Esther & Sons: Family Matters

A coffee shop this fine, who wouldn't make it two mornings in a row. Tomorrow at this time I'll be helping my sister clear out her garage, but you don't need to know that.
I was sitting here reading the Globe and Mail. Damned if I didn't see my daughter Lucy pictured in front of a blind horse, which doesn't know it's blind, on page S2--a production shot for her show at Caravan Farm Theatre, which opens tonight.
You don't need to know either how proud I am of Lucy, which I just now tried to express, in a card I'll give her tonight, from my base here on the deck chair at Esther's.
No sign of the Sons this morning. Maybe they slept in. Maybe they're having coffee somewhere. Could be them in the float plane or the irrigation truck.  
Here at Esther's, a guy just brought in a saw and a long extension cord, which he's plugged in, getting ready to work on something or other. I suppose this kind of thing happens when the Sons are away.

Coffee

Washrooms are for Esther & Sons customers only. Thank you!
Those must be a couple of the Sons right now, examining the plants--bending over to sniff them, even--and talking loudly enough to generate these first few sentences. But they've gone inside now.
This is Kelowna, another smokey place, cough cough.
The Son who made my latte did well. It's all gone, the inside of the cup looking like exposed sedimentary rock above a pool the colour of my tanned right arm. Walking here from my sister's place, I felt a-travel again. Do I ever get lonely? Why yes! But I write it off as essential human condition, or something. I mean that. Let's say there are only two choices: sip my latte over the sports pages of the Globe and Mail or look/listen around. The latter is the bit that leads out, the lonely bit.

On Being Interviewed About My Summer Reading

CBC Radio One in Sask, sometime soon. Samanda Brace, her name. She's been asking women about summer reading and I was the first man, a status I hadn't attained for years. I stammered out something about the John Ashbery, Quick Question, and an idea I'd been tinkering with for a few seconds, the concept of reading one of the poems every five minutes while walking around town. I used the word jolt but that's not what I meant. More a kick. "The average / lighthouse is mostly ancient by now" ("In a Lonely Place"). More a series of hops and skips that once in a while thumps you on the head. 
I forgot until after the interview to tell her about my "To Read" list. When I said something like that to her, she turned her machine back on, and I put in a plug for the Guy Vanderhaeghe collection Daddy Lenin and the David Stouck bio of Sinclair Ross, As for Sinclair Ross.
No, after Ashbery, what I told Ms Brace about was a read-by of The Divine Comedy, for I, like many a young dog, had followed Dante down that road, wanting to be transformed.
And speaking of plugs, I did find a way to talk about my Hillsdale Book, published in April with NeWest Press, from which I'll be reading in Saskatoon three nights from now.

Idea

I've begun to play up any crossover between Transition Area, where I live, and transition, the personal event. 
I've plotted a few pre-WWII houses on a grid, this accomplished without lament for the loss of the rest of them, and without claiming any link between 2250 Scarth and, say, my left knee.
The idea seems obvious but wouldn't, I assume, with further attention. With a place and a name, where else could I find the story?

Hat's It for Today

All a hat has to do is stay between my noggin and the sun, unless I let it in. Today it was the Leaf cap, about which I'd once been abused in London. England!
But that's not what I started to say. 
Select Hops is back and running.