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When last we left our hero and my wife, A., she was waiting for the last of her crew to report, looking forward to “probing [her] first eggs,” and worrying that she might have to shoot some squirrels. Since then, all of the approximately two dozen employees and grad students have finally arrived, trickling in from native countries as far afield as Canada, the Bahamas and Taiwan. Unfortunately, three staff members have had to leave: one experienced a death in the family, one experienced the recurrence of a herniated disk, and one decided to pursue a different employment opportunity. These departures have resulted in three “projects” having to be abandoned; unfortunately, my notes – scribbled late on Sunday night in Baton Rouge – are not detailed enough to let me explain what those “projects” consist of. We may be talking about the closing of three plots where research had been planned, but A. will have to confirm that.

But otherwise, work continues apace. Everyone has been assigned plots and tasks. Everyone has been trained in nest searching, the most overarching activity of the project, though certain crewmembers are engaged in the more specialized tasks of mist netting (catching and banding a sampling of whichever kinds of birds fly past a given point, with a filmy net shaped sort of like a volleyball net), target netting (catching and banding specific kinds of birds by placing a mist net near their nests), and mammal trapping. The main purpose of banding is to be able to see how long banded birds survive and where they end up. Obviously, some already banded birds will be caught in the above operations; when they are, various statistics are recorded and added to that bird’s life history record before it is released. (The same statistics are recorded as a baseline for a newly netted bird.)

The squirrel-shooting operation I mentioned last time was suspended, in the end, because they discovered that they had gotten started on it too late in the season to achieve the desired goal. The idea had been to decrease the number of predators of bird nests (i.e., of eggs) in certain of the project’s plots in order to see how much of an effect this form of predator is having on the birds’ successful reproduction. I know, you’re thinking, squirrels eat eggs? As I was typing this out, I second-guessed my notes, wondering if I could possibly have that right, but it looks like I do. Also, remember that squirrels aren’t the only small mammals in this region who like a nice egg now and then, but trapping is sufficient to remove mice and the like. However, “squirrels don’t trap well,” A. explained last time.

I was mistaken, when last I wrote about this squirrel-shooting plan, in my explanation that the goal was to eliminate the squirrels from an enclosed – i.e., fenced – area. I assumed that this was the case because I didn’t understand how else you could keep the squirrels from returning. But in fact, as A. points out, it was absurd of me to think that there is any practical form of fencing that could keep squirrels out of a piece of forest land – the fence would have to be taller than the surrounding trees and electrified to boot, plus there would need to be no openings bigger than maybe two inches across. Impractical, to say the least, and besides, whoever is capable of building a fence like that should just report immediately to our southern border.

What’s interesting is that such extreme steps are not necessary, and neither is an ongoing shooting campaign. Apparently, squirrels have the extremely sensible instinct to avoid areas where they find no signs of other squirrels. It’s not that they want to hang out up close and personal with other squirrels – as anyone who has ever sat for a while in a city park can attest, these animals can be intensely territorial – but they seem to want to hear/see/smell that other squirrels are at least in the vicinity. Otherwise, they (have instincts that make it appear as if they consciously) worry that there might be an efficient predator in the area. So if you manage to eliminate them from one area early enough, the population there will never get a claw-hold and you’ll have a largely squirrel-free plot; then you can compare how nests fare there compared to other plots, where the squirrels are allowed to live unmolested. Another question is simply whether the birds behave differently in the absence of these predators. Perhaps they have lower “energy costs” each day that, in turn, allow more attention to other possible dangers, and so on.

But as I say, they got started too late in the season to achieve the desired effect. Oh, well. There’s always next year.

The professor in charge of Bird Camp made his seasonal visit soon after everyone had arrived. He typically only stays a few weeks in the early part of the season, just to make sure the training is proceeding as he wants and to give some lectures on the goals and findings of projects like this one. While there, he did indeed teach A. to probe eggs, although I must make another retraction: egg probing does indeed result in the death of one egg (but maybe a squirrel would have eaten it anyway?). Egg probes are set up by making a tiny hole in the shell and inserting the needle-like probe about halfway. Super-glue is used to seal the probe in place. The probed egg is then put back into the nest, in the center of the clutch, or group of eggs. A wire is led from this probe out of the nest, carefully concealed from the bird, and connected to a small data recording device; these devices are collected on a regular basis so that their data can be downloaded into a computer back at the camp. I was also wrong when I described this process as functioning like some sort of amniocentesis for birds; in fact, all that is being monitored is the temperature at the center of an egg in a given nest throughout the incubation stage – just another piece of data that allows you to comment on what did or did not lead to one nest’s success over another. But speaking of amniocentesis-like processes, at the request of another professor interested in analyzing hormones (androgen, specifically) in the developing eggs, the Bird Camp crew is collecting some of [whatever you call the stuff inside of an incubating egg].

About a week into the start of work, a human-caused fire on the Rim closed off a section of forest and prevented the crew from accessing five plots for about two weeks. The fire was 100-percent contained by the time A. left for last week’s New Orleans/Baton Rouge trip, but this is a circumstance that will continue to arise, with increasing frequency, for the rest of the season. Forest fires break out in this area all the time, some caused by humans but most by lightning strikes that easily ignite vegetation that has been dried out by the summer sun. For those of us who don’t live in fire country, it is easy to form the impression that there are only a few forest fires a year out west, but we only hear about the fires that are particularly large and/or which threaten human settlements. In fact, according to Wikipedia, “wildfires burn 4.3 million acres (17,000 km²) in the United States annually.”

When I visited Bird Camp last year, the Forest Service radios the researchers carry were crackling almost continually with conversations between fire-spotters in towers and Forest Service rangers on the ground as they tried to locate and evaluate the various fires that kept cropping up. Two or more towers in different locations would first compare compass angles on smoke sightings. (Otherwise, their directions to the rangers would be something like “there’s fire in the woods somewhere to the west of me, give or take 100 miles, go find it”; with sightings from different angles, it is possible to draw lines on a map whose intersection will give a more precise location). Then the rangers would drive out and see if the fire needed putting out, which not all of them do, of course.

I also asked A. to tell me what her typical day is like.

3:45 a.m. – Up and at ’em. Breakfast of oatmeal and hot cocoa in the military-style kitchen tent. (Some people cook eggs and the like, but A. doesn’t want to have to fuss around that much so early in the morning.)

4:30 a.m. – Vehicles (SUVs and a van) depart in various directions to drop everyone at their plots. A. typically drives one of these as she needs to remain mobile, visiting many different sites, throughout the day.

