It isn’t often I am professionally advised not to take a shower and to avoid driving an automobile or riding a bicycle. Yet such were the prescriptions germane today, the first day following my left knee replacement surgery. As luck would have it these obstructive recommendations are acknowledged by an inexpressibly lovely day, a cloudless azure sky with a visibility of 28 km. There is a dry wind from the north at 14 km/h. The temperature is about 44°F. And if it matters the 10-day forecast is sunshine and 86°F. I took the opportunity to lounge in the sun for a half-hour on the balcony deck.

So here I am: all dressed up (or down) and nowhere to go!  Being thus inhibited is a rarefied pleasure and one to which I willingly submit notwithstanding the limitations.

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It was at six o’clock this morning that I first addressed the new day with any clarity. Not my usual hour of appointment for greeting the dawn (other than as a parenthetical necessity to void my bladder).  Nonetheless by remarkable distinction I was already out of bed, showered, shaved and dressed (though pointedly lacking any accompanying scent or pomade).  In fifteen minutes I expected to rally with Don’s Taxi at the front of our apartment building.  Our destination was the Perth & Smiths Falls Hospital on Cornelius Street, Smiths Falls.  I had been told by the hospital staff at our pre-op meeting a week ago to be there this morning at 8:30 am in preparation for my left knee replacement surgery.  Dr. Mark Roberts MB BS FRCSC is my surgeon in this matter though I understood the procedure was to be conducted robotically (of which Dr. Roberts is technically the overseer).  Hopefully I will be too anaesthetized to have any truck with the delicacies of the subsequent surgical procedure (matters from which traditionally I prefer to distance myself and to abandon to the sole concern of the presiding physician).

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In what can only be described as a miracle of nature and engineering, the field of yellow dandelions has overnight turned to a collection of white sylphlike cushions.  For the time being – that is, before a wind blows over the feathery heads of the plants and spreads the parachutes of seeds abroad – the field is dotted with fluffy motionless bulbs. The rigour and precision of the metamorphosis from yellow to white, from substance to levity, from days of absorbing sunshine until the natural evolution of casting seeds abroad, is a display of mechanical production governed by incalculable routine and design.

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Immediately upon awakening this morning I cast my eyes toward the open bedroom windows. In an instant 10,000 dandelions saw I at a glance! Then afterwards, from the drawing room onto the balcony overlooking the river, I further profited by lounging for a moment in the  yellow sunshine upon one of our new fabric deck chairs.

The Water Music (German: Wassermusik) is a collection of orchestral movements, often published as three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717, in response to King George I’s request for a concert on the River Thames.

The first performance of the Water Music is recorded in The Daily Courant, the first British daily newspaper. At about 8 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 July 1717, King George I and several aristocrats boarded a royal barge at Whitehall Palace, for an excursion up the Thames toward Chelsea. The rising tide propelled the barge upstream without rowing. Another barge, provided by the City of London, transported about 50 musicians who performed Handel’s music. Many other Londoners also took to the river to hear the concert. According to The Courant, “the whole River in a manner was covered” with boats and barges. On arriving at Chelsea, the king left his barge, then returned to it at about 11 p.m. for the return trip. The king was so pleased with Water Music that he ordered it to be repeated at least three times, both on the trip upstream to Chelsea and on the return, until he landed again at Whitehall.

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I am able to recall almost every rainy day in the past six months, not because they were particularly memorable but because there were so few of them on Key Largo to recollect. Even during the past three weeks since we crossed the border from the United States of America to Canada, the weather has been predominantly clear. Yesterday I received an email from our former next door neighbour on Buttonwood Bay (she and her husband are from Boston).  She alluded to rejoining us this coming winter on Key Largo for more sunny days. Thus when I awoke today to see doleful cloudy skies and dripping beads of water upon the floor-to-ceiling windows, I was in the mood for a very different music than the one to which I am accustomed. I won’t say mournful but at least melancholy. Rainy days do that to me.

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The word candid is connected with the word white (implying innocence and freedom from malice). In the context of the etymology of candescence it has more to do with the heat from which it derives than the light it emits. In the literary setting the import is strong emotion and passion. In the artistic milieu it is pronounced gemstone colours.

candescent is glowing with heat; white-hot, while incandescent is emitting light as a result of being heated

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The medical appointments we had this morning and this afternoon were not what I’d call drudgery – one never likes to belittle even the most routine scientific enquiry – but I have to say it was all a bit of a grind! These consultations were by any estimate conventional (though critical) affairs, things we do every year. I was especially anxious to complete the agenda and put stuff behind. Since our return to Canada three weeks ago on April 27th we’ve been exponentially focussed and diligent. Happily we’ve wrestled the numerous complications to the ground. I am beginning to regard the universe with a more enlightened view.

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I have always liked things to be just so. Organized. Clean. And properly positioned. Everything tight. Some there are no doubt who would call it obsessiveness. Cloying preoccupation with meaningless detail. Getting one’s world just so. Hmph!

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Sitting in my car, waiting for my passenger, is eventful because on this approximate location and date (June 11, 1976) almost exactly 47 years ago I stepped foot on the nearby property which was to be my first residence in Almonte. The residence was then the retirement home of Rev. George Bickley and his wife Anne who for the moment together occupied the manse of St. Paul’s Anglican Church around the corner (poignantly immediately across from the original Land Registry office built around 1860).  The contractual matter of my employment as a junior lawyer by Messrs. Galligan & Sheffield, Barristers, Solicitors and Notaries Public at their offices on Bridge Street had been concluded days before over dinner at the Mississippi Golf Club in the Village of Appleton.

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