With men, it's always about the subtext.

That being said, this is either my shallowest recounting or my least so.


Something We Seldom Do

LittleStar drives the car, fast.

We're hurtling along a ribbon of concrete (looping mazes of freeway) between jumbled corridors of metal (slow trucks, fat wagons, torpid tankers), weaving our way down from the trees beyond the morraine to the sick stink of our local megalopolis. We skirt its edges and veer west toward Lake Erie, cast down a river of cars.

I look out the window and think of robots.

LittleStar presses our purple Nissan beside two lines of lolligagging vehicles, dodging the flotsam and jetsam like a pod racer. She glances behind her shoulder and then changes gears, accelerating hard and melting through a transient hole in one the spongier streams of cars. We come out the other side faster and freer, wending on.

The sun slips out from behind another mound of cumulus. LittleStar's blonde hair is awakened in the light, shining as it whips in the wind. It lashes across her sunglases and she wipes it away. "We're making pretty good time," she notes.

"La," I say lightly while nodding, imitating our toddler's current mode of affirmation. LittleStar giggles.

We are going to my father's house. Which is something we seldom do.


Mashed Potato Noodles

Popsicle stretches out her toes, straining gently against her car-seat. Her blue eyes snap open. "Hi Dada," she says to me, yawning. She dodges her head to the side and spots LittleStar. "Hi Mama," she says.

"Are you ready to get out?" I ask.

"La," she says, nodding. "Out."

I lean in through the open rear door and unsnap her restraints. She reaches up and puts her arms around my neck, and I lift her from the car and deposit her on the driveway. She walks hesitantly toward the grey house where my father and my step-mother are standing, waving and smiling. "Popsicle!" they call. "Hi Popsicle!"

"Hello, hello!" I call back, picking up our bag from the trunk, taking a roundabout way toward them. LittleStar straightens out of the driver's side and smiles convincingly, smoothing down her short red skirt with her palms.

I hide behind Popsicle as we greet them, allowing the toddler's uncertainty to cloak my own. She's afraid of my dad, and only slightly less wary of my step-mom. She allows herself to be picked up and hugged and then passed along, and I follow this set of hugs with a version of my own that involves less cream cheese. LittleStar joins the fray and then we're quickly all focused on the toddler again as she spots their tiny poodle leaping at the front door. "Dog," announces Popsicle seriously.

"Do you want to see the doggie?" asks my step-mom.

"La," Popsicle replies.

So we all go inside. My father and step-mother haven't been here long. They moved from the big big city to this small town four years ago, and this is the first we've seen of their latest series of renovations: a screened verandah that runs out over their backyard, connected to a wooden staircase that wraps down to a hot-tub and swimming pool underneath. "It's just like being outside, only better!" crows my dad, showing us to seats on the verandah and taking drink orders.

We chat and watch the toddler play with the poodle. This set of my parents seems a little more relaxed with us than usual, which is nice. LittleStar drops her guard once she sees that they're not going to be all stuffy and strange, and I tell a few jokes about my recent trip to Los Angeles. They fawn over the baby, playing at being the grandparents they're not really involved enough to be.

My dad is rotund, and has a head of wooly white hair and a dense white beard -- like God's fat kid brother. He is wearing a Hawaiian floral-print shirt for some reason, but everything else is his usual black. He is trying not to appear dismayed that Popsicle doesn't remember him, and isn't willing to sit in his lap or give him "five." For reasons tied to a zillion other stories we'll be calling him Mashed Potato Pop.

My step-mother is fit, and brassy. She's cheerful despite the fact that her own father has just suffered a heart attack in the middle of quintuple bypass surgery, and was almost lost on the table. Now he lies in Toronto General kept in a medically-induced coma, his body struggling to repair itself. Whenever the telephone rings she jumps up for news of his condition. In between she regales us with stories about herself, and how much people like her. For reasons tied to a zillion other stories we'll be calling her Noodles.

They do their best to be hospitable, and are making a better show of it than in recent memory. I appreciate the effort. Maybe this weekend won't be as bad as all that.


