It’s Dry Dock, as I might have mentioned.  That means no cars cross the water for three weeks while the ferry is off for annual service.  Any coming or going from the island is on a walk-on temporary commuter boat. 

Dry Dock has an odd effect, though Brits of a certain age would recognize some of it.  We aren’t exactly under siege, but we are suddenly left to fend for ourselves, to haul whatever we need, and to talk to our neighbours, because there is no one else around.  Today we didn’t even have electricity.  That was because of some bother on the res when a telephone pole got knocked over.  It had nothing to do with the ferry being out of service, but what with the day’s constant rain, it added to the feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world.

Before the rain and the no electricity, my friend G declared we had to have a booze cruise on the ferry, because in a few days I am going to be flying back to England and I need to have every possible small island experience first.  G swore the Dry Dock Booze Cruise was a tradition, though no one else had ever heard of it.  Clouds were gathering and the sun deserted and G wavered, but though the locals have done nothing but complain, this is the sunniest summer I have had in 30 years and I really wanted to celebrate it.  Never mind that our cruise would be on the island hopper commuter ferry.

Besides, I specially like picnics, because they make me feel European, as in lunch at 125 miles per hour on the Eurostar from London to Paris.  When I went after 9/11 I wanted to be sure that the Swiss Army knife I’ve carried for 35 years to open wine, cut saucissons, and smear cheese on crusty bread wasn’t going to be confiscated, so I came prepared in case I had to post (mail) the knife back home.  With some difficulty I requested pre security screening so they could examine my potential threat. Anyone who has witnessed a Gallic shrug will probably agree that you can’t hijack a 25 voitures train with a three inch blade and a corkscrew, and why would you bother if you could have camembert and claret instead.  If you go, the gendarmes will be just fine with your weapons of mass cheese destruction.

Our local ferry is not quite so liberal.  Even though neither G nor I would be driving on or off the island the open container law means no legal alcohol on public transport.  G put her cocktail in a travel coffee mug.  Mine was in a sports water bottle. 

In the US refrigerators and larders are usually bigger and more amply stocked than their UK counterparts, but in both countries I pride myself on being able to produce a meal or a party whatever’s on hand.  This time I had tinned olives in the cupboard which I stuffed with feta cheese from the fridge.  I toasted thinly sliced bread and topped it with smoked salmon, onions and capers (I did mention that the Survivalists had left me with a lifetime supply of capers), and just for good measure I melted parmesan cheese onto some Wheat Thins (can’t think of a Britsh equivalent – it’s just a really square cracker) and topped them with dried chillis .  G was not impressed with my bicycle basket where I arranged my hors d’oeuvres covered with a tea towel, but I thought it did very nicely for a picnic. 

We boarded with our disguised drinks and my bike basket of hors d’oeuvres.  We told the captain that we couldn’t afford the whale watching boat so were cruising on his ship instead and he took our picture.  The ferry is seven minutes each way, but we got a bit extra because there was a minor breakdown on the mainland side and no one was allowed on.  We sat on deck, eating and drinking, the only passengers on board, and toasted the bored commuters waiting on the dock below.

Here’s the picture of our no-whale, booze-camouflaged-cruise, the Duchess’s farewell ferry journey with G, native Alaskan, judge’s daughter and firefighter’s wife.  This summer, for the first time, the Duchess has affected a pink baseball cap.  She feels her British friends might not approve, although she thinks it is very fetching.

I did an upgrade without reading the instructions.  Bad plan and I lost my design and pictures.  A redesign will be coming soon but in the meanwhile this will have to do.  I have invited 10 people for farewell homemade pizza this afternoon and am getting on a transatlantic flight in a couple days…

The ferry’s been out of service for just over a week.  People who live here (like my mother and her partner) are settling into the routine of staying mainly on island, walking or biking everywhere, chatting to their neighbours.  These three weeks of purdah, when the island is cut off from all vehicle access, is the annual divide that separates the busy, touristy summer from the long, rainy winter.  The sun is still shining, but we know its days are numbered.  The nights are drawing in.

I’ll have returned to England before the car ferry’s back in service, but meanwhile, like a good islander, I’m enjoying the forced privation that keeps me mostly off the mainland.  I’ve baked bread (twice) and (twice) walked – that’s hiked to Yanks, who take these things seriously and have poles to prove it – up the island’s mountain, all of 1000 feet high.

