Last night's storm was a disco extravaganza: strobe-light flashes, thunderous applause, and in the middle of the excitement an old poodle mildly pottering into the raindance as I stood at the door wondering whether our aged dog was going to die of a lightning strike while taking care of business at 2 a.m.

The end result of all this excitement was that I slept through the alarm and woke up to a dark-green morning that might as well be nine o'clock at night.

It's the last gasp of summer vacation, which means a day crammed with dentist appointments, piano lessons, soccer practices, summer term-paper revisions, emergency laundry, and rain rain rain. I have started reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a novel I loved in college, but now I am maddened by the anti-Semitism and not sure I can keep plowing through it. My desk is heaped with books and papers, and the ficus tree is shedding leaves all over the floor, and the cat is leaving muddy paw marks on my time sheets, and all of the bath towels smell like the Wrestlers Spend a Week at the Beach, even though I put out clean ones yesterday morning.

I dreamed about spending the night in a small-town bus station that was also an indoor campground, and everyone there knew all about the latest Frost Place gossip, but refused to tell me what it was.