Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

In an effort to be more than a happily ignorant member of the "complacent majority of citizens" described by Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, I read the following brief article in Today's Boston Globe. Read it. Then someone tell me what to do about it. . .

Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment

By Laurence H. Tribe | May 16, 2006

THE ESCALATING controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."

The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.

Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection at his whim is a ''search." And doing it to all Americans, not just those chatting with Al Qaeda, and with no publicly reviewable safeguards to prevent abuse, is an ''unreasonable search" if those Fourth Amendment words have any meaning at all.

The legal landscape, too, has changed decisively since the court's majority opined that Americans have no expectation of privacy in the numbers they call. Rejecting the accuracy of that description even decades ago, Congress, which was more vigorous then in its protection of privacy, enacted statutes reassuring us that our phone records would not be shared willy-nilly with government inquisitors without court orders. So it can no longer be said, if it ever could have been, that our ''expectations of privacy" about whom we call are groundless or that we ''consent" to reconstruction of our telephone profiles by using one of the phone companies that, unbeknownst to us, have agreed to share such information (although, we're told, not the content of every call) with NSA on demand.

Privacy apart, this president's defiance of statutes by the dozens is constitutionally alarming. But the matter goes deeper still. Even if Congress were to repeal the laws securing telephone privacy, or if phone companies found loopholes to slip through when pressured by government, the Constitution's Fourth Amendment shield for ''the right of the people to be secure" from ''unreasonable searches" is a shield for all seasons, one that a lawless president, a spineless Congress, and a complacent majority of citizens -- who are conditioned to a government operating under a shroud of secrecy while individuals live out their lives in fishbowls -- cannot be permitted to destroy, for the rest of us and our children.

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.

A Kiss from Maddalena

I recently attended a weekend conference for writers sponsored by Grub Street. It was the fifth annual “Muse and the Marketplace” event at which roughly half of the sessions were muse related, i.e. craft related, while the other sessions were concerned with publishing.

After hearing an agent rave about a book fallen in love with and signed the author, I picked it up on the book table. A Kiss from Maddalenais the first book of Christopher Castellani, who is the artistic director at Grub. I even snagged his signature for my book between sessions.

I finished the book after two readathons (due in part to rainy weather in Boston). It has been a while since I had such a yummy read. By the end, my heart was a-flutter, I swear. It is a classic love story set in World War II Italy. Village girl in love with local boy. Village girl gets “flower picked” by a rich Italian back from America looking for a bride. She is forced to consider the fast talking rich guy. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. It is not a new story, but it is all in the telling. And I was swept away.

Of course I heart all cosi italiani. Having lived a year in the shadow of the Pantheon, who can blame me?

A girl needs a good Italian love story now and again.

Check out Christopher Castellani’s website,
where you can take a
virtual tour of the village of Santa Cecelia
where the story unfolds
www.christophercastellani.com

Penguin Reading Guide

The Innocence Project

Recently I started to think about the death penalty. It had been a while since I had given serious attention to capital punishment. In particular I wanted to know more about those who are exonerated from death row. Although I do remember cases of convicts released after DNA tests excluded them from the crime, I had do idea about the scope of the phenomenon.

I checked out and have just finished reading Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer. Scheck and Neufeld founded The Innocence Project in New York to provide legal aid to the wrongfully convicted. The provide counsel free of charge and work tirelessly for the inmates who become invisible behind prison walls.

Violent crime happens.A five-year-old is raped and murdered. An eyewitness is one hundred and ten perfect sure that Jim X did it. The system rushes toward justice and throws away the key. We breathe easier. We condemn the inmate and we walk freely down the streets.

Justice has been served. Or has it? Scheck et. al. shows that underpaid/overworked defense attorneys, shoddy science, racial discrimination, and eyewitnesses who tell compelling narratives add up to blind justice. Literally blind. And not in the fair and impartial way.

We tacitly endorse a system that is efficient and “hard on crime” even at the cost of truth. Modern DNA analysis has shed light on the ranks of the wrongfully convicted and the ways our judicial system failed and continues to fail.

Scheck found that in 130 DNA exonerations, 101 were cases involved mistake identifications. In other words, the eyewitnesses fingered the wrong person. How can this be?

It turns out that eyewitnesses are notoriously bad at recalling their attackers. After the attack when the tension mounts to name the criminal, the victim has incredible pressure both internally and externally to produce a narrative of the attack.

The brain takes data from before and after the attack to form a narrative that explains the events and helps the victim process the experience.

It turns out the brain is much more interested in healing itself by means of a coherent narrative than it is about facts.

