Happy Patriots’ Day to my fellow Massachussettsians!

Patriots’ Day is another completely serious, totally non-made-up holiday that commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord. The Boston Marathon just happens to be scheduled for Patriots’ Day each year. Draw what conclusions you will.

While a select few of my friends and colleagues were running up Heartbreak Hill, I was taking a leisurely jog around downtown Miami. I ran around Brickell Island, a triangular spit of land that houses very Miami-ish high-rises. I am pretty sure that in “CSI: Miami” someone traced a bullet trajectory from a victim on the ground to one of those high-rise windows. Or maybe not; it all looks pretty much the same.

Do you heart the wonderful cheesiness that is “CSI: Miami”? Even if you do, you probably can’t watch all 7 minutes of the following, but it’s good for a few laughs:


Anyway, when I learned I was coming to Miami, I had hoped to connect with an old Peace Corps friend who’s been here for a few years, someone who’s been out of touch with her old friends for awhile. I Googled her e-mail address and sent off a challenge to respond (”Ignore me at your peril!”), and what happened next reminded me of that Michelle Shocked song:

I took time to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
I mailed the letter off to Dallas
But the reply came from Anchorage, Alaska

Well, she wasn’t quite in Anchorage; she had moved several hours away, but within an hour of my parents’ house; I could have seen her when I went there in February. So now I’m sitting with hours to kill in Miami, a storm looming, and nothing much to do, which isn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but could be more fun.

So my friend and I exchanged e-mails over the course of several days, and at the end of a lengthy meditation on the political characteristics of her new town she added, “Did you hear I got married?”

I wrote back, “No, I did not hear you got married. WAY TO BURY THE LEDE.”

Of course I had not heard that she got married, because I was obviously the first person she had told. It was a piece of news that would interest people on four continents (five if my friend E. had not just moved back from Australia), and I was its sole possessor. The trouble is, I could not be sure it was true. My friend is an unusual person, and I could not picture her doing something so prosaic as marrying and moving to the suburbs. If I had learned that she murdered this man and sank his body in the Intracoastal so she could usurp his house and money by masquerading as his wife, I may have been less surprised. If I had learned that this “husband” was a figment of her imagination who lived only in her diary, I could have handled it. But this? She had to be pulling my leg.