The Greatest Show on Earth

Start by remembering that high school is a circus. The show begins a few minutes before the bell rings, when you notice the car with the TOONCES license plate, as the kids begin to trickle out – stiffly in JROTC uniforms or jauntily in whatever footwear is a la mode.

Keep calm and win Christmas: 10 last-minute gift ideas

Originally published in 2012.

The best laid plans can go astray in the run-up to Christmas and you may find yourself having to buy a last-minute gift, as I did yesterday.

In the weeks leading up to holiday I have felt that I have been engaged in a kind of stress challenge, a triathlon for moms that measures thoughtfulness, organization and endurance.

Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” recently had guests Allison Pearson, author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and journalist Deborah Orr on to debate the extent to which an Asda supermarket commercial was celebrating reality or perpetuating gender stereotypes and whether or not Christmas is a mother’s realm, her undoing, or her finest hour.

It hits a nerve, right?

In an anthropological aside, an American ad would never end with giving the mom a glass of wine. Instead mom gets external validation, male approval or female envy, a sticky kiss from her son or Santa winking from the rooftop or the husband’s arm around her shoulders.

So, here, in an effort to help you in this final push before the big day, or as on online note to self as I train for next year, are some last-minute gift ideas:

There are no words

The members meet weekly in a church hall. They practice giving speeches and speaking extemporaneously because at some point they realized this was a skill they lacked or a streak of potential that had gone unfulfilled for too long.

I imagine they go because they are tired of the palpitations, the queasy current of nervous electricity that shoots up the back of their legs when having to take the podium, or there hangs over them like a cartoon storm cloud the deeper fear of actually not having anything worth saying, their thoughts unformed or shapeshifting. They are failing to convey their points or they wish to exorcise their embolalia. Yes, of course, I am projecting.

I am sitting in a small row of chairs with a folder in my hands, an agenda written out to the minute, with all the members given formal titles for the roles they will assume, like the Introducer of the Welcoming Speaker. It is like a play about a play about a meeting and the ritual of the symbolism of the meeting. It is what makes city council meetings on television fascinating in their excruciating verbal obfuscation, the saying of that which is meant to convey politeness and procedural correctness when what you are feeling is rage or fear.

They are so welcoming. It’s even my title in the ritual symbolism of their meeting etiquette, where I am Welcomed Guest Wertis. I want to take that leap into the mosh pit of their hospitality, but at the same time something is holding me back, the fear perhaps that I would be under obligation to practice speeches I didn’t want to give or find myself stating, in week after week of Table Topics that, “I have no words.”

Good ideas are not at my beck and call in that way. Maybe it would be good training for the words, to roust them out and make them march in straight lines, not meander aimlessly, but this could be achieved by journaling exercises rather than by devoting the time to come to meetings and having this precise verbal choreography with people.

In spite of the time limitations, the Key Speaker runs over. The warning card is flashed more and more emphatically by the Keeper of Time in the front row.

Some of the Toastmasters have been in this together for a decade. I find this both touching and disconcerting. I had thought it was more like a course you took, where you solved your public speaking issues and moved on, but it is more a club where they take comfort in the rituals, a sort of fan group for an ideal state of a very certain kind of polite eloquence. They draw closer together through succinct personal revelations but maintaining a correct distance. Feedback is given not by name but by role. I thought the Master of Table Topics did a commendable job keeping time.  There are leadership tracks you can join, a progression of speaking accomplishments to achieve, wider audiences to be addressed regionally, internationally. Is this my show? Are these my people?

What if, during the meeting, an emergency happened and we were forced to stay in the church hall until the all-clear sounded, how long would it take for the formality to erode? Would the topic be correctly adjourned in lieu of determining the severity of the situation? What if someone is an unreformed circuitous talker? Would the group turn on him or her? I imagine pairs being elected to venture into the church basement in search of nuclear era snacks. If the situation were worse than we had at first imagined, how long would it be until the longest-serving members of the club revealed their true feelings about each other? Perhaps one person would throw down her knitting and cry out, “I’m tired of being so darned nice all of the time!” and made a run for it into a thick cloud of waiting poison.

The folder sits on my desk at work all summer, an unanswered invitation, offering the promise to be a different person, one who speaks with a firm but measured conviction on a variety of topics, who can turn a phrase like an unexpected flash of silver in the otherwise muddy creek of human communication where the cliches and the long winded preambles sway like aquatic weeds, the point falling like a lost lure into the silt. Weeks pass and I know that I should say something, thank you for having me to the meeting, anything, but the words just won’t come.

