Everywhere you go, there you are.

In the last week I've been back to see "Alain", the audiologist, and Dr. H., to see if the tube-insertion steroid-wicking thingy worked. Alas, it has not, but Dr. H. is a man of faith to an unscientific degree, apparently, and has asked me to continue using them anyway. They're a nuisance (as I have to cock my head to the side for about 10 minutes after taking them, making doing much of anything else impossible) but I don't really mind.

I was floored to discover that "Alain" is actually from St. Pierre et Miquelon. Now, this is only a coincidence if you know that I grew up very close to Grand Bank, NF, which is next door to Fortune, NF, which is where you take the ferry to get to St. Pierre-Miquelon, which in spite of being only 29 km off Newfoundland's coast belongs to France. (Long story, fishing, wars, more fishing, more wars yadda yadda yadda, France owns it.) There's a nice map that illustrates how close the two are here. When we were kids we used to park on the cliffs over the Atlantic ocean and sit in our cars in the dark and drink beer and listen to the radio and watch the lights twinkle on St. Pierre. "Alain" has actually been to my hometown (700 people - it's easy to miss). Not only that, but when I mentioned that we used to go to St. Pierre to play our soccer arch-rivals, the St. Pierre Miquelon Women's team, he commented that his house directly overlooks the soccer pitch. Oh, by the way, I don't advocate drinking beer anywhere in the vicinity of a car now. Period. But this is a small world, and that revelation brought back a lot of memories.

ronnie