I opened up a deli bag and laid out chicken-salad-sandwich halves on homemade bread wrapped in white butcher paper. The sandwiches were stuffed with alfalfa sprouts and grated cheese, impaled with toothpicks with red, blue, and green cellophane ribbons on them, and there were two large, perfect, crunchy garlic pickles on the side. And a couple of cartons of strawberry Yoplait, two tubs of fruit salad with fresh whipped cream and little wooden spoons, and two large cardboard cups of aromatic, steaming, fresh black coffee.

It begins to rain, and we have to haul ass into the front seat of my Olds, where Suz and I finish the best little lunch of a lifetime and suddenly the Shirelles are singing, “This is dedicated to the one I love,” and I’m thinking that I’m gonna be all right, and in the meantime what can be better than a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds on the wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with a view of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?

Superman, My Son

WILHELM BLAINE PULLED his red Volvo wagon under the lone, stubby fig tree in front of his son Walter’s California-beige stucco home. Somebody needed to get off their rear, get out here, and do a little landscaping. But Blaine knew it wasn’t so bad behind the large cedar fence. It was a little enclave, really, with the pool, the Jacuzzi, the barbecue setup, and the rattan chairs. You could do a Winston Churchill—sit under lofty palms, sip a little brandy, smoke an expensive cigar, and discuss the weighty matters of the world.

Blaine ran down his electric windows and the hefty scent of gardenia from the backyard hit him in the face. Behind the fence, Walter’s wife Zona pruned, watered, and fertilized—but out front, nothing. The fig tree was in need of serious medical attention, and in general the whole neighborhood was taking a precipitous slide. Blaine saw lots of “For Rent” signs. Almost every driveway seemed overloaded. If it wasn’t a pickup truck with jacked-up monster wheels, it was a pin-striped van or a Harley low rider amid broken bicycles and rusty automobile transmissions. When the subdivision was new, Walter had paid $240K for his place, but Blaine had just seen a chicken prancing across a sun-torched lawn before he hung the left on Millpine Drive.