2010-07-07 - 10:28 a.m.

It's so hot the dog sleeps in the doorway to the bathroom, because that's where the coldest air is. It's so hot I've been hiking up my jeans to the knees and sometimes walking around that way. The air on the sweat feels good. At home, I've been getting down to underwear and spending the rest of the evening that way.

Which makes me think of Sunday. Went up to a little state park, on one of the thousand Chesapeake inlets, and had a picnic. Everyone clustered at the picnic benches under the big trees. Dudes flying past on their jet skis, kicking up great walls of greenish-gray water. Kids splashing in the shallows. The grass almost bleached by the sun, almost dead from the lack of rain, weirdly so next to all that water. Teenagers knocking around a volleyball. Black families cooking on huge grills. A Latino family tacking up big red balloons that say "Happy Birthday" on them and I realize the happy birthday is for America. It's the fourth of July. They've taped cheap flags to the trees, using masking tape.

Later, though, at a cookout ten miles away, I say to the host that we'd just come from this picnic. I was telling him about how fast those big dudes took those jet skis. Sixty miles an hour, I thought. He's a motorhead, but I'm not, and I thought he'd be impressed. I'm forever looking for things like that, things that might interest him. I fake my way through a lot of engine talk and Mustang and Corvette talk. He asked which park and I told him Flying Point Park. He opened a beer and then, nodding, said, "You mean, Nigger Point Park."

And it's true that he was smiling a big smile but I'm not at all sure it was the right kind of smile.

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