“After martial arts and gymnastics, we have nature hiking with the botanist. The botanist is usually a graduate student from Santa Cruz or Davis, who reiterates, with each brittle leaf, desiccated seedpod, and severed insect leg or wing, that she isn’t a certified expert.”
“Mrs. Bobs did not know the first thing about me, for instance that I was a chalk-and-talker, recently suspended for hanging a troublesome student out of a classroom window.”
“A quarter only got you ten minutes here, but I supposed we’d been lucky to find a parking spot at all. Lower Manhattan, late September. The air studiously neutral, at last emptied of the humid frenetic energy that had made of the city a kind of particulate snow globe in the last few weeks.”
