Bad Day in the Neighborhood

Can't think about anything I want to write about today. It's not that nothing is happening here in Bugtown. The trees and flowers are all in bloom, and the birds are singing songs I've never heard before. Brand new songs. Probably there's something sinister in that; probably the birds are species that have moved farther north to escape or take advantage of global warming. Tropical birds. Next there will be palm trees.

No, there's plenty happening. Yesterday I attended the funeral of one of the best men I ever knew. His friends told hilarious fishing stories, so we laughed as much as we cried, but his death from an obscure inoperable cancer at the age of 66 still seems monstrous. We're all going to miss him so much. I don't want to write about that.

Nor do I want to write about my friend at the bank, one of the tellers, a woman I like a lot, with whom I have much in common; she came here from Trenton; she has a grown son. Shortly after we noticed that she hadn't been at work for a couple of days the word got out that she had been arrested for embezzling the bank's money. I'm hoping it was a bum rap, that two other people did it somehow. But I don't want to write about it.

You see, for a person who calls herself a crime writer, I really hate crime. And death. These things are abhorrent to me. I do like jelly beans, though, and I like to laugh. So I'm going to abandon this effort to write a blog post and eat a handful of jelly beans while I work on my latest book, which is turning out to be really funny.

Kate Gallison