13--The Sleepers

 

                                                                                     

                                                    

 

The Windhover

          To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

   dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy!  then off, off forth on swing,

   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

   Rebuffed the big wind.  My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

   Buckle!  AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

 

   No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down silion

Shine, and blue-bleak ember, ah my dear,

   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

                                                                                      Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The intercom buzzed at 10:00 a.m. as, shoulders hunched, he was trying to compose on his desktop in the southwest corner of the great room on a cool, partly sunny late September day.  High above the town, glancing now and then at seagulls cruising rooftops, he had on a hunch typed out "The Windhover" and was waiting uneasily for words to emerge.  Grateful for the excuse to pause but nettled by the obligation to respond, he went to the intercom phone hanging on the wall by the front door. 

"Yes?"

"Hi, Wayne!  It's Solveig."

His heart thumped once and then skittered.  Apparently, his dosage of Sotolol was not sufficiently powerful to preclude all atrial fibrillation.  His fingers shook.  His lungs spasmed.

"SOLveig?"

"Yes!"

"Please come UP."

He buzzed her in and opened his unit door.  How was his hair?  Was his shirt--a black cotton tee--wrinkled?  He heard slow, heavy steps climbing, sensed a pause at the first landing, heard slow, heavy steps again, heard panting, sensed a pause at the second landing.  When thudding resumed, he edged out onto his own landing and beamed down upon Solveig seven steps below as she labored up, supporting herself with a hand on the railing, her compact black leather purse dangling from her left shoulder on a long, thin strap.  She beamed back, puffing, probably sweating.  How stout she was!  Not obese, exactly, but certainly a couple of clicks north of zaftig, a BMI of 29, probably, in contrast to Diane's lifelong athletic 20.  She wore a black diaphanous thigh-length wrap and a white, scoop-necked long-sleeved tee offering an inch of cleavage, untucked over ankle-length black slacks.  Her feet were broadly visible in black, rhinestone-studded sandals with a strap at the ankle and another at the base of the toes, which were painted magenta, hyperlinking to her hair.  Her hair!  Still auburn, chestnut, henna!  Surely, these grayer days, she was having her roots done?  Still pulled back from her broad forehead, secured above the ears with combs, and extending to the middle of her back.  And perched atop it, a black beret.  Slowly she climbed, shrugging and rolling her ice-blue eyes behind hexagonal horn rim glasses, coppery red and rutilant beneath the stairway skylight.

"Sherpa!" she gasped.  "Oxygen!"

Her ascension at last complete, she extended her arms wide, as he did his, and they embraced and squeezed.  He could feel her heart pounding against his, felt some moisture seeping through the back of her shirt and wrap, scented the jasmine perfume radiating from her overheated body.

"SOLveig, what a shOCK!  WHAT are you DOing here?  I MEAN in EDmonds?"

"I wanted to see you, get more directly involved in your story."

"My STOry?"

"Yes.  A How Pretty Town.  I wanted to see this brave new Edmonds that you write of."

"How LONG has it been since you were HERE?"

"Forty years.  Since my parents sold their business and retired in '78 and moved to the Virgin Islands.  Before that I was here a few times after I graduated from Whitman and moved to Manhattan to look for some sort of editorial work in the book business.  In '65 I came back to marry my boss at Pendant Publishing, Walter Lippmann, at the Everett Golf and Country Club in front of my parents' golfing friends and some of my sorority sisters and a few EHS friends like Sylvia and Dorothy and Carolyn and Dave.  I was disappointed that you never responded to my invitation.  Then I was here in the '70s on a few occasions to visit my parents and let them have some time with my children, Oscar and Samantha."  She smiled.  "I did not come back for my second marriage.  Or my third."

"Well, my God, you look wonderful!  Just a filigree of wrinkles around your eyes and your mouth.  A few short vertical creases above and below your lips.  Where are the DITCHES?   Crevices?  Sunbursts?"

"It's not Botox, if that's what you're hinting.  It's just an abundance of my own subcutaneous fat.  Although I would not disdain Botox if I thought I needed it.  But look at you!  I think you and I have reversed weights since our high school days.  How skinny you are!  About 40 pounds less than the doughy Wayne I used to know."

"So come on in.  Sit down.  Cool off."  He led her to the camel-colored  leather couch that faced the town-sea-mountainscape.   "Can I get you a glass of something?  Sparkling water, cranapple juice, an IPA, some chardonnay?"

She slipped off her wrap and sat.  "Some water would be fine."

"BRB.  Oh, no, I did not just say that!"

Solveig laughed.  "AAMOF, I love text language!" she called to him as he entered the kitchen.  "There's  much to be said for condensation.  Not that I don't love your prose style.  DGMW!"

"YJMTU!"  he called back, his head in the refrigerator.

"YGM!"

He returned with two tumblers of un-iced coppery gold liquid.  "In honor of the occasion, how about some ginger beer?"

She smiled.  "Are you referencing my hair?"

"Yes.  An homage to the prettiest hair at EHS."

He clinked her glass and sat next to her, side-saddle, right leg crossed over left.  They sipped and gazed at each other over the rims of the tumblers.  He sensed the Sotolol beginning to brake his runaway heart.  He noticed tiny random flecks of orange in her horn rims.  Eventually Solveig glanced outward.

"Wayne, this view is just gorgeous!  The little town could not be lovelier today.  Wearing like a garment the beauty of the morning."

"The ships and shops and condos all bright and glittering, steeped for the moment in our peekabooing sun?  For a long time now this room has been for me a fine prospect from which to recollect emotion in tranquility.  A tranquility  which I do not feel at the moment, BTW.  But soft, I pray me, no more!  I do feel lucky that Diane and I were able to afford this place on our middle-class incomes in 1985.  Today it would cost five times what we paid for it."

They sipped.  Solveig's jowls jiggled when she swallowed.  "I like the ginger.  The piquant woodiness."

"So when did you get in?  How long are you staying?  Where are you staying?"

"I arrived yesterday.  Ubered out from SeaTac.  I'm at the Harbor Square Best Western for a week.  Sylvia has been my contact.  Did Happy Hour with her at Salt and Iron.  Vodka martinis and steak salad.  Edmonds fooding has certainly changed since the heyday of Brownie's Cafe!  She drove me up here this morning."

"And you're here to get more involved in my story?

"Yes.  Is that it on the computer screen over there?"

"Yes.  But what does getting involved even mean?"

"It means that I want to stimulate you and your thinking, your truing and skewing, and use you to do a little of that for myself.   At this age I think we need each other.  I kind of feel like Emily returning from the dead to Grover's Corners."  She patted his free hand with hers.

He flinched with pleasure.

"There are so many things to share.  I was hoping we could take some walks and have some talks.  I'm a little jealous of Sylvia and Liz Ann."

"Well, sure, we can do that.  I'd love to do that.  You have the energy?  You want to start now?"

"I have the energy for short walks.  Not the full Gourmand Way or Ecclesiastical Way experience all at once, but perhaps a neighborhood at a time."

"Sure.  Today's the Saturday Market.  We could drive up past your old house on Walnut and  park on 6th by the Christian Science church near Lumsden's old place and visit the Market, then see what you're up for after that.  There are so many places I'd like to show or see anew with you." 

"Good.  Let me just use the bathroom first."

"Go down the hallway, through the bedroom, and use mine.  You can see the ferry docking from the toilet."

"So I've read!"  She handed him her empty glass and heaved herself up. 

He rinsed the glasses in the kitchen sink and trailed her to his bedroom to get ready.  His jeans were okay.  He kicked off his slippers and laced up the two-tone black and silver Under Armour basketball high tops that he had bought online when he decided to enter the shooting contests at St. George.  He heard the toilet flush.  He pulled the tee shirt off, tossed it in the hamper, and lifted his clean blue-and-white checked short-sleeve shirt from its closet hanger.  The bathroom door opened, and Solveig came out.

Shirtless, he tried with minimal success to roll his shoulders back, straighten his spine, suck in the half-inch ripple of flab that hung over the waistband of his 32-inch jeans. 

"Well," she said, "quite an experience!  Up too high to have Toms peeping at me, me peeping at them instead while I peed.  I could see cars and pedestrians streaming northward on 5th.  They're heading to the Market?  I felt like I was hovering invisibly over the grandeur of the town, Holy Ghost-like brooding over the bent world--with warm breasts, if not bright wings!" 

He laughed, dawdling a few seconds before putting on the shirt.

"You know, you're not exactly swole, but for a skinny guy, you've got some muscles. Tupac abs, training bra pecs, unleavened dinner roll bis.  Your workouts are doing you good.  Wayne Manley Adams!  The windhoverer."

"Well, Hopkins is one of my favorite poets."

"Mine, too.  And I'm thinking, in keeping with a theme of yours, that Hopkins' prosody, his sprung rhythm, is perhaps his unconscious intunition of quantum mechanics.  His unpatterned variety of stressed and unstressed syllables is a kind of quantum entanglement that heightens the import of words put together in the quirky, quarky process of composition.  'In his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air' is just so lovely, bits of language separately sprung and then strung together, staccato blending into lilting legato, syntactic rhythm turning diction photo-electric.  And ee cummings, too, now that I think about it!  Quirky syntactic structures--'pretty how town,' 'up so floating many bells down,' 'down they forgot as up they grew'--casting words in a new light.  Producing a kind of Higgs field through which words pass and gain mass and meaning."

"Ah, so this is why you came back--to enrich my thinking."

"Yes.  But I also want to see, and help you to see, this town.  So why don't you button up your shirt and we'll go?" She pinched some fabric and leaned forward to look at it.  "That's  the shirt you were wearing when you had a beer with Liz Ann, isn't it?" 

"Yes."

He buttoned up and grabbed a navy blue UW baseball cap.  He filled pockets with wallet, phone, and keys.  "All set.  I've got a catheter in the glove box of my car if I need it."

"Where you used to keep the condoms!"

They returned to the great room, where he saved his work and logged out. 

"I have such a fear of forgetting to Save or of hitting a wrong button and erasing everything.  Or of some invasive crooked worm gnawing at my computer's brains.  Or of incurring a power surge that my suppressor fails to suppress."

"You don't make a hard copy as you go?"

"No."

"I would advise you to do that."

"Yeah, I'm sure you're right."

From the coat closet the old man selected a powder blue vest, "Tennis Championship Monte Vista 2009" embroidered in gold on its left breast, memento of the final time he and Diane had won together, she flying around the court to return difficult shots and give him a chance to score points on volleys at the net, from the hall closet.  Solveig slipped her wrap on and they stepped out to the landing.  "Going down is sure to be easier on my heart and lungs, but I still need to be careful because of my arthritic knees, so I'm going to cling to the handrail."

