That’s better! Decorating a wreath is not at all like decorating a tree! For one thing, you can’t count on the support of lower, longer branches. For another, the boughs on the right-hand side of the wreath all face down, ruling out the little natural niches that make it so easy to stick an ornament somewhere on the opposite side. And don’t get me started about the lighting! There is much to be learned about treating a wreath — even if, like this one, it seems to be as big as something for a truck — like a small Christmas tree.

The figures on the wreath are cloth mice decked out, we’re told, in Cambridge drag. Three or four of the seven are safety-pinned to the wreath. (This works.) On the mantel itself is our lineup of Gladys Boalt Alice-in-Wonderland ornaments.

Alice, standing up above the Mad Hatter and the Fish Footman, is the most boring of the lot, so we see her from the hem down only. My favorites are the White Rabbit and the Duchess.

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It’s hard to believe that Christmas is right here! Not a few weeks away, but a few days away. I was hoping to write a few Christmas cards this evening — I have yet to write one — but I got no further on the Christmas front than hauling out the four boxes that hold all the miscellaneous Christmas stuff. Not the ornaments; they’re so special that Kathleen would store them in Fort Knox if she could. But, for example, the crèche that Fossil Darling’s late lamented mother bought for us in Spain, and the spinning top that I shove underneath the tree each year, as if there were an all-American, top-spinning boy in the vicinity.

The tree: ahem. It will be a small tree this year, just for Kathleen and me. We won’t be having the usual Christmas at-home this year, for perfectly nice reasons that I won’t go into. (Regular readers will fall into a catatonic state at this point: Not the Closets!) I can tell you that one of the reasons is my Better/Storage/Now! program of reassigning space in the apartment for this and that — and for giving away deze, dem, and doze other things that no longer fit in.

(I did do amazing things with the Spode platters yesterday, not to mention the new deep-fat fryer. Really, it’s almost as good as a new house!)

Christmas. When I think back on the Christmas-morning thrill of childhood, I don’t miss all the presents. I wish I could do the thrill justice. Crouching on the stairs when it was still too early to be out of bed, not wanting to make a sound but being too young to know what a “sound” might be. Looking at the tree from across the room, hardly daring to approach its nimbus of lights and tinsel, glowing in an empty room in what was still the night. Hoping that I’d find things I wanted and things I couldn’t imagine — which is why I don’t regret the naked lust for stuff. The fresh smack of fir tree scent lent an air of pious rectitude to what was in fact a craven longing for very material surprises. (A preview of coming attractions.)

Who knew what was under the tree? For four or five years, I didn’t. Then I wised up. As I say, I don’t miss the prospect of acquiring interesting new things at Christmas. But if I say that I don’t miss the thrill, that’s because I haven’t forgotten it.

¶ Matins: Even though it’s Christmas and everything, and we’re in between presidents who get shoes thrown at them and who won’t, let’s take a moment to wish Thailand well. It’s hard for an outsider to tell, at this point, whether the choice of Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva is a good thing, but the fact that a coalition is now in charge seems like a step forward.

¶ Tierce: The curious thing about trickle-down economics is that, while it doesn’t work so well when times are good — hmm, wonder why? — it kicks in nastily when there’s a slump. New York’s doormen are here to tell you about it.

¶ Sext: The Minimalist Chef, Mark Bittman, writes about the size of his kitchen, which is not unusually small for a New York City apartment but, at six feet by seven, tiny by American standards.

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If I seem to have been shirking my duties lately, it’s for a very good reason — but also a very boring one. Perhaps the most boring one. I’ve been getting my house in order, literally.

Don’t ask me why it took this look to see the light, but, talking things over with Kathleen in St Croix, I realized that I could no longer coexist with miscellaneous piles, bags, and other accretions of stuff in an already overfurnished apartment. It was clear that I need to live in a world where “catching up” is as uncommon as a triple bypass.

Not just catching up, then, but trying to obviate future catchings-up is what I’ve been up to. The going is very slow. (And the side effects! My mind set to Drudge, I’ve read little and written less.) But my working principle is to deal with each item on the list until it no longer exists. Until the contents of the bag or pile have either found a permanent home in one of my smallish rooms or been discarded.

That is so much easier said than done!