Auntie Spoil

My half-sister Spoil joins us for a dip in the pool. She's eleven years old. She's bright and unhomely but her presence is marred by her petulant simpering and self-centred whining. She has up til now been too busy playing videogames to come down and greet us, but she is excited to the point of obnoxiousness when she finally does. "CheeseburgerBrown my brother, my big brother!" she cooes, sitting on my lap and nestling into my shoulder, asking me a million questions and then interrupting me when I try to answer.

"What have you been doing this summer?" asks LittleStar.

"I dunno," she says, hanging off of a chair and playing with her long brown hair. "Watching TV, mostly."

We josh around in the pool for a while. I forgot my trunks so I'm wearing my shorts and they're bunching painfully, riding up my keister and making a nuissance of themselves. LittleStar and Noodles talk about breast reduction surgery (which Noodles has had but LittleStar has not) while Mashed Potato Pop kicks around the water with Popsicle who is giggling uproariously. Spoil is hanging off of my arm, wanting to know whether or not I approve of Yu-Gi-Oh and Beyblade and Digimon and Fairly Odd Parents. "I mostly like shows for boys," muses Spoil. "I don't know why or anything, but I just do."

Soon she is whining to be ferried to the next town because she wants to buy a videogame. The next town is a half-hour bicycle ride away, but my dad explains that Spoil "doesn't like her bike" so she'll have to be driven. I suggest that she could walk, but Mashed Potato Pop counters that Spoil has "flat feet" and thus walking long distances pains her.

"I have flat feet," I point out. "I can walk a few clicks without trouble. You have flat feet, Pop. Can't you walk a few clicks?"

"It's been too long since I tried," admits my pudgy father.

"What about insoles?" prompts LittleStar.

"She won't wear them. She says they hurt her feet."

"Ah."

We hear a tale about how when Spoil's class at school was scheduled to take a long country hike. Spoil didn't feel she could do the hike, so her parents took her hookey for the day to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban instead of encouraging her to face the ordeal. As they talk on it becomes increasingly clear why Spoil is such a jagged little pill. "We love Harry Potter books at our house," smiles LittleStar. "Which book is your favourite?"

"Book?" echoes Spoil with a sneer. "I don't read the books. They're too long."

"Ah."

"I just watch the movies and play the game, but not on my GameBoy only on my GameCube."

"Oh yeah?"

"But I want an Xbox becuase I don't even have one and there's all these games I can't play. So, like, it's stupid I don't have one."

"I see."

After we dry off Mashed Potato Pop takes me into his home-office so that I can capture some material off of large-format tapes that I can't digitise in my own laboratorium. I want a digital copy of one of my student films, entitled Way of the Jazzman, so that I can put it up on my website as further proof of my general incompetence behind the lens (part of my ongoing freakshow of memorabilia as a man-child on the edge, teetering but willing to testify).

Mashed Potato Pop ambles into the big comfy chair at the centre of his cockpit of technology, gleaming PowerMacs and flat-screen monitors and humming storage devices walling him in on three sides. It is beyond me how one man could need so many machines. He is overpowered, to stem his insecurities. I could do his job in a quarter of the time with a single computer. Waste, waste, waste.

As the film digitises he shows me his new aisle that runs behind the machines for access to the patchbays. At my house I have to crawl under my desk to do this, so I'm fairly impressed. He has a new gateway server, too, and everything is bustin' out Gigabit.

I wander into the recording studio and ask him a few questions about its construction, since I've promised a similar (smaller, cheaper) sound-proofed booth to LittleStar for her own. (Not that I'd build it, of course. I wield a hammer like an ape handles cutlery. But I figure LittleStar and Old Oak could use some pointers.)

The voice of the Jazzman rings out through the speakers: "At least I'll be pouring coffee in a different town, you know?" My own voice-over smothers in overtop, the levels wild and clipping. "Artist sans portfolio, poet sans paper, a wandering jazzman without a home. He could be pouring coffee for you anywhere, at any time. He might be humming jazz."

"We're getting some clipping here," notes my dad, tapping the meter.