5:00 a.m. – Everyone should be on their plots and working by this point (around the time my alarm clock is going off, and I thought I liked to get up early). A.’s daily tasks include checking on nests that have already been located, finding new ones, and setting up egg probes and the video cameras that are used to capture predation of eggs as well as bird behaviors.

12:00 p.m. – Everyone is picked up and brought back to camp for lunch (after a nice seven-hour workday so far, remember). Most of the crew members’ shifts end after lunch, with the copying of information collected on “field cards” onto the “home cards” that never leave the work tent and serve as a sort of daily backup file (analog, baby, analog). But some people have egg and nestling measurements to make, and most of the crew is – so far – so gung-ho and curious and helpful that just about everyone volunteers to help with this. Other afternoon activities include looking into nests with “peeper cameras,” jury-rigged little camera cells on the end of long poles than can be held up over nests, and cavity-nest access. Cavity nesters are birds that build their nests inside hollow parts of trees, and they aren’t safe from snooping either, though this is easier said than done. Researchers must assemble special stackable ladders to scale the trees, sometimes as high as 20 feet off the ground, and use a reciprocating saw to gain access to the nest. A. reports that this is strenuous work that “hurts your arms from all the vibrations.” As a last task before dinner, A. makes up the next day’s schedules and decides which vehicles need to go where, depending on terrain and how many people need to get to the various plots.

6:30 p.m. – Dinner. After dinner, A. downloads data from the egg-probe data recorders, hangs with her crew, answers questions, gives impromptu training, relaxes a little. Some crew members have cars and might leave camp now, maybe to drive to the Rim to make phone calls, maybe to make a personal errand, although it’s about an hour’s drive to the closest store, a little general store and gas station that constitutes “downtown” Happy Jack (and serves as the post office, so that’s where your letters go, assuming you’re writing – you are writing, aren’t you?).

9:00 p.m. – Bedtime. Zip into the tent, curl up in the sleeping bag, try to rest up for another long day.

Jeez, I need a nap just writing about all this.

1.
I couldn’t care less about your exercise routine, so why do I think you’ll be interested in mine? Pure arrogance, I guess.

On Friday, I sacrificed my actual workout for a meeting with the weight-room attendant, who rearranged my workout on the computer into three different workouts, to allow for rotating attention to different body parts (something that, now that I’ve typed it out, sounds like it would be illegal in some states) as opposed to one long workout at a time. And breaking it up like that made clear how little I was doing for some muscle groups, so we added some new exercises in, including the leg ab- and adduction machine, which feels like a great way to pull some very delicate muscles. I’ll have to ease into it. But I guess I must be turning into some sort of fitness machine, because I went for a run after this meeting, and, for the first time, my route seemed too short.

I can feel it working.

Feel myself growing more powerful.

Soon my enemies will quail at the mere sound of my heavy stride.

If I had any enemies.

2.
In pet news, dogfighting is on the rise in Baltimore and Zuzu is still digging the wet food. Today we moved on from “beef giblets in gravy” to “ocean fish feast.” Given recent events, I laughed out loud when I read the punchline in Friday’s edition of my favorite currently published comic strip, Get Fuzzy: “Cats never know how good they’ve got it… And yet they know it’s not good enough.”

3.
At 3:17 p.m., my heart began to race and my chest swelled with joy. I had just proved someone wrong, someone who had been the bane of my existence – by leading me to believe that I was wrong – for months. The repercussions should prove interesting, but that’s about all I can say here, except how sweet it is.

4.
I was sitting at the bar in Dizzy Issie’s, one ear on the conversation, one eye on the television. Apparently we will be banning toothpaste imported from China. Dr. Death has been released and strides among us once again (his PR people should tell him to lose the demented grin). The semi-doomed, globe-trotting TB patient hopes he “can be forgiven.” (What travel plans would you make if told you had a disease with only a thirty-percent chance of recovery?) My phone rang. A call from my parents’ house in West Virginia. I figured I’d call back later and so I ignored it, but a second call from the same number a few minutes later struck me as ominous. I ducked outside to answer and heard the following story from my mother, who works the week in Silver Spring but drives to the West Virginia house most weekends, and who had a little adventure on this Friday’s “commute” (as retold in an email she sent me Saturday morning).

From her email:

“I don’t know if it was a turkey vulture, but it was larger than a crow and there are a lot of turkey buzzards around that area.

“I saw them feasting on the shoulder of the divided highway right after Wardensville and stupidly ignored them. Should have moved to the left lane. Suddenly I saw a large wing at the passenger side of the windshield followed by a the sickening sound of impact and glass breaking. It was such a shock but I just kept driving in frozen mobility. I assume there was a dead or badly injured bird on the road behind me. Should I have pulled over? And do what?

“The emptiness of the highway allowed me to look at the damage as I drove on– a concave spider web of shattered glass making an incredibly beautiful pattern in the sunlight. The glass had not been fully penetrated, but shiny particles sprinkled the passenger seat. The question was would the windshield hold–I was smack in the middle of my weekend journey with a hundred miles to go. I stopped briefly at a park to examine the damage more closely and took some pictures. Decisions–call AAA? the Honda Road Service? Keep going? I chose the last option as seeming to be the least complicated.

“So I turned up the Sirius Blue Grass Station and spent the next couple of hours wondering if the whole thing would suddenly collapse or if I would get pulled over for driving an unsafe vehicle especially as I passed through Moorefield and Petersburg. Just 35 miles to go but there were threatening clouds over the Alleghenies and I hoped that it wouldn’t rain. It did of course–a horrendous downpour! I was relieved to find that the rain did not penetrate but I was afraid to turn on the windshield wipers in case the motion would make the whole collapse. I had to pull over because I had no visibility. When the rain did not let up I had to chance turning on the wipers–and (small miracle) they cleaned the drivers side of the windshield and then just flew over the dented part. Pretty sturdy windshield! When I finally pulled into our garage I found that my fingers were still gripping the wheel some time after I had stopped. Definitely time for a drink.

“Monday the glass doctor will come and replace the windshield.

“So was the bird startled and flew into the car by accident? Did it want to attack the black object interrupting its dinner? Who knows. I will certainly be more respectful of birds in the future.”

5.
After the bar we drove to Aaron’s house in Hampden, a few minutes away. Along the way, there were the usual crowds of Hampdenite teenaged boys riding dirt bikes a few sizes too small for them, cretinous and stunted-looking with their knees scissoring up near their ears like grasshopper legs. At Aaron’s house, the conversation turned to sports and I tried to guess which one by listening to the names of the players and teams, but nothing sounded familiar. What sport do the Ducks play? What sport has MVPs? The frequent use of the word “ball” was no help, except in eliminating hockey, but do we even have professional hockey anymore? Kevin picked up a guitar. My attention drifted, my eyes grew heavy. It was nice to get home.

