Ching ching! I am not quite awake, aware it is close to time to get up but still with my eyes closed, drifting in and out of a dream-like state, so when I hear this sound and know on some level exactly what it is (it is the sound of a text message arriving on my Iphone, parked in its tiny high tech cradle on my bedside table) the sound is quickly co-opted my subconscious and integrates itself into my dream and just like that it is a bike bell, the old fashioned kind where the lever is pulled in an arc around  a cupped silver disk that with its pointy center looks a bit like a nipped breast, albeit one belonging to a silver robot of small proportions. 

The bell is on a bike with a basket, also old fashioned but enjoying a retro- renaissance in the city where I live, so much so that certain famous bike makers have dubbed it a City Bike, painted it funky colors, given it lots of shiny gears to grind and slapped a price tag of around $800 on it, which is low compared to the prices of the bikes in, say, the Tour de France but nevertheless a shocking revelation of just how old I’m getting, since I can clearly remember that my top of the line  Schwinn ten speed that I got in 7^th grade as my Confirmation present cost about $250 and that was, for the time, *dear*.  

It was red, a the most beautiful bike in the world and my parents parked it in the basement because they knew I was scared to go down there and wouldn’t do so unless commanded and I could almost hear everyone holding their breath when mom said “run and get me a loaf of bread out of the freezer” and I went slowly,  slowly down the thirteen gray painted wooden steps, my feet slippery in socks and poised to turn on a dime and vault back up, singing to give myself courage and rounding the corner to the freezer and there it stood, gleaming elegantly, redly under the bare light bulb and seeming to whisper "Heya, let’s ride", a whisper drowned out by my loud and prolonged shriek of complete surprise and joy.

 Ching Ching! Comes the sound again and I am still drifting up toward wakefulness like a porpoise swimming up toward the watery membrane between it and the sun, and through that membrane I can hear a bike bell sounding and gaze in porpoise-eyed surprise at the bike that wafts across the sky  ridden by the lady from the Wizard of Oz, the grumpy dog-hating neighbor lady that had a point, sure, of course she did, you could tell that Dorothy didn’t have any control of her dog at all and it was wreaking havoc in the old lady’s yard and what was so damn hard about keeping it in their own yard anyway seeing as it was not even a yard but a whole farm, what is it, is Dorothy simple minded that she can’t make this happen?

And the answer is, Dorothy is simple minded, she has the simple, one track mind of the secure and well-loved child who follows her joy, walking around thinking that nothing can ever go so wrong that can’t be fixed because what could be wrong on a farm where everyone is always so nice, and industrious, and good at fixing things? But the thing is the lady is mean and she doesn’t like Toto, in fact she doesn’t like any dog, it’s as plain as that, you can totally tell because a person who was really just bummed about the dog being a destructive nuisance would express irritation and maybe even start a neighborhood cold war, but only an asshole would demand a dog as cute and relatively harmless as Toto be pried from Dorothy’s trembling arms and taken to the pound to be destroyed, all over a little mistake by a little dog owned by a little girl who was a little too dreamy to stop him from being a little too curious.

THAT is what made the old lady so grim and frightening – Why, (as Dorothy would say) what kind of person wants to murder a bright-eyed puppy over some chewed up shrubbery? Who is she, to declare that patch of nature belonged to her, and not the dog?  She’s an evil bitch is what she is, and Dorothy’s dream proved it, transforming the wicked old lady on the bike with the bell (ching ching!) into a green faced cackling monster on a broom that mounted itself into the sky on a whirlwind of dark necromancy.

My porpoise mind breaks the surface of the water and I open my eyes to see that it is 6:30a and Ching Ching! my friend Kaiya is text messaging me that she can’t make it to the gym this morning.   I get up, put on my robe and walk into the living room where my computer is perched on the flat arm of a brown leather chair in front of the old-fashioned six-paned windows that front our elegant Victorian Lady, she of the long torso and narrow shoulders, she of the fresh paint job like understated makeup.