"It's on the source," I sigh. "I flubbed the mix way-back-when. Audio, my enemy."

Noodles makes a meal called Beer-up-the-butt Chicken, but the can of beer shoved inside the cooking chicken tips over in the barbecue and spills all over the deck. The little poodle licks up this combination of beer and grease and shortly thereafter commences to vomit and shit himself with liquid abandon, on account of it being too rich for his wee system. Hilarity ensues.

When Popsicle gets tired she yawns and rubs her eyes. She pushes her dinner away and climbs up into LittleStar's arms. "Baba?" she prompts, and I hand her a bottle of milk. "Bo?" she prompts, and I hand her Bo the teddy bear.

"Are you ready for bed?" asks LittleStar.

"La," answers Popsicle, inserting the bottle into her mouth and laying back. She is handed to me and I ferry her into the mainfloor guest bedroom -- which also doubles as a music room, so the soundproofing should shield the sleeping toddler from our chatter. "Good night, Popsicle. We love you."

Spoil excuses herself quickly after eating little, and disappears to play videogames or watch DVDs in her room with the door closed. Later there is a dramatic production forty minutes long when she is encouraged to brush her teeth and go to bed, involving much clinging and whining.

"Well, the girls are finally asleep," announces Noodles, uncorking a bottle of wine.


Non-Invasive Open Heart Surgery

So, we drink wine. Another bottle is uncorked shortly after the first. We sit in the screened verandah as night descends and the air cools. Noodles is telling us about being at the hospital watching over her father with her siblings. Her youngest sister, Flake, is obsessed with healing through the non-tactile manipulation of mystical energy fields, so we hear about how she kept bugging the nurses to see her father's chart, and asking pointed questions of the surgeon like, "Don't you think open heart surgery is a bit too invasive for my father?"

The surgeon wasn't quite sure what to say.

Noodles' other siblings cracked up laughing, which infuriated Flake. "I demand to be taken seriously!" she fumed.

"Yeah, okay Doctor Flake," quipped her brother, a Hollywood North yuppie with an amazing phone.

"To hell with you guys," grumbled Flake, storming out of the room. "I'm going to meditate on Dad's aura and ask him what he wants," she threatened.

I pour myself another glass of wine. Things are going well. Everyone is giggling as they should be. Mashed Potato Pop and Noodles have decided that LittleStar and I aren't threatening to them tonight.

They're threatened by anyone who they imagine might call them to task for being such self-involved ninnies most of the time. They usually spend the first few hours of any visit cringing like beaten dogs, or making a wall of inane chattiness that is strictly unidirectional.

This tension first came to bloom shortly after they left the city to go live in Port D., a modest but pretty lakefront tourist town of five thousand souls. They decided that their only contact with us (myself, my siblings, our families) would be whenever we ventured out cross-province to visit them. They ceased to visit us altogether. Even when they had business in our neighbourhoods they wouldn't come calling. They stopped telephoning, too. They forgot birthdays, and make promises for dinner get-togethers that frequently fell through. When we did call them up all they'd ever say was, "When are you coming to visit?"

So we do, when we can.

They made the effort to drive in for my wedding. This was the occasion upon which they met LittleStar's parents. It stands as the only occasion. They didn't come in to see the birth of our child, or to attend her first birthday party. They've never been to see the old schoolhouse where we live.

They didn't attend my brother's wedding in Mexico. That one made my usually composed brother cry. Poor Isosceles Cat!

They gave my sister the same thoughtless Christmas gift twice in a row. They stood her up for a birthday dinner. To make it up to her, they scheduled another intimate dinner and then at the last moment invited eight other people. They talked business and ignored her. Poor Xena!

It's no great tragedy. Nobody's going bonkers over it. It's just sad. We collectively feel consistently disappointed by their lacklustre sense of family.

Anyway, they're easier to take when they're not being defensive about it. And they're not, so we're all cool. More wine, more wine. Noodles is talking about being on the Port D. Chamber of Commerce, and Mashed Potato Pop tells a humourous anecdote about running into a minor Canadian rock star, and chatting with him.

