Neither of the two newspapers that we subscribe to -- one local the other national -- publish on Sunday, so we're bereft of printed newspapers to go through at breakfast time. Which has led to my husband driving off locally to get us a Sunday paper. One of Toronto's dailies publishes on Sunday, so that's what he picks up. Neither of us care for the paper, but it does have an insert that we're interested in, a New York Times international section that is crammed full of interesting articles to pique our curiosity and inform us.

As he does most Sundays before breakfast, my husband went off this morning to the convenience store nearest our home, about an eight-minute drive from our house. The person who looks after the store in those hours is always eager to talk, and this morning was no different. He showed my husband a print-out still, taken from the store's closed-circuit video camera. It was of a youngish black woman who, pointed out the man, had taken lately to coming by the store in the wee hours of the morning. The person whose shift is midnight to eight is the unfortunate one who has interacted with her in the past.

She has repeatedly feinted all manner of ruses enabling her to grab packs of cigarettes at the back of the counter and make off with them. She obviously has a need to fill. Waiting for her, usually outside the store, is a young white man. On the last interaction, last night, the man accompanied the women into the store and threatened the clerk to just be cool about his companion lifting cigarette packs. He had no visible weapon but his threatening demeanor frighted the clerk into being 'cool', and not making an effort to stop her or to pursue them as they left.

Finally, the police were called in, and they interviewed the clerk, made observations, collected some evidence, and left. These jobs filled by people needing to work, placing them in vulnerable positions where sometimes innocent people trying to do their jobs become victims are frighteningly miserable. Miserable too is the dependence of people on substances that do harm to themselves.

As coincidence would have it, that edition of the newspaper that my husband set out to collect for us featured homeless people in Toronto dependent on alcohol and illegal drugs to feed a habit they have been unable to discard at cost to their very existence. The article focused on the societal problems inherent in this shadowy aspect of society; lethal dependence on health-inimical substances by people who are addicted, who may be mentally unstable, and who pose a risk to themselves and to others, and who often end up dying on the streets -- alone, isolated -- from overdosing.

The latest victim, one of hundreds of bleak lives over the years, was approaching middle-age, from a 'good' family. Adopted before he was a  year old, the child of a drug-addicted biological mother, he began to exhibit disturbing symptoms of mental disequilibrium before he became a teen, and his life after that represented one crisis after another, culminating in drug-and-alcohol-addiction, homelessness and hopelessness. A security guard discovered his life-expiring body in an alcove of a building in downtown Toronto.