The issue is out. Shelly drove it to Sacramento this afternoon. Collating should be next Thursday, if things stay on schedule.

It was a quiet, strange day. Charlie took off for Sercon — I drove him to the airport after lunch — and for the rest of the day we worked with that giddy, disembodied feeling we always have when he is gone. Near the end of the day Faren finished the sub lists and I drove to Marin to drop them off at Chuck’s.

Chuck is a wizened, bearded old man who works with a computer he apparently constructed from a chest of drawers, a television screen, and an old typewriter keyboard. On this thing he enters the corrections, additions, and subtractions to the sub list and runs out labels for mailing day.

When he’s not at his video store, he lives in a low, dark house in the Marin Hills, a shady area of long wavy driveways and views. Just a few feet from his house is a dreary little beach where the water laps half-heartedly at a strip of brown sand. The house itself is kept tightly closed, its curtains drawn, and the inside is dark, layered with carpets, thick with heavy furniture and expensive looking memorabilia. It reminds me of places my fathers’s parents used to take me on visits when I was a little girl. Almost all their friends were old folks who lived in their own personal museums.

Chuck lives with a younger woman, a cousin who, I believe, decided he couldn’t take care of himself and moved in with her two wolf dogs. These are beautiful, huge, playful, and frightening. They don’t speak proper dog language, mixing barks and tail-wagging with deep, muzzle-wrinkling growls. Both the dogs and the humans of the house send out conflicting signals. If I walk towards the house when one of the dogs is tied outside, either Chuck will appear in the doorway urging me on (“Come on, come on, he’s just a baby, he won’t hurt you!”) or his cousin will shout at me to stand “ab-so-lute-ly STILL!” until she comes out to untie the dog and take him in.

Today it was Chuck. The white wolf dog was tied outside, and made a racket when I approached. Chuck came out with the gray wolf dog and accepted the documents from me while the two animals yipped and romped around me, thrusting their enormous heads under my hands to be petted.

No work tomorrow. Hooray!