Scheck does not go deeply into pyschology in his book, but the problem of eyewitness accounts dovetails nicely with the subject matter of another book I am reading, Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson.

Although I have only just started to page through another book, I can already recommend Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated. While Sheck's book is a compelling third-person narrative, this collection is a rich and disturbiing collection of oral histories edited by Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers. (Yes, that Dave Eggers. What a man.)

While you may not have time to read Scheck or Eggers, at least visit the website for The Innocence Project to get a better idea of what is at stake for the wrongfully convicted.

Freakonomics: Success

Experts are made and practice matters, but birthdays do too

By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt | May 7, 2006

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: Elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the first six months of the year than in the later months.

If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced.

On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining nine months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just four players born in the last three.

What might account for this? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) babies born in winter tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in ''none of the above."

He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers.

''With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from seven to 20," Ericsson recalls. ''He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one.

In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person ''encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was through a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task -- playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback, and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking, and darts.

They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own lab experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the ''Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated.

Or, put another way, expert performers, whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming, are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliche as well: When it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love, because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.

Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't ''good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

''I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, ''is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it."

This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require ''talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school.

Surgeons, however, are an exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn't know for certain whether there is breast cancer. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years later, when no cancer develops.

Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training.

''Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for each case," he says. ''Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice."

If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle of why so many elite soccer players are born earlier in the year.

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, it's Dec. 31.

So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick?

He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice, and the feedback, to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem, that will turn them into elites.

This may be bad news if you are a soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month. But keep practicing: A child conceived on a Sunday in early May would probably be born by next February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family section.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of ''Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything."

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Michael Cunningham "Speciman Days"

It is a struggle to get back into the “normal” flow of things. The rainy weather actually helps. I have hunkered down in one Newbury cafe or other with my shiny new laptop and tinkered away at my work-in-progress. Tuesday morning I took a break from my work to read the Boston Globe. There I saw that Boston University’s Book Store was hosting Michael Cunningham as part of their lecture series. L. was out of town; I was in a blue funk. I decided to kick myself out of the house and endure the rain for the chance to hear Cunningham read from his latest work.

The minute Cunningham entered the small room and approached the lectern, I was impressed. He just moves well. Tall, lean. Casual in jeans and black knit top. He pulled out his glasses and got his cold water bottle in place before he dove into his novel Specimen Days(already out in paperback). He explained that it is difficult to read from because it is a “big whackball of a book” that has three sections: a ghost story, science fiction, and a thriller. The characters move through each genre. And Walt Whitman serves as a kind of Virgil for the reader (I imagine, as right now this is the best book I still haven’t read yet).

His reading voice was bursty—coming in bits and punches, silent pauses while he took tiny gulps from this bottle. It was an urgent voice. In fact, it reminded me of my attempts to read my own work to a crowd. When I read other authors I cradle each word or set them up on pedestals or shoot them off like roman candles, trusting the semantic magic show created by a “real” author. When I read my own stuff, I am a clod. I am deeply worried that I might bore my audience. Or I want to stop and talk about each detail with raptures of joy or angst, depending.

But I digress. I am sure that Cunningham has read hundreds of times. He was probably more bored himself than afraid of boring us.

As he read from one of the sections, he described a burning building. A woman steps onto a window ledge and readies herself to take the awful plunge. I can’t quite recall the exact language, but an image of her with wide skirts billowing in the wind lingers in my imagination. The narrator describes her image up there in the window as precise and fragile.

He ended the section. Wiped his glasses on the bottom of his shirt. He continued to read.

Then it hit me: his prose is just like the woman he described in his story: precise wordsmithing yet fragile enough to resonate with emotion and image.

Does that make sense? His writing is that woman on the ledge, her skirts billowing in the wind. Ready to take the plunge. A slow motion fall toward death, but a death that is revelation to the young boy who watches her. The reader sees the images he creates with photographic precision and is left vulnerable to the wind strong enough to blow her skirts, yet eager enough to feed the flames that kill her.

He is famous for his book The Hours (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulker Award). But it is not that work that I recalled at that moment.

Instead a short story I had read recently and an off-hand remark about Cunnningham’s genius took center stage in my mind. Of course: This is the Michael Cunningham who wrote “White Angel,” a story that sheared off the top of my head and wore out my highlighter when I read it for the first time a few weeks ago.

Then I wanted to know: does he teach? and where?

