We’ve successfully driven back to Washington from Massachusetts today, after successfully picking up our daughter at college, where she succeeded in completing her second year. So much success.

Traffic wasn’t bad, and weather was mostly decent, in the northeastern United States today. America really does have an incredible amount of roads. And an incredible amount of people in cars, few of whom know that they’re not supposed to drive slowly in the leftmost lane.

It was too distant to get a picture, but for a moment driving through Baltimore we got a view of the ruins of the Key Bridge. It looks just like the photos in the news—and weeks later, the boat that hit it is still sitting there, right at the impact spot.

In New Jersey, we stopped for lunch with an old friend and his family. (I grew up in New Jersey and attended my town’s public schools from kindergarten all the way through high school.) For some reason, my friend had saved a 35-year-old copy of the high school English department’s “literary magazine.”

I have no memory of writing this incredible bummer of a poem. Nowadays, I feel at least a bit better about my fellow humans: let’s give some credit for art, literature, music, science, philosophy, and similar triumphs. But there are still days when this poem is on the nose.

Ten and a half hours after we’d left our hotel in Massachusetts, we arrived home and unpacked just as a rainstorm was ending. Check out that rainbow.