I hope so.

A friend phoned me and offered to give me some of her time to help me with my files. She is totally qualified and I trust her implicitly. She is a former editor of mine and has edited four of my books. And I knew just what to set her to so I could work on messier stuff that I had to read and think about what to do with it and where to put it. Remember I talked about decisions last week? I didn’t finish that discussion but my point was going to be that one can manage only so many decisions a day, and then one is finished—for that day. The mind gets sort of sponge-y, not firm, you know?

I get tired, too.

Did I mention that I was back in Stratford again over the weekend? I saw Paradise Lost, a dramatization of Milton’s epic poem, by Canadian playwright, Erin Shields, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was contemporary in its political undertones, it was witty, funny and visually interesting, slick, in fact., so slick that a friend who had seen it described it to me as “sweet”. I wouldn’t go that far. I think she missed some of the hard lines about what’s happening in the world today. I knew the titles of a couple of Erin Shields’s dozen-odd plays, one of which, If We Were Birds, won the Governor General’s Award for English -language drama in 2011, but I had not seen one. She’s good and she’s only 41 years old.

Wow.