Noodles sometimes plays at being a Catholic, so we talk about praying for her father -- comatose and wired up like a Borg drone. (My father is quiet, because the conversation requires too much interaction. He favours telling humourous anecdotes. Besideswhich he'd rather eat paint than contemplate mortality.) We discuss why no one takes Flake's faith seriously, which we agree is largely because her faith changes every few years and we've become jaded to her latest profound revelations. I mean, despite her spirituality or because of it, Flake remains the same dumb tit she's always been.

"You can't demand respect," interjects my father.

"Indeed," I agree. "Not unless you're willing to back it up with violence. And Flake just doesn't have the nuts for it. Fucking Buddhists."

Later, I give a brief rant about magic healers using pseudo-science to advertise their wares. We discuss the quantifiability of electromagnetic fields, and the gamut of effects they might have on the soles of someone's feet. LittleStar talks about the psychology of belief and suggestion, and then we wend back to the power of prayer in healing.

"I want God to give us a miracle tonight," breathes Noodles.

"I am an open minded materialist," I tell her. "I don't believe in the power of God to answer those prayers, but I believe in the power of human faith having real effects."

"We each pray in our own way," translates LittleStar.

The telephone rings. Noodles takes it in the kitchen. She returns a few minutes later to announce that her father has made a significant turn for the better. Apparently they've unplugged parts of him from life-support and yet he didn't die. Good news! Noodles is ecstatic. "The prayers worked!" she grins.

"I'll drink to that," I say.


Creature Comforts

Mashed Potato Pop and Noodles retire. The candle burns low in the screened verandah, and the wine bottles are empty. I ask LittleStar what she wants to do. "Are you ready for sleep?" I ask her.

"No," she says. "Let's go hot-tubbing."

I frown. "Those shorts suck as a bathing suit. They're probably all clammy now, too."

"You don't need shorts."

"I don't?"

"Well, I don't know about you but I'm going commando."

"For true?"

"Nobody'll be able to see us, silly."

"Oh boy!"

We strip off our clothes and slip down the turning wooden staircase into the small, densely landscaped yard. LittleStar hauls the folding lid off of the simmering tub and a gush of warm steam roils out. I twist up a marijuana cigarette and we both slide into the soup.

"Jesus Murphy Brown, that's hot!"

"Shhh!"

LittleStar sits over next to the controls, and experiments with the settings. We decide to save the extra bubbliness for after we've smoked the joint, but she leaves on a series of underwater pinlights that slowly change colour across the spectrum, sparkling through the foam of air bubbles. "That is the cheesiest thing I have ever seen," declares LittleStar. "It's an underwater disco."

She giggles, looking down at herself through the water as the coloured shadows of her breasts wink across her belly with the patterned lights, momentarily capturing motes of tiny sparkling bubbles from the dark. Her glistening, voluptuous curves slide in and out of visibility through the spume, now red like a daemon tempress, now green like a Star Trek hooker...

I light the joint and draw from it. LittleStar dries her hands on a nearby towel and takes it from me. The night is very quiet outside from the chortle and hum of the hot-tub. Below, my nethers are turned orange and purple by disco lights; above, a dense canopy of stars.

It seems to me that the lighter whorls of the Milky Way are the moonlit sides of mountains, and that the stars are the lights of small towns and cities sprinkled through the rugged, inverted landscape. It's like another planet is bearing down on us from above, night facing night.

Heh. Fuckin' weed.

LittleStar is talking about how strange it is that my dad keeps talking about where we live as if he has any clue about our house and environs. Being committed to a library of self mythology about a city-slicker grooving in the "small town experience" leaves no room for competition. He is convinced that his experience is more rural than ours. (He brags, "Unlike you guys, I can drive for less than ten minutes and be in a cornfield!"

"Uh...there's a cornfield across the street from our house," I had mentioned.

My father seemed baffled, afraid and confused. He said nothing.

"You have sidewalks," LittleStar pointed out.

So Mashed Potato Pop changed the subject.)

