At the Broadway Cafe

It feels like travel, this wee trip to Rosthern and Saskatoon. Last night, opting for the country motel experience, I bought a room at the Parkland in Rosthern after the Sask. Book Awards roadshow group reading at the beautiful Station Arts Centre. At the end of a gorgeous day, the night was lovely—open, fresh, a slip of new moon.

The motel room, though, would have been a downer after a travel day in Portugal. The hot water worked, and the wireless connection. As for bed, pillows, thin walls, all-round smell—well, I was up and out of there by 6 this morning. Next stop, Saskatoon, where I’ll be leading a writing group workshop starting in an hour. That has given me plenty of time to drink tea in cafes and overhear conversations (of a bunch of Asian folks—the one word I understood was “Blackberry”) and watch pelicans.

And watch pelicans. Shiny white below the weir on the South Sask. this morning, diving in pairs but not catching much, as far as I could tell. Through my Eddie Bauer binocs, one of them looked like my landlord—that tuft of hair sticking out the back.

“If you give it all up, where will you go,” Dave Carpenter (part of the SBA roadshow) asked me after the reading last night. I’d told him a bit about my euro trip and how I haven’t done much since. “Don’t know. Somewhere with a more moderate climate” was how I answered him.

For now, I'm hanging at that Nutana hotspot, the Broadway Cafe, admiring the tea, the overheard conversations (“They don’t even want to talk to me” / “Well now that you’re working it’s more of an investment decision” / “I thought of all my old buddies but . . .”), the pelican, the six hours of poetry talk ahead. After that (as the Asian guy answers his Blackberry) I’ll catch the Habs on tv—last night one of the roadshow readers pulled a Habs jersey from her bag and put it on before beginning to read; Go Leafs, I hollered—watch the sun go down, get up tomorrow and go visit my grandson Davey (he’s turned me into a non-stop singer/hummer). Put a period at the end of one sentence, start another.