Life Is a Trip

The Caine Mutiny has been one of my favourite books since I was a teenager. I don’t know whether it is much read today; a 1951 novel about World War II probably doesn’t seem as relevant now as it did when I was growing up in (what I now recognize as) the post-WWII years. Fans of Hollywood's golden age will remember Humphrey Bogart's iconic performance as the paranoid Captain Queeg in the 1954 movie.



Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg


At any rate, The Caine Mutiny occupies an outsize piece of real estate in my brain. It is, among other things, a coming-of-age story about the growth of Willis Seward “Willie” Keith from a spoiled mama’s boy to the captain of the Caine. When not aboard the Caine, a good deal of the story concerns Willie’s romance with May Wynn (née Marie Menotti), a night-club singer from an impoverished Italian immigrant family. At the end of the book, Willie, who had previously broken up with May on the grounds that the class difference between them is unbridgeable, has returned from the war determined to make her his wife. Will he succeed? We’ll never know. Or will we?

Often, when I read a work of fiction, I speculate about what will happen to the characters after the end of the book. (Will Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler get back together? I don’t know and I don’t care, but I’m convinced that Ashley Wilkes will move to England.) I started thinking about whether Willie and May would get married, and ended up imagining a whole future for their family, almost up to the present.

So here it is… the further adventures of the Keith family.

Willie and May get married. Willie, who majored in comparative literature at Princeton (this is canon), is able to live out his dream of becoming a college professor – he belongs to the last generation that will be able to do that. He gets a tenured position at a school in the Midwest; I picture some place like Ames, Iowa. May – or rather, Marie, because she gives up her stage name when she gives up her night-club act – is happy to leave behind the struggle to make a living and become a postwar housewife in a little detached house with a yard. It’s more luxury than she ever imagined she would have. With her beautiful singing voice and her stage experience, she is a great acquisition for the local community theatre.

Marie’s parents sell the fruit store in the Bronx and, with Willie’s help, move to a little house in the same town as Willie and Marie. They spend their later years growing vegetables in their back yard and providing emotional support to their grandchildren. Willie and Marie ask Willie’s mother to move closer to them also, but are relieved when she chooses to stay in New York.

Willie and Marie have two children. Following the Italian custom, they name their son after his paternal grandfather and their daughter after her maternal grandmother. Their son is named Willis Wynn Keith – Willis for his father and grandfather, Wynn for his mother’s stage name – and is called Bill. Their daughter is named Serafina, but is called Sara. Bill is a high achiever – in school, in piano (he inherited the family musical talent), in Boy Scouts – who likes getting recognition for his achievements. Sara struggles in school. She likes hands-on work, such as helping her grandparents in their vegetable garden. Both children feel that their father is disappointed in them.

Bill turns 18 in 1968, just in time for the Vietnam war. By that time Willie is a left-leaning academic who opposes the war. Yet he is proud of his own service in World War II. Bill resents this. Against his parents’ wishes, he joins the Navy. This is not the worst place to be during the Vietnam war, but it is bad enough to leave him confused and traumatized. He flounders for a while after coming home, but eventually establishes a career as a music therapist. He marries a widow whose husband was killed in Vietnam. For whatever reason, Bill and his wife don’t have any children. Her son from her first marriage is Willie and Marie’s only grandchild.

Sara also has her problems as a young adult. She wants to learn a trade, but that is pretty difficult for a woman in the 1970s. She is also a lesbian, a fact that she keeps hidden from her father. Despite his somewhat liberal politics, he has rather archaic ideas about sex and gender (this too is canon). Eventually, with the help of her grandfather, Sara becomes the apprentice of an old Italian cabinetmaker. She lives in Colorado with her partner, and keeps her distance from her parents, though she is close to her brother.

Willie dies in 1979, at age 59, of lung cancer. He always smoked too much (canon). Marie lives long enough to vote for Obama in 2008.

As of 2026, Bill and Sara are both in their 70s, and retired. Sara and her partner are into adventure travel, though they realize that they are getting a little old for that. Bill plays in a band with some other old guys. His stepson lives a conventional life in the suburbs with his wife, a nurse. Their children are young adults. But I won’t follow them into the next generation. Enough is enough.