6.
Before bed, I finished the Ian McEwan novel I’d started on the plane on Monday, Enduring Love. All in all, I enjoyed it, but I found myself barely skimming long digressive passages that seemed too transparently designed for the purpose of building tension. An intimation of impending doom at the beginning of a scene, for example, would lead into a long explanation of the state of the historical record concerning the relationship between Wordsworth and Keats, technically related to the characters’ conversation in the moments before said doom, but needlessly and a little preciously detailed, I found. Now that I’m glancing through the medical journal article that inspired the book, reprinted in an appendix at the back, the whole book is starting to feel a little show-offy. I can too clearly picture the author musing, “I wonder if I can flesh out a whole novel from these sparsely narrated facts?” Nowhere near as good as the tight, compressed, claustrophobic little books of his I read during and around my Missoula trip in March, which I recommend much more highly: The Comfort of Strangers, The Cement Garden, and Amsterdam. But the part of Enduring Love you hardly notice, the relationship dynamic that hovers behind the more thriller-like main storyline, is an interesting accomplishment, portraying as it does a very realistic-feeling scenario of a married couple just ceasing to “get” each other, with no clear blame, nothing that either person has obviously done wrong. The world turns, the sun rises and sets, and one day someone just feels differently than he or she used to, and so it goes…

7.
Just before turning in, I accidentally knocked a plastic San Pellegrino bottle off of the top of the fridge. It hit the floor and bounced nearly as high as my waist.

I reconsidered my plan to enjoy a little over ice before bed.

1.
Ah, the tyranny of mere chronology. First I did this, then I did that. I’m thinking I should start putting the really interesting stuff first. But on a day like Thursday, what would that be, exactly?

2.
It is startling how many people are in the gym at 5:29 a.m. on a weekday morning, working on their hunter-gatherer hearts. Enough, anyway, that the fanciest gerbil steppers – the ones with the moving handles, which let you push with your arms instead of just stepping – are all taken, and I am forced to use one of the stripped-down models. So what to do with my arms? I can let them hang loosely, or I can bring them up to bob at chest level, as if I were running. Neither one feels natural at first. One thing I won’t do is use them to lean heavily on the rails at the sides of the machine, as some people do, locking their elbows to take most of their weight off of their legs. True, this allows them to move their legs faster than they would otherwise be able to, but only because their legs are doing less work, an approach that would only make sense if the goal here were to exercise the machine’s pedals rather than one’s own body. As I warm up and start to move faster, my arms rise into what feels like the posture of a shadowboxing boxer, and then there is no more thought about my arms, just pure effort and the sweat streaming down my face.

When I used to use these machines regularly, I was in the habit of bringing along a magazine to flip through while I stepped, but now I am out of this routine and have arrived empty-handed. I can stare at the floor between my pedals or at one of the six televisions ranged along the wall above the windows. The moving image is entrancing, as always. But I don’t watch television for the pictures, I watch it for the juxtapositions. An Air Force recruiting commercial ends with a dramatic image of helicopter taking off at night and the motto “go where you want to go.” Next, a brief item concerning five U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, killed in a helicopter crash. And in entertainment news, the Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress has sold at auction for $192,000. A show called “Morning Joe” begins, one of these new types of shows in which cameras have been placed in a radio studio and we can watch the host leaning close to an enormous microphone suspended from the ceiling on an articulated arm. The guest is Joe Scarborough, and the two Joes seem to be competing for some sort of fatuity prize. Do they ever stop talking about the news long enough to read it?

I can’t hear the television, of course, and the closed captioning lends an air of surreality, since whoever is typing it up – humans? a computer? – often seems barely able to understand what is being said. Bizarre koans like “I must went closet with this” spool up the screen, and it takes a few seconds for me to understand that this represents something like “I just want to close with this.” Meanwhile, the talking heads are about 30 seconds ahead of the text, so their gestures and facial expressions aren’t any help in deciphering the text, though they give some hint of what is coming, a glimpse of the future, the sight of the mushroom cloud reaching us five seconds before the sound and the heat.

3.
No dice with the cat-food changeup. Her Highness Miss Zuzu called my bluff and made clear that she would rather starve to death than eat another bite of any of the four different kinds of dry cat food I currently have on hand. My brother reported that she was so hungry on Wednesday night that she kept lunging at the piece of pizza he was eating, mewing furiously. I found an old can of “beef giblets feast in gravy,” left over from when we used to give her wet food every morning. (We stopped when she got bored with that, too, and started leaving the food to fester on her plate all day.) I gave her a few forkfuls and she ate it so quickly that she all but inhaled the plate. All right, guess we’ll try that for a while. When she gets bored with the wet food again, I guess it will be time to move on to egg-white and fennel omelettes. Maybe I should hire her a personal chef.

4.
On the radio, as I drive to work, I hear the story of a local Marine lance corporal who recently turned 22 while overseas in Iraq. His mother took a picture of the cake she baked for him and posted it on his Myspace page so that he could see it. He asked her to save him the “22.” On the phone, they talked of his desire to dedicate a memorial of some sort to fallen Maryland soldiers. A few days later, he joined their ranks. His mother is working on the memorial. There will be no shortage of names: Maryland’s biggest National Guard deployment since World War II just started two months of training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. They will arrive in Iraq in late summer.

And another suicide at Guantanamo Bay, where – I am surprised to learn – we hold one prisoner who was fifteen when he was captured during the invasion of Afghanistan. He just fired his lawyer. In the Sun: “He doesn’t trust American lawyers, and I don’t particularly blame him,” said Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case yesterday.”

5.
At work, back to editing. I am giving the famous 140-page policy report another read-through. Amazing: no matter how many times you go through a piece of writing, you always seem to find more to change – word choice here, grammar/punctuation there, and some of the mistakes embarrassing indeed, so I’m glad I’m doing this. I wanted to force myself through the first 50 pages at least, so I turned off my computer to put some obstacles between myself and my compulsive email checking and paced the floor while I read to keep from getting drowsy. The building was silent save for the whoosh of passing traffic and the occasional – but not occasional enough – screaming match on the sidewalk below, a pedestrian route plied by a class of people who do not seem to make much distinction between a public street and their living rooms, and who seem to hew to a “get it off your chest as loudly as possible” philosophy when it comes to their resentments and frustrations. The exchange I heard as I read was typical.

