It’s bad enough that Gardenia-rose decided I was homeless, but it is something else when you realize that you look, in the eyes of others, more dilapidated than you imagined. And then you find a place to recover—and that place turns out to be full of real lost causes.

It’s not as if I haven’t been dishevelled in the past, at the height of my serviceability. Washerwomen are hard to find on a soldier’s travels and when he finds one he pays her well if he cares at all how others perceive him. Can it be possible I look as wasted and disreputable as the men here at La Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy?

Dear Mother…My pad is stained with the beggar’s coffee….As you know, the entire world has always been my home….

But is this true? I do not feel, at this moment, that it’s true at all. Can I even picture my mother? I hardly remember her address. How Sophie laughs at me every time she catches me looking for a postbox. Ridicule presents itself all around me.

I have, by reason of my endless wandering, always loved to hear of your perennials, and of my father’s onion garden. I imagine returning to your chives and alyssum, your roses and gooseberries, all the while I march through these strange lanes….

That young lout’s cat bothered me. How dare he tie it to his belt, depriving it of hearth or scullery where it might doze in a patch of sun? If a man has to roam, he should limit the discomfort of his family and of domestic animals as well.

But tell me, mother, to what has this all led? I walk the streets of Montreal and cannot say it has become a seat of learning, nor an example of the English values for which I…

For which I…what?

The S–W shelves loom behind me. Beyond them, past the tiny XYZ cubbyhole, towers the History section to which I dare not gravitate.

What has history decided about me?

If I succumb, as I have in other Septembers, I can hardly expect comfort from the pages of those books that mention me, nor from Sophie who scoffs at my addiction to “reading my press,” as she terms it. If I open any page in the collection concerning my life and times with the aim of checking up on my reputation, I’ll reap what Sophie says any eavesdropper deserves. It’s no different, she claims, from pressing your ear to a door, behind which you know the servants or your friends and family might mention your name.

“I know you’re gonna do it, though,” she taunts every year. “You can’t resist the lure.”