My Poor Little Substack...

How I have been neglecting you!

I feel guilty about you, little Substack. You’ve been languishing, unwritten, unread, wondering if I’m mad at you. Was it something I said? No, I have just been a bad and unworthy Substacker.

But I have some very good excuses.

Excuse 1: I had a wart growing on my nose. It was getting bigger and bigger!

(I didn’t have a picture of the wart, so this will have to do…It’s by Tim Walker, a tip top English photographer. I got to keep the hair extensions. )

Well, if you know anything about anything, you’ll realize I had to get that wart taken off right away, before the witch-finders spotted it and became overexcited. Conflagration might have resulted, and goodness knows we had enough flames and smoke this summer without me contributing to it, however unwillingly.

So the Wart Doctor took it off. She said, “Have you been shaking hands with a lot of people recently?” “Yes,” I said. “That’s how you got it,” she said. “It’s a virus.”

Who knew that? Not me!

Nothing to do with toads. They’re innocent. In that respect, at any rate.

If you happen to come across me, do not say, “Where’s the wart?”Do not stare at my nose, hoping to see a scar. There isn’t one.

We’ll just pretend this never happened.

Excuse 2: Norwalk. We’ll just pretend this never happened either. I could wax graphic about this experience, but I won’t. That would be Bad Taste, eek.

Excuse 3: It was put to me that I should enable paid subscriptions. This sent me into a rabbit-in-headlights paralysis: I don’t need people to pay me 6 bucks a month, or whatever. I don’t need the money. But other people might, and Substack does need it, because they are running the platform and that’s how they cover their costs.

So I shouldn’t hitch a free ride on Substack, as it were. Right? But I shouldn’t hit you up for cash I don’t need, either. Correct?

After much agonizing and dithering and procrastination, I came up with the following solution:

The usual blather for everyone, free. Warts on the nose, warts on Doug Ford, warts on Toronto construction and traffic, that kind of thing.

But then, for subscribers, Book Stuff. What I’m reading. Sections of my library: Mythology and Folklore, witches included; the military history shelves— I have a lot of that, I inherited some; history of costume; poets of yesteryear; Nature books, including birds. What I’m writing (at). And so forth.

Then, where will the money go? To a designated charity, maybe three or four month’s worth. One of the smaller outfits, where it will actually make a difference. The first one will be PIBO, the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. pibo.ca. It was Graeme’s thing —here he is, birdwatching on Pelee, as we both we did every spring — but a group of us is carrying it on, as it is an essential part of bird migration monitoring in North America, extending all the way down through Mexico and Central and South America.

So you won’t be buying me a coffee with your 6 bucks, you’ll be buying one for the bird banders and volunteers who wade through mud, chiggers, and mosquitoes to keep track of our migratory species, increasingly under threat… Click the link above, take a peek!

Meanwhile, the wart was sent off in a bottle. I’ll let you know if any interesting news comes back about it, but I’m hoping none will. No news is good news, in the case of warts.