They descended slowly, side by side.  His balance was as precarious as hers, but he was ready to grab her if need be.  Coming out of the parking garage, he stopped the Santa Fe at the sidewalk for pedestrians passing, then nosed his way into traffic. "Morning Edition" had just concluded on KNKX, the NPR station, and Marian McPartland's "Somewhere (There's A Place For Us)" was  playing on the mid-day jazz segment. 

"That was one of Diane's favorites," the old man said.

"I know."

He drove to Walnut and turned right.  Halfway up the block, choked with condos that had replaced single-family ramblers on wide, grassy lots, he pointed and said, "I lived right about there when I was a freshman at EHS."

"I know.  I used to think about you now and then."

"Really?  I did not know that."

They passed a parked truck the color of honey mustard whose driver was carrying bags of frozen food toward a condo entry.

"Wayne, look!  We're taking Schwan's Way!"

He smiled.

"And look at what's become of my family's old place," she said when they reached 6th.  "Our blocky Craftsman with the basement that my dad ran his plumbing business out of has become a split-level with picture windows facing the Sound--or the Sea, I guess it's called now--and a wide cedar deck that runs the length of the house.  Actually, I have to admit, it looks better.  I don't miss the way it was, but in a sense I miss the way it is now.  I mean, it might be good to live there."

"Why don't you come back?"

"I'm married, Wayne."

"Oh, right.  Well, let's just crawl through this area, running from 6th to 7th and Walnut to Maple.  It was called Cedar Valley back when my grandfather was a young man."

"What's it called today?"

"Nothing that I know of."

"I think in your story you should call it the Lower East Side, and then the area from 7th to 9th and from Pine to Bell, with all those big houses cantilevering their way up the hill, would be the Upper East Side."

"So that would make the area between 3rd and Sunset, from Main to Caspar, the Upper West Side?  And between the beach and Highway 104, from the Dog Park to Main, would be the Lower West Side?"

"Exactly."

"Actually, I do often conceive of the Bowl as Manhattan, with scattered outer boroughs like Firdale and Five Corners and Perrinville and the International District comprising the rest of the city."

"I know you do.  But what's special about the Bowl, as opposed to Manhattan, is that it remains scaled for humans.  You can see the sky, and except near some of the newer condo developments you don't feel cramped.  How quiet it is right here!  The Lower East Side is really a step back in time.  It's almost the way it was when my family lived here in the late '40s and early '50s.  Local traffic only, spacious yards.  Houses still unpretentious, upgraded but modestly so, cedar-sided bungalows with composition shingles on the roof.  A sprinkling of  two-story places with dormers but, because of very sensible zoning restrictions, no McMansions.  And look at this on the right--two really dumpy tiny ramblers with rotting roofs and siding!  They must date back to the '30s.  Amazing that they haven't been bought up and torn down and redeveloped.  Sure, there's no view, but still this is the Bowl, and it would be a nice neighborhood for kids to grow up in.  It was for me!"

They turned left at 7th.  "Look, the alley's still here between Walnut and Alder!  Gravel with a deep grassy median because it's so little used.  Still perfect for playing hide-and-seek or kick-the-can."

They turned on Alder and drove back to 6th.  "When I was four," the old man said,  "I used to live right there on the west side of 6th, between a patch of woods on the south and Claudia Ward on the north."

"I know, although I wasn't here yet. We left Ballard and moved to Edmonds in 1946, when you were living on Maple Street.  Claudia and I were friends in grade school.  We never played--or urinated!--in the woods, but we could busy ourselves with dolls and dollhouses for hours.  And look!  I can't believe that her simple little old place with the hip roof and the white, horizontal cedar siding is still there.  And that white picket fence!  And the vegetable garden!  This isn't exactly my 'How young Mama looks' moment, but it is agreeably touching.  I'm so glad I came back."

"Me too."

He turned right, crossed Maple, and parked opposite the church.

"The old Lumsden place hasn't changed either," she said.  "Same ramshackle rambler, same white cedar-plank fence."

"Remember Lenny?  The butcher at Safeway?"

"Of course.  He and my dad used to march for the American Legion, Frank Freese Post 66, in the 4th of July parades, before we moved out to Talbot."

They extricated themselves from the car, the old man zipped up his vest, and they walked across Dayton.  The old man turned, hesitated, then pointed his key fob at the Santa Fe and locked it remotely.

"The Lower East Side a pretty rough neighborhood?"  Solveig said.  "Don't want anyone to steal your catheter?"

"My bat bag, containing my precious old Mikan Freak, my brand new DeMarini Nihilist, my Wilson A700 glove, and my Under Armour high-top softball shoes, is in the cargo area.  We get very few car prowls in the Bowl, but I don't want to take a chance.  Rather than entice any freebooting kids passing by, I'll risk a charge of xenophobia."

"There's actually a bat called the Nihilist?  Who's the CEO of that company?  Art Schopenhauer?"

"Yes, there is.  It sells for $345 at so-called Cheapbats.com, but naturally I had to have it when I heard about it.  Not sure who the CEO is.  Fred Nietzsche, possibly."

They passed the Legion Hall.  "Hasn't changed," Solveig said.  "Same simple barnlike building it was when your dad was playing for New Year's Eve dances and my parents were out on the floor jitterbugging and fox-trotting."

They stopped at Main.  Foot traffic had increased.  Pedestrians passed on both sides of them.

"Remember here on the corner there was a fast-food drive-in called Day's?  Later changed hands and became Dee's?"

"No, I think that happened in the '60s, after I left."

"Yeah, you're right.  Diane and I used to go there for ice cream cones."

They waited for a pair of bike riders in helmets and blue and yellow spandex to zip by, then crossed to the west side of 6th.

 "Remember the old Shopping Cart grocery store with the huge parking lot on this corner?  Built  by Ernie Vollan and Claude Savage? Later became Thriftway?  It's now going to become--"

"Main Street Commons!  The original building plus an Old World Plaza in a new Warehouse Style building.  Touted in My Edmonds News as a refuge from urban distractions (sic!).  Going to have an Artists' Alley, an outdoor stage, a family-friendly arcade and roller bowl, and restaurant space for healthy food--vegan spots, sushi spots, juice bars.  Sure, why not?   I know that you like to call the center of the commercial area Midtown, with the hub at the 5th and Main roundabout being Times Square, but this whole section from 6th down to 3rd and from Walnut to Main, I'm thinking, with its condos and galleries and art supply stores and restaurants and specialty shops, you could call, hinting at a brave new world, SoMa, and the section between 6th and 3rd and Bell and  Daley, less commercial and more residential, NoMa.  And the Arts Corridor that the Mayor talks about establishing, on 4th from Main to the Edmonds Center for the Arts at Daley, could be Greenwich Village."

He pulled out his phone and tapped.  "Noted," he said.

They crossed Main and entered NoMa.  On the corner stood a two-story house with a broad veranda and a prominent gable-roofed dormer and matching mini-gable protecting the front door, built years before the old man and Solveig were born. 

"Doc Kretzler's old place!" Solveig said.   "My family used to go to him.  He kept his office in his home.   Newly painted creamy yellow.  Somebody has made it shine!  New white picket fence, arched trellis at the gate, flower beds along the perimeter lush with blooming yellow and copper gladiolas.  When I visualize '50s Edmonds, this image is one of the first to pop into my mind.  Stalwart, substantial.  Upright.  A symbol of virtue, success, prosperity." 

At Bell they encountered a vehicular barricade demarking the Market.  To the right, a half-block north on 6th, lay the vacant Civic Field, barren of its old grandstand.

"Ah, the old, rude high school athletic fields and the Field House where we had second grade with Mrs. Hill, soon to be Olmsteded and become the Bowl's Central Park.  Which of course would make 7th Park Avenue."

They turned west on Bell.

"Behold the Market," the old man said, gesturing to a canoply, extending the length of the block and then angling from 5th to Main, of open-sided tents erected on slender metal poles by nomadic  artisan-merchants--farmers and gardeners and fishers and woodturners  and silversmiths and jewelers and ceramicists and quilters and weavers and soapmakers--to mark their temporary turf and protect tables laden with boxes and trays of flowers and fruits and vegetables and meat and eggs and baked goods and confections and snacks and portable racks and trees of hanging artifacts. "Our little agora."

"It's charming," Solveig said.

"Uh-oh.  Do I detect condescension?"

"Not necessarily.  I urge you to refrain from prebuttal.  Let's not either of us rush to judgment.  Let's just wander and observe.  Then find a place to sit down and reflect, because in another 15 minutes I am definitely going to need a rest."

They snailed their way through or around clusters of attentive shoppers, who were reading signs, pointing, touching, asking questions, deliberating, making choices, handing over cash or credit cards, smiling, munching something, or tucking purchases into their own reusable straw baskets or cloth shopping bags.  As they neared Main, they came upon a jazz quartet of white teenage  males in black fedoras launching the moody opening chorus of "Blue Monk."

"Break time," the old man said.  "Let's stop right now and go sit on the Library steps that I skipped up and down so many times in my youth.  I have got to hear this song."

"A good choice," Solveig said.  "I love that warm old Carnegie building.  We could almost think of it as the Edmonds version of a brownstone.  And too bad Monk Monken isn't here for some classic Monk bebop."

"He wouldn't be interested.  He liked a little Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, but 'modern' jazz  bored him.  Zee and I couldn't even get him to listen to Duke Ellington."

The thin kid on alto sax began soloing, bass and drums providing rhythmic ballast, trumpeter standing by, the absence of a piano visible and audible, Monk without Monk, no idiosyncratically jagged, angular, resounding, flatted, deliciously sour comping chords and tart punctuating single notes, but the foray a pleasure nonetheless, noodling runs, a soaring ascent to the top of a roller coaster and a precipitous drop into low register followed by a bit of plangent whimpering, then the drummer, à la Art Blakey, with a rolling flourish wiped the screen like a transition in a '30s Hollywood movie, and the old man irised in on the trumpeter who took the air with a crystalline restatement of the melody followed by a long run  of wailing notes that ended in an epistrophe of sharp seagull cries before the other three rejoined him in a flatted reprise of the main chorus.

The old man's vigorous applause induced a few bystanders, and Solveig, to clap politely.  He stood, extracted his wallet, fished a five from it, strode over to the saxophonist's open instrument case and tossed in the bill, the four nodding to him in appreciation as they began to play "Round Midnight."

"That was quite nice," Solveig said as he returned to sit beside her.  "Tasty in the brackish, dry, mordant, almost fecal way that blue cheese and gorgonzola are."

"'Blue Monk,' blue cheese, the blues--yes!   My kind of music.  The minor key is the key of entropy.  It's the poignant key of life.  I'm pleased to see these young guys caring about classic bop.  Like you and me, I doubt that it has much of a future, but it was lovely while it lasted."

