There's a PSA warning on TV right now--- the parish is under severe thunderstorm alert for the next hour or so. It's still bright and sunlit here, but I can hear thunder off to the south. I think I'd like a brief, fierce rainstorm--- clear the air, cool off the afternoon. And I've always liked watching lightning roll along the horizon.

There's some vur' odd little Brit comedy called "Caffeine" on one of the Showtime channels this afternoon. It's bizarrely funny, even coming in midway through.

Sometimes when the phone rings I'll put on my Apu Voice and answer the call as Doctor Vajayjay, the famous Hindoo physician. Or chirurgeon. All I need to be Doctor Vajayjay at parties is the metal reflector on a headband that doctors wore back in the 1920s...

Chocolate cappucino and rum cake at the coffeehouse this morning. Reading Andre Aciman's "Out of Egypt" and Eve Babitz's "Slow Days, Fast Company". Not a bad way to spend the morning. I do love reading on summer mornings. I love the idea of reading in silence and diffused light.

It's hard to find that kind of silence. Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes about Connecticut towns from the early 1950s. I can think of houses along Lake Pontchartrain in my Lost Youth. I can remember pensions and cafes in Trieste or Ljubljana. It's the silence and the light that makes it easy to just lose oneself in a book. I used to tell the pettable little K-dot at citydress about sitting on a little bench outside the Rossauer Lande U-bahn stop there along the Donau-Kanal in Vienna and reading Mary Renault's "The Charioteer". That was a weekend afternoon, too, on a day in June.

I can hear thunder again outside, and it's turning dark. But I will ask any lovely readers and correspondents to tell me about books and summer days from their own memories, to tell me about nostalgia-lit moments and the scents and tastes that go with them...