Street parking increasingly requires us to go to one of those machines and buy a slip of paper with a time printed on it to put on the car’s dashboard. Aggravation ensues. In the “olden days,” parking meters were right outside the car. Drop a coin in them and walk away. Now I often have to walk half a block or more to the machine and then must walk back to put the slip in the car. Not a huge aggravation in the scheme of things, but still aggravating. I learned to be careful in placing the slip. Early on I carelessly tossed it “near” the windshield. It apparently did not display properly, and I got a ticket. With the old parking meters, there was always a chance that time remained on the meter at the spot where I pulled in. Then I might need fewer coins than I thought. It was not a huge joy when that happened, but it always made me feel at least a little bit lucky. But that happy moment is now gone. Or does anyone, when leaving a parking place, give the slip with time remaining on it to someone pulling into the spot?

Chalked on a sidewalk sign in Times Square: “Special. 2 drinks for the price of 2 drinks.”

Trump wants a slush fund so he can give money to his January 6 supporters who were supposedly prosecuted because of a “weaponized” Justice Department. This might seem like a less bad idea if the fund would give money to the Olympian erroneously arrested for damaging the reflecting pool. But what are the odds of that happening?

After I found the book I was looking for, I scanned another library shelf and saw The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler. The jacket copy told me that it was the first in the series of Christopher Marlowe Cobb thrillers. I checked out the book and found that the fictional Cobb was an early twentieth century war correspondent. The book placed him on the eve of World War I in Mexico with its own complicated history of that time. I enjoyed the book and noticed that the jacket also proclaimed that Butler was a Pulitzer Prize winner. I assumed that he (like Cobb) had been a newspaperman and had won the prize for some reporting. Instead, I found that he had been awarded the Pulitzer for fiction in 1993 for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories. Although I seldom read short stories, I was curious and got A Good Scent as an e-book from another library. Most of the stories are told in the first person by Vietnamese refugees living in the New Orleans area. When I told a friend about the book, she assumed that the stories were depressing, but no, they aren’t. Some go all the way to heartwarming, and all are wonderful. Serendipity worked out.

Because of the Democratic Socialists, conservatives are happy to sling “communism” and its variants as damaging epithets at all Democrats. I remember that Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking book Silent Spring was attacked by claiming that Carson was a tool of communism. Hmmmm.

“If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.” Satchel Paige, Rules for Staying Young.