I think, I’ll just get a couple of things done that need doing and I do them and idly look at the time and how in the *world* did it get to be 9:30 already? I check my email to see if Lonnie replied to my request to stop by around this time to pick up some stuff and his answer is the kind of answer that makes me smile,  an unstudied welcoming warmth that is half and again more satisfying than flirting, so I head over, and when I get there he is making coffee and we talk while I gather some things, we talk about our plans for the weekend, then about the scary smart quickness (or is it scary quick smartness) of Stephen Colbert (he of that surprising sweet boyish smile that now and again surfaces like a porpoise, showing his true heart amidst all that satire) and how it’s a fond wish of mine to write the kind of book that would get me invited on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report because when those guys invite an author onto the show it’s because they’ve actually read the book, in fact they’ve gone further than just read, they’ve digested it, they’ve cogitated on it, and now they have questions about it and I always feel sort of sweetly touched by how the authors respond to this treatment, not with amazement but rather with no surprise at all, as if it is the regular thing to work hard on book and then sit down with super smart people who read it and liked it and *actually want to talk about the book and the ideas therein*. 

In a world of Jon and Kate Plus Eight (a show I've never seen but have been showered with the shrapnel of, nonetheless) exploding from the television in a geyser of bloody familial destruction, those author interviews feel like a fucking miracle and it is good to know that they aren’t, that there are in fact plenty of people in the world who are writing and reading and talking about real reality and not reality television reality.

Then we talk about the effects of music on the brain and guitar and singing and musicals and a play I’m going to see and the conversation meandered from there to books and clothes and real estate and then I see  it is getting late and make my goodbyes and walk the three blocks to my trusty little car and then race home where I burst through the door expecting to be chastised for not having started my packing when the Super Shuttle is due to arrive in an hour but the h, bless him,  is not in a chastising mood which is typical of  him, he is sitting on the couch with his computer on his lap working and has pretty much been unaware of time passing until I burst in. 

We throw our suitcases on the floor and begin piling clothes in and then I run outside and jump in my car and drive it half a mile up the street making a right on Temple, a little used side street that is a good place to park during extended trips, it is one of a handful of streets left in the city where you can park long-term and not worry about getting a ticket due to lack of a community parking sticker or street cleaning requirements.

I curb my wheels and as always a ghostly voice sang out “Up Up and Awaaaaay” because that’s how I remember which way to curb the wheels, up hill is away from the curb, downhill is towards and you can laugh but if you get it wrong in my city it can cost you $150 if one of those little DPT cars finds you and it WILL, you can count on it, because those DPT cars are as ubiquitous as flies on shit, they are like death and taxes, they are the one thing you can always be sure of, that in a battle between luck and the city’s need for parking ticket revenue, luck is not the favorite, especially if it’s mine. 

If we sent a crew of those little cars to Afghanistan we’d end the war in a month, with American generals standing next to tanks that have seventeen tickets on them, asking passersby ‘you can see that my wheels are curbed correctly, will you be my witness in court?” and Taliban ripping off their turbans and stomping them in the dust in mad frustration because they weren’t blocking the driveway dammit and now they have to go to the DMV and wait in line to get the boot taken off their car.

Except today I am lucky because I find a parking spot without even having to look and a big one to boot (!), and then I get out and run back to the house, not jog but actually run, arms pumping, even though I am in low slung jeans and high heeled boots (!) and a long sleeved black silk t-shirt that begins to stick to me as my body heats up with the exertion. I race past a construction crew that whistles and claps, down the hill and around the corner I RUN the half mile to the house, up the steps and burst in and the man looks up from his computer and does not chastise me for leaving such a crucial task for the last minute because this is not the first time I’ve done this, this is in fact the third time that I have made this exact same run down the exact same hill, racing to beat the arrival of the Super Shuttle because I still have some packing to do. 

You’d think I’d learn but apparently no, I will be doing this when I am eighty, making a mad dash that is not at all metaphorical, a mad dash to get ready to go have some fun.

 An aside: there were a lot of boots in the last three paragraphs, weren't there?  And we think, as writers, that we're choosing our words - but here they are, obviously choosing *me* and what should I make of that?

