On an Easter in 1999, I groggled into the dining room of my group house and discovered the doyenne of our domicile, just laying out an elaborate feast of waffles, pancakes, omelettes, little fruits, juicy ones, pitchers of orange juice, milk in glass jugs, coffee, ice cream, mimosas, wine skins taken down from the top shelves, sharp tequila, cherubs piping on silver trumpets—anything that could be desired on a Sunday morning.

The night before (a Saturday night, I remind you) had found me lucubrating in my room, smithing at a piece of text, which if memory serves, revolved around the ambient stillness of the often-busy house that midnight. Upon putting the final period at the end of the third line of the second stanza, my roommate broke into the room (his was the outer room of our double) with a girl, who on closer inspection turned out to be a sort of ex-girlfriend of mine, if I could be said in those days to have had ex-girlfriends.

"Looks like poems," she said, startlingly observant, neither her gaze nor her posture fixed.

The next morning the two stumbled to the dining room table, spangled with delicacies, and fourteen of us—old friends suddenly in town as well as the regulars—gorged ourselves on a feast to remember.