With summer two weeks from autumn, our warmest weather yet. But not all-round warm. Not warm coming out of the morning shower warm, or standing in the shadow of a building warm. Warm at bedtime warm, yes, but those coldnesses!

When was it, 1976? Sitting in Mrs Winters’s English 9/10 CanLit class on the third floor facing south, cooking in the wools our mothers bought us (with January in mind, not a hot September), the room damp with hormones, and Mrs Winters reading aloud “significant bits” from Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

Whither Mrs Winters? I remember how angry you looked when we goofed around, how you shook -- and that thing you did with your neck! Yet I also remember the glimmer in your eye that told us you had seen our kind before, that you knew us, and that you knew what we were going through.