He looks up from this novel he is reading over a rare leisurely dinner, which threads meditations on painting (or more generally art and the impulse that propels art, that of love) with the mystery of a murder. And discovers that his gaze is resting upon the face of a woman, less than a foot away, over the low wooden wall that splits his row of seats from hers', in this noisy restaurant.

Startlingly this face seems to contain the essence of the other face - same brow and same eyelashes - he had been trying to summon all day today. Why you ask? Perhaps because it was because the memory of this face's twin - now less hazy - reading to him a poem, in the original language of this novel he had been gnawing for ten to fifteen minutes before sleep for the past week, which hovering over his day like the overcast sky. Perhaps because he has been hoping for days that he can go, if only for a while, to that place, that crevice from which words last flowed.

They say the body tears up the eye to protect it from its own sadness yet he can't tear up now, with words if not water, as he did just recently, in this winter, when for the briefest sequence of days he needed words to hold intact the warmth that was always under his palms. And now this face - now nothing more than just the shadow of that other face summoned from memory's archive, and this line he just read from the book open at the table:

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."

Unable to sit still any longer, he picks up this book, his dinner half eaten - food hasn't had much taste for days anyways - tips heavily on the bill presented by the congenially cheerful waitress, and walks out into a city besieged by a heavy snowfall, wondering if this world is still his home. He is thankful that he is dressed like a crow, in all black; this way none would notice how his just reopened wounds bleed, not unless they looked down at the snow, and saw his disappearing footsteps briefly outlined in red.

[1] On Bloor Street, after a week of being away from the wash of humanity - this discounting all the many people who asked him where things - from grape leaves to anti-aging face creams - were in retail store a few football fields large, in which he labored to earn his daily bread - he encounters a motley group of women, waving banners with assorted slogans ranging from stopping Iraq wars to asking for increases in government support for childcare to expressing solidarity with all mothers of of the world. In other words, to him, it appears to be a protest rally with no definite purpose, even if the lead sign says "International Women's Day - 2007"

Given that the temperature edged up above freezing after weeks, and that many of the women in the rally were beating drums and shaking cymbals, he stands at the street light watching this tiny procession under a citified prairie sky pass, scanning the faces of those mostly older women, and recalling a line by Walt Whitman:

"A woman waits for me —she contains all, nothing is lacking"

[2] Reading a novel set in the Canadian prairie during the 1930, in which an older woman recalls her days as young school teacher, his memory takes him back to certain scenes of his childhood: sitting in a narrow gully of earth gouged by the monsoon, scribbling lines and maps of countries (Italy's boot, the French pentagon etc - things he had just read about, and escaped to through his geography textbook) in the sand washed up by the rains' run off, the voice and the presence of his favorite, and perhaps the best, teacher of all time, in second grade teaching him how to write cursive, and then her gift of a picture book at the end of the school year for his academic performance as she left the city of his childhood and his life forever. The picture book which was about Pinocchio's travails and triumphs. Did the teacher foresee that some 20 years later that this little attentive and adoring student of hers' would undertake an experiment to re-invent himself by turning his life into the artificial and wooden mode of a puppet acting out fantasies of a corporate life.

[3] In a bookstore - given his inability to maneuver out of solitude into a life of social acts, this is how he spends his weekends, attempting to dissolve the tiredness of the work-week in the alchemy of the word, - he chances upon a book intriguingly titled "Picturing and Poeting", and thus falls into the completely magical world of Alan Fletcher, and his brilliant wordplay-diagrams composed using discarded cardboard boxes, labels, random signs etc and the anagrams contained in those words - Evian, the best selling water brand, for example, contains the word "naive" in it.

A short excerpt from a Fletcher's article titled "Gbobledigook Rlues OK":

"Orus is the age of sbusttiutes: isntead of lagnuage we hvae jragon; insetad of gneuine iedas, Birght Idaes.

He copies this in his notebook for this is also snapshot of his life; had he not recently traded in a life for a "lifestyle"?

[4] On the street, eyes bleary from an afternoon spent reading poetry and non fiction at a bookstore, he notices a woman's - abmer eyes, women in Toronto have the most brilliant range of eye colorations - gaze upon his unkempt face with its weekend bristles, thinning hair in the need of a haircut and in returns bestows her his "life is suffering" grin.

He is seated in the Calgary Airport, with a magnificent view of the snow capped Rockies in the distance, eating lunch and re-reading an essay by Pico Iyer's essay on airports and their place in modern psyche. However, when Iyer opines:

"Airports have become something more than just an intra-national convenience zone, and it is easy to see them as models of our future"

he mutters to himself, "yes Mr. Iyer, only for a certain slice of the world population", for certainly, he wouldn't have been able to consider airport existance as normal, as that much younger self, who at 12, watched mesmerized for the first time in his life, a plane carrying his mother on a voyage to America, from a huge viewing gallery, for which his father had to buy tickets to enter. And who could only a decade later, at 22, be able to board an airplane for the first time, as he left on a voluntary exile to America.

On Air Canada, all announcements are made in both English and French; in English first followed by French. And when is Toronto pronounced in two different ways, the French way of saying it is of course sexier. O Frenchies, if only you had managed to beat the Brits in taking over Hindoostan?!

At the baggage carousel, going round and round, waiting for his manna (he can't live without his 30 lbs heavy mobile library - this is how he accessorizes anonymous hotel rooms "tailored for the discerning business traveler" like himself) to be delivered, a poem of Vikram Seth's, revolves in his mind.

It would make perfect sense to use an airport as a circle - perhaps the fourth circle given that the most frequent users of airports, i.e., frequent of frequent fliers (I include myself in this group now) tend to be capitalists - in a post-modern version of Dante's "Inferno"

On a CBC News TV Kisok next to the signs for baggage claim, Canada's (more popular) version of PBS, a news report on the next book chosen for the "Canada Reads" program (some of the books with this sticker that I have seen in bookstores are excellent) is followed by a report on a Mickey Mouse's sold out exhibit in Montreal. Thusly has literature to live, cheek and jowl, with pop culture in these best of times and worst of times.

When at the baggage carousel, a woman unfolds a beautiful Japanese fan to beat the thermostat turned on too high, the waiting time speeds up a little.