My erstwhile physician mockingly joked today while driving me home from surgery at the Queensway Carleton hospital that no doubt I missed not having gone for my routine car ride this afternoon. He knows me well. Nor by coincidence is this the first time in the past 35 years that he has so generously restored me to my digs following surgery. It is most certainly an uncommon privilege. And by further chance only minutes after being deposited at the doorstep of our apartment building, and once having regained my chair looking upriver (complete with traditional sliced green apple and glass of espresso grâce à my inveterate partner), I read with moderate alarm that Cadillac has discontinued the XT4 effective 2026.  Apparently the electric templates have bullishly insinuated the stream. In the result I have the last of the recently improved model (2025).  Commiseratively I wrote to the web site The Car Connectionwhich had shared that topical information with me. I advised that I have enjoyed both renditions of the XT4 which I have owned, adding, “The search begins!” It is however uncertain that the search will indeed recommence as it has customarily done each year in the past. Serendipitously was the news offered today by my ineffable surgeon Dr. David Carver to my erstwhile physician, “All went well!” which is to say (from my unlearned perspective and visceral interpretation), “Don’t push your luck. Let well enough alone!” I have always been an advocate of not seeking to overextend one’s fortuity. Nature’s bounty is normally sufficient.  And intuitively instructive. At my advanced age it may be opportune to dilute this now redundant avenue of retail amusement.

I don’t know when you were last in a metropolitan hospital for surgery.  It reflects the commotion of driving in the city; that is, unparalleled activity, speed and diversity. The start of our day today – at 3:30 am to complete a restorative cleansing of the specimen – was followed by our local driver Bill Dugdale of Don’s Taxi assuredly collecting us at 5:00 am, then dropping us at the front door of the hospital where we awaited opening at 6:00 am in the cool morning air of this uncommonly balmy November day. That brief damper was soon succeeded by a launch to the Diagnostic centre for yet another nuclear injection (repeatedly for the benefit of the surgeon to trace the evolution of the melanoma to the lymph nodes).  Thereafter awaiting briefly to be removed to the Day Surgery Unit where I marvelled at the precision industry (and exceeding congeniality) of the staff.

Miraculously the time evaporated over the next three hours, leading to ultimate delivery to the surgical orb, whence I recall only being told to take a deep breath then next staring at the dazzlingly lit ceiling of the recovery room where, between struggles to subdue what I overheard said by the RN to be my “restless leg syndrome”, I awaited the arrival of my erstwhile physician and my partner both of whom happily materialized unscathed. It had been a taxing day all ’round! Such is the price and penalty of accommodation. And people have other things on their minds than one’s own pitiable distractions. Not least of these triumphs was the 40th birthday today of my former Legal Assistant Marina Thompson who has endured and surmounted her own calamitous medical issues. Her unstoppable brilliance has brightened my own day once again!

The crowning moment of the day however was an early evening meal of farm fresh eggs (recently given us by our building custodian Jeff) on Ezekiel toast with St Albert cheddar cheese and cherry tomatoes.

Altogether we’ve turned a number of important corners today, among them reaffirmation of our prospective winter plans. It is no trite observation to say that, in old age (as my late father so frequently opined), “Peace and quiet” is the Elysian status.

Historic Chapman House: ​

Scottish born industrialist Donald Fraser built the house in 1903. He was in the lumber business and operated a mill nearby where the Delta Hotel currently stands. He was the founder of the international forestry company Fraser Companies Ltd.  The house is in the Queen Anne Revival Style of architecture and is one of only a few homes of this style in the city. We are currently working on more research.  George Chapman, a prominent fox farmer, later purchased the house. He raised seven children here and we are currently tracking down and meeting with family members to get information on their lives in the house. Local residents commonly referred to this historic house as the Chapman House.

The Queen Anne style in British architecture refers to either the English Baroque architectural style approximately of the reign of Queen Anne (reigned 1702–1714), or a revived form that was popular in the last quarter of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century (when it is also known as Queen Anne revival).

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Years ago I read an article by society columnist Zena Cherry in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Whatever she had written, a reader replied, “Eat those words!” to which she responded, “Gulp, gulp, gulp!”