For example: there’s a quaint basket that’s full of photo albums. Not all the photo albums, mind you. Our wedding pictures are kept separately, and two albums of my favorite law school photographs (one black-and-white, one color) may be found, side by side, in the interstice between a bookshelf and a structural element in the bedroom — where they just fit. And the vast bulk of our photographs are housed in “shoeboxes” (actually pricier storage boxes from Exposures) and stacked in a purpose-built unit (also from Exposures) that reaches almost to the ceiling. The albums in the basket are truly miscellaneous. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them — especially the ones that I just inherited from my late stepmother. My inclination is to digitize the lot and toss the prints. But I don’t have one of those neat scanners yet.

And that’s just one problem. Two items on the list are heaps of magazines. Thinking about them makes me break out in the moral equivalent of hives. This afternoon, I went through a pile of Saveurs. I clipped very little, and what I clipped I put in a manila folder that I will purge in a couple of months.  The recipes that I haven’t used will go down the dumper.  That’s the theory, anyway. Mind you, the Saveurs weren’t even on my list, because the magazines weren’t in a bag. They formed a stack on the sofa, shown above. (The sofa, that is; I took the picture after the culling.)

By now, regular readers will by shaking their heads slowly: I sound just like someone who has sworn off drink — for the umpteenth time. And what arrests me is not that I’m promising yet again to keep up with the influx of printed matter. It’s that I believe, in some rock-ribbed way, that I owe you an explanation for what I’ve been doing, instead of writing up books and concerts and whatnot.

Or perhaps it’s just that I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve been out having fun. One thing is clear, though: I blog about The Problem in good faith. It may be boring, but I don’t know a soul who doesn’t face the same Collyer-esque nightmare. There’s something about the way we live now, some side-effect of our best intentions, that generates unmanageable middens of information. We live in The Information Age, after all! No one has ever had to cope with such pressures. It seems almost ungracious, if one is at all historically-minded, to complain about a vexation that does not involve death or dismemberment. Hey, I’m not complaining!

I’m just wondering if LXIV was right, this afternoon, when he saw Hedge Funds for Dummies in one of my book piles. He said that I can throw it away now.

This afternoon, at Feldman’s Housewares, the ladies behind the counter tried to sell me one of these. Whether it was the charm of their attempt, or the delicious incongruousness of a plastic pickle that, upon request, produces a rather cackly yodel, I can’t say. But although I didn’t buy one, I think that I must have one.

Like Philip the Good, late duke of Burgundy, I shall “entertain” dinner guests by making them wonder why such a ghastly sing-song seems to be pouring forth from their derrières.

Here’s the rub: do I order the Yodelling Pickle from Amazon, at a savings of three or four dollars? (I should note that even Feldman’s, on Madison Avenue in Carnegie Hill, isn’t charging Amazon’s “list price” of $22.96) Or do I support the neighborhood by trekking back up to 92nd Street? Either way, I’ll be mincemeat when Kathleen finds out.

LXIV tried to explain this to the salesladies. “If he buys it, his wife will never forgive me,” he pleaded. I nodded. “He’s the designated grownup,” I said. The ladies loved that one.

While my young friend looked at the pictures in the Living Hall at the Frick this afternoon, I stared out the window at the passing traffic on Fifth Avenue. If I lived in that room, I thought, I would always be looking out the window, and there would be no need for world-famous masterpieces to hang at my back.

After years of wondering what to say about art — given the fact that I have no technical training of any kind — I’ve suddenly realized that I’m as free to talk about art in the world as anyone is; my only obligation is to make interesting sense. With that perception, there is suddenly much to discuss. I’m fascinated, for example, by issues of authenticity. What does “counterfeit” really mean in the context of fine art? We’ll look at that another time. The issue that came to mind at the Frick was the matter of the private ownership of art.

I reached my position some time ago: The art world depends on collectors, so the purchase of works by living artists is only to be encouraged. When a work reaches its century, however — assuming that the original collector is no longer around to enjoy it — the public, in the form of museums and other institutions broadly open to everyone, ought to have the right to acquire it. (Let’s worry about valuation some other time.)

Quite aside from affording public access to major work, museums are also professional conservators, at least as a rule. Conservation is no less a function of the modern museum than display. Private owners are free to mistreat their holdings. I don’t see the interest in that kind of property right.

(Regular readers will see parallels to my thoughts about intellectual property — not as of yet gathered in one place; but this will serve for anyone interested.)

The time period might be extended for prints and other works that exist in multiples. In a weak moment, I might be persuaded to let heirs and assigns hold on to drawings, but they would have to beg most convincingly.

