calming down

Toronto has a hangover, and so do I. The city's is physical and emotional, mine just the latter. Strange to go about business as usual, passing stores and restaurants with boarded up windows. To read about Harper gloating. I could scream but won't. The garden continues to glow.

Apparently I was on the CBC this morning. I'd forgotten that I'd called the Vox Box of Metro Morning yesterday, about the police chief saying the black bloc were - such an interesting word - "co-mingled" with the peaceful crowd and thus impossible for the police to pick out. During the march and during the violence, they could not have been more visible, I burbled into the phone, my heart hammering. Friend Nancy White emailed this morning that she'd heard it. I'm amazed that it was in any way coherent.

That's enough activism for this week.

Today, a milestone: I spoke to a very nice civil servant, downloaded some forms, have to get a few bits of paper together, and soon will have applied to receive my pension. My old age pension. I, so incredibly lithe and youthful with lustrous brown hair, will be a pensioner! I'm not waiting till I'm 65; I need it now. If all is well, I'll start to receive a monthly cheque the month after my 60th birthday. How amazing that the government will reward me for staying alive. It'll be under $200 a month, but that's enough to make a difference. Thank you, tax payers of Canada, for providing more than $1 billion for Stephen's summit and an allowance for us oldsters.

To celebrate, I walked across the Don Valley to Loblaw's and bought $250 worth of groceries. Usually I buy from the No Frills nearby, but occasionally I need things they don't have there, some of that fancy stuff - I bought nine large bars of dark chocolate, for example. Two bags of reasonable free trade coffee. The vital stuff, in bulk. Took a cab home, and Mr. Choy came for lunch. It was so sublime on the deck, neither of us could move for a bit. Colour, breeze, scent. Life.

We're all coming back to life, after that nightmare. Now we just have to pay the bills.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it. -Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935- )