Zena Mary MacMillan was born on 6 October 1915 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to Stanley Butler MacMillan (1888–1959) and Belle Thomas-Brown (18??–1980). Stanley MacMillan was a seventh-generation Canadian. He descended from Colonel Gordon MacMillan, who had come to Canada with the army of James Wolfe in 1759, and later settled in Nova Scotia. Stanley was born in Isaac’s Harbour, Nova Scotia, and was educated at Horton Academy in Wolfville. He attended Acadia University and Dalhousie University before transferring to McGill University, where he graduated bachelor of medicine in 1910. Subsequently, he lived in Edinburgh, where he took his Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, and then interned in Peking. Stanley’s wife, Belle Thomas-Brown, was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and was educated at Harrogate Ladies’ College and the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris. After Stanley’s internship in China, the MacMillans moved to Prince Albert, where he entered practice as medical officer of health and surgeon for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, regional Indian reserves, and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was here that Zena was born in 1915. Later they had a son, Horace Goddard MacMillan (1922–1964).

In 1930, the MacMillans moved to Toronto and settled at 372 Russell Hill Road. Zena attended Bishop Strachan School and was part of the class of ’34, though she left school after the 1932 year. During the 1934–35 season, she was a débutante. In 1936, she was hired by the Globe and Mail as a society reporter. She wrote her first column under her own name on 17 March 1938, detailing the St. Patrick’s Ball held by the Irish Regiment of Canada. Cherry left the paper in 1941 after she was engaged.

On Tuesday, 30 June 1942, MacMillan married Westcott Warren Christopher Cherry (1904–1980). Westcott was a graduate of Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and Harvard Business School. He retired in 1968 as sales manager for the Continental Group of Canada. Zena and “Westy,” as she called him, did not have children. The Cherrys lived in a home at 200 Heath Street W., which they called Cherrywood, in Forest Hill.

Unwittingly in 1967 Ms. Cherry was part of my more immediate past. While attending undergraduate studies at Glendon Hall on Bayview Avenue my boarding school chum F. Max E. Maréchaux and I sought to overcome the legal drinking age (18) by visiting Stop 33, a posh lounge atop Sutton Place a new downtown Toronto building.  We dressed with jacket and tie and behaved admirably while casually ordering our cocktails.  So frequent were we that we became acquainted with one of the servers.  Years afterwards when Max and I both graduated from law school we thought to re-attend Stop 33 to see if the same waitress were still there.  To our astonishment she was.  When we surreptitiously sat in a corner and ordered our drinks – now at legal age – the waitress appeared and instantly recognized us.  We gleefully proclaimed, “You never knew we were under age!” to which she replied, “You never knew I was a prostitute!”

In retrospect I did however have a hint though it was one I never dared to embrace.  I recalled one evening while ascending the elevator that two of the ladies in the lift were uncommonly interested in my well being.  Thinking they were house detectives, I avoided them with complementary discernment. Of course little did they know that they were no competition for a stiff drink!

In 1967, Cherry caused a commotion at the paper accidentally. On 21 and 22 September, she published a list of residents at the new Sutton Place, a combined hotel and apartment. Several of the residents were married men who had not told their wives they had taken out apartments in the city, and threatened the Globe with injunctions. In a profile written years later, the author said, “there has been much speculation over the years as to whether Zena knew what she had wrought, but [Richard] Doyle is sure ‘she knew exactly what she was doing.’ “

“The Sutton Place Hotel was a 33-storey hotel and apartment building located at 955 Bay Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Designed by the architectural firm Webb Zerafa Menkès Housden and operating from 1967 to 2012, Sutton Place was one of Toronto’s most luxurious hotels and was known for frequently hosting dignitaries and celebrities. It was operated by the Sutton Place Hotel Company (SP), which also manages hotel properties in Edmonton, Halifax, Revelstoke Mountain Resort and Vancouver (The Sutton Place).“

As the years have mysteriously passed, I find myself (now 75 years of age) satisfactorily perched at my desk on a magical late autumn afternoon overlooking a serenely flowing river, listening to schmaltz music by Mantovani, pondering only tomorrow’s upcoming cancer surgery (which I consider a fitting ornamentation to a life of toxic misbehaviour). I’ve been gulping water to assuage the impending peril of post-operative thirst.

Vianney Carriere wrote that “she was one of the most gracious ladies I have ever met. She was one of those infuriating people who are immune to any form of scolding, from the very gentle all the way to flashes of temper. I never could instruct her in a way that did not prompt her to smile a caution at me not to take life too, too seriously.

It wasn’t long before I recovered from the dissatisfaction of having been wrong about the winner of the American election.  Likewise no doubt the people of America – and throughout the world for  that matter – soon got back to work.  There is only so much time usefully spent upon analyzing the reason things happen.  Better to adjust to the reality. Accordingly we evaporated as usual from the apartment this morning in anticipation of the arrival of our housekeeper.  We were however still so immersed in the overnight dismay of the election result that we barely contemplated where to divert ourselves. The car seemed to nose itself independently along the quieter residential streets and country roads, pulling us more deeply into the farmlands along the river, completing the revolution of time and thought to enable us to regain control.

