enough already, volcano

Last night, Anna and I said good-bye to our Paris visit and spoke of planning it for next year. She posted on her Facebook page, "F U Eyjafjallajokull." This morning, I awoke to an excited email from my mother, saying that Air Canada had called Anna (who does not have the Internet) and told her that her flight would leave tonight, Tuesday night, to land Wednesday morning. I went on-line immediately, to see that Charles de Gaulle airport is still closed and a new plume of ash has exploded into the atmosphere. This is a crazy, worrying situation - much as I'd love my daughter here, I don't want her to come if it's dangerous or will be insane at the airports, as I can only imagine it will be.

Only 6.30 a.m. her time - not a good time for a chat. We'll talk later and see what the latest is.

If it is safe to travel and she comes, or if it isn't and she doesn't, I will simply enjoy one experience or the other. I ache to share this city with a young woman who appreciates good food as much as Anna does, the cooking, the presenting and the eating. I bought flowers this morning, and wanted to show her how, at the flower shop on the market, they ask if the flowers are just for you or for a present - because if they're a gift, they will make a beautiful package of them. I want to show her the cooked roast suckling pig and roast potatoes ready to go at the butcher, and take her where I went before my errands, to my new favourite café which gets the morning light. They had run out of croissants, so I walked to the bakery across the square, bought a brioche studded with orange bits and ate it with my creme as I sat reading in the sun.

However, alone I will be happy too. Alone I will work, listening to myself instead of to someone else.

I am reading a beautiful memoir: "Wordstruck," by the broadcaster Robert MacNeil of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report. (I almost, as I wrote, mentally pronounced it "repor" as Colbert has trained us to do.) MacNeil is not only Canadian, but he was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as was I - he even went to the same grade school, Tower Road, also acted with the Halifax Little Theatre and at the Dalhousie Theatre (though he was a student there and I had a child's part in a student production.) He also was an avid reader from an early age, moved with his parents to Ottawa and went to Carleton to study English, fell in love with words and the poetry of T. S. Eliot and worked as an actor, loved the radio and worked there, then gave up acting to become a writer and broadcaster. Many similarities, though he, of course, went on to become a famous newsman and write many books, and I am writing to you. He rhapsodizes about words and the English language the way I do about wine and cheese. A wonderful book.

Going to take it easy today - feeling a bit wobbly, perhaps all the accumulated stress of the past 2 weeks hitting me, not to mention the uncertainty of what's going on right now - and anyway, if my daughter does arrive, it will be good at have had a day of rest and silence. Only one engagement - coffee at the famous Café Rostand at the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, with the woman I met last year completely by chance, when we were both stranded by a strike. Now that feels Parisian - meeting a friend for un café near the Jardin du Luxembourg. And maybe, tomorrow, I'll go there with my girl.

Or maybe not.