In the hot-tub, LittleStar and I discuss how positively urban this place seems to us -- with its density and infrastructure and services. I find it comforting in a way, claustrophobic in another. Being out in the countryside has changed my notions about space. The small town experience is one thing, but we live in a village. And now, with newfound perspective, I'm sure that I prefer it that way.

I forget to dry my hand and thus mangle the joint when LittleStar hands it back to me. So that's the end of that. I flick the wet roach over the fence toward the lake. We simmer quietly for a few moments, and then LittleStar starts playing with the controls again.

Jets of water erupt from beneath us, and a volcanic geyser surges up from the middle of the tub and chuckles like a little fountain. Flat arcs of hot water pour in from the sides, too. It's quite a display. The jets work into the knots in my back and shoulders, and I relax two or three pegs. "Now that's some kind of a creature comfort," I murmur, sinking beneath the surface.

We take turns sitting on the volcano geyser, which tickles. "Ugh, it just went up my bum!" grimaces LittleStar. "That feels funny! I don't like it."

We jigger with the controls until we have only the basic jets going -- no volcano, no fountain arcs, no disco lights. We snuggle up in a comfortable corner and look at the stars and talk about nothings. The soup melts our muscles, and we smile like idiots. "I want one of these," declares LittleStar sleepily. "Oooh yeah."

"Hey, don't people die getting drunk and then sitting too long in hot-tubs?" I inquire.

"Oooh yeah," answers LittleStar, closing her eyes. Her hair spreads out in a languid net around her head as she dips lower.

She is beautiful in the starlight, and I kiss her.

There is something especially sultry about wet people kissing. The kisses can slide so easily from mouth to chin to neck to ear. There is a smooth, frictionless play to every surface. There is a medium of wetness between each touch.

It is not long before we are consumed by one another, and the porn moves from soft to hard. LittleStar executes some pretty breath-taking moves, and all in all a good time is had by all. Afterward, we turn off the bubbles and hold each other in the simmering, steamy dark.

"I'm hungry," I whisper.

"Me too," she says.


Merry-Go-Not and the Padawan Slut

It is morning. I wonder what has awakened me. I opened my eyes and look across the room to see Popsicle sitting in her playpen. She looks at me, sticks her arms straight up and calls out clear as a bell, "Mama, Dada: I want out."

"Did she just say 'I want out'?" asks LittleStar blearily.

"La," replies Popsicle. "Out!"

As we play on the bed LittleStar notices a triptych of garishly colourful show posters framed along the wall. She makes a brief, equally colourful critique before thinking to add, "Did your dad design those?"

I nod. "Sure."

The posters advertise various dinner theatre events that my parents have put together. There are plenty of pictures of my step-mother in wigs pretending to be Patsy Cline or Proud Mary or whatever, and a bunch of other performers like Hairless Vic the comic (and oncetime partner of Boob, the goofy dick who tried to weasel into my non-television show), a pudgy Buddy Holly lookalike, a passable Elvis, an authentic French Canadian faux-Celine Dion, and some hootered cougar billing herself as "Shania Twin."

Serving as backdrop to the collage of photos is a rainbow swirl with the names of the performers and the title of the show featured in repeated diagonal patterns, coloured hot pink. The posters are uniformly ghastly, suitable only for frightening small children or inducing criminal artists to confession.

"I think I'm going to have a seizure," mentions LittleStar.

"Look away, quickly," I advise her. "Even the afterimages are deadly."

With a shudder we pull on our clothes, dress our toddler and rejoin the household. Noodles makes us a breakfast of poached eggs which we all consume together in the screened verandah, except for Spoil who is in her room playing videogames. When Noodles asks for Popsicle's plate so she can clear the table the toddler proffers it and says, "Here you go!"

We all look at each other. "So..." I say, as casually as I can; "how long have you been talking?"

Popsicle looks at us all looking at her. She seems to consider the question for a moment. Then she says, "Turtle."