"Don't be too sure of its demise.  Esperanza Spalding and lots of other young musicians are playing Manhattan clubs all the time and evolving the form with fusions and infusions, according to what I hear.  Bop-rooted jazz lives on.  And so do you and I, for the moment.  But what are we to make of this crowded Market?  Who are the people coming here?  They're not all Bowlers, are they?"

"Assuredly not.  Many are from the outer boroughs of Edmonds or from Lynnwood, Shoreline, Woodway Park, Brier, Mountlake Terrace.  Some even ride the ferry over from Kingston.  But they are Bowl lovers.  They delight in coming here." 

"As we look around, certainly we can say that they are mostly white, although back on Bell we did see a handful of Asians and right over there, lining up for some crab rangoon won tons, is an African American couple.  There are a few teenagers, a sparser few like you and me from the Silent Generation, a fair number of Millennials pushing strollers or holding the hands of toddlers, lots of Gen Xers, and a scattering of Boomers, more women than men but still many couples exploring together, to all appearances settled, comfortable, prosperous, self-assured folks, polite, considerate to each other and the merchants, no jostling or edging in, calmly enjoying the scene, never making a scene, not needing to be seen, not wanting to stand out, call attention to themselves, just wanting to be a part of, blend in, unhip, unchic in their bucket hats, floppy sunhats, tennis visors, ball caps, tucked in tees and blouses, crewneck sweaters, pullover sweatshirts sometimes pulled off and tied around their waists, Gore-Tex vests, poplin windbreakers, blue jeans, mom jeans, khakis, polyester slacks, cargo shorts, white tennis shoes, Rockports.  Wardrobe by REI, Eddie Bauer, LL Bean, Nordstrom, Kohls.  No pizzazz at all, except for that black couple, she in turned-up-cuff jeans with a multi-colored rope belt and a sewn-in matching thin rope running from thigh to knee on one leg, he in tight plus-four-length black jeans with long side zippers, long black socks, and  silvery high tops very much like those Under Armours you're wearing."

"So the vibe is vapidity?  Insipidity?"

"No, not exactly.  You sense that the people are quietly excited to be here, turned on in their sedate way.  There's a sense of community but not camaraderie or competition.  They are here to enjoy the display, not to display themselves.  Like Manhattan, the Bowl is a center, a hub, but it lacks Manhattan's edge, its swarming mix of races and ages and income levels, where the ethos is do unto others before they do unto you and the sartorial key to fitting in is not fitting in."

"It's also a far cry from the evening passeggiatas that Diane and I enjoyed observing in Milan, a range of ages parading, strolling, perhaps trolling, dressed to impress, greeting friends, gossiping."

"Yes.  This is more like a secular religious celebration taking place in an open-air meme-plex.  It produces a kind of hygge, a coziness of shared values.  The Market is a safe space for the affluent and the liberal.  The Sierra Club has a presence here, with its 'Save The Edmonds Marsh' banner.  Another sign down by the intersection admonishes 'This is a Zero Waste Event/Please Use Our Recycle and Food Waste Bins.'  People are not on the streets this morning to meet with or compete with their neighbors, nor are they here just to replenish their food supply or get a ceramic plate to hang on a wall.  They're demonstrating their virtue, their piety, their belief in purposeful eating, in the nourishing and detectable, delectable, gustatory quality of pure, simple, wholesome, sustainable natural food produced on mini-farms in outlying valleys-- the Flying Tomato Farm, the Sky Valley Family Farm.  Immaculate, pesticide-free, fresh-picked, vine-ripened  fruits and vegetables grown in organically fertilized soils that are weeded by hand, home-made compotes and syrups, meat and dairy products untainted by antibiotics, fresh goat milk, eggs from free-range chickens and ducks, cuts from free-range chickens and humanely-raised pigs and lambs.  They're here for Wilson Fish Market's local troll-caught fish and for gluten-free baked goods.  For half an hour or so they are locavores, off the grid (although ready to jump back on at the ting of a text), paying nostalgic homage to an agrarian tradition, to '60s counter-culture, to the artisanal, to capitalism writ small, to producers who labor with love and are not alienated from their products, to the environmental movement, to the greening of America.   And they're seeking the ritualized sensory pleasure that the Market offers, bowing their heads to sniff astringent lilies and mums, lifting their heads to inhale the sweetish smoke from grills barbequing pork or to get a whiff of the metallic emanation from the hot oil in which caramel corn is sizzling and popping, delighting in the lurid colors crammed into a dizzying array of floral bouquets, fingering the fuzzy, doughnut-shaped peaches, the plump heirloom tomatoes, the glistening grainy blackberries, the red and golden beet goblets with their snaky umbilical-cord stems."

"So you're saying that we're spoiled?  Smug?  We're entitled, we're elitist, we're classist, we can afford to be environment-conscious and health-conscious and quality-conscious?   Our quest for authenticity is inauthentic?  We are contentedly playing our privilege card?  Flaunting our taste for the fresh, the organic, the unusual, the wholesome?  Didn't you say just a few minutes ago that the quiet Lower East Side is a great place to raise kids?  Now you're saying that we have too much beauty, safety, comfort?  We lack a salutary frisson of danger, surprise, shock?  We need some panhandlers and muggers, we need some drunks pissing in the alleys or passing out in their own puke?  We need con artists, guys running shell games, guys selling  knock-off watches?  In Lynnwood there are homeless people living in their cars on side streets or pushing shopping carts containing their entire estate down 196th while in the Bowl we deliberate over which kohlrabi might be the crispest?  We need a grittier racial and ethnic mix of people, black rappers instead of white kids culture-appropriating black jazz or that bland flautist we had last week or that bluegrass banjo picker we'll have next week?"

"No, not exactly.  The secular reverence is genuine.  This new Edmonds truly is brave in its staunch support of progressive values.  It puts on a splendid show that could not even have been imagined by our parents in the '50s.  They had no concept of purposeful eating, of making political or moral or esthetic statements in their choice of aliment.  It's just that...."

"It's a veneer?" 

"Maybe so.  Possibly there's a starker underlying reality.  Possibly the Bowl is a place where superego tamps down restless id.  There's a core of local patrons, sure, but I'm guessing that the Market is supported largely by wised-up outsiders.  Probably most of the locals don't attend and possibly many either secretly resent or are indifferent to its principles.  But enough about the Market.  Shall we move along?  Maybe find a place to get a bite?" 

They walked a few steps south to Main and paused at Pelindaba Lavender.  "The old brick Fourtner Building," the old man said.  "It housed the post office and the Safeway and then Peggy Harris Gifts for so many years, and now it's a place for all things lavender, soothing, handcrafted items for personal care therapy and home decor, made from organically certified lavender produced on a San Juan Island farm, what the owners call a 'holistic and self-contained ecological adventure,' and for a women's clothing boutique called Sound Styles."

They strolled to the intersection and paused, looking up Main to the east. 

"Oh, there's the new mural I've read about," Solveig said.  "Let's take a look."  They walked a few steps east past some pin oaks whose leaves were yellowing their way toward mocha, and gazed at, on the south side of the Fourtner, "A Mother's Love," 30 feet long and 12 feet high, a huge black and white mother Orca attended by a flight, a heavenly choir, of seagulls, tailing its cute young offspring on the surface of abstract blue and white waves.  "It's so sweet, so charming!  It's Disney, it's adorable!  A romantic anthropomorphizing of nature.  No sturm, no drang.  I'm getting that hygge feeling again.  I can hear Louis Armstrong singing 'What a Wonderful World.'" 

"So you're saying that Edmonds and the Salish Sea are idealized here as safe spaces?  That we're not edgy enough?  That the town is full of art but most of it is bland?  That we are en garde against the avant garde? That authentic, not ersatz, graffiti pulses with energy, rebelliousness, criticism, Kilroyan ululations?  That the poetry readings at Cafe Louvre are not challenging or aggressive enough?  That poems published in My Edmonds News by the Epic Poetry Group run heavily to nostalgia and 'observations'?  You're wondering where are the experimental painters and writers?  Where are the poetry slams?  Where's our 'Howl' on the one hand, our 'Wasteland' on the other, our 'Idea of Order at Key West' on the third?  You're thinking that everything here is sanitized?  You're hard-hearted Hannah calling out the evil of banality?  You're wondering where a guy can get a good lap dance in this town?  Or where a girl can score some bud?  Or where a TG can do a little vaping?  You're thinking that this mural might as well be titled 'Helicoptering Nemo'?  That the solicitous mother and innocent babe are at odds with the stark reality that is embodied in Hobbes' Leviathan or Melville's Moby Dick?  That the mural is pretty much just a feel-good ad for the whale watch cruises that are available for a fee down at the harbor?  That this is so Edmonds?  No anarchic splashes of graffiti from anti-social taggers to be found anywhere--instead, authorized, subsidized, sublimated, domesticated street art expressing the town's  idealized conception of its ethos?" 

"Well, yes.  But that doesn't mean that I don't love it.  I'm in tune with its self-conception of its ethos, with the top-down direction from the super-ego that seems to rule here.  But I still think the id needs to be heard from.  Rather, will insist on being heard from."

He smiled.  "Sing it, sister!"

She smiled back, tightly, and narrowed her eyes.  "Wait a minute, have you been reverse Malcolming me, feigning ingenuousness, getting me to do all this unpacking, just to test my bona fides?  You're playing me?" 

"Ah, so, Macduff, but if so, Macduff, it's because I simply can't get enough of your talk of the town, your take on the town.  When I hear you speak, I know I'm not dreaming.  You corroborate me."

She widened her smile and relaxed her eyes.  "Well, that's why I'm here."

He looked east and pointed.  "Remember further up Main was Evans' Music Center, where my dad and I used to buy jazz records? "

"I do.  That's where my parents bought the baby grand for our new house on Talbot."

"And then on the south side, where Epulo Bistro is now, was the old post office, after it migrated from the Fourtner Building?  The Driftwood Theater moved into that site after a new post office was built at 2nd and Main.  I appeared--'acted' would not be le mot juste-- in a couple of plays there in '64 and '65--The Waltz of the Toreadors and Nude with Violin."

They edged their way across Main, wary of colliding with focused shoppers striding toward the Market.

"Ah, Starbucks.  Might LaTasha be in there?"

"I doubt it.  She only works the early shift.  Gets off at ten."

"Might we bump into Liz Ann walking over from 4th on her way to work at the Museum?"

"I doubt it.  Her shift doesn't start until one."

They wandered south on 5th, pausing to look at the table of bargains displayed outside the doorway of the Edmonds Bookshop.

"I've always liked this little shop," the old man said.  "Warm, tight, the air close.  The old flooring creaks beneath the carpet when you walk.  They have an impressive inventory for such a small space.  Shelves and tables are really crammed together.  You have to be careful not to bump butts with your fellow browsers when you move."

"Will  A How Pretty Town lie in state on this table one day?"