You’re a cab

Make me a sandwich. You’re a sandwich.

Call me a cab. You’re a cab.

You’re the parent of an 8th, 9th or 10th grader? You’re a cab, too.

A slice of life

We are an hour and a half into the Diwali dance program when my husband nudges the younger daughter to find out when they will start serving dinner. A lot of kids from school are here. She has been roaming around with her friends, looking at the jewelry tables and knows her way around. She slips away to see.

Throughout the performance the children filter in and out of the dark auditorium. People chat quietly. A trio of girls in full, red satin skirts and tops spangled with large, jingling gold sequins, practice their arm movements in the aisle between their numbers. One of the younger daughter’s friends is hanging out with them so they must be younger than they appear on stage, the heavy skirts giving them a kind of adult presence. Others must see them this way, too, as the women they will become. Surely this is part of the meaning and purpose of the dancing, where the audience can see who moves with confidence or grace. Parents will be complimented.

The theater gradually fills. Adults are filtering in and out, too. The availability of tea is announced. This is the only event I have ever been to in Alabama with hot tea. It is strong and has cardamom in it. We are there with non-Indian friends. The Diwali festival had been promoted at school and on the local public radio station. We thought it would be an interesting night out with good food. Over time, it is easy not to attend events so sometimes we have to rally ourselves. We missed something like this last year, involving food, dancing and a fashion show. We should do that some time, but then consider the distance, the time, the comfort of one’s own warm house.

It is the weekend before Thanksgiving. I have spent the morning going through recipes and planning meals, writing shopping lists—one for Costco, one for the fancy supermarket one for the regular supermarket, and one for the small-town Piggly Wiggly where they barely sell produce, where we will be for the day itself—steeped in the responsibilities of my own culture and its traditions. The yard is disorderly, covered in leaves that keep drifting down like the kind of slow, persistent snow that can bring a place like this to its knees. It will be nice to have this dinner out. It might just be snacks, my husband had said earlier in the day, but the website clearly stated dinner, I assured him, taking on, then, the responsibility for the meal, as you do when you propose an outing.

The MCs, a man and a woman, have a jokey kind of old-school patter, where the woman says things to the man like, “I really hope that your wife is not in the audience.” She precedes him onstage and calls for him as if he has forgotten his cue. Sometimes the whole introduction is made in Hindi.

An Indian friend of ours slips into the seat next to me during the karaoke. Video from classic Bollywood films is shown. There is a sort of Solid Gold number where they are playing the hook from “Funkytown.” “These movies,” he says, “sample everything, music, plots. I was watching one the other day that combined E.T. with Batman.” He moves on, working his way into the auditorium.

“There is something about being at someone else’s cultural event,” my husband observes, “that gives you insight into your own.” Our people, we realize, like to direct and control the flow of traffic. When we arrived there were some paper signs with arrows posted in the vast parking lot, but no sports teams or scouts with buckets, collecting $3-6 for parking, or men with orange pointer cones like they have at the airport or the botanical garden, making sure that people filled the lot in a particular way.

Now two men are doing impersonations of actors. I am reminded of the play we went to our first year in London, written for an audience well versed in Ealing Comedies. I had only a vague gist of the kind of thing it was about but no real understanding of the jokes. It is this same wash of over-my-head, out-of-my-ken references situation, plus it’s all in Hindi. We have been here for two hours, maybe longer, the music and the costumes and the teenagers, swirling around us in the dark.

My daughter comes back in and whispers three words you never want to hear at an Indian festival: “We’re having pizza.”

Is it possible that I have misjudged this event? Could this celebration somehow, plausibly culminate in pizza and I have made these assumptions that an Indian celebration requires Indian food? Or does she have the pointiest irony stick in the family, the cruelest wit, and she has jabbed us with it. It’s a bold move.

“Seriously,” she says, “it’s pizza.” People, she tells us, have started to eat, so we follow her to the cafeteria. The tables have been set with tea lights and rose petals.

And there, on the first serving table, are about fifty pizza boxes. When she says people what she really means is children. Happily, further down, are the chafing dishes you would expect to see, and a few other adults, enough to form a short queue. By virtue of our outsider status we, I hope, can be forgiven being slightly too eager to rush to the buffet, like non-pizza-eating children, not quite clued in, happy just to be at a party.

