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We spied some fresh produce and made a stealth correction to a sign offering “tomatoe” (there was the missing e that had migrated from “tomatos”!) before deciding we’d had enough. Benjamin looked exhausted, which isn’t something you see every day, and I confess this place had an ill effect on me—I was turning grouchy. Escape, however, wouldn’t be so simple. As we headed down the lane leading out of the park, I caught sight of an oddity ingrained in wood, amid hand-carved goods in one last tent. “Excuse me,” I forced myself to say to the woman seated behind the table, “I noticed on one of your signs—”

“We don’t sell any signs here,” she corrected. “We sell artwork.”

After the beatings I’d taken, this response made me much less interested in sparing her feelings. I blurted, “Okay. There is a typo in your artwork. Unless it’s a pun? ‘Bon Appetite’?”

“It’s not a pun; it’s a phrase.”

I could tell she enjoyed the rhythm she had going. Oh wait, sorry. It’s not a rhythm, it’s a sentence structure.

Rather than take her artwork and slam it against my skull, I replied, “It shouldn’t have an e on the end.”

“Well, people are still buying it!” she replied. Then she loosed a long, evil cackle. Fool, the free market has triumphed over your silly normative spelling conventions! WUAH-HA-HA-haaahhhh … With her laughter ringing in our ears, we hurried from the Tulip Festival, gladdened at least to have escaped with our souls intact. Back in Callie’s steel-reinforced safety, I checked to make sure my own name was still spelled correctly.

After having been shouted down by the renown guy, shut down by the Hawiian noodle chef, and cackled at by the artwork woman, I expected to feel saddened, confused, and angry, seasoned with a generous helping of weariness. Brutal as the festival had been, though, some magic note of dissonance produced in me an ironic reaction against the attitudes I’d experienced. Yes, an incongruous light-hearted feeling descended upon me, and I opened myself up to the world with a curious receptivity. As Benjamin had noted in returning to the adventure, the value of the experience might lie in rolling with whatever came our way, and seeing where it led.

The next day we went hunting through Albany again, with a newspaper team joining us for the tour of basically a couple blocks. We introduced them to the inevitable towing signs warning of “owners expense,” and some assorted merriments typical of our quest, including a sign above a small flowerbed that read, THIS IS NOT A TRASH CAN PLEASE DONT LITER IN IT! Alas, with hate speech like that, the metric system will never find a home Stateside. The tour didn’t last long—we discovered that many businesses were closed on Monday in Albany, at least in the neighborhood we visited. With the hunt done, we had dinner with one of my pals from the old Washington publishing days, and met the young man to whom this book is dedicated. When last I’d seen them, Henry was a mere mound rising from the midsection of his mother.

Here our eastward return offered a strange reflection of the westward venture. As New Orleans had followed Mobile, so too would Albany be counterbalanced by a more hopeful locale. No place could have served that purpose better than our alma mater, where Benjamin and I had first met, as well as being the site of the first stirrings of my mad destiny. Somehow I couldn’t quite believe this adventure had nearly come to its end. I felt as though I’d only begun to pull it all together, that I needed more time to synthesize it and start doing things right.

It had been nearly a year since the perfect June weekend that had seen the genesis of the League. Now I found myself on the same postcard streets, on an equally stunning day. Sun warmed the Georgian brick of the campus, and the green crests of nearby mountains seemed to beckon. This time, however, I wore a desert-dweller’s hat on my head and a vinyl bag full of curious implements at my side. Benjamin and I had planned in advance to meet up with our respective