Flying over the vast emptiness that is Canada at 30000 ft, the quote "no man is an island to himself" comes to his mind, as the eye scans below Green Bay's many ice crusted islets, which from this height look like the rotten teeth of a demon.

It is the in-flight navigation tracker which informs him of this, the current location over which he slides. He thinks of time's curvature, dimensions of space, the lack of any such instrumentation to map the human heart and memory, and this once great friend who over a period of nights many winters ago tried to lead him into a world of twenty six dimensions, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking watery chai.

Nothing much got absorbed as this was around the same time when they had both stumbled upon a Dutch painter - this man's life and painting, in which stars are whorls, in which sunflowers are nature itself - spoke to their young and raw urges to leap into the world. And so his head was too full of Western art that he ate from thick yellowing books, rarely borrowed from the library they both dearly loved; his friend for all the quantum physics books it contained, written by people with names like Landau, and full of incomprehensible symbols and diagrams. As for himself, he was more modest in scope; penetrating nature's mysteries was too onerous a task for him. He limited himself to the library's cave of poetry, best reachable via a pitch dark iron fire escape stair.

Now headed into this horizon's lit arc with dusk eddying under him, he remembers his friend, and also the time's fork which took them to different countries, in opposite directions from the country of their youth. They have't spoken to each other in months or have met in years. The last time they did meet was when he went back to the country in which neither now lives. There was too much smoke and noise from the seperately experienced heartbreak of the intervening years for them to hear each other's voices. They both left that meeting, which also ended at dusk, puzzled and unable to explain how and why their seemingly perfect country of friendship, with its riverbank talks, railway walks, impulsive train journeys had all come to that zero of silence.

He scans the in-flight tracker again, and brings fore to his memory a leg of the lonely trans-continental journey, from Delhi to London, back to this New World, during the course of which he tracked geographies, murmuring their names, and thought repeatedly of another saying - a cousin of the one currently flashing in his mind - this one by Hercalitus - a man can't step into the same river twice.

Only for five or ten minutes that is, when I was caught up in Toronto's St. Patrick's Day Parade, with its phalanxes of drum and fife bands, horses, Asians - cultic such as Falun Dafa and non-cultic such as the Pinoy Boy Band - passing for Irish, Ms. Canada International, all lovely and lonely at the back of a Mercedes convertible, clowns and mascots*, bad Irish folk singing, hung-over people etc etc on Bloor.

All these festivities, of course, delayed my getting to the local office of my firm where I spent a happy Sunday afternoon and evening earning my over-priced daily bread. Since I wasn't drunk (or had the time to get drunk later in the evening) I let the pair of green gloves I was wearing, a cover-song by The Corrs (if I was a rich man, la de da, I would totally go for the raven-haired lead singer, Andrea Corr) I played in the afternoon, and finally, those lovely lovely sonnets Seamus Heaney wrote for, and about his mother, in the sequence "Clearances" I re-read (I also had the fortune of seeing the great man recite these sonnets in his inimitable Irish brogue few years ago) before bed last night, stand for things that enable me to say this morning, I was Irish too.

There was a time when he once bought books solely on the criteria of their weight. In that fashion he could get economies of scale, a cheaper cost per page.

Now his traveling portmanteau nearly full with all the books acquired on this journey, he begins to buys books for their slenderness; books of poetry mainly, books that have spines as slender as flower stalks, books like that one he had once given a woman (whose ability to quote verse had filled him with amazement) saying,

"Let this be the bouquet of wild irises that I didn't bring with me for you, this winter evening."