Tomorrow, as a belated birthday present, Tom is taking me to Quebec City. We will stay in a beautiful hotel with an enormous, many-pillowed bed, and we will Frenchly say, "Merci," to the concierge. We will eat a prix-fixe dinner composed of jewel-like and mysterious ingredients that requires for its consumption a battery of forks and at least five different wineglasses, and we will become romantically inebriated in a plushy hushed restaurant that contains too many waiters and not enough eaters, although the few in attendance will all be older and richer and less giggly than we are. I am so excited. It will be nothing like Harmony.

So I am imagining now, but probably it will be more like Harmony than I expect. I mean, already I have been reading some Canadian poetry, just to get in the Canadian mood, you know, and this is what I'm discovering:

from the wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police

Bill Bissett

they opn our mail     petulantly

they burn down barns they cant

bug     they listn to our politikul

ledrs phone conversashuns     what

cud b less inspiring to ovrheer

they had me down on th floor til

i turnd purpul thn my frends

pulld them off me     they think

brest feeding is disgusting     evry

time we cum heer to raid ths place

yu always have that kid on yr tit

Hmmm.

I'm thinking we would be wise to observe the speed limit.