This evening we rallied with friends for dinner at Speaks Clam Bar on Boulevard of the Presidents, St. Armand’s Circle. It was a strictly casual enterprise and ended being thoroughly pleasant. It helped too that each of us applauded our respective meal. Speaking for myself the lobster/shrimp/pasta dish – which incidentally had been recommended to me by Her Ladyship – was divine! I can’t recall having lately hoovered a meal quite so greedily! Nor was it the consequence of an appetite being the best sauce for any meal – though admittedly I had intentionally restrained myself since breakfast to ensure that I sidled up to the trough with befitting gusto. This afternoon I applied further oil to the ensuing culinary wantonness by cycling the constitutional 15 kms in addition to having swum afterwards in the pool.

As I gape across the boat slip and the fluttering American flag toward Sarasota Bay on this chilly, windy morning I cannot but confess the allure of the mounting Christmas spirit. I have enhanced the current emotional bent by listening to a collection of Christmas orchestras, choirs, oratorios and operatic celebrations. Shamefully perhaps we have no intention of insinuating the Christian worship tradition. Indeed I am more intent upon witnessing the passage of the Winter Solstice.

R. A. Jamieson, QC was the lawyer whose swivel office chair on the second floor of 74 Mill Street I filled when I arrived in Almonte at 27 years of age in June of 1976. He was then 82 years of age, having practiced law for 54 years. He had been called to the Bar at Osgoode Hall in Toronto in 1921, previously a graduate of the University of Toronto where he had distinguished himself as a long-distance runner. Appropriately Mr. Jamieson lived until 96 years of age, ill and hospitalized at the Almonte General Hospital only during the last 6 months of his life. Though he like I began his legal career working in a firm of other lawyers, we both similarly soon transitioned as sole practitioners.

Dear, I thought I’d drop a line
The weather’s cool
The folks are fine
I’m in bed each night at nine
PS I love you

Billie Holiday

We’re in for some stormy weather overnight. The sky has changed to a soupy grey colour though the rain is not expected until closer to midnight after which the temperature will drop and the skies will clear. By Christmas Day things are predicted to be comfortable. It will just be pleasant to have rounded the corner of the Winter Solstice.

There once was a man named Rex
Endowed with small organs of sex;
When tried for exposure
He replied with composure
“De minimis non curat lex!”

Appropriation and compromise don’t normally go hand-in-hand. Yet by an odd twist piracy and bargain are convenient and comfortable companions.

I’ve decided that cycling 15 kms a day is the limit for me at my age! Besides I can’t think of a good reason to exhaust myself. Not that my exercise is ever particularly strenuous. It satisfies my personal ambition just to roll along the pathway for an hour and half each day. And being here for the season is an unparalleled privilege by any standard! The sun, the azure dome, the palms, the sea birds of every description, just being at sea level not to mention the sea and the boats. The nautical influence is for me largesse personified!

Everything comes and goes, we all know that. There is the good and the bad about everything. Basically things change. That’s the two sides of the universe, the binary view of it all. Keeping the pathway moving towards the good stuff is the challenge. It’s always easy to close a door, to walk away, to forget, to ignore, to pretend you were never there.

It would be an unwarranted extension to proclaim that after having been on Longboat Key for the past month and a half, and having returned here after last year for another season, that I am beginning to blend in with the wallpaper and that my babbling is starting to sound like a television ad. Nonetheless the indisputable truth is that while cycling along Gulf of Mexico Drive late this afternoon I couldn’t help thinking how commonplace everything now appears to me, how my vision of the place has become so astute as to remark upon the lines and crevices in the sidewalk, how noticeable are the newly arrived tourists, in short how “residential” I feel in spite of my foreign citizenship and remote domicile.

We received an invitation today to rally with friends in Naples. Earlier other friends pushed off from Canada to Hilton Head Island; they connected with us en route while driving in North Carolina. Yet another couple is ramping up to a winter sojourn in Portugal. My sister and her husband are making plans to go to California for a brief visit. Their daughter and her husband plan a trip to Taiwan. Meanwhile locally there was a dearth of activity. This partly reflects the uncommonly dreary weather today but more strategically heralds the uptick of anticipated visits from northerners immediately following Christmas. For my part I content myself to listen to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor as sufficient evidence of my preparation for the season.