Whoever in the comments corrected me on the name of the camp destination: You were right. It’s Bloody Gorge, not Gulch. Evidently I’m the last to know. When Kate and Alan pulled up to the house after he picked her up at day camp, she caroled out to a neighbor, “We went to Bloody Gorge!” Another neighbor, my age or older, called back, “I went to Bloody Gorge at day camp, too!”

I told you this camp has a history.

The trip to Bloody Gorge — which seemed to involve wading, in socks, shoes and clothing, into water to the knees — was a huge success. Kate was dirty in the way that only kids who have truly played themselves to exhaustion can be dirty. I mean: She was coated with grime. I’m washing her clothes now, stained brown to their very warp.

What a great day camp. If I left her in it all summer, she’d be truly feral by Labor Day. But happy.

Oh, well. I don’t want to get all Lileks on you here. I’m just casting about for material, and hey, look, there’s a kid in the house. Maybe this blog is finding a new theme. Chapter 1: Daily Life with Links; Chapter 2: Re-invention; Chapter 3: Whatever Comes Next. In these mild days before Whatever Comes Next, some linkage:

One of our most interesting KWF seminar speakers last year was Republican pollster Bob Teeter, who died this week. During his introduction, he mentioned he had a place on Coldwater Lake, where our little cottage is. Alan says he recognized him from the water and thought he sailed an E Scow. Hot boat. Too bad.

We lead their guys around on leashes, they cut our guys’ heads off — a look at beheading as a tool of terror, by the AP.

Another key-to-the-city type greeting to the returning sabbatical-takers: Welcome to the Fort! You’re just in time for the TB crisis!

One of our fellowship speakers last year was a funny guy who talked to us about the nomenclature of jurisprudence — why we say “at odds,” what do we mean by “just,” etc. That he made this into a comedy routine tells you why he’s a law professor and we aren’t, or maybe it doesn’t. It was an entertaining talk. Then he went off on a side trail, discussing risk and childhood.

“You know those stories about the knights in armor, how they’d get suited up and then they’d have to be hoisted onto their horses because they couldn’t mount otherwise?” he said. “That’s a kid on the west side of Ann Arbor, learning how to ride a bike.” Parents strap their kids into every possible sort of pad and shield, because God forbid little Megan might fall and skin her knee.

I thought about Ann Arbor kids again today, when Kate went off on a treat we thought would be denied her this summer — a week at the Franke Park Day Camp.

This is a hugely popular city program that’s been going on for nearly 50 years, and normally if you don’t sign up the first week after registration opens (in February), you’re out of luck. We got shut out last year and didn’t even consider this year a possibility. But lo, there were openings late, and we got her into one.

It’s popular because it’s a real leave-it-to-Beaver summer day camp — no computers, no weight loss, no SAT drills, just fun and games and singalongs and getting dirty. And because it’s Fort Wayne and not Ann Arbor, it’s totally un-p.c. The kids divide up into Indian tribes, and there’s a powwow on Wednesday.

But I hadn’t realized just how far we’d come from Ann Arbor until today, when she reported one of the activities. “We dug for bullets on Bullet Hill,” she said. Bullet Hill, they were told, was an old police firing range, and the ground still contains rounds and rounds of spent ammunition. Kids, go dig and see if you can find a bullet of your very own!

I still find this story a little dubious — How much digging can Bullet Hill sustain? How does one find a bullet in the ground? — but just the idea is so amusing. I tried to imagine Ann Arbor kids being told to root around for spent shells and pancaked slugs as part of a summer camp activity. Clamor for the cast-off detritus of our gun culture! Clutch lead slugs in sweaty palms! Finally I gave up; it just wouldn’t happen.

Kate said one kid found a whole bullet and others found “squashed bullet parts.” She found nothing. Tomorrow’s activity: A trip to Bloody Gulch. Oh, I can’t wait.

Not much linkage today — I’m still up to my neck with trying to get acclimated to my new job and schedule — but I thought this odd NYT story about Metallica going through therapy, en masse and in front of cameras, was sort of cool.

Take care. Tomorrow.

