefully satisfactory results. Starting with a recovery from the overnight sleeplessness. The analgesics have yet fully to kick in, but the ensuing moderations of the day have partly assuaged my internal mechanical dilemma. Well-being is very much an evolutionary emotional state. Overnight I contemplated those seemingly heady matters which had unwittingly survived the previous day into the night where in the darkness and the vacant restlessness naturally they became astronomically more significant. But the purchase of the white woollen socks replenished my strength, reminding me as it did of my erstwhile habit years ago of buying white woollen socks on Cape Cod to celebrate my arrival on Labour Day, the imperative to align with my new Top Sider “oilers”.

Trapped in the automobile, jerking relentlessly through the abbreviated road construction, we had the opportunity to chat between ourselves and to address the blunt features of our most recent flavourful communications and rumination upon family and friends. These are the matters which frequently are willfully disguised though undigested. But confronting the residue and particles of the nutrition is invariably profitable.  As it was today.  We were thankfully able to concede that the calculated withdrawal from one incident in particular was fortuitous.  For both sides. And by coincidence later in the day a matter arose which sanctioned the conclusion.

But additional matters required percolation.  My mindset was yet ambiguous, reflecting perhaps the mercurial weather patterns. As the hours unfolded in their singular manner, as the clouds began to clear, I too was restored to that evaporation which heralds clarity of thought and removal of ambivalence. There is no recipe for the transition. It is but yet another example of the incomprehensible majesty of life! We would flatter ourselves to imagine we are its authors! Nor is it necessary to lapse into the stridency of literary serendipity! The naturally fermented ablutions of time and space are incalculable.