Nothing happens to me anymore I was thinking. I don't leave my room is why but I was on my way to thanksgiving dinner a couple of towns over where I recently re-established my relationship with a friend who lost her husband last year. The whole family would be there and I've known them since they were babies.

This is a family where everyone talks at the same time I remembered shortly after getting there. I wanted to stand in a bit for my friend who passed away. I'd already had meaningful talks with the kids over the years and to be honest for once I was glad to be somewhere amongst people again. And this was the first time I got to spend time with the son's partner of a few years already.

Their names are Dan and Dan which is already a Meet The Fockers kind of rich minefield for a screenplay. They have a nice apartment downtown and a wrinkled old dog of some breed. He's Jewish and has just recently told his parents and introduced our Dan to them. My 'nephew' Dan has never missed phoning me on my birthday and always spent some time getting below the surface. He's a good kid. So I talked to his friend Dan about how Hitler was Austrian and got turned down by the Vienna Art Academy twice before turning to his second career. How he went to public school with Wittgenstein (same class) who went on to become one of the more important philosophers. I got some insight into how the Talmud is different from the Bible and some of his views about what happened.

In the meantime I was being shown pictures of the house the daughter bought with her boyfriend of ten years. They had just taken possession two weeks earlier and the boyfriend had already gutted the basement and dug a trench to rebuild it all into an apartment. Mother in law (my friend who lost her husband - their dad) was moving in. I already knew she was going to rent there because she called me one night and drank a bottle of wine bouncing off the walls going through it. She misses him terribly. She can't keep the house going because they don't have enough. This is in Toronto so she will have massively more opportunities. I went through her finances and she needs to work for five years and is just 59. It can be done. She's terrified of intruding on her daughter's life, of being forced to shrink into a small space, she's overwhelmed they took her, of how horrible it is to force herself to move on. The daughter's boyfriend of ten years straightened me out at that thanksgiving dinner. He told them they were always disagreeing, always had disagreed, and would be disagreeing at their house. They're both double A types.

Eddy the cat came up too. He didn't like the dog much but he wanted his pats from Uncle Wolf. He always sat on my knees and liked my chin rubbing techniques. Kathy the new widow was feeling ok and kept pouring the wine. Without realizing it I had a half a bottle of red before dinner.

So there I was hanging on with the cat in my lap looking at pictures of the house and listening to Dan talking smelling the turkey in the oven knowing this would be the last time I was in this living room because she was going to rent the house out in case it didn't work and she needed to come back. She gave me one of my paintings back because she won't have the space and Dan's friend Dan immediately caught on that the picture of Sean Connery and maid marian in Robin Hood was actually Mary and Joseph . I'm going to be speaking at their wedding I suddenly thought letting the cacaphony of family chatter wash over me.

The boys invited me to come for a visit in Toronto. One of them is vegan and one is vegetarian. Should be interesting as another chapter in a book I'm not writing but am invited into. As to the house the apartment ceiling is 6'3" so I can't stand up. I flash on Gandalph at Bag's End nodding. She's five feet tall and her husband called her 'stumpy'.

Nothing ever happens to me I realized driving home later through the dark country night to the city I may yet live in.

Have a great trip, marsh! Since you are not going to try to straighten out out the government, I hope you have a chance to visit some of the more inspiring places in D.C. - the monuments and museums.

Awww, Marsh, I was hoping you would be the one to straighten it out! But, I guess it's sort of like our spouses - it just declines and declines. (Sorry, Joan).

I'm shocked, too. Every year, I get very surprised when winter reminds me that it actually exists. I keep hoping . . . but no, it always arrives.

This year I was fooled for a while because our fall was so mild but now that it is dark so early I can no longer be in denial. My husband went into LTC this summer and when I visit, I try to give him a change of scene and get him out of the unit for a while. Often I took him for a ride right after supper. But now it's dark at that hour and neither of us wants to go out. So I'm going to start cutting my work day short in order to get there by 3:00. That way I can still give him a change of scene in the daylight and maybe be home by dark.