This is going to be the winter I grow a beard and let it grow in gray. The boy I was is slippery as an eel but I've buried him without too much of a struggle in my psyche. Rest in peace with your music and your eternal hard-on. I'll be Hemingway minus the big-game hunting, the bull-fighting and the boxing. I'll charm everyone I meet until they start calling me Papa Deloney.

I'm not about to walk down the alley that leads to my fire escape. I couldn't if I wanted to anyway -- it's blocked off from the street to prevent intruders. I did crawl out the window once when Fanny knocked out the screen in pursuit of a bird or possibly another cat. Down the fire escape stairs I ran, and back and forth along the alleyway until I caught her by the scruff of the neck. She would have found her way back anyway I suppose, but I wasn't thinking. What if she'd climbed up a different fire escape and got adopted by someone who didn't read Thomas Hardy?

If I stood in the alley today and looked up I'd see icicles two feet wide and six feet long. When the weather warms up overnight they will fall with one crash after another. These icicles can be seen hanging from all the old redbrick buildings around here. Very pretty I admit, but you wouldn't want to be standing under them...

I'm staying in tonight for another reason. The rarely shown movie "O Lucky Man!" is on tv. I saw it when it first came out around 1973. Very strange and very surreal, starring Malcolm McDowell with Helen Mirren in a small part. And the soundtrack by Alan Price, erstwhile keyboard player for the Animals, is fantastic and curiously ignored by the official appraisers of soundtracks and music in general.

"Crash!" It's happening sooner than predicted. Alfie, stop squirming.

Look at the fat pigeon sitting there, seriously unconcerned. Alfie is all thumbs, being a polydactyl Hemingway cat. Her bottom is on my desk and her front paws on the windowsill. The window is closed, of course, and the pigeon in question is half-covered in snow. Alfie's meow is very mournful when these brief encounters occur. She reminds me of Hank Williams going on about his lonesome whippoorwill. One big difference: I don't think Hank had a feathery late-night stew in mind.

I'm always willing to take advice. I was told today that a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with cumin and a pinch of sea-salt, along with a slice of toast, is a very good breakfast for a cold winter morning. Where, my heart cries out, are the baked beans, the stewed tomatoes, the sausages, the fried mushrooms and the bread fried in bacon fat? Not that I have such things very often, but I've been known to do so once in a while when it's cold outside.

(Note to Helen: eggplant for breakfast? Surely you jest.)

Last night at the Willow, a tex-mex restaurant on the Danforth, I sat around most merrily with a group of people, among whom were my old friends Gerry and Dan. These guys are musicians and songwriters, and I thought it would be a good idea to post links to their sites.

http://www.myspace.com/willthecircle

http://www.myspace.com/dandagostino

Craig and Helen have both brought up the subject of meditation lately. I remembered a story. Alan Watts, a man who helped to explain Eastern ideas to the West in the 1950s and 60s, was hanging out with a very famous gent. Was it Aldous Huxley? I dunno, but Alan assumed his pal meditated and asked him what form it took. With a book in one hand and a pencil in the other, his friend replied : "I meditate...by underlining words."

Tomorrow is a big day in the U.S.A. I'll be watching as everyone will. It's also the anniversary of my mother's death. Sometimes things just get personal and implode like so many tulips. My mother and I were never close. If anything I rebelled against her overwhelming loneliness. I wanted another sort of life, to be tempted by harmless beautiful things when I woke up in the morning, and to fall asleep unafraid and unrepentant. I've achieved that much. Still, I'm my mother's son, no question about it, in spite of our differences. I mark the changing of the seasons as she did: with regret and a tentative happiness. I work hard for a labourer's wages, and I tend the graves of the people I loved.

I used to go out with a girl who made me recite the first few lines of a Coleridge poem to make sure I was sober. I still remember it, albeit with a small alteration:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree
where Alfie the sacred pussycat ran
through caverns measureless to man
down to a sunless sea."

John Cowper Powys and his brother Llewelyn were taking yet another walk down a country lane in their beloved Dorset. "I confess," said John, "that I'm one of those who would like a religion or philosophy to serve as a background to life." Llewelyn, leaning down to pick a daisy to put behind his ear, looked up and said, "Isn't the brevity enough?"

Up shortly after dawn -- making tea and toasting English muffins -- well below zero outside -- my elbows on the kitchen table -- the window facing east over rooftops -- a good morning for smokestack watching.

I stepped out briefly tonight and passed the God-Bless Indian and his girlfriend. Like me they took care to avoid the icy patches as they walked along. I'm glad they're still together. I haven't seen either one of them panhandling in months. I was especially cheered when I heard her remark to him: "Honey, we're having Shake 'n' Bake tonight. Four big chicken legs."

They won't be recovered, those Friday nights on the patio of Yellowfingers when we were young. It was a jazz club downtown. None of us were into jazz, we only went inside to pee. We were people-watching in the summer, drinking too much and leaning towards one another with so many secrets to tell. And how good it was when it started to get dark, a thin sunset between the highrises and bank towers. We laughed and laughed until we choked on our laughter. Later, we shared taxis to Toby's Good Eats, the late-night restaurant. We didn't see it coming, this getting older, the old crowd dispersed and gone off to their haunted private lives.

First Monday after the holidays? Edith Piaf, frites en mayo, nothing else will restore the human spirit.

The apple slice is in the bag of brown sugar and all is right with the world.

Not only that, the Crazy Greek has resurfaced. Who knows what really happened. Maybe he flew to Athens for the festive winter riots.