Today, the second time on the mountainside, I met a girl I went to school with 35 years ago and 3000 miles away.  There were 85 kids in my high school class; the population of this island is about 900.  Both of us come from east coast families, and when we were in class together neither of us had ever been west. 

It’s a little weird that we should both turn up here, but not quite as weird as a discovery my mother made when she was first living on the island and introduced to another recent arrival.  As they talked it gradually emerged that they have the same great grandparents, making them second cousins.  Neither my mother nor her long lost cousin have any roots in this part of the world – I think the shared great grandparents were from New York – yet both my mother and her cousin retired to the same tiny, relatively unknown, island in Puget Sound (population then about 800).

If there are any mathematicians out there I would be interested in what the odds against such coincidences might be.

Late in 2001 my school asked me to write an article for the alumni magazine as part of a collection of essays on the terrorist attacks in September that year.  They asked me because I live a long way away, and I guess they thought I might have a different perspective.  I understood that what happened that day would probably prove to be the most significant event of the early twenty first century, but, nevertheless, I wrote personally about how it felt to me.  I’m pasting it in here and hope my readers will forgive the every day tone.  In hindsight I don’t think I would write it very differently, except to say that it is pretty obvious now that our response was wrong (though I should make it clear that the country my daughter said we were about to bomb was Afganistan, not Iraq).

Reflections on 9/11: A view from afar

I watched the events of Sept. 11 from a distance of thousands of miles. I was working at home in my little English village and exchanging occasional e-mails with an American friend.

“Is your radio on?” he wrote. “Two planes have just flown into the World Trade Center.” I switched on BBC radio and listened for a few minutes.

“They are talking about the problems of nappies in landfill sites,” I wrote back. “The planes flew into the WTC?” I thought my friend must be having trouble with his prepositions.

His response made me turn on the tele. That medium, which seems to me less natural to the British character than radio, was showing live pictures, and I watched as the second tower collapsed.

The British know a lot about living with the random violence of terrorism, and, when I thought about it, the orderly airing of an environmental program in the midst of attacks—even while planes bound for unknown destinations were still being reported missing—was just as I would have expected. It is not so much that in Britain terrorism is a daily fear, but it is a part of daily life, and life carries on. I accidentally leave a bag in the library and I return only minutes later to find the bag sequestered and to receive a cold rebuke for raising unnecessary alarms; someone is careless with a suitcase at Heathrow Airport and we all file out into the car park. Luggage lockers are gone from train stations. Litter bins are scarce.

The precautions reflect real threats. Seventeen years ago we woke up to the news that the hotel in which the prime minister and all her government had gathered for a conference had been blown to pieces. Nearly all the ministers survived, but, with dust still rising from the ruins, the IRA issued a chilling statement: “You have to be lucky all the time; we only have to be lucky once.”

So it was now for America, and Britain wept for the loss of innocence as much as for the loss of life. There was not a hint of exultation—now you see what we have suffered—though there might have been; there is widespread belief here that Americans funded the terrorism of the IRA. There was, instead, simply a recognition of the sense of anger and outrage, a sharing of the grief.

The queen ordered that “The Star Spangled Banner” be played at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, and at a special service at St. Paul’s in London she stood and joined in the singing of it herself. The media were amazed. Her Majesty, they said, had never before been seen to sing the national anthem of another country.

In my little village I walked my dogs, and neighbors approached me as they would someone bereaved. A newcomer down the road who had for months merely glowered at me (not a dog lover, I guess) stopped his car and got out. “You are an American, right?” he asked. I said I was. “I just want to say how sorry I am.”

The following day my next door neighbor of nearly two decades also wanted to make a formal declaration.

“I would just like to say to you, as an American, and to the American people, on behalf of, well, on behalf of myself, how sorry I am.”

I accepted his and others’ sympathy gratefully. I have never felt less foreign than I did that week, nor more longed to be home.

I was at the school in the dark, angry days of the Vietnam War, when I would have as soon burned the flag as flown it, and even now I wear my patriotism uneasily. I do not know if what we are doing is right, and I suspect that only the outcome will make it clearer. But what happened on Sept.11 was the talk of playgrounds as well as of cabinet offices, and that is as true here as in the United States.

