Poutine, food of the fallen angels.

I was out on some errands when who should I run into but my old friends Kevin and Marushka who moved out of the neighbourhood a few months ago. They were playing at being tourists on the street they know as well as I do. The good news is: as long as their fortunes continue to improve they will move back here in the fall. But it's a yin-yang world, isn't it? My old pal Gerry moved back downtown a few weeks ago. He says he was "tired of all the squeaky-clean white people walking their dogs and pushing their baby-carriages." And so it goes.

I know it's still Friday but already I'm thinking of returning to my old habit of making Sunday night a casserole night. I have countless recipes memorized from a tattered cookbook. Granted, a casserole is winter comfort food, just as reading Sherlock Holmes in bed at night in the winter is literary comfort food, but I'm willing to bend the rules as long as the heat and humidity hold off.

Hundreds of chestnuts fallen from the trees outside the nursing home...it's an image I remember from childhood. And years later, a knee-high memorial stone half hidden by summer grass. I have a head full of words so of course a quotation comes to mind. It's from Montaigne: "I hope death finds me planting my cabbages."

Alfie isn't afraid of thunderstorms. She's adopted a brave Shakespearean attitude towards the sound and fury. Like her late and justly famous predecessor she's found that sprawling on the kitchen floor keeps her cool on these hot afternoons. And when it's a downpour, as it is today, she hooks her thumbs to the windowsill and listens.