At a junk store – excuse me, antique market – northwest of Brampton, I see some shelves of tiny items and figurines for cheap, cheap, cheap. Two little figures catch my eye: a tiny cast-resin teddy bear, looking quizzically to its left, and a tiny ceramic figure with a cap, long coat and black bag, glancing suspiciously to its right (turns out to be a salt shaker; later, at home, I would pull out what was once a make-shift plug made from a bit of the Toronto Star from 1943). Because I’m old enough to have seen Arte Johnson on Laugh-In, the wary little doctor very obviously belongs behind some plants. And I happen to have some miniature bamboo stalks for model-railroad landscapes. I put a layer of cork in the bottom of the bamboo box, and use a pin to make holes for the miniature bamboo stalks to stand in. So the little doctor goes on the right-hand side of the little box. That puts the teddy bear on the left. But what goes in front of it? Something to parallel the bamboo …. I have some charming, colourful little capacitors and resistors, looking a bit like long, striped beads in the middle of wires. They look almost, but not quite, toy-like. I’ll make a little thicket of these things for the bear to sit behind (Why is it sitting behind them? Beats me.). But the bare wires at the top are boring, so I’ll add some beads that Mia gave me (they used to be among things that her kids played with, I think she said). What about the back of the box? Something of an outdoor scene or nature setting … but not vividly coloured. Aha! I have, on my computer, an illustration of hunters shooting dense flocks of passenger pigeons (The Illustrated Shooting and Dramatic News, 3 July, 1875, public domain, Wikimedia Commons). I sized it for the box, and faded it drastically using Photoshop. Now there’s a bare patch in the middle of the ‘floor’ of the box. Something needs to go there – something that doesn’t match anything in the box – something that’s nonsensical, out of place, askew, maybe even damaged – something that might or might not be what causes the two characters to glance at each other. I have some dollhouse-sized plastic stemware (parfait glasses? wineglasses?). I have some little stars from the dollarstore – six glass vials of tiny stars, six different colours. A spilled wineglass of stars, then. The final vignette has a shade more coherence than a dream would, but only just a shade.