Does Father’s Day exist if no father is in the house to be served breakfast in bed? You tell me. Alan spent the last week cutting grass, trimming hedges, selecting annuals, planting said annuals, driving to four different places to see if anyone had tomato plants left so we could at least try to get a few of our own even though it’s way late to be planting them, planting said tomato plants, repotting the rosemary, whipping the herb garden into shape, and am I forgetting anything?

Oh yeah — he did some plumbing, too. On Saturday I came home from work and he said, “I want to paddle my kayak. Let’s go to the lake.” I said, “I don’t really want to, and Kate’s playing with her friends so she won’t want to go, either. You go on ahead.” So he did, and didn’t come home until Sunday night. Was this an appropriate honor for a hard-working father? I say yes. I say a dad who works hard deserves a 36-hour solo holiday, and that’s the way it is in our house. You gotta problem with that?

Actually, I’ve known couples for whom such behavior would be grounds for divorce — no, has actually been grounds for divorce. I once knew someone who was said to file for the Big D because her husband failed to buy her a Mother’s Day card — the nerve!

“I don’t get it,” I said when I heard this. “She isn’t his mother.”

“But they have a baby,” I was told. “And so it was his responsibiity to buy the Mother’s Day card on behalf of the baby.”

Ohhh-kay.

“How is Alan celebrating Father’s Day?” my neighbor asked today.

“Hell if I know,” I replied. A healthy relationship leaves both parties room to grow and change.

So that was Dad’s Special Day.

Note, above, that I was talking to my neighbor. That’s another sign that I’m home. Weeks passed in Ann Arbor without exchanging more than a nod with our neighbors, but you can’t say that about Oakdale, where we’re on cup-of-sugar terms with our neighbors at all four compass points and then some. Two have keys to my house. One helped us get our water turned back on when the valve siezed up. One cuts Kate’s hair. On weekends, when the kids are running from house to house, we walk in and out of one another’s living rooms as though it were a commune. If someone’s out on the porch with a beer, you stop. (This is a good way to get a free beer.) My neighborhood may have its rough elements, people still drive too fast through it, we still have idiots who keep pit bulls, but it’s the friendliest place I’ve ever lived, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.

It occurs to me this entry has passed without a single link. Sorry. It was a beautiful day. Oh, wait: As long as we’re talking about neighbors, here’s the obit for our late neighbor Chuck, one of the best. Four Purple Hearts. Could he ever tell stories.

Since it keeps coming up in the comments, let’s just throw in a link to the Deteriorata, shall we?

I mean, for the sake of reference.

P.S. “Remember the Pueblo.” Good lord, but there’s a measure of one’s time on earth, isn’t it? If you remember it, you’re over 40. If you’re under 40, no months-long, constantly updated news event was ever less consequential in the long run.

I got home from work today and Alan had something important to tell me: Our ex-neighbor Chuck Gibson died yesterday. I can’t say I’m surprised; the last time we saw him he looked awful, and he’d had health problems for years. But I felt sad just the same. I’d been meaning to track him down, now that we’re back in town. I got on the bike to think about it. A storm was banging around up north, but it was sunny where I was and they don’t call them widely scattered showers for nothing. So off I went.

Into the park I rode, back out from under water but redolent of recently flooded ground — 10 past poopy diaper, I guess you’d call it. It was hot and humid, and there was mud where it shouldn’t be, and puddles that were gross to go through, and all the rest of it. The storm continued to bang away in the north, the sun continued to shine where I was. Bob Dylan was on the iPod. I rode on.

It’s strange to ride on a flat course again, after all the up-and-down of Ann Arbor. Thought: How can I make this more challenging? Thought: Ride faster! So I flew, something I rarely do since I knocked out my No. 9 incisor on a headfirst tumble three years ago…this week, now that I think about it. I went as fast as I dared, panting in the stink, thinking, Chuck, where did you go? My neighbor said at the end he called for the friend he was staying with, said he felt awful, and just died. What happens when the light goes out? Is it a chemical reaction that fails to happen anymore, or what? A bolt of lightning cracked ahead of me and the thunder was fierce. Finally a cloud rolled over the sun; I was still miles from home.

