These days the memory of her voice pulls me out of good dreams, but not bad ones, so at least now there is some solace in nightmare.

The material in his pants was worth more than some people's cars, but the color of them has never, in the entire span of human in history, been in fashion for anything intended to be seen outside of an esophagus.

There will be plenty of time, later, to argue about the difference between compulsion and regret.

The exact spin of the truck, as it crossed the median already shedding clouds of Korean aluminum and Malaysian static-fiber, took its front wheels close enough to my head for me to pick out the smell of tires leaving asphalt.

I remember when I stopped knowing what you think, and later, when I stopped caring.

This desert used to be a place.  

You will always open the yellow door, and most of the time this is what will lead you to her.  

He knows I hate him looking away while he's talking to me, but he also knows how his profile affects me, and I have never known how he balances these two and decides whether to turn.  

I wish I could promise you that I'm never going to lie.  

In the Mexico where the three of us learned what time is worth, waiting is sometimes a way forward.  

A 647-year-old oil painting in a perfectly square frame lifts silently off a cloud-grey wall, and 405 miles away a zero changes to a one with a peripheral click.  

The man with the third code wears black leather shoes that seem unremarkable until you notice that they bear no manufacturer's logo of any kind, gray wool pants with faint dots of heel-flung sand up the back of both legs, a blue crew-neck sweather with folds still pressed into it from having sat on wire shelving under great weight, and an immaculate almond-brown felt stetson under whose left brim, two inches behind his ear, the bullet has just entered.  

The three largest American tobacco companies have each killed more human beings that all the world's missile manufactuers put together, which is indirectly but indisputably why, for the fourth time since I swore this would stop happening, I am standing on the front step of my own house in early afternoon sunlight with a cardboard box full of snow globes in my arms, trying to improve on how I broke this news to Meredith before.  

"The processes for cigarettes and cheese," he was saying, "are basically the same," which explains a little bit about the cigarettes and quite a lot about the cheese.  

A red square is sealed by any movement into an adjacent black rank, unsealed on the conversion of its original marker, and removed from play after the third change in control, all of which Marco knows exactly as well as I do, so I wait patiently while he fumes at what he will presently recognize has been his own negligence.  

The brownstone was rehabbed half-heartedly in the late Nineties, the dog still has his appetite but not his hearing, and the Belgian in the neck brace has been dead for no more than an hour.  

I am doing something viscous and unmentionable when the phone explodes.

When the airport was still new, and we were still young, and our city was still old  

Before the night stole our river, and the river took the trees, and we learned to inhabit empty spaces without filling them  

After even the wolves learned mercy and swam into the retreating sea  

When the ground was still made of hope, and the sky smelled only of air  

Before we learned how to sleep without resting, and wake again without ever having dreamed

After testing on our Costa Rica trip, I feel fairly confident about this minimal packing list for anything up to two or three weeks in comparable climate:  

two pairs of underwear
two short-sleeve shirts
one pair of long pants
one pair of short pants
one swim suit (for hotel hot-tub use only)
two pairs of socks
one pair of proven trail/walk-forever shoes
one pair of sport sandals
one dorky sun hat
one pair of sunglasses
one light rain shell
minimal toiletries/first-aid/meds
sunscreen and bug repellent
small pack-towel or kanga
watch with alarm
money belt
appropriate currency, cards and/or travelers checks as needed
passport
paperwork (reservation numbers, itinerary, etc.)
backpack with space for acquisitions  

and then all the weight:  

your favorite guide-book to where you're going
language dictionary (if applicable)
one reading book
one small notebook and pen
camera, media, batteries, case
binoculars (shared)  

Several caveats inevitably apply. I actually brought a third set of underwear, socks and shirt, but only wore them on the plane home for scent considerations, which slightly better laundry planning could easily have alleviated. I brought a long-sleeve shirt, but only ended up wearing it to and from the airport in Boston. I brought a razor, which is obviously expendable. I brought twice as many camera batteries as I ended up needing, but I'd only just got the camera so I knew I was guessing. And I never wore the sun hat, but should have a couple times.  

The only piece of gear that failed me significantly was the sandals, a pair of chunky elastic-strap Nike ACGs that had always worked well as light-duty water shoes and general-purpose summer wear, but turned out to be dreadful for walking distances while wet, and by the end of the trip had torn up my feet pretty badly. Next trip I will probably revert to Tevas, which would also have the virtue of packing flatter. I believe those sandals were my final surviving item of Nike apparel, bring a misguided phase in my shopping life to a welcome close.  

I'm not entirely satisfied with my choice of shirts yet. I brought one fancy Ex-Officio nylon one ("17 countries. 6 weeks. One T-shirt.", beckoned the package.) and one slightly thicker polyester one. The nylon one was much more comfortable in humid conditions, and dried much faster after washing, but it also seemed unnecessarily fragile, constantly catching on packs and other clothing and developing dozens of micro-tears that left me looking a little chewed. I suspect it would be an ideal under-shirt, but in single-layer climates I'd rather something more durable. The poly one, though, was both warmer than I needed and slow to dry. I will keep experimenting. Possibly I've been underestimating buttons.  

The rest of my gear, however, performed admirably. Ex-Officio's briefs (from the same line as the T-shirt) were unfailingly comfortable and trivial to wash, and next time I'll bring two of those. My shorts were Ex-Officio, too (Amphi), and in a beach setting might happily have been my only pants. Between city conservatism and rain-forest fauna, though, I ended up wearing a pair of Prana Titan long pants most of the time, and on a cooler trip might consider bringing nothing else, as they seem to be inexplicably self-cleaning, and despite repeated application of jungle mud and empanada grease still looked uncannily untouched when we got back home. Dual-entry cargo pockets, incidentally, are not a gimmick, and I quickly developed a shuffling motion that allowed me to expediently get out of the way of beligerent San Jose traffic despite carrying an impressive array of things at knee-level.  