"My remains on the remainder table?"

"Yes.  Is that a consummation devoutly to be wished?"

He chagrinned.  "Yes.  It shouldn't matter to me now, because it won't matter to me then, but yes.  I like to imagine the title catching the eye of a vacationing Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker's resident aphorist and elucidator of liberalism's thousand small sanities, who riffles through it, then turns to his daughter Olivia and announces that it appears to be filled with a thousand small inanities."

She smiled and helped herself to his arm, slipping her right inside his left, bicep to tricep, nudging him to the chivalric side of the walk.  Her breast abutted his elbow.  He began to tingle.

They crossed the alleyway, passed Engels' Tavern, and stopped in front of the Red Twig.  Chattering patrons were brunching or lunching in the street-side courtyard. 

"The last time I saw this place, it was still McKeever's Shell."

"We could eat here if you want."

"Fulfilling, as you used to with Diane, a Brousseauian social contract?"

"Uh-huh.  But if you don't mind, I'd rather hit The Cheesemonger for a Beef and Blue sandwich.  Your take on 'Blue Monk' has memed its way into my brain."

"Lead the way."

Drivers lined up three deep in all directions at Dayton's four-way stop waited patiently, all smiles, for the octogenarians to traverse the intersection's herringboned crosswalk of maroon brick pavers just a shade darker than Solveig's hair. 

"I think they love us," Solveig said.  "We are cute, aren't we?  Fading  flâneurs."

"Sadly, we are.  I mean, yes, we are, and that is sad.  I still cannot allow myself to use 'sadly' or 'hopefully' as a sentence modifier.  In any case, I don't like being condescended to by younger generations as I devolve."

"You'd rather they honk irritably to tell us that we're too old and slow to be in the street anymore?"

"Well, no."

They reached the sidewalk.  The cars began to move.

"So," Solveig said, "the old home of Yost's Suburban Transportation System Bus Garage and the Edmonds Motor Company."

"Yes.  Zee and I used to stop in to buy Coke stubbies for a nickel from the vending machine in the passengers' waiting room.  And then Ward Phillips, EHS class of '58--remember him?"--

"I do."

--"bought the complex in the '70s and turned it into a little two-story mall that he called Old Milltown, giving the storefronts an early 20th century look.  Our destination is just ahead, in one of the old service bays."

They wound among sizeable planters filled with flowers in Hazel Miller Plaza, an oasis that fronted the shops, entered The Cheesemonger, studied the hand-written menu on the whiteboard above the counter, the old man leaning as far forward as he could to lessen the blurriness of the letters, ordered, the Beef and Blue for him, the Speck-tacular for her, paid separately, poured themselves glasses of water from an urn, and took a corner table.

"So, where were we?" the old man said.

"Examining the virtues, the progressive pieties, of the Bowl.  It is in so many ways a shining city at the base of a hill.  Shall we count those ways?"

"Okay.  I'll start by saying that Edmonds was the first to participate in the statewide Sustainable Cities Partnership, the City Council has adopted a Climate Change Goals project to reduce the local output of greenhouse gases, the town holds frequent Styrofoam Recycling Events, as of 2020 it will no longer allow single-use Styrofoam or plastic cutlery and straws in eateries or at community sponsored events, and it's the first in the state to achieve 100% renewable energy for city buildings." 

"Being an inveterate reader of The Beacon and My Edmonds News online, I can add (broad, Ada-like, 'a' there, vain Wayne--this is fun!) that The Arbor Day Foundation has named Edmonds a Tree City USA in recognition of its commitment to effective urban forest management." 

"There exists an Edmonds Diversity Commission promoting 'diversity, equity, and inclusion'; it sponsored a Diversity Film Series at the Edmonds Theater in 2017-18, and in 2018 paraded a 4th of July banner reading 'Accept Respect Celebrate Diversity in Edmonds.'  

"We'll circle back to that," Solveig said.  "On a related note, in 2017 the Council approved changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day to recognize that, while the European colonization of North America did lead to the development of a unique, diverse, and complex civilization, it also led to the suppression, forced assimilation, and genocide of indigenous peoples and their cultures."

"The Pride of Edmonds celebrates Pride Month with an LGBQT picnic at Hickman Park, and the Cascade Art Museum has scheduled an exhibit of work by gay and lesbian artists to show how their work has influenced the cultural identity of the Northwest."

"The Council has invested over a million dollars to clean up the salty Edmonds marsh, daylight Willow Creek, and restore salmon habitat."  She gulped some water.  "Needed that!"

 He sipped from his glass in empathy.  "It also passed a bill requiring gun owners to store firearms securely; however, when the bill was challenged by some residents, the State Supreme Court ruled that the Council had exceeded its authority." 

"Circling back now, the Council has designated Edmonds a Safe City, and 600 gathered at Westgate in 2018 to protest Trump's zero tolerance policy for immigration law enforcement, chanting 'No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.'  Also in 2018 an Edmonds Bakery Valentine cookie with the message 'Build the Wall,' said by the owner to have been facetiously intended, was criticized by many locals as divisive, and the owners of the very Cheesemonger whose sandwiches our waitperson is now bringing us responded by creating some 'Build Love' cookies." 

"Here you go," said the smiling middle-aged woman, setting down two baskets and two bags of popped corn.  "Enjoy!"

With alacrity the old man two-handed half of his concoction--layers of thinly sliced roast beef and crumbles of blue cheese strewn with caramelized onions and bound with garlic mayo and dalmatia fig jam on grilled whole wheat--and Solveig did the same with her smoked prosciutto, laura chenel, fresh chevre, arugula, and dalmatia fig jam on grilled ciabatta.

"Mmm, so good," she moaned at first bite.  "I walked up quite an appetite this morning."

"Love the fig jam," the old man said.  "The dark sweetness atop the tangy cheese--an overtone but not an override.  By the way, the name of your sandwich takes me back to the '40s and a silly song my uncle Ned used to sing: 'Oh once there was a Dutchman whose name was Johnny Burbeck, he used to deal in sausages and sauerkraut and speck.'  How is the speck?"

"Tender, smoky, salty, spicy, fatty, rich.  Love it."

"And may I say I also love having a companion?"

"In the literal sense of one you are sharing bread with?"

"Exactly.  But back to our task.  A Housing Strategy Task Force was appointed by the Mayor  in 2017 to develop strategies to reduce homelessness and develop housing tailored to the specific needs of the community.  Too few people live in too-big spaces, it was said."

"The State Arts Commission named Edmonds the state's first Creative District in recognition of the role arts and culture play in the town's economy, attracting and retaining a variety of creative-sector businesses--art museums and galleries and studios, theaters and music and dance venues."

"And the town is developing a 4th Avenue Cultural Corridor, which you have already given the sobriquet Greenwich Village, organizes monthly Art Walks and Wine Walks, and helps fund the many murals intended to capture (though they may also reveal inadvertently) the soul of Edmonds."

"The Council is proactively working to establish facilities to accommodate new wireless 5G technology."

"Edmonds is rated Snohomish County's Most Fiscally Healthy City, based on credit scores, and ranks 22nd in the state."

"And there's an abundance of parks, some of which have seamless, latex-free rubber surfaces accessible to all people, including those with disabilities."

The old man flashed 13 fingers at her.

"What's that-- our gang sign?" 

"No, that's 13 ways of looking at our backburb!"  He tipped the bill of his cap to her.  She lifted her chapeau to him.  "Our little town fairly shines with virtue.  It is so very much in tune with the Green New Deal.  AOC might feel at home here.  What could possibly be wrong with the town's official pieties?" 

"What could be wrong, Mloclam, is that they are not truly representative.  I absolutely love the pieties, but it's quite likely that many residents strongly oppose, or are at best lukewarm toward, progressive points of view.  I have read the campaign platforms of Charlotte, Gary, and Monk in their race for Position 8, and I am guessing, based on events since the 2016 presidential campaign, that for every vote for Charlotte's AOC or Gary's Biden, there'll be one for Monk's Trump. I suspect that many sense and fear the presence of a Deep Town.  I suspect that many feel that the city is moving too aggressively--and expensively-- toward virtue."

"Are you virtue-shaming us?"

"No, but I am implying that virtue is in the eye of the beholder and that every view deserves to be expressed." 

"Tu quoque, Solveig?  Are you afflicted with the modern Trumpian defenses of bothsidesism and whataboutism and argumentums ad populum and ad hominem?  Have you abandoned Aristotle and the Law of the Excluded Middle?  Surely both sides can't be right." 

"I'm just saying that probably a fair number of people want everything to just slow down."

"And by 'just slow down' they really mean 'stop!'  They don't want the Bowl to change because change means imposing on their privilege.  'I've got mine, Jack, and I want to preserve it and the old Edmonds in amber.' "

"Perhaps they doubt whether, in forcing density upon the Bowl by the artificial means of regulations and subsidies, it will be possible to maintain the town's Hallmark movie milieu , its quaint charm."

"What they want to maintain is their sense of entitlement, that discriminating  charm of the bourgeoisie.  They fear an invasion of poorer, less-well-educated people (and I think you can add, though few will say it, non-white people) who won't love the quiet, clean, safe town the way they do."

"But it's also not a crime to look out for one's own self-interest or to fear change.  Should there not be more debate?  Not only would that be fairer, but taking seriously the concerns of the reactionary side might allay animosity."

"Or is calling for more debate just another way of stalling?  Such comments tend to come from Boomers and Karens who grew up absurd, at least according to Paul Goodman, and are growing old absurd, spiritually empty, ideal-less, the products of the ethos of unfettered capitalism." 

"Maybe so, my good man, and we may find it appalling, but surely there is a significant number of them.  If 600 showed up to demonstrate against exclusionary immigration policies, thousands more locals did not.  Of those who showed up, probably many were not Bowlers or even Edmonds residents.  Perhaps a fair number of Bowlers actually want Trump to build his wall.  Probably many see the historic displacement of indigenous peoples as a necessary evil.  Probably many believe in assimilation, do not value diversity for its own sake, oppose the gun storage law as an invasion of privacy and an unlawful restriction of a constitutional right, oppose or at least don't wish to promote gay marriage, and don't care a feather or a dab of fig jam for the arts.  Because they aren't walking around with 'MEGA' caps on their heads or 'Brackxit' buttons on their lapels, there's a tendency to think that people with an antipathy toward bigger, more powerful governments don't exist in this town."

"You're certainly  right about their being a dearth of public conservative speech.  In my walks around town I have seen only virtue-signaling signs in windows.  In separate condos on 4th: 'LOVE'  and 'Stop Hate Together.'  In the C'est La Vie store on 5th: 'We Welcome All Races, Religions, Countries of Origin, Sexual Orientations, Genders.  We Stand With You.  You're Safe Here.'  In a house on Main across from our old grade school: 'Take Action To Elect A Democratic Congress.'"

