Sunday Sundries, 4

• The Traveler's Lament: How can it be that when you're gone for only one day (or twenty-one ... or 1001), that there is a Himalayan pile of work to do when you walk back in your house?
• Joyce and I spent a productive, informative, and, in some ways, uncomfortable morning last week at Baltimore's National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. (Link to the museum's website.) Joyce was principally looking for the display that features Abolitionist John Brown (she found it); otherwise, we were there to learn. But the very first display was a mock-up of a slave ship. With us at that point was a summer-camp group of middle-schoolers (almost all were African American), and as the very informed docent told the kids about the horrors of the Middle Passage--the vileness of the treatment of human beings--I felt eyes turning our way at times. Ancestral guilt ...
  
• A Traveler's Joy: Crossing the state line back into your state. When we lived in Oklahoma (when I was a kid), our entire carful (Mom, Dad, Dick, Dan, Dave) would erupt into Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" every time we crossed back into the Sooner State.
• Standing in a long line at the Post Office the other day, I thought about how we all want tax cuts--until they inconvenience us. We want tax cuts that inconvenience other people, right?
• As I posted here earlier this week, I'm now patronizing the new Open Door Coffee Co. here in Hudson. But yesterday--Saturday--for the first time, someone else was sitting brazenly at "my" table. I let him get away with it ... this time. But I make no promises concerning future violations.
• Yesterday was the opening day for the Hudson Farmers' Market. All sorts of folks swarming over the Green in search of the green.
• We had a wonderful dinner Friday night at Hudson's new Peachtree Southern Restaurant with old Hiram College friend (and tennis teammate) William (Bill) Heath and his wife, Rosér; they're in town for his 50th college reunion. Both are writers, so it was fun to share with them the stories of the vicissitudes of this writing life ...  I tried the pecan pie--only, you see, in honor of my mother, who made great ones throughout my years at home--and the Peachtree's was fine. Though not my mom's ...
• And--of course--Father's Day. Charles Edward Dyer, 1913-1999. Not a day, not an hour, goes by ...  Thank you, Dad ...