Today (Tuesday), I was asked to pick up our visiting writer-speaker Paul Lisicky from the train station. I was a bit early to the Mays Landing environs, so I had time to stop at the Starbucks for the usual (a grande coffee). The one girl, the girl who knows my order by heart but whose name I don’t know (I really should know it), said that my bow tie was precious, and the woman who fixed my Pike Place admitted that not every man could pull off a bow tie, and a pink one at that, but that I did it well. I was chuffed. How could the day not go well after that?

I waved to my former student Bree and was on my way, listening to The Chap’s “Well Done Europe” until switching for a bit to 90s on 9.

I arrived in Egg Harbor City and parked my little orange car in the commuter lot. It was 9:45 and Paul’s train wasn’t due in until 10:10. I took a stroll over to the High Street. Later at lunch, my friend Elinor would recount how she had once seen a man on the platform in EHC with a knife; thankfully, no one seemed to pay much mind to me.

As I sat on the train platform I found myself fixated a moment on the “WATCH THE GAP” caution and longed for London; for a minding of the gap.

I met Paul and delivered him safely to campus. The reading and subsequent talk with our Visiting Professor Kathy Graber was lovely. Paul was impressed with our students; the students impressed with Paul. It was a veritable festival of impressedness.

I met Lauren and Robbie later that afternoon for lit-mag layout stuff. The magazine is coming along, if slowly. I was a bit tired and didn’t have much to contribute as they wrestled with InDesign. I found myself longing for the old Pagemaker that I used as Rewrites editor and when I was the editor of The Billows in high school. This was not Pagemaker. Pagemaker, what happened to you? Are you in some desktop publishing retirement cloud somewhere? I miss you, old friend.