A year ago I was in Eastend, Saskatchewan, in the Stegner House, and beginning to write the first draft of the book I am still struggling with. I'm on the countdown now of my second draft and I think it's better. I've been deterred by a mass of mind-numbing paper work but today I'll be back at it and that pleases me. We'll see how I feel at the end of the day.

As you know, I call my morning swim wet meditation and I solve problems while I swim: writing problems, people problems, menus, leftover plans, shopping, appointments and so on. But sometimes I am able to free fall. One of my games, then, is making words out of the words on the warning signs in the pool room. The signs read:

SHALLOW AREA (wallow, hallow,allow, aware, etc.)

NO DIVING (don, din, gin, nod, ding, etc.)

DEEP AREA (peer, pear, pare, rare, and so on)

It's a kids' party game, right? No, it used to be a kids' party game. Now they do everything on computer. Whatever happened to pencil and paper games?

Anyway, this one is quite nice and it takes a few lengths to list words in my head.

Here's another one you can play in an airport lounge, when your flight is delayed or cancelled. (Does that ever happen to you?) Think back as far as you can in time to what was in that space you are in, as far as your knowledge goes, from Pleistocene or Neanderthal or whatever, through time and history. Pile everything into that one space you are in now. Very crowded! It's time travel at its most comfortable because you don't have to go anywhere, except maybe to the ladies', slash, women's room.

Happy Day. Use it well.

I expected diamonds today and it turned pretty stoney. Or papery. Brazil, India and China have my passport to play with until the end of November so I have to get an enhanced driver's license in order to enter the USA in three weeks to visit my daughter and her family - an early Christmas with them. More paper work, beginning with my marriage certificate to explain my change of name from the one on my birth certificate to the one on my driver's license. Oh dear. The permission may not come in time.

Well, isn't it wonderful that we live in a free country limited only by the amount of paper we can amass to prove we are who we say we are? We are fortunate, I know that. I am not complaining. There's a lot to be said for staying in one place, isn't there? Every once in a while I feel sorry for myself, you may have noticed. I kvetch that I have lost my friends, my family, my furniture, my doctors and so on. But you could say that they have lost me. I'm still here, sort of, like that farmer's axe, the one he's had for 30 years, with 3 new heads and 2 new handles.

I used to joke that it would be convenient if we could tattoo a number on an infant's heel, his own personal affidavit of her existence, for identification for everything: country, bank account, charge cards, marriages, social insurance, and so on. But people keep moving, so you'd have to add country numbers, and regional numbers, on and on. No one has a heel that big.

What if you cut it on a stone?