I am not usually much of a theatre-goer, but it somehow happened that I saw nine plays during the month of August.

At the beginning of the month was a family trip to the Stratford Festival. Our party, which consisted of two children, two parents, and two grandmothers, saw four plays in two days. Though for the kids, the visit to the cat café was probably the highlight of the trip.

A little over a week later, I went on my second annual Road Scholar trip with my sister, which this year was to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. In keeping with Road Scholar’s mission of educational trips for seniors, there were lots of educational extras: a backstage tour, pre- and post-performance talks by members of the company, and even singing and dancing workshops. I was dreading the singing and dancing, but it actually turned out to be pretty satisfying, because the instructors were patient and encouraging, and had such low expectations that whatever we did was great.

This summer I have been volunteering at High Park, pulling out invasive plants and planting native grasses. The park also has Shakespeare in the Park every summer. I had never gone to it, but after hearing glowing reviews from my fellow weed-pullers, I bought a ticket.

Then yesterday, I went back to Stratford – this time by myself – see “The King James Bible Play,” which seemed to be calling my name (it’s about translation!) but which, for obvious reasons, was not included in the family trip.

When I tell people that I just saw nine plays, they usually ask some variation of, “So, which did you like best?” So here are my mini-reviews of the plays I saw. In “top ten list” style, starting with the one I enjoyed least and working my way up to the one I enjoyed most. But first, a couple of cautions: (1) I wouldn’t presume to say one play was “better” than another, even if I knew what that meant. This is a purely subjective rating based on how good a time I had at each performance. (2) In this kind of list something has to be toward the bottom. So I want to make it clear that, with one exception, I enjoyed all of them. And while some plays were more or less to my taste, I thought the actors – again, with one exception – did a fantastic job.

So, without further excuses…

#9. “The Hobbit” (Stratford). This was Stratford’s annual children’s play, but no one in our party liked it, including the children. The Stratford company didn’t seem to have put any effort at all into it. We all agreed that if my granddaughter’s middle school had put this on, we would have thought it was pretty good. But a middle school wouldn’t have charged $150 a ticket. Among many disappointments with costumes, scenery, writing, and acting, one stands out: an important plot point is that when Bilbo Baggins puts on the ring, he becomes invisible. I think even a school production would have made some attempt to indicate invisibility, like illuminating the actor with a spotlight when he was visible, and turning it off when he was invisible. This production didn’t even bother to do that. If you didn’t already know the story, you would not have known that he was supposed to be invisible. Also, why were the 13 dwarves played by five actors? Most of them didn’t even have any lines. Could they not have found a few members of the company to swell the ranks?

#8. “One for the Pot” (Shaw). This is an old-fashioned farce (written in the 1960s in imitation of older models), with lots of exits and entrances and cases of mistaken identity. The main actor, who played four identical brothers, was superb. My main problem with this production is that the entire thing was played at one uniform, manic level of intensity. A joke needs a quieter buildup so that the punch line can really punch. Also, this kind of play is so heavily invested in plot at the expense of character, that I really didn’t care what happened to any of these people. There was a woman in our Road Scholar group who kept saying, “I just don’t care for that genre.” I guess that really is my opinion too, though I wouldn’t have expressed it exactly that way.

#7. “Something Rotten” (Stratford). I really don’t care for this genre either – a story set in the past but employing deliberate anachronisms for comic effect. (I think of the TV series, “The Great,” ostensibly set in court of Catherine the Great.) This was a musical about a pair of playwrights from Shakespeare’s day who are, anachronistically, writing a musical. The opening number was called “Welcome to the Renaissance.” You get the idea. Not my cup of tea. Though, you have to admire the chutzpah of people who would put on a play called “Something Rotten.”

#6. “Funny Girl” (Shaw). I have no complaints about this production, except possibly that the actor playing Nick Arnstein was a bit lacking in charisma. It was perfectly fine. But… I was struck by how dated the material seemed, specifically in its treatment of gender roles. Of course, I know that it reflects the attitudes of the 1960s, when it was written, and the 1910s, when it was set. And there are many plays and novels that I like even though they include material that is much more problematic than anything in “Funny Girl.” I don’t know. Maybe “Funny Girl” isn’t great enough to transcend its limitations. Or maybe the problem is that – unlike, say, Shakespeare – “Funny Girl” can’t be modified to really grapple with these issues, because of the constraints imposed by the holders of the rights. For whatever reason, it made me a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, one pleasure, for our Road Scholar group, was that the singing and dancing workshops used material from this show, and it was really exciting to see them in the actual performance. This gave me some insight into how much the enjoyment of a performance can be enhanced by careful preparation.

