Last night, AJ and I went for a walk along the wooded nature trail in our neighborhood. It was almost dinnertime and AJ had suggested the walk. He carried with them a large sheaf of sticks that he refused to put down, even as he hiked down the slippery logs that serve for stairs descending into the park. We followed the winding trail around fallen trees, over small bridges, stopping to watch the running water. When we got to the end by the ponds at the foot of our street, AJ paused, �Mommy, let�s just watch.� We both squatted in the grass and looked over the pond. It was very quiet. �What a beautiful sunset, � AJ observed, as the sun began its descent behind the trees in front of us. A waterbug skimmed across the pond. AJ wanted to look for frogs, but I told him I thought it was still a little too soon to see them � in the summer that pond holds hundreds of them, attracting small boys for miles around.

We bounced across the narrow boards the bridged the stream between the ponds and headed home by street. �Mommy, when we get home I want to draw a picture of the sunset. I will draw mountains and the sun.� �That sounds like a nice picture.� We arrived in our driveway and I headed for the front door, then noticed AJ was not behind me. He was sitting on the lawn looking at the sky. �Mommy, can I draw my picture outside?� I ran in, grabbed his crayons and a pad of paper and returned. AJ selected his crayons carefully and drew his picture of jagged mountains with a beatific sun beaming over them.

The picture�s here to remind me of our lovely evening. Three cheers for free wireless connections in boring hotel rooms! I spent 5 hours in my car today to arrive at a hotel from which I can see three car lots and a Red Lobster. There is also a disturbing looking van parked directly under the window of my room. It appears to have a gun rack (empty) and both rosary and Mardi Gras beads hanging from the mirror. And apparently, I am staying in a college dorm. There are kids screaming and giggling down the hall. I actually went down there earlier and asked them to shut their doors. Yes, I am that grumpy neighbor who wave his cane in the air and screams at kids to get off his lawn. But in my defense, I have to be up by 6:30.

I am staying just outside the town where my father grew up. We used to come here a lot when we were kids, but after my grandfather died and then my grandmother, we didn�t get back much, if at all. I don�t think I�ve been here since I was in my teens. After I arrived at my hotel, my aunt came by to pick me up and take me to dinner. I haven�t seen her since my wedding. She took me to her favorite Chinese restaurant where live turtles swam in tanks. The food was great and it was great to talk to her. I finally got to hear the whole story about my uncle (her brother), a Ph.D. in English lit who went on to become an attorney, who met a director at a party who said he was perfect for a particular character in a film he was making (my uncle, to the best of my knowledge, had no previous acting experience) and found himself in a major Hollywood film in a not insignificant part and my quite possibly be embarking on yet another career. We went back to my aunt�s house after dinner, which I haven�t been to since we were kids and we hung out in the basement playing ping-pong with my cousins. She gave me a bag of things she�d collected from my grandparents and my great aunts. There were two paperweights from my Great Aunt R�s vast collection that Great Aunt R. had labeled in her tiny script, one for me and one for my brother. My brother�s is a glass cube with a large chunk of turquoise embedded in the center. Mine is egg-shaped with an abstract explosion of copper, orange and blue in the center like a flame. Strangely, their respective places of origin are oddly appropriate for us --- my brother�s is from Israel, where he was living until he moved across the border to Jordan last summer. And mine is from Ireland � I play Irish fiddle. My great aunt wouldn�t have known either of those things before she died. Strange. There were also old pictures of me and my brother, a whole sheaf of blurry pictures that I�d taken with my old Kodak instamatic and must have sent to my grandmother. There is a corroded silver plated butter knife that was my grandmothers, a pair of child-sized horn-rimmed glasses that were my father�s, a beautiful green mechanical pencil engraved with my grandfather�s initials and a small bag full of beautiful marbles that Aunt K. thinks were my dad�s. It is a strange and meaningful collection. After I said goodbye to Aunt K., I brought the bag back up to my room and spread everything out on the bed. It seems funny to have such personal items in such an impersonal place, but comforting too.

Tomorrow I head a half an hour south to the conference. My paper is at 11. It�s the same paper I gave in February, so I�m not too worried about it, although I am a little worried about the fact that I�m not worried. I�ll be glad to have something to do. I miss my boys at home.

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