Because, as you know, an oyster has very few feet

(Can you think of eleven different felonies you could commit with an oyster?)

The oyster festival was a good thing. If nothing else, it gave me the opportunity to visit my brother, whom I have seen only infrequently since he moved out: and I understand why, because he has an unreally nice apartment. Up a steep flight of stairs with the kind of stairwell made to hang art on, the rooms are not high-ceilinged, but airy space, a bay window, a wall made half into a window with glass bricks, and he has not so filled the walls with pictures or posters that they don't reflect sunlight back; he has all the right angles of sky. He parks his bicycle at the top of the stairs, which is slightly chancy, but so far has produced nothing more disastrous than a minor lock-out. The washer-dryer is in the closet between the bathroom and the kitchen. There is a large stuffed dragon on the balcony. And being the kind of person who cares about picture quality and audio, he has rigged his living room with do-it-yourself surroundsound and a computer screen that would threaten the masculinity of many TVs. (He played several pieces off his computer, including A Perfect Circle's "Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" and the 1812 Overture, to demonstrate. The subwoofers work.) His toilet flushing sounds like the steam whistle on an express train, but for God's sake the place has to have a flaw, and it's certainly better than the exposed wires I had in the wall of my apartment when I moved in. He lives near enough to the water that he is planning to go crabbing sometime.

There were no oysters on Friday night, because there was a torrential thunderstorm, but this was more than made up for by Saturday. I hadn't realized the festival was such a major affair; I had assumed it was more or less local, and instead there were a dozen different kinds of oyster from Maine to Virginia, some sweeter, some more salt, and all delicious. I ate eighteen, which my brother pointed out was a respectable one-thousandth of the number advertised. I browsed Milford's extremely high-quality small used bookstore and got a hardcover of Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat (1976) for my mother; my brother photographed classic and antique cars; we survived the maddened crowds eating lunch. I got sunburned. He got a T-shirt with this year's festival logo on it, a one-eyed, hook-handed, quite possibly peg-legged pirate oyster, with a parrot on its shoulder. In the later afternoon, there was grocery shopping and collapse; I re-read The Left Hand of Darkness. He barbecued steaks for dinner, which meant that at one point the apartment was so smoky, the air was turning blue. (I had thought that was a metaphor.) We watched a fourth- or fifth-season episode of Remington Steele, which reminded me that I should probably see the rest of the series sometime. And I came home, so to speak, and I miss my apartment, deadbeat landlords and antique telephone jacks and fratboys and all. It is cold and clear as autumn in the dark outside and this time of year—even prefigured, not yet the end of summer—always seems to fold so many other years into itself. I should be in another city; I should be walking home with other people. I am carrying the wrong set of keys.