During the questions and answer session he proved to be both quirky and intelligent. At least, I found him witty and jumped on board with his take on writing. When an audience member asked him why he writes stories that take place across eras, he replied that he wants to get as much time into his work as possible. He remarked that human nature has not changed but that the pace of our lives has dramatically altered. Our right now is deeply infused with historical awareness and a deep longing for the wonders the future will hold. He wants to get this sense of our time-consciousness into his novels.

Another person asked him about his interest in writing science fiction. He said that many people are shocked that he would attempt such a “lowly” art form. But he doesn’t see it that way. For generations other art forms have blended highbrow and lowbrow. Literature, however, is stodgy. He wants to play with the forms. Do the unexpected. See what comes. Yes, he thinks that most science fiction is “crap,” but the good stuff is really, really good. And he wanted to take a shot at it.

He was asked about his use of Walt Whitman in the book. He adores reading poetry, calling himself a “poetry hound.” And he worships Whitman because he was “the least stupid optimist” in American history. I mean he is “Walt ‘fucking’ Whitman,” he said. He was hesitant to use Whitman in this book, however. After all, he had made a bundle on Virginia Woolf. But nevertheless, he is there. It seems Cunningham uses him partly because Whitman, a man of our American past, is still here with us in our American identity. He is past, present, and future. And Cunningham sees that and wants to celebrate the miracle of ideas and objects that survive and endure, and even grow sacred.

Applause.

I hadn’t intended to buy the book. I came to get myself out of funk. But I had been swept off my feet. When he signed my book, he exuded warmth. Of course I asked him where he teaches. Brooklyn. Alas.

The Michael Cunningham Website
(with links to a biography, books, interviews, reviews, tour dates, etc.)

Interview with Cunningham about Specimen Days

The Cell, NewburyPort, Sailing on the Charles, and Kenya

Compared to the nuptial weekend, this weekend has been very "slow." The weekend was also "lonely" with just the two of us! I had plenty of time to indulge my honeymoon read: The Cellby Stephen King. The King of Creep. I finished it last night in the dead-dark after midnight. I had goosebumps trying to sneak quietly up the stairs to the bedroom--in my own apartment. People should read a King novel just to get jolted now and again. His writing works on you, you have to admit it. Besides high school kids read him (just like I did when I was in high school) and I want to keep up my cool factor.

We did make it up to Newburyport on Saturday. The first annual literary festival was the draw, but the good weather and a day trip from Boston were also key factors. We managed to hear one author speak.

We heard a local author reading from the second book in a planned trilogy. The Season of Open Water is set in a New England town entangled in the Prohibition-era rum-running trade. The author is Dawn Clifton Tripp. She was a good speaker, very candid and open. The historical material for the novel was culled from interviews she did with residents who either remember that era or remember the stories passed down through the generations.

When she read from her book I was convinced to read it, even though she is a "new" author for me! I refrained from purchasing it just yet. My book shelf is too deep as it is. But I will blog her here in my external memory. (A blog is wonderful way to store information in your virtual brain.)

My favorite parts of Newburyport: the tea house and the jewelry store on the corner. The tea house was brilliant--the world needs more tea houses. (Mark my word.) I loved the jewelry story because I discovered a brilliant sapphire that I can wear. It shines like a diamond, without all the political/metaphorical heaviness. I shall have a sapphire one day.

Today we set off to the North End in Boston to catch a day of free sailing--free boat trips are offered to the public at the start of each sailing season. Just as we went out the door, L. called a friend....who invited us to go sailing with him. We stopped in our tracks. He picked us up five minutes from our front door in his MIT sailboat. We cruised the Charles River. It was my very, very first time in a sailboat. It was brilliant. I could be converted to a life that involves more sailboats.

Tonight ends the week of unofficial honeymooning. I have found the destination for the official honeymoon: Kenya. Il Ngwesi. So start saving your pennies if you want to join us for a night sleeping with the lions!

One Week After

The wedding was perfect. Need I say more? One week of wedded bliss. I'll write about it later, perhaps. These things need time to clarify events. In sum: we both said, "I will"; we have rings; there was a feast; our friends gave brilliant toasts (all about us!); we roasted a pig; and the Kansas stars were never so near in the midnight air.

It is back to the reading/writing grind these past few days. It feels good to sleep as much as I need, then wake up to a hardback novel that needs my attention. Finally this afternoon I sat down with my rough draft (I am up to almost 40,000 words!) and did some serious revision. I have a plan to finish the novel. This is good. Endings are tough. Theory is good. Action not so easy (for me, I should say).

Plans for the weekend: the Newburyport Literary Festival. 35 miles from Boston. On the shore. Literary events. Spring air. Did someone say lobster?