Woman’s voice, loud, shrill: “Thanks a lot!”

Man’s voice, booming, aggressive: “Thanks what, motherf***er?! You the one started it, you dumb b*****!”

On my next pass across the room, I glanced out the window in time to see their backs moving away down the sidewalk, a small child wearing a large backpack trailing behind them.

6.
I worked a little late so that I wouldn’t have to go home before a seven o’clock dinner date with my mom, a friend of hers, and my brother at Thai Arroy in Federal Hill. I thought there was no chance that it would take me less than a half hour or so to find parking, but with amazing luck I found a spot almost directly across the street, perhaps the very one that the driver who ended up crashing into Regi’s on Tuesday had been aiming for when his brakes failed. I bartended there in the summer of 2004, but it’s been years since I’ve walked right by the place and I was surprised to see some familiar faces in the street outside, locals who often stopped in for a drink. The doctor who was a chardonnay drunk and for some reason was allowed to drink for free. The blonde woman with stern Swedish features who always ordered either a near-beer or an orange juice, and who habitually wore the facial expression of someone who has been handed a turd instead of her drink. No sign, of course, of the one I’ve long dreamed of running into: cheap vodka drunk Jack (drunk on cheap vodka and also a cheap old man), who once put me through the wringer on a busy night about a confusing check after he and his two dining companions decided at the last minute that they wanted separate checks after all, not a simple thing to redo on the old-fashioned cash register Regi’s was using at the time. I don’t know what I would say to him if I ever did see him, but I have a few fantasies.

At Regi’s, they have already re-erected their sidewalk-dining canopy, and a full house of diners appeared willing to stare death in the very fangs by eating there. Can you imagine? After all, there was an accident there yesterday, which – by the usual lazy logic that seems to come into play after plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and even minor mishaps like this one – means that there is a high likelihood of an accident there every day forever. Alan, the owner, is on record in the paper with his plan to advocate for concrete jersey barriers along the sidewalk in front of his restaurant, a sort of “green zone” for his clientele of spoiled young mortgage brokers and middle-aged married couples who can only stand each other after a few belts of gourmet-fruit-infused vodka on the rocks. As I waited in front of Regi’s to cross the street, a Baltimore City Fire Department ladder truck rolled past, the fireman in the front passenger seat pointing and laughing at Regi’s, the rest of the crew wearing big grins as they leaned out for a look.

Thai Arroy served up some delicious beef pa nang (mine) and tofu pad thai (my brother’s and mother’s). (I didn’t try the shrimp pad thai enjoyed by my mother’s friend, but it looked good.) I tried the tofu and it was easily the best I’ve ever eaten, crispy and with a mild, satisfying flavor that might even be enough to convert those who think they hate the stuff. It’s BYOB there, too, so make sure you bring along a bottle of crisp white wine.

My mother and her friend stopped by the house after dinner briefly, so that the friend could see the house, and then they left and it was off to bed, because 5:10 a.m. comes early. It was a little difficult falling asleep, though, what with the painters who worked past ten p.m. on the house next door and the hordes of people who hang about on the street these days, making leisurely throws at the portable basketball hoop that seems to be almost a permanent fixture at the head of the alley.

My Baltimore lullaby: a bouncing basketball and the chirrip chirrip of walkie-talkie cell phones.

[Bird Camp update on Saturday. I promise promise promise.]

What the heck?

[Note: section two of this post has been edited since I first put it up this morning.]

[Note 2: and it’s been edited a second time.]

1.
So the exercise plan that I came up with on Tuesday was to start rising at five a.m. daily. On the first day I would go to the gym and lift weights for arms and chest, then use the gerbil stepper. On the next day, I would go to the gym and lift weights for back and shoulders, then go for a run. On the third day, I would go to the gym and lift weights for legs and abdominal muscles, then use the gerbil stepper. On the fourth day, the pattern would start over.

But the Y, I discovered Wednesday morning after heaving myself out of bed, still exhausted after a rather poor night’s sleep and hung over from a bedtime Benadryl, doesn’t open until 5:30. (I can’t escape the feeling that there is something wrong with you when you are getting going earlier than the Y, but I never claimed to be completely sane, especially not under the current circumstances.) So I went for a run (otherwise it would have been a gerbil stepper day) even though I had also run on Tuesday. Just as well, because I was eager to try out the new shoes I purchased on Tuesday, which I also figured would save me from a little of the strain that two days of running in a row would put on my semi-untrained muscles and joints. And the shoes (some variety of New Balance) were, um, great (not sure what to say about shoes, really). By the time I was done, the Y was open and I nipped in for said arms and chest exercises, and life was back on track.

2.
Over breakfast I read of the first of the funerals for the victims of last week’s rowhouse fire. Authorities are saying that the fire seems to have been caused by someone falling asleep while smoking on the living-room couch used as a bed. I have always heard that a couch can be a real fire-bomb, especially because of the way an ember can sink into the foam and smolder even after it looks like you’ve brushed it off. In fact, if you ever do drop an ember of any kind on a couch, and there is any chance that this may have happened (i.e., the couch cover has a hole burned in it), I’ve heard that you should put the affected cushion outside overnight just to be on the safe side.

Meanwhile, smoking in bed? Who does that? Maybe the problem is that, with fewer and fewer people smoking, the public safety messages these days all tell us simply not to smoke, as opposed to the little reminders they used to tuck into movie previews and radio announcements and even songs specifically warning against or at least alluding to the dangers of smoking in bed. The concept was drilled into me at about the age of eight or nine when an apartment in our complex burned and my father explained that this had been the cause. He of course grew up in the era of omnipresent cigarettes and so had been pretty well trained concerning this danger himself. The smoker in this case died, I think, or I assumed he did, and the blackened hole of his apartment was a daily reminder of the risk. So don’t smoke, but if you must, never do it unless you have at least one foot on the floor. Or is that the rule for how teenagers have to sit on the couch in the basement with their dates?

All joking aside, the article about the funeral was devastating. Apparently, all but one of the fire’s victims were related, and that one was essentially an adopted member of this free-form, self-defined family of a type that is so typical of America’s urban poor, carrying on traditions of self-sufficiency and survival against terrible odds that began during slave times (so don’t believe this nonsense about there being no functioning families in the ghetto, it’s society that isn’t functioning, at least at this level). The family had hoped to bury all seven victims at once, but they must first wait until each victim, most of them apparently charred beyond recognition, has been identified. (You know, so they’ll know which one is in which grave.)

But identifying each victim is taking longer than expected because no dental records are available.

