Many factors combined today to make for a perfectly splendid summer day! The broad outline of my day was a trip to Manotick to meet with my Hair Architect (Warren), then a pleasant visit to my mother at her retirement residence, followed by a late afternoon bicycle ride and the exceeding pleasure of the fine weather and blossoming lilac bushes.
“For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.”
Excerpt From: Bram Stoker. “Dracula.”
The distinct moment I began to write a diary is hardened upon my memory. I was fourteen years of age in Fourth Form at boarding school, St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. My parents and only sibling were several thousands of miles away in Stockholm, Sweden where my father had been commissioned as Attaché to the Canadian Embassy. As Her Majesty had earlier that summer generously paid to ship our entire family from Montréal, Quebec to Le Havre, France by first class service on the S.S. Arcadia I did not return home for Christmas that year but instead visited my maternal grandparents in Northeastern Ontario in the small, remote Town of Mattawa at the confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa Rivers.
My medical experiment began on May 10th. The object was to test the hypothesis that my medical condition (which I then characterized as heart disease, arthritis and spinal deterioration reflected mostly in numbness in my lower limbs and feet) might actually improve without drugs.
It is the Friday afternoon of the Victoria Day Weekend and the surge of energy is everywhere apparent! The excitement is happily fuelled by warm temperatures and brilliant sunshine. All infused elements have serendipitously combined for a favourable holiday weekend.
Every two weeks on Thursday afternoon our cleaning lady attends to clean our apartment. We make a point of absenting ourselves and use the occasion to go abroad for a day of leisure. By design the perambulation includes a meal which, because we seldom get going until shortly after mid-day, means a late lunch or an early dinner depending how far we travel. Our compass most frequently includes Cedar Cove Resort on White Lake, Ivy Lea Club on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Town of Gananoque and the City of Kingston. Each has its appeal, variously promoted by the weather, our appetite or the geography.
It was one month ago we returned home to our beloved Almonte from our winter retreat on the Atlantic barrier island in South Carolina. The transition has been virtually effortless and generally gratifying. We have accomplished what we planned to do during this initial period; namely, income tax filings, financial planning, reuniting with family and friends, medical, eye and dental appointments and extending our residential apartment lease. Only once have we conducted the ceremony of an afternoon drive to the St. Lawrence Seaway but that will shortly become part of our weekly routine now that the gears of habit are re-engaged. Our global objective here is parochial when compared to the ambitions of most during the summer months but we rejoice in this small-town vernacular.
Mine is a placid life, an admittedly parochial, routine affair with little probability of discomposure. Each day of my life – even when examined abstractly over a period of a year or more – is by any stretch largely the same; namely, a sober existence marked by such affirmative traditions as early rising, regular exercise, improving private study, responsive communications with family and friends and a healthful diet. The wallpaper to this harmonious dalliance is classic music, jazz and the exotic accents of the BBC hosts and their array of worldwide reporters. Yet occasionally there develops a discombobulation, the infrequency of which exponentially increases its agitation. A case in point is paradoxically the very vehicle which supports my current narrative. I speak of my web site.
In an unrehearsed moment of synchronized lightheartedness as we hovered about the kitchen to finalize the preparations for this evening’s meal, we both announced how pleasant it would be to drink a frozen vodka Martini! No doubt because of the uncommonly cool air today, this Sunday has reminded me of an autumn Sunday. And that inevitably engenders fond memories of crackling fireplaces, grey tree branches tossed about in the wind and yearnings for drawing room coziness generally. The very sight of the sparkling Sherry decanter moves me! Earlier this morning we had cranked the heat on to remove the chill from the apartment. Nonetheless undeterred we went for our routine morning bicycle ride (complete with wool cardigan, jackets and gloves) along the nearby country roads; and afterwards when I went for a drive in my car to visit my elderly mother I insisted upon wearing my short pants (something I began to regret when standing in the icy wind by the gas pumps to fill the tank).
From what best I can recall my habit of taking an over-the-counter pain killer started in 1967 when I was studying Philosophy in undergraduate university at Glendon Hall, Toronto.
“The Platonists tell us, that the soul, during her residence in the body, contracts many virtuous and vicious habits, so as to become a beneficent, mild, charitable, or an angry, malicious, revengeful being; a substance inflamed with lust, avarice, and pride; or, on the contrary, brightened with pure, generous, and humble dispositions: that these and the like habits of virtue and vice, growing into the very essence of the soul, survive and gather strength in her after her dissolution: that the torments of a vicious soul in a future state, arise principally from those importunate passions which are not capable of being gratified without a body; and that on the contrary, the happiness of virtuous minds very much consists in their being employed in sublime speculations, innocent diversions, sociable affections, and all the ecstasies of passion and rapture which are agreeable to reasonable natures, and of which they gained a relish in this life.”
Excerpt From: Addison, Joseph. “The Tatler: By the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq.” Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University.