slept all day. accompanied mother and dad to a fourth of july barbeque. brendan smith, with whom i attended grade school, is engaged and otherwise unchanged. his fiancee wears an awfully short skirt for such a staunch christian, which makes me like her immediately. poor brendan, all look and no touch. who knew that bible enthusiasts could be such teases. she has the entire new testament more or less memorized, she tells me. his father has a meat smoker out back and he gives me the step by step run down of how to do both wet and dry briskets. his mother, sweet, loud, heavy-drinking eileen, has a grey streak at her temple that serves as a standard to which the growing number of my crowning silver hairs can aspire. she has just discovered cancer in her left breast and is struggling to decide between chemotherapy and a double mastectomy/reconstruction. it isn't my place, so i don't tell her that really, she should just lop them off. it's sick and sad, but the alternative is so much worse. they drink and talk and i sit with my ice tea and the straw hat of my teenage years, staring into the sparkling white reflections on various surfaces and thinking about glutted things; overfed goldfish, leaf-clogged rain gutters, sticky squeeze-bottle tops, overfull glasses spilling onto counters, rooms in excess of their fire safety body count, tipped cows swollen in hot fields, hot feet after long daytime shifts, lolling eyeballs, oil boiling ceaselessly into the sea