Because not a single one had ever been to a dentist.

Tuesday’s funeral was for seven-year-old MarQuis Ellis, known as a friendly, smiling child who enjoyed riding his bike and playing tag and who met his end like the rest of them, alone and afraid in a hellstorm of smoke and fire. It’s almost more than I can bear to think about this and keep typing, but I wanted to mention the strange and disturbing eulogy given by Reverend H. Walden Wilson II, of Israel Baptist, who seems to have essentially taken the tack of telling the mourners to be glad the boy died.

The good reverend, as quoted in the Sun:

“No Christian would want to live… in this life, in this city, in these neighborhoods, with all of the imperfections. Who wants to live here forever?

“I can speak on behalf of MarQuis… he will never experience any childhood diseases. He will never encounter any gang violence. He will never experience cruel and evil speech. He will never experience drug activity… A young boy. Seven years old. Already experienced victory.”

The reporter paraphrased the reverend further:

“Marquis’s death, said Wilson, is a victory for a boy who will never have to ride his bike down dangerous streets again or worry about his mother braiding his hair.”

I guess this is the style of a certain kind of religious outlook, “the world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through” (a song about which I agree with Woodie Guthrie). And I know that the reverend intended only to console. But I found myself reading his words with a growing sense of anger that I can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s anger at the hopelessness expressed in this view, the way this view helps people accept the injustices done to them, as if the more injustice you can bear, the godlier you are, which may be, but it also coincidentally benefits the people actually responsible for the injustice. (Which, not to bring you down or anything, is pretty much all of us who can sleep at night while the MarQuises of the world bed down in dilapidated firetraps and reach the age of seven without once receiving some of the most basic medical care.) Or maybe it’s anger that some members of this so-called society experience so much injustice that they need this outlook just to get through each day.

But also, think of the attitude toward life you would need to have to find comfort in such words. I won’t be so arrogant as to claim that I can speak for MarQuis, but I’m guessing that, if we could have asked him, he might have been willing to endure some of the travails the reverend described if it also meant he could have experienced his first kiss, seen the sun rise over the ocean, gone to college (unlikely, in a city where less than a third of African-American adults even have a high school diploma, but you never know), maybe gotten married, maybe dropped off MarQuis, Jr. for his first day of school, maybe cured cancer. You just never know.

MarQuis seems to have struck a chord, at least: hundreds of friends, family and strangers attended his funeral, including preachers from both the west and east sides, which means a lot in this divided city.

3.
Back at work, back to the grind. The end is in sight but quite far off, really, which leads to what I’ll call some perception problems, as if I’m constantly switching back and forth between a telescope and a microscope. At lunchtime I walked to Safeway for a new jug of water. This Safeway has recently gone “upscale,” meaning fake hardwood floors in the produce section (like Whole Foods, I guess), special tilted display shelves at the ends of the aisles, tons more managerial-looking employees who lunge at you and ask how you’re doing every time you turn around, and unappealing little seating areas inside and outside the store that it’s hard to believe they really want anyone using. And who wants to sit and eat either in a converted aisle under flourescent lights, nowhere near a window, or outside next to the parking lot where you will be hassled by all of the people who want to sell you their food stamps?

Another innovation: small little European-style carts with two little cargo baskets, not much bigger than hand baskets, stacked atop each other, with no seat for kids. I was entering the store behind one woman who was slowly wrestling one of these into the store with one hand while she held a cell phone to her ear with the other, trailed by a toddler clutching her pants leg. The toddler appeared barely able to walk upright without support; she came up to maybe the woman’s knee. As the woman made her glacial way into the store, the toddler realized that she was not going to get to ride in the cart and began bawling.

“You hear her?” the woman chuckled into her phone. “She pulling on me and yelling.”

Finally, I saw a small opening and plunged past them.

“Yeah, well, she can’t always get what she wants,” I heard the woman continue into her phone. “She got to learn some day.”

I could hear the screaming and increasingly hoarse child the entire time I was in the store.

I was upbraided by one reader for not reporting what the bride and flower girl wore. Fortunately, there is an extensive photographic record I could refer back to.

They seem to have worn dresses.

(Actually, if you go and look at Diane’s comment, you’ll see I essentially stole her joke.)

Sorry it’s been so long. Expect a new one in the next day or two.

I got home from New Orleans on Monday night but had cleverly taken Tuesday off as well, as a decompression/get-my-head-on-straight day. Throughout the early spring, I had looked at the New Orleans trip as marking a boundary between the period of time when I could just dabble in getting ready for the move, and the period of time when preparations would have to begin in earnest. In addition to unpacking, then, I knew that I would need to sit and do some planning, make a few calls, etc., before returning to giving my best eight hours of each day to someone else. Well, not giving, but you know what I mean.

So I was up by eight a.m. and headed to the gym. This will be a difficult summer, I think, with ample opportunities for visits from the black dog, so I want to get into a real exercise routine to keep my mood and energy up. Routines in general are reassuring to me, in part because it’s the best way to make sure I get the important things done, but also there is just something soothing about knowing what shape my day will take, if only in outline. Don’t worry, this won’t become an exercise blog (I don’t consider it a blog at all; blog is short for weblog, which originally meant “log of interesting stuff you found on the web,” but I guess that’s a usage battle that is pretty much lost), but it finally occurred to me that I could overcome my hatred of lifting weights in a gym by breaking up my routine, and then, on alternate days, running and using the elliptical trainer. I know, I know, that’s what everyone does. It just hadn’t clicked into place for me before in a way that felt manageable.

So I moved some heavy objects and then went for a run. The cupboard, as I believe I mentioned, was bare, so I went to Sam’s for bagels for my brother and me, and was at my desk working on the final diary entries from New Orleans/Baton Rouge by eleven or so. I emailed the property manager and our alleged future tenants, and I filled out a form on a moving company’s web site so that they can call me with an estimate. This is the same moving company that moved my parents to West Virginia, and my parents raved about them, not least because they were inexpensive. The company seems to act like it wants your business, and that’s my favorite kind.

