a gusty day. i hid my ears under a scarf and wandered out to burdick's. margaret v. and i have our birthdays exactly a week apart, and as this always happens during reading period, we don't do anything about it until february. we had made a date to have chocolate and tea today. this we did. good conversation and an enormous pot of qimen tea and a mixed dish of chocolates and a corner table and queries about hallucinations brought on by chocolate. (people have cheese dreams, we have chocolate hallucinations.) since margaret has never read pratchett, i gave her a quick rundown of the war against the auditors. lingering on the part about the last chocolate in the lift - "cherry liqueur centres melt quickly and the smell wafted out as the lift doors opened and the bad people were all annihilated. (q: can you annihilate anyone and still be the good guys?) and i told her about lady lejean diving into the vat of chocolates.

margaret was telling me about her grandmother, who is ninety-seven this year and unflappable and extremely tough. she ran a small hotel out in the woods in northern ontario and has seen everything and knows how to stop bar fights and bears who make a scene at the hotel. how do you stop bears making a scene? i asked, interested. margaret: you keep a shotgun... what! i said, aghast. margaret: no no, you don't shoot at the bears. you point the gun upwards so you don't hit anyone. bears don't like loud sounds so they go away. me: but that must be very bad for the ceiling? margaret: that's before they get inside. if they're inside you bang pots and pans. me: that's awfully useful to know. margaret: unless you're between a mother bear and her cub, in which case there is nothing you can do. me: except be torn limb to limb? margaret: exactly.

(to stop a bar fight between people, this is what you must do. if the fight is between two men, never send another man to break them up, he'll just get embroiled. you send a soft-spoken old lady to get right between them and speak to them gently and firmly. this calms them down immediately, according to margaret's grandmother, and works best with polish people, who are highly matriachal and will obey anyone who looks like their mother. if the fight is between women, you must also get a woman to interfere. get her to ask the women if they have done their washing that week. the women will then stop fighting and begin to complain about their washing machines.)

the women in margaret's family all seem charmingly brash. her grandmother, on first meeting her sister's boyfriend, and learning that he was an organist, asked if he would play at her funeral. "and my mother has given me permission to have children. she said she was ready to be a grandmother and that she just thought she'd let me know." "and do you have any more siblings to get going on the grandchildren? or is it just the one sister?" just one. when my sister was born i locked myself in the basement and only came out for food." "were you afraid of her or were you jealous?" "oh, jealous. that's why my parents decided that once was bad enough and they'd better wait till i am much older and more reasonable."

also margaret gave me a quick geography lesson by sketching the map of canada on a napkin. i then took over and began to sketch in margaret's grandmother's hotel on the map. what else shall i put in, i asked. manitoba is where winnepeg is, she tells me. (i drew a ballet dancer on the napkin.) in british columbia, there are lots of cowboys (i drew a bandy-legged man pointing a pistol) and the ogopogo monster. (i drew the head of something that looked like the loch ness monster.) and vineyards. (i drew a bunch of grapes.) they make lots of money and they have cougars, which from time to time attack the people. (i drew a dollar bill and a big cat showing its teeth to a baby.) and they have lovely gardens and have high tea all the time. (i put in a shrub and a cup of tea.) ferries for crossing (nonsense, i said, they don't deserve it, and drew in a tiny boat with oars. let them row themselves across.) i coloured the ground for permafrost. and the inuits are exploited. (i put a furry hat on a sad-faced stick figure. and in the north, icebergs. (i drew an iceberg, labelled the tip, wrote "start" underneath it, drew in some dotted arrows and labelled the finishing line. in montreal they have hydroelectricity ( i drew a light bulb) and lobsters (i drew a pincer) and disputes over fishing waters (i drew a man with a bandana, standing on a boat, waving a hooked hand, shouting yo ho ho! and a shoal of fish behind the boat.) we decide to keep the napkin. i plan to get shari, the other resident canadian, to give me her version on the other side.