"But that's probably because the antis don't dare to broadcast a contrary opinion.  They've been cowed by this new guilted age we're living in.  Although we might not like their opinions, I think it's wrong to stifle them.  Draw them out.  Hear them out.  Let id go.  Repression is oppression."

The old man smiled widely, opened his arms widely.  "Yes, yes, Macduff, whilom lover, star of my lucid dreams, corroborator, accreditor, I beg to agree.  O, Edmonds, Edmonds!  Your leaders suffer from motivation attribution asymmetry.  They  assume  that their ideology is based on love and goodness, whereas that of their critics is based on hate and selfishness.  Let a hundred flowers bloom--and after they do, don't foment a Cultural Revolution if you happen not to like the color or scent of the blossoms."

They smiled at each other.  They looked into each other's eyes.  They picked up their napkins, dabbed at their mouths, scrubbed grease from their fingers.  Each took a fistful from their popcorn bags and crunched meaty kernels.  The old man fetched a water pitcher and refilled their glasses.  Each chugged, breathed, chugged again.  Solveig's phone pinged in her purse.  She looked in its direction and shrugged.  He nodded.

"It's from Sylvia!  She wants to know how it's going.  What should I say?"

"Swimmingly?"

"'Swimmingly' it is," she said, tapping her reply. "All right, then!  We've spent a good hour here.  The sandwiches were delicious, and we got so much done.  What's next?  What I've been dreading?  Time to put our pieds à terre?"

"Yes, let's just slowly work our way back to the car and then guiltily add to earth's superfluity of greenhouse gases by taking the Adams automotive tour of the Bowl, featuring arboreal and architectural highlights."

She doffed her beret, patted her hair, donned it again, and they got up and retraced their steps to Dayton and turned right.  Solveig eyed the climb to 6th and said, "'Work' is right!  If only I could cube my enthusiasm!"  They plodded about forty yards and  stopped in front of the Salish Sea Brewery, their attention drawn by the bright white Italian columns of the Masonic Temple across the street.

"Here's one highlight, no doubt," Solveig said.  " And a real lodestone for me in my high school days.  Repainted a gray-blue with white trim on the A-shaped roofline and the buttresses supporting the eave, freshened up, but otherwise the same as in the '50s." 

"Yes, an erratic in the geological sense of not being native to the area in which it rests, those iconic columns inviting us to enter the fantasyland of the teen Canteen.  Rock 'n' roll and ballads.  'Dream.'   The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Solveig, belle-lit.  I was a child and you were a child in this kingdom by the sea.  You were my Kim Novak, dancing with Dickie.  Somehow there I got the idea that you could be mine."

"And so I became."

"But only for a year."

She took his hand--how  touchingly teen-age that felt.  He assayed a single squeeze, she reciprocated, and they trudged up the hill, she on the chivalric side this time, past a succession of condos that had superseded '30s Craftsman houses and the O.C. Kelly Fuel wood and coal yard.  By the time they reached the car, Solveig was panting and sweating again.

"Now you can relax," the old man said.  "We'll drive around the Bowl the way we did in my '49 Ford when we were killing time, waiting for dark so we could park, only now we are more interested in Bowl exotica than in our own erotica.   Let's start with the Upper Eastside."

He drove up Dayton, past the Anderson Center, to 8th, turned left, went to the intersection with Main.  "Behold the elm."

The tree, in the yard of a two-story house on the northwest corner, was at least 60 feet tall, its dark-leaved branches dominating the yard and sprawling in high arcs from its forked trunk over the sidewalk and half of the street.

"Goodwin's old place!  I never really noticed that tree when I was a kid.  It must be nearly a hundred years old now.  What an elegiac  beauty!  Creating a shady bower, a shrine to the Edmonds of our youth."

"It's one of my lodestones.  Now on to the next one."

He coasted down Main to 4th, turned left, crossed Dayton, stopped at the power substation, and pointed at the gangly tree shrouding its gate.  "The deodar cedar."

"Very pretty.  Makes a good screen with all those lateral branches drooping and spreading.  Love the long needles, the silvery-green color, the gray scaly bark, the pale green cones like Christmas lights.  Not sure I ever noticed it when I lived here and went to visit Sylvia."

"Deodars are naturally pyramid-shaped and can grow to 50 feet, but the city keeps this one topped so as not to interfere with residential views.  We have here another symbol of longevity, even eternity, and peace and holiness for some.  So, ready for one more?"

"Wayne, this is so Woody Allen!  I feel like Mariel Hemingway or Diane Keaton.  Ou comme Odette, avec Monsieur Swann.  If only we could get a carriage ride."

"No carriages available in the Bowl--but we could rent a Segway."

"No, thanks.  I don't trust my balance for that."

"Me either."

He turned on Walnut, went to 3rd, headed north, crossed Main, and parked next to Claire's Restaurant. 

"Oh, yes, of course, the horse-chestnut, le marron!"  Solveig said, pointing to the tree across the street towering at least 100 feet, stout, pendulous, broad-leaved branches culminating in a domed crown.  "Now this one I do remember.  I used to see it all the time when I went to Patty's house.  We would gather the nuts when they dropped in the fall.  They were inedible but we polished them and our mothers used them in arrangements of fall leaves and flowers."

"For me it's a nondigital calendar that I watch year-round from my condo.  Gold-green, then kelp green, then maize, like now, then bare ruined choirs.  Solveig, could I prevail upon you to go stand next to the tree's trunk for a Facebook picture?'

"Facebook?  I unfriended myself from FB years ago.  Instagram too, even though they helped me keep tabs on Oscar and Samantha and my grandchildren.  But, if you really want to document my re-appearance in town...."

They got out of the car.  The old man stood on the sidewalk and prepped his phone.  Solveig waited for a wide break in the traffic, then slowly, brazenly, jaywalked across.  She posed, mouth closed, staring the camera down, and he took two vertical shots, getting in all but the crown of the tree. 

"Thank you," he called, waving, then selected a shot, tapped "Under the spreading chestnut tree the rufous Solveig stands,"  and posted.

After waiting a minute at the curb for the traffic to clear, she jaywalked back and they re-entered the Santa Fe.

"All right, we've done my favorite carbon-sequestering trees.  Now let's pay our respects to the buildings that stand out to me.  One, unfortunately, no longer exists:  the original Hughes Memorial Methodist Church." 

"I can still visualize it, though, its height and breadth commanding attention, its unapologetic  mission-style design--terra cotta roof tiles, Roman arches, ecru stucco walls, belfries, stained glass--like something transplanted from the Old World to lend stature to our little town in the '40s and'50s."

"Then there's its first cousin, the two-story Beeson Building, built in the early 1900s, also with its ecru stucco, Roman arches, terra cotta tiles on the roof and the awning over the first floor shops, and deep red eyebrow awnings over the west windows on the second floor.  Let's go look."

He pulled out of the parking space, turned right at Bell, turned right at 4th, and found a spot next to the Churchkey Pub.  The western side of the Beeson gleamed in the sun, which was well past the meridian, while the northern side was shadowed.

"Since I was a kid living on 4th heading over to Swanson's for a Sport magazine," the old man said, "this afternoon image has stabbed me again and again, its offer of glory in the sun, a singularity inflating--O let there be light!-- juxtaposed with deepening dark, a black hole contracting, yin and yang, an evocative phenomenon, so beautiful to me."

"Dare I, like most of your characters, use the word 'awesome?'"

"You may."

"You, of course, may not?" 

"May-- can't."

"Now what? '

"Can you tolerate a little more boulevardiering?  We'll have to exit the car and walk a bit to get a good view of the next few."

"I'm okay with that as long as we just tootle."

They tootled to the corner and the old man pointed southwest to the Shumacher Building, a two-story wooden structure in the Western False Front style with a detailed façade and a parapet higher than the roofline.  "This is about as old as we get here in the Bowl.  Originally the site of a general store when built circa 1900," he said.  "Several other businesses since then, Chanterelle now for many years."

"I never really thought about it when I lived here, but it's like something in Shane or High Noon," Solveig said.  "A touching attempt to look brave and grand, imposing civilization--admittedly, a white version of civilization--upon the frontier, reaching for the stars, Edmonds style, as aspirational in its resource-challenged way as the Chrysler Building or the new Hudson Yards." 

"And then there's what I call its city-cousin once-removed, the Leyda Building, originally built by Fred Fourtner."

They went east single-file against the foot-traffic in Times Square, shoppers with their bags full drifting away from the closing Market, passed the new 407 Coffee Shop, passed the theater, and settled on a sidewalk bench near the intersection.  Built in the '20s, the Leyda was a sturdy, rectangular, two-story mixed-use (his aunt Mable and Uncle Ned had once lived in an apartment above Llubb's, an art gallery, in the '60s) building with a weathered dark brick façade busily ornamented with miniscule bas-relief arches below the roofline, interspersions of  light-colored blocks above the broad street-level windows and the many narrow rectangular second-floor windows, and, in the last decade, flat wooden "Starbucks Coffee" awnings attached by cables to the building's masonry. 

"It feels solid and sturdy, bourgeois, more sophisticated than the Schumacher but kind of heavy and earth-bound, advanced at the time of its building, no doubt, still interesting to look at. Sitting here under September's ochering oak leaves, listening to the water gushing from the fountain, we can almost imagine ourselves immersed in our own little tone poem of the Pins and Fountain of home."

"That's a stretch!"

"But that's what meta's for!

"Agreed!  So let's take a shot at a few more metaphors before we bring our tour to a close."  He ushered her across Main in a stream of pedestrians who outpaced them, then clasped her shoulder and led her into an about-face.  "The Fourtner building from this perspective--what does it remind you of if you subtract about 21 stories?"

"A very flat Flatiron building!" she laughed.  "Yes!  From here it's a triangle."

"It always amuses me to imagine it so," he said.  "Now let's look at the theater."

They tootled west and stopped in front of the bakery.

"Mmm, in my mind's nose I can still smell the maple bars of my youth," the old man said.

"Oddly enough, I seem to be still smelling the beer from the Edmonds Tavern that stood next to it!" Solveig said.

They gazed across the street.  Also built in the '20s, the remodeled two-story Edmonds theater, née the Princess, was an Art Deco erratic, with a stucco façade painted desert-sand brown and ornamented with lighter tan stucco trim on the corners and a symmetrical roofline that was formed by five horizontal overlapping pieces, two on either side rising to the fifth at the apex, a tall vertical marquee, readable from east and west, affixed between two Roman-arched window frames, one glassed-in, functioning, the other stuccoed over in a frozen wink, and a cable-suspended awning over the windowed main entry and an adjacent doorway.

"I never really paused to look at it before, back when I was going to double-features in the '50s," Solveig said.  "It looks like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.  It's appropriately playful.  It suggests fun, escape, mystery, intrigue, problem-solving."

