The Port Royal/ Annapolis show was uniquely magical. Every time you arrive somewhere and are told that advance ticket sales are already healthy, you find yourself facing the best problem a touring musician can have: how to relax into the knowledge that people are actually coming. Usually, before a show, the mind behaves like a small, underqualified promoter. It predicts twelve people, then seven, then a weather emergency affecting only those who bought tickets. You look at empty chairs and begin calculating how many personal friends the sound-man might telephone. But in Annapolis Royal, there was no need. Tickets had been sold. The evening already developed a pulse before I played a note.

No surprise considering the whole thing had been assembled by a cast who seemed to have wandered in from several different stories. There were the women helping with the event, none of whom, as I understood it, were actually from Port Royal. There was Elaine. There was the sound guy and his girlfriend. There was Bob Snider. There was Susana and Gary who hosted me (and Bob Snider) in Cobalt 25 years earlier, although parts of that memory remain filed under Canadian Touring: Unverified but Probably True. I remember Gary played me a Paul McCartney album I had not known. There were sheep when I arrived. On an adjacent farm. Sheep are very good for a touring musician because they appear entirely unimpressed by how many tickets have been sold, whether the mailing list is growing, or if the Meta advertisement has located the correct demographic. They look at you as if they already know how the evening will turn out and have decided not to interfere.

Then Greg’s former girlfriend arrived with coffee. This is the kind of detail that makes a good show possible. The history of music is usually written as a sequence of geniuses, movements and important recordings, but the real history may be former girlfriends bringing coffee to people setting up folding chairs. All these unrelated elements began to belong together: the advance sales, the sheep, the coffee, the McCartney record, the people who had travelled in, the people whose homes I may once have slept in, the sound check, the accumulating audience. Touring contains a great deal of uncertainty, and most of it is not romantic. It is mileage, bad sleep, ticket counts, unfamiliar pianos, strange detergents and the daily question of whether anyone knows you are in town. Occasionally, you arrive in a place like Port Royal and everything gathers around the evening as if it had been waiting for you. The songs recognize where they are. Even the sheep, somewhere outside, appear to have approved.