There’s something I like about a good cigar.  Admittedly it is not a routine I regularly indulge.  Nor indeed should it be.  The other seemingly trifling detail about any good experience is that it mustn’t happen too often. It’s the novelty of thing that compels it. Otherwise it loses its art.

The same thinking applies to social convention. Say what you will about the need for communion between humans, each of us still values those equally necessary moments alone when we can enjoy the breeze without having to comment or opine. And Mother Nature is similarly pernickety about rendering those superbly beautiful sunny days when all is right with the world. Those occasions – if blended with convenience and accessibility – make for the optimal fortuity of a good brunch for example. You see where I am going with this!

This morning at the Mississippi Golf Club in the Village of Appleton we succeeded – after an initial failed attempt about two weeks ago – to congregate overlooking the ninth tee and the meandering Mississippi River for a mid-morning brunch and confab. The reunion itself was a huge success because two of the parties – Bunny and her son – independently have a lot on the go at the moment. It would have been easy for either of them to decline our invitation to the season’s inaugural brunch on the flagstone patio.

Established in 1915 on the former Patterson Farm in Appleton, just five kilometres east of Carleton Place, Mississippi Golf Club is one of the oldest clubs in Ontario. Mississippi began as a nine-hole course, with a second nine – designed by the renowned golf course architect Graham Cooke – added in 1987.

Uninhibited by either necessity or preference, we assembled in a private cocoon of social intersection, partly shielded by a patio umbrella from the intensity of the morning sunshine, glancing sideways occasionally upon the manicured fairway and placid river. As with so many celebratory social events, it heralded the beginning of new adventures for both our guests – both involving removal from the past and the start of something new. Though we didn’t linger uncomfortably upon either of their adventures, the unspoken harmony was the favourable trespass on the new and inviting territory of them both. On the one hand it was a critical decision of Bunny to adapt to nature’s alterations; and, for her son it was the adaptation of what had been a lifelong mooring to a compelling entrepreneurial and spiritual calling.

But still we had time to evaporate our overriding urges and missions to contemplate the lesser themes of humanity – advancing in a rambling manner from the smell of tobacco in the observation deck of a train to the allure of vodka at midnight, from cohabitation with family to group dwelling for actors, from grasping tenuously at the past while imagining alignment with the future, from choral production to grocery shopping, from appetite to satiety.