So, if I lived at the Frick — and, oh, could I ever! — I’d put a new entrance somewhere along 71st Street, to allow public access to what would now be the ballroom (and to the excellent Music Room), which I’d fill with rotating displays of new art. The Collection itself would be shipped across the street and up a few blocks, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — from which it could be borrowed for shows at other institutions, just as all serious art ought to be. I wouldn’t miss a single famous painting.

I’d be looking out the window.

Ever since I was in the sixth grade, I’ve seen psychotherapists on and off — mostly on. Two questions: what’s wrong with me? And: isn’t it late in the day for repairs?

Hopeless questions — and beside the point. These days, I want a therapist more than ever. Not a psychotherapist, though. What I want is a delotherapist. (I have just made up the term, using a handy Internet Greek dictionary that is undoubtedly a dangerous thing for ignorant minds like mine.) In English: a clear doctor. Someone who would help me to navigate my day.

I don’t mean one of those organizers who come in and tell you to throw everything out. I can do that on my own. Well, not entirely on my own. LXIV has been a great help at getting me to cart stuff that I can live without to Housing Works. We made a couple of trips yesterday, in fact. First we took about twenty books. Then we lugged in some inherited items: two large wooden urns and a pair of gilt candlesticks.

No, I mean an Information Therapist. Someone to whom I could pour out my troubles with email, RSS feeds, Flickr, Facebook and The New York Times (print and digital). The weedy tendencies of these utilities seems at times to choke off more valuable growths. By habit, I am not a procrastinator. But I have a hard time switching focus between the long and the short view of things. I think that almost everyone does. A lot of time gets wasted in the shift from mastering some new technological widget to placing the Mumbai massacre in an intelligent perspective.

On Sunday, in the middle of a massive and really very successful reorganization of our apartment’s closets — I can’t believe that I got so much done! — my vocabulary and reading-comprehension skills dropped below kindergarten levels. With my mind locked into solving spatial problems, I was reduced, in my infrequent and somewhat subhuman exchanges with Kathleen, to grunting and pointing.

A session on the couch would be so helpful! First I’d have to clear it off, though. It’s completely covered with piles of books and papers.

We had a bit of fun last night. Multiple bottles of Cabernet sauvignon were consumed, and not just by me, either.

It all began when we went up to listen to Steve Katz, the really gifted guitarist whom we always look forward to hearing, play what the hotel’s daily bulletin called “Flamingo Music.” We thought we’d listen to him for a while before going in to dinner, which we’d booked for 8:30.

Or rather it all began when the singer called Malcolm and the Roy Davis Band, the jazz trio that followed Steve in the lounge, dedicated a song to us, possibly because we were actually paying attention. And what do you suppose the song was? One that I’ve always wanted to hear sung: “Stella By Starlight.” It’s usually an instrumental. Of course, I caught very few of the words. But it was great fun. I was glad that I’d dressed up: in my coat and tie I felt very grown-up. (A pathetic illusion in more ways than one!)

The second fun thing was not being able to remember Dexter Gordon’s name. What prompted this was the trio’s performance of “Willow Weep For Me,” an old song that seems to be very popular down here — everyone but the classical flutist seemed to play it at some point or other. “Willow Weep For Me” happens to be the one song on the Dexter Gordon compilation, “Ballads,” that Kathleen always used to ask me to skip, in pre-Nano days, because it has a (misleading) bump-and-grind introduction.

Anyway, we couldn’t remember Dexter Gordon’s name. All we could remember was the name of another (somewhat greater) saxophonist, Lester Young. “Lester” put “Dexter” entirely beyond the reach of our ageing brains and squarely within senior moment territory. I had to go to the computer in the lobby, which guests are asked to use sparingly, to refresh my memory. Searching the song title at Amazon did the trick very quickly.

The third fun thing was the Tomato Surprise. So to speak. As I wrote the other day, another wedding party has descended upon the Buccaneer, this one quite a bit larger than last week’s. But who was the bride, and who was the groom? The waitstaff didn’t seem to know, and no happy couple stood out as obvious candidates. So, toward the end of dinner, I walked up to an authoritative-looking gentleman, a few years older than I am I think, who was standing alongside the really lengthy table — it must have seated forty — that ran along the inner arcade. I asked him if he could clear up our ignorance and point out the happy pair. This was the moment of the Tomato Surprise, because when he said that he was the groom, I felt as if I’d sat on one.

