Crisp Night of the Full Moon

It has been almost two weeks since my last entry. I have continued my audio logs. The march of fall progresses as now we have the first frosts, red maple trees, and can see our breath. Not a whole lot of news from Shel. She is still looking for a place in our "big" city and says she will have her stuff out around November 1. I have missed her greatly but my girl is lost in her own fantasies-some about how truly awful I am and others about how truly wonderful she is.

I am still planning on leaving the island at some point. The details are a bit difficult as there is really no way to select a home on the other end-I really need to go there and look around. This will mean some time in a motel. I just hope I do really get some time with the kids or I might just as well stay put here.

At least the Canadian dollar has crashed along with the US stock market. This adds a few dollars to my pension on this end-actually discounting my rent by about 40% should the loonie stay down until the end of the month.

I spent a lot of time with my lady friend Mary this weekend. It is nice to be pampered by a lady again. She is a good cook and very spiritual and feminine. We went up to North Cape today to see the wind farm. She, born and raised on the island, had never been there. Its 60 miles from Summerside.

She has never been in a plane. She has been off island twice in 50 years. The tragedy of her island life-especially her childhood and marriage is a horror. But it is all too common a tale when individual lives here in the Maritimes are examined. There is pain and human suffering beside the red cliffs and pastoral beauty of the planted fields.

I really am not sure what will come of it. All I know is this chapter closes. Shel fades to a tragic memory, among the joyous glimpses of our storybook romance and marriage. The travels. The foods. The love-making. Her beauty. Washed away in a sea of red clay tears on a foreign beach-sunk deep into the red mud of the old clay roads.

Mary to give me solace in her maturity and simplicity. Mary to be hurt when I leave the island as she and a few others are quite in love with me. The enigmatic Yankee. A romantic warrior tossed on a exile shore.

Crazy Germaine is back. I have been gone all weekend. Jerry let him in. Its OK-but he can't stay here forever without paying rent. He rather takes over the living room and smokes in there. His English is so bad its hard to communicate. Hopefully he will make some fertilizer, sell it, and go back to the Magdalen Islands. Somehow I doubt it will all be that easy.

I had invited Shel over Sunday as I had some oysters and quahogs left over that Manny Gallant gave me. I never heard anything and continue to get cold, unfriendly mails. She claims to be coming over to organize this week. I am not sure why. So I asked her to give me a little warning. There is no way that she doesn't miss her life. She thinks she has improved, reinvented herself. She is now just another young girl with nothing, working a minimum wage job, uneducated, with a hollow future. It is a far cry from Arizona palm trees and a pool , no responsibility and no cares.

She will miss that as the years swiftly pass. I can reinvent all that rather easily. But there will be no Shel. Actually now I am unsure that we will remain the promised friends we agreed to be. It is really tough to lose a loved one. Death is an eye opening. I still miss my dad after 36 years. My mother, my rock and guide gone now just over 4 years. My beloved wife, gone on lies and tragedy now almost 5 years. But my best friend-alive and unrepentant, still breathes an easy breath while the tears of our souls rain on the lost hollows of the broken heart.

But I will still make the effort. I will email her with news of the travels. She shall be a central character in the novel. I hope she gives me an address so I can send her magnets and postcards. Perhaps she doesn't care. Never really did. Now I know why Germany lost a war they should have won. No quarter. No forgiveness. The savagery of the Hun. Blue eyes flashing, Blond curling. Blood flowing. Defeated.

Letter To My Wonderful Son

Son,

I was very moved and a bit surprised at your mail regarding my fantastic mother. I know from the first time she held you as an infant that you had a close spitirtual bond. She was a very private person. I had always hoped you would have had the time to know her life. Especially the real powerful love she felt for my father, your and my namesake.

If you think of her, much that she wanted to tell you was blocked by the ugly situation you found yourself in. I mean the tension between your mother and me. She truly loved you and your sister. She was handicapped the the silly and unnecessary issues of the day.

I am most glad you knew this fine proper lady. She was the light of our family in her simplicicity, appeciation of beauty, and of life itself.

Only with much time will you know this gift.

I miss her greatly, as I do my amazing father, now and forever.

Just know that her blood flows in your veins, and she remains with you forever. She was most proud of her heritage, as founders of of our great country. Our people founded all that we love, and she stood as a beacon of that that is good. She had flaws. Often some sharpness, but always meant to build you high and to remind you of who you are.

That we both knew her, and are both products of the immense love she had for my father, your grandfather are gifts beyond earthly value.

My smile and pride brims in you and you lovely sister, my children.