And what, I wonder, would the cultural festival of the Wertises entail? There would be a slice of real pizza, a bag of zeppoli, things that don’t travel on airplanes and things that exist in another time. It’s not a dance my daughters will do or a belief others would be invited to share. It’s mismatched earrings, a long walk with no conversation, a whisper, marginalia, a Bollywood-style mashup of obscure cultural references, but with no discernible plot, the shadow of an old sign of a defunct business painted on a brick wall, faded by decades of sun, photographed by a hipster, then it’s gone, over.

Making tracks

This is about journeys. This is about a hitchhiker, a walking man and a singer. This is about people’s stories and where their paths cross and what they carry.

We’re in the car going to dinner, driving though the west side of town, where there are car dealerships, rock-bottom carpet, house of style and these apartment complexes where a person could disappear. There is a man all in black, walking purposefully. He has a design of flames around the hem of his shirt and shoulder-length, apricot-colored hair. He is wearing a short, black cape.

Look at the man, I say to my daughter, behind me.

Should we get him?, my husband asks. Because when you live in a place where no one walks pedestrians are like safari park animals, I guess. Because we are listening to the Ramones. We would never actually abduct a pedestrian, they belong in the wild, and I don’t know why he says it, but it’s funny, in a perverse way, which is why he said it.

The 13-year-old, ever practical, without missing a beat, says, “But, where would we put him?”

Other, better things happen as the result of our impulses. My husband gets the idea to invite a singer who does house concerts to come play at our house. She lives a couple of hours away and after a few emails back and forth a date is fixed and she will come play a concert. I suppose, for the 13-year-old, there is some slight connection between this and our absurdist car humor. You never know what these people will do next.

We clear all of the furniture from one end of the living room and line up seats and sofas. I love the emptiness of the room. The emptiness makes me happy. Emptiness feels like possibility. Knowing that there are many other things I could do, always, at any time, a fact that can be paralyzing, I decide that the couch being moved away from the wall gives me a chance to finish alphabetizing the fiction. This was something I had finally rallied to do a few weeks ago but every time I started I would get comments like if you’re going to do that, you could do this. Change the air filters, wash some dishes (I have spared you a post about the first-world trauma of a month of no dishwasher), but it’s been three years and, frankly, for my sanity if no one else’s, it needed to happen, and when it was done, though imperfectly, A-D is a bit jumbled, there was this incredible sense of order having been restored. I worked it so that Liebling and Mitchell share a shelf.

Tonight, my husband asked for Lanterns on the Levee, and I said, from upstairs, Middle section, second shelf from the bottom. But still, because he doesn’t hold with this kind of thing, I had to get it for him. However, I was able to pluck it from the shelf like a lady in a cereal commercial, sure of herself because she is in control, what with the jeans that button and the 99-calorie desk snacks and the 10 PM binges mastered by chocolate-tinged pulped fiber food product.

A friend who came to the concert told me afterwards that he told the singer about the time he hitchhiked from here to Seattle. I asked him to tell me about it. He ended up in some ghetto in Los Angeles and a gang of youth — I pictured something out of an 80s movie, one of those multiracial gangs they would have, with bandana headbands and sweatshirts with cut-off sleeves, but it could have been a couple of kids with backpacks on their way home from school — came up to him and asked if he had a knife. Now, this is a kind of basic thing I know from my urban youth, have mugger money in your pocket and if someone at all threatening asks for the time, don’t expose your watch.

Our friend pulls out his knife. He is telling a story on himself about naivete, but I am still surprised that he is carrying a knife. No, don’t take it out, I think. But he does. And here’s the funny part, the guy takes his knife, as you knew he would, but then he uses it to open a can of tuna fish. My friend says, Now, I don’t know how much you know about men and their knives [here I’m thinking, Clearly not much!] but we take pride in keeping them clean and sharp, and this L.A. guy, gangster or just a guy, had crossed a line. Somehow, our friend is whisked away, knife returned to him, by a cop who was like, What are you doing here? and tells him to get in the car and not to tell anyone, but he’s like, Of course it’s a story I tell everyone.

It took him five days to hitchhike across America and three to get across L.A. The trip, he says, restored his faith in people. It made him less cynical. The people who gave him rides are all sorts. There are kind and good people out there, even in L.A.

For the singer, he said, he thought that her travels had done something similar. You think of her pulling up at a house, following whatever directions had been sent to her, taking a risk with each one; and for him, the car or truck pulling to a stop. This is where your stories intersect. Once a person broke down at the exact place where he was hitchhiking.

