Important Places

 I told Ms. Rivers this morning that, if I had to name the two places in the world that I would most like to visit, the answer would be Stockholm, Sweden & Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Having visited Stockholm in 2018, and Prince Edward Island (henceforth PEI) on this trip*, that life goal has been completed.  No celebration is needed. Instead, I can rest with the satisfaction, unusual for this day and age, of experiencing something positive that actually was everything that you expected.  That was PEI. 

Just what did I imagine?  A place of green rolling hills, a city (in this case, Charlottetown) that is impeccably clean, a place filled with friendly people.  It was all those things.  Now I get it: I am firmly wearing rose-colored tourist-y glasses.  But with all the nasty business going on in the world today, I think having a bit of PEI is due.

Side note: I am still thinking about the significant anxiety that I felt on Sunday as we navigated the whole flight thing (see my last posting).  I need to give myself a bit of grace in the fact that…

…I was running with not nearly enough sleep

…I have a mind that is wired for control

…I have an almost fanatical attachment to always being on time

Being exhausted, out of control and missing every single departure and arrival time wasn’t a good thing for me.  As noted above, maybe I was due for a bit of PEI.

There is also a kind of sensory overload thing at work for me as well.  Ms. Rivers and I were walking somewhere in Charlottetown and I pointed out some obscure thing, which surprised her.  “How did you notice that?” she asked.  “I notice everything”, was my response.  Now that last point needs both a bit of a clarification and an explanation.

Clarification: I noticed everything that I can actually see.  One simple fact of my life is that my vision has been getting worse over the past few years.  What seems to happen is that it gets bad, I get new glasses, it gets better for a while, then it gets worse again.  This is a combination of age and the “walleye vision” that I possess (there is actually a long, detailed posting about this somewhere in the blog archives).

Explanation: As I told Ms. Rivers, I grew up in an environment where, at any given moment, my mother could erupt at something that went wrong or something we (my brothers and I) did wrong.  Similar to my vision issues, I’ve written about that before.  The net lifetime impact of that kind of environment on a child is that, as an adult, I am hyper-vigilant when it comes to my physical environment.  Well, to the extent I can actually see my environment.  Anyway, this also is part of the whole travel anxiety thing (see above).  Lastly on this point, the whole anxiety thing is something that has been a feature of both my life and that of my brothers.  How each of us has chosen to deal with that seems, in retrospect, quite different.  For me, it’s been a combination of internalizing/ignoring and intellectualizing how I process life’s issues that produce anxiety.

Anyway, clarification and explanation provided, sometimes there is a positive side to all of this, namely being in a wonderful place can feel, well, extra wonderful.  See PEI.

I'd like to end the posting with a few pictures, but the internet access situation here is not great, so it looks like I'll only manage to get 3 added.   

(the Voldemort, in port at Charlottetown, PEI)

(Confederation Bridge, PEI)

(Inside St. Dunstan's Basilica, Charlottetown)

(*) Writing this on the evening of August 11^th and 12^th, 2026