"Yes.  I'm not going to call it beautiful, but it's definitely something out of the ordinary.  Now what?  Ready to drive over to the old high school?"

"Wayne, I actually think I could walk it if we slowly stroll and pause now and then.  It's only three blocks and quite flat."

"Capital!  We can time-travel through Greenwich Village."

They moseyed to 4th and crossed Main, exchanging waves with the driver of a Lincoln Navigator who had seen them waiting on the curb and stopped for them, and continued north, on the east side of 4th, for about 20 paces, to a cement walk beneath an awning on the side of which appeared "Motto Mortgage" in white letters.

"Now here's a little gem," the old man said, pointing to a set-back square single-story building, its façade a chalky-mortared interspersion of vermilion- and rust-toned bricks, with a centered triangular peak rising from the front edge of its flat roof.  There were large windows, eyebrowed by a row of dun-colored bricks placed vertically, on either side of its front door, and the corners of the building, from bottom to top, were defined by dun bricks of alternating lengths placed horizontally. 

"I do remember walking by here now and then.  Used to be the offices of Dr. Kenney and Dr. Magnuson."

"Yes.  Magnuson was our family dentist."

"I gave the building absolutely no thought as a girl, but now that I look it over, I like it!  It's kind of jaunty, kind of saucy, the gratuitous peak and the corner piping announcing the offices as a place to do spirited battle against disease and decay."

"Agreed.  But are you sure that the peak is gratuitous?  Let's go up the walk and look a little closer.  Do you see what's inside that diamond shape of dun bricks in the middle of the triangle? "

"Oh, yes!  It's a caduceus etched in a gray diamond-shaped stone with the letter M on one side and the letter D on the other.  How appropriate for the building's original purpose!  Truly, I never noticed it as a kid."

"Me either.   I never came here except when I was in pain.  All I could think about when approaching the building was the abscessed tooth that Doc Magnuson was going to be pulling without giving me Novocain.  But now I really dote on it every time I pass by."

"And there's kind of a visual echo of the Carnegie Library on 5th, too, which also has its corners defined by a lighter shade of brick."

"Quite!"

They walked on, the only pedestrians on the block, now that the Market had been closed for half an hour, paused at Rick Steves' two-story complex, whose Roman-arched portico  and somber brown brick façade adorned with gargoyles and figures in high relief nodded to Old Europe, turned and noted, on the west side of the street, a couple of Victorian- style two-story houses  with gables and a veranda roof supported by white-painted columns ("Kind of a Belle Époque feel," Solveig said) until they reached the North Sound Church at the corner.

"Ah, the old Edmonds Baptist Church--Dave's dad's place!" Solveig said.  "I actually attended a vacation Bible camp here one summer along with Dave and Sylvia and Patty and Claudia.  Had a great time!"

"Did you indeed?  Shall we  cross to the other side of 4th to get a better view?"

"Topping!"

They traipsed over the crosswalk's faded, chipped stripes of white paint.  The old man noted empathetically the cracks in the street's asphalt and the shiny rivulets of tar that had been applied to seal the largest of them.

They faced about.

"Do you mind if I take this one?" Solveig asked. 

"Not a tall." 

"Now, this old church is definitely not an erratic," Solveig said.  "Like the Schumacher building back on Main, it really looks like it belongs here, on the northwest frontier.  It's just the right size for Edmonds.  It basically fills up its wide lot, and it's two stories high, but it doesn't overwhelm.  There's a modesty, a self-sufficiency, a this-will-do  about it.  The cladding is native cedar shakes painted stark white.  The design is simple, yet visually interesting.  Its roofline meets in a short triangular peak in the center, like the little brick offices that we just looked at, but the left side begins higher and runs horizontally until sharply angling toward the peak, the right begins lower and runs diagonally all the way to the peak.  There's a complimentarity throughout.  At the double-door entry, two columns support a small protective gable peak that salutes its superior at the roofline, and on the roof there's an unusual belfry telescoping out of a box-like base and surmounted by a half-dome supported by six short slender columns on top of which stands a cross.  The fascia boards of each structure--gable, roof, and belfry--are painted dark brown, and the color correspondence, abetted by the upward slants from the gable and roofline peaks to the cross at the top of the belfry, creates a feeling of ascension.  The vertical sets of rows of little window panes in the center of the building, the upper set's middle row  longer and capped by additional panes that form a Roman arch, provide variety, reinforce the feeling of ascension, and also suggest the Trinity, as does the three-piece belfry.  And enclosing the whole, leaving an opening only for a wide welcoming walkway, is a low white picket fence.  The image is redolent of rectitude, cleanliness, virtue, purity, order.  It's very traditional, very touching, very comforting.  One of the town's nicest features.  Thank you for bringing me back to it--and it back to me."

"My pleasure."  He patted her shoulder.  "Just one more now.  Can you make it to our last stop?"

She mock-fluttered her silvery lashes over her ice-blue eyes.  "I'll try!"

They crossed Bell and lumbered north, passed the house in which the old man had lived in 1950, he telling Sovleig how small the yard now seemed to him, wondering how was it even possible that eight or 10 of his friends used to gather there to play football games, then crossed Edmonds and Daley, Solveig doggedly matching his restrained pace, and stood in front of their old high school.

Once a Neo-Classical two-story rectilinear brick building, rigid, upright, stern, it had been jazzily transformed in the '30s by a new stucco Art Moderne façade, its flat westside front becoming a long, swelling, sweeping curve lightened by vertical windows on the first floor, its northern and southern corners now gracefully rounded off, softened, and lent an airy elegance by three supporting stucco columns separated by tall, slender second-floor windows.

"Did you just praise with a faint 'Damn'?" Solveig said.

"I did.  I really like the other buildings that we've looked at today, but I love this one.  It has a creamy warm glow, a voluptuous fecundity, yet it's also aerodynamic.  It's lithe and supple.  It flows.  To me the transformation of the building from Neo-Classical to Art Moderne is like moving from the hieratic to the demotic."

"Or from Bach to Gershwin."

"Yes.  'Swonderfully accessible."

"And there's almost a nautical element to it as well.  One can sort of visualize this entrance as the bow of a ship breasting the waves, transporting students out of ignorance."

"Or of full-breasted Liberty leading the pupils."

"In any case, we seem to be agreed that there is something warmly mammarian about it."

"Yes, we are.  Alma mater indeed.  And this completes our lodestone tour.  Nothing magical or mystical about them, just beautiful parts of my reality for the past 80 years."  He turned toward her.  "It's 4:02 by my watch.  So now what?"

"A visit to your bench on Sunset?"

"Why don't we go park?"

"What?  Where?"

"At the beach.  You haven't been to the beach yet.  Let's come full circle.  We'll go to the dog park, just south of where we used to sit in my '49 Ford.   My Santa Fe's bucket seats will keep us chaste."

"Uh-huh.  Actually, what I'd most like to do now is find a bathroom--and then get a cup of coffee to perk myself up.  I'm exhausted."

"Should I jog back to the car and come pick you up?"

"Show off!  Would you mind?"

"I could use the conditioning.  I'll be back in an Edmonds minute." 

He pivoted, closed his fists, and eased into a comfortable trot, running through intersections, making an evasive shuffle and feigning a stiff-arm as he passed his old front yard, kitty-cornering at Bell, and gliding to a stop beside the Santa Fe.  Panting comfortably, he jumped in, pushed the starter button while belting up, made a right at Main, a right at 3rd, a right at Daley, and picked up Solveig at the corner of 4th.

He squeezed her hand briefly.  "I have a suggestion.  Why don't we go back to my place and we'll both use the bathroom and I'll make you a pour-over."

"Another climb up those stairs?  That pour-over better be pretty damn good."

"I think you'll like it.  I've got an unopened Starbucks bag of Sidamo beans from Ethiopia boasting of notes of ripe blackberry and creamy chocolate."

At the foot of the stairs she girded and he took her left elbow, abetting her, lifting her slightly while conveniently using her to maintain his own balance, as she jacked herself upward by gripping the railing with her right and pushing off.

"We'll just take our time," he said.

"Considering how little we have left, is this how I want to spend mine?  Climbing up to your aerie?"

"I'm hoping yes?"

"Yes."

He squeezed her elbow in gratitude.  "So, do you often think of dying?"

They reached the first landing.  Solveig paused and panted.  Her pinkening skin glistened.  "Of course."

"Me too."

"But not quite as often as I think about living."

"Me either.  But like what do you think about when you think about death?"

"For one thing, I think about how I would want to go.  I would like it to be as free of pain as possible.  I see no virtue in dying in agony."

"Me either.  But, if agony does occur, bearing it stoically?  Setting a good example?  Biting down on a stick held between your teeth, the way you did in giving birth to your children?"

"Hah!  Exercising my right to choose, I had elective C-sections for both Oscar and Samantha.  The procedure was brief, pain-free, perfectly safe for both baby and me, and recovery was a breeze, although I do bear stitching scars, an uninked maternal tattoo, my paunchy belly resembling a football with laces the width of cooked fettuccini.  I feel under no obligation to seek pain--I would never even run a city block, let alone a marathon--and when pain perversely seeks and finds me I am under no obligation to bear it nobly.  I am free to wail and rail against it.  Fain would I exemplify a manic defiance of the cult of imperturbability.  I will not be wus-shamed!"

"She said, bearing her opprobrium nobly."

"She said, refusing to acknowledge opprobrium."

They baby-stepped over to the second flight.

"So, clearly you don't want to be stoned to death by some lottery-losing villagers, or chopped into pieces by an axe-wielding Mafia hitman who mistook you for an informer, or burned at the stake for practicing bitchcraft."

They resumed their climb.

"But what about a sudden violent but virtually painless death, instant lights out-- massive cerebral hemorrhage, bullet fired into your brain by a mass murderer in a shopping mall, neck broken in a clumsy backward fall off a ladder, body blown to pieces when your plane crashes into the side of a fog-obscured mountain at 600 miles an hour, that sort of thing.  No introspection, final review, taking stock, coming to terms with oneself and the universe, no saying goodbye to one's husband and children and grandchildren and friends, no goodbye to clocks ticking--no, wait a minute, that's only relevant if you happen to be enjoying the anachronistic tick-tick-tick of an auditory transition on '60 Minutes'--rather, goodbye to digits silently, inexorably, blinking up or blinking down, and to red wheelbarrows and leftover plums liberated from the refrigerator and tumultuous orgasms, just zip, rip off the bandaid, and it's over?"

They reached the second landing.  Solveig leaned against the wall and fanned her flushed face.  "It's not the climb, it's the memory of those tumultuous orgasms," she said.  Her ice-blue eyes twinkled, her coppery glasses gleamed in the wavy particles flowing through the skylight.