At the concert, the singer tells stories about the songs, which are themselves stories, often about a time when it was sung and took on an additional layer of meaning, at Folsom Prison, or in Christchurch, New Zealand, just after the earthquake, or inside the Arctic Circle, where she saw the midnight sun and then a solar eclipse. She lays down tracks of story over story and if you imagine that each telling leaves a vapor trail you can look up into a blue sky and see a complex latticework of car rides and walking routes and maps and flight paths and songs and stories and experiences that we hand each other along the way, so that in this room full of our friends and their children, each of us will remember some piece of the experience as part of our own story.

After the singer has left and homework is done, I drive the girls down the parkway to a flea market. We listen to her CD in the car, already a soundtrack to our lives. At the antiques warehouse, we wander through stalls of untold stories, things and things to be priced, alphabetized, explained. Four impish children in a portrait stare and beckon us from beneath a neon beer sign.

We won’t hurt you, we won’t steal your watch, just tell us what you’re doing here. Tell us why you wear the cape.

Hello, it’s us

In the darkness two or three of them are  hunkered over the glow of their phones, like flames cupped in their palms. It appears they are wearing hoods. They are visible in outline form only, waiting while the leader confers with someone who has happened upon them and is trying the assess the situation. What are they doing out here on the landing, separated from the rest of their people? They could be Bedouin tribespeople holding candles, not American domestic teenagers at a sleepover, on the way to the kitchen for salty snacks.

The younger daughter is having a sleepover party. After dinner, before cake, the girls, had arranged themselves in pairs and threes and peered into each others’ hands. There is the tinny buzz of music. No one uses headphones. That would be antisocial. Even the younger daughter, alone in her room, eschews headphones/speakers. There is no desire for a stereo or better speakers, larger sound. What would you put in a stereo anyway? What’s a stereo? Do we even need a house phone or cable? It’s all on your device. It’s like we are walking around holding our brains in jars of phosphorescent fluid.

There is a hum of industry as they view and tap. I want to say “freeze” and have each of them declare her task: I am listening to this music video. I am texting a boy. I am showing her videos of herself from the bus trip two weeks ago (because when you are middle school one falls so easily to reminiscences; remember how we were last month?) but worse than writing about it now would have been to have asked them about it then. Mostly, I am told, they are on Instagram.

And while the girls are networking, I am texting with one of the mothers. I, too, am caught in this web of communicative white noise. Right after college, friends of ours had an apartment by a loud highway and there was talk of a sublet or a vacancy in the building. A white noise machine in the bedroom made it possible to sleep or do your art. To be in the apartment with the constant stream of sound and have it not drive you mad required generating your own noise-canceling noise.

We are in the Piggly-Wiggly and my husband says that tabloids like the National Enquirer are suffering. Guess why?

The internet? Because as soon as it happens it’s on Twitter?

It’s the internet, but not for the reasons you’d think it is. When people are at checkout, they are on their phones.

The covers of the tabloids fill me with despair. It’s a death I can handle. Better we should be scrolling the headlines of our friends’ lives than to be learning which celebrity is too fat or too thin or dumped. I can only hope that the IGing teens are affirming each other as funny or liked more than they are tearing each other apart. The scrutiny of teenage girls, scrutinizing and documenting, and passing it on. We wrote on each others’ notebooks, signing our names in a distinctive hand. I was here. We are friends. You are with me. We are together. We like this band, this code word for that thing that happened, but now everyone can know everything in real-time, realer time. As you are saying it, she hits share. That was so funny.

At a sleepover party in 8th or 9th grade, I remember going out with one of the other girls for french fries in the middle of the night. The party was in a residential, single-home neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was fall, mild weather. Earlier in the evening there had been boys and music and pizza. Had everyone else gone to sleep? Was one of us feeling the need “to talk.” That was the thing about being in a large group, within that group there was always the pairing off, the smaller conversations within the larger, the awareness of those conversations taking place. Suddenly the others would fall silent and listen in. Then it was a big conversation again.

We just need to talk. You’d go off into the corner, another room. That might be a pivotal moment in your friendship. A new insight into the contradiction of character, the way girls got a glimpse behind the social front they maintained even to each other. She seems like she doesn’t care what people think, but she really does. You saw how people were constantly being misunderstood or misrepresented. And sometimes, as maybe had happened at the party, you wanted to have a different experience from the group and so, sitting outside with an order of fries wrapped in tin foil, we had achieved independence.

