What a tough day yesterday was, with humidity in the 100s and temperatures nearly as high. Beauregard took turns lying on different cool spots on the floor all day, his tongue hanging out, his eyes ringed with fatigue. When I finally took him for his long walk after dark, he had to struggle to keep up.

I have been busy trying to wrap up some assignments before going on a 2-week car trip to Cleveland, Cooperstown, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Cape Cod, New York (New York), then back to Pittsburgh and home again.

It will be a poor man's tour of rich people places. The east coast signified more than anything poverty to me. We were so poor in New Haven, when Red and I lived off her nursng school scholarship, and I worked as a French waiter and graveyard shift proofreader. and now we are going back to these old haunts -- we call it simply "the Cod" -- with two pennies to rub together, no more, no less.

We'll be spending most of the time with friends, and perhaps two nights in hotels. It will be fun, provided we are not in the same city at the same moment a dirty bomb goes off, which according to the latest Gallup Poll everyone seems to feel will happen.

(Whatever happened to the logic of last fall, which was that you don't do nothing that gives the bad guys the sense that they've scared us -- because, if we act differently because of them, they've "won"?)

But even without the dirty bomb I have mixed emotions. It has taken me nine months to get some work on my plate, and I have 500 additional irons in the fire, each of which could turn, Micawberlike, into "something splendid."

And while I am tired of all the hustling and could use the time off, I am afraid that I am giving fate the finger by leaving. As if the moment the car turns the corner on Howell Avenue, the phone will ring with the offer of a lifetime. Only now I will have to live multiple lifetimes, in squalor for the most part, to hear just the one.

Wish us well. Wish my mother well, whom I am leaving behind, and hope she thrives without my care and supervision. Wish my brother Patrick well, who is flying in from California to replace me for the two weeks, and who, I'll wager, has major misgivings about something going wrong while I'm away.

Wish Daniele well, for she is planning to leave our family home while we are gone, and move into her very first apartment. It is an emotional milestone of the utmost gravity, and being absent, I will miss it, but I will feel it, somehow, out on the clam-strewn strand. She is the honey of my existence, and how shall I live without her sweetness.

Cross fingers for Beauregard because he cannot cross fingers for himself, not having any. Poor witless French beast, he will remain behind, and he will howl for two days, and then mope for two days on the couch, where he is not technically allowed to be, and then he will turn down his dials and be all right, except that when I do finally come home, he will bide his time, and then strike out to hurt me in a way and at such time as to cause me the maximum discomfiture, never mind if my pain and my failures take him down too, for he is a poodle, and revenge is a dog dish best eaten with cold kibble. 

But mostly, wish my son Jon well, because he is 14, and coming with his parents on a long car trip, the last of his life perhaps. Inside his body, chemicals are roiling and urging him to commit unspeakable crimes of devastating rudeness. He can't help being that way, it's all part of nature's inscrutable plan.

Rachel and I know how to relax and let the trip take itself. But the boy knows nothing of that. The eastern seaboard will be a rebuke to him and a source of ceaseless stinging and reproach unless something magical and mature happens to him, and he sees that the world, if you are blessed with open eyes and are willing to give it a good look, is really a very interesting place.