Noodles, LittleStar, Popsicle and I decide to take a stroll down to the local merry-go-round. LittleStar pulls Popsicle in Spoil's old wagon, and I take pictures. Noodles tells us about the town as we wander lazily down the streets, pointing out her contributions to the street-lamp society or whatnot. Lots of people wave and say hello, which tickles Noodles pink. She's an important woman about town. Popsicle is also impressed by all the waving, and waves back. "Heyyo!" she cheers. "Hi!"

We pass by the historic N. Tavern, which Noodles tells us features a basement dungeon used to hold American prisoners during the War of 1812. There are still shackles on the walls. The room is rentable for parties.

We walk another few blocks in the quaint downtown core and then come upon a disused-looking vacant lot between two restaurants featuring a colourful and well-maintained carousel and horse merry-go-round.

Which, naturally enough, is closed.

How do you close a merry-go-round in Canada? You put a sign on it saying This merry-go-round CLOSED. Curses -- foiled again! We stand and look at the sign in dismay for a few moments along with another young mother and her two little girls. Popsicle is disappointed. "Maybe the merry-go-round needs supervision or something, so nobody sues the town," speculates LittleStar.

"It's Sunday..." contributes Noodles vaguely, as if brainstorming the problem in a business meeting.

"Maybe it's supervised by the local clergy?" I offer.

At any rate, no one is willing to go against the sign, so we turn around and strike out on a slightly different course, looping back toward Mashed/Noodle Headquarters. On the way we pass a house converted into a shoppe, and Noodles tells LittleStar she must stop in and see the simply gorgeous odds and ends for sale there. Popsicle is dozing in the wagon, so I volunteer to sit outside on the front lawn and wait for them.

Finally, a spare moment to think about robots in peace.

But then there's a girl hanging off the rails of the porch, trying to catch my eye. She looks like she's maybe twelve years old. She drops off the porch and saunters over. "Hey there!" she calls out brazenly. "Are you CheeseburgerBrown?"

"Yeah," I say. She walks over and strike out her hand, so I shake it. She is not quick to release it. Her decisive, clinging touch lingers against my forearm.

She looks me in the eye, inclining her head coquettishly. "I've heard all about you, you know. I'm your sister Spoil's very best friend."

"What's your name?" I ask politely.

"Li'l Muff," she smiles, turning her bare foot in the dirt. She's wearing a chastely-cut tank top and cut-off jeans and she has no sign of a woman's body, but the little minx somehow manages to exhude an air of sex in a thick, langorous cloud. I am startled and discomfited. I want to look away. I wish the little harpie would fuck off.

"This must be Popsicle. She's really adorable," comments Li'l Muff, holding my arm and pressing into my side as she sits beside me. I stand up and ask Popsicle if she wants to go into the shoppe. She does, so we amble up the walk to the entrance. Li'l Muff follows us. "Does Popsicle wear Huggies or Pampers?" she drawls.

"Pampers."

We step into the cluttered front hall -- a till to the right, every other side boxed in by decorative knick-knacks and cute country bric-a-brac and quaint odds and ends. "This is my mom's store," explains Li'l Muff, at my elbow again.

"Oh," I comment.

She catches the banister with one arm and lolls lazily around it, half up on the landing, flexing her torso carelessly side to side to a slow, hot, internal rhythm that must play inside of her. I am reminded of a cat in heat. I scamper after Popsicle, ostensibly watching that she doesn't break anything. "Gentle," I remind the toddler as she curiously examines a small ceramic frog.

"Toad?" she asks, furrowing her brow and poking at it.

"I think it's a frog, cute-sauce."

"Oh," she says. "Ribbid-ribbid!" Satisfied, she replaces the ceramic frog and moves on. "Mama!" she calls, and LittleStar calls back from the next room. We continue our slow motion escape from the gyrating tween, ducking behind an aisle of lawn gnomes and wind chimes. Popsicle greets the gnomes casually, "Heyyo."

We find LittleStar and hide behind her. She's trying to work her way toward the exit, fencing off an endless stream of friendly babble from the proprietress. We hold together in a neat squadron to defend against both mother and daughter as we reach the front hall and attempt to press out the door. Noodles has discovered some kind of fabulous clock, but we persuade her what it's time we get a move on.

