Good days.

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The very best bench in Kew Gardens park: I go to the library two or three times a week to connect to the Internet, and afterwards I like to sit on this bench just behind the library building, have a smoke, see what I can see. A few days before Valentine's there was a snowfall and it was covered with snow so I passed on by. But the next time I noticed that someone had cleared the snow off part of it. Ah! It dawns on me that I am not the only one who values this bench. A connection. An affirmation. Slender but heart warming in the solid frozen park. My father was a gardener. We saved eggshells in a paper bag in the kitchen and sometime in the spring, as we turned over the plot, it would be time to crush them up and spread them. Old habits die hard ... so here I am after five or six years in this town with bags and bags of eggshell in the cupboard. They are getting in the way so I crush and consolidate them into one plastic supermarket bag - a good load, maybe ten pounds or so. The bag sits waiting by the door for more than a month. It's obvious the only place to spread them is in the park but I hesitate because ... well, it's Toronto, and everything is forbidden ... then some residual energy from having found the bench cleared carries over and on a sunny morning I trudge over, make a hole in the bag and distribute the shells to the trees and bushes in a bit of fenced woods; smiling secretly, feral, mad.

 
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