Nostalgia.

August 7, El Cerrito, California.

My mother and my friend Fred left yesterday (back to France and their respective lives without Dylan.) It is sad and strange without them.
And the circus moved from Fairfield to El Cerrito, across the bay from San Francisco, with a view of the Golden Gate bridge, soft and grey in the distance, that Fred would have loved. We took advantage of the whole week the circus stayed in Fairfield to go on a car trip back to the Northern California coast, hoping to make it all the way to Oregon but ending instead no farther than Eureka, baby oblige. Route 128 to Fort Bragg through wine country then redwood country, Route One up the coast to highway 101 to Eureka, motels all booked because of a music festival right off Route 101 drawing some 50,000 people, according to a family man we struck up a conversation with at a café in Eureka the morning we drove back; sweet to be in Eureka again, the bookstores, the waiter remembering us at Bev's Café (I would have gone all the way back to Eureka just for their spinach omelette,) people speaking fondly of the circus everywhere we went, "we wish you'll come back and perform here," the lot by the boardwalk where the circus was looking forlorn without it, feeling happy about the footprint we left there.
(Fred tried the ocean again but only put in a foot.)
Moral of the trip: it is not advisable to travel long distances with a (almost) nine-month-old strapped in a car seat who's just beginning to discover the world and wants all of it, and has all the energy for it, now.