Plenty geeked about this event.

Hey Siri, what’s the Italian word for bubbles? It’s not a word one would expect to need. Life is unpredictable. I’ve enjoyed this morning’s walk more than usual, perhaps because it’s the last one. I’ve been in Pesaro for the past week, staying with my daughter, her husband and kids. We ride bikes to the beach, we ride bikes to bars and restaurants, at the end of the day we ride home, tired, full, sometimes a tiny bit drunk, and happy.

“He was driving one of those big black SUV’s,” I say to Tizi. “A Tundra.” It’s a Saturday night. We’re watching “What Just Happened,” a movie that critics in 2008 agreed was a bad movie about a bad movie. We’ve reached the point where in a minute one of us will say, Do we want to watch this? “And what happened?”

I've downshifted. These days I'm concentrating on "micros," short narrative pieces that bring 2-3 memories together. You can see a bunch of them in my micro-memoir pages (see menu, above). Here's an example. “I think it’s the son,” Tizi says. The dentist’s house, we call it. Someone is moving in. Summer days we would see him sitting on a lawn chair on the driveway, watching cars go by,

A man approaches me in the Kroger parking lot. He could be fifty years old as easily as he could be seventy. He’s wearing faded khaki pants and a tan short-sleeve shirt. His hair, the color of rust, is cut close to his head. He tells me he doesn’t speak English. I hear Eastern Europe in his accent. Maybe I see that in his face.

It’s not an infestation.  Call it a visit. Near the end of May I start noticing flies in the house, on downstairs windows, buzzing back and forth between the kitchen and family room. First one, then two, then a couple three or four or five. Every day a few more. Twenty years ago, in late summer, we dealt with a full-force infestation, an invasion.

Too bad about the "too." It was an odd crossroad and it was dark. A mile out of town the two-lane road came to a stop. You turned left for the airport or you turned right to take the drive around the airport. There was no third option. That evening a woman went straight and in ten feet ran out of road and drove her car into a ditch.          

I tell Tizi, “I want a hat like that.”  We’re on the second level of Somerset, a local mall. It’s a chi-chi place that used to be called “The Collection.” That chi-chi. We’ve come to buy a birthday present for a friend. When we get off the escalator a woman walks by us wearing the almost perfect summer hat. It looks like it’s made of canvas.

There it is, the burning barrel. In the corner of the back yard of our house on Main Street. It's a 55 gallon drum. The top has been cut out of it. One of my jobs is to "burn the papers." Any paper trash goes in a waste basket, in the corner of the kitchen. In any weather--rain or sleet or snow--when the basket is full, I take it out to the barrel, light the papers on fire, stand back, and watch.

It would be a heist. We’re standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the lot where Frank Lloyd Wright's Master Builder Harold Turner built a beautiful house in 1959. Walking past it, we admire its large windows, its brick and wood and its slanting roof that seems to flow down toward the road. The house harmonizes with the piece of ground it sits on.

We’re leaving the house to go find lunch. Tizi asks, “Do you have a copy of Marcus Aurelius?” “No, why?” “I thought it might be a good gift for the boys.” Safe, for sure. These are high school boys. They’ll have birthdays. She’ll be ready. A few years ago I bought a book of poetry for their sister who was graduating from high school.

Ah, strawberries. A June fruit in Michigan. That’s what our trusted fruit man at one of the local farmers markets would always say. I’ve been rushing the season. All week I’ve been seduced by those plump blushing beauties in their plastic baskets, arriving from who knows where. When I set a bowl of them on the table today, my wife said, “Did you read something about strawberries?” Meaning had someone made an argument for their salubrious qualities?

“What the heck,” Tizi says. “We might as well have another piece.” One of many reasons I love her. It’s lunch time, when postprandial delights are in order. Usually we finish with three almond cookies each, dunked in double shots of espresso smoothed with a few teaspoons of milk. Today, instead, we’re having slices of columba. Columba is a traditional Easter cake, in the shape of a dove (“columba” being the Italian word for dove).

Tentative cover, for this site only If I had to choose my favorite essay in this collection, today it would probably be "Toothpicks" (tomorrow "Beans and Baroque," the day after that "Socks Optional"). When I started writing "Toothpicks" I didn't know I was going to wander into the social and cultural history of the toothpick. (Portuguese nuns, it is argued, make the world's most highly prized ones.) And I didn't know I would stumble upon the fact that "Hang On, Sloopy" is the official rock song of the state of Ohio—by an act of the 116th Ohio General Assembly—and that the Ohio State University marching band plays it on the football field at every home game.

Early in Linda Sienkiewicz's Love and Other Incurable Ailments, the narrator Serenity Tomczyk, confesses, “My heart ached over a stranger named Birdy,” establishing the motive for the decisions she will make and the actions that lie ahead. Who is Birdy? Can she find him? Then what? Serenity, a character who is anything but serene, is a loveable bundle of neuroses.

“Please sign on the pad,” the rep says. I’m at the Sixt rental car counter at San Francisco International. From here Tizi and I will drive three hours south and east to Mariposa for a family visit. The rep points at the 4 x 6 screen with its attached stylus on the counter, an odd marriage of new and old technology.

What got my attention was a BuzzFeed post I saw a few days ago.  I would put it in the snarky-remarks-Europeans-make-about-Americans category. Lots of snark. So much you need subcategories. What irritates Europeans about Americans who travel abroad, for example: Americans talk too loud, Americans tell what state they come from (people from Michigan, raise your hand!). Americans are polite, they smile all the time, they engage total strangers, like cashiers, in conversation.

I had ulterior motives. For a few years, whenever I had a blood pressure check, as soon as I felt the cuff tighten, I waited for the look. Perched on the examination bed at the doctor’s office, my arm in a nurse's hand, or on the unforgiving folding chair at the Red Cross donating center, my arm in the nurse’s hand, I saw the same look coming as soon as the device began to exhale or once the Velcro patches were ripped apart.

So I had to get something.  Buy something. My wife and I were on the ninth day of a ten-day stay in Italy. She had visited her cousin’s boutique in Pesaro.  And her favorite shoe store and bookstore and her favorite herbalist in Rimini. And a great toy store in Bologna. And her scarf and headband lady in Santarcangelo. She was pretty loaded.

“I don’t like the word cheese,” my wife says. We’re driving home from the grocery store, where we have just bought a couple mozzarella balls to slice and lay over tomato slices at lunch today. I am surprised and delighted. Forty-two years of marriage and I never knew this about her. I tell her cheese seems like a perfectly good word.  

I was first in line at the Lahser and Maple Kroger yesterday morning, a Sunday. The doors would open at 7:00. I’d been waiting in my car for fifteen minutes, cars pulling into the lot after me, first one, then two or three at a time, killing headlights, engines. I was there more out of curiosity than immediate need. The day before I’d been to Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Menards at 7:00 a.m., checking on what they were out of. 

Tizi says, Hey why don’t you Google the local stores and find out if they have special hours for senior citizens?   And I think, But why would I do that?  And then I remember. I haven’t developed the habit of thinking of myself as a senior citizen. Then it hits you, like a pie in the face. A week ago, talking to my son in LA, I described our distancing regime during the pandemic. 

I’m feeling good about our ditch. Between our house and the house next door, running from the street to the back of the lot, this ditch conveys water to a large storm drain. Surface water drains into this ditch. Our sump water is pumped into this ditch. The water from the long ditch across the street, a major tributary, flows under the road through 12-inch pipe and into our ditch.