Pussyodyssey

Canada has a lot of things going for it, but one of them is being close to the US when its dollar is at record-setting lows. Hopefully for me that will last until my trip to New York in September. I'm gonna buy everything. Well, not everything. But I controlled myself at Marimekko Vancouver, buying only one dress, in anticipation of the much cheaper and larger Marimekko New York, where I will do damage. A bit, anyways. By which I mean, maybe one more dress, and a gift card for La New Yorkaise, who is back there and who is marrying yet another French man despite how swimmingly the last ones went . . . by the way, what is this bizarre sado-masochistic love-hate superiority-inferiority schizo relationship non-Canadian Anglos have with the French? The French are just a bunch of people who eat reasonably well, say what's on their minds, and have hideous intergender relationships. Europe is full of them.

Have resettled Lexie away from Sugarplum and here in North Bay with my parents. She never bonded with them in Neil Young country and they, obviously in retrospect, were far too busy for her, what with two kids under three. Almost as soon as I saw her at their place - back covered in matts, like it was when I adopted her from that girl in Toronto with the brain tumour - I decided the F-word was right when he suggested we wait until after we have kids, and they grow a bit, to get some domestic animals in. Not just for the kids, but the animals too. (Not to mention I have a feeling we'll be inflicting the potentially horrible psychological blow of making at least one of our children emigrate at a sensitive age, which will probably be easier if we promise them a dog on the other side of the move.)

Well, thank goodness my parents can take Lexie; even with Magnum and his kid in town, they have a lot of stray affection looking for a home with all the rest of us knocking around the world. And I am as pleased as I can be to be able to spend time with her now, and in future visits home as long as life is granted to us. In her case I don't know how long that will be. She's as big as a whale now, and moves like an old lady. But she knows me and loves me and has either forgiven or forgotten my abandonment and the way I made her take trans-Atlantic plane rides. That's animals. They'll remember love longer than anything else, I think, even when they are vicious death machines.