I also uploaded the New Orleans/Baton Rouge photos to Flickr, a process that has become so amazingly fast and easy now that I have a computer with decent memory capacity. Not that they’re paying me or anything, but I highly recommend Flickr for your online photo sharing (I especially recommend it if you want to share them with me – I ain’t looking at no Snapfish), not least because no one has to join Flickr to see your photos. Even if you keep them “private,” which you can do at various levels of restriction, you can use a “share” function to grant access to anyone with an email address. And why keep them private, unless they are risque? I know people are often very concerned about pictures of their children ending up on line, but I’ve never understood why. Maybe it’s because there is this steady drumbeat in the culture about online predators, but those people are in chat rooms looking for real people to converse with. Of course you need to be careful about giving out too much information, so it might not be a good idea to post pictures in which your address is visible or your house is otherwise locatable, particularly if you also post pictures of the riches contained in your treasure room. But even then, what are the odds that a burglar is out there scouting around on line for places to rob? I suppose it could happen, but that kind of burglar really will be looking for a treasure room, not a tiny rowhouse that contains pretty much the same stuff as any other tiny rowhouse.

Except for my shrunken head collection, of course.

And back to Flickr, for a second. The best thing about Flickr is that it is very easy to navigate and use. The second best thing is that the color scheme is reminiscent of a box of laundry detergent, and doesn’t that just make you feel clean and happy?

By late afternoon I was already feeling very productive, and it didn’t stop there. After starting some laundry, I drove to Fells Point to get a new pair of running shoes and then stopped by Giant for some groceries. I guess one reason I was able to get so much done is because of the feeling I always get when I’m home on a weekday – even on a vacation day that I earned fair and square – that I am somehow playing hooky, yet another example of the way our minds are poisoned by this innocent-sounding thing called a work ethic. Frankly I wish I had a stronger leisure ethic, but that’s a rant for another time. But the idea that I “should” be working anyway makes it harder to laze around like I might end up doing on a Saturday.

In other news, while I was at Giant, I received live text-message updates from my brother concerning the car that crashed into the outdoor-seating area at Regi’s, the bistro where I once tended bar (my brother works across the street). Amazing that more people weren’t hurt, and that the ones who were got off so lightly. Just think, if I’d kept working there for only three more years, and if I’d happened to be working a wait shift last night, and if I’d happened to have been standing in the outdoor seating area taking an order… well, the mind quails.

That’s all.

The morning was no fun. We were both tired and reluctant to rise, because of said tiredness and also because rising meant packing and saying goodbye. But A.’s airport shuttle would leave at seven and we eventually accepted the inevitable. While we gathered her things, I turned on NPR on the radio. I did this with a certain amount of trepidation, since I hadn’t really followed any news since leaving Baltimore. What had I missed? A local politician was being interviewed about Louisiana’s impending cockfighting ban. There was “mysterious bubbling” in a lake in the northern part of the state. Some bombs had exploded, and some people had died.

A. and I said goodbye at the door to the room and I watched her walk away down the hall, her duffle bag slung over one shoulder. The only thing for it was to keep busy, so I finished my own packing and did a little typing before checking out at eleven and locating our friend, Tracy, who was coincidentally on the same flight as me. For some reason, we had both arranged to depart from the New Orleans airport rather than Baton Rouge’s, and we had decided to join forces in figuring out how to get down there. A cab ride would cost $130, I had learned from guest services, so that was out. The night before, I had reserved a car from Thrifty; with taxes and “drop fee,” the drive would cost us only about $65. Thinking I might want to spend the day sitting in the hotel typing up my last notes from the weekend, I had ordered the car for two p.m., but Tracy convinced me that we should get it early and maybe knock around the French Quarter for a couple of hours. (Our flight was at six p.m.) So we caught the eleven a.m. airport shuttle. At Thrifty, they didn’t have any cars of the size I had ordered (economy). If they hadn’t had any at two p.m., the upgrade would have been on their dime. But since we were requesting the car early, we had to pay an extra $14 for a PT Cruiser convertible, which – surprisingly – was the cheapest rental they had on the lot. Since the only other option at that point was to sit in the Thrifty waiting area until two p.m., we decided to go for it.

We studied the driver’s manual for instructions related to the convertible top before leaving the rental lot. Not exactly rock and roll of us, I know, but then, neither are our bank accounts. Mainly I wanted to know if you could put the top up and down while moving, as it looked as though it might rain. (You can’t.) There was a ZZ Topp Memorial Day rock block on a radio station we found and we were blasting the rumbling instrumental bridge of “La Grange” as I accelerated onto the main road. I had visions of booming along the Lake Ponchartrain levy with the top down, but I couldn’t take the sun beating down on my sparsely forested skull after about 15 minutes and gave up. Tragedy was narrowly averted, too, when we stopped at a drug store for some cortizone for Tracy, who must have brushed some poison ivy on Sunday’s bayou stroll. We were just pulling out of our parking spot when a warning ding sounded; a little readout flashed “deck.” I had no idea what this could mean, but after a few fruitless minutes with the owner’s manual I decided to check the trunk. It was ajar, and a chill ran down my spine. An open trunk on a sedan is no big deal, but a PT Cruiser convertible’s trunk is accessed through a vertical opening in the back of the car, meaning that – if it is open – there is nothing but a little lip to keep the contents from sliding right out the back, like jeeps being parachuted out of the ramps in the rear of those massive Air Force cargo planes. I remembered closing and checking the trunk at the rental lot. Had someone popped it open while we’d been in the Walgreen’s? I opened it and Tracy’s roll-on suitcase tumbled out into my arms, which is what I guess it would have done on the road the first time I accelerated sharply. Nothing was missing, though the mystery of how the trunk had come open remained. We decided we were too paranoid to risk it and piled everything on the back seat before buttoning up the top one last time. As we drove, I tried to keep track of the billboards that involved plays on laissez le bon temps roulez (e.g., “laissez le profits roll”) but lost track after about six or seven.

In the French Quarter, we parked in a valet garage in hopes that this would keep the luggage safer (adding nine more dollars to the tab for our “cheap” method of getting to New Orleans, but of course a cab ride to the airport wouldn’t have allowed us to stop for lunch in the FQ) and set out on foot. A sidewalk hawker in a plaid shirt and striped tie tempted us into The Alpine, “a Louisiana Cajun Bistro” that turned out to be owned by the same people who run Oceana, the delicious seafood restaurant where our group hat eaten on Thursday night. During lunch, I noticed a headline on the TV: “Police shoot 80-pound lizard – unclear if it’s dead or just wounded.” Our po boys were delicious. We asked them to pour the last of our beers into “go cups” and set out to stroll the quarter. I wanted to at least look at Preservation Hall, a historic jazz venue that my dad, the jazz writer, had urged me to check out. (I see now, having just gone hunting for a link you could follow to learn a little more about the place, that I didn’t find the right one. I found someplace called “Maison Bourbon – Dedicated to the Preservation of Jazz” and assumed that perhaps the name Preservation Hall Jazz Band had simply adapted part of the name of the establishment. But I can see in the Wikipedia article’s photo and in the real Preservation Hall’s virtual tour that the building looks different from the place I found. Oh, well, pays to do your research ahead of time, I guess.)