That explained the size of the party: between them, he and his very attractive and wholly age-appropriate bride could count fourteen grandchildren among the guests. Eh comment! 

We’re staying another day. We’ll on Saturday and go straight to New York. Via San Juan, but without leaving the airport. Kathleen is in heaven. I ought to have suggested this sooner: we got the last two seats on the plane.

And I wrote all the postcards that I’m going to write.

Just so you know what paradise looks like.

This is our last full day here. Tomorrow evening, we fly to San Juan. (That’s the current plan, anyway; our vacation endgames are notoriously open to rearrangement.) There, we will spend the night in one of the big hotels in Isla Verde, on the Atlantic, only minutes from the airport. On Saturday, we’ll return to New York. (That’s the plan, anyway.)  

It has been a very simple vacation — or so I think of it. It has been simple for us. A battalion of housemaids, gardeners, cooks and servers has made simplicity possible. We’ve had to do little more than show up for meals. Kathleen has alternated needlework with a rather comprehensive history of the West Indies (full of treaties and other diplomatic complications). I have read several books and re-read two others (taking notes in the latter case). If I haven’t spent as much time studying Nederlands as I might have done, I’ve been very thorough about my lessons. We have walked most days, either along Beauregard Beach or out on the headlands. In the early days, we watched a few DVDs, but for the most part we have spent evenings quietly and gone to sleep early.

Kathleen never made it into Christiansted, and I haven’t written any postcards.

In our room above the beach, the pounding of the surf has been audible at all times, even with the door shut and over the air-conditioning’s low groan. I’ve spent a positively boyish amount of time watching the waves wash grains of sand and small rocks back and forth across the strand, trying to grasp the millennia during which all this beauty transpired without anybody to see it. Then I think of how long it took human beings to see the beauty in it.

And I’ve thought of all the messages that I have tucked in bottles, just like the one that you are reading, even before the InterSea was discovered! I think of all of everyone’s messages, bobbing about out there — and of the many more that have sunk forever to the bottom, as unlikely to be retrieved as if they’d fallen into the Mindanao Trench. Is it not amazing that any are ever read!

Very grand accommodations: not ours!

The terrorist attacks on Americans and Britons in Mumbai have made it hard for me to work up even a modicum of Thanksgiving spirit. Sorry — I forgot to mention that I’d been reading about all the passengers stuck at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok — among them the mother of a friend. The two incidents are utterly different in one respect: the Thai protests have little or no international dimension. And yet perhaps for that very reason they trouble me more. I’ve been watching Thai democracy founder for a few months now, and what bothers me the most is that I’m on the protestors’ side: my instincts, too, are to disenfranchise uneducated, semi-feudalized rural voters. I’ve wanted to disenfranchise rural American voters ever since I lived in Texas, in the 1970s.

I say “wanted.” I didn’t say that I thought it would be a good idea. Clearly it would be best to bring rural Thai voters into some kind of cultural synch with their educated urban countrymen. But what if they don’t want that? What if, like so many Americans, they’d rather reality television?

My democratic impulses, obviously, are a lot more head than heart at the moment. So it’s a good thing that the most problematic of American holidays (in my book) will find me at a table for two with Kathleen, far from home, eating anything on the menu that isn’t a turkey dinner.

Last night, at dinner, Kathleen asked me why I looked so sad; and when we walked back to our room on the beach, I knew for the umpteenth time how lucky I was and am to have found her.

The night before, I had selected Red Dust from the wallet of DVDs that I’d brought along for our viewing pleasure. Kathleen hadn’t seen this movie, about a Truth and Reconciliation proceeding in South Africa, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Hilary Swank. I had completely forgotten the brief flashes of gruesomeness that punctuate the film whenever Alex Mpondo (Mr Ejiofor), currently an MP, is obliged to remember his persecution under the apartheid regime. Kathleen found the movie excellent but was troubled by the blood. It woke her in the middle of the night, and she had trouble getting back to sleep.

If reports of bad dreams and sad faces sound contrary to the spirit of vacation in Paradise, don’t be daft. This is what our vacations are for: slowing down to a point that allows unpleasant things to be registered and dealt with. Unlike all previous vacations that I can think of, this one is lasting long enough, and quietly enough, for us to break past the running-away phase with which all vacations begin: we can’t believe that we’ve escaped! Now we’re beginning to think of going back, not in the do-we-have-sense (although there’s certainly that), but in the more constructive frame of asking how regular life might be made more like this.

