I planned to write about this yesterday but Toronto's new (to me) streetcars and elevators interfered. If you read yesterday's blog, though you will have noticed something I wrote in dismay about the stamped transit ticket. "What do I do with it?" Another bit of detritus for the hoard. My subject for today.

Ernest Hemingway was a packrat. A new museum with all his artefacts (when does junk become artefact?) has recently opened and an article in the New York Times reviews it and comments on what he saved: everything, even to used bullfight tickets. Forty-seven different endings to A Farewell to Arms; a letter of protest to Harold Ross (former editor of The New Yorker) about a review H. objected to, but then he never mailed the letter, written in pencil, by the way.

Hemingway preferred to write in pencil, first draft, anyway. He said that a pencil draft received one-third more rewrite. Yes. I know someone who writes his first drafts in a fine fountain pen, liking the noise of pen on paper, and who thinks he gets another rewrite out of that. And I remember reading somewhere that H. liked to sharpen pencils before he started work. Everyone has some kind of ritual, I suppose . I wonder how many pencil sharpeners he owned. I have four extant, all duck-heads (I said dUck). I used to have an electric pencil sharpener; I think it remained on the wall of whatever office I was in then - probably up north. I digress, deliciously. (I'm enjoying this.)

I also remember reading that Florence Nightingale never threw away a piece of paper. Her grocery lists have emerged. I love grocery lists! Speaking of grocery lists, the science fiction writer, Walter Miller (1923-1996), in his wonderful novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (copyright 1959, published 1960) describes the grocery list of Saint Leibowitz, canonized after a nuclear holocaust has left an abbey in the southwest American desert as a long-term survivor (well, the occupants, of course, but the abbey is the ongoing, "permanent" character in the book). The list, discovered later outside what must have been a fall-out shelter, becomes the focus of illuminated manuscripts painstakingly created by later generations of monks and comprises a grocery list: dill pickles, pastrami and other snack food.

I'm being warned that the battery is low. I think I'll go on tomorrow about packratism and its side effects, good or ill There's another baseball game this afternoon and I have to recharge me for that. Anon, anon.

learn something every day...

There's no denying it: the Blue Jays are taking too much of my time. But how often does it happen? Well, I hope it's going to happen. Don't want to jinx it by saying it out loud, that is, by printing it in black and white. I just have to fit my days around those games. I'm trying to do some work, too, now, one eye on a book or notes and both eyes on the pitcher.

So I'm short of time, have to fit in a blog before another day is over. l was going to write something longer but I have something else on my mind. Yesterday I had to go downtown, into the heart of the business district to meet a publisher. (Don't ask.) I took a new-to-me streetcar. I asked someone about it/them: pretty new to t he city, too, only a couple of months since they arrived. So I wasn't the only one who was confused. I transferred easily at a subway station so I didn't have to worry about paying a fare then. Of course I noticed that it was a big, new, modern car, very long, with accordion additions, and with step-up, facing seats, handsome but not very comfortable. Suddenly there was a horrible screeching, hooting noise and the car stopped. The driver stepped out of his box and walked down the aisle until he found a little, scared-looking kid, maybe 13-14 years old, small for his age (Asian-Canadian). The driver led him over to a small yellow bar on the wall and ordered him to read the (very small) sign; the kid was too scared to do anything. The driver told him that he had broken the law, that he was forbidden to touch the emergency stop sign, for that was what it was, and that the police would deal with him or/and he would have to pay a fine of $500. This confrontation went on as the threat was repeated several times before the driver went back to his space to move us on. The kid got off at the next stop.

Now, that's tricky, too. There's a button in the middle of the door that I think opens it, not sure. An old woman pushed something else and the car stopped again and the driver came out again and gave her a lecture. I didn't understand it, either, but he let her off.

Well, when I was going home, another of the new cars picked me up. I didn't know what to do with my (senior) ticket. There was a kind of a slot machine for people to buy tokens? tickets? didn't see them, but I had one. A woman showed me a little box beside the slot machine where I slid my ticket in to be stamped, proving I had paid. We had to have POP (Proof of Purchase) in case someone checked. No one checked and I came home with a stamped ticket. What do I do with it?

That's not all. The elevators in the building where I was meeting the editor had an advance box with a little screen with numbers displayed . I had to push the number of the floor I wanted to go to and on a smaller, separate screen it directed me to go to Elevator R (other people were sent to other letters). I entered Elevator R and it knew which floor to let me off at. (Lots of prepositions ending sentences here, can't help it.)

Hey, I'm an urban person but I guess I haven't been downtown lately, just malls and movies and theatres and such. So even though I live in the biggest city in Canada, I had encountered a couple of new wrinkles that made me feel like a rube. Simple definition: a country bumpkin. Yup.

Learn something every day.