"Yes, my point exactly, wouldn't you like to hang on to that, wouldn't you prefer an easing into death, a long fatal illness, multiple myeloma perhaps, negotiated under the hauspices of palliative care, a gradual decline like that which I imagine for myself--at first, propped up by bed pillows, maintaining muscle tone by practicing the dynamic-tension exercises of Charles Atlas, the way Zee and I did when we were kids, then, iPad on lap, fictionalizing, revising, Noting, anagramming, palindroming, gazing across the town and across the Sound to Skagit Head gleaming Doverishly, welcoming visitors, rubbing minds--Zee, Monk, Sylvia, Charlotte, Carolyn, Liz Ann, Dave, perhaps, if he happened to be in town, you, perhaps, making one last special trip to see me, everyone bringing books (Chomsky, Beckett, Rovelli, Kolbert, Pinker, Gopnik, Harris, Jim Holt, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Yuval Harari, Joseph Henrich, Michael Gazzaniga) for me to fondle and flip through as I haphazardly true and skew, a nurse, serving as my death doula, climbing the stairs daily to microwave rice bowls for me (cashew chicken, shrimp with pineapple and green peppers), assist me with taking my pills, help me access my toilet and shower, within a few weeks connecting me to an IV and a Foley catheter, emptying my bedpan, wiping me, giving me a sponge bath, introducing morphine to the IV, then titrating it daily until time for the ultimate supercharge that painlessly eliminates me?"

"Of those painless alternatives, which would I prefer?  It's a tough call, what with the orgasms and all, but I'm leaning toward instant death.  My familial bonds are strong.  I don't need to exchange last-minute terms of endearment with my husband, children, grandchildren, or even you, or even to say an official goodbye.  In fact, that might be painfully maudlin for me.  I might prefer to just disappear."

"Not  me.  I'm such a clinger.  I cringe at my own craven sentimentality, but I want that slow winding down, that hanging on to phenomena, even if it's only Netflix reruns of Seinfeld on my iPad, until finally exhaustion and morphine-induced metabolic torpor render me apathetic and I lose my grip.  I don't want to die unexpectedly, the way Diane did.  I want to die the way my parents did, in bed, drugged, only not angry or sullen, not spitefully welcoming death as a refuge from life, just clinging to my unnecessary and meaningless life, a life that has always been unnecessary and meaningless but so absurdly absorbing and compelling, until I can no longer.  I don't want it to end suddenly, arbitrarily.  I want to lose heat gradually.  I could never commit suicide."

Solveig inhaled deeply, her chest rising, and they began their final ascent.  "But surely you would want someone to pull the plug if through accident or illness you became unconscious and entered a vegetative state?" 

"True.  If it's likely that I will never again be able to experience the rush of life, take me off the respirator and kill me softly with kindness."

"You have an Advance Health Care Directive?"

"I do.  It's on file at the office of Dr. Robert Hope, Jr.  And you?"

"I do.  I'm covered legally.  But my inner living will is that my dying will release me from earthly bonds, my atomic fetters, and I will graduate from this earthly high school."

"So it isn't over when it's over?"

They reached his unit door.  Solveig gasped and leaned against him in relief.  He inserted his key.

" I don't think so.  I was raised as a Lutheran but, like Sylvia, I gave up organized religion long ago.  However, the fictive stage manager within me feels that everybody knows, even you, Wayne, though you will not deign to admit it, that there is something, some essence, some quiddity, that is eternal about each person.  I have to believe that consciousness does not die and that, apart from the dreadful physical pain that might occur in the process, death has no sting."

He pushed the door open wide, put his arm around Solveig's waist, and they entered together.  "You have to believe because you need to believe?"

"I have to believe because I have no choice.  I cannot close my mind's eye.  Seeing is believing.  I'm being empirical, not mystical.  As I lie dead, I'm still awake.  I find the end of consciousness literally unimaginable.  You don't?"

"No, I do.  In my mind's eye, I never die.  But my physical eyes, severely macularly degenerated though one of them is, tell me that I will.  My mind's eye offers only an ersatz empiricism, the physical ones offer the real epistemological maccoy.  Through them I induce, from what is observable, measurable, testable, and repeatable, the theory that entropy rules the universe, systems fall apart, the electro-chemical system that is me being no exception." 

He closed the door.

"And the electro-chemical system that is me says I gotta go.  Same bathroom?"

"By all means.  Enjoy!"

As Solveig passed the guest bathroom and quick-stepped down the long hallway, the old man began coffee preparations.  The metal electric water heater and the thermally insulated quart carafe, both spouted and handled like a coffee pot, and the electric coffee grinder were at their home bases next to the stove.  He extracted an eight-ounce glass measuring cup from a lower cupboard, filled it thrice with cold tap water, each time raising the cup to eye level, dribbling a few drops in or a few drops out as needed to get an exact eight ounces, then pouring it into the heater.  He flipped the switch and took from an upper cupboard a plastic funnel, a number 4 brown Melitta filter, and an unopened bag of Starbucks beans.  He inserted the funnel into the carafe, fitted the filter into it, noted the Spokane just coming in, and turned to find Solveig doing the same.

"Almost as much fun as the first time," Solveig said.  "And I didn't bother to touch up my lip gloss, since we're going to be cupping."

"Excellent.  Here's the bag we'll be drinking from."  The bag was two-toned, powder blue on the upper two-thirds, black on the bottom, the tones separated by a thin magenta stripe.  "Howard Schultz had me at powder blue," the old man said. 

"It is a buoyant, cheerful color."

"Offering the dream of a blue yonder to a SAD denizen of the often calaginous, Stygian Edmonds Bowl where we both descry and decry 50 shades of gray, where we have 50 words for rain.  Now let me just wrestle it open.  They seal these things so tight that my arthritic digits are almost not a match for them."  He unfolded the top and gripped the sealed edges with thumbs and index fingers and yanked.  Nothing.  He clenched his jaw and tried again.  A nanometer of movement.  He pressed his knees against the cupboard, held his breath, flexed his abs, and pulled again, grunting.  A micrometer of movement.  Once more he strained, thumbs throbbing, and finally created a millimeter of separation, gained a bit of momentum, and pressed his inertial advantage hard as the bag gradually opened wide.

"Well, quite an operation," Solveig said.  "I could never put that much effort into making coffee."

"What do you usually do?"

"Sometimes I step out to a coffee shop on my block and have an Americano.  Sometimes I make a K cup."

"A K cup?"  He stroked the back of his neck.

"Disappointed in me, Wayne?"

"Of course not.  Not seriously." 

"Yes, you are.  It's as plain as the no's on your face."

He smiled, lifted the bag to his nose, snorted.   "Want a whiff?"

He extended the bag to her.  She leaned forward to sniff, once, twice. 

"What do you get?"  

"Honestly?  The interior of an old garage like McKeever's Shell with its blended smell of dirty drained oil and stacked rubber tires.  But that's not a bad thing--I like it!"

"Me too!  So let me just get this brew going."  He took a scoop from a drawer and dropped six heaping  tablespoonfuls of beans into the grinder.  "Brace yourself," he said, and switched on the grinder, which growled its way into a whir, its pitch rising like the wail of an air raid siren as it hit full speed and raced for a good 20 seconds, Solveig muffling her ears with her hands.

"Yet another reason why I don't grind my own," she said.

The old man removed the plastic receptacle and poured its finely-ground contents into the filter evenly.  The whooshing heater clicked off automatically when the water hit the boiling point, and he lifted it, aimed the spout, and slow-poured a steaming stream over the concupiscently spread  grounds, wetting the outer edges evenly, washing them toward the center in slow, counterclockwise swirls, then drizzling the middle until all were soaked, reddish brown muff becoming a puddle of black, pausing a half-minute to let it steep and drip and dry, coming again with the swirls, urging the grounds to release all that they had, pausing again, then finishing with a final trickle to the center from the exhausted pot.

They stared into the filtered funnel until the oozing was done.

"Those were the days," the old man said.

"Yes, they were," Solveig said.  "I have to admit, I like a man with a slow hand.  But the proof of the puddling is in the drinking, n'est-ce pas?  Let's find out how it tastes."

The old man lifted the filter from the funnel and dropped it into the garbage beneath the sink.  He rinsed the funnel, set it in the sink, and screwed the cap into the carafe.  He drew from a cupboard two slender porcelain mugs, white, and poured a couple of ounces into each. 

"No, fill mine up," Solveig said.  "I don't need to aerate and sniff.  I get bubkis from that."

"Ohh-kay."

They carried their full mugs carefully to the couch and set them on the glass coffee table.

"While the coffee's becoming sippable, I'll just take a minute to run back and use a catheter.  Please sit back and enjoy the view."

"Sure.  And at the same time I'll check my phone with my evolving third eye."

"Excellent!"  How nice it was to have an attentive reader.

He hurried to the bathroom, told himself to relax, relax, she would be there when he got back (early on in the self-cathing portion of his life he had impatiently rammed a catheter through the bladder wall and into his prostate, his hand the voluminous bowl incarnadining, turning the yellow sea red, and had driven himself to the emergency room at Swedish, where the doctor on duty, Horst Kloppelberg, fitted him with a Foley, which he had to wear for two weeks while the wound healed, causing him to miss four games with the Classics), set paper towel, catheter, and nitrile glove on top of the tank, unbuttoned, lowered jeans and underpants, slipped on the glove, opened the package, and carefully, mindfully, actually, inched the catheter into his bladder.

When he returned to the living room, Solveig, occupying the middle of the couch, her purse and wrap beside her right hip, had her phone to her ear.  "Yes, dinner with Sylvia.  Okay, sweetie, gotta go now.  Love you.  Bye."

She tucked the phone back into the purse.

"All right," the old man said, slipping off his vest, tossing it onto the Morris chair, then seating himself to her left, "let's drink some coffee."

They sipped from their mugs, reflected, swallowed.

"I definitely get the blackberry," Solveig said, "although I might not have come up with that word on my own.  There's a winey ripeness, a deep flavor, that lingers on the palate and in the nose.  It really is reminiscent of those wild berries we used to pick in the '40s and '50s, going out with our parents to areas like Picnic Point and Martha Lake that had been logged off but not developed, the thorny vines growing in tangles over left-behind stumps and branches,  scratching our hands and arms when we reached deep under broad green leaves to get the biggest, juiciest berries, the ones that turned our fingers purple and stained our clothes when we wiped them off.  A tart, anise-like flavor, aromatic, with a hint of tar, like the black licorice we used to buy at Bienz's."

"Agreed.  And, accompanying the blackberry on the palate," the old man said, " I detect a bit of creamy chocolate along the edges of the tongue, a tri-toned berry-mocha-latte effect."

"Agreed.  Maybe your labor-intensive coffee-making protocol is worth following after all.  Or maybe what we just said is pretentious horseshit."