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As an old white middle class Christian male I cannot pretend to be completely disheartened by the results of the US presidential election. In many respects it’s back to business as usual. Certainly the results were not those I had anticipated; and the ambivalence of the outcome indisputably speaks to the persisting differences of morality and philosophy among Americans. On the other hand the adherence to historic  rhetoric is curiously stabilising because it removes the necessity to think or act beyond the scope of one’s immediate and personal interests. While the clarity may be likened to the theory of the Melting Pot, one cannot escape the contemporaneous recall of the Confederacy and White Supremacy which have historically underwritten and sustained similar anthems of singularity in American society.

Making America Great Again doesn’t divert from some hardcore features of American society. I cannot help but recall my own limited experience as a child in the 1950s living in Washington DC in an upper middle class residential environment, attending Horace Mann School in the same class as Julie Nixon (whose family headed by VP Richard Nixon lived a couple of blocks from us) with a black live-in maid, when the country club in nearby Maryland was a common resource of me and my sister. It was what I recollect as a safe and secure life,  My sister and I regularly walked to school; our neighbours all were white with similar household staff. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were the celebrities along with Howdy Doody, Mr. Roger’s and Leave it to Beaver. The rest of the world was seldom mentioned  it wasn’t until I began attending boarding school in 1963  and JFK was assassinated that the world changed. Perhaps it was the the start of the Enemy Within heralding the ensuing suicide mania of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians cult in Waco, Texas and Timothy McVeigh’s Ohklahoma City bombing.

And now I hear screams against communists, Marxists, murderers, rapists, drug dealers and the radical left.  And build a wall. All the while school shootings increase and guns are reminders of the Wild West There is as well the tolerated threat of dictatorship and militarism and revenge in the name of God from those who last invaded the Capitol building, threatened civil war and latterly walked openly through public streets with torches while shouting “Kill the Jews”. Mention of sexuality other than rape or pornography is disapproved. Books are ritually condemned as unfavourable truths. A convicted felon, adulterer and notable liar is the president of the United States of America. The substance of oligarchy broadens.

But who’s to blame?  Upon whose account does this conclusion rest? Therein lies the really uncertain and unsettling reason, the underlying motive and intent of the American people, the unequivocal limitations of popular persuasion, the erstwhile unspoken realities. Americans have reasserted themselves and unwittingly brought to the fore decades of undisguised subterfuge of their own. Fear is a two-edged sword.

Shortly after eight o’clock this morning we drove to the St. Lawrence Seaway. Last week Kim, the property manager where we live, had requested residents to remove their vehicles from the garage so that Jeff, the custodian, could clean the floor. We decided to employ the occasion to go for breakfast at Katarina’s Coffee Shop in Prescott on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

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Traditionally whenever one asks, “What’s new?” the focus is upon people not upon things. I note however that real estate and retail are prominent seconds for this gossipy mortal absorption. When I arrived with my Yellow Labrador puppy (named Lanark Drummond Beckwith of Rosedale – the latter being the kennel on the east side of Ottawa) in Almonte in June of 1976 I recall having seen a sign outside town showing Population: 4500.  While I do not believe the population has remarkably increased since that time (perhaps it may now be as much as 5000) the appearance of the town has nonetheless altered significantly in my estimation. And in what I consider a good way thankfully. Interestingly too the developments have been balanced by having evolved on all sides of town almost equally unlike many cosmopolitan expansions which often for example are unidirectional only. By contrast our local geometric development has been almost circular, both sides of the centre roadway north to south and both sides of the river east to west.

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As diminishing as the observation so often is, there is certainly no unexceptionable need to feel embarrassed about a habit. One of mine of especial note is an afternoon custom. Nor I suppose is it necessary to dignify the regularity by calling it a custom. The relieving feature – howsoever characterized – is that I adore my afternoon ritual. It is a fully anticipated ambition to which I project myself from the moment I set foot upon the floor planks in the morning.  It is as much an unwitting though imperative part of the scope of my everyday ablutions.

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The US presidential election is Tuesday, November 5th, 2024. Voters in each state and the District of Columbia will choose electors to the Electoral College, who will then elect a president and vice president for a term of four years. By contrast to this impending event of global curiosity and gravity we here at home have to remember to remove our car from the subterranean garage in anticipation of a floor cleaning.

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