So, our summer vacation this year is in Asheville, North Carolina. I've wanted to come here for a long time, I think first of all because I kept seeing it coming up in all those "best places to live in the United States" lists and compilations. The combination of mountains and fresh air and rivers and cool, historic, offbeat, lefty town seemed like a great recipe for fun. Hell, if it was good enough for the Fitzgeralds to drink themselves into oblivion, it's good enough for me. And indeed it's as good as everyone says. We've had a great time here so far. Went swimming a couple of times. Went to the Bele Chere street festival one day. Spent a day in the Pisgah National Forest hiking and looking at waterfalls. This picture here 
is of my son looking out for bears on the trail. We're here for another week and hope to get to the Biltmore and who knows where else.
My son has gotten three "presents" from random people in the town of Asheville, and maybe these three encounters nicely represent the coolness of the town. The first day we were here, we ate at some downtown restaurant, and I took Walter to the men's room (interesting side note here is that at some point around turning 5, Walter started really preferring to use the men's room than going with his mother to the ladies room. "I'm going to be a man, so I think I should use the men's room"). While he was in the stall, I did that awkward thing that parents sometimes have to do where they have to hang out in the bathroom not doing anything but also trying not to look like a creepy pervert. You do this by saying things like "is everything OK?" over and over so that people know you have some reason to be in there (you really have to hope that the kid responds to you, however, else you seem like a lunatic in addition to a creepy pervert, especially when you start banging on the door screaming are you OK in there over and over to complete silence). Well, this time there happened to be this other guy in there, dressed kind of weird, listening to headphones and not leaving after he finished washing his hands and whatnot. I had no idea what he was doing. When Walter came out of the stall, however, the guy showed him a magic trick with a quarter (it didn't go well, and Walter, a budding amateur magician himself, was unimpressed) and then put the quarter in Walter's shirt pocket. He left and Walter and I looked at each other like "whoa, that was weird." My wife, Walter's mother, let him keep the quarter, but only after she scrubbed it for half an hour with antiseptic.
Yesterday at the Bele Chere festival, we were sitting around listening to some blues music and relaxing when a man with a giant blue parrot on his shoulder came over and gave Walter a string of Mardi Gras-type beads. That was cool. Here's Walter with his beads.
Finally, a couple of days ago, we were all walking on this weird staircase downtown that leads to Wall Street when Walter suddenly fell like the stock market after the textile industry releases a somewhat weak quarterly report. Note to grandparents, etc.: he's totally fine. But he did fall down a few steps and bumped his head and got all kinds of scrapes on his arm and his nose and both his legs. Now, Walter hates getting scrapes. He has a real thing about keeping his body entirely intact and does not like it when the integrity of his body is breached in any way. So a scrape is sort of like the end of the world for him. As an example, while he was screaming and crying after the fall, one thing he said over and over was: "I WILL NEVER GET BETTER. THE SCRAPES WILL NEVER HEAL." I carried him down to the street and we sat on a bench and while Karen was getting out a couple of small bandaids that we happened to have with us, a random man came up to us and handed us a complete on-the-go first aid kit, with antiseptic and a giant enough bandaid to cover Walter's humungousical scrape on his right calf. And then the guy just disappeared. Yay, Asheville Angel guy. Here are the steps Walter fell down: 
On Thursday July 30 at 7 pm, I'll be reading from Holy Hullabaloos, my church-state road trip comicomemoirotravelogue at Malaprop's Bookstore in downtown Asheville. I went into the store the other day, and it's completely great. Independent bookstores are without a doubt the best, and this one seems like one of the best of the best, up there with places like Kepler's in Menlo Park and Brookline Booksmith in my hometown. If you're in the area on Thursday, I hope you'll consider coming down to the reading. I'll make some jokes and if there are enough people there, I'll read a little something that didn't make it into the final book and that you can't find or read or see anywhere else.