One morning in mid-September when I coaxed my 9-year-old awake, and she resisted as usual, I spoke, unthinkingly, with mock sternness.

“Catherine,” I said, “little girls have to go to school!”

“Not everywhere, Mummy,” she answered. “In that country America’s going to bomb they’re not even allowed to go.” And she snuggled back under the covers, confident in a point well scored.

So I focus on that and hope for an outcome where all little girls must trundle off to school, where bombs do not lurk in suitcases, nor under bus seats, nor in litter bins, and neither do they fall from the sky.

On Saturday at midnight the car ferry made its last journey from the island and headed off for its annual refit.  For the next three weeks there is a walk on, passenger ferry only. 

The Island has one general store, a restaurant and a diner. The mainland is a seven minute ferry ride away; from the mainland there’s a twenty minute drive through the reservation and into town.  All through last week the queues getting off the island were three times usual.  The summer people were packing up and getting out just in time and the year rounders were heading to town to stock up.

The Survivalists came home from Alaska and like everyone else began to shop. Because I have taken on local habits there was already a mountain of food and drink here.  Now, every time I open the refrigerator something falls out.  In three weeks I suppose it will be very bare – rather alarming to think what we will consume.

On the last Friday and Saturday most of the Islanders drove a car onto the ferry, parked it on the other side and took the return journey in the passenger cabin where they rediscovered their neighbours.

Now there is little traffic on the roads – there’s no petrol on the Island so drivers must eek out the supplies for any cars still here.  Suddenly everyone is walking and bicycling.  It feels a little like living in a major infrastructure failure, only everyone knew it was going to happen and everyone knows how long it will last (give or take a few days, depending on ferry repairs). 

Since I got here everyone has spoken of this time to come.  In a way, the whole summer has been leading to this point, the climax that only real islanders get to share: Dry Dock.  Not a single person complains about the inconvenience. 

I’ve got plenty of red wine and I am good at hunkering, so I’m not complaining either. 

Alas, two days before Dry Dock ends I’ll be hauling my suitcase onto the passenger ferry and heading back to England.  Oxford is going to feel like real culture shock.

Oxford gets an extra week of summer this year.

Brits start shaking their heads and saying sadly, “The nights are drawing in,” as soon as it’s August, and to most people the Bank Holiday on the last Monday in the month brings the summer to an end.  (The holiday isn’t “for” anything, as I explain to Yanks who seemed a bit puzzled by the concept of a Bank Holiday, except to get a day off work – there isn’t another holiday until Christmas.)

But in Oxford summer isn’t really over until the St Giles Fair has been and gone.  It isn’t clear when fair people, travelling the surrounding counties through the season, first began to come together in Oxford for an end of summer celebration but there are references to the Fair, which celebrates St Giles Day, as early as the 17th century.  Year after year the fair people return, with each ride or stall occupying the same spot it has for decades or more.  The carousel of horses, built in 1895, is always the first ride.

St Giles is a wide section of street in central Oxford, lined with plane trees, with the Martyrs’ Memorial at one end and St Giles Church at the other.  On the two days of the Fair traffic is diverted from all approaching streets and the area is taken over by dodgems, waltzers, ghost trains, flying elephants, galloping horses, swing boats, fun houses, baby roundabouts and a tall wooden helter skelter.  There are rows of trailers selling hotdogs, chips, toffee apples and candy floss (cotton candy).  The sound of the parents shouting to children over the noise of kerosene engines is almost deafening and the air is choked with the engines’ smoke.  Metallic balloons bob above the heads of teenagers carrying giant stuffed animals.  By 9 pm it is almost impossible to move except with the flow of the crowd.

The Oxford historian Jan Morris described it thus in 1965 and it is not very different today:

The annual junket called St Giles’ Fair… is an inexorable sort of festivity — in September 1914 they tried to cancel it, but the Home Secretary himself admitted that he was powerless to do so. The whole wide street of St Giles is closed for it. For these two days of the year the University Parks and Christ Church meadows, the two main open spaces of the city, are closed to the public. Traffic is diverted, business is disrupted, the night is gaudy with neon, and all among the plane trees there proliferate the side shows, caravans and pulsing generators of the showmen.

