Everything tastes like more.

I don't go out for many meals at home so it has been a rare treat for me to go out - three days in a row! - for lunch. (All of them were my treat; I owed everybody.) I had a hamburger (no bun) the first day because I was hungry after a long lean day of driving and thought I needed meat. The second day I was cold and I had minestrone, first soup -for-lunch of the season, and bruschetta, more tomatoes than bread. And yesterday I had oysters - all local ones from the ocean so near - because I LOoove oysters.

Today we are at home and we will eat leftovers for lunch. I'm very good at leftovers. (My first cookbook, you may remember, was about leftovers - Encore: The Leftovers Cookbook; McClelland & Stewart, 1975, I think.) Tonight, though, I will be alone because J&K are going to a party and Kate bought me sushi for my dinner. I love sushi.

"There must be something you don't like," says a character in one of my plays to a very fat friend. The friend thinks a bit before she answers..."Well," she says, "I don't like water much." [The play is called "The Temptation of Carol Hamilton" and it's about a fat woman who tries to sell her soul to the Devil to be thin. It was first produced - where else? - in Waterloo, Iowa. Mention my name in Iowa.]

I just hope I haven't gained any weight. We'll see.

I brought some notes with me for a blog or two I wanted to ponder. It's nice to dally with a thought, to have time to dally with a thought. . I have just recently joined a new venture launched by CSARN (Canadian Senior Artists' Retirement Network). Salons. If you think immediately, as I do, of the famed French salons presided over by gifted women like Mme de Sévigny (1626-1696) or Mme de Stael, (1766-1817) centuries apart , were gatherings for discussion by men and women, usually presided over by women, dedicated to intellectual discourse.

After two meetings, I'm waiting to see where we go. So far, they seem to me to be too closely career-oriented rather than idea-focused, and though we elders all need a lot of help as the media play the Age Card against us, we also need to use our hard-won wisdom to figure out why we're (still) here and what (in the world) we are doing???

Maybe I'm asking too much.

I wrote that line in a play of mine (a comedy). One character asks of others after they have turned up in a city strange to them to take a holiday together with money they have won/earned. She says, "Why am I here?" And another character answers, "Sooner or later we all ask that question."

Yup, we do.