… on this sad story, the murder of an Indiana University English professor, when all the electricity in the house, and up and down Rokeby Avenue, and all over Garrett Park, went out.

It was a sunny, pleasantly windy winter morning, so I threw on my coat and gloves and took the dog for a walk around our acre, picking up twigs and branches tossed everywhere by last night’s more powerful wind.

Across the street, evergreen limbs had fallen into my neighbor’s azaleas. I tried to lift the limbs, but they were too heavy. The Garrett Park maintenance crew eventually came along and took care of it.

I walked down the street and along the tracks to the post office, where I picked up a book Richard Fallon, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, sent me. It’s an academic satire titled Stubborn as a Mule, and it’s Fallon’s first novel.

Back in my front yard, I broke icy snow off of my own azaleas so that they would stop drooping, and I chatted with Elena, who lives across the street and had just come back from a week in Hilton Head.

“Look at these pictures,” she said, holding her phone out so I could see the beach and the sun.

“Meanwhile,” UD responded, “I go north to Cambridge every winter. Why didn’t human tribes migrate from Boston millennia ago? Dark, cold, ridiculous.”

Suddenly a rush of fire engines and HAZMAT trucks and police cars appeared. Elena and I followed them to Els Benjamin’s house, where there’d been a gas leak.

I walked back into my house, made a fire with some of the twigs and branches I’d collected, and sat down to play the piano. Mozart’s Fugue in E-flat Major, K. 153/375f , has UD written all over it, because it’s short, and has a manageable speed and a strongly voiced theme. I love to follow just a few notes as they open out to variations.

Tonight at nine o’clock on CBS Les UDs will be watching the Kennedy Center Honors. La Kid‘s in the chorus that sings with Sting in honor of Bruce Springsteen, so her parents’ noses will be pressed to the screen during that number.

Actually, she claims we should be able to see her quite easily.

One more thing: Les UDs will spend the
end of the year and the beginning of the next at an
inn in the Virginia countryside. Blogging will continue
as always.