Today's punks (wood splints covered with ground plant pith or dung and then saturated with nitrate) used for lighting consumer fireworks are a type of slow match.

That's the word I was looking for yesterday. I didn't find it in the dictionary but I got it when I described what it does.

As some of you know, I am writing a book about aging. I find that I am remembering more and more as I think about my life. It's all there. Well, I suppose people who have gone through psycho-analysis already know this. Do they? And do they constantly encounter ah-hah moments? It's kind of fun, even the bad stuff. Bad stuff about me, I mean.

It's not pleasant when you realize that you have been mean or stingy or dishonest or self-indulgent or neglectful, not, I'm relieved to say, all at once, but often enough. I don't want to talk about it.

I forgive me.

If only we could be so lenient toward others.

Sometimes, I am, I think because I'm a playwright. I am trained to see the other person's point of view and to try to think like he does. Or she. (I refuse to say they when referring to a single person.) There are times when I don't like being fair-minded.

Happy Canada Day. In my day it was called Dominion Day. My brother called it Firecracker Day. We had a great-uncle, my grandmother's brother, who lived in White Bear, Minnesota, and we seem to have visited him quite often (from Winnipeg), often enough to keep my brother supplied with firecrackers every summer, or so it seemed to me. I guess I was about four or five when the mayhem began. Uncle Bill was sheriff or something and as I vaguely understood it, he gathered up all the firecrackers in the town (I think the word now is confiscated), and then celebrated the Fourth with a bang-up party. He used to give leftovers to my brother. I guess Customs didn't bother much about it then, at least, no one ever accused my brother or my father of being terrorists. So then for the rest of the summer in Gimli, where we went for our summer holidays, my brother played with fire. There was a word for the slow-burning string he used to light his squibs, can't remember it.

Well, I was too little for firecrackers. I got to light a Burning Schoolhouse - not sure I even knew what a schoolhouse was. Do they still have them? The burning kind, I mean. I got to look from afar at a Roman Candle. And I was given a supervised sparkler. Nowadays they put little sparklers on birthday cakes instead of candles. That's still my speed though I worry about the frosting. I don't remember rockets at all. I think my father banned them. He was a doctor and at least once every summer he had to treat a case of rocket burn, especially around the eyes. So, no rockets for his family. Also no skiing, but that was a winter embargo. My brother blew up anthills.

In one of my unpublished novels I describe the destruction of an anthill. Some things you never forget.