I have had today what easily rates as a gratifying day! It was hot and humid with a blazing sun and clear blue sky. Not everyone’s favourite yet oddly tolerable for me.  Things just happened today and nothing obstructed the aimlessness. It seems only fit that I should recall an expression from the salad days of my youth!  Apple pie order!  If memory serves me properly it was something Joseph Conrad wrote between character lines in Heart of Darkness. Conrad had to have been less inspiring at the time than J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye yet both are memorable, certainly a retrospective tribute.

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Whether as a commiseration or as a congratulation I shall never know but I regularly spirit myself with Voltaire’s satirical rejection in Candide (1759) of Leibniz’s optimistic view of the world; viz., that this indeed is the best of all possible worlds. The mettle preserves my oomph through all circumstances. This morning for example I was not disappointed in this vital frame of mind. When bicycling along the alameda in the centre of town I encountered Stephen E. C. Brathwaite of local, national and international artistic fame. Dressed in his customary cotton clothing he at first resembled a gardener puttering in the weeds. He was in fact checking recent art installations of his doing. The first of three items he mentioned was a casting of two table tennis rackets and a ping-pong ball. The casting is inventively located aside one of the new park benches along the tree-lined promenade.

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As teenage boys at boarding school on Sunday mornings when walking from school to the local Anglican Church for matins we would regularly challenge one another to name the make of the cars we saw as they passed on the road. Admittedly at the time (1963) it was a less than taxing obstacle given the limitation of manufacturers to the “Big Three” Ford, GM and Chrysler. Yonge Street was then but a 2-lane highway which naturally extended from Toronto beyond the residential limits of North York through the quaint Thornhill and Richmond Hill to Aurora. Along with the residents of nearby King, Ontario we were among the local rural inhabitants. Our closest village was Newmarket where Sir William Mulock (a former Postmaster General of Canada among other winning credentials) once resided and whose ancient descendent and classmate of mine Bill Mulock was driven by chauffeur each day to school from his ancestral home.

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“I am ruined!” Those were my exact words late this afternoon as I languished in a sensible deck chair on the patio under a large umbrella at Katarina’s Coffee Shop, 513 King St W, Prescott, Ontario. The St. Lawrence River murmured but yards away; children frolicked in the water to escape the raging heat and humidity of the day. I had just gulped a spoonful of Affogato coffee followed by a nibble of a Double Baked Chocolate Croissant.

We bake the croissants, soak them in a rum flavoured simple syrup and then bake them again before topping with sugar! Same great buttery taste of a regular croissant, but now sugary sweet.

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Many people who live in Almonte – and who have done so for some considerable time – don’t know we have an island in the centre of town. It’s called Coleman’s Island and is surrounded on every side by a tributary of the Mississippi River.  What even fewer know about is the esplanade on Coleman’s Island.

An esplanade or promenade is a long, open, level area, usually next to a river or large body of water, where people may walk. The historical definition of esplanade was a large, open, level area outside fortress or city walls to provide clear fields of fire for the fortress’s guns. In modern usage, the space allows the area to be paved as a pedestrian walk; esplanades are often on sea fronts and allow walking whatever the state of the tide, without having to walk on the beach.

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Ask anyone who has sought to get on the right side of the public cash box and you’ll no doubt stumble upon an enthralling tale. The slander (because that’s what it’s always about) captures far more than the putative excesses of personal greed and selfish ambition. It will go far beyond any base insight into the less than judicial interpretations of legislation. It will reveal in the end the answer to the very question which ought to have been addressed at the outset; namely, the price to be paid? For some the matter is of no consequence particularly as most of what evolves from historic analysis is buried between the covers of a tome by a gentrified writer who as often as not retired to his country seat with his book and his bottle. But for the man who has to endure the consequence, the rebuttal is clear and compelling.

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We needn’t expect that every day – or any day for that matter – should be quintessential; that things will go precisely as we imagine they should; that the timing at the traffic lights will correspond to our particular urgency; that the shelves of the grocery store will have all we require in abundance; that people’s manners will be preserved throughout trifling commotion.  Today was in part one of those “off” days, an occasion when the mechanics of the clock don’t exactly correspond to the movement of the hands on the face. Yet as moderately irregular as the day has been in certain respects, in others (such as the weather and the serendipity of a kindly email and telephone call late this afternoon) it has been splendid. The unanticipated outcome of the provocation was a reminder how magnificent it is to have “nothing to do, nowhere to go”, that incalculable profit of retirement.

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“The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died, viz., “Abiit ad plures” (He has gone over to the majority,) my brother explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts!”

Excerpt From: Thomas De Quincey. “Autobiographical Sketches”

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There is not, I don’t imagine, a more succinct and penetrating idiom for food than “bread and cheese”. With perhaps, according to some, the addition of wine. Maybe Champagne. But aside from the stimulants we employ at and about table, even the supplement of as basic an ingredient as meat to the jargon might be conceived a superfluity though there are admittedly compelling distortions such as grilled cheese sandwiches with bacon! But that is more a culinary infatuation than a metaphorical adaptation. In any event it came as a surprise to discover that the classic rendition of the concoction – bread and cheese – is the fabric of a long-standing Native/Canadian/British tradition. It is refreshing to awaken palatable features of our past which connect to national heredity.

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The heat today was a furnace. We languished for lunch at the golf club in the shade on the fieldstone patio overlooking the first tee.  We were spared a measure of the sultriness by a gentle breeze. The weather in spite of its ineluctable sway did not diminish the gusto of the familial congregation; specifically the youth of 18, 19 and 20 years of age. An encounter of this scope is for a septuagenarian such as I an infrequent affair. I view this historic brush as an invitation for discovery and expansion – oddly reminiscent of a mythical query I heard years ago:

Q: You are crossing a field and encounter a hedgerow which extends high above you and as far to the left and right as you can see.  You must get through it to the other side.  How do you proceed?

A. Go either left or right in the hopes of going around the obstruction; or,
B. Plough directly through.

Q: When you get through the hedgerow, what is on the other side?

A. Nothing; or,
B. A farm house.

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