When in doubt or sadness remember her. She has immortality.

Fear not.

Dad

Mail From My Son

THE DAY SHE DIED

You never truly expect death to happen until it finally occurs within your life. When your young, you are so wrapped up in the present that you never truly consider the possibility you may die some day. However, when someone close to you finally goes, it can change your perspective on many things. This experience is usually not the most pleasant. For me, I’d say my worst experience was when my grandmother died. It was this event that caused to see the true value of life and the relationships we have with others. My views took such a drastic change since I saw the sadness death causes in others, the fragility of life, as well as my own regrets regarding my relationship with my grandmother. I hope that Readers’ Digest will help to honor her memory.

The most obvious revelation I had did not occur while my grandmother was dieing. I suppose I couldn’t really comprehend someone I had known all my life was truly leaving us. Rather, the revelation came the week following her death. Never before had I felt such an emptiness within myself and in others. My mother and father barely spoke to one another for days. My grandma May, as she had been known, was my father’s mother. For him, I suppose the tragedy was the worst of all. We had been through hard to times before, but nothing like this . My father would often sit alone in his room, usually crying, sometimes just staring into space silently. Being close to my father, this was difficult for me, I simply did not know what to say, so I left him to his thoughts. It was the saddest day of my life.

My mother and sister were also so affected by this in different ways. My mother seemed to be shut away from the rest of the world, getting lost in books or her cooking. My sister, like myself, seemed to have difficulty understanding grandmothers’ death. She and I would talk about it, neither one of us truly knowing any truly comforting thing to say to the other. Never before had I felt so alone.

Secondly, my grandmothers’ death made me truly aware of my own mortality for the first time. I had thought about death before, but never with this amount of clarity. All I could do was think about my own eventual demise. How, when, where would my life end? What would happen when I died? Would I simply fade away into nothingness? These thoughts and others plagued my mind. Never before had I realized how fragile life is or how brief a time we occupy this little planet. I would like to say these thoughts no longer linger within my mind but, my grandmothers’ death has an effect on me to this day. I shall never forget the fear and doubt which haunted me that week following her death.

The most difficult aspect of this event I was forced to overcome was the regret I felt for not appreciating my grandmother while she was still alive. We had gone to visit her every Sunday over the years. To me it was simple routine. In all that time I never really asked her any questions about herself or her experiences. She had lived for Eight-five years and I never took the time to find out anything about her. Now that she is gone, all I have are my memories of her. I still often think of our visits to her little house. I remember her dog which barked at anything that moved and the beautiful paintings she made. I miss her kind demeanor and her soft voice. I will never forget them. My grandmothers’ death was difficult, but it made me understand something. Life is precious. We must treasure our lives and the people we care for most. In the end all we have are our memories, so we might as well make some good ones while we can.

Strong winds, Angry sea

So October arrived yesterday very gently. The warm afternoon and a glass calm harbour made for some nice relaxing fishing. It really wasn't my day. I only caught a few small smelt and 2 scrawny mackerel. But they cooked up nicely with island tomato-cucumber salad, farm fresh carrots and potatoes, and quahogs and oysters courtesy of Manny Gallant.

Manny is a soulmate fisherman and friend, perhaps business partner to be of mine. He pines away for his pretty wife. He opines that he is illiterate as he has been in a boat since age 12 to help with the family fishing business, and never went to school. I explain that I find it rather charming. This soulful man is healthy and prosperous. He glows with what I now identify as "Island Health". They have that here. Fishing. Can't read or write much. Oysters. Never been off island. Mackerel. Neat little farm. Artist wife. Never been in a plane. Inbreeding. Fresh quahogs. Big tomatoes. Healthy kids. 4 wheel drive. Divorce. Blizzards. Strong island moonshine. Hurricanes. I am in total complete envy. West Virginia on the Sea.

My soft tired educated body. I will miss this special place. Its rotund incomprehensible females. The shine. The bootleggers. Lobster at 4 bucks a pound. My wife.

I was sure that the last time I caught smelt I smelled something familiar-from a long ago dream-time. Yesterday I caught the scent when I landed the angry smelt-it was the smell of thyme and cucumber, that I had smelled long ago. The arctic grayling I caught in Alaska yarens ago smelled that way. Hence the scientific name of grayling, Thymallus. The arctic grayling is a sport fish somewhat like a trout. It has a huge very beautiful dorsal fin, almost like a sail. They are silvery gray and have tiny black and blue spots, as I recall. The fish used to range into the Northern US, but was extinguished long ago along with most good things during deforestation, pollution, greed, and mortal sin.