We walked the narrow streets and took in the sights, the neighborhood seeming to blink in the bright sun. The sights included beautiful, time-ravaged old buildings, a splash of vomit by a bench, a “statue guy” performer posing as a football player in mid-pass, and strippers arriving at a club for an early shift. When we couldn’t take the oppressive heat and still, fetid air any longer, we struck out for Jackson Square Park, which turned out to be less shady than I expected. There was a guy selling prints by fence on the Riverwalk side of the park. At first the primitive, blocky designs looked appealing, but, when he started showing us how many different sizes and colors he had of each print, it all started to feel a little too mass-produced to be worth $30-$40 a print. We moved on after he asked me if I were studying creative writing “to impress my girlfriend.” “That’s not my girlfriend.” “But you’re still studying creative writing to impress a woman, right?”

What?

It was getting late and we had neglected to mark the precise location of our parking garage, so we picked our way back from one landmark to the next. A bar called Frat House. Hustler Hollywood, “home of the Hustler Honeys,” in case you’re ever looking for them. A balcony with a large papier mache head suspended from ropes. Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House, which does not serve absinthe.

Back at the garage, Tracy went in search of a bathroom while I ordered up the car. As I waited for a valet to drive it down, his honks at blind turns echoing down through the levels of the garage as he got closer, a woman with an expensive-looking hairdo and wearing a black suit sat on a bench waiting for her own car, smoking a skinny cigarette. Another garage attendant, a heavy black woman in a sweat-soaked red polo shirt emblazoned with the name of the garage, asked the woman how it was going. Her tone did not give me the impression that she cared to hear much of an answer, but the blonde was off and running. “Well, I just got back from a business trip and they took us to a golf tournament and I didn’t know how to behave, I mean I guess you got to be real quiet and stop walking when they’re putting, I don’t know but I was about to get myself booted out of there.” The attendant nodded slowly, staring into space and fanning herself weakly with her hand. I had the distinct impression that, while the attendant might not have known how to behave at a golf tournament either, common ground had not exactly been established.

On the way out of town, next to the I-10 on-ramp, a giant billboard tempted drivers to a casino where they might win “one out of fifteen John Deere tractors.” In only slightly smaller print at the bottom of the billboard was the required advisory as to where to call if you have a gambling problem and want help stopping. In heavy westbound traffic, we found ourselves stuck behind a truck with a hand-lettered sign on the back: “Ladies go topless.” But in case you might be tempted to take offense, the driver had drawn a smiley face on the sign, too, so you would know it’s just good clean fun. We stopped at the edge of the airport for gas ($13, bringing our “cheap” ride to a grand total of a little over $100) and then had a hell of a time finding the Thrifty drop-off, which was not mentioned on any of the airports’ rental-car return signs. But we had allowed plenty of time, as it turned out, and arrived at the airport with a good hour and a half to go before our flight. I had trouble in security because I’d forgotten to remove the two bottles of water I’d taken along from the hotel room that morning, plus they also said I looked cold, calculating and dangerous, but I get that all the time. I talked my way through before too long. On the way to our concourse, Tracy asked if I had noticed the man ahead of us, traveling with two boys, who had carried his “go cup” of beer right up to the verge of the metal detector before downing it in one long chug. It was a shame about my water bottles, as I’d been dying for some water since leaving the French Quarter and hadn’t realized I’d had some all the time. I bought another one in the concourse for $4. I had to ask the clerk to repeat the price when she said it. I haven’t gotten that ripped off in a long time, but what are you going to do?

The walk in the quarter had exhausted me and left me grimy and sticky. I would have given anything for one last afternoon nap in a soft hotel bed but had to settle for sinking into a bench seat in the gate area. These seats looked soft but weren’t and only supported me up to about my middle back, as if they had been designed to discourage you from sitting in them for too long, which just seemed cruel under the circumstances.

My flights home were largely unremarkable, but I offer the following two findings for the sake of the permanent record:

1. Either I had the same pilot as when I’d departed Baltimore, or AirTran pilots in general really do favor especially sharp ascents from takeoff and long, dramatically pitched banking turns above the airport. Exciting!

2. Leaving your cell phone on during flight does not cause the plane to crash. I discovered this the way all true scientific research is done, by hazarding myself (and my fellow passengers) in mad pursuit of knowledge. Actually, I was just reluctant to turn the thing off because it does not reliably turn back on again, in which case I was afraid I might not be able to find my brother at the airport in Baltimore. I was reasonably confident that I would survive this experiment for two reasons.

a. The pilot, in his announcement concerning such devices, said “discontinue using” them, as opposed to “turn them off,” and I figured he would have more precise knowledge of the nature of any potential problems than would the flight attendants, who favored the “turn them off” formulation.

b. If cell phone signals actually posed a hazard for the plane, why on earth would we be allowed to bring them on board? You’re telling me I can’t bring a five-ounce bottle of mouthwash but I can carry a deadly communication device that will send the plane screaming toward the ground at the touch of a button? As we were circling Baltimore, I almost chickened out and turned the thing off, though, when it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t be gambling my life based on policies set by the federal decision-makers responsible for the nation’s safety and security, who do not generally seem to be what you would call “sensible” or “good at their jobs.” But I held out and before long we were safely on the ground.

At the baggage carousel, my suitcase popped open when I grabbed it from the conveyor belt. The AirTran packing tape I’d wrapped around it was broken, I noticed. I later found out that this was courtesy of TSA, who’d left one of their random inspection calling cards behind. I also found out later that the gift jar of “crawfish jelly” I’d packed inside was broken, although fortunately I had put it in a Ziploc and hardly any of it had leaked out. I want to blame TSA for this, though I can’t be sure it was their fault. I guess I just will blame them anyway.

Stupid TSA.

We piled my belongings into my brother’s Ford Taurus and made our way home, seeming to hit every red light possible on the way. After my restless sleep the night before, the 1,000-degree hike through the French Quarter, and a layover in Georgia, I was barely conscious by the time I crawled into bed, leaving my unpacking for Tuesday.

It wasn’t as soft and fluffy as the bed in the Sheraton, by the way.

The morning after the wedding found me standing on the levee while the groom hunted for his bride in the underbrush along the Mississippi.

That was a fun sentence to write but I may be giving you the wrong idea. We had all simply gone for a stroll, and Erin had diverted from the pack to take a look at a pile of river-polished glass she knew of. But the heat was getting oppressive and we all wanted to head back to the hotel, so Greg jogged off to find her and tell her what we were doing.

