… and then there was that week that I didn’t write anything.

Preparation for the new job got the better of me last week. My hat is off to anyone who can keep up a blog on a week-to-week or more level.

My old boss found the gift that I had hoped for but had thought long gone. One of the shows I was most proud of was Sweeney Todd. It was a long plan to build toward something that scale and I put every last trick and favour into making sure it was filled to the rafters. It is with a great deal of pride that I tell people that we filled 98% of the seats to that run.

There is only one keepsake that I would want. One memento that would be just the thing. And they found it. I got one of the prop straight razors from the show. One of my former co-workers made a simple box for it and an engraved plate bears a line from my first show as Marketing Director, The Mystery of Edwin Drood – “More than what solution fits the crime, what I’ve learned is that life is bits of time.” You might remember that from the Grammy Award prop I showed you a few weeks ago. It is also on the farewell gifts for two other of my co-workers from that era. It just fits.

Promises are a funny thing.

I have a cat named Raziel whom I love very much. No, she isn’t named for the stupidest angel from Christopher Moore’s book, I encountered that novel almost a decade after Razzie came into my life. I was a religious studies student and a name that literally translates as “Wisdom of God” was more than a little fitting for the cat who helped me through some stressful years.

Razzie was really my girlfriend of the time’s cat, but I helped pick the name so I take that bit of ownership. That girlfriend and I went through grad school together and then moved to Montreal where I was to take a year off while she went on to a Phd. I couldn’t find work and ended up moving back to Calgary a few months later and a misunderstanding with the landlord meant the cat came with me.

My girlfriend would keep Razzie’s whiskers as they fell off as a sort of substitute for bronzed baby shoes. When I was leaving, she asked that I continue to save them for her and to return them when we were a family again.

That was not to be. That girlfriend now lives on the other side of the world and it has been 10 years since that fateful move back to Calgary. But I promised. And so here they are. Every time I happened to see a whisker it went into this old pill container. There was no thought they would ever be given to the woman who parted ways from us so long ago. But a promise is a promise.

It is a promise from which I free myself. One less attachment to the past.

If ever I am have to justify myself to a greater power, it will be this story I tell. It is who I am.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, 

But I have promises to keep, 

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep.

– Robert Frost