I kept waiting for the right group, preferably with a dog, to put into that blank spot on the lawn, but they haven't come along yet! Good thing the sketch is in pencil, because I can add them later and get rid of some foliage behind them.
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Montreal is a sad city today: the beloved Habs lost their hockey game last night, so they're out of contention to win the Stanley Cup. I loved Adam Gopnik's little essay about the loss in The New Yorker - and had no idea he'd grown up here:
I had allowed myself to hope—that the old orderly springs of my youth, when I had seen five Stanley Cup parades down St. Catherine Street by the time I was twenty, would return, and restore with it not just the circumstances of my own younger years but also restore my connection to the city, and in a way, the city’s connection to itself...
As for me, hockey is a game I once attended faithfully through an entire season, when I was a sophomore at Cornell; in those years our team was always in contention for national titles. All but one of our players were from Canada (Ken Dryden had just graduated) and after singing the American national anthem before the game we always sang "O Canada!" -- I thought the songs should have been in the reverse order. Tickets were in such demand that you had to line up and sleep overnight in Barton Hall to get them; it was a kind of rite of passage to show up there, with your pillow and bedroll and boyfriend, and spend the night in order to watch a legend in the making.