#5. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Stratford). A solid, traditional production, which is the way I like my Shakespeare. I have seen this play several times, and this was the first time that I thought they got the fairies right – making them magical, beautiful, and sinister in what I consider the correct proportions. However, there was something – I don’t know what – about the mechanicals’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” that just didn’t work. Usually this is the one part of the play that everyone gets right. I once saw it performed by young teens at a day camp, and it was hilarious. I don’t know what was wrong with it in this production – it just seemed to fall flat.

#4. “The King James Bible Play” (Stratford). This is a new Canadian play with an intriguing premise. In the first act, which takes place in 1609, a group of scholars are working on the translation of the King James Bible. Of course, there is a lot about the personal lives of the translators and their relationships with each other, and not too much about the work of translation – which is only to be expected. We do get to see them working on chapter 1 of Luke. (You see them deciding, for example, that “The babe leaped in her womb” is better than “the babe sprang.”) In the second act, a group of present-day women are working on a play about the translation of the King James Bible. We find out a lot about their personal lives and relationships, which uncannily mirror those of the men in the first act. Eventually (or maybe not so eventually, but I’m slow on the uptake) you realize that what we have just watched is their play, and the parallels are there because they have written them into the play. I cried a lot at this play, partly because it reminded me of how much I miss my own translation team. But also, I think, because the material is somewhat emotionally manipulative – for example, employing sure-fire tear-jerkers like the death of children, when the plot didn’t seem to really call for it. And – why is there so much in it about pineapple?

#3. “The Importance of Being Earnest” (Stratford). A good, solid, traditional production of one of the great comic plays in the English language. It is extremely funny – and a little bit serious, as all comedies should be – and the jokes worked even though I knew exactly what was coming. Not much to say about it except that I had a good time. I’m sorry I didn’t get more of a chance to find out what my eight-year-old granddaughter made of it.

#2. “Jeeves and Wooster” (Shaw). This play uses some of the same stories that are in the TV series with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which is a hard act to follow. They did it brilliantly by making it extremely theatrical. There were only three actors. One played Bertie Wooster, telling his story directly to the audience (allowing some of the P. G. Wodehouse voice to come through). The other two actors played all of the other parts; sometimes, one actor played two people at the same time. The changes of costume and scenery were done in full view of the audience and were actually part of the action of the play. This worked because it is funny and because, given the structure of the play, it made sense for them to be an extra degree removed from reality, relative to the narrator Bertie. Very creative adaptation of the source material. And, the three actors came and talked to the Road Scholars immediately after the performance!

#1. “Twelfth Night” (Shakespeare in the Park by Canadian Stage). This is a play I particularly like, although it does require believing that a brother and sister look so much alike that no one can tell them apart. I have seen it several times, both on stage and in movies, and have never seen a performance that I didn’t like. (I once saw it performed by amateur actors in the courtyard of a shopping mall, and even then it was good. At least there they had real water for the shipwreck – they waded into the fountain.) I put this in the #1 spot because… it was magical. I was completely absorbed, so that I forgot that I was sitting on the ground in a manner unsuited to my age. Before the play started, I was thinking, “I’m too old to be doing this,” but I am so glad I did.

I wonder if the play would have seemed so magical if it had been done indoors, in a regular theatre. Probably not. What about the other eight plays I saw this month - would any of them have been magical if they had been performed outdoors? The only one that I can picture is such a setting is "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (Well, maybe "the Hobbit," if it had been a better play.) I think "Shakespeare in the Park" is a thing because these plays are particularly suited to being performed in the open air. After all, they were written for a theatre that was open to the sky and exposed to the elements. Shakespeare wrote for an audience who knew that they would probably be uncomfortable (a lot of them didn't have seats) and possibly exposed to rain, or worse. The refrain of the final song in "Twelfth Night" is "hey ho, the wind and the rain." I can picture that being sung with great gusto on a windy, rainy day. So that may have been part of the magic - that I was seeing the play more or less as it was intended to be seen.