I have heard there are grayling stocked in the Arizona rim mountain lakes. To me, since I have spent a lot of the prior 15 years at those lakes fishing (for trout), I am unsure about any Arizona grayling. Maybe Montana or the U.P. of Michigan, but I can't confirm it. But in Alaska, grayling, like eagles are or were then (my last Alaska trip was in 1993), everywhere.

On the Internet I looked up smelt as the odour and even taste of these fish was grayling. Indeed they are closely related fish. The grayling has two distinct memories I will share here. When I took Rhonda to Alaska to go camping before we got married we fished grayling. I think I caught a bunch in a ditch by a culvert along the Denali Highway. It was probably 1985.

I took out our trusty little stove and cooked grayling along the road. Rhonda and I had fish together there, it was great. It is a very fond memory of my first wife before the dark times.

On the first trip to Alaska with Shel, wife 2, I fished grayling again in nearly the same spot. Actually, Shel only went to Alaska with me once. She was truly a child bride-barely 20 at the time of our trip.

I caught a truly impressive grayling, the largest I had seen. I wanted to take a photo of it. I asked Shel to hold the writhing fish up so I could take the shot. She, terrified of live fish to this day, refused. So you will have to take my word that that fish was 25 inches if it was a foot-thats a big grayling. (Alaskans consider grayling trash fish, pronouncing the name with a long A sound, ahhhhh, instead of the vowel-arctic graahhling.)

Here today as October begins the leaves are turning and falling very quickly. Very hard rain and hurricane force winds today made my evening walk difficult. The harbour was a froth of mud-red swells and shiny whitecaps, wind-whipped so salt can be tasted strong in the air in my living room.

I saw Cindy, but I didn't tell her I am moving out yet. The decision came painfully, slowly, but today I started to clean a bit and pack. I really have little to take south-just what I arrived here with 3 1/2 years ago.

Today 2 years ago I had been living on PEI 9 months. Shel asked me on this date back then, in 2006, to move out. It was then that the 6 month imbroglio with EIC and the Gustafson's began in Ottsville. It was really a wonderful experience and I had real quality time with my kids-even on the holidays. I know now that is why all that happened-it had little to do with business.

I will state for the record that both my Child-Centered Assessment and my E-Petz patents are great ideas. But I will have to do it myself or with family, without greed.

My pal Germain is back off to North Lake in search of Donnie Rose and Russian fish plant girls in Souris. I for one am about complete in my unpaid consulting services to Mr. Fougere. In fact, my friend Manny Gallant stopped by today. He has concerns about the business idea.

I told him I was glad to help, but that I am probably leaving, and that like the Gustafson's the chance of our colleagues (Fougere) business being a success were slim. Not because the idea is bad, but because of him.

Tomorrow I look forward to a calmer day and perhaps some fishing, and a call to the kids.

I guess I didn't record here that Shel stopped by Monday. She had said that she wanted to organize things. She still has no place and is living with Kathleen. There is much that both of us will have to leave behind-not the least of which are our hearts.

She was pretty angry at first. The issue of money and what bills are due being paramount. We settled that and she calmed a bit, looking stunning with bright blue-green eyes blaring and an adorable short-curly blond hairstyle-my Shel, my child-wife, who can't bear children. Tragedy within a tragedy.

She ate some of my cucumber salad and muffins. I had made cold coffee for her with creamer and sugar as she likes earlier in the day. I had to substitute honey for sugar, and I don't think she liked it so much. I thought it pretty good.

We actually parted on good terms. The one thing that sticks with me during her tirade was that she "wants her husband back". As if I am so different. so far, so much a distant memory. Oh save but one last chance to be a couple-she feels the loss too, but now moves into a new world.

Her world will not be the blissful days of lounging by our pool under the palms, with the smell of ancho chilies drifting on the wind. It will be 6 days a week of work without me.

It seems as Shel as an immigrant here has ended up a bit like my beautiful Russian fish plant girlfriends in Souris. 6 days a week of work and little money, in shared housing, praying for some escape after buying into the dream to live and work in Canada. To some of the girls, if not all I met, Kaliningrad is sounding better and better-to go home. That's a scary determination.

Maybe someday Shel will miss the palms, the chilies, and a real home too. She is part Russian, after all.

Up West and Real Work

So since I met the "Doctor" of organic landscaping Germain Fougere from the Magdalen Islands, I have been involved in a new and fascinating business venture. Involved originally only to set-up a web site and be a general business and entrepreneurship consultant, I am now actually getting my soft hands dirty.

