Excited to be invited to the White Hart Speakers Series, at the White Hart Inn, 15 Undermountain Road, Salisbury, for an event on Wednesday, April 17, 6-7:30 PM, with support from Oblong Books.

It was a lot of fun. I got lost on the drive here–saw sheep in someplace called Stanfordville–and found myself in Millerton, passing Oblong Books. The young woman at the register said she would be at my event. Her father was making her go. This fall, she’ll be starting at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is all classics all the time. I wish I had gone there.

The White Hart Inn is a beautiful country inn, where they gave me a suite with two bathrooms, all to myself! I don’t know how they’re going to get rid of me. There was a good crowd for the talk/reading. It was the first event outside of the copy editors’ conference where I was alone, with no one interviewing me, so I got to choose what to talk about and which passages to read. I found myself going for the passage about particles. You know, really, why not? Very intelligent questions afterward, mostly about Greek, though one woman asked me how I felt about semicolons, and I found myself dissing them. I have some friends in the area, and one of them, the writer Helen Klein Ross, reserved a round table at the inn for a group of us to have dinner afterward: Ann Patty and her partner, George; Tom Parrett, who typed my thesis for me way back when on an IBM Selectric (state of the art!); and John and Dana Bennet. Wonderful conversation about everything from climbing Annapurna to nominating Buttigieg.

Not least of the pleasures was this: lots of people bought both my books!