Reconvening With The Monks Of Fall

I'm 24 hours away from enjoying another two-and-a-half days of this:



Depending who you talk to, this is either our 21st or 22nd gathering. There was at least one year when I called in sick, so I consider this #20. As for the others, my memory of it all has mashed-up and reassembled itself like a large plate of particularly runny scrambled eggs -- washed down with a tumbler of single-malt scotch, of course. I'm bringing a bottle of 15-year-old Oban. I had a wee slurp of it the other night, and now I'm wishing I'd reached for the Talisker next to it, instead. Oh well: it's sure to grow on someone, if not me.

For the last three years I've lobbied with increasing insistence for a change of locale, with an emphasis on Montreal as an attractive possibility (one of our members has his own table at a particularly fine restaurant). The group e-mails go back and forth, and gradually the chorus for change begins to gel. Then someone mentions this damn bridge, and all bets are completely off.

This year the cabin is up for sale. Since no-one in our company has, as of this posting, offered to buy, we might very well be re-locating next year. After 20 years I refuse to believe it until I finally sink my teeth into that "tic-tac" steak (avec frites, of course).

I've finished bitching about it. The truth is I'm eagerly anticipating the weekend. The bridge is a marvelous place to sit and talk. It's a marvelous place to just sit. And, weather permitting, it's not a bad place to sleep, either.

Hey, Nineteen! It's The Monks of Fall

The Nick Adams Society turns 19 this year. This is our final year at Lovesick Lake. The cottage has been sold, no doubt to someone intent on knocking it down and building something enormous in its stead. It remains to be seen just where the next NAS location is, or if we reconvene at all.

I'm bringing a bottle of 18-year-old Talisker, a single malt I'm partial to (regular readers will note that I tend to favor malts with a relatively clean finish -- though a bottle of Laphroaig is always a welcome sight).

Cheers. Here's to turning 19.

Reconvening With The Monks of Fall

I'm off to the Kawarthas to meet with my mates and slurp single malts. It's been 18 years and counting with this crew. The day someone scraped together the lucre for a bottle of Lagavulin was quite the revelation. Up to that point we'd been scruffy beer drinkers, who occasionally dipped into bourbon or blended whiskies that had a nose reminiscent of unleaded petrol.

But Lag! Oh! Oh my!!

I have cooled on Lag, since then. There's just too much contained in that tiny little glass. And it's bloody expensive. A bottle of Laphroaig is less than half the price, and its remove from Lag is not significant enough (to this aging palate, at least) to merit the expense. Last year our hurtin' Albertan introduced us to Bowmore Darkest, which was the hands-down highlight of the weekend. Not that different in price from Lag, but its pleasures were so much more nuanced than Lag's punch-in-the-gut.

But I ramble. I ramble because this year I have nothing to read to these jokers. I ramble because I have nothing more to say. So here's a picture of what I did on my summer vacation:



That's me, up in Northern Alberta. I pitched in with my brother in law and his friends to assemble a grain bin. The scene wasn't exactly raising the barn for Kelly McGillis (but then I'm not Harrison Ford -- and thank God for that!), but it was an incredibly satisfying day.

Alright, back on Monday. (Hey, Pattie -- we call ourselves The Nick Adams Society!)

Bridge With A View

Several enjoyable moments from this weekend, including the Scotch. Chief among them is The Bridge, an ancient, mostly wooden contraption that reaches from the shore to a small island. The lads like to sit on this bridge all day Saturday, weather permitting (it did). Those of us who use the sauna also use the bridge for diving (those dives are getting shallower - in the past 17 years of global warming, I've witnessed the depth recede some six inches). And one of us, who doesn't much like crowded cabins, even prefers to sleep on it under the stars, when at all possible.

This was my sunrise view.

Re-convening with the Monks of Autumn

Unless something momentous springs to mind and simply has to be expressed, this is likely to be my only posting this week. On Friday I'll be meeting with a bunch of cobbers for the 17th annual gathering of the Nick Adams Society, and part of the collective bargain requires a piece of prose from each member. I've got my work cut out for me.

The NAS is a mongrel assembly (or "motley crew", if you prefer - the moniker is in fact more applicable to us than it is to the band that claimed it, since we are more demonstrably prone to sea changes of the heart than they ever were. If my use of "motley" confuses you, you're not alone. Look it up in the dictionary, or simply trust me on this: Yeats knows his English better than Nikki Sixx does. But I digress.)

We're twelve guys, most of whom are veterans who survived the academic and emotional carnage of a particular "Bible College". Some of us, in our early 20s, fixed onto Hemingway's macho post-religious musings ("Nada y pues nada" - damn straight) for succor. Someone else scored access to a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes, and we indulged in a weekend of unbridled (and unexceptional) craziness.

For some inexplicable reason, we kept returning every fall. The craziness took on a gentle shape, and now the event serves as a yearly retreat for diverse people of surprisingly common ground. The fury of our heresies is no more (or less) remarkable than the immovability of our orthodoxies. So ... same time next year?

Absolutely.