I am writing this at Hampton Inn just outside Alb.. oh, hell, you know where I am. I was just outside for a coffee break, where I ran into this marvelous woman who was apparantely traveling with what I now assume is her sisters or cousins or relatives.

“We could have gone to Vegas, you know, but no, she wanted to come here. She wanted to go to bingo. ‘Cause there’s no bingo in Vegas, right? But she wanted calm, I guess, and Vegas is not that. It’s her birthday, so we all came here. One of us is from California, and another from Arkansas, and well, all over the place.”
“Do you always travel together for birthdays, then?”
“Since our mother passed away. We have very few deaths in our family. People live to their eighties or nineties. Our mother was eighty when she passed, but it still came as a surprise. So we decided we needed to start celibrating birthdays. But there’s a whole lot of them coming up in the next month. Can’t travel on all of them. But people just choose a month, and we go there. When it’s my turn, we’re going to Canada, and they’ll have to come, because I came here.”
“Where in Canada?”
“Niagara Falls. But it has to be the Canadian side. My birthday is in October, but you can’t go there then. But the minute the snow disappears, we’re off. And I’m gonna give them lots of advance warning and time to plan. At least six months.”
“That’s nice of y…”
“Give them no excuses. They can bring their husbands if they like.”

After that she talked for a while about insurance and Obama care, and then my cigarette was finished, and she said: “well off you go. Have a nice one” barely without interrupting her monologue. She might have continued without me, I don’t know.