They smiled at each other.  Solveig drank deeply, uncrossed her legs, and set her mug on the table. 

"But the caffeine is definitely perking me up."

The old man took another tri-toned sip.  The sun, glimpsed through gauzy herringbones of red and charcoal cirrus, was dropping toward the Olympics. 

"So, where were we?" he said.  "Where are we?"

"We were in love."  She touched the hair at her left temple.  She reached again for her mug, leaned back, recrossed her legs, swigged.  "We are in Edmonds, quaint sylvan city of hunched shoulders where progressive superego and reactionary id vie for soul control."

"And also in limbo?"

"Maybe."  She uncrossed her legs, set down her mug, scooted toward him, leaned into him.

He reached forward, deposited his mug, and sank back, reestablishing contiguity.

"Are we doing the movie thing?"

"The movie thing?"

"Yeah, you know.  Except for a few specialized oeuvres like My Dinner With Andre or Babette's Feast, characters seldom finish even a cup of coffee, let alone a meal, in a movie or TV show, that would be way too boring, they just do a little stage business and then shade into something else--lovemaking, for instance."

He raised his right arm and extended it atop the back of the couch behind her.  She fingered the earring dangling from her left lobe.  She stroked her neck.

"Are we doing the Quora thing?"

"The Quora thing?"

"Yeah, you know.  For each question like 'What did Einstein mean when he said that God does not play dice with the universe?' the daily Quora posting offers a half-dozen trite masturbation fantasies 'reported' in response to sham questions like 'Have you ever stopped and had a conversation with a hitch-hiker who offered you a special massage for a ride to their destination?' or 'What pleasantly surprised you when a neighbor took off their clothes?' or 'What is the most inappropriate experience you have had with your paternal aunt, your best friend's spouse, your uncle with the wooden leg, or your married ex-girlfriend?'"

"Alas, the few hitch-hikers I have picked up over the years have never offered me anything more than a grateful 'Thanks a lot, man,' none of my neighbors have ever taken off their clothes in front of me, I never had an inappropriate experience with my aunt Mabel or with Zee's spouse Janice or with my Uncle Ned who, although he didn't have a wooden leg, did have a cedar chest, he told me to my immense amusement when I was in third grade, or with my married ex-girlfriend."

He placed his left hand on hers, which lay fanned on her left quad, and smiled.  She smiled back.  He inched his right hand onto her right shoulder.

"And what did Einstein mean when he said that God does not play dice with the universe?"

"I think that he was plumping for a lawful, deterministic universe untainted by the randomness and uncertainties of quantum mechanics, a universe accessible to human reason but created by an impersonal, intangible force unconcerned with the fate and doings of humans."

He stroked her left hand once.  She looked at him with wide-open eyes.  Was she breathing faster?

"I think so, too."

"But I also think that he was wrong."

"God does play dice with the universe?"

"That I really don't know, but my sense is that the wacky quantum theorists are on to something with the charming uncertainty of their quarks.  Einstein's God is too hidebound, too steeped in rationality, too antipathetic to quantum mysticism to suit me.  His cool God does not exude the dearest freshness of deep down things.  He lacks spirit, passion, compassion, playfulness.  My exquisite fictional God is hella more than rational, is relational, is beautiful, sexy, transformative, is one who breathes fire into his equations, gives them what Steven Hawking called their ontic clout, is one with whom atonement brings an epiphany to the umpteenth power, a mind-blowing trip of awful intensity, like that experienced by a rodent in the embrace of a hawk or a salmon snared by a bear." 

Stirred, he wanted to pull her into him with his right arm in a hawkish embrace, snare a breast with his left hand.  Might she want that too?

"A rodent, a salmon?  Leda mastered by the brute blood of the air, shiveringly, orgasmically, assimilating Zeus's knowledge with his power?  Heart battered by a three-personed God, broken, blown, burned, made new?"

"Yes.  The ultimate transmogrifying big deal.  Delta S forever greater than 0, a fiction that you know from your feelings to be something else."

He risked raising his spread hand to her breast, felt the supporting wire of her D cup, risked saying "But what about #MeToo?  Are you countenancing rape?"

"Only as a metaphor for the longed-for assault of atonement."  She slid her right hand to his crotch.  "Try to sudden-blow me and I'll crush your balls!"

They laughed.  She did not remove her hand.  A penile vein pulsed.  His hackles horripilated.   It had been 10 years.  He swallowed.  He cautiously pulled her closer with his right arm.  He tentatively touched a clothed nipple.  Outside his jeans, she fingered his glans.  They looked at each other, leaned in, kissed by the book.  He inhaled her tri-tone coffee breath.  It was going to happen. 

They drew their heads back, looked at each other, smiled.  She removed her glasses and hat, set them on the table beside her mug.  He followed suit.  She closed her eyes and sighed.

"You're not thinking of England, are you?"

"No, only of you.  Just trying to be in the moment.  Eyes wide shut."

She found his glans again and his lips again.  Yes, because she always did a thing like that, zeroed in, found signal in noise, like that first touch in the '49 Ford, Diane too, coming to sit by him, betting him across the board, he was her guy save for that one contretemps, whereas he equivocated, ambiguated, hesitated, factored in, contextualized, maintained his perimeter, eyes wide open, taking in her fine lashes, her high forehead, the brown redness of her hair, but also the green gem, town and Sound and mountains out there where the evening was about to meet the sky, mouth wide open too, his teeth clumsily clacking hers, Solveig chuckling for old time's sake, keeping eyes wide shut, fondling him, yes, teasing him to life on the couch where Diane used to affirm him, his hand slipping under her tee shirt, roaming, his cold shriveled root stirring, firming, lucky, yes, think, yes, given the truth as uttered forth in the fictions of Chomsky and Beckett and Rovelli and Kolbert and Pinker and Gopnik and Harris and Holt and Dawkins and Dennett and Harari and Henrich and Gazzaniga, for reasons unknown that time won't tell, y-a-t-il quelque chose plutot que rien parce que l' univers estvenu par hasard d'une fluctuation quantique du vide, no matter, matter a mere matter of events, it is established beyond all doubt beyond that which clings to any fictions of humans quaquaqua scientific and philosophical  and religious and social constructs, that everything changes, nothing endures, the Olympics disintegrate, the Pacific plate subducts, the earth rumbles and spouts, rumbles and spouts, its climate warms, the universe cools, the Bowl shape-shifts, a dime store dies, a lavender shop is born, ramblers fall, condos rise, Indians become indigenous peoples, in short, in brief, empires melt like ice cream, become anathema, the better angels of our nature emerge from their chrysalis, the facts are there, reams of data, on the whole, in general, prove material life less violent, safer, easier now, it matters not, people continue to waste and pine, waste and pine for salvation, for metempsychosis, the meta that matters most to most, his hand surfing the fulsome folds of her belly flesh with its fettuccini laces, his nose hunting  pheromonal emanations, were those a real thing, was it time, yes, they drew back, they smiled, they stood, high above the town he helped her shrug out of her tee, her combs loosening, her tresses further confessing, unhooked her lacy black bra, slid the straps down her arms, tossed it to the end of the couch, her heavy breasts sprawling, overflowing his kneading hands, broad mauve areolas, rosier nipples erect, seeking contact, while she unbuttoned his shirt, skated her hands over his hairy pecs, unbuttoned his jeans, tugged them down till they sagged at his ankles, his black Jockeys too, stroking the veiny throbbing vee at the base of the circumcised glans, his selfish gene, in spite of the fact, as proved by neurologists, that he lacked a self, anyone no one, no one anyone, growing manic, lusting to be copied, to end run entropy, but whence the emergence of a rage to replicate in an RNA molecule four billion years ago and the evolution of selfish selflessness, love and law, billions of years later, summer winter autumn spring, wondering, hoping, could he be within an inch of the old, once so reliable, five-and-a-quarter, he glanced down, yes, if measured generously that is, he chuckled gratefully, she smiled approvingly, he unbuttoned her pants, unzipped her, let the pants slide to the floor, nearly swooning at the pink silk bikini panties stretched so tight across her broad cheeks and thighs, she wouldn't be waxed, would she, no, wanton strands of roseate pubic hair peeked out from their pouch, he sucked an extending nipple, squeezed her ass with both hands, tugged down her panties, cupped her slough as she widened her stance, her gene raging too, loving to live, why, so many fruitless years after menopause, stroked her clit, lipped his fingers, fingered her lips, companions sharing scallions, chives, they smiled, they kissed off book, muscularly, they drew back, they smiled, each kicked off their shoes, pants, underpants, he sat, opened his arms wide, she, soaked, knelt over him, woman-spreading, with her right hand held him straight, cathed him up, he arched his pelvis, abs and rectum tight, held the pose, a reverse plank, an asana, palindrome, beseeching her to grind him, she read his sine, tightened her vaginal grip, would not let him go except he blessed her, tugged and pushed, tugged and pushed, her knees on the couch, her eyes half-shut, middle-distancing, intuning, seeking the rhythm she needed to get them off, her breasts flopping as she went up and down, up and down, her hair falling over her ears, he felt firmer, longer, almost engorged, was he four and a half now, four and three-quarters--impossible!--yet it felt like it, yes, he was up to this, they were soaring, windhovering above the town, he was engaging, he was probing, he was ramming, ramming, ramming, his loving selfish gene demanding, Solveig, eyes wide open now, was jouncing, jouncing, jouncing, riding the roiling underneath her choppy air, clinging, brute and beauty, pride and plume, buckling, grasping the wind as with gasps each burst and flamed, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing, wrung upon the wimpling of their lusting interlocked loins, galling, galling themselves, until at last, chafed, their whimpering embers gashed gold-vermilion. 

He felt something cold and wet.  He opened his eyes, reconnoitered.  The sun had routed night and drenched his bedroom in wavy particles of bright light.  5:05.  Was it possible?  After 10 dry years?  He extended his arms under the covers, unstuck his cotton sleeping shorts from his mons, touched the slimy pooled proof, touched the retreated tender glans, and guffawed.  Guffawed!  Chortled!  Hilarious, that little death.  A tenuous transcendence.  Yes, yes, yes.  Humpty Dumpty.  Only senselessness made sense.  He was in the bed where, on a day like any day, sun, moon, stars, rain, a hospice worker would supercharge his IV and cause his fictional self, that brief, conscious event known as Wayne Adams, to unhappen, some of its elements to be cut and pasted into other short stories by Science Care, the rest to be atomized and rebound by nature and read as leaves, as grass.  But not today, not today.  Today he would shower away the remnant of the night and take his pills and ask Alexa for the question of the day and walk and drink coffee and immerse himself in cyberspace and visit his bench and work out and shoot baskets and go to the batting cages and read and write and drink wine and watch the setting of the sun, which would be gold-vermilion in its dying.