But in the end, it can't really be analyzed. In live theatre there is an incalculable element, that happens when it happens. Magic.

For the past two weeks I have been working on a day-by-day account of my Camino, with some reflections on what the whole experience meant to me. Making it was part of the decompression that I had to do in order to transition from Camino life into ordinary life. It ended up being a 46-page booklet (the print is pretty big, though) illustrated with about 60 photographs.



If anyone is interested in reading the full account, let me know - I can send it to you as a PDF.

I now have 5 days of walking ahead of me - 17 days behind me. I have come about 200 km and have less than 75 km left.

There is a noticeable change in the atmosphere once you get within 100 km of Santiago. 100 km is the minimum distance you have to walk to get the "Compostela," the official document certifying the completion of a pilgrimage. So around 100 km out, you start seeing more people on the trail. And not just more people - different people. Earlier on, I met mostly people from North America and Western Europe, walking singly or in pairs. Now there are larger groups from more far-flung places - I met a group from Taiwan, an several groups from Russia.

There are some people in the online forums who resent these new walkers - "tourists," they say disdainfully. But if the Pilgrim Office in Santiago says they are pilgrims, it's not for anyone else to say otherwise. There is no one path that is THE Camino de Santiago. There are many paths, of varying lengths. And there are many ways to walk: hotels vs. hostels, luggage transfer vs. backpacking, pre-booking accommodations vs. winging it. Everyone walks the Camino that makes sense to them, given their physical, financial, and logistical constraints. No one walks the last 100 km because it is "easy." It would be easier not to do it at all.

In the earlier stages of the walk, there were times when I walked alone, and times when I paired up with another pilgrim and walked together for a day. Now, instead of walking as an individual interacting with other individuals, I am part of a large and growing stream, as we pick up people who started later, and as different paths come together. There is a change in the energy level. Like little streams and tributaries flowing into bigger and bigger rivers, we are swept along by the current.

Today marks the midpoint of my Camino journey. In ten days of walking, I have encountered quite a variety of roads, paths, and trails. Some I welcome with delight, while others elicit groans of, "Not again!" So here they are, ranked in order of preference, from best to worst.

1. Well-maintained sand or dirt roads with plenty of shade. These are often found in pine or eucalyptus forests (or plantations) without much of an understory, giving a park-like ambiance. The road is easy on the feet, the trees are easy on the eyes, the bird life is abundant, and the walk is easy enough to afford leisure for appreciating the natural beauty. Most of my bird lists were compiled in settings like this.

2. Boardwalk. Easy to walk on (except where in poor repair), with awe-inspiring views of the Atlantic waves crashing on the rocks. Simple to navigate. The disadvantage is the lack of shade. Ideal on an overcast day.

3. Ordinary city streets. Extra points for pedestrian malls and traffic lights. This doesn't occur too often on the Camino, but when it does it is a welcome reminder of home. Drivers in Portugal and Spain seem much more respectful of pedestrian crosswalks than in North America. I always wait for cars to come to a complete stop before crossing the street, but I notice that the local march confidently into the intersection, secure in the belief that cars will stop for them.

4. Roads with bicycle lanes. Many of the roads in this part of Spain include a bicycle / pedestrian lane, like a broad shoulder but more distinct from the part of the road that cars drive on, and painted yellow to make it clear to drivers that it is a no-go zone. I fondly call it "the yellow brick road" even though it isn't brick. Like boardwalk, it's easy to walk on, hard to get lost, but exposed to the sun and closer to the traffic.

5. Cobblestones. The most common surface in towns and villages, and surprisingly common even in big cities. Some are made of small, uniform-sized pieces of stone, like a mosaic; these are the easiest to walk on and can be quite beautiful. I love the way the crosswalks are marked with alternating bands of granite (white) and basalt (black), so much classier than paint. The ones where the stones are of irregular sizes and shapes can be hard on the feet.

6. Sand and/or loose gravel. On the beach, in the forest, or in small villages. Scenic but hard to walk on.

7. Rocks, stones, and roots. These are hazardous - it would be easy to trip, slip, or lose your balance. These trails require a lot of concentration and careful planning of where to step.