It is the most boisterous of Oxford traditions, the profits of which go partly to the city and partly to the college of St John’s, the local landowner; and it brings together in an atmosphere of unnatural intensity every type and kind of Oxford citizen. The academics go with their burbling children, eating iced lollipops and arguing the toss with indulgent showmen in piping cultured accents. The factory families go, trailing balloons and sweet papers, and hugging flowery vases they have won at shooting galleries. The farmers go, stumping stoically through the hubbub with kind wives in blue hats…The parish clergy go, from a sense of boyish duty, and the weedy louts go, to stand around in bow-legged moronic cliques, licking candy floss, and the shop-girls go, to let their skirts fly on the Big Dipper. Every degree is represented there, from the exquisite patrician to the grubbiest slut in carpet slippers: and flushed from their normal habitats like this, thrown together between the Bingo stalls and the Man-Eating Rat, they always seem to me larger, finer or more awful than life… St Giles’s Fair is like a city with its masks torn off, seen with a flushed clarity, and it makes you wonder how such contrasts can ever be reconciled. It is sure to end, you feel, like all the worst dreams, in a scream, a cold sweat or a blackout.

Oxford, however, is old, and experienced at the game. By Wednesday morning all those stalls and roundabouts have miraculously disappeared, and the scholars, the charge-hands, the oafs and the parsons are restored to their blurred and unalarming selves.

It is certainly true that I always meet someone I know at the Fair.

The St Giles Fair is held the first Monday and Tuesday after the first Sunday in September, so it’s late this year, and summer gets to linger a little longer in Oxford.

Edited to add:  I attempted to simplify the rules for when the St Giles Fair is held and a reader has reminded me that in Oxford nothing is simple.  So I should state that my rule doesn’t quite work.  By statute the Fair cannot be held on the following Monday and Tuesday if St Giles Day (the 1st of September) is on a Sunday.  In that case it is held the second Monday and Tuesday.

Got that?

I happened to be in Chicago this time forty years ago, visiting my aunt, the last few days before I started high school.  I walked around a city buzzing with the excitement of the Democrat Party convention, but by the time police and demonstrators were fighting on the streets I was safely indoors.

I grew up in an intensely political family.  My grandfather had been among those called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and my stepfather openly claimed to be a Marxist.  (I like to tell people that the house I lived in as a teenager had an 8 foot tall painting of Lenin’s head on the family room wall.) Though he now usually votes Republican, later in 1968 my father’s name would appear amidst hundreds in the tiny print of a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Thinking Men Think Humphrey”. 

Like hundreds of thousands of others we felt the loss of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, only months earlier, as if we ourselves had been bereaved, and forty years ago I watched horrified the news films of the riots outside the convention.  I kept an occasional journal when I was a kid.  I still have it, in storage in England, but I know how the entry I wrote that night in Chicago began:  “Remember this date,” I wrote, “because history will.”

Well, I was only 14, but I wasn’t wrong.  I’ve heard a lot about 1968 this year, rather more from the BBC than the American networks.  I assume the preoccupation with that year is because most of the journalists running the shows are just a little older than I, that is, approaching the ends of their careers, and feeling nostalgic for a time when they had newly come of age.  For several months the BBC has been airing four minutes each afternoon: 1968 Day by Day.  If you are old enough to remember that year, or want a sense of how it felt to live through it, it’s worth listening to, which you can do online.  Unfortunately, for copyright reasons – I guess because there is music and archival material – you can’t subscribe to a podcast or download a week at time unless you are in the UK.  You really do have to listen day by day.

This is the first convention season for 32 years that I’ve been in the US, and though I have enjoyed watching the speeches and the razzmatazz, frankly these gatherings were more exciting when I was a kid.  It’s all too stage managed now and the long primary season really does mean it is all over bar the shouting.

It’s also, incidentally, hard to imagine now any candidate thinking an ad in which he gained endorsement of academics and other “pointy-headed intellectuals” would do him (or her!) good.

That phrase was coined by George Wallace, a third party candidate in the 68 election, who had been resoundingly elected Governor of Alabama six years earlier with the declaration:

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

He carried five states in 1968.