The phone rings and it is an automated message from the Super Shuttle van and we start cramming things into our bags willy nilly and I have a moment of disappointment when I can’t locate the new Irvine Welsh book Crime because I am really looking forward to reading it on the plane, have been ever since I read this excerpt in the store which I will kindly share with you now and ask you, how fucking good is this, man, how fucking good IS this it is that good, hear for yourself the description of a man running:  Ray Lennox walks quickly through the glass doors and out of the police station. His jarring staccato descent down the steps evokes a pianist playing chopsticks. At the bottom he breaks into a trot and then a sprint.  The lay-off from his sporting endeavors is painfully evident: his weight hangs around his heart and lungs and his leg muscles ache. Under his soles the slabs on the sidewalks are cracked and uneven, and he self-consciously fears for his footing. Then the bilious mass seems to lift, his chest holding the air, lightening him, and Lennox is flying. 

Man that is some writing chops baby that is some writing chops. And so I fly around the house and finish packing (and I find the book!!) and the super shuttle guy is idling outside, literally idling, the van in park and the driver standing on the walk having a smoke and squinting at our house, then pacing patiently back and forth, smoking and stopping to examine a wire that sticks out of a garage door, a wire that apparently goes to nowhere and he leaves it with a shrug and steps across the street to help us load our bags in to the car. 

The trip to the airport is not super at all, it is in fact quite slow because we wait too long at one place and no traveler shows up and we all agree this is pretty rude behavior and I wonder briefly at how oblivious people are to their selfishness, thinking they should call Super Shuttle and cancel but somehow not getting around to it and now there are three people sitting here in an idling van experiencing anxiety as they wait for the no-show (and is he/she in there hiding behind grandma's hand-me-down divan, perhaps, waiting for us to go away? orr is he/she just now waking up woozily in the bed of stranger across town thinking uh oh, something's wrong, knowing they are missing something important but unable to remember what).  Now the driver  is calling  his dispatcher, and we  his passengers  are using our iPhones and Blackberries, worriedly searching to find out  if the cutoff time for checking a bag is an hour or forty five minutes before a flight because if it’s the latter, time is getting really really tight.

We finally leave the no-show to his or her fate and wend our way to the final pick up, a woman who looks like she is going on a trip – she is a robustly figured woman in white capris and a white jacket with a bright stripey shirt and a white visor wrapped around her steel-gray coiffure, the kind of visor with a terry cloth bill. Her clothing and her luggage scream “cruise!’ but when we ask her she merrily tells us about her visit with her grandchildren, which has just concluded. We exhange a smile because her clothes were screaming not "cruise" but "I didn't know northern California would be so effing cold, I thought it would be sunny and warm like Los Angeles!" a mistake we have all made at one time. 

The Visor Lady  is from Minnesota and the three of us settle in for the kind of chat that is typical of Midwesterners, and the ride to the airport passes quickly and we are there and wave goodybe to the Visor Lady.  The lines are long and it turns out the cut off for checking a bag is forty five minutes and we make it, just barely, laughing because we always do this and somehow we always get away with it like the time we both had the flight departure time wrong and showed up for a flight to Puerto Vallarta just ten minutes before take off and managed to talk our way onto the plane, and this wasn’t even that long after September eleventh.

The plane is delayed so we have an excellent sushi dinner – salmon and tuna sashimi, edamame, unagi roll and fresh fruit for dessert and then we finish and head to the plane and they are boarding our row and now here I sit, on my way to New York and telling you about it. I hope everyone has a great weekend.  We’ll be seeing a play and just generally hanging out with the seventeen year old, a two- or three time per year event we cherish. We may see a Harry Potter movie because that is a thing we do, we read, watch and discuss Harry Potter and the whole concept of good and evil as they occur within the same person and how religion as much as it might like to claim to be so is nevertheless not the seat of all human morality, the type of conversation which I highly recommend if you have a sweet, intelligent, curious, super tall, beautiful and absolutely delightful seventeen year old in your life, as I do mine.