The skies opened. I hate riding in the rain, mostly because I wear glasses, which are impossible to keep clear. Then the sun came back out, while the rain continued to pour — unusual, but it happens (it’s how you get rainbows). I headed for home, soaked to the skin, no longer minding the puddles, sun shining through a significant shower. It occurred to me this was a natural occurrence of “Hollywood rain,” the sort you usually only see in the movies, because it’s fake rain, shot with a Rainbird sprinkler on a sunny southern California day. The pavement steamed, the gutters streamed, Jimi Hendrix came on the iPod — “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” Thought: Am I in a movie? Hendrix soundtrack, Hollywood rain, emotional subject matter — all the signs say yes.

A brush with death, either as a participant or observer, brings predictable reactions. Some people get horny — this one’s a classic. Others get mordant and depressed. This is what happens to me: My senses open wide, and I pay more attention. Death comes for all of us, I guess, and sooner or later we’ll be the ones whose name is passed around on the telephone lines. Someone else will go for a ride in the rain. But for now, we’re all still alive and it’s someone else’s turn.

That’s today’s edition of Five Pointless Paragraphs. Thanks for your patronage!

In other news at this hour, I thought this story, about a TV reporter yelling at a gay activist for writing something “cruel” and “defamatory” in a memory book devoted to Ronald Reagan, was an absolute stitch. I also liked this line, from the TV reporter’s official station bio: She was crowned Miss Majorette of Illinois in 1993 after fifteen years as an accomplished competitive baton twirler.

I guess one sign you’re enjoying parenthood is that you keep changing your mind about what the best part is. Once Kate grew out of the screaming-colicky-hellion stage of infancy, I wanted her to stay a baby forever. Six months was my favorite age. Then 10 months. Then she was a toddler, and even though it was like having a miniature Joan Crawford in the house, that was fun too. Then the period when she referred to our state capital as Nipply-napolis. But I’m changing my mind yet again. Yesterday, at breakfast, she called from the living room: “Mom, what does…t-y-p-h-o-i-d spell?”

“Typhoid,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just doing a crossword puzzle,” she said. And that was that.

Oh, this is the best, I tell you. The best.

Is this the return of the Single Long Entry? It may be! More tomorrow.

Sorry for the dearth around here, but it’s been a challenging week — the internet connection went out for 36 hours, and I started my re-entry at work, which means most of what I think about these days involves how to force a return without an indent in Quark (it’s shift/return, if you’re taking notes). Yesterday my next-desk neighbor and I discussed, at some length, whether “special-education teacher” should have a hyphen. I contended it should, which is why I just used one now. Adjectival phrases take hyphens! This is something I feel very strongly about! And now that it’s my job, I see myself penning 2,500-word essays on the topic in this very space.

Ha. Kidding. Besides, someone else thought of it first.

But now I’m home, in the cool gloom of my living room. It’s gloomy because I think it’s gonna rain, the way it’s rained 39 of the last 40 days, or something like that. We left Fort Wayne last August, one month after a summer flood some described as “freakish.” We arrived in June, in the midst of minor summer flooding, again caused by rainfall. Maybe not so freakish. (Alex has more on this.) Every day since we returned, it’s rained at least a little, and some of them have been cloudbursts where it came down so fast and hard it threatened to wash the paint off the house.

Monday, at the library, I heard a man moaning that parts of the city were flooding, “and still you see kids outside playin’ in the puddles. It’s like they don’t know we’re havin’ a disaster.”

No, they probably don’t. When you’re nine years old, a puddle’s a puddle and a flooded basement is not yet a disaster.

Since my broadband’s been down — aren’t you glad people no longer say they “broke down on the Information Superhighway” when this happens? — I haven’t even been able to comb the world for linkylicious linkage for you to follow. But! I have analog media to recommend, so y’all listen up.