The only time I noticed the Coolmax light-hiking socks was when I wasn't wearing them, and even at the end after my sandals had done their damage, as soon as I put socks on again I was fine. My pair of Merrell Chameleon Stretch shoes are now close to retirement, after long service, but were no more fazed by rain-forest trails than they had been by Las Ramblas or the Louvre. My REI Ultra Light rain shell got less use than "rain forest" might imply, but rolls up nicely into its own stuff-sack.  

Easily the best piece of gear, though, was the new digital camera, a weather-tight Pentax Optio 43WR that B bought me and us as a wedding present. The weather-resistance is its defining character-trait (it's not intended for underwater shooting, but it can withstand semi-prolonged immersion and any amount of rain, so I had it out when my other cameras would have been in sealed bags), but in pre-trip A/B tests I found that it produced consistently better still images than my aging Nikon Coolpix 990 (even, startlingly, at macro lengths), as well as much better movies, with the considerable additional virtues of weighing a good deal less and consuming exponentially fewer batteries. For a $350 point-and-shoot camera it offers an unexpected amount of control, including a quirky but extremely useful manual-focus mode, and although my attempts at digiscoping on the trip weren't very successful, I'm pretty sure the camera is capable of better results with better binoculars. All the posted trip photos were taken with this, so you can make up your own mind about its performance. B's only complaint was that she missed some shots due to its relatively slow shooting speed, and my only complaint was that I missed some shots due to her borrowing it.  

I wish I could report on the efficacy of our bug repellent, but I can't, really. There never seemed to be enough insects to merit DEET usage, and although I wore our usual Repel Lemon Eucalyptus repellent sporadically and still got bit by plenty of things, I have no clear idea whether I'd have been bit less if I'd used more of that or anything else, or vice versa. In areas of higher disease risk this would bear more thought and research.  

Guide-wise, we brought a whole Frommer's book because it was the newest of the ones we had, some Xeroxed pages from a friend's Lonely Planet guide, and the San Jose section sliced out of a slightly older Rough Guide. Of these we ended up using the Rough Guide chapter most often. None of the three, however, proved capable of either revealing the elusive Serpentario, or at least identifying its location with sufficient clarity that we could be sure we weren't repeatedly walking past it without noticing.  

Currency-wise, we actually brought the bulk of our funds in travelers checks this time, which seems anachronistic but saved us high Costa Rican credit-card surcharges on hotel bills. For daily expenses in San Jose, at least, you can just arrive with US money. You'll get colones as change, but in our experience dollars were accepted for everything down to $1.25-worth (i.e. a huge bag) of weird Hungarian chocolate bars.  

Lastly, although it might be tempting to save a few ounces by ditching the alarm-watch if you know that you're going to be awoken at dawn by howler monkeys every day anyway, keep in mind that if the sun sets before six and dinner is not until seven, there will be a daily period during which you, or somebody with whom you are traveling, may experience a frequent recurring need to verify that time is still flowing properly.

My bank, which wasn't small or cozy when I opened a checking account there many years ago, has now merged up into a larger corporate megalith for the third time since I joined. My part of it was BayBank, which merged with Bank of Boston to become BankBoston, and then with Fleet Financial Group to become FleetBoston, and has now been acquired and absorbed by Bank of America, whose line of the merger chart is even bristlier.  

The usual cynical view is that these changes are of little consequence to individuals. Fees go up, and levels of service go down, but that happens in non-merger years, too. You don't sign up with these banks because they're virtuous, you do because these banks are big. More specifically, you join them because they have ATMs everywhere you live.  

And this is where the Bank of America change is actually startlingly significant, in a way that I doubt was ever raised in the merger negotiations. The previous three incarnations of this, the largest New England street-level banking presence, had different names but the same color. Ever since the ATM era began, the coolly luminous greenish-teal of the BayBank/BankBoston/Fleet signs has been an omnipresent component of the New England urban color scheme. Arguably it has been the single most distinctive brand element in a thoroughly branded visual environment. It has become the signal color of commercial critical-mass, the flag of normalized rules of exchange, and whether through coincidence or an obliquely enlightened collective consent, remarkably little other signage adopted and thus polluted the semantics of the hue. You could walk out onto a sidewalk in New England, look one way or the other to find the nearest glowing greenish-teal, and know immediately what sort of place you were standing in.  

Bank of America's color is red. As the signs are changed, this time, the greenish-teal is being removed. Of course, whole signs were replaced the other times, too, so this change to red involves no more labor than the others. But it is the genius of evil to do more and more-permanent damage with the same small gestures. Red is bright, but overwhelmingly banal. There are countless other red signs, everywhere, and the new Bank of America signs are thus effectively swallowed and invisible. Where the old signs defined and delineated commercial presence, the new ones herald nothing but oblivious intruding anonymity. In replacing something with nothing, Bank of America has ripped little holes out of thousands of intersections and squares and centers across New England.  

Of course, it doesn't really matter. Greenish-teal was not a moral quality, and distinctiveness is not an inherent good. I should have found a better bank long ago. Visual coherence in the built environment should be neither the responsibility nor the privilege of ATM signage. We are used to this process in New England, greens turning to reds in a thousand little flares of temporary death.

79 photographs from a honeymoon in Costa Rica
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Freddo Fresas, Alajuela  


Juan Santamaria International Airport (Sansa), San Jose  


Cabina Gecko, Bosque del Cabo  


Comalapa International Airport, San Salvador  


General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport, Boston

It's so gray here, and although I often don't understand people when I talk to them here, too, somehow it isn't fun.

The new camera is going to be just fine.