Okay, This Is Really It

It's the last night of our vacation, and we spent a peaceful evening people-watching at Cafe Amadeus downtown near the university. There was a lot of humanity to watch, most of it relaxed and beautiful -- old, young, black, white, brown, golden, couples, groups, dogs -- the usual diversity of an academic community. It seemed like everybody was out enjoying the beautiful evening, eating outdoors in the cafes, strolling around. The only sour note at all was a group all wearing matching yellow t-shirts saying "Sarah and Malcolm: The Wedding Party Pub Crawl." These people were raucously, insultingly drunk, and there were lots of them. They would have been a blight on Bourbon Street. One young woman, jostled and insulted by them, remarked to her companion, "Oh look, !@#%$(*s in matching shirts." We wanted to applaud.

I'm all packed up for the flight home. I had to move all the stuff from my carry-on that is legal on trains but not on airplanes. Basically, you can carry anything you want onto a train; airplanes, not so much. It's been a great week, it really has. I'm going to miss the traveling around, but even more, and I might as well say this here, I'm going to miss the closeness with Hank. We often pass like ships in the night at home -- he goes to bed when I get up, we both have meetings and responsibilities. But here, out in the world together, we have time to laugh, to really talk, to play silly games, and generally be in love. If I could wish for one thing, and I do, it's that we carry some of the carefree spirit we've had this week into the summer ahead.