"Can't you just stop? Can't you just let it go?" Says she, from the top step of her front stairs, looking old, fat, ugly--without a hint of that beauty that has led me to bankruptcy. But I interupt the writing of this to walk over to Gage Park, a few blocks from Beechwwod Avenue. There is a festival going on, one of those summer festicals that fill our Canadian summers, with artisans and junk dealers selling there wares, and ethnic groups selling their ethnic edibles and ethnic culture. The festival crowd is a morass of sadness and weary. Tatooed men and women with a tooth or two missing plod through the nuddy rows of artisan booths, dragging their matted haired children with a certain noble courage and mechanical routine. The women maintain a shadow of the beauty they once had. They intrigue me. I am allured by their stories--how they got to where they are now. In a strange, lurid way, i want to embrace them, like a Siddhartha river ethos--feel the flow of their disintegrating lives within my embrace; feel the young taut flesh fatten and dry beneath my touch, fondle the scars and sores on the skin, smooth their matted hair, kiss their withering lips, clasp their sorrow, meld with their sullen lives. And in the middle of this, there is a bagpiper. A woeful, wailing, cat killing bagpiper making wretched noises from the noble, ancient instrument. And because he is playing this during the break I have taken from writing about her it is significant. There was a bagpiper playing the day we were wed. The ceremony took place in the woods. At the last minute, to give the event an air of ceremony, we hired a piper to play as she walked down the dirt path to where the minister and I were standing. I choked back tears as she walked down the path with our three children. It was a perfect moment. I was happy, ecstatic, overwhelmed by the beauty of my family marching down the path towards matrimony, enhanced by the wonderous ancient tones of the piper. So--- A vitoral piece that initially had the purpose of venting vile and bile against she that was the biggest error of my life, has dissipated to a reverie on the one perfect moment of my life, one moment of deep love, beauty, blesssing. A truth. A truth that cannot be maligned by the malevolence of the subsequent tragic years.