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single solution, where each case might be the exception, a concept that had at its center a dark nihilism.
    This was life in The New Existence , and it didn’t end with the morning routine.
    Norman began to face the 24/7 reality of childcare. After the reprieve of the morning walk there was another change of clothes, a smock for finger painting, the mounting pile of laundry, all part of the monotonous sinkhole of commitment a child’s life entailed if you decided against daycare, or didn’t simply hand a child over to Sesame Street and SpongeBob SquarePants .
    In this he better understood his mother’s choices. Hers had been the new era of delegated responsibility, where a life no longer had to end with marriage, and the rearing of children didn’t have to be a soul-killing proposition.
    But, of course, it was never that easy. He was, as he had described in the opening of Confessions of a Latchkey Kid , ‘Formula Fed!’ with its double-entendre in that spirited age of dehydrated foods and pills, where nobody wanted to suffer the recourse of slaving over a stove.
    How it had changed, that sixties lightness of existence, a calculated minimalism that might be ascribed to a processor, to the functionality and purpose of something, and not the thing itself, not its beauty. He was thinking of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans.
    Something had changed in the interim. Why were chefs now so popular, why was the kitchen part of a new eroticism, and why were there so many goddamn cookbooks on the market?
    He now bore witness to it. The mid-morning snack, the organic lunch with the sugar allowance noted, the small juice box and the wholegrain animal crackers, the calorie-counted dinner, and, at the evening’s end, his concentration broken in the midst of reviewing the day’s work by the quack of a rubber duck, the splash of the ritual bath, so that he was forced to get up and close the door.
    For the longest time, life had thrown up nothing but a quiet stasis of days. He had forsaken the tempestuous shouting and making up of a sexual relationship for The New Existence . There were agreed terms of civility and order to maintain with Joanne Hoffmann.
    At one point, Joanne called Norman into the hallway. He compliantly appeared. She was in the process of putting a sticker on the top of each of Grace’s winter boots. Each kitten had its paws raised. Joanne explained how when the kittens’ paws aligned correctly, they completed a heart. Then Joanne made Norman do it.
    Joanne swept her hair off her face and lit a joint, observing as Norman dutifully brought the kittens together. In so doing, Norman gained an insightful awareness into how, even in the teaching of the simplest of tasks, the act of communication required one to take into account the other’s temperament and self-awareness, so Grace learned not so much her right from her left, but a strategy to complete the task.
    As in all things, a balance needed to be struck.

4.
    A MERICA HAD ITS great stories of rags to riches, and so, too, did Canada, though celebrated in a different way. Canada didn’t lay claim to greatness. It didn’t set men on pedestals.
    If Nate Feldman were to tell it, Canada had been a providential lifeline. He had made a small fortune in organics from the late twentieth-century obsession with all things natural and had gotten in on the ground floor of the Green movement long before it was fashionable.
    He did it out of necessity, eking out a subsistence existence in the early years after his escape. He tapped a line of trees around his small cabin, drawing a viscous maple syrup, and later, in the disaster of the early onset of one winter and a briar of grape vines freezing, he’d fallen on the idea of making an ice wine that went with a salmon he’d caught and smoked.
    These items – the maple syrup, the ice wine and the smoked salmon – became synonymous with a rugged Canadian mystique. He added honey and unleavened bread later to his gift baskets.