Walking downhill after breakfast, Kathleen wondered if people who grow up in St Croix realize how beautiful it is. I answered that no reasonably healthy young person can live on beauty alone. That’s for folks our age, at least the ones who have amassed plenty of interesting stuff.

In the late afternoon, Kathleen and I took a walk round one end of the golf course, the part that sticks out into the sea. The wind was relentless, a steady blast from the northeast. The shadowed grounds were  a matte green, almost a colorless grey. The leaves on trees already permanently slanted by the wind shrieked and frizzled like pennants announcing the grand opening of a hurricane. But it was just a windy day.

It was odd to be out in such conditions without being soaking wet; for there wasn’t a drop of rain.

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We have reached that delicious sweet spot of complete relaxation. We are no longer looking around to see what has changed since last year. We aren’t paying attention to the other guests — or not so much, anyway. Why, we don’t even know where yesterday’s wedding reception took place. We didn’t ask and we didn’t see.

Ordinarily, that sweet spot is soured somewhat by the knowledge that we will be leaving in a day or so. Not this year! The halfway point in our visit will come at midnight. Now, that is bliss.

The Mermaid, a beachfront café where we usually eat lunch, will be serving dinner this evening, and we’ve got a 7:30 reservation (the last seating!). I will presumably have something different for dinner, instead of the steak sandwich that I’ve ordered, four nights running, in the bar up at the main house. That’s about all the variety that I can handle.

Our vacation has been clouded by two technical glitches that a bit of preliminary checking would have avoided. It took forever to realize that the extra cell-phone charger that Kathleen picked up a while back, identical twin to the one that we use every day at home, doesn’t work. We (I) thought it was everything else. Much tohu-bohu on that score. And I neglected to load the software for Kathleen’s Digital EOS Rebel on to any of the three (!) laptops that we have with us. It’s true that she has not used the camera since our trip here last year. I know that there’s a trick to making the camera act as an external drive, but I can’t remember what it is. Last year, I was using a smaller Canon camera myself. Oh, well. We’re managing.

Oh, yes: we’re managing all right.

Here is a very discreet shot of the marriage that was just celebrated a few dozen yards from our terrace. The bride and her father made as they approached the waterfront structure — a sort of topless huppa — where the groom and the scarlet-robed celebrant awaited them.

The bride’s veil drifted over the sand just as dreamily as you might think it would.

I’ve made it a point, this vacation, to get up early in the morning and head to breakfast. It’s very simple: I want to be tired when it’s time to go to bed, without having had a lot of wine to drink. So I’ve been getting up before seven, or shortly thereafter, and climbing the hill in hopes of snagging a table with a view like the one above, which I enjoyed for several hours this morning. On my way out of the room, Kathleen promised to join me, “in a while.” It’s true that, when I finally called the room to see how she was doing, she answered immediately and was obviously awake. She crested the hill about fifteen minutes later.

Between finishing my own breakfast and Kathleen’s arrival, I finished reading Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech, a novel as important as any that she has written and particularly important reading right now, when Americans are thinking about getting their groove back in the world. It’s largely about the waste of American intelligence — particularly the intelligence of women. I didn’t have much left to read; I’d had to put the novel down in the middle of the 42nd chapter — out of 45 — shortly after eleven last night. (See? My plan is working.) Then I got out my notebook.

I do not plan to write up Lulu while on vacation, but I do intend to take notes that are good enough to allow me to write it up later without feeling that I have to reread it. This is something that I ought to have gotten into the habit of doing a long time ago. In the summer of 2007, I read about ten books without either taking notes or writing them up promptly, and now they’re as good as unread. (I’m particularly distressed about Vikram Chandra’s amazing Sacred Games — which I wouldn’t mind re-reading if re-reading weren’t so very, very expensive in terms of time.) This summer, four books slipped by, two of them novels of the first rank: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba. In fairness, it wasn’t just poor note-taking skills that held me back. The power of both novels seemed to derive from something concealed beneath their smoothly engaging surfaces. Both were exciting, but the excitement struck me as a kind of sleight-of-hand. I brought both with me to St Croix, and I hope to start re-reading them tomorrow or Monday. In addition to taking notes as I read, I’ll try hard to summarize my immediate impressions right afterward.

