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brown-haired women, one of whom introduces herself as my student years ago at the College of Saint Rose. I say, ‘Oh yes,’ but truth to tell, I cannot remember her.
    My fellow speaker is a young woman named Mary Cahill who has written a humorous, sprightly novel called Carpool , which is exactly what it is about. She is first to speak, and gives a very honest, funny speech about her experiences publishing her first novel. She tells me later, when we lunch together, that she is on a tour of Eastern suburbs where carpooling for the transportation of children is a familiar phenomenon. She is surprised by the elderliness of the Duxbury audience and wonders how many of her listeners know about carpooling. She thinks her publicity agent may have misjudged this stop.
    On this leg of her trip she is accompanied by what she calls a ‘tour expeditor,’ an energetic and attentive young woman who lives in the area, meets her plane, assists her travel from hotel to lecture, and then back to the departing plane. Clearly, writers’ tours are a well-organized and profitable business. I have no such person, but no matter: this kind expeditor allows me to ride to Logan Airport with her and Mary Cahill in a blinding rainstorm. By nature she must be kind to itinerant writers, for she races ahead of me to the gate, carrying my bag. I make the plane by four minutes.
    To go back to the event: I have difficulty speaking after Mary, because I have almost nothing funny to say. I notice the audience squirms a bit as I describe my views on aging, and certainly, I learn afterwards, when Mary and I sit at separate tables to autograph books, they have not been persuaded by my ‘dour’ remarks to buy my book. The lines at Mary’s table are long. I hear more than one buyer tell her they are planning to send her book to their daughters.
    Of my book one elderly lady says to me: ‘I am giving it to my daughter’s mother-in-law.’ She offers no assurance that she intends to read it herself. An old lady walks by, carrying two copies of Carpool for her two daughters, I assume. Another lady with a cane does buy a copy of End Zone (bless her), and then asks me to inscribe it. I smile happily, write ‘For Amy’ and my name and hand it back to her. She pats my hand gently and says, ‘Well, dear, I do hope you will feel better.’
    The flight from Boston to Bangor was accomplished in a plane called a ‘Business Express.’ It had two propellers and was so small that it was much buffeted by the wind and heavy rain we were ‘experiencing,’ as the pilot phrased it. It is capable of holding twenty persons, and a crew of three. On this trip there were ten passengers. True to its name, nine of them were businessmen uniformly equipped with briefcases, Wall Street Journals , furled umbrellas, and trench-style raincoats.
    The Business Express seemed to me to be a somewhat frail, almost rickety, but still jaunty and gallant little plane, a throwback to the forties in style and size. I felt it was more liable to failure or accident than its larger and more robust jet brothers. Should it crash, I suspect a number of large corporations would suffer grievous executive losses. American literature, on the other hand, would not be significantly affected.
    I am relieved to be home in Sargentville, weary of being an artificial, public person. Here I feel I become real again, no matter how badly dressed and grumpy, quirky, cranky, etc. I am. Know thy place . I find a letter from Patty Smith and a card from a Washington friend. In her letter Patty says she went to a bookstore in Camden to buy End Zone . The clerk could find it on the computer but not on the nonfiction shelf.
    â€˜I know we have it,’ she told Patty lamely.
    Patty searched and finally found it nestled happily among more active-type books, on a shelf marked SPORTS.
    And Cinder Johanson, a friend and librarian at the Library of Congress, writes a