Earlier this week I changed the tagline for my blog to Always looking for connections. When I’ve been asked what I write about on my website, I’ve said it’s about community and family history, a bit of DIY, anything that has caught my interest, really, everything and nothing.
But I realized recently that what I get most from writing here is figuring out how I’m connected to other people, both alive and dead, how the past is connected to the present, how one thought leads to another. Writing this blog helps me find my place in the midst of churn and the passage of time.
News is spreading across, well, the world of the death of Leo Cheverie, a widely-known and hugely loved Islander. I met Leo 7 years ago when I was working on an outdoor theatre show. He had volunteered to help park cars, cheerfully donning a safety vest and capably Tetrising vehicles to make the best use of the space available. We got chatting and quickly we connected the dots: he knew my neighbour’s nephew, perhaps a vague connection, but that’s enough here. I know you. We are connected.
When I asked Leo if he was going to stay to see the show, the only real perk of volunteering for a sold-out show, he said he wished he could, but he had just come from volunteering at another event and had promised to sell 50/50 tickets at a concert later that evening. Three volunteer roles in one day was probably not unusual for Leo, which is how he was known everywhere.
I bumped into Leo a few times since then: at a rally, at a meeting, and on social media. The last time I saw him was in December 2021, when he and I joined a mutual friend who was visiting PEI and staying at a beautiful Summerside inn. The heritage home was decorated for Christmas, and we had a lovely time talking, drinking tea and eating Christmas cookies in the inn’s parlour.
The afternoon slipped away, snow started to fall and I had to start for home. I hugged Leo and made him promise to visit me during his summer solstice trip, when he and a friend would start their day at the East Point lighthouse and drive across the province to end up in North Cape, stopping to visit folks along the way. I’m not sure he was ever able to make that longest-day pilgrimage again as he was diagnosed with cancer in spring 2022.
I can’t claim any deeper connection to Leo than what I’ve written here, but I admired and liked him so much, and his example makes me want to do more, do it cheerfully, do it tirelessly. To nurture old connections and find new.
I’ve been thinking a lot about your comment, Ton. I recognize so much in the description you gave of ‘in de kunnigheid’. On PEI we can sometimes believe that our searching for family and other community connections is unique to here, but your experience shows it is not. PEI residents who have family connections going back generations have intricately woven networks, and the difficultly in finding a way to connect to those networks is often commented on by people who move here. PEI is said to be a difficult place to fit in; we are seen as insular and unwelcoming, even as we are praised for being outwardly friendly and helpful. Those who come here with no connections and stay are those who don’t mind being on the outside and either stay there or find a way to build different relationships, accepting that those connections will never be the same as what people who have always lived here have.
Makes me think about how social networks operate, how we build trust (or don’t) on the internet, if it’s really possible to create a virtual network as helpful and vital as an in-person human one. We try to replicate “real” relationships, and it works to some extent, but me helping you bring in your crops is much different and more vital that liking your TikTok. Food for thought – thanks!
I can very much relate to your concept of connecting and how you worked out the connection between Leo and you when you first met. In the region I was born (but didn’t grow up, then returned as student and stayed for almost 30 yrs) the dialect has this notion of being ‘in de kunnigheid’ which is something of being in each others knowledge, but a networked knowledge, an understanding of the world through familial, village, tribal almost connections. A first meeting will always contain that searching of each others connections, and responsibilities towards the local community to find where yours and theirs connect. Only then a direct connection can be formed. I had the luck that my paternal grandfather was in many people’s network, so I usually led with that and could lean on his reputation. But a neighbour’s nephew would work too. It also means that in stories my grandparents or others told me, they’d explain who someone was in terms of that network fabric (I bought this thing from X who is the nephew of Y who helped bring in the harvest of neighbour Z some years ago, and a friend of … etc. etc.) I have a tendency to do such things myself in conversation too, as a means of providing context. Quite often superfluous too: “You could have just said they’re an acquaintance from work, you know”.