Yes, it’s obviously the thing to do, and I point out my not having done it as a sort of incidental indictment: there are things that I don’t do very well, usually for the reason that, until I began keeping Portico, I didn’t need to do them at all. Oh, I ought to have mastered these skills when I was in school, but — school! As I’ve aged, I’ve grown less thick-headed. When I was young, I could not learn a thing that I wasn’t ready to learn: a vicious circle if there ever was one. Like the people who say, “What do I need a computer for? I get along perfectly well without one!”

As I say, the waste of American intelligence. It’s got to be something in the water.

As a vast wedding party descends upon the hotel, trying to work out who’s related to whom makes for a fantastic parlor game. Kathleen is much better at it than I am, because I tend to let my imagination run wild — like the children in the gathering who are having a blast. Kathleen will overhear a key remark and say, “See? I was right.”

It’s hard to believe that, only last weekend, I was a father of the bride!

We talked about the snow and cold back home. That’s what everybody here is talking about. “Have a wonderful day,” said the assistant at the general store. “Every day here is a wonderful day,” said the customer, a man of about my age. “Where I come from, it’s seventeen degrees!” (That would be Fahrenheit.)

“Well,” said Kathleen as we came down the hill, “this year, I don’t feel guilty about enjoying the good weather while everyone back home is suffering. I just don’t have the energy.”

Kathleen claims to have seen the reflections of clouds on open water back in our part of the world. Not me.

To move or not to move: that is the question. We thought we’d been given the room that we had last year. But in fact we were given an even nicer version of the more deluxe room that we had the first year. The difference is very simple: the room that we liked — at the moment, it’s more the case that I liked it; Kathleen is quite comfortable where we are — had a more beautiful view, since it’s high up on a ledge, and the view could be seen through a pair of arched French doors.

The room that we have is twenty yards from the surf. The view is, indeed, quite nice, but it’s visible through a great plate-glass window. I hate picture windows. To me, they represent everything that is wrong with the modern world. All right, almost everything.

When we arrived yesterday, all the rooms of the type that I wanted were taken, but several will open up tomorrow. We’ll be offered a choice then. Do we pack up and head up the hill? Or do we stay put? Place your bets.

At breakfast this morning, I recognized a couple from last year’s visit. They’re from Denmark. I know this because I stood behind them on line for the plane back to San Juan when it was time to go home, and the tags on their carry-on luggage bore a Danish address. (Denmark is one of the previous owners of this colonial isle. That’s how the town across the bay comes to be called Christiansted.)

You could call it “spying” if it involved anything meant to be private, but all of my speculations about fellow-guests at the Buccaneer are conducted in the rather full publicity of mealtimes. Last night, a Proud Papa showed up at the bistro with his three little children, two boys and a girl. A Proud Papa is, typically, a fit, conventionally good-looking father in his late thirties or early forties who radiates the satisfaction of paying his own way in the world. It is of the essence of Proud-Papa-hood that children are truly part of the vacation. Unlike Dads of the past, today’s Proud Papa can be seen playing with his children at some point each day. He probably works in a round of golf, but he does not live on the course.

It is also very typical of the Proud Papa to shepherd the children to dinner while Mom — well, who knows what Mom does; the point is that she has a moment to herself. Last night’s Mom materialized about twenty minutes later. It is of the essence of Moms married to Proud Papas that they are quietly lovely. Although often radiant, they do not call attention to themselves. They smile, but you don’t overhear them laughing, unless everyone else at the table is laughing louder.

Fifteen minutes after Mom appeared, another couple showed up, sans kids, and was greeted warmly by all the children. This almost certainly meant that one or the other of them was the (presumably younger) brother or sister of Mom or PP.

It is of the essence of this game that I play that I “win” when all my deductions are shattered by the facts. That is always great fun — not to mention a learning experience. It doesn’t happen very often, because the facts rarely reveal themselves. People come and go at a resort; they check in and out without warning. What usually happens is that at the very moment that my family portraits teeter tantalizingly on the verge of corroboration, the parties involved are heading for the airport — and I never find out if that surly teenager merely suffered hormonal surges or really hated his step-father.

I remember being very surprised, a few years ago, when almost everyone staying at Dorado Beach checked out on the day before Thanksgiving. I had thought that, like us, our fellow guests were escaping Thanksgiving at home. Evidently not: a learning experience.

Who was happier? Each one of them would insist, “I was!” No: knowing them, they would both say, in unison practically, that each of them was as happy as she could be. So there.

How lucky I am, that the two most important women in my life are so fond of one another!