Back at the party, anything could be happening. Did they know we had gone out? Would they all be asleep? Was it about them or us? We must have told someone or left a note. If this happened now you would stay in touch, it would be the two of us together but still with the others, unless we made a point of silencing our devices, cancelling out the white noise.

They can’t turn it off now. It is always with them. It is like the inside of their heads are in constant broadcast mode. In some ways being a teen is just being a teen. There are constants, but the way they are together and apart and with people they’re not with, is very different. It is like one’s own teenage sense of simultaneous omnipotence and inconsequentiality come true. It’s real feedback on who you are but as you are trying to become whoever it is you will be.

They are in the pantry eating sour cream and onion poppadoms. They could be telling the people upstairs about it as they finish the bag and tiptoe back up the stairs. You guys? You guys?

Equality rocks

My friend in New York City called one day last fall to say that she was thinking of moving here. I think it was because of a picture I had posted on Facebook of a local apartment complex: clean, modest and mid-century fabulous.

Why am I taking grief from people in this crazy a place when I could just go somewhere quiet and affordable? is how one’s line of thought goes in NYC. I don’t need this. And so begin the fantasies of cheesemaking in Vermont or moving to a small city in the South.

When we lived in New York, people were always threatening to leave. The irony? I was never one of them.

Two weeks, a family friend said, was how long it would take to reacclimate if we moved back from London. When you were back, people weren’t too concerned about where you’d been (true of people everywhere). The city you returned to, like a self-absorbed friend, had its own issues and needs. Whatever exotic little habits you might have picked up from wherever were swept away by some new trauma about how they didn’t have that same particular muffin/soy drink/bartender at that place you always went to.

My friend is picturing a university town and thinking liberal and I’m saying not so liberal. International, yes. Educated, yes. It’s… conservative, I tell her. I mention one thing that had taken me aback when we arrived, Choose Life car tags. When I had last lived in America, your license plate said your state and maybe the state slogan, but not your college or your social or religious beliefs. Maybe other states all do this now, too, but I hadn’t seen it before. There was a pause. She was like, I’m going to have to think about this.

That pause, that slamming on of mental brakes, told us that one should not rush out of Manhattan. Maybe it was right to toss out something a little scary, like a test, but I reeled back from the force of the detail as it rebounded.

When we were looking at houses here I was shocked by a gun cabinet in the family room. There are a lot of ancient people driving beige Mercury sedans. Our area has a high incidence of tornadoes, low crime, most people own dogs. Do we base our decisions on statistics, observation or anecdote? We say that we have weighed up the pros and cons, but really we liked the way the color of the leaves went with the color of the paint, very Prada, very college housing, and we figure the people that go with this idea must be here, too. And they probably are, but so are people who use their cars to advertise lots of ideas you don’t agree with.

Do you remember the prophets of doom in the NYC subway, in those vast corridors between platforms at the 34th or 42nd Street stations, passing out slips of paper with densely written bits of scripture or poetry. Most of us did not share our beliefs or art so readily. There were men in signboards with the same close text inscribed, back and front, who held megaphones through which they foretold of the apocalypse, of our sins, at busy intersections, so we formed a river of the unrepentant that flowed around them. Your need to use your car to tell me who you voted for and why reminds me of them.

It is easy to imagine your life, simplified, in a bungalow or, as I imagine my friend’s life, minus the expense and hassle of the city, in a river-view apartment, on a floor that is three times higher than any building in this town, with space to think if not to move. There could well be a bicycle on the wall, a too-full closet, or things packed tightly under the bed. But I hear only a charming symphony of horns from overheated taxis and imagine a life decadent with choice and Shakespeare in the Park, overheard gems, parties at restaurants, readings at independent bookstores.

She does not move to Alabama. Not yet. Months go by. A bumper sticker makes me laugh: six zombies—two adults, two children, dog, cat—and the words, “Our family ate your stick family.”

Now come the Supreme Court hearings for the Defense of Marriage Act. A meme strikes. People are changing their avatars to show support for same-sex marriage. I support same-sex marriage, but I have my initial bumper sticker reaction to the avatar change.

