It is a soggy cheerless Sunday. I have just arisen languidly from an uncommonly deep nap on the green leather sofa. Already it is late in the afternoon approaching the dinner hour. The yellow hue of the declining sun gleams through the blotched grey clouds like an advancing Chariot of Fire. The light is otherwise mercurial and lacks the vibrancy of blue and gold. In keeping with my undying religious necessity I expiated my guilt earlier this morning in the gymnasium on a stationary bicycle or what qualifies as an “indoor cycle” on my Apple Watch. It is an experiment which I doubt will succeed my passion for outdoor cycling.

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There is a wide gap between those who love and those who hate ceremony. Ceremony is the more detectable blueprint of social custom and etiquette and thus affords a common basis of disunion. By virtue of its imperative prescriptions the topic engenders the most fundamental rejoinders. It doesn’t matter whether the ceremony is religious, military, pedagogical or otherwise. The underlying theme of ceremony is control.  It is not however that feature that causes the riff. Rather it is an objection heralded by “Get over it!” that captures what essentially is a recommendation to cut to the chase or perhaps more astutely, “Get to the point!”

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It was an odd subject to arise when one was, such as I was, languishing in a swimming pool in a meadow beneath a blazing sun from an azure sky amid overwhelming radiant heat above 32°C. The subject? Civility – that recognizably sublime word for formal politeness and courtesy.  Parenthetically I emphasize “formal” because I recall the quip that, “Manners are only required when the going gets rough!” or words to that effect.

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This morning when withdrawing my bicycle from the garage storage cage we saw with instant dismay that the front tyre was flat. Again. This is the third time this summer – reportedly all the result of some obstruction on the road. This minor dilemma – or should I say this singularly annoying disruption – caused an eruption of ideas. Instinctively I got into the car and drove. I hadn’t either my driver’s licence or a credit card so the journey was devoted solely to the percolating concepts regarding this latest challenge and its internal rivalry. The flat tyre precipitated a review of the growing competition between bicycling and other possible exercise.

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Today is Tuesday the 24th day of August, 2021. Lately I find it desirable to be explicit touching that casual though basic information. Otherwise I risk careless misstatement. Just as importantly it reminds me of the speedy exhaustion of time. Not only the day and the month are relevant; the year as well! While today is an ordinary balmy summer day under an azure sky in Mississippi Mills, the word “mardi” has in this part of the world acquired a celebrity assured to erase the root meaning of the word.

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Dissolution and distillation – melting and filtering – the natural processes of aging and maturing. The unfolding like anything directed to decomposition and purification is as though by hidden imperative limited and refined in its ultimate expression. Basically, we discover unwittingly the truth of the sometimes disturbing adage that, “Less is more!” All that we’ve been given or allotted by any measure, privilege, entitlement or projection is systematically reduced to a whisper of its former colloquial. The liquefaction and condensation are not however mere cessation and extraction. There is inherent in the proceedings an uncanny impeccability; a voyage to a universe once unimaginable to us. After all, how could we have envisioned it?

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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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