8. In last place - walking on the side of a road with a narrow shoulder or (occasionally) no shoulder. Fortunately this isn't often found on the official Camino, but may be encountered when leaving the path to walk to a cafe or hotel.

About a week into the Camino, people started to notice that the rocks-and-roots trails are often a shortcut between two sections of a road with a bicycle path. I see why the Camino is designed to minimize the amount of road walking, but in general it's easier and more pleasant to "follow the yellow brick road" instead of walking on cobblestone streets or treacherous trails. I have taken this alternative a couple of times when I was walking with someone else who was confident of being able to navigate, away from the Camino's yellow arrows and the tour company's blue line. I'm not sure whether I would dare to try it on my own.



The best kind of road


P.S. In "The Sun Also Rises," Hemingway describes a landscape in Spain that is like my #1. This is from the chapter where Jake and Bill go on an idyllic fishing trip, away from the excessive drinking and sexual tension of the earlier and later parts of the book. "The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park."

I have reached the end of the first week of the Camino - two more weeks to go. If all goes well, tomorrow I should be crossing from Portugal into Spain. ("If all goes well," because it involves a boat ride, which is subject to tides and weather).

To catch up on the past few days:

Sunday was a hard day. On one of those rocky forest paths, I momentarily lost my concentration, tripped, and fell. I wasn't hurt, but it was unnerving. Then, after a few days of walking on rocks, loose gravel, and sand, I got a couple of blisters. I lost my hat, which I had specially altered to make it fit my tiny little head. And after all that, when I was relaxing in my hotel room, suddenly the door opened and two strangers walked in! So sorry, they said, they mixed up the room number. But how did they get in? It turns out that in that hotel, the doors don't latch if you just let them close - you have to really slam them. You can be sure that after that, I slammed the door AND bolted it!

Monday was a previously scheduled rest day, and much appreciated. I did my laundry and bought a new hat. The store owner was super nice and adjusted the fit for me by pinning it with a gadget they use to put price tags on things. Other than that, I stayed in my hotel room with my feet up, listening to the audiobook of "The Count of Monte Cristo."

And today, it was back on the trail. I was able to walk 13 km despite my blisters, thanks to the magic of hiker's wool. If you're not familiar with hiker's wool, it is sheep's wool from New Zealand, which you wear inside your sock wherever there is a sore spot on your foot. It provides padding, and the lanolin in the wool has lubricating, antibacterial, and other good properties. It's a game-changer!

My path today took me past the site of a wildfire. I could see and smell the smoke. A small plane kept flying over, presumably observing and/or fighting the fire.



That's not mist over those hills.


According to the weather app, tomorrow is supposed to be a rainy day, the first I have encountered since coming to Portugal. Maybe not so great for hiking and boating, but I hope it helps put out the fire.



I saw this on a church I passed. It looks like he's saying, "What were you thinking?"

I'm writing today from a beautiful hotel in Esposende, Portugal. It has a restaurant, a pool, and a lovely arcade/courtyard. My room has a balcony and - important - an abundance of electrical outlets. At the last hotel, I had to unplug the bedside lamp in order to charge my phone.

I have walked about 45 km (28 mi) in the past three days. So far so good! The weather has been perfect - cool and sunny, or warm and breezy.

For the first two days a lot of the the path was on boardwalks along the coast. I love to watch the ocean.




Today the path turned inland, through a woodland with a great variety of bird life. Merlin identified 16 species, including some I've never heard of, like Common Firecrest (not common in my world) and the oddly named Zitting Cisticola.




Along the way, people have set up these little impromptu shrines where people leave stones, messages, prayer cards, etc.




Organized religion is represented by an abundance of churches, with beautiful painted tiles and mosaics and (to my Protestant mind) an excessive amount of gold leaf. There are lots of statues of St. Anthony (the one who helps to locate lost items). The world knows him as St. Anthony of Padua, but here they want you to know that he is actually from Lisbon.




Before I started the walk I worried a lot about getting lost. I have taken a couple of minor wrong turns but actually there is an abundance of wayfinding aids. The path is marked with yellow arrows (on trees, posts, buildings, pavement etc.). I have a map on my phone showing the route. The company that set up the accommodations provided written directions. And there are usually other people with backpacks in sight, to confirm that I am on the right path. So far so good!