In an article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is quoted saying Facebook activism is for people who aren’t motivated to make a real sacrifice, on the other hand, the idea with the avatars is to show that there is popular support for equality in marriage and to make the abstract personal. As a person who grew up practically on Christopher Street and then attended college at Ivy League Whorehouse, one would not be surprised to find me sporting the red and pink equal sign avatar but, as a person living in the deep South, it’s more important to represent my region and in this region to stick up for what I believe, if only quietly and abstractly.

Alabama has red dirt and it is an agrarian place where people believe in the land. I placed some pebbles in the tire tracks of a red dirt road and made my own avatar. It’s indigenous. And, like choosing who you love, it’s natural and it’s personal. Like my friend grasping the social significance of the Choose Life car tag, symbols have power. Adopting a meme for your avatar is not much in the face of a much more profound issue, but there is a force in the aggregation of these images. Looks matter. One turquoise wall could contain a portal to a new life. Sitting in our cars, scrolling through Facebook, we notice these things, these small but telling details that could change your mind in an instant.

Belty-Shelty House

Readers will know that I do not actually hide things belonging to the members of my family, even if they are unable to find them.

“I didn’t say you’d tidied it,” my husband may say to soften an accusation, “Moving is different to tidying.” It’s the intent, Your Honour. She perverted the course of looking.

A night of luminaries

“Oh,” says the man in the fedora when we are introduced, “You were on the radio yesterday.”

What a great way to enter a party, especially when you have come alone and you are not sure who else will be there.

He has just recorded a couple of spots for the same program and writes a column for the paper and a blog about restoring a 1954 Chevy truck. He doesn’t mention it, but he has a day job with an international engineering and geospatial software firm. Now, if we hadn’t started off talking about writing we might have chatted about our jobs and left it at that. When meeting people at parties I am not extending my urbane, tabby paw and declaring myself to be The Wertis.

The great thing about social media, my husband jokes, is that nobody knows you’re a dog.

Yeah, says the dog, before there was Twitter, no one would talk to me about anything of substance.

Social media blurs all the lines between your professional, family and private life. And while it is important in, say, marketing to connect your brand across platforms, I am not wanting, personally, to become this seamless online entity. I don’t want to log in to news media through my Facebook account or Tweet my Amazon purchases or be the same six people everywhere I turn up. I don’t want people to read this blog because I am the mother of the older or younger daughter. I want there to be a little opacity even if it is an illusion.

The cat’s mother: she has followers.

The world being flattened by social media is good for education, health, the arts, technology, maybe democracy, but all the facets of your life and all your social groups merged into one avatar is a bit horrible and tedious. You don’t need to know me as the charming professional that I might be. This blog is where I get to be grumpy or go off topic or be uncertain. If I felt that I were writing for people I see every day it might be a bit weird. I like to think of my readership as mostly far-flung. And not everyone at work wants to know about my obsession with keeping the scissors in the kitchen or what I think about when I drive.

On the second Saturday in December, 5,000 glowing paper bags line the roads of the historic districts of our small city.

But I didn’t know about this and so, when driving to my friend’s open house, my first thought was that, as I turned off an arterial road into the dark residential one, these were little stone plinths to help drivers avoid running onto lawns. Or to warn them off. The neighborhood association had gone a bit bonkers I thought, baring their teeth at me. These white markers extended all the way down the street, in an endless maw.

As my eyes adjusted, I realized that the brutal white teeth were paper not concrete. This transformation and their impermanence made them beautiful. I had the idea that they were there to guide the runners of whatever race had taken place during day, for the stragglers, to light their way to the finish line.

When the network of light expanded at the first cross-street, I saw that it was too complex to be part of the race. As a marathon route, this would have been like one of those puzzles where you have to trace a design without lifting your pencil or retracing any segment, which, town of engineers that we are, would go down a treat. They could call it The Mental Mile.

I tell the man in the hat about a post I have been trying to write about a friend, how I think that both of us consider each others’ lives to be a form of writer’s colony. Is that fair? It is so hard it is to write about people you know. Other people will read what you have written, if you’re lucky. You will have made your friend both larger and smaller than real life. You have reduced them to fit the form of your writing, but at the same time you have made them a larger character with whom more people might identify. You expose them to interpretation.

Dotted around the room, I see people I know. I run the course between them, without lifting my pen. The night, the bags of light, the people walking on the street are all part of an evening called Luminaries, which involves house tours and people being expected to decorate.

On my way home, I see a set of blue upholstered French Regency chairs arranged in a front parlor. The room behind them is alight and the light falls on the cushions so that they take on an air of mystery and importance, like a cat disappearing into the shadows.