I flew to Baltimore but first I went to State College, PA which is in the middle of God-Only-Knows Pennsylvania to visit my friend Richard. Sure, I thought to myself when I was planning this, I can just bop over to State College. Bop is right. Bop is what my father called dog poop. It is more than a 3 hour trip from Baltimore. State College, home of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, is not as nice as one would think for a college located in the middle of nowheresville. Richard, who took this job only a year or so ago, has already quit it.
On the way back to Baltimore I stopped in Carlisle, home, as I mentioned, to Molly Pitcher. What a gorgeous city. Town, more like. My friends Gary and Terri have lived there for maybe 40 years. We went to college together and since they moved there I have seen them maybe 3 or 4 times. But I’m a great correspondent (once-a-year-letters, I’d have sent more but I don’t like to burden people). They looked just the same as they did in college. His hair is shorter but not all that much shorter and just as full, unlike, say, mine. They made me a fabulous dinner which finished with something called affogato which I had never heard of (of course the horse-mounted food-law enforcer, as per usual, was all blasé, “oh sure affogato . . .”) It was sooo good. Ice cream and mulled chianti. I know, sounds totally weird—was fabulous. (see it here) I did not take a picture of it since, well, one does not whip one’s phone out at someone else’s house and take pictures of one’s dinner as I might at my own when I remember to do it.
I did whip my phone out the next day as I cruised out of town to take some pictures. Several people watched me suspiciously and in this day and age of suspicion I worried that I might get shot at. Wouldn’t be the first time.
