And Louis Armstrong was singing beside the zucchini

On Sunday evening we picked blackberries in the park across the street and I baked them into scones the next morning. I felt the most appallingly Hallmarkian glow of contentment at the thought of living in a city where I can do this.

Furthermore, on Tuesday, 2 and I biked to the new farmer's market, not five blocks from our house, where vendors set up stands under colorful tents in a lot next to a well-tended community garden... and wait! there's more!

In the middle of this garden there grows an enormous mulberry tree, under which is arranged a semi-circle of straw bales covered with checkered tablecloths. Every market day at 4:30, a neighborhood mother with a real! English accent reads a Beatrix Potter book amid the bales. As soon as we arrived at the market, 2 put on a gauzy bit up dress-up fluff from the play tent and held the hand of the Book Mother to walk into the garden.

What did you expect? Of course the sky was azure and the clouds symmetrical!

Rhymin' Simon and the Bright Colors of Immortality

4 p.m. Thursday. It's real hot. At the traffic light we pull up beside another car with all the windows rolled down, just as the light turns green. I realize music from Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" is spilling out, the frenetic instrumental bridge. I look over and it's two boys, probably about 20, probably Korean. My eyes meet the driver's eyes for the briefest of moments. He doesn't know why.

I can't help smiling.

"That's Paul Simon. Huh," I say to 2, riding in the back seat.

"I thought I recognized it!" she says. There's a pause. "I'm glad they're... I'm glad people play that music you and dad play. I want people to still be listening to it when I'm grown up."


It was a lovely moment and I didn't feel like ruining it with reassurances that if the song has lasted 35 years (for her, 3 1/2 lifetimes), it'll probably stick around for a while longer. I did break the news, however, when she asked me to put the tape on, that I had thrown it away a few weeks ago. It had finally spindled and warped beyond the point of playability.