We take a similar trip in the big Ford Diesel truck of "Fougere Organic Landscaping" about twice a week. Again today we went to the "Old Man's", a very pious anglophone gentleman named Loren near Richmond. Loren has clear bright intelligent blue eyes and is nearly deaf. Fougere has been storing equipment and supplies there. We loaded the trailer with what I imagine was close to a ton of plants, rocks, gardening stuff, shells, and one very heavy ( about 600 pounds) cast iron crusher. It had been a while since I worked that hard and I felt alive again. Loren lives in a homemade hut that is sinking into the boggy soil. It is filled with interesting but valueless things accumulated over his long life. He gave me two religious books, one called"I Need A Miracle" by Pastor Benny Hinn. I think he knew exactly what I needed. He had preached as a young man in Appalachia. I was somewhat envious, perhaps the smallest of my sins to date.

He carves amazing images of geese from huge pieces of wood and carefully paints them as to life. His wood stove is rusting through the floor. He has no insurance as his home is not "insurable". His phone was cut off. The company putting the power lines from Summerside to North Cape's new windfarm is coming across Loren's fallow sad land. He hopes they will pay a fair price for the easement. Maybe 6000 dollars. Perhaps this 85 year old man will not have to freeze alone in the cold this long and soon to arrive sub-arctic winter. His son distant and somewhat of an ass I am told, away in the "real world" and business.

It was a great clear sunny day. The sea was beautiful up west along the "lighthouse trail", route 11. We stopped as always to see Fougere's and now my friend Danielle. We need a motor and PTO ( Power Take Off) to run the lobster shell crushing machine. They talked Acadian, which I am starting to get a bit of, thanks little to my long forgotten high school Parisian French.

We then stopped at Manny's place to drop the trailer we will unload tomorrow. Manny is a soulful, sorrowful outwardly cheerful man, an oyster fisherman who built his own solid boat and at 55 could probably pick me up at 180 pounds like a feather. It was a great cold night, the milky way bright along with the planet Jupiter embedded in it like a bright white luminous gem. Manny lives on a neat little farm near his oyster beds in the Northumberland Strait. The farm is very neat and cozy and Manny is one of those people you instantly knew if you had to leave a thousand dollars cash with him to hold, it would be there when you return. He gets a few crates of oysters each day after 10 hours of back breaking work raking the bottom of the sea in churning swells under blistering sun or freezing winds.

Manny gets about 50 dollars a crate for his oysters. The shells are infested with shell worms this year. They cut tiny perfect holes in the shells but don't harm the delicious meat inside. Despite that, only one oyster buyer on the island will buy Manny's "ugly" oysters. Oddly enough its the oyster wholesaler across the way from George and Brenda Henderson's cottage in Freeland. That is where Shel and I stayed long ago when we were first coming here each summer. Long ago, so it seems, when I picked the wild mushrooms in George's little pine forest and steamed them with edible jewels from the sea (to the locals terror and amazement). I had learned, being self-taught, mushroom collecting in the high pine and aspen mountain forests of Arizona. Also dimming into that past.

He grows nice tomatoes and a few other things in a small garden. He shared tomatoes with us-a real luxury this far north when the incredibly short growing season ends. Manny is finalizing a divorce after 10 years with the artist wife who his feelings for are well concealed but to a fellow sufferer glow in that slight moistening of eye with a glance towards her primitive oils hanging on the old wall, or with a little deepening of the fisherman's sun and wind-worn brow. The artist wife. How well I know.

Manny is quite the artist himself. He crafts beautiful decorative items from driftwood and large, ancient white oyster shells. He built a little gift shop near the road that is quite a nice cottage in its own right, matching the perfect yellow Victorian farmhouse. He cries inside. Artist wife gone and the tourists far and few between. Gone now until summer returns-a truly distant and abstract thought. As goes the artist wife.

I know I'll be sore tomorrow-that's OK. No news from Shel, but I got a nice email from my son. Tomorrow we unload the ton of stuff and I hope my back holds out. Then to the beach for seaweed collection to make the fertilizer product.

You really never know whats around the next corner. I just wish it was spring instead of fall, as winter looms and I have decisions to make about my home and life on PEI. Quite a change in paradigm in a couple weeks. Maybe work therapy is what I need. I am really back in the environmental field in a very physical way. I also obtained oyster shell chemistry data for product labelling. Fougere needs my patent and trademark help too, but that comes later as orders are filled and I create an Internet presence. Its pretty exciting.

I have my desk work, legal work, computer, and even outdoor physical labour in one of the most beautiful places on earth. How about that? Retirement? Maybe, but it beats the button-downs and smog and office politics of the big city, in the "real world".