Wayfinding arrow in a wattle bush

It's not exactly the swallows returning to Capistrano. (Which, I just found out, they don't do anymore, since their nests were destroyed during a renovation project in the 1990s. But I digress.) I am pleased to report that the house sparrows have returned to the ventilators in the building outside my window. They are flying in and out, chirping away, presumably nesting. Welcome back, sparrows! I missed you during the winter!

A few months ago I read a review of an art exhibition called “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold.” The idea was to bring together a variety of artworks from different times, places, and cultures that are not usually seen together, but that are all united in that they deal, in one way or another, with the experience of winter, and the rhythms of life in a cold climate. I thought it sounded interesting, and I was disappointed to read that it was not in Toronto, but at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Then I thought, I could go to Ottawa – why not?

So a few days ago I took a one-day trip to Ottawa – that is, one day in Ottawa, plus two travel days. I used part of my vast accumulation of “points” to get two free nights in a hotel. Since I was going to be in Ottawa, I threw in a tour of Parliament. I thought of going to other museums while I was there but decided not to make it too complicated. Appropriately, for a trip with the theme of “Embracing the Cold,” it snowed almost the entire time I was there.


The view from the bus

I’m happy to say that the exhibition lived up to my expectations and was worth the trip (if indeed any art exhibit can be said to be worth two 6-hour bus rides). A few of the works, such as Lawren Harris icebergs, were familiar, but most were new to me, and all benefitted from the context provided by the others. The artists really did seem to be embracing the cold – finding joy and beauty in it – and not just enduring it. That is what I have tried to do this year, which gave me a feeling of connection with the artists and their works.


Two views of winter in Algonquin Park - me and Tom Thomson


While I was at the museum I went to another installation, a recording of the 40-voice motet “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis, recorded with each of the 40 voices coming out of its own speaker, so you could walk around the room and hear each voice separately. If Peter had been there, this would have made the trip worthwhile for him.

Peter was a collector. He collected CDs, books, hockey cards, toy soldiers, model airplanes, musical instruments ... you name it. I have given away most of these things to people who are either interested in them for their own sake, or wanted them as a memento of Peter.

One thing I hadn’t been able to place was Peter’s collection of Canadian stamps. This was a collection of Peter’s youth: he started it as a teenager, stopped working on it when he went to MIT, then resumed it for a few years in young adulthood. He kept it up until 1976 – not so coincidentally, the year he became a father.


A page from Peter's stamp album


For years afterward, at least into the 1990s, he saved interesting stamps that happened to come his way.




For the past several months I have been volunteering at the Post Office Museum, a small local history museum with an emphasis on postal history, located in the building that once housed Toronto’s first post office. Using the paleography skills that I developed when working on documents from early New England, I am transcribing a backlog of some 30 years’ worth of items that have been donated to the museum. About 90 percent of them are letters, mostly about buying and selling land. There are some miscellaneous items, such as bank certificates, or engraved portraits of kings George IV and William IV. One recent lot consisted of nothing but a single postage stamp: a Canada Postage stamp (with picture of a beaver) from the reign of Queen Victoria. The value was three pence, so it was from before 1857, when Canada switched from pounds, shillings, and pence to Canadian dollars.

This gave me an idea. Peter’s collection included stamps from the reign of Victoria. Might the post office museum be interested in his collection? I asked the museum coordinator, who told me to bring it in so she could look at it.


Victorian stamps from Peter's collection


It turns out that the museum only collects artifacts from before 1860, which means that only three or four of Peter’s stamps were eligible to go into the museum’s permanent collection. She took the whole collection, though. She said it could be used in educational programs, to give kids a quick tour through the history of Canadian stamps, and to introduce the idea of stamp collecting as a hobby that even a child can do. For this purpose, the amateurish nature of the collection (the stamps pasted onto lined looseleaf notebook paper) is part of its charm. A few of Peter’s unmounted stamps went into the starter packs of miscellaneous old stamps that the museum sells, in case anyone is inspired to start their own collection.

So Peter’s humble little stamp collection has found a home at last, in a humble role in a humble little museum. It seems like a fitting place for it.


Toronto's first post office, 1839