Once we're safely outside and Popsicle is rewagoned LittleStar whispers to me, "That girl will be a slut in less than two years."

"So you noticed her too, eh?" I reply, relieved. "Thank God. I thought I was having a stroke or something." The girl, now waving to us from the porch of the shoppe, is plain but somehow compelling in her looks. She made me feel like I was on remote control -- and she is just a child!

"Sex wafted from her," says LittleStar. "You know what I mean -- without a smell, but..."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. When she walks down the street dogs must bark."

"Jeeze Louise," sighs LittleStar. "Good luck, kid."

Meanwhile down in the wagon a profound and thunderous noise erupts from Popsicle's diaper. "Oh!" exclaims Popsicle. "Bum?" There are a few aftershocks, and then a funk hits the air. "Poo-poo," she reports seriously.

And so we take the short way home.


In Which We Say Good-Bye

Yes, and Mashed Potato Pop wants to talk in circles about how they might just break even with their dinner theatre enterprise next season, and Noodles wants to talk about how she wishes everyone would move to Port D. so that we can all see each more often. She expresses sadness and confusion over the cases of people who don't visit them very often, and concludes that they don't like her.

We stay for a cup of tea but I'm agitating to leave. I have a lot of work to do.

Spoil makes a big scene as we pack our bag into the trunk. She doesn't want us to go, yet. She wants me to help her with her website. My dad wants to show me his new turn-key all-hardware DVD writing system. Noodles had planned to make LittleStar watch videos of her performances at the dinner theatre. But the clocks keep eating time like Pac-Man eats his pills and I'm living in the shadow of a deadline. I make my apologies, I hustle the family into their seats. LittleStar starts the car.

"Bye!" calls Popsicle, kicking off a renewed round of waving.

My dad ambles over and slips a wad of money into my hand. "We miss you guys," he says.

And then we're driving, and Port D. is disappearing behind us. We join the fast streams of cars speeding toward our local megalopolis, the towns between broken only by gasoline alleys and islands of fast food. Popsicle falls asleep in her car-seat. "What did your dad give you there?" asks LittleStar.

"Money."

"How much?"

I had stuffed it into my pocket without looking. I pull it out again now, and unfold the crumpled wad. "Four hundred buh."

"Wow," she whistles. "What's that for?"

"It's like a thank you card," I explain.

"Thanks for coming out, please don't hate me?"

"Exactly," I nod, folding the money into my wallet. I shrug. "It's his way."

We skirt the edge of Toronto, using its gravity to slingshot us off on a new trajectory northward. We stop for a cheeseburger along the sprawl and then dip away east into the farmland above the marsh. Soon it's nothing but green trees and rolling yellow fields outside. The air is thick with country smells like ripe corn and diesel fuel and burning wood, tobacco and insecticide.

Those bugs that only sing when it's hot are singing, buzzing like little wind-up motors in the grass. When LittleStar turns off the car it's all we can hear as we stand there in the dirt driveway of the old schoolhouse, stretching out our legs. "Home!" beams Popsicle, waking up and looking around brightly. "Tittens?"

"Did you miss your kittens, Popsicle?"

"La! Want out," she says, pulling at her straps. "Tittens!"

The new kittens are in the front window. They look little Siberian tigers. They are falling over one another to catch a butterfly perched on the opposite side of the glass. We release Popsicle and she crawls up the steps to slap at the window and giggle. "Hey tittens!" she calls. "Hi!"

Once through the front door we are joined by a host of other beasts. LittleStar's mom has been feeding them while we were gone, but they are starved for attention. Popsicle picks up her kittens and tries to hug them despite their protests, and then she is knocked down by Persephone the pony-dog.

And I am to my laboratorium, to check my machines and their respective queues of rendering jobs. An older machine has crashed due to a memory error, but everybody else is chugging along nicely, patience bars creeping across the screen to chart progress measured in dozens of hours. I reboot the dead node and settle into my scuffed burgundy chair, the leather creaking.

And my world shrinks. To a manageable size.

For a while.