None of us were given the rules but most of us figured out the important ones along the way You don't tug on superman's cape You don't spit into the wind You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger And you don't mess around with Jim or drink his Kool-Aid either You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table there were more rules too but I never learned them and none of my friends did either.

Starting out in Ottawa--not my first time away from home, but the first time truly living far away from where I was born with no chance of going home without considerable expense in terms of my career and anyway I couldn't support such a plan with my pocket book--I wrote home to my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor that I was homesick in the worst way.  He replied by telling me to read Thomas Wolfe, not the author of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , but a book with the inconsolate title You Can't Go Home Again .  This was the beginning of book ending things I couldn't understand with cranial looking stops made of petrified wood. I think I got the basic concept--and tried to think how I brought home with me in my heart when I moved and could return to its real comforts anytime, but somehow the dressed stone of Canada's neo-gothic capital were nothing like the Rockies, and culture invaded, the way nature had for Auden in Oxford. When Barry Coo...