journal features

a nurse's pin and a room full of chairs

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.02.25

Tonight I found an RN's pin on my seat on the eastbound 504 streetcar tonight. I handed it to a TTC operator who happened to be riding the streetcar.

I hope that the nurse gets her pin back.

After I'd alighted, I once again noticed that the light was on in a basement window on my street, showing a room full of chairs. That light is often on, and nothing seems to ever change in the way the chairs are arranged. And I don't mean just wall-to-wall seating, I mean every cubic meter was full of stacked chairs. Not sure why they'd need so many chairs or why they'd need to the light the room.

P.S. The original "Jurassic Park" is eighteen years old. We showed it to Kenny tonight. He really liked it (when he wasn't hiding under his afghan).

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner