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sirloin, rare, on kaiser rolls, an Oregon Pinot Noir, chocolate ice cream. We lunched on an island upstream from Stillwater, got a nice buzz, napped in the shade, and paddled on to Hudson, our destiny, site of our marriage. Every August, this was a sacred day.
    On the last Saturday in August we put on our shorts and Gopher T-shirts and went to the Minnesota State Fair for the ritual trek through the Swine, Cattle, Horse and Sheep Barns, the Chicken Pavilion, to the Tilt-a-Whirl, Big Jiggle, the Giant Slide, the John Deere exhibit, blue-ribbon preserves and cakes in the Home Activities Building, the fine art show, and we bought four corn dogs with mustard and a bag of miniature doughnuts, which we ate on the double Ferris wheel, and then went home, satisfied, foot-sore, smelling of grease.
    And on September 7, we celebrated my birthday by staying in bed all morning. We had our coffee in bed and read the paper and talked and nuzzled and dozed and necked and at 11:30 we made love and at noon we got up. Larry Day. A grand occasion.
     
     
     
    A fact: I was born on September 7, 1942, exactly nine months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which shows you that people do react to international crises in different ways. Some folks sit and fret about the future and others go upstairs and create the future and we are the product of their optimism.
    And in a burst of optimism, Iris and I put a down payment on a house on Sturgis Avenue with money I got from—O miracle of miracles!— The New Yorker for a story, “Nearby Person Pleases Parents,” which Roger Angell wrote me a letter about on creamy stationery saying, “We would like to publish it as soon as possible with only a few nit-pick changes. It is fresh and funny and stylish in every way and we feel fortunate to have it and hope you will write more—much more—for us in the future.” And I sat down with tears in my eyes and thought, Well, thank you, God, now my life is not utterly wasted. If I should die when I’m thirty of stab wounds in a fracas in a county jail while I’m doing ninety days for public urination, nevertheless the obituary will say that I wrote for The New Yorker. I won’t be just another vagrant who blew through town; my name will be associated with Literary Quality.
     
     
     
    I had loved The New Yorker since I was 13 and rode my Schwinn bike to the Minneapolis Public Library and perched on a high stool in the periodicals room and pored over old issues. Some boys hurl rolls of toilet paper into trees and recite the limerick about the curate from Buckingham, and other boys find pleasure in reading snappy fiction.
    A. J. Liebling I loved with a childlike love—“The Wayward Press,” The Sweet Science, his stuff about France—the man was a natural. I adored all of them, Cheever, Thurber, Calisher, Salinger, McNulty, White, Mitchell, Perelman, all of them Greek gods to me. And the minor deities: Audax Minor, Winthrop Sergeant, Whitney Balliett, Edith Oliver, Andy Logan. The very type font was sacred. I submitted my first story when I was at the U. They rejected it, but so gracefully (“Your story,‘MOBY WHO?’ came very close indeed but in the end seemed to us to lack the sureness and inevitability that we feel certain you’re capable of and though there was much to admire in it, there was also a faint sense of strain to the writing. Probably we are all wrong about this, and please do not let this disappointment slow you up for an instant. We look forward to having you in our pages.”) that I kept trying and trying and then one night—sheer blind luck—I took an antihistamine and two aspirin and some zinc tablets and four hundred milligrams of vitamin E and for about forty minutes everything I wrote was easy and powerful. I got in a groove and every sentence fit and was balanced and yet pushed the next sentence and a sort of force field ran through it. It was 1,500 words long: a kid who learns to make $50 bills on a hectograph and is able