Though he later said he had been mistaken about segregation, I cannot imagine that the governor who tried to prevent black students entering the doors of his state university, or presided over state troopers breaking up a voter registration campaign with dogs, whips and tear gas, could imagine just how far we have come these forty years.

****

After I wrote this I learned that the 1968 Season on BBC Radio is coming to an end this week.  I don’t know what permanent links they will leave up.  I’m hoping they’ll be selling a dvd — it really was brilliant.

Most Brits have probably already seen this by now, but Americans may enjoy hearing the Mayor of London look forward to 2012 while incidentally revealing the origins of ping pong and other Olympic trivia.  Keep watching past the introductory niceties.

My Ex, who sent me the link, said I was going to have to explain Boris Johnson to the Yanks, so I’ll try.

As you can tell by his accent, Boris is a toff, with aristocratic forbears on both sides of the family.  Educated at Eton and Oxford, he is a journalist and Tory politician and recently resigned his seat in Parliament to run for London’s Mayor, beating the Labour incumbent in May of this year.  He’s also something of a television celebrity after guest appearances on popular comedy shows.

He’s probably the only politician in Britain who is usually referred to solely by his first name (during the Mayoral election the Labour Party was said to have issued fines for any party member referring to him that way, because it might make him seem too popular). 

He has made something of a career of issuing apologies, to people as far away as Papua New Guinea. Here was his insult to them:

For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.

And this was his apology, following a formal complaint to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:

I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us.

Though I would maintain that class war still wages in Britain today, I wasn’t surprised that Boris squeaked through in May’s election, despite the capital’s Labour voting tradition. In the UK, though we don’t on the whole care for toffs, we like our politicians clever, which he undoubtedly is, and we especially like them if they are funny as well.

Finally, Yanks probably won’t know that Boris’s statement “Ping pong’s coming home” is a reference to the official anthem for the 1996 European Championships, held that year in England, whose chorus is “Football’s coming home”. We take our football (the soccer variety) pretty seriously, even though we lose, but it is also characteristic that the words to the anthem were written by comedians.  We know how to laugh at ourselves while we lose gloriously (it’s the irony gene).  Every Brit, even ersatz ones like me, can sing along with this song. If you are a real glutton for British punishment, the link is below. 

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to more Boris on the subject of how you reconcile playing Wiff Waff with passing the Port to the left.  It seems to me that if we introduce this extra element to the competition, we might have a real chance at a medal.

Phew. That was a lot of explaning.  How did I do?

If you throw out the odd seconds, the Romanian woman who won gold the other day in Beijing ran exactly twice as fast as I ran the London Marathon in 2001 (2 hours 26 minutes to my 4 hours 52).

I was never an athlete of any sort.  I was the kid who was always picked last for any team (in fact sometimes the team that got me also got a few extra points to make up for how bad I was).  I never once made a hit in softball.  In basketball I broke my glasses (I claimed I was simply keeping my eye on the ball).  I came last in the 50 and 100 yard dash, and I don’t think anyone ever asked me to run further.  Basically I was a chubby, extremely short sighted kid who thought being told to go outside and play was a form of punishment and gym class was serious torture.  In high school I successfully petitioned to have canoeing counted as a team sport (well, there were two of us) so I could graduate.

Nevertheless, though the “physical education” I was forced to endure taught me nothing more than I was weak, uncoordinated, incompetent and unattractive, I eventually learned, all by myself, that exercise works a lot better for me than drugs to control depression, an illness that has troubled me all my life.  Divorce is pretty depressing and it demanded something big.  My marriage counsellor thought my idea of joining a gym might help.

Six months after my husband and I separated, and more than twenty years after we married, I ran those 26.2 miles.  It was neck and neck between me and a guy in a Rhino suit, but I think I just beat him to the finish line at Horse Guards Parade, London.

Because I have done it (sort of) I find it kind of scary that anyone could keep going all those miles exactly twice as fast as I ran, but just this week I’m focussing on a different way of looking at the maths, which tells me I was once half as good as an Olympic gold medallist.  And she is nine years younger than I was when I ran it (she’s 38; I was 47).  And I don’t think she’d had four children.  I’m feeling pretty impressed with myself.  I mean, how many things are there that you would be really glad to do half as well as the best in the world?

If it weren’t in storage in England, I’d post you a picture of my medal.  It’s kind of brownish and says Flora on it, which is a British brand of margarine, that year’s sponsor, but it’s good as gold to me.