Sundays with Mary and the PEI "question"

So the first day of autumn is here. The day started cool, breezy and cloudy. By evening the sky cleared and it warmed the quiet town ever so slightly. Last night was my usual Saturday night at the "wing" as the air force legion hall is called here. I guess to distinguish it from the regular Canadian Forces "legion" that it sits beside. I met my friends Mary, Eva and her husband. Judy, Joan, and Rebe didn't show last night. There may have been a band elsewhere, and they are not big fans of Karaoke. Nor am I, but there are a few good singers and its better than sitting in my place waiting for emails from Shel or Joey. We sip water and dance rather badly I think. The attitude and music the very same as my nights spent in small taverns deep in the mountains of Appalachia during my years on the road.

Mary has become my special friend, after my very short relationship with Judy. Mary is a mature woman, tall with dark curly hair. She has lived her whole life on the island, born up the road a few miles in St. Eleanor's. She left the island once many years ago to go to her nephews wedding, I think, in Brampton, Ontario.

Her life has been a typical island, if not maritime tragedy. Her abusive mother kept her from her father who died, like mine, when she was 15. After a marriage that left her unable to remarry save she lose her support, she has had several variously awful romances. The last was with a trucker who was seemingly seeing another woman the whole time, 15 months, he was with her. This story is repeated in some form or another by almost everyone I meet here.

Mary and I dance and have been somewhat cuddly and close on the dance floor. We "waltz" as they call any dance to a slow song here, even when its rock and roll twist music. We often stay in embrace after the music stops and the dance floor empties-to the astonishment of everyone. Its good in some ways, but I doubt Ill get another date at the wing as I seem "taken". But it is a pure friendship and I suspect it will remain so.

I meet Mary Sundays and we talk for hours about family issues, good, bad, and ugly. Finding some comfort mutually in trying to discover why our relationships are so failed. It is quite sad. But the talks help. Today I showed her photos from my past lives-the big house, kids as babies playing at the New Jersey shore. My airplane, Mercedes, Chimney house-my red 'vette convertible with Shel lounging on the hood seductively somewhere in the mountain west years ago.

These are things as alien to her as a walk on the surface of Mars. I am attracted to her simplicity, lack of bitterness, and good church-going heart. Hours past and I just got home a bit ago. I missed my Sunday call to Joey as I had lost track of time. We sat today at the yacht club, as the mall was closed this Sunday, as it will be now as the tourists are gone away home, back to school, jobs, and the reality of the outside world.

One thing we discuss is my leaving PEI. Forever? For a month? Never? She overflowed like a happy teenager at a prom when I suggested I may not leave at all. It breaks my heart as I fear I may have to break hers. She won't be the only lady here that will miss me. And I will miss each and everyone of them.

No news today from my wayward Shel. Divorce now is imminent and I will have to file the papers soon. Shel wouldn't be able to, and she seems to think that we just go to the courthouse and sign a paper. It is , of course, more complex. I find the whole process distasteful and although I love my island, all those times I could have just stayed in PA with the kids makes me feel embarrassed. You see, I had three chances to stay in PA and chose each time to return to the island. Either to be with Shel or to try and get her to come home. As recently as August 5th, Shel was moving back in with me and/or going to Calgary with me. But no. It didn't happen.

So the three years I have been here seem a bit wasted. I mean that I could have had a little time with the kids as kids. But they have grown up, suddenly while I was here trying in vain to recapture a marriage that as I realize now was over in 2003. I guess.

I read Shel's journals from the 90's and she tells page by page of he unending love for me. Well it seems ended. One way or the other I must escape that bind. A new life-here on the island of dreams and sorrows, or back in harsh reality down south, in the states, my home home in Harrisburg to be near my beloved children.

Mail from an old friend, associate, and student at HTS

Please don't conclude that I believe everything Brian Feeney or Rhonda ever said. LOL

I acknowledge that you were among the very first people to advance the very same environmental assessment protocols in use today. In fact, our company's Phase I ESA uses a checklist very similar to the one HTS used in the late 1980s. I might have an old HTS Phase I ESA somewhere around. I never present myself as self-educated in this work; anyone ever asks, I was originally trained by you. When I say this, it actually drives Roni nuts. Many Manduke-isms that were true remain true today. Sometimes I tell the staff things even today that I recall you saying to the staff almost 20-years ago.

I might be a harsh critic, but I am also a fierce defender of yours. I gave you superior recommendations for your job interviews.

I am still wondering why you aren't at the helm of one the largest ESA companies in the US. Someday I might figure that one out.

Jim G.