I just bought a huge box of copy paper, and it has given me some pause. I mean, I don't buy green bananas and I have never bought a year's supply of toothpaste or toilet paper. That's not because I thought I wouldn't live long enough to use it but because of something that happened to us early in our married life (My Other LIfe). Bill was a great peanut butter eater so it made sense, when we had the chance, to buy wholesale a 25-pound pail of peanut butter, at a great saving. A pail, I said, so we had to decant peanut butter as we needed it, into a container that fit a kitchen cupboard, thence into a good-looking jar for the table. We put the pail into a closet in an empty bedroom - this was early in our marriage, as I say. The bedroom was designated soon to be a nursery for our first child. For the nonce, the closet was a storage closet for out-of-season clothes hung in garment bags which I had laced with mothballs. (I used to be very organized.) The moth balls were so powerful that their fragrance permeated the peanut butter. We discovered this when we went back to the font for a refill. The peanut butter wasn't poisonous, I guess, but it tasted terrible. I tried baking cookies with it, hoping that in combination with other ingredients and with the addition of heat, the hint of mothballs would go away. It didn't. We ended up throwing out almost an entire pail of peanut butter. And that's why I never bought "lifetime" supplies or bargains on bulk. Paper was different. When I was living up north, not far, just Muskoka, but too far from an office supply store for me, I stocked up on supplies, not food but paper. I still do, obviously, because I just bought that big box. But for the first time it hit me: maybe the paper will outlast me? I had better keep writing.

I don't know why I bother to write or why I think I should add to the world's supply of what - knowledge? information? thinking? drivel? There is so much marvellous stuff to read and not enough time in the world to read it all, who do I think I am to keep trying to contribute to the mass and why do I bother? This weekend I am reading four or five books at the same time. Wherever I am, and wherever I have put one down, I'm reading and they are all interesting books: David Rakoff's posthumous verse novel, LOVE DISHONOR MARRY DIE CHERISH PERISH; Luanne Armstrong's THE LIGHT THROUGH THE TREES; Paul Theroux's THE TAO OF TRAVEL; Donald Hall's UNPACKING THE BOXES (asked what it's about, he answered, "love, death and New Hampshire"); and Kate Atkinson's STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG. I'm a bit behind on that one because I'm reading it only when I go down to the gym to pedal and I haven't been to the exercise room for over a week (too hot or too many guests - I bicycle at 5 p.m. but not if I'm cooking), and to tell the truth, I'm not liking it much. There are more books waiting for me, right at hand. I buy more than I can read, and faster. And my reading is not random; there is a purpose and a reason for every book and I try to be discriminate, choosy, even. Enough already. I think I told you that I stopped buying cookbooks and began to give them away when I realized that if I started then to cook my way through every cookbook I owned I wouldn't finish in my lifetime. That's true of my books, too, but I can't stop buying. I remember a friend saying he found it comforting to buy a book because it was almost as if he had read it - there it was on his shelf, giving off comforting vibes, becoming familiar. If only.