I think, a few times in the last few years, I’ve pointed you to a Hank Stuever story in the WashPost. He’s my fave WashPost Style writer, and I’m almost over my all-consuming jealousy that one of his editors is the great Henry Allen. (I took a writing workshop with the great Henry Allen when I was young and impressionable, and it messed with my mind in a big way.) Well. One lesson of the internet is this: People Google their names, and sometimes they find you, and if you’re really lucky, sometimes they send you just-published collections of their journalism.

I’ve hardly minded the 36-hour internet interruptions, because I’ve been reading Hank Stuever essays and reportage on such topics as molded-resin chairs, discount funeral homes, a modern wedding and, of course, the famous Evil Queens piece.

Don’t just take it from me because I got a free copy due to my shameless sucking-up: This is a wonderful book. Buy two!

P.S. The great Henry Allen sent me his book, too, after that writing workshop, held when young Hank Stuever was still playing with Star Wars figurines. Oh my, but I loved Fool’s Mercy too. Current Amazon sales rank: 1,569,914. Well, it’s been a long time.

Among members of most baby-boom or younger adult demographics, it’s hard to find people who, er, didn’t take Nancy Reagan’s advice and feel entirely one way or the other about it. Frankly, I’ve seen this topic addressed more honestly in fiction than in non-, so I was heartened to read about “Can’t Find My Way Home: American in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000” in Salon this morning.

Can’t say how good the book is, but this interview with the author — you’ll have to sit through a Visa ad, sorry — is thoughtful and interesting. If nothing else, this passage made common sense:

If we really don’t start talking about drugs honestly, we’re never going to get anywhere with drug policy reform in this country.

Duh.

Rush Limbaugh is getting his third divorce. Next they’ll be telling us he has a drug problem!

(OK, I stole that line from a commenter at Atrios. Follow that link for a quick ‘n’ dirty roundup of the flaming gasbag’s thoughts on the institution over the years.)

Think Ron Reagan Jr. made any friends in the White House this weekend?

From his remarks Friday night at his father’s burial:

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

“I know we’re home now,” Alan said. “I heard semiautomatic weapons fire last night.”

I can’t say my realization was quite that dramatic. But it was similar. Fireworks. Anyone who lives around here knows exactly what I’m talking about, why I’m still awake at 12:20 a.m., among my still-cardboard-box-strewn house, typing listlessly, avoiding bed.

The move went about as expected, which is to say, it sucked. Once again, I marveled at how many Fellows were able to make it in Ann Arbor for eight whole months on things they could carry in one car. The overseas Fellows brought two suitcases! We loaded a 15-foot rent-a-truck, and filled it full of crap. Well, we paid for it. At least the move to Ann Arbor was out of our house, into a nice flat ranch house with a driveway that allowed us to extend the ramp almost to the front door. Going back? Eleven steps up from the street to the front porch, crossing the yard, and then half the crap had to be hauled to the second floor. In about 80 percent humidity. Oh, kill me now.

Now we’re back in the house, fighting the old battles. Fireworks. Semiautomatic weapons fire. The cable guys, who came, stayed more than an hour and managed to install broadband cable that still doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. One of them was a veteran letter-to-the-editor writer — I thought he looked familiar, although I met him only once, in a Best Buy, where he recognized me when we were both looking at camcorders.

“You know anything about these?” he said.

“A little,” I replied. “What are you looking for?”

“I need a model with night vision.”

He said today he no longer writes letters to the editor, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much. “If you really want to know what’s going on in this country,” he said, “you need to buy a short-wave radio.”

Back home agaaaaain, in Indiaaaana…

The house is slowly returning to normal, the pile of collapsed boxes growing on the back porch, art back on the walls, clothes finding their way out of suitcases and into drawers. It’s starting to look the way it did before we packed it up last summer, with some differences — there’s the kilim pillow Yavuz and Nursen gave us as a hostess gift last New Year’s, here’s the glass dish we bought in Argentina, little reminders of the year. There’s a Shaman Drum bag, here’s a bunch of hangers with MICHIGAN CLEANERS on the paper wrappers. I looked up the definition of “fugue state” on the internet:

…a type of dissociative disorder in which the individual may “flee” from his or her usual life circumstances, take on a new identity and have no recollection of his or her previous life.

Yeah, it’s like that.