It was free lunch in the lunchroom. 2 kinds of soup they had: cream of tarter soup with pepper for grown ups. Rubber band soup for kids. The grown up soup was terrible. I put my finger in and tasted it when the lunchroom lady wasn't looking. 2 young girls doing charity work told me the kids' soup was much better. Both kinds of soup had 6-sided oyster crackers floating in the soup. The workers could nibble crackers but NOT you. So on the way up the hill I had to pass by the place where the escaped convict was hiding out. It turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. We both loved convenience stores. At the red store, department [the red department store] there were heavy duty shopping bags of freebies for the poor propped up next to the door. There were thick big robes but just too heavy to wear and too thick and very ugly. Those robes were USELESS to anybody. A huge necklace was on top of a bag full of coat hangars. It didn't take much kindness to give that crap away. It was all messed up [the situation of helping unfortunates]. It was all crappy stuff nobody else wanted I had been to the library looking for one in a series of books about an 18th Century girl. The librarian recommended a book with 3 stories about Africa. Novelettes. I got both books and was surprised. They didn't ask about my overdue books. I also picked out a Dick Tracy picture book. I left the library with my books and I ran into Sonny Klienfield sitting on a bench on a bridge. We started looking at my books together. Then I had to leave and I ran into Zeb on the other side of the bridge. He was carrying many plastic bags of costumes. We pulled them out and tried them on for Sonny. Sonny liked Zeb a lot. Zeb was busy and forgot to take his bags with him. I put on a mans' beige cardigan with dark, dark trim. About 3/8." I said, "Sonny, Zeb left his stuff all over the place." And he said, "You should be glad you have a nice man." Zeb was not my man, but Sonny was right. Scott was sitting on the wooden couch looking at pictures of castles. He called them rooks. I called them castles. He was trying to think of the place this castle was. Somewhere out of state, he said. He said, "It's not swamps but like swamps." I said, "QUICKSAND!" He said, "No, like swamps, but not swamps; with grass chest high. I was sitting in a school desk. A girl in the row to my left, right across from me was very, very annoying. She was a model/actress. She was going on and on about her head shots and disrupting everybody and finally I went off in a tirade to her. I was mad. I said, "You should put as much effort into your acting and forget about the head shots for now." She was simpering. I said, "you should quit whining." She was looking at a book of photographers and bragging about her Mother. She flipped the pages of the catalog and kept complaining and I said, "WOULD YOU SHUT UP!" I looked behind me and Mary Reynaldie was taking it all in with amusement. Her eyes were thinking. My father was making home made peach ice cream and you could tell when it was ready because it started coming out of the top. I was in charge of scooping it into 12 Dixie Cups. my father liked vanilla wafers with his. Soggy in ice cream. I was running a race and I forgot about the finish line. A little girl was balancing her bicycle on the curb, trying to get to the very top of the hill. [I assumed the finish line was at the top of the hill, but I was wrong] Exterminator inspectors came into the apartment. I said, "I'm busy now." He said, "You'll be busy later too." So I kept doing what I had to do of everything around Zeb's bags and my books and the clutter. I didn't have time to be concerned about my mess. I followed him through the door. He had a vacuum cleaner. I thought, "He sure cleaned up my kitchen fast." There were 2 brand new duck head phones and a fax machine on the kitchen table. I loved the new phones he put in. It was sparkly clean. He said, "This is NOT your kitchen, it's your neighbors.' " I knew he was right. WE went back to my messy place. 3 messages. I hit "play." I had left a message on the answering machine telling Dora how much I loved her and missed her. I could not remember where I called from.