The couch was ugly and old and free. Did I want it? Of course I wanted it. I met Mom at the church that afternoon, and we hauled the thing out of the parish hall, green and squat like a corpse excised from a condemned house.

When I read in the The Globe and Mail that IKEA is planning on building and operating an entire urban neighborhood in East London, I imagined what it would be like to live in an IKEA, and then I had to shake myself because I had slipped into a day nightmare.

I had a little bit of money, and now it's gone.

But where do the books go? WHERE?