When I was much younger, I would often accompany a parent on errands. In particular, I remember my dad would ask “Do you want to go for a drive?” My mom probably asked something to the same effect, only in French. There usually wasn’t an obvious reason for them to make the offer. I don’t remember being good for conversation while a passenger. Maybe they preferred my silent company to driving in an empty vehicle. I think this is one of the reasons I would go; because I sensed in the way they asked their question that what they were really doing was making a request “Please come do errands with me.” I’m not so unselfish to go for that reason alone, however. I liked, and still do, to look out the window at moving things, to feel the seat and door press back on me securely during turns or acceleration.

If my mother was driving, the post office was one common intermediate destination. When we were parked, I was handed the P.O. Box key as well as a few letters to be mailed. I sorted them into two groups, one in each hand, before leaving the car, so that my mother could approve my work and keep the envelopes from being sent on misguided journeys. The two groups corresponded to the two bins for outgoing mail in the post office. One was labeled ‘local’, the other ‘out of town’. Each bin had a pull-down swing door, like the type used on street corner mail depositories. There have been some recent changes at the post office. One change concerns these bins. There are still two of them, but the labels have been replaced. Now one is labeled ‘outgoing mail’ while the other is labeled ‘Netflix’.

My sister named her pet leech ‘symbiotic’. It escaped its open-air water-filled container within a week.