What else?

Well, I went up to New England to visit my married friends Rose and Ed. Rose and I went to Boston and took a tour of this Victorian house which was only noteworthy for being a well-preserved Victorian house that this eccentric insisted on preserving. In fact, when the city of Boston refused to accept it as a historic site, sometime in the thirties, he just roped the rooms off and gave tours himself, which prompted me to jokingly ask the extremely sinister, pallid guide, 'James' (lit student at BC)if he in fact lived upstairs and was just giving the tours for fun.

"I live in a basement apartment in South Boston," he replied unsmilingly. (We were, obviously, the only people on the tour.)

Then we had to listen to some recordings of the eccentric's extremely mediocre poetry, "Ode to a Worm" and "Ode to a Toad." Am seriously considering offering tours of my Greenpoint apartment: eight dollars, five for students and seniors.

"We know the hours 19th Century servants worked; we know what a bell-pull is; we know how long laundry took on Mondays!" groused Rose after we left. "*I wish they wouldn't assume we were idiots!"

She further added that forelocks like the one that fell across the guide's pale brow make here extremely uncomfortable. "Widows' peaks, too, but less so."