The day is finally here. Not the day I give the talk but the day I write the essay that is the talk. I’ve done everything else possible, several times. Reading, sleeping, musing, reading, hanging out with people, sitting outside in the lawn chair and the heat, feeding the birds cracked corn on the stone wall, witnessing a very gentle fight between a chipmunk and a mourning dove—choosing sides because the mourning dove was taking one tiny grain at a time while the chipmunk was vacuuming the length of the stone wall like a carpet. Reading some more, and then more, driving the dog around slowly on our country roads for an hour each evening so she could smell the night air. Letting other cars pass us in the dark, listening to Terry Gross ask people questions and then to their answers. Dion, he of the Belmonts, surprised me with his keen mind and his obsessive love and encyclopedic knowledge of not just doo-wop but all music. Why would it be surprising that Dion knew a lot about music? Think it through, Jo. Pay attention. Remember when Sherman Alexie said that thing and you pulled over to write it down on a receipt and then forgot the end of it and had to listen to the whole interview again the next night so you could pull over and write the second half—of one sentence. Remember what X said and how it annoyed you enough that you thought, Oh, please. This is why the world hates a memoirist. Remember what Bruce Springsteen said and how it thrilled you enough that you thought, This is why the world loves a memoirist. Remember what Astrid something, the woman who created the look for the Beatles, said, and remember how it made you think of John Lennon, who had a guy crush on Astrid’s boyfriend Stuart, a young man who politely refused to be in the Beatles. He wouldn’t have lived to regret it, Stuart, even if he hadn’t died soon after of a brain aneurysm. Stuart was that certain an artist.

Forget, of course, everything Terry Gross said, because she is so good at her job that she isn’t what anyone remembers. I like people who are good at their jobs but I’m not one of them. Which is why you’ll notice that everything I did this summer until today—the day of writing the Alaska talk—did not have the word writing in it.

But now I am writing, because it’s on my calendar and it’s in my mind, though what Dion has to do with Alaska I don’t know. He sounded like someone’s dad, old now but still young in the way that rock-and-roll guys stay young. I remember something else: how my own dad was not a rock-and-roll guy but looked (in his younger days) like Buddy Holly.