The Baby and I were talking about my father, her grandfather, whom she barely knows. I was trying to remember when she had last seen him, but she was very clear.

The last time I was there, she said emphatically, was when you went to the CIA by accident.

Right. I had almost forgotten that.

I had taken the two younger children, my son the Actor (then about 15) and the Baby (10), on holiday to the USA. Among other places, we went to my father’s house in northern Virginia, partly to visit with him, and partly so I could show these British children some of their American heritage.

One morning I borrowed my father’s car just to drive it as far as the underground – I guess it was about 20 minutes. I wanted to take the kids into Washington DC.

About five minutes down the road I remembered I did not have my driver’s license with me (in England you are not required to carry it when you drive, and because it is large and doesn’t easily fit into a wallet, I usually don’t).

Oh, don’t be silly, Mother, said the Actor. You are not going to get stopped!

A few minutes later I remembered I hadn’t brought the map either, but once again my son took charge. Not a problem, he said, I’ve memorised the directions.

So we carried on. I spent the day dragging the kids to every monument and memorial in the Capital. It was post 9/11. Visits to the White House were suspended and trips up the Washington Monument had to be pre-booked, but otherwise we saw and did pretty much everything a good tourist is meant to do: we trooped up the steps of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, wandered in the then fairly new sculpture garden at the Roosevelt Memorial, and walked sombrely past the names of the Vietnam dead (which I found deeply moving, and no doubt the children found dull, but they humoured me).

At the end of the day we rode the train back to Virginia and the Actor directed me as we picked up the car and headed toward my father’s house. We were nearly there when the Actor told me to take the next right.

Here? I asked.

I think so, he hesitated, and I turned. The sign, invisible from the main road, said, CIA. Authorized Personnel Only Past This Point.

Oops, said the Actor.

I looked around in a panic. The road was designed with a thick hedge of trees and bushes entirely separating the lane heading towards the CIA from the lane heading away. There were no turns to the right or left and no way to go back.

I had no choice except to carry on and eventually stop in front of a speaker on a post rather like the ones where you order at drive thrus. Only I didn’t think they would be selling me a latte. We were still a long way, I guessed, from any building.

A stern voice asked me to state my business with the CIA.

I said I didn’t have any business. I had taken a wrong turn and just wanted to get back on the main road.

The voice ordered me to continue forward into a parking area, stop in front of the chain link fence and follow the instructions of the officer.

I said, Please can’t I just turn around?

The voice bellowed, Follow the instructions of the officer!

I pulled in and parked.  Through the rear view window I saw a man in combat uniform sporting a machine gun almost as tall as he was saunter towards the car. I rolled down the window and waited for the inevitable question.

Can I see your driver’s license?

I explained that I came from England where it was not necessary to carry the license.

Okay, he said, Can I see your passport then?

I regretted that I did not have my passport with me.

He strolled around to the back of the car and examined the number plate. As he did so the Baby asked, in a whisper, What does the CIA do?

Without hesitation my son answered, They kill people.

The officer returned and said, in some exasperation, Well, can I see some kind of picture ID, please?

I said I thought I must have something… I shuffled wildly through my wallet and in a moment produced the only one with my photograph on it.

Reader, I handed the officer my Bodleian Library card.

A look of real sadness came over his face as he turned it from front to back. Ma’am, he said, I’m trying to help you here.

Well, anyway, things went from bad to worse and the officer pointed out I wasn’t giving him much to go on when I couldn’t find either the registration or insurance documents in the glove compartment. Nevertheless, he finally let us go after running the number plates to see if the address I gave him matched. You’ve got a couple of kids in the car, he said, by way of explanation, but I think it was the Bodley ID.

Back home, my father found the story hilarious. The turn towards his house is right after the CIA turn and it seems it wasn’t the first time that mistake had been made. His new house cleaner had also gone to the CIA by accident, only because she was Hispanic and driving an old beat up car, the disembodied voice directed her to pull into a spot where swords came out of the ground, surrounding the car and creating a cage. She was scared out of her wits. My father laughed until he cried as over and over he threw up his arms to demonstrate just how the swords had come up.

I guess, compared with your average encounter with the CIA, we came off pretty well.