Nuptial Fete Menu (April 21) Laszlo Barabasi & Janet Kelley

The Wedding Feast

Aperitifs
palinka (plum brandy), made by Béla Keresztes, uncle of the groom

Blessing
Ronald Kelley, father of the bride

Appetizer
spinach salad with roasted peppers, apple-smoked bacon, romano cheese,

and balsamic vinaigrette
or
original chicken fingers with dipping sauces

Soup
hideg cseresnye leves (chilled cherry soup)

First Course
tenderloin fillet of bison and garlic redskin mashed potato

Toast
Deborah Justice, friend of the bride

Second Course
pan-seared tilapia, seasoned with cilantro and coriander,

served over savory beans in a fragrant broth, bacon, spiced pecan, and garlic,

and topped with tomatoes and crisp leeks

Toast
Boldizsár Jankó, friend of the groom

After-Dinner Entertainment

Champagne Toast
Jason Dinges, friend of the bride

Cake
dobos torta

Dancing

Cheese Course
selection of cheeses, Hungarian salami,

and fresh fruit

Schlink: The Reader

Tonight we will discuss Berhard Schlink’s The Readerfor novel writing class. I admit: I read it twice. I will help lead the discussion and wanted to get a firm grasp on what has been called a “moral maze.” (I also had time due to a cancelled class.) The novel’s central love story involves a fifteen-year-old Michael and a much older woman, Hanna.

In the later parts of the novel Michael, a young law student, watches her trial for war crimes committed during the Holocaust. Michael realizes during the trial that Hanna is illiterate and unable to read the charges against her or set up a defense. She admits to her crimes readily. But because she is busy trying to hide her illiteracy, she appears more guilty than her fellow female guards. She is sentenced to life in prison.

Hanna spends eighteen years in jail, where she learns to read and write with the aid of books Michael reads on cassette and sends to her. The rest you will have to read for yourself. It is a post World War II tale that asks its readers to consider life in the aftermath of terrific violence.

Useful Links

Oprah Winfrey Show: discussion excerpts

Reading Discussion Questions

"Reader's Guide To Moral Maze"

Memorable Lines

"When rescue came, it was almost an assault." (4)

"I didn't reveal anything that I should have kept to myself. I kept something to myself that I should have revealed." (74)

"When I think about it now, I think that our eagerness to assimilate the horrors and our desire to make everyone else aware of them was in fact repulsive." (93)

"All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning everyday occurrences." (103)

"Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt?" (104)

"If felt the numbness with which I had followed the horrors of the trial settling over the emotions and thoughts of the past few weeks. . . . But I felt it was right. It allowed me to return to and continue to live my everyday life." (160)

"Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcome the suffering we went through on account of it." (170)

"You can chase someone away by setting them in a niche." (199)

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive." (217)

Whirlwind

March 30 – April 7

The weeks have been a blur. Life lived one event at a time with no room to think about tomorrow. It was quite a change from my writer’s life of pajamas till noon and books as my companions.

We had three guests, one birthday, two parties, late-night girl talk, seafood and pasta, dress shopping and the philosophy of wedding dress shopping, and a tired visit to the Garden of Eden for macaroni and cheese.

After my guests were safely aboard planes and trains, I set off for Kansas and a whirlwind of florists, caterers, and a priest. Pancakes were involved. I was supposed to fly back to Boston late Tuesday, then fly out early to DC.

But the flight was delayed. . . so I had them reroute me directly to DC. I headed for a round of Capital Hill lobbying in my torn jeans. Luckily Ann Taylor at Union Station had just the navy suit and faux pearls (a double strand) that I never knew I always wanted. The shoes were cute, but evil. (Note: wedding shoes –which haven’t yet been purchased—may be less cute.)

Luckily my brother pointed out a Starbucks that morning and praised-be they gave me an embarrassingly huge venti latte by mistake. That tanker of milk and caffeine lasted me until our calorie break at 4:30—an apple thrown into my bag at the last minute way back in the Wichita airport.

We met with every single Indiana congress person and senator. Well, we met with their very young aides. We gave a spiel about the Writing Project. We were intelligent and dynamic and our (my) feet hurt like the dickens. That night wine and cheese at the postal museum reception and then pizza and wine with my brother at the Matchbox.

The next day it was sessions and digital story telling and blogs and the achievement gap. I took the train to Baltimore. I saw the house and the wedding album. I ate a pound of chips and salsa before the enchiladas. Then onboard the flight back to Boston, another delay. My seatmate was something like a soul mate, but we never even exchanged names. Then metro home. Then hugs and kisses. Then bed. Then no dreams, bliss.