Yesterday I narrowly avoided yet another fender bender. I was in a line of cars at a shopping mall exit equipped with a traffic light and two lanes with big arrows indicating the left and right turn lanes. I was in the right lane with my turn signal on. A young lady in a Subaru was about a car length ahead of me in the left turn lane. At the last possible moment she wrenched her steering wheel violently to the right. After much honking and slamming of brakes she looked up, took evasive action, and we made it through the intersection with all fenders intact. She was embarrassed.

Until recently, if you drove your car into the office of the chief of the Bangor Police Department and told his secretary you only planned to leave it wedged in the doorway so he couldn’t get to his desk for a few minutes while you ran a couple of errands, ate lunch, caught a movie, visited your gabby aunt in the nursing home, and had organ-replacement surgery, you wouldn’t have had a thing to worry about. The Bangor cops issued parking tickets with about the same frequency as Maine voters decide to throw incumbent U.S. senators out of office.

Just as the tourists leave, and I thought things would be settling down at the A&P, Rose Thibideau gets out of rehab. Not your Betty Ford kind of rehab. I’m talking about the rehab wing of Mahoosuc Green, the Senior Living Facility where my Dad is.

He’s not in the rehab section, though. Dad bought in a few years after our mother died, and has the cutest little apartment there.

I was driving to my favorite coffee shop early (Is it possible that I was actually driving “In the Early Mornin’ Rain”?) yesterday morning when I heard the news about the passing of Mary Travers on my car radio. That seems appropriate since, along with millions of other folks, I first “met” Mary Travers on the radio. As a boy growing up in the 50s and 60s in Boothbay Harbor the radio, in particular AM WBZ in Boston which we could get clear as a bell due to something called “skip distance,” was a magical place for me.

Maine has come through a week of almost unspeakable horror. I say “almost” because I’m capable of speaking about it (well, technically, I’m capable of writing). I’m putting myself through this excruciating exercise in wordsmithing (which I don’t think is actually a word) in order to preserve these events for posterity. I’m doing it to help bring these tragic occurrences into perspective. But mostly, I’m delving into the gory details because my editor expects a thousand words from me, or there’s going to be even more violence.

Well, Labor Day has come and gone, and it’s time to get serious about thinking about my weight. I’m not saying I’m going to do anything about it just now, but I am going to start thinking about it.

When I was in high school, I took a drivers’ education course in which we had it drilled into our impressionable young skulls that drinking and driving don’t mix. This proposition seemed entirely sensible to me, so I promptly gave up driving.

But that was a simpler time. The list of things you weren’t supposed to do in cars was relatively short. The only other item on it besides boozing it up was having sex. By the time I was actually having sex, I’d discovered that a bed was a vastly superior location.

When he first arrived from Poodle Rescue, Scamp seemed like such a shy, little dog. Charlie and me found it kind of odd for a puppy to be so quiet, so well behaved: no accidents on the carpet, no chewing on the furniture. He just watched us from his bed, getting the lay of the land.

Bon Appetit magazine (motto: We Will Never Admit We Had A Can Of Dinty Moore Beef Stew For Dinner Last Night) has named Portland “America’s Foodiest Small Town 2009.”

Foodiest?

While driving around New England this summer I’ve been keeping a low-level, almost subconscious tally of old venues I’ve performed at over the years. I’ve found myself driving past buildings like the old Opera House in Lebanon, New Hampshire, or The Colonial Theatre in Keene, for instance, and thought: “Hey I remember being on that stage back in…” Of course many of these halls are still on the “circuit” for me. I have shows coming up this fall at The Concord City Auditorium and Caribou P.A.C., for instance.