A small dash of serendipity struck this afternoon. Kat and I are going to make arrangements to go to Birmingham sometime soon—probably next weekend. She needs a particular facial cleanser from a store whose closest outlet is in Birmingham, and we both want to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We'll combine trips.

Like today; we combined forces at Costco. Costco, like Sam's, sells everything in bulk. (Need a metric ton of crackers? They've got them.) Since we both live in small households, this isn't always useful for us. We all know that meat is significantly cheaper there, but the packages are so large that they're not terribly useful for us. It occurred to me a few months ago that if two of us were willing to combine forces, that we could split some purchases and come out with a lot of meat for the less-than-horrific amounts that we're accustomed to paying.

Nine years, I do believe, it has been since a letter from M.E. last appeared in my mailbox. Nine years, or so, I think it was since I did much paper correspondence. He was British, I the crass American teenager. We shared musical tastes; how much else I do not know.

This past week, my mother phoned me. As an aside, she mentioned, "A letter from a [M.E.] arrived today; I've put it with my things and I'll bring it with us when we come visit this weekend."

My response was of sheer astonishment. He was someone I hadn't thought about in quite some time. But, in the classic "don't think about a white elephant!" sense, I spent the next few days wondering how his life has changed over nine years.

Occasionally I have to remind myself that to Tenzing and Edmund, everything in the world makes perfect sense. It's only the humans, who have this daft notion of 'logic,' that get confused about things that are perfectly normal to those inhabiting the feline world.

"Are you going out today? If you are, then don't forget to take your umbershoot."

If my mother said this to you, you would probably look at her with a great degree of puzzlement. If my mother said this to me, I would know that we were supposed to get rain that day.My mother can be dour and serious. She was the eldest of four children, and her unasked-for position of seniority required her to be the caretaker of her siblings while her parents ran a small store.

As a result of that caretaking, I can vouch for her excellence at it.

She graduated from high school in 1961, when in Arkansas, the propriety of the 1950s hadn't quite been overtaken by the gaiety and looseness of the 1960s. She was unmarried, and through casual comments she made, I gather that her family despaired that she would ever marry.

We have Caller ID, and it has been one of the best services we've ever purchased, despite my sometimes missing the element of surprise when I pick up the phone. Once, there was a time when the phone would ring, and I would answer tentatively, expecting telemarketers or wrong numbers, only to be thoroughly gratified to hear an old friend's voice on the phone.

Two generations of my family are best defined by the things they almost never discussed with me. For my grandparents, it was the desperate poverty of the Great Depression, followed by the heartbreak that was World War II. For my father and mother, the event that shaped the years of their early adult lives was the Vietnam War.

I am a member of the first generation of my family who, upon looking back, cannot claim to understand what they went through. My generation has nothing of the kind—and this, as my mother once said quietly to me, is probably the greatest blessing we will never comprehend.When I was ten, I was given a school assignment: to interview an older member of my family to learn what their life was like when they were my age. I picked my maternal grandfather's eldest sister, Belva Davis.