Pausing at door of cafe, late winter morning, the swinging door in part blocking the cold breeze blowing from a northwest direction, and letting the static of conversations, all tangled up into one hairy organism, travel through the web of silence that covers you.

When at a stop sign, a girl dressed in a pea-green jacket, smoothly swings by, in a wide left-ward arc, on an old fashioned bicycle, smiling, her lips moving, humming a inaudible song, the morning warms up considerably.

At an organic cafe - Canadians seem to be very big on organic food - when you notice that attractive couple sitting next to you will soon be parents, you chant a half forgotten prayer for a safe arrival, and for a good journey subsequently.

At an photography exhibit in City of Toronto Archives, Michael Ontaadje's novel "In the Skin of A Lion" surfaces in your memory, as your eyes move over slices of sepia, those restored gelatin photographs of the municipal photographers. Images of Commissioner R.C. Harris smoking a fat cigar, his "Temple for Water", the majestic Art Deco water filtration plant, mud caked water tunnelers with their ponies squinting into the glare of the photographer's flash-bulb, somewhere under Lake Ontario, and finally the bridge, the Bloor Street Viaduct, under construction, all of which make you feel as if you have entered that luminous novel again; that if you look at these photos of Toronto slums and tenement rooms (with reproductions of Old Masters on their walls!!) closely enough, you might spy Patrick, Alice, Clara, Hana, or even that shape shifting thief, Caravaggio, again. You walk back home with a poster, attempting to peer into the faces of the construction workers on the viaduct, a memento mori for those other imagined lives inhabited through the act of reading.

In a bookstore, at dusk, looking through the pages of Anthony Storr's lovely book "Solitude: A Return to the Self", you find yourself chuckling at the very same quoted passage (on the subject of romantic unions, or in case of our contemporary society, sexual unions*) of Edward Gibbon's, which made you laugh when you had read this book, some years ago. You copy it into your notebook for future reference:

"When I have painted in my fancy all the probable consequences of such a union, I have started from my dream, rejoiced in my escape, and ejaculated a thanksgiving that I was still in possession of my natural freedom."

* In the light of a letter, I have been meditating on thoughts pertaining to what it means to be loving, to love, and to be loved back, especially in this time in which the yearning for connection is manifested predominantly, and swiftly, via the sexual act. What is the goodness inherent (if anything good can be discerned) in such an genital centric act, in which one barely touches the skin, both real and emotional, of the other, the "lover"?