Last night we watched the rainless lightning illuminate the clouds. It was right over Lower Manhattan, or maybe it was over Jersey behind it.

As I lay on the beach on Long Island on Saturday I closed my eyes and listened to the conversations around me. A girl had worked in real estate and done real good, she bragged to her friends, but she didn’t want to ever go back. After a while, a man wandered up to them with a rap about how he learned to swim.

“My family had a boat when I was a kid. A lot of us. We were in a bay and we all jumped off. The last one out forgot to drop the anchor. We had to be rescued by the Coast Guard the following day.”

There were murmurs of admiration from the girls.

“You didn’t swim, you didn’t survive,” he said. “Now two of my cousins are Olympic swimmers.”

More cooing. Oh! Ah!

“In the Army they tell you water is like, an obstacle,” he continued. “In the Navy it’s a refuge. The water like, protects you. You not gonna get shot.”

A group of two or three men walked right by our tent, in mid-conversation.

“Sounds like a liberal,” one said.

“... so he gets all naked and starts going on about Donald Trump,” said another.

“Sounds just like a liberal,” he repeated. The word liberal pronounced not with disgust exactly but a kind of exasperated disappointment.

I was back out in the world of trees and guard rails last weekend. To Cat and Rich's house on Saturday, on Long Island just past Queens. I forget the name of the town even though it was on the front of someone's shirt the whole afternoon. East something? It was the sort of place that got put on a T-shirt for people to laugh about or maybe not. It was a hometown.

It's a house with a car that crowds the driveway right beside it, and a porch and lawn in back, and fences.

There was a crashing thunderstorm in the late afternoon and everyone huddled around the table on the tented porch, around the chips and congealing meat. I leaned back on the rail to get drops on my face and shoulders. Some lightning must have come beside us; we didn't see it but there was a terrible bang and everyone was OK.

Planes flew low above us toward one or the other airport. Two engines, four engines. I tried to make out their designs. We drank the rest of the beer and Cat broke out some wine. We talked about baseball and Tom Waits and the planes seemed to get nearer and nearer as the night went on. WHOOOEEESH they went with blinking, blurring lights. We played games with the kids such as why are you hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself. And the planes got closer and louder and closer.

Greetings

I stood in the corner of the backyard with Mr. Fun. Under a tent beside us there were folding tables burdened with hodgepodge holiday food: Sternoed steam trays of chicken, hamburgers and pulled pork; macaroni and cheese, cucumber salad, Nacho Cheese Doritos, potato chips; a crudité tray freshly divested of its saran so that some of its baby carrots and broccoli florets had spilled into the desolate crevasses between the dishes, never to be consumed.

Fun's default stance is disgusted sarcasm. I like hanging out with him.

Natuza sat on the steps beside Steve and picked at her meat. Everything seemed raw to her.

"It's cooked," Steve said. "That one's cooked all the way. Eat that one. Don't eat that one."

Don showed up and was winding his way through the crowd, saying hello, holding what appeared to be some kind of casserole and trying not to step on kids.

"Look at him, thinks he's all sexy," Fun mused.

Beyond the fence, a young boy stood at the top of a slide and peered blankly down upon us. There was an exchange of greetings: cheery hellos from our crowd reciprocated by a regal yet uncertain wave from the child, the salutation of an alien who has just crash-landed his craft and not yet gained his bearings.

Bunche said, "Should I moon the kid? Should I? Should I?"

We laughed.

"Someone tell me not to moon this kid!"

Finally Don reached us, half bent over from leaning down to peck the cheeks of prone women. Fun shook his hand.

"You think you're too good for us, don't you?"