To start from the beginning, A. and I had dawdled in the room until almost ten before heading downstairs for the breakfast buffet. On Saturday the buffet had closed at ten thirty and we figured we had at least that long on a Sunday morning. We were in the lobby by 10:10 a.m. but this was too late, because, for some reason, the buffet closes earlier on Sundays than on any other day. We waited around for twenty minutes until the main restaurant opened and had breakfast there, instead.

After breakfast, the newly hitched couple invited us along for a walk out on what Erin calls “the rusty old dock where you can see everything.” This turned out to be a disused cargo pier about a half-mile down the levee from the hotel. A rusty metal truckway led out to a massive concrete platform, with the I-10 bridge across the Mississippi towering nearby. Actually walking out along this rusty metal seemed like a terrible idea to me, but it was one of those terrible ideas that groups of people tend for some reason to be ill-equipped to reject. One lone naysayer goes along anyway, muttering things like “this doesn’t seem safe,” sure that he’ll be the first to fall through once everyone else has weakened the metal.

But there were no fatalities and the view was grand, more tugboats tugging past, a river of traffic pouring across the river on the bridge, hobos’ fishing poles bobbing in the grasses along the bank. In the water, at the base of the pier’s pilings, a massive raft of driftwood (by which I mean tree trunks) bobbed in a smear of bright green silt, along with dozens of Dasani water bottles. So healthy and natural to drink water, but then where do the bottles go? Where do they come from, for that matter? Nowhere healthy and natural, I’ll wager.

After the bride and groom found each other, we all walked back to the hotel to shower and change for the afternoon’s eating, a crawfish boil at Erin’s parents’ house, Erin’s parents who do not ever stop. I’d never eaten crawfish this way before – hardly any way, actually – and it was a treat. The basic set up was like a crab feast, for those of you who know those: seasoned, boiled crustaceans are poured in a pile on a table, and you crack them open and pick out the meat. Crawfish are delicate enough that no mallets or crackers are needed, however, and it is pretty fast going to suck down a good amount of the lobster-like flesh. The seasoning involved red pepper (“don’t rub your eyes,” called out the cook for the benefit of the newbies) and something that smelled like holiday mulling spices. The crawfish that hadn’t been cooked yet awaited their doom in netted sacks like laundry bags before being poured out in a bucket for washing and salting. Then into the boiling water with seasonings, potatoes and corn-on-the-cob in a pot the size of a cut-off 50-gallon barrel, over a propane flame that roared like a jet engine. The men took care of the preparations and cooking. Down in these parts there is a strong tendency toward traditional gender divisions of labor, but any kind of cooking that involves heavy equipment and the possibility of explosions is gladly taken on by the men. (And I shouldn’t perpetuate the stereotype: Erin’s dad had cooked the jamabalaya for the wedding and also makes a mean praline, the recipe for which was a deathbed bequest from an old friend of his on the condition that he would never ever tell. And he won’t.) The crawfish was served on an aluminum table custom built for the purpose, about bellybutton high on me with a hole in the middle for a trash chute. One young woman had brought her parrot, which perched on her shoulder and nibbled cheese from her fingers. It made an occasional lunge for some crawfish but she would swat it away.

After the crawfish, people revisited the food they’d loved best the night before. The microwave beeped and whirred as guests reheated jambalaya; there was more potato salad; pralines were brought out on a platter; and alliances were formed for the purpose of eating more cake (“I’ll get a plate with a couple of different kinds and we’ll share”). The conversation turned to the weather and the locals all agreed that we’d been blessed with unusually cool temperatures this weekend. “Usually it’s already oppressive this time of year, and we’ve been getting a lot more rain than usual.” I found myself thinking that no one seems to know what to make of the Baltimore weather either; it can’t quite seem to settle into the expected balminess of late spring in that area. Have we reached some sort of tipping point? Are people all over the country having these kinds of conversations? “We never used to have so many locusts, neither…”

To walk off the food, Erin and her brother led a walk down to the edge of the subdivision and along the bayou, through dense underbrush that at least one guest can attest included poison ivy. The air was still and hot among the trees and two young girls who had tagged along seemed to regret their decision to join us. We finally fought our way back out onto the power-line right-of-way that runs behind Erin’s parents’ house but high grasses kept us from making a straight shot. A local homeowner was upset at our decision to crush down a wire fence for the children to hop over. “Just step on the ‘No Trespassing’ sign,” said one little boy just as a woman walked up in gardening togs and a sour expression. “The fence is there for a reason, you know.” We were sorry but not sorry enough to turn back. Erin’s brother and two others straightened the fence back up the best they could as the woman walked off in a huff. Guess her life hasn’t turned out the way she hoped. Nice garden, though, but that just kind of proves my point.

We passed the long slow hours of the late afternoon and early evening talking in the shade of the tent that had been erected for the wedding. Erin’s brother told us about his tournament bass fishing avocation, and the sideline business he has making custom bass “buzzy bait” lures. Various guests tried their hands at creating frozen drinks with a newly purchased blender (purchased because Erin had had an itch for daiquiris and had taken everyone’s order before she remembered that “the drive-through daiquiri stand isn’t open on Sundays”), and with each attempt the vodka or rum content seemed to rise. It really was only a coincidence, though, when one guest tipped over backwards in her chair and took a whole folding table with her. When I walked inside to use the bathroom, I found the Tennessee cousins sprawled on the couch, ceiling fans humming overhead. The men were watching auto racing (not sure if it was the Indy 500 or the Coca Cola 600) while the women dozed.

After a certain point, I could no longer ignore the dreadful fact that this was the last night of the trip; on Monday, A. would leave bright and early for Arizona and I would catch a later flight to Baltimore and we wouldn’t see each other for another few weeks at least. So we jumped at the chance to catch a ride home from a sociology grad student, a friend of Erin’s, and we were back at the hotel before nine. We watched a few Office episodes that I had brought down on the laptop and received a good-bye visit from Erin and Greg when they got back to the hotel around midnight – after being forced to open every single wedding present for an audience of friends and family, so thank god we escaped when we did. At around one a.m. we set the alarm for six and tried to get some sleep. Can’t speak for A., but it wasn’t the most restful night for me as I (1) regretted we’d be parting ways the next morning, (2) worried that the alarm might not go off, and (3) tried to hurry up and go to sleep before too many more minutes ticked by on the big red digital display, which, if you don’t know, is not a good technique for trying to fall asleep.