Better today.

First good news: I “finished” the research for my new book. It was a temperate day, pleasant for balcony reading. I’ll tell you more about the book and the research soon.

Second good news: as I predicted, I threw out hundreds of pages of copies of my latest book. Paperless society, indeed. I still need hard copy to catch errors and repetitions and faulty logic. I can proof the copy for typos on the screen but I need my paper and pencil.

Of course, I found interesting notes and resources in amongst the dross, which I need to look at, not for the archives but for me. I’ll toss a few at you.

But not now. My new book is uppermost:

I’m calling it Now We Are Twelve and it will be a report on the first twelve years of my life.

First I pulled out my Time Tables of History and read through the events and culture and influences dating from the years 1931 to 1943—well, up to 1945—those were pretty important years. I had to find out how world events influenced my life and what I remembered of them. Then I re-read Childhood by Nathalie Sarrauté (1900-1999), tr, Barbara Wright. G.Braziller, 1984. I read it last year but I reacted only to her; this time I put myself into the events of her life, where possible, and contrasted them with mine. Again, I made some interesting discoveries.

Others await me when I review my summers in Gimli. My Icelandic-Canadian grandparents gave my parents a summer cottage in Gimli for a wedding present and I spent the first 15 summers of my life there (thus avoiding polio). That, too,will yield up some interesting memories. It has influenced a lot of my writing.

In the meantime, I have to deal with the ore I dug up from the paper mine. I have a lot to do. Aren’t I lucky?