A hundred years on the eastern shore

spatch is home. The mermaid brought him safe back to me. He was in central Maine to bury the ashes of his aunt and his grandmother and his grandmother's last two cats in the cemetery that goes back at least five generations in the family; the family itself goes back to the seventeenth century in this country. It would have been his grandmother's hundredth birthday. She always said, he told me, that the moon landing was the greatest birthday present a person could ever wish for. I'm glad he was able to celebrate her. On either side there seems to have been a truly impressive amount of travel snafu, not limited to the MBTA, but also some very good meals and time with his extended family; he brought me a stone from the cemetery, two nautically appropriate used books from Portland, and some pictures of Old Orchard Beach. Earlier in the evening I used a taxi to get us takeout which we just finished eating and am now about to essay lying on the couch and watching a movie. It is much too hot in our apartment and has been all weekend. The cats are sweet.