finding a champion

An image to keep you cool - a friend sent this from the Alaska highway. It's chilly here, she said. 

Hours of gardening today - everything is overgrown or falling over or invading something else. It's so dry, I had to drag my filthy garden hose through the house to water the parched plants at the front. The water line at the front exploded one winter years ago and I've not replaced it, not had to, until now. No rain for ages! And yet it poured across town the other day - here a five-minute sprinkle.

Watching six sparrows bathe and drink in the big saucer on the deck rail, such fluttering, splashing, and squawking. They don't mind bathing and then sipping the same water. I am about to join them, take my grubby self up to the shower. But then I will drink rosé.

On Thursday, to my new friend Ron, who's a vigorous 88, and his partner Babs. Ron has kind of adopted me; he believes I'm as good a writer as Alice Munro and M. Atwood, and though I beg, vehemently, to differ, I cannot shake his faith in me. He told me, "You need a champion as a writer." And for a writer as self-deprecating as I, he's right. It is a very good thing to have a champion. Babs is a fellow Beatlemaniac, so after a glass of wine, we put on Sgt. Pepper's and danced. 

Yesterday's pleasure - on the way to a swim and dinner at Lynn's, I took the TTC to Rosedale subway, then walked up Yonge St. to St. Clair, stopping at the Paperie, full of lovely things, and Book City where I bought Lauren Hough's memoir in essays Leaving isn't the hardest thing; trying to keep up with what's current is one of the hardest things. I'm interested in essay collections, since that's what I may aim for - a guaranteed bestseller, as are of course all my books. 

LOL. 

In bookstores I always look longingly at the Ks in the nonfiction section, where this writer as good as Alice and Peggy is not. I once found Finding The Jewish Shakespeare in a Barnes and Noble at Times Square, and several copies of All My Loving in a Book City here. But not recently. 

But what joy to go into shops and shop! And then to float up and down Lynn's grotto-like pool and have dinner on the deck with her partner Nick. I'd brought a fine bottle someone gave me years ago that I'd forgotten about and was sure had gone bad - a 2003 chardonnay, to be drunk by 2008. Lynn and Nick were game to give it a try, and amazingly, it was wonderfully rich and complex! Only 13 years after its best before date. 

Lynn and I looking at the little red squirrel on the telephone wires.

May we all be so lucky and last long after OUR best before date.