Jennifer?

The title of today's post is the question a young woman asked me last Saturday just after I'd stepped through the sliding glass doors to the Loblaws at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was making my way through the mob of people who were either waiting to order something at the deli or shopping for flowers or grabbing a shopping cart or stepping onto the escalator up to the liquor store or entering or leaving the store. 

MLG Loblaws is a nice place but I think they could have spent a bit more time thinking about crowd flow.

Anyway. I step in the door, look over to see if there are any small shopping carts and the face of an absolutely not familiar-looking young woman emerges from the anonymous hubbub of the crowd. She's looking right at me, so I smile because why on earth wouldn't I. Her eyes lock onto mine. I see that she seems to recognize me. I get that much-more-frequent-these-days feeling of slight panic as I search for information in my brain to help me know who this young woman is.

My panic is completely diffused by her question "Jennifer?" and I smile more broadly. "No, not Jennifer," I say. The young woman is thunderstruck. "Oh my God," she says, "You look exactly like her."

Sadly, I failed to act on this. True dopplegangers are hard to come by and come in handy. I should have asked for Jennifer's number.

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I flew to Washington this week. Because I persist in packing illegal-sized liquids, I have to check my luggage (and pay an additional $25 - for which I apologize to Ontario taxpayers). 

I needed to go to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the Air Quality Committee - an august body operating under the auspices of the Canada-US Air Quality Agreement. The AQA has been around for a long time and the international cooperation under it has been remarkably successful, and not just because the competition - action on climate change or protecting the Great Lakes, say - is so weak. Things are moving along so well in fact that there really wasn't much to talk about. 

The fact that we had little to say notwithstanding, I spent my 22 hours in Washington DC -- one of America's most beautiful and interesting cities -- inside one of a cab, the hotel where I was staying, or the room where the meeting was held. The only photo I took was of this card I found in my luggage:

A very polite notice -- in both official languages -- telling me that after I'd sent my bag on its way along the belt conveyor, someone with the Screening Officer Number of 5279, and with a